One year from election day, many Minnesota farmers and manufacturers are still speaking out about the high costs of tariffs.
Workers inside MISCO Minneapolis Speaker Company work by hand to build the speakers that are used in tractors, motorcycles, ultrasounds, drive-thru windows, mass transit, home theatres and the military.
The company was started in 1949 by the parents of CEO Dan Digre, when his father fixed a radio speaker on his own and decided to go into business. The industry changed in the 90s and the parts needed to make the speakers come from China before being manufacturered locally.
The tariffs are not paid by China, putting MISCO in a disadvantaged spot, Digre said.
"It impacts our cash flow," he said. "It impacts our ability to reinvest. The time we spend trying to mitigate the tariffs takes away resources from innovating, coming up with new products, designing new things like that."
Matt Moore, legal counsel with Bloomington's Quality Bicycle Products Inc., has a similar story on the manufacturing side. He says with a six-month lead-time on products, uncertainty is very difficult to deal with.
"That money is tied up, it's not in your cash flow," Moore said, "You can't use it to operate your business, pay your employees, make the improvements that make you competitive with your competition."
Moore says the choice is to raise prices and lose sales, or pay the tariffs and suffer the consequences.
"Now imagine if your tax bill on April 15th was suddenly announced to be 40 percent higher," he said. "What would you do about that?"
A national organization that supports free trade called Tariffs Hurt the Heartland says Minnesota companies have paid $704 million in tariff costs.
Southern Minnesota farmer Kristin Weeks Duncanson says USDA payments are not fixing the problem.
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"It did (help) to a certain extent, it helped pay some of the bills," she said. "But it's not contributing to the bottom line. We try to be a for-profit operation, not a 5013c."
Weeks Duncanson says she worries about the ripple effects in rural communities like her own in Mapleton affecting schools and other businesses. Other business representatives, like Moore, say they're now not able to donate some after-tax profits to local organizations like they used to.
Minnesota Farm Bureau President and fifth generation farmer Kevin Paap says 60 percent of soybeans grown in Minnesota are exported.
"The consequence that we're most concerned about in agriculture is the fact that once you lose a market, it's really hard to get it back," Paap said.
For now, all they can do is continue to be vocal — and head to the polls next November.
"It's disastrous," Mark Brown, treasurer for Minnesota Soybean Growers, said. "I don't think it was thought through before it was done. You asked, 'What can we do?' I think there's two simple words of what we can do. I'm a Republican, and I think 'dump Trump' is what we need to do."
