Small business owners in Colorado’s solar and outdoor industries fear the economic fallout if tariffs are raised by 10% and more. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he backs a tariff of 10% to 20% on most imports and a tariff of at least 60% on goods from China. For Colorado business owners Travis Campbell and Jason Sharpe, what tack the next president of the U.S. takes on trade is of the utmost importance.
Among the products the Trump administration put tariffs on were solar panels. Sharpe of Namaste said his company was in the final stages of a construction project when the increases hit. The price of the solar modules the company was waiting for went up by hundreds of thousands of dollars. “But the companies actually hurt by tariffs are the small businesses,” Sharpe said. “They’re employing Americans and doing good work in the U.S.”
Campbell of Eagle Creek worries about the impact of higher tariffs on his travel gear business as well as the lapse of a trade program intended to encourage U.S. businesses to move manufacturing to developing countries. He has joined efforts by the Boulder-based “Like lots of manufacturers, that’s caused us to pass some of those costs onto our consumers,” Campbell said. “But it was such a big swing we didn’t feel we could pass it all onto our consumers, so we’ve just been far less profitable.”