ST. LOUIS – David Munson’s small business started with a big challenge.
“Find me a light that’s not going to destroy my painting,” he said.
Munson was more than 20 years into a career in lighting design at the time, but this was his first foray into art lighting.
“I designed one, took it over, and he said, ‘That’s great.’ I put a little dimmer on it. He goes, ‘Let’s order them.’ I said, ‘Sam, I built that one. We’ll get somebody to manufacture them.’ I couldn’t get anybody to want to manufacture,” he said. “I came home and I said, ‘Honey, we’re in the lighting business. We’re going to build some lights for Sam.’ She goes, ‘OK, what’s that mean?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re not going to park in the garage this week.’”
The success of his side hustle has forced him to hustle in recent years. Munson says as domestic lighting suppliers went out of business, he turned to China. That’s when he got a taste of tariffs.
“I said, ‘What do you mean tariff?’ Well, it was a 50% tariff that Donald Trump had put on, but President Biden increased it to 100% so I called my nephew in Texas. I said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘Well, go call my buddy in Vietnam.’ So we talked to Vietnam. He was more expensive than the guy in China with the tariffs,” Munson added.
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff—and it’s my favorite word,” former President Donald Trump said during a recent economic discussion with Bloomberg.
“You don’t just throw around the idea of just tariffs across the board, and that’s part of the problem with Donald Trump,” Vice President Kamala Harris stated in a recent interview with MSNBC.
The topic of tariffs has gained steam on the campaign trial. Trump has said he’d propose an across-the-board tariff on all imported goods with higher rates on goods from China. Some economists say Trump’s proposals would cause companies to raise prices and worsen inflation.
Vice President Harris opposes across-the-board tariffs. The Biden Administration did, however, keep most of the Trump-era tariffs and even hiked tariffs on some Chinese-made goods.
“We’re now building the electronic boards, and I’m assembling them here in the United States, and they’re cheaper than if we bought them in China,” Munson said.
Munson believes his small business solution could work on a larger scale. He says tariff money should be used to help fund manufacturing developments that would eventually eliminate the need to outsource and import foreign made products.
“So, I decided to make everything myself. My wife says, ‘You’ve got to build everything yourself?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can control it.’ So not only do we eliminate the tariffs, we don’t have to worry about the time lag of trying to ship things in and the shipping cost of going crazy,” he said.
