Trump Wants Tough New Car Rules — But Only On Foreign Cars

Ingo Wagner/DPA via ZUMA

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At the same time that Donald Trump is trying to undermine environmental standards for US cars, he wants to tighten them for imported cars:

Mr. Trump has asked the Environmental Protection Agency and several other agencies, including the Commerce and Transportation departments, to pursue plans to use such laws as the Clean Air Act to subject cars made overseas to strict emissions-standards testing and reviews when entering the U.S. The rules could effectively require more expensive technology on some foreign cars or subject those cars to more expensive hurdles that can be billed to the manufacturer or importer.

Either option would likely raise the costs for foreign cars sold in the U.S., making domestically produced cars cheaper by comparison. This effect of raising prices on consumers is common to most nontariff barriers, which seek to penalize imports through measures other than tariffs or duties.

I don’t even know what to say about this stuff anymore. Is this aimed at Canada and Mexico as yet another threat to force them to cave to his NAFTA demands? Is it a play for votes in the upper Midwest? Does he care that it would mostly affect Europe, Japan, and Korea? Is it just some random idea that sprang from his mind after watching Fox & Friends? There’s no telling.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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