Trump's newest China tariffs will include a tax on, yes, the Holy Bible

Donald Trump's trade wars have caused pain to everyone from heartland farmers to American motorcycle manufacturers, but his latest plan to impose a 25% tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports is now causing a new group of people to sweat: Bible sellers.

“We believe the administration was unaware of the potential negative impact these proposed tariffs would have on Bibles and that it never intended to impose ‘a Bible tax’ on consumers and religious organizations,” Mark Schoenwald, chief executive officer of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, told a panel of officials at the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Outstanding, simply outstanding. Donald Trump jacking up the price of Holy Bibles is (clasps hands together, a single tear forming) as on-brand a metaphor as one could hope for.

The situation is, well, both peculiar and not. Trump's tariffs would include printed materials, and industry executives say that the United States has for the most part lost the ability to print its own Holy Bibles due to the (again, this is so on-brand as to be physically painful) technology and skills required. Children's books will also be affected, but nobody is pretending to give much of a damn on that.

The solution that "evangelical" publishers are hoping for is simple: They want Bibles to be exempted from Trump's new tariffs, because Jesus. (Or more to the point, because money.) It will be harder to sell Bibles if the price sees a steep increase; many already-less-profitable editions would be discontinued entirely. It would be morally wrong to deprive people of their Bibles, even if not many of them are often cracked open.

There seem some obvious solutions to this problem. Of the people Trump truly cares about, meaning his still-loyal supporters and absolutely not one damn person besides them, a great many of them are Bible owners but precious few, televangelist-White-House-photo-op participants included, have much use for the inner contents of the thing. If Bible costs are about to go up 25%, why not simply print a Trump Edition of those Bibles that contains 25% less content? 

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2KyqSHd