Kaine stops by Danville, talks economy, tariffs with local manufacturers

Sen. Tim Kaine dropped by Danville on Tuesday and met with local manufacturers to talk about the economy and tariffs.

Kaine’s visit at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research was part of the Democratic senator’s stops at several localities this week in Virginia, including Wytheville, Richlands, Christiansburg and Verona.

The meeting in Danville was closed to the press, with Kaine taking questions from reporters in the Institute’s lobby following the event.

Kaine said he was using the Senate recess as an opportunity to gauge how people are feeling about the economy.

“I’m very troubled about the tariffs,” he told media outlets after the meeting that also included local officials and community leaders.

He said he was also concerned about the uncertainty surrounding President Donald Trumps’ tariffs — between imposing them, pausing them and granting exceptions for some countries, with “different rules for different nations.”

However, tariffs do hold an important place in certain situations, Kaine added.

“You use them against adversaries or for very specific trade imbalances, but I don’t think you use them against the whole world because that just becomes a national sales tax,” he said. “It just raises prices for ... people and businesses.”

A tariff, which is a tax a government imposes on any product from another country, “is just essentially a sales tax,” Kaine said.

“It could be groceries,” he said. “A lot of produce comes from Mexico. Or it could be clothes. A lot of clothes come from Vietnam or Indonesia.”

Anything that is imported immediately increases in price with a tariff — from 10% up to 50%, he explained.

In addition, as soon as the United States puts tariffs on other countries’ products, they impose tariffs on our goods, Kaine said.

“There’s never been a one-way trade war in the history of the world,” he said.

Under a trade war, Virginia businesses that are exporting products around the globe will have a harder time finding overseas markets, Kaine said.

“This is really bad for agriculture,” he said.

America produces much more food than it can eat, so farmers need an export market or their products just rot on the ground, Kaine said. But if those goods become more expensive, other nations will not buy from us, he added.

“They’ll buy from others,” Kaine said.

As for Danville, it “has had tremendous success in recent decades in attracting investment, but there’s a lot of uncertainty,” Kaine said.

“When there’s uncertainty about tariffs or ... other issues, then businesses tend to pull back and they say, ‘Well, we might want to invest, but we’re going to wait until we see certainty before we make those decisions.’”

Kaine also talked about the $100 million grant for Microporous, whose lithium-ion battery separator project would bring more than 2,000 jobs to the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill in Pittsylvania County.

Microporous announced in November plans to invest $1.35 billion for the project, making it the largest economic development announcement in the history of Southern Virginia.

In January, the company earned an official designation as a $100 million awardee under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Energy Manufacturing and Recycling Grant Program.

Later the same month, after Trump took office, the administration paused distributing those funds.

Kaine helped secure the grant for the project under the Inflation Reduction Act during the Biden administration.

“I hope and I believe that the Trump administration will pause and say, ‘Wait a minute, this is a great investment, this is American manufacturing, this is American innovation, we wouldn’t want to get in the way of it.’ I’m very hopeful that the grant is going through.”

As for tariffs, Trump imposed them on Chinese products during his first term, and China retaliated with tariffs on American soybeans, he said.

“We were selling a lot of soybeans to China,” Kaine said. “That immediately dried up and our farmers lost a lot of money.”

China ended up purchasing soybeans from Brazil, instead, Kaine said.

“When the tariffs go away, they’re not switching from Brazil back to the United States,” he added. “They’re like, ‘Hey, we have a good relationship with Brazil.’”

Kaine said he has found a way to challenge the president’s tariffs, adding that he got the support of the Senate to reject tariffs on Canada. However, it has to make it through the House, as well, he added.

“I’m using the same procedure to challenge the global tariffs,” Kaine said. “There will be a vote on the Senate floor either late next week or early the following week.”

A Dan River Region manufacturer who met with Kaine expressed concerns to the Register & Bee following Kaine’s interview.

“Our main issue is with tariffs and the uncertainties those cause,” said Randy Beauchamp, manager at Polynt Composites USA in Chatham. “It causes our customers to hold back.”

Polynt produces unsaturated polyester resins that go into fiberglass, boats, RVs, marble countertops, baths and showers.

With the tariffs and uncertainty, “people just aren’t going out and buying new boats and things like that,” he said.

“That’s really affected our market,” Beauchamp said.