Article from The Daily Caller by Molly Prince.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky slammed President Donald Trump after the White House announced financial assistance to farmers to offset the distress caused by the escalating trade war.

“Tariffs are taxes that punish American consumers and producers,” Paul tweeted. “If tariffs punish farmers, the answer is not welfare for farmers — the answer is remove the tariffs.”

The Trump administration extended $12 billion in emergency relief to farmers on Tuesday, triggering Paul’s response. The U.S. agricultural industry, particularly pork and soybean producers, have taken a big blow by China’s retaliatory trade penalties after Trump’s initial tariff implementation.

“Tariffs are simply a tax on the American tax payer and so I’m really not for raising taxes. I think raising taxes hurts the economy,” Paul explained to the Bowling Green Daily News in early July. “My advice to the president is that we should try to sign deals that are advantageous to the U.S., but I think going right into a tariff war is going to be a problem for us.”

Read the entire article at The Daily Caller.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons