YOUR OPINION: What Should U.S. Citizens and Taxpayers Expect From an Ally?

By  //  June 5, 2018

could tarriffs help level the economic playing field with our allies?

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both pressed NATO allies to increase military spending, but President Trump has made this a far more consistent and far more intense theme of nearly every discussion he has about NATO.

In 2006, 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreed to spend 2 percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the defense of their country. Twelve years later, only five of the 28 have honored that commitment.

Most of the countries complaining about the tariffs that President Trump is proposing are countries that have not honored their obligation to NATO or the U.S. to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense.  Now they have the nerve to complain that maybe they can’t count on us anymore to defend them.

While those countries aren’t our enemies, one really has to question if they are our ally when they ignore their financial obligation to NATO leaving the U.S. to shoulder the financial burden for their security and save them billions of dollars on their national defense while America goes into debt helping protect them.

Could it be that Trump figures a way to balance things out for their failure to honor that commitment is to charge the same level of tariffs that many of those countries charge companies in the U.S. for their products and to treat them as competitors for consumer dollars?

I figure for many Americans, if they have to pay a higher price for some things from overseas, may decide they don’t need it, or the tax savings from the new, lower tax rates will offset those higher costs.

Just wondering.

Certified Financial Planner Ilene Davis Releases Insightful New Book, ‘Wealthy By Choice: Choosing Your Way To A Wealthier Future’Related Story:
Certified Financial Planner Ilene Davis Releases Insightful New Book, ‘Wealthy By Choice: Choosing Your Way To A Wealthier Future’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ilene Davis, CFP

Ilene Davis, a resident of Brevard County since 1971, is a Certified Financial Planner with a bachelors degree in Mathematics from the University of Michigan, a bachelors degree in Accounting from Rollins College, and a Masters in Business Administration from Webster University.  Davis became a stockbroker in 1982, earned her designation as a Certified Financial Planner in 1984, and with a desire to serve clients more on her own terms, opened her own financial consultant office in Cocoa Village in 1986. She has combined her professional and personal experience with keen financial insight and instinct into her first book, Wealthy By Choice: Choosing Your Way To A Wealthier Future, which was recently published by Tablet Publications of Cocoa Beach and is now available on Amazon.comBarnesandNoble.comTabletPublications.com and ChoosingWealth.comShe is committed to helping each client create their own “Financial Freedom Fund,” and believes strongly in free market capitalism and a “hand up rather than a hand-out” as the best path to prosperity.

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