Why does the chicken tax place a tariff on trucks you might justly ask?
Well, between 1961-1964 there was a Chicken war, so the resulting tax was call the chicken tax. During the chicken war france and west germany placed a tariff on the importation of chicken from the US so the US responded with the chicken tax. Initially this included potato starch, dextrin, and brandy but those have all been removed in the intervening years.
That's weird, one might say, why are light trucks still on there if everything else has been removed? Well, you see, Detroit massively benefited from this tax and so lobbied to keep just the light truck tariff in place, which worked.
`The tariff affected any country seeking to bring light trucks into the U.S. and effectively "squeezed smaller Asian truck companies out of the American pickup market." Over the intervening years, Detroit lobbied to protect the light-truck tariff, thereby reducing pressure on Detroit to introduce vehicles that polluted less and that offered increased fuel economy.`
Cool. Loving it. That's awesome. Great. Thanks. Glad we got this shitty truck culture as a result of this.
Fucking fuck.
It did, however, lead to a very amusing situation where Mercedes decided to just disassemble already assembled vehicles to make them 'locally manufactured'
"To import cargo vans built in Germany, Mercedes disassembled fully-completed vehicles and shipped the components to "a small kit assembly building" in South Carolina, where they were reassembled. The resulting vehicles emerged as locally manufactured, free from the tariff."
