HARTFORD – A new report details yet another damaging economic impact of President Donald Trump’s global tariff scheme: homeowner insurance policies in Connecticut are expected to increase by an average $82 this year due solely to Trump’s tariff war.
The report by Insurify notes that Trump’s tariffs on goods made in Canada, China and Mexico will be especially harmful to American homeowners because Americans import 70% of their lumber from Canda, 71% of their wallboard from Mexico, and 54% of their home appliances from China.
Trump’s tariffs on these countries will result in higher product costs, which results in higher rebuilding costs and therefore higher insurance premiums for homes that are insured against damage by fire, floods, hurricanes and other catastrophic events.
At $82 per home, Connecticut’s insurance premium increase – based on a home value of $400,000 – is one of the highest in the entire Northeast, surpassing projected premium rate hikes in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and nearly equaling insurance premium rate hikes in New York and Rhode Island.
Not only are Trump’s tariffs adding to the cost of insurance premiums in Connecticut, they’re also driving up the cost of new home construction at a time when Connecticut needs to build 100,0000 new housing units. The National Association of Homebuilders estimates that Trump’s tariffs alone will now add $10,900 to the cost of building a new home.
“Donald Trump’s capacity for inflicting pain on middle-class Americans seems to know no bounds,” said Senate President Martin M. Looney (D-New Haven) and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk). “At every turn, Trump’s public policy decisions are costing Americans billions of dollars in stock losses, local budget cuts, and now increased homeowner expenses. Every week brings some new, horrid news out of the Trump administration, and all of it is costly and damaging to average Americans.”
“On the Insurance Committee we spend a lot of time figuring out ways to get people to spend less on insurance costs. What we can’t control is a president who engages in a failed tariff war and who drives up insurance and re-building costs for Connecticut homeowners,” said state Senator Jorge Cabrera (D-Hamden), who is Senate Chair of the Insurance and Real Estate Committee. “There seems to be no end to the economic destruction that the Trump administration intends to inflict on America.”
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