…unless, of course, you’re one of the thousands of U.S. companies still paying unnecessary tariffs because Congress has yet to pass GSP renewal legislation.
In honor of the holiday, we created our GSP flag made up of the money paid in tariffs every second that GSP has been expired.
Fun facts about our GSP Expiration Flag:
- worth $20.98, the amount paid in tariffs every second by US companies since GSP expired
- made up of 174 coins (to scale, except for quarter “stars”) weighing 1.5 lbs
- stacked on top of each other, the coins are a little taller than 11 inches, laid end-to-end the coins stretch nearly 12 feet
Since those are per second, here’s what you have at the end of one day:
- more than 86,000 flags worth $1.8 million
- made up of more than 15 million coins weighing about 65 tons (more than 8 African elephants)
- stacked on top of each other, the coins reach 15 miles into the sky (2.75 times higher than Mt. Everest) and stretch nearly 200 miles end-to-end (DC to NYC or Pittsburgh)
And after 6 months, you ask?
- 15.6 million flags covering 432 acres of land
- made up of 2.7 billion coins weighing nearly 12,000 tons (the U.S. Capitol Dome weighs 16,600 tons)
- stacked, the coins would reach 2,750 miles into the core of the earth (enough to get Jules Verne 70 percent of the way to his destination) and laid end-to-end would be able to circumnavigate the globe 1.4 times
If the scale of those figures don’t put a bit of a damper on your 4th of July, consider this: importers of fireworks from Indonesia and Thailand paid about $50,000 in tariffs through the end of April because of GSP expiration, a figure that surely rose in the run-up to this weekend.
If GSP expiration is raising the costs for your 4th of July celebrations/products, please let us know in the comments section!
