Former White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci has encouraged the EU to "outgame" US President Donald Trump by lowering tariffs on US imports to 0%.
Speaking to Ivan Yates for Newstalk, Scaramucci said the EU should not apply tariffs on US goods in response to Trump's 25% tariffs on EU steel and aluminium imports, which came into effect.
The EU plans to impose tariffs on €26bn worth of US goods from next month, but Scaramucci, who served as Trump's spokesman for 10 days in 2017, thinks Brussels should take a different tack.
"I would caution ministers and people in Brussels. If you want to outgame Trump, play his game, lower your tariffs.
"[Ronald] Reagan in 1981 went with a zero option. He said he would zero-out the Pershing missiles in West Germany if the [Soviet Union] did the same thing in East Germany, and so play his game. Cut your tariffs to zero."
Regarding Trump's potential efforts to repatriate taxes paid and jobs created by US tech and pharma multinationals with operations in Ireland, Scaramucci was skeptical as to whether he would be successful.
He recalled Trump "opining about the genius" of Ireland in terms of attracting US firms with its low corporation tax at his meeting with Taoiseach Micheál Martin earlier this month, but said it would be unlikely that Trump could unravel Ireland's FDI sector, which employs 300,000 people.
"He was opining about the genius of your country with the tax engineering to get the multinationals over here, but he didn't say, 'hey, and I'm going to fix it. Hey, I'm going to change it,'" said Scaramucci.
"I think when you look at the matrix of outcomes, it's very hard for him to fix even if he gets a 15% corporate tax rate, which I predict he won't be able to get, because he doesn't have the mandate that he's pretending to have.
"But even if he were to do that, it's not enough of a threshold to cause that migration. You just said this 30-year build-up of corporations that have moved here, that have made a strategic decision to be here.
"They've got expats here alongside of Irish citizens working in their companies. I think it's very, very hard to snap a finger and make a migration."
"I think what the President is missing with the strategy is that these economies are integrated, that these economies have trade agreements," he added.
Scaramucci went on to say that if Trump could "screw up" Ireland's corporation tax regime, he would have "telegraphed" that to Martin and "scared the life" out of him in the Oval Office.
"It would have been Zelenskyy-lite ... but he didn't do that because he actually knows that he can't do that. He doesn't have a mechanism to do that."
Excluding the €13.1bn in back taxes from Apple, Ireland took corporation tax receipts of €28.1bn last year, an increase of 17.9% or €4.3bn year-on-year, and foreign-based multinationals now employ 302,600 people or 11% of the workforce.
*This article was originally published on BusinessPlus.ie.
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