Do you have a package coming your way from overseas? (I do, it’s a gift, and I’m very annoyed.) Hopefully it’s not urgent, because it’s going to be a minute before that thing gets to our shores. Questions surrounding the Trump administration’s ongoing tariff regime, including a policy to end an exemption from taxing small packages, have resulted in postal services across the world simply choosing not to ship to the United States until things get sorted out, according to Bloomberg.
Central to this problem is the de minimis exemption, which allows packages valued at no more than $800 to enter the country without being subject to tariffs. According to the White House, about four million packages that qualify for the policy enter the United States every single day, amounting to more than 1.35 billion per year. Trump has rolled back that policy considerably, setting the new bar at a value of under $100 to enter the country duty-free. Everything else will be subject to the tariffs that apply to the country from where the package is being shipped.
That new policy is set to go into effect on August 29, and the rest of the world is throwing up its hands about it. Per Bloomberg, there are still questions as to how the tariffs will be collected and how countries are even supposed to submit the relevant information to US authorities. Instead of dealing with all that, some countries are opting to simply not ship to America for the time being.
Bloomberg reported that Korea’s postal service, Korea Post, will stop sending packages to the US starting Tuesday. Singapore’s SingPost and Austria’s postal provider will do the same, just a day earlier. Norway and Finland are getting an even bigger head start, announcing that they will stop sending packages to America starting on Saturday, and Belgium is halting shipments as of Friday. Deutsche Post in Germany and the Czech Republic’s postal service have already stopped shipping packages state-side due to the confusion. Other countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, announced temporary suspensions until they get things sorted.
Presumably, these things will get straightened out, as this pause should be too much of a pain point for the Trump administration to drag this out forever, though it does seem to have a penchant for self-inflicted wounds. But the fact that this whole plan has been applied so haphazardly does not exactly infuse the rest of the world with confidence that things are going to be stable and predictable when doing business with the US.
Meanwhile, it’ll be low-income Americans hit the hardest by this new policy, per the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that eliminating the de minimis exemption would increase average tariffs faced by the poorest ZIP codes in the country to about 12%, nearly double the impact on richer ZIP codes. In total, the researchers warn that ditching di minimis will reduce consumer welfare by between $11 billion and $13 billion per year. But hey, that’s a small price to pay for pissing off the whole world to little actual gain.
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