The US Postal service loses millions of dollars every year offering extremely cheap, subsidized shipping rates from China into the United States. Meanwhile US domestic shipping rates continue to rise for Americans. This harms Americans in the following ways:

1. It gives Chinese shippers a hugely unfair advantage when it comes to the cost of shipping goods. US ecommerce businesses pay more to send a package within their own city than Chinese shippers pay to send anything to the US. This is a huge competitive disadvantage for American entrepreneurs in the ecommerce industry.

2. It facilitates the flood of counterfeit goods into the United States, stealing billions of dollars from the US economy and robbing innovative American companies of revenue for their patented, trademarked and copyrighted goods. Protecting American intellectual property from offenders overseas is nearly impossible, as those offenders are not subject to litigation within the US.

3. It endangers the health and safety of American consumers. When these small parcels ship in from China, they are not inspected to see if the products violate any safety standards we have in place for products sold in the US. It leaves American consumers vulnerable to faulty electronics that can injure them or cause fires. It also puts American children at risk of receiving counterfeit toys with dangerous illness-causing ingredients (such as these toys found by the UK government in 2015).

We ask that this administration immediately cease subsidized shipping from China into the US to protect our economy and consumers. In addition, we would like to ask that all imports from China be subject to a minimum import tariff regardless of customs declaration form. We cannot trust Chinese shippers to truthfully declare item values on customs forms and a minimum tariff will ensure that all shipments from China are appropriately taxed. Our country is currently being deprived of much needed tax revenue due to the influx of goods from China and imposing a minimum import tariff will help offset those losses!