The cost to move these industries to the U.S. exceeds the cost of these tariffs. The market will pass the cost of what are import taxes to the American consumer, resulting in inflation.
True, the shareholders will take a pay cut too, because something less than 100% of American consumers will just suck it up without changing their behavior. But in aggregate, we will all save less.
If inflation takes off again, maybe eventually there's some monestizing of debt. But in less than 4 years these tariffs will go away, which is why companies won't spent billions of dollars investing in state side manufacturing that'll take maybe 5 years to plan and build. Therefore I'm not sold on the montizing debt motivation yet.
Why in 4 years they will go away? Is that assuming the new administration will reverse course? It’s my understanding that generally country don’t lower tariffs voluntarily. They are usually bargaining chips.
We have tried this before about 100 years ago. Supply chains and economies were not nearly as interconnected as they are now. Read the history of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act.
Tariffs may not even last 4 months. Trump demanded Powell reduce interest rates, the FRB declined. The might be Trump's way of forcing the Fed to reduce interest rates, by inducing a recession with massive inflation. And then Trump takes the tariffs away once the Fed gives him what he wants.
FRB won't reduce interest rates if there's inflation alone. They'd only reduce interest rates if the economy also slows down into recession territory.
That's the short term view.
In the long term view, they are the biggest tax increase in the history of the country, therefore they are potentially the biggest tax decrease in the history of the country. Political fodder, even for a corpse.
(c) Should any trading partner take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters, I may further modify the HTSUS to decrease or limit in scope the duties imposed under this order.
Even the Americans, the State Department has (had?) people whose job is to help with nation building and they'd learned that if you copy-paste the US model you're basically just setting up a dictatorship in advance, the "President" will seize power, whoops.
It's impressive they got to forty odd Presidents with only one civil war so far, but it's just luck and it didn't last.
It depends.. For some goods possible to just immediately raise prices, for others, business will try to compensate from another source.
As example, Daimler stated, they will cut cheapest models from export to US, so some segment will got less concurrent market, and probably prices will raise.
Probably, this is because Daimler have much higher profits on expensive models, so they could just lower profits on them. Other variant, also possible, expensive niches are more tolerant to price raise.
For small countries, tariff raise nearly guarantee prices rise, but US is big country, things are not so simple.
The more I think about Trumpian strategies the more I suspect that he got some friends together (or they came to him) and decided they'll short everything, then he'll do this for a while. He and those friends would be able to 'generate billions' that way, by legal insider trading (since we learned that anything he does "in an official capacity" is legal and he can pardon anyone who ever got caught).
Last term he did some tax on bauxite that had a similar effect of costing billions to a whole industry that processes or buys aluminum, but one of the few bauxite mines in the US, run by a Trump ally of some kind, made bank.
Politically it's going to be just like how most everyone fell into line fervently supporting the Iraq War when the corpo media told them to. Then after the unavoidable truth finally seeped in, equivocation and rationalization from "I didn't really support it" to "we were misled". With a lot more visible economic pain, of course.
Then that anger from having been "tricked" will be used as raw energy to drive the next con, and so forth. A broken clock is at least right twice a day, but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time.
> but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time.
It is generally not cool to blame the voters. There was a ton of misinformation preceding the Iraq war as you point out, but even then there was a massive popular opposition to it. Hundreds of thousands protested against the war before the invasion in New York and Washington DC. Some polls showed that 5% of all Americans participated in a rally or a protest in the weeks leading up to and following the invasion. And despite that popular opposition, among politicians there was a bipartisan support and just a handful of MPs opposed to it. Meaning the public was never really given a choice. In short, the Iraq war was the fault of the politicians and the politicians alone, the voters came nowhere near it.
Yes, I went to a few of those protests. Despite the popularity of opposition, there were still plenty of people arguing in support of attacking Iraq. In fact I'd say that most people were in support of it. "They hate us for our freedom", "fight them over there instead of here", and general reflexive arguments supplicating to power. That's the dynamic I'm talking about.
Whether invading Iraq would have still happened without that popular support is besides the point. The point is there was full-throated support from many people, who would reflexively reject dissent while parroting corpo media talking points, and who then only came to see what a poor idea it had been over time.
What's the actual strategy behind the current US administration slapping tariffs on everything? Feels like they're handing them out like Halloween candy. Is there a long game here, or is it just managed chaos and alienating trade partners for short term optics?
Kill people's savings, might happen. Discretionary spending is about to get clobbered. Restaurants may be at the top of that list, and travel.
I rather doubt Walmart is going to increase the price of only Chinese made goods 25%. I think everything goes up 25% and they pocket the margin as long as they can get away with it.
It doesn't work because it's basically illegal to be poor in America, or rather to live like a poor person in a developing country. Because of theories about gentrification and such we just banned everything like SROs, company dorms, etc.
It worked for a little while in the 2000s because earlier flight from cities had left a lot of empty housing open to gentrify, but none of that is left.
There's a few classes of people left like supercommuters and people who live in RVs in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, but not going to run a big factory like that.
Well yeah, that's just some weird French place we bought and turned into a slave labor camp.
But memes about suicide nets aside, Chinese factory workers are there by their own choice, because it's better than their alternatives, and we've eliminated such choices by simply making it illegal to have the low cost of living it requires.
This was done to make the poor underclass go away (homeless people) but it also makes this type of working class (factory workers) go away. Luckily for us, we have a service economy with email jobs for them to work instead.
I mean, I was just thinking about the civil law system.
The problems I described are mostly in blue states, although Texas has different problems that somehow result in basically the same issues. Like Houston doesn't have zoning, but still ends up with sprawl due to other restrictions.
Unless you’re dealing with wills and stuff, and real property the civil law system isn’t really affecting people that much because you have to have some compatibility with the other 49 states. Even divorce is not as unique as it was. But yeah, it still is a disadvantage to incorporate here.
The TLDR is Miran sold to Trump US can Plaza Accord everyone, devalue USD to reindustrialize US, draw down US debt/commitments, keep exorbitant privelege... all by slapping tariffs (Trump's fav hammer) to scare countries into signing (converting) existing US commitments to "century bonds" in US favour while tying them to US orbit for foreseeable future. Is US strong enough to coerce others to sign on? IMO doesn't matter, this seems like plan specifically tailered to Trump preferences and ego, so as long as Trump thinks so Miran gets the job.
E: there is logic to the plan, logic that appeals to Trump -> US strength and monetary manipulation skills can force others to fall in line. And TBH countries have fallen in line in the past.
Yeah that’s not going to work. America is about to find out that the era of bully pulpit is over. Why work with a recalcitrant and quite frankly obnoxious US when you can cut bilateral EU/Asian deals?
Category error to think there's a strategy. Trump doesn't even know what a tariff is. People try to project a strategy because it's probably too discomfiting to believe that the greatest superpower the world has ever known elected a complete nimrod king.
I'm on the side of free trade and dont think there is a single policy. The strongest arguments I can think of are:
1) raise tax revenue in a way that partially falls on foreign nationals
2) reduce trade deficits and foreign purchasing of treasuries.
3) Increase relative power if other economies are damaged more than the US. There are situations where zero and negative sum strategies are optimal, like war, where it is better to have a larger % of a smaller overall pie.
Im talking about trade deficits, not budget deficits. Im not convinced trade deficits are a bad thing to begin with, but that is a whole sperate can of worms.
My understanding is that yes, the national debt is still increasing, although the administration is counting on tariff funds to supplement revenue. Would you agree?
> the national debt is still increasing, although the administration is counting on tariff funds to supplement revenue
Not the debt, the deficit. The debt is the card balance. The deficit are new swipes. Nothing in the current policy package is about deficit (let alone debt) reduction.
(Valid on trade deficits. I guess we can run trade surpluses if we give up dollar hegemony. That, of course, means no more deficits.)
> My understanding is that yes, the national debt is still increasing, although the administration is counting on tariff funds to supplement revenue. Would you agree?
Let me see if I am following. The tariffs are ostensibly about spurring domestic industry so that American companies can flourish and we don’t have to pay tariffs on imports of foreign goods in the long term. Is that right? If so, then long term, aren’t we hoping that the “tariff funds” are small? But they are simultaneously supposed to supplement revenue to pay down debt too?
Trump is using century-old misinformation about tariffs to raise tax revenue to pay for tax cuts on the wealthy. In reality, it's an added tax on all spending that accelerates inflation.
Tariffs are theoretically supposed to encourage domestic production, but rely on the false premise that all raw and intermediate materials can be sourced domestically at a cost below the import price. That has generally proven to not work unless tariffs are in the hundreds of percent. But at that level, import taxes tend to poison entire sectors due to supply lag instead of drive domestic economies.
It's a bit difficult to nail down direct citations for what is basic knowledge of how tariffs work in reality. It's covered in AP/college macroecon and U.S. history classes.
Wikipedia's articles on Smoot–Hawley and the Tariff of Abominations both have sections on their effects.
In short, we'll see a brief rise in the domestic economy, then a sharp recession. One of the reasons SE Asia, BRICS, and the EU have been so active to disconnect themselves from the U.S. is they don't want to get caught up in the U.S. economic failure like they did in the 1930s.
They claim that they are "reciprocal" tariffs, and their chart shows them at exactly half the tariffs they claim are imposed by the target or 10%, whichever is higher. But it is suspicious that the column on their infographic showing the foreign tariffs has fine print indicating that includes other non-tariff things that you can't easily calculated as a neat rate the way tariffs are. And, some people running the numbers have determined that the quoted foreign "tariff" amounts are consistently the US trade deficit in goods with the target country divided by that country's exports to the US, with a minimum of 10%.
So, despite being labelled "tariffs", the actual basis for calculating the "reciprocal tariffs" has nothing to do with tariffs.
A rebirth of mercantilism. Peter Navarro is a huge fan of it, and in his heterodox fever dreams, laments that most of the world abandoned it several centuries ago. In his mind, a net surplus of currency is every bit as important as having a strong military. People like Lighthizer have drunk the coloured sugar-water.
>25% on South Korea, 32% on Taiwan, 36% on Thailand, 46% on Vietnam
Harley Davidson moved some of its production to Thailand in 2018 to avoid a 31% tariff the EU had on US manufactured motorcycles, announced in 2024 it was moving more production there, and prior to today had plans to sell the Thailand produced bikes back into the US, as the US had a 0% tariff on bikes. Not surprisingly Thailand has a 60% tariff on imported motorcycles.
This tariff jumping is real. I guess we will see how it works out for the US.
It's just going to be a game of whack-a-mole as production and dumping shift to the less taxed countries. In the end, manufacturing won't shift to the US while labor costs are too high for factory workers. And the only way to remedy that is tanking the currency.
It's obviously the only real end game to this policy. Asia needs to divest itself off US bonds, which China has been slowly doing the background of late. No matter how it plays out, it's looking like higher interest rates, inflation, and foreclosures for everyday citizens and SMEs are going to be on the cards for the US, and it's going to take something akin to religious faith for people to tolerate the hardship on the way to this promised renewed prosperity.
Bessent didn't sound too sure in that interview. Given how many members of the cabinet lie on camera flagrantly multiple times a week and how even the numbers on their little poster were total BS pulled from thin air, I'm not gonna give him benefit of the doubt.
This underscores the difficulty companies have trying to navigate through this. Even if Trump doesn't change his mind tomorrow, as he's liable to, he's only around for another four years and for most companies that's not enough time to justify a supply chain overhaul.
10% tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands which are uninhabited, and can be reached only by sea, which from Australia takes two weeks by vessel.
And also 10% on Svalbard and Jan Mayen which is also uninhabited. That will teach them not to ripoff the USA!
Both Svalbard and Jan Mayen are inhabited. Jan Mayen only by about 35 people, though. Svalbard has both Norwegian and Russian settlements, but of course entirely too small to have impact on US trade.
Svalbard imports a lot of snowmobiles though, given their population. From what I know a substantial fraction, if not most, are from Polaris so made in the US[1].
If you bring back goods worth more than $800 it has to be declared and a duty paid.
Judging from the changes (currently paused) to the de minimus shipping rules (also formerly $800) I’d expect the threshold to be lowered substantially. Possibly arbitrarily while I’m on a trip and have already bought the goods.
The risk being if detained by DHS for who knows how long is not worth saving $400 on a MacBook personally.
It is highly unlikely my iPhone or Macbook will be checked for newness when on my person, or the iPads in my kids' hands. I'll just time these purchases around trips to Mexico or Europe.
Anything more powerful I will rent or colocate outside of the US in a rack somewhere, moving bits instead of atoms. In short, unless you spend a lot on tech, or tech that isn't portable, workarounds in some cases are available. Certainly, if you’re trapped in the US (or you need goods that are impossible to import on your person), you’re hosed and will be exposed to the tariff costs.
This is how a lot of people around the world live their lives. Dubai wisely provides this as a service to surrounding countries, to their great enrichment.
It creates a lot of incentives for corruption though.
It’s not at all uncommon in Latina America from my understanding for wealthier people to fly up to Miami, buy a ton of iPhones for family and friends, then bribe the customs agents to look the other way.
~19M people live on the US-Mexico border alone in the US [1]. I am not ignoring nor unsympathetic to those who cannot, for whatever reason, make a trip outside of the US happen, but surfacing it as an option for those who can. When you are trapped within a suboptimal system, you have to find ways to hack around it.
My parents did certainly smuggle a fair bit on their trips. I'm so happy Americans can learn that experience too! :> (I don't. Why are you hitting yourself.)
When I lived in San Diego, tons of people would walk or drive across for better deals - teenagers would even take the trolley and walk over since their money went so much further. I’ve heard that this is also common in Washington and Maine.
If the savings is enough, it’s guaranteed that people are going to try this. San Diego claimed a 158% increase in egg seizures last month, there’s no way you aren’t going to have people try that with iPhones.
Matches the expectation analysts have had from December 2024 [0]
"In the baseline scenario, we assume that the US will raise its effective WATR against Chinese goods by a total of 20 percentage points over 2025-27. We expect the effective tariff rate on China to rise by 5-10 percentage points in 2025, owing to the imposition of tariffs related to fentanyl smuggling disputes. Mr Trump will further phase in tariffs from late 2025 with a wider range of excuses and policy tools, eventually bringing the effective WATR facing Chinese exports to about 30% by 2027."
For China maybe, I doubt any serious analysts were expecting this high of tariffs on most other countries, like Mexico, the UK, and Canada.
The methodology of counting non-price barriers on certain goods then applying it across the board on all goods as tariffs is bonkers.
Doubtlessly they aren’t including all the non-price tariffs the US imposes on other countries either.
I’m extremely skeptical the EU has effective tariff rates of 40% on all US goods, and furthermore skeptical that if so the US doesn’t have countervailing effective tariff rates at the same rate.
And there are a lot more countries in that list, South Korea and Taiwan are going to really hurt for electronics. And I assume Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and other countries will hurt for other good that are made cheaply there.
> And I assume Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and other countries will hurt for other good that are made cheaply there
Vietnam and Bangladesh would hurt American consumers (clothes). Cambodia not really.
Silver lining, Brazil and Colombia (edit: and the rest of Latin America) are kept at baseline, and Philippines is now the lowest tariff developing Asian economy.
We'll probably see a significant amount of capital returning to Philippines (who saw de-industrialization when South Korea signed their FTA with Vietnam).
> Are those in addition to existing tariffs?
Yes (Edit: not sure now, I'm hearing some say they include the 2017 tariff regime of flat 10% - smh shows how this was just a political ploy that answers for such a critical question are mixed)
(Edit 2: was right initially - thanks u/inverted_flag)
Depends on the country. India is negotiating a Bilateral Trade Agreement by mid-2025, Vietnam has sent a trade delegation to DC to negotiate as we speak, and tariffs on Colombia, Brazil, Philippines, and Turkiye are the lowest for middle income countries.
The harshest pain will be felt by Cambodia and Vietnam, because both are part of ASEAN like Philippines and share similar trade partners (Japan, SK), Bangladesh as they have an FTA and significant capital from India, and China as EU (looking at you Poland and Czechia), Turkiye, Japan, SK, and India are now cost competitive
You'll be seeing more "Made in Philippines", "Made in Colombia" "Made in Turkiye", "Made in Brazil", and "Made in India" shirts, auto parts, and assembled electronics now.
We might also see a return of Malaysia in the semiconductor industry, as they are now cheaper than Taiwan - great for whoever buys Intel Foundry Services (Penang reax only)
As soon as Malaysia gets anywhere near a significant capacity of semiconductor manufacturing they’ll also get increased tariffs. Or, the the tariffs will end and it will return to Taiwan.
Stability is necessary for any big shifts to be worth taking.
> As soon as Malaysia gets anywhere near a significant capacity of semiconductor manufacturing
You mean since 1971 when Intel opened their OSAT in Penang?
Malaysia was THE hub for electronics manufacturing until 20 years ago when China became cheaper.
In fact, it was the same businessmen in the Penang electronics industry who largely invested in China's electronics industry.
Also, semiconductors are exempted so my whole thread is moot about that. Electronics manufacturing though will return (and already started due to most companies China+1 strategy).
But will investors make any long term decision given the unreliability of the US administration? Who would invest in manufacturing in a country if the tariffs could be gone tomorrow again?
Seems unlikely, at least in the near term. These are LARGE amounts of good to be shifting, and they don't shift overnight. Plus, if the tariffs calculations are really based on trade imbalance, who's to say Columbia won't get slapped with more tariffs as soon as they start making and exporting more goods to the US. Pretty risky to be opening up a bunch of factories only to be tariffed to death right after.
> These are LARGE amounts of good to be shifting, and they don't shift overnight
Hence I listed countries where manufacturing in those industries was significant until 10-15 years ago or where investment has largely moved beforehand.
> Yes (Edit: not sure now, I'm hearing some say they include the 2017 tariff regime of flat 10% - smh shows how this was just a political ploy that answers for such a critical question are mixed)
An interesting observation is that the tariffs are half of what the other country is charging. Does that mean this was a common strategy across the board? Or was strategic importance of goods considered?
>the tariffs are half of what the other country is charging
And that figure is questionable. Read "including currency manipulation and trade barriers". This is the same presidency that believes the "EU was made to screw USA over", and accused them, Japan and practically every other major economy of manipulating their own currency to harm US. It's improbable that rate has any basis in reality, but surely a detailed breakdown of how they came to that number will be published.. not.
Exactly. Calculation for actual figures is based on trade deficit, everything else is just a fat lie. "White House officials said its levies were reciprocal to countries, such as China, which it said charge higher tariffs on US goods, impose "non-tariff" barriers to US trade or have otherwise acted in ways the government feels undermine American economic goals" (from BBC)
Non-tariff barrier usually means regulation US exporters don't like, including data protection, EU not wanting to buy junk food from the US, most of which apply to EU companies the same way anyway... There is no point in asking for a reduction of these tariffs, and will probably never happen.
Let's not forget the biggest of EVILs, Lesotho, with its 50% tariff. Mr Trump has just noticed that they have cornered the US economy. (A strange coincidence, Trump has recently said nobody has ever heard of Lesotho being a country...)
It’s not like mom and pop stores are equipped to source things locally any better than Walmart. They would also be relying on the same imports from abroad, but would not have the bargaining power that Walmart has.
> aren't their employees on food stamps at some ridiculously high rate?
Welfare like food stamps is a subsidy /against/ Walmart, not for it. You are supporting the employees by paying for their food, which means they can negotiate for higher wages, which means Walmart pays them more.
An example of the other kind would be literal wage subsidies, which are sometimes paid so companies will hire mentally disabled people.
Trump really thinks America is in the 1950's. He thinks people want to work at factories doing manual labor. He doesn't understand that we DON'T want to work at factories. Americans like our plush corporate office jobs building intellectual property. We aren't oxen doing physical labor.
And we designed it that way. We pay thousands of dollars to each citizen in our public schools to teach them calculus, literature, world history, and science, so that they DON'T work at factories doing manual labor like we were oxen. We're supposed to be doing more valuable jobs in intellectual property and services.
It's going to be hard lesson to be learned by Trump and his working class supporters when the inflation hits them because our economy doesn't have any workers that want to work at factories, but it'll have to be a lesson they learn the hard way.
The correct economy is to let people do labor they're best at. If a foreigner can make a shirt cheaper than an American can, LET THEM. Our economy is already taken by the people that design the shirts.
Well, the unfortunate beauty of touching the incredibly hot stove of Tariffs is that the pain is immediate and obvious. So assuming that these tariffs go through as is, we'll immediately launch into one of the worst recessions we've seen with price increases unlike anything Americans are used to.
A tariff of some +x% doesn’t cause a +x% increase in retail prices. The ratio is somewhere between 2:1 and 10:1 for most products, depending on the markup, local value add, taxes, etc…
The real damage is business uncertainty, inefficient capital allocation, etc… all of which takes years to fully impact the economy.
This is only true in the ordinary situation of using tariffs. Such as targeting specific markets or exports in order to bolster the local market.
Tariffs on literally everything have an immediate outsized impact as businesses need to rapidly readjust and renegotiate prices on everything. Not only that but there's the second order effects too, such as Trump's interactions with Canada resulting in destroying tourist and seasonal travel from up north to the border states.
Uncertainty will be priced into the price of things moving forward, I’ve already started adding 10-15% to my BoM over today’s prices to account for the possibility of future price increases and I’m definitely not the only one.
Yes. They - or other poor countries - are. And it's their responsibility to grow their citizenry in a neoliberal world. Economics doesn't care about liberal concern tools.
China eliminated poverty through neoliberalism. The rest of the world can, too. This is the benefit of neoliberalism: it lifts the world out of poverty through free trade and self-selected efficiency.
You said america worked hard to get rid of manual factory jobs and then you gave the example of China as a state that followed their neoliberal example. But China is the Earths factory and they have hundreds of millions doing manual factory work. You contradicted your own arguments. Not sure what you are asking me right now.
So, none of that matters to what I said, since I specifically talked about eliminating poverty. That's what a "straw man" argument actually is, when you decide to argue against something else entirely, like foreign intervention, instead of poverty.
Now you're getting it. Adamantly trying to focus on "eliminating poverty", when my original comment was about the morality of neoliberalism, is a straw man argument. I'm glad that after enough contemplation you have come to understand this.
So, if you'd like to address my original comment, I'm all ears, otherwise this discussion is a complete waste of time. Before you do that, though, it would be prudent to learn about what neoliberalism actually is, and why foreign intervention is directly related to it and your original premise. Once you do that, we'll be able to have a fruitful discussion.
An excerpt from The Divide:
> People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extension of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of state intervention. The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral free-trade agreements – with reams of new laws, backed up by the military power of the United States
You are fixated on a straw man, clearly too ignorant of the subject material to have a discussion on this.
I provided resources. Read them and get back to me, otherwise there is no reason to continue, since your aim seems to be controlling the narrative and not actually engaging in substantial discussion.
This doesn’t sound like you want to eliminate poverty?
You complain I brought up the straw man of poverty, but that's the entire point of neoliberalism: to make people wealthy. It's NOT to start wars or bring disease or famine or whatever. It's an economic system designed to bring about wealth, as demonstrated by neoliberal policies that removed poverty from much of the third world.
This is why I don’t trust socialist: I have never heard a socialist say “I want to eliminate poverty”. And in fact, they seem to take pride in being impoverished while being ashamed of any bit of wealth.
It’s Ok to have nice things. You DON’T have to be poor.
We don't care if people are rich. We are if they are poor, and we believe that's a problem.
And our track record of eliminating poverty around the world over the last 50 years through neoliberal free trade should be celebrated, not discouraged.
Again, I have no interest in engaging with someone who is clearly extremely ignorant about neoliberalism and US foreign policy, and who is fixated on engaging in straw man arguments. Stop embarrassing yourself and let it go.
Instead of congratulating yourself on your sheer brilliance all the time and how you like to declare yourself to be superior, maybe look at why your arguments aren't convincing to others?
I'd recommend you take a point-by-point look at what you're saying vs what I said and see if what you said had any relevance to any of my literal sentences.
Let it go. You're not even discussing the subject matter anymore, and are arguing about the meta. No one is thinking in terms of superiority except yourself. This is a toxic discussion, and it is over. Have your compulsive last word.
Look at what you wrote. Nothing you stated had any relevance to neoliberalism. I talked about neoliberalism eliminating poverty, and you brought up invasion.
Neoliberalism is what I say it is, not what YOU say it is.
Additionally, you have yet to answer why you believe poverty shouldn’t be eliminated.
China didnt eliminate poverty, it merely shifted dirty work to other poor countries (other SE asian countries). Just like the US did. Just like all countries will do until they run out of poor countries and the pyramid scheme of globalization collapses.
Not everyone gets to have a cushy intellectual office job. Somebody has to do the coal mining.
Especially given the luxury lifestyle that even the poorest suburban 20-something American male lives in today. They get to play video games all day and watch any movie at home with any food from around the world that can show up at their doorstep of their parents home at a moments notice. The aristocrats of 150 years ago could NEVER imagine such luxuries.
And Trump expects our population of suburban aristocrats to work hard at factories...
I agree with this. People seem to forget that factories and other manual labor positions were hard to fill. No one wanted to do them anymore in America. I don’t remember the timing, but there were articles about the whole situation. Well, those jobs went to other countries.
Bush Jr. was all about outsourcing to India and other countries. The India population were thrilled to take office gigs for Microsoft and Google and any other tech company.
The whole “put me to work” in middle-America doesn’t exist anymore. They don’t want to do that type of work.
I do think a missed opportunity is not increasing defense manufacturing in the US. That could mean a lot of jobs and skill-based jobs. NASA is another failed opportunity where it could be a huge skill and labor opportunity for America. I remember the thousands of workers on the shuttle program being devastated. I’m not saying we need another shuttle program, but the next evolution of NASA, aerospace, and defense would be great for jobs and America.
We have no one left thinking about the long-term big picture for America - and we now have a president trying to destroy America. Any current politicians are focused on just staying in power, more so than they ever have.
I think Bill Clinton was the last president to focus on America.
Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.
> Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.
I agree how Obama continued Bush's "war on terror" was a disappointment, but to state that as the reason for his relatively limited accomplishments is profoundly unserious. The Mitch McConnell's strategy was to do anything Obama did for no other reason than to make him look bad, because McConnell realised that Obama had the potential to be the most consequential president since FDR, with broad public support.
They used every trick in the book to hold up votes, to not schedule votes, voting against popular policy they themselves supported just a few years ago out of principle, etc.
I don't know how anyone could have forgotten this; the Republican party was not serious good faith participant in the democratic process long before Trump came along.
These guys are untrustworthy liars. I assume there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of carve outs for the tariffs, based on bribing the POTUS or approved affiliates.
My company pays VAT surplus to government every quarter since the VAT we collect on our products and services is higher then the VAT we pay for our purchases. How are we not paying it?
You are answering your own question: companies collect VAT from consumers and pass it on to tax authorities.
Then, as the company is VAT-registered what it purchases is either VAT-free or VAT paid can be deducted from the amount of VAT collected from consumers (as you said).
Bottom line: companies do not pay VAT on their own purchases, they only pass on VAT collected from consumers.
Obviously companies do make actual payments to the tax authorities but the point is that these are not from their own funds, they only effectively act as tax collectors.
Because that would be an obvious loophole and has been made illegal almost everywhere (i.e. you can't have a business that isn't aiming for profitability).
"Paying" is a bit too ambiguous term. Let's say we go to have a lunch, but I forgot my wallet at the office. You pay my lunch and once we are back at the office, I pay you back. Who paid my lunch, you or me? Your company pays VAT in the technical sense you paid my lunch and your company does not pay VAT in the economical sense I paid my lunch.
No, VAT is actually paid by companies (and also consumers of course), it's one of the subtle differences between VAT and sales tax.
The "thought experiment" you can make is the case of something not ending up being sold. In a VAT regime the manufacturer will have already paid the VAT on the inputs but since the customer hasn't paid the VAT on the finished product the manufacturer won't get their money back on the VAT they already paid (there might be other tax rebates or write offs, but that's a different matter)
In a sales tax regime the tax is only paid by the final consumer so if the manufacturer doesn't sell the product they are not out for any additional tax
Still doesn't change that neither of those are a tariff by any definition
A VAT-registered company is either able to purchase VAT-free or is refunded the amount of VAT it pays (by offsetting against the VAT it has collected, up to getting actual refunds).
Effectively VAT is only paid by consumers.
NB: in you example if the company has paid more VAT than it has collected in the period then it gets an actual refund.
Yes, absolutely, in 99% of cases that is true. But conceptually there is a difference.
> NB: in you example if the company has paid more VAT than it has collected in the period then it gets and actual refund.
Yes, which is what I said as well. But the refund in itself is an additional step on top of the tax system and the money does get paid by the company in the first place. There is indeed a difference in how the cash flow of a company looks like.
That's the entire point of VAT, to make tax evasion harder by making everyone pay at every step and figuring out later the refunds
This is not a criticism of VAT or anything else by the way, as I said, in 99% of cases the company will get the VAT fully refunded and not pay anything on net over the fiscal year
VAT = Value Added Tax. Tax should be paid whenever there was value added to a product/service, and it was sold.
The manufacturer has paid VAT, and will get back the paid VAT from the tax authorities.
It then adds value (value added tax). It has to charge VAT of the full amount. So, the company in the chain pays VAT over the profit of that product/service. For example (assume 20% VAT):
Company 1 creates something with 0 cost, and sells for 100. Needs to add VAT (20) and pay that to the tax authority. 20 has been collected.
Company 2 buys it for the 120, packages and labels it, then sells it for 180 but needs to add 36 VAT. The company will file a tax return of 20-36, so will effectively have to pay 16 to the tax authority. Another 16 has been collected.
Consumer buys it for 216 and doesn't get any VAT back.
Effectively, 20 + 16 = 36 VAT has been collected over time. The tax return can only be done by companies with a VAT registration. In some cases the VAT burden can be inverted in b2b transactions and within the EU. This is there so companies don't have to do cross-border tax returns.
Maybe that applying VAT to imports is done asymmetrically? If, for example, I'm a US citizen importing a european widget, will federal and state sales tax be applied on import?
If they're not, then this might be why they're considered thus.
Uhh... Whether you're a citizen isn't a factor. There's no federal sales tax, although these tariffs act as an import tax that will increase the wholesale costs. And state sales taxes don't apply to imports or wholesale transactions, they are retail tax (or also often a use tax if a sales tax wasn't previously imposed).
VAT is not only a retail sales tax, it'll apply anytime the widget is somehow modified (value is added).
Not really, because the point of tariffs is that they apply only to imported goods, creating a preference for local ones. If VAT is applied equally to imported and local goods it's not a tariff, it's a tax that consumers pay in any case.
I know he's a very different person with very different interests, but I can think of little worse than spending ANY years having to put on a suit and makeup every single day.
To go down in history as this great figure who increased American territory and the power of the executive branch while making America this economic giant that doesn't depend on the global economy, because he thinks economic policies still work like they did in the 19th century.
He has talked about VAT, but in terms of how they ended up with those numbers, people noticed that the claimed rates don't have anything to do with the actual tariff/VAT/etc. rates, they're just based on the relative size of the US trade deficit with each country.
The gloss will be "this way captures all the various unfair things they're doing to us that are the cause of all these trade deficits" but that's just, well, gloss.
Inheriting a strong economy beating all expectations that was just about to end its fight with inflation and burning it all away in a pump and dump crypto scheme fashion, while doing nothing (or even working to expand) unprecedented wealth inequality. Good luck, going to need it. The world reserve currency status is faltering, and so will the benefits it allowed US economy.
If there is a deficit at all. Looking at the monetary flows it seems most of the deficit outflows where just flowing back into the US through the stock market.
> If American consumers or the American government borrow to consume, what you say is right
Consumer borrowing is paid back, so it does not contribute to inflation. Government just issues more debt to pay off the debt, and that leads to collapse.
> US monetary policy for decades now that the deficit doesn't really matter
AKA kicking the can down the road. The bill will come due.
The US economy was not strong in 2024. Cost of living was literally the most important election issue, and it is what decided the election undoubtedly.
It's partially because elites said 'the economy is great! look at my stocks!' while consumer goods had increased in price by 100% or more in only 4 years.
The economy has not been 'strong' since at least 2019.
CPI is a joke that just subs out everything when it gets more expensive. Oh food is only up 3%, let's ignore we were pricing beef and eggs and now we're subbing in chicken and tofu.
Inflation has been borderline runaway from 2019-2024. Just ask anyone who isn't rich.
That's the part where "unprecedented wealth inequality" comes in. By most metrics, 2024 was an excellent year and the US was far ahead other developed countries [0] in growth, labor market, consumer spending, net household wealth, and much more; the fundamentals were solid and no figures could point to a major economic downturn at that point, certainly not in a predictable manner. In 2025 the 90th percentile accounts for over half all consumer spending, the median household hasn't reaped the same benefits high-income, high-spending ones have. There is no indication this will change, and may get worse with the current and proposed policies.
So strange to take VAT into account when it's not discriminating between local or import. By that logic the US has a 5-10% tariff on everything too since we have sales tax in like 47 states.
The thinking may be that the asymmetry in taxes itself cause a trade imbalance. What can the country do with the extra tax money they receive compared to the lower tax country? They can spend it to fund infrastructure, goods, and jobs inside their own borders.
Ok. Taking this argument completely in good faith, does it follow that they think no country should be allowed to have any sales tax? Or that it’s an act of economic oppression for any country to have a higher sales tax than our country does? I’m just confused, do they propose every country should abolish all their sales taxes to appease this strange and pretty novel point of view.
I feel like Trump or whoever is running this import tax show has lost the plot on what they’re trying to accomplish.
I don't know if anyone's necessarily saying that. I think it's a matter of "if tax differences cause trade imbalances, then increasing tariffs by the other side is basically a fair response, since it is also a tax."
Yes, we're on the same page I think. For context, this thread was originally about to what extent VAT is comparable to tariffs. For example, say country A has a end-consumer tax of 20% and country B has one of 10%, and neither has tariffs or other trade barriers. On the surface, we might expect country B to have a trade surplus due to having comparatively cheaper exports. But what if they instead they have a deficit?
Country A is less dependent on B than the other way around, and they are able to enrich their country with the extra tax revenue. Maybe they even use this tax revenue to invest or incentivize what's needed to become even less dependant on country B. Now suppose country B increases their tariff until the trade balance is zero. In this scenario, all country B is really doing is increasing their own tax revenue to match that of country A.
That's a bit misleading.
Make no mistake, current US tariffs are UNIVERSAL. Not specific to e.g. chicken or automobiles or purebred horses. They cover absolutely everything.
While you may see 38% or more tariff on chocolate, chocolate export to the EU from the US is hardly an important issue. And for dairy products, the tariff is a fixed euro amount per weight, not %.
I wasn't touching the first two categories anyway, tariffs or no tariffs.
First one because I don't understand why i should risk a milk based product that has traveled for months across an ocean. Or even from another EU country, when I can buy stuff made in a 200 km radius around me.
Second one because afaik it's legal to call "chocolate" something that does not contain any actual cocoa in the US.
> Second one because afaik it's legal to call "chocolate" something that does not contain any actual cocoa in the US.
Well, no. It cannot be called "chocolate" if it is something that consumers would expect to be made from actual chocolate. However, it can contain the term "chocolate" if cocoa or another cacao product is the sole source of its chocolate flavor, and as long as consumers have a pre-established understanding that it is likely to not be made from chocolate. For example, people generally understand that chocolate cake is likely made with cocoa, not chocolate, and so it can be labeled "chocolate cake". If there is no such general understanding, the product must be labeled "chocolate flavored".
(See the US FDA CPG Sec 515.800, "Labeling of Products Purporting to be 'Chocolate' or 'Chocolate Flavored'")
Now if we could just get them to stop calling chocolate products with dairy in them "dark" (I'm looking at you, Hershey...)
Cheese is the obvious one here. I can get a variety of foreign cheeses even at my local big-box grocery. Much better options than most domestically produced cheese.
Irish/Finnish butter (Kerrygold/Finlandia) is also fairly popular here.
If properly refrigerated, milk can last for months especially if pasteurized.
You can also evaporate milk and it will last nearly forever unrefrigerated if kept dry
> But why take the risk when you can have fresh?
> Is that still milk?
Some people just find it things like evaporated milk convenient. e.g, Coffee drinkers who don't want to bother with refrigerating the cream, so they use the powdered stuff.
In the case of European butters/cheeses, they just taste despite the higher cost.
I doubt anyone would actually prefer American butter, except maybe Americans, but it could be the American producers can make it more cheaply.
> Coffee drinkers who don't want to bother with refrigerating the cream, so they use the powdered stuff.
Infidels! Coffee is the black as night stuff! The rest is just kiddy drinks!
When I say milk, I'm talking about drinking it as-is.
> In the case of European butters/cheeses, they just taste despite the higher cost.
Ok but I'm European. My favourite butter - with taste - is manufactured 124 km away from me :)
It's nothing fancy, just butter. Not even expensive. Maybe 10% more than the average local butter.
This subthread started with the post that said the EU is taxing US dairy and chocolate products prohibitively.
Careful: The rate mentioned for alcoholic beverages (and confectionery) may include Excise Duty.
Excise Duty usually have the non-discriminatory aspect of VAT : they’re also applied on local production.
Interesting that people are downvoting heavily those information. If reality does not match our view of the World, well, let's ignore reality. The truth is that EU kept higher tariffs on US goods than the other way, Trump is changing that and there is an outcry, because it was Trump who did that. If that was Kamala, nobody would even notice.
3.5) rescinded/paused [30-61) days. There will be some bluster, and then announcements with the large trading partners like Japan, South Korea, etc., that some new deals have been struck.
Genuine questions: why are they calling it “reciprocal”? Is the US just matching the tariffs set by the other countries?
Also, this announcement has wiped out any plans of buying tech products this year, plus a holiday to the US and Canada later in the year. Good thing too, as the entire globe is probably staring down the barrel of a recession.
Because when the blowback comes, people will be looking to cast blame for starting this whole trade war, and when that time comes Trump will point to the word "reciprocal" and say "we didn't start this, we were only reciprocating".
> Is the US just matching the tariffs set by the other countries?
No. Trump claims that the new tariffs are a 50% discount on what those countries tariff US goods at. (Even if that's questionable - is VAT a tariff?)
If he's correct, or anywhere close, this is a "tough love" strategy to force negotiations. We'll see how it goes. It also plays to his base - why should we tariff any less than they do us? And they have a point, it's the principle of the thing.
Prior to yesterday's announcement, the claim regarding tarrifs was that the goal was to bring manufacturing back to american soil. This is unlikely to happen in any case, but it requires at minimum that consumers put up with high prices for a while (with "a while" being measured in years, if not decades). Actually, the "liberation day" tarrifs strongly agree with this goal: after speculation, the administration announced the formula for these new tarrifs, which has nothing to do with counter tarrifs or trade barriers as claimed, and instead comes from a ratio of the trade deficit in goods and the overall amount of trade. In other words, countries that export a lot of goods to the US (and the US doesn't have commensurate goods exports to) get high tarrifs. This makes sense if the goal is to incentivize manufacturing in the US, by making manufactured goods from outside more expensive.
There is another camp that thinks that trump doesn't really have a goal per se, and is rather doing all this as an exercise in showing off his strength and to draw attention to himself. This camp holds that eventually trump will get bored, or the public will turn on him, and he'll need to get rid of tarrifs to save face. We call these people "optimists".
According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.
According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam's trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.
The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan's claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU's claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.
Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.
Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn't buy a lot of US stuff is because they're poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they're nowhere near 90%: [3].)
America's government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.
Someone calculated the formula used. They divided the trade deficit of each country by total trade of each country and assumed that was all a tariff.
So for example Indonesia and the US traded $28 billion. The US has a 17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. 17.9/28 =0.639, or 64%, which is assumed to be all caused by tariffs. So they divide by two and impose 32%.
Anyway no the US isn't matching tariffs they're dramatically exceeding them.
That's a bit of a messed up way to calculate things.
I also think the US deficits are hugely overstated because much of what the US produces is intellectual capital rather than physical goods and the profits are made to appear in foreign subsidiaries for tax reasons. Like if I buy Microsoft stuff in the UK, Microsoft make out it was made in Ireland for tax purposes, but really the value is created in and owned by the US. The US company both wrote the software and owns Microsoft Ireland. So much of the perceived unfairness Trump is having a go at isn't real.
You raise an excellent point that US corporate tax evasion is exaggerating the trade deficit. However, from the perspective of winning US elections, I think it does not change the issue that the trade deficit falls more on de-industrializing Midwestern states, and the corporations you are referring to are concentrated in Northeastern and Western states.
Secondly, if Microsoft or Apple makes the profit appear in Ireland, it cannot move that money back to the domestic US, right? So as long as the money sits overseas, it would not count towards US trade and thus the deficit calculation is fair.
They don't move the profit back to the US, but through Ireland and the Netherlands they move it out of the EU mostly to some tax havens in the Caribbean. From there they use them for their stock buybacks, which I think equals mostly flowing back into the US.
Again, not flowing back to the right people. All of this could have been solved by sane redistribution, but no. It'll still be redistribution but in a cruder, less apparent form.
If the profits went back to Apple HQ directly they would serve to raise the share price and allow stock buybacks and stock based compensation for employees. Same as they do now.
You may not like a tech company succeeding at exports and having a rising share price, but that is distinct from the overall point which is that properly considered these are US exports obscured by the US tax code which incentivizes profits abroad.
That's a great point. I checked into this, and if and when the profits are repatriated they indeed only show up in the capital account, not the current account.
However, in practice even if not repatriated those exports show up in the us economy. Profits raise the share price, which allows stock grants at higher values, effectively a wage as one example.
I wonder how big an effect this phenomenon you highlight has. Must be a fairly large overstatement of the US trade deficit.
If the US has a trade deficit, doesn't that mean the US is trading make-believe pieces of paper for real goods.
Like, if I scribble on a piece of paper and then trade you the piece of paper for an incredibly engineered brand new laptop, is that bad for me? Is this a sign of my weakness?
I know economics can be complicated, and probably "it depends", but why is a trade deficit bad? Why does the Trump administration want to eliminate trade deficits?
Do you have some required reading to share here? As I remember it, the body of knowledge on economy is that tarriffs are good for collecting revenue, but bad for economic growth.
What is the phase called? What is this amputation and what spreading is it stopping?
Yes, it is bad for economic growth, but this is not the tactic of protectionism. It is in the name that the purpose is to protect domestic production. It is done by forcing competition barriers on external producers
> What is the phase called?
Economic crisis / intense rivalry. US is economically threatened by the rise of China, it has been on the radar for many years. Things have reached a point where US can't just sit there and do nothing as China challenges the global status quo.
> What is this amputation and what spreading is it stopping?
The spreading is the slow but ongoing rise of Chinas economic power. The amputation is thr free-trade bariers
But even if this works. How is the best outcome achieved for the USA? Take phones for example. Today, Apple design phones in the USA and has them manufactured outside the USA by low wage workers. If the phone costs $1000. That price is the sum of production costs and profits (and other things, but those are negligible for this discussion).
If the production cost portion increases, because of tariffs, then Apple either has to take less profit (shareholders unhappy) or increase the cost of the phone (shareholders happy).
If the tariffs are increased enough, Apple could be forced to move production to the USA. But this only happens if the workers in the USA are willing to work the same wages as external production. If USA workers cost more than external production, then again, Apple loses profit or raises prices.
Am I missing something? Unless USA workers are willing to work for wages as external production (give or take the tariff amount), then this simply doesn't work.
There’s one scenario: if there’s room for more automation, manufacturers might have fewer high-wage workers at a more automated plant. The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t work if the task can’t be cheaply automated (much textile manufacturing falls into this category) or if it’s already being automated. I would be surprised if Apple has that much untapped room for automation but other companies might be able to match costs that way.
According to the BBC reporting, it appears that for each country he's charging 50% of the tariff they place on US goods coming into those countries, or a baseline of 10% for some countries like the UK.
A lot of comments have already mentioned that. You can also calculate it by yourself.
For example, in 2024, the total value of US trade in goods with China was approximately $582.4 billion, comprising $143.5 billion in exports and $438.9 billion in imports. [0]
OP's comment sounds like a red herring to me - is it the "broken legal system" that still keeps Trump away of turning the US into a technocracy/autocracy?
Could be. There’s that software engineer that is touting the king Trump thing. I forget his name. The whole idea is ridiculous. Imagine folks that want such a thing just imagine an AOC queenship.
What? No, just literally the US legal system is utterly broken. It's the reason we literally put black men in jail for Life over and over again for minor crimes, because we have a broken legal system.
Just take it literally, the US legal system is utterly broken, as in it does not function. It's the reason we literally put black men in jail for Life over and over again for minor crimes, because we have a broken legal system, it's why in America whoever has the most money wins it's why all of our politicians are lawyers because the legal system is broken.
Don't know about beef specifically, but I wouldn't trust food from the US because I'm sure it has in it a lot of stuff that's illegal in the EU...
Too bad that I actually like bourbons. Let's see if the retaliatory tarrifs make them more expensive than the fancy japanese whiskey bottles next to them... I've been meaning to try those.
lately in conversations with people who have always openly hated the US hegemony and the "western system" (and I can myself see the many issues with that system) I see a certain glee at the current state of affairs, as if they are happy that finally the pain inflicted by "the west" on third-world countries is finally coming back to haunt the US and Europe. They don't seem to think two or three steps ahead, what is the alternative they are cheering for? A russian style oligarchy? A chinese style one party dictatorship?
I think it's just human nature that if things are horrible for you and your family you'll want things to change and if things are good you want them to keep going. The guy above obviously is having a great time so any change to the corrupt system terrifies him.
"anything but the pain I'm experiencing now is better" is a short-sighted outlook. The working class will bear the bulk of the pain from these tariffs.
Broken systems should be fixed or replaced, is that the type of thinking you abhor?
If you prefer living in a broken system I guess you have a lot of options available. What we have been doing in America has utterly failed humanity, sounds like your making a lot of money off a failed state and don't want your income to be threatened. I wish your type of thinking didn't exist, the world would be a much better place.
I've talked to several Iranians, they pretty much said that that's what happened to Iran. People tore it down because they were unhappy with their current government, but they didn't have a replacement. Authoritarians with false promises filled the void and created Iran as we know it today.
Sounds like the way things are going to me and it's what a lot of people are rooting for. I think America did a really good job of compartmentalizing the rich and the poor so the rich are completely unaware of what everyone else is dealing with.
Trump is saying the positives are the it will force companies to build stuff in the US, thus increasing our domestic manufacturing and increasing jobs. I don't see that happening in a significant way, but who knows?
But if that does happen, then the huge amount of revenue that Trump thinks is going to come to the government's coffers won't happen, and that revenue is meant to offset some of the tax breaks for the wealthy, so we're kinda screwed either way.
Well it's positive for various countries that benefit from an end to US dominance over the world. :p
So for the US itself? The theory would be that the tariffs will increase US manufacturing sector. But the cold hard truth is that it isn't the 1830s anymore and last time tariffs were tried happened to line up exactly with the Great Depression.
Even an competent administration would have great difficulty making tariffs to restore manufacturing work in the US, if that is even at all possible. It fails because other countries just put the same tariffs back on the US.
So with the Trump's administration some kinda of serious economy meltdown is almost certainly the result.
Autarky is just bad economic policy because comparative advantage is too powerful. Nobody benefits from this. The US loses and everyone else loses. The US loses the most however, both economically and in soft power.
This isn't even the China model. Slapping tariffs on raw inputs guarantees that US industry cannot compete internationally. This is more like the North Korean model.
While there are positives to targeted industrial policy, there are no positives to autarky.
> The US loses the most however, both economically and in soft power.
Yes. It loses most because 10-20% of world trade is for value added in the USA. The one exception is the USA of course, because their percentage is 100%. So USA is 100% effected, the rest of the world is 10-20% effected as they continue to happily trade with each other without tariffs.
I dunno about everywhere else, but in Australia the effects are already noticeable. Trade with the USA is dropping, and trade with Canada is growing.
Trump is going for a 1-2 punch. First tariffs and then tax cuts to soften the blow of price increases. It also puts republicans in a choke hold to force the tax cut legislation through, because the fallout of tariffs with no tax cuts would be a death knell for the party.
Maybe in a sim city game this would balance out, but it's a tall order for a real world scenario. Prepare for a bumpy road ahead.
It’s all a grift for the wealthy anyway. He doesn’t care about the hurting 50k a year worker. Low income MAGA voters are just fodder for Trump to enrich himself and the wealthy around him.
> It also puts republicans in a choke hold to force the tax cut legislation through, because the fallout of tariffs with no tax cuts would be a death knell for the party.
I mean, they could vote down the "emergency" Trump is using in order to obtain the authority to enact these tariffs instead, and that would be so much less work. But of course they won't go against their Dear Leader.
omg do you think elon started playing simcity recently, trying out all these ridiculous things, and now he's advising donald to do same in the real world, because he's convinced it'll work based on the simcity experience?
I don’t buy the blanket statement that the consumer always pays the tariff. It depends on what alternative companies have. If a company can purchase the same clothing from Chinese, Vietnamese, or Mexican vendors, a tax on China only could make the Chinese vendors lower the price or risk losing the business.
However, a blanket tax on every country, regardless of available alternatives, would leave businesses with fewer options and make it more likely that the cost is passed on to consumers.
For taxes to work in raising money, they have to be paid. So, if the goal is to make revenue from the taxes, then raising costs is expected?
If the goal is to incentivize alternatives, then the tax has to be such that it raises the price above the gap there now. So, even if you do drive people to an alternative source, the new price will be higher than the old. (Unless the thought is that people were choosing to not buy the cheaper source to begin with?)
I suppose you can argue that some suppliers have such a margin that the tax could be an effort to get them to cut into that? I have not seen evidence that that is the case?
The objective reality of the situation is that there is a transaction between a buyer and a seller. That transaction is what pays the tariff, VAT, property transfer tax or whatever vampirical suckage by whatevername.
Both transacting counterparties are robbed.
How that is distributed between them is a matter of which has more alternatives. E.g. if the seller has lots of prospective buyers, most of whom are not subject to the tax, then the market price they demand is not sensitive to the rare buyer who does pay the tax.
If a big fraction of the seller's prospective buyers face a tax, then it makes their product or service look more expensive to a good chunk of the market, which exerts downward pressure on the price. The downward pressure on the price means that the seller effectively pays some of the tax, through lost revenue.
So, the transaction pays the tax as such, but how much of it is distributed between buyer and seller depends on the degree of influence of the tax on the price point.
> If a company can purchase the same clothing from Chinese, Vietnamese, or Mexican vendors, a tax on China only could make the Chinese vendors lower the price or risk losing the business.
This example implies producers are already in competition with one another, so it's unlikely that any of them can lower the price much. On the other hand, if some producers leave the market due to the tariffs, then there's less competition overall and the other producers can charge more.
This is true, but the amount of production in China dwarfs everyone else, and definitely what America can bring up anytime soon, so two consequences:
A. Tariff for Chinese goods will be reflected in consumer prices pretty much directly.
B. Domestic suppliers if the same goods have very limited capacity, giving them the pricing power to raise their prices by the tariff amount, and take it as extra profit.
Take for example cars. We will see American cars go up by the same amount as imports as long as they are oversubscribed on capacity.
>Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States.
I thought the tariff goal was also to fix the issue with Pharmaceuticals where the R&D happened in the US, the company then “exported” the IP to the EU factories, and now import the drugs back. This results in a US tax rate of 0%.
Exempting chips alone doesn't make sense. Does Intel have to pay 20% on ASML lithography machines or more on Japanese ones? Meanwhile TSMC can fab chips in Taiwan and export to the US without tariffs.
Americans have been hurt for 50 years … yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers. Buuuuuut - placing tariffs on our allies that will likely lead to a recession makes no sense.
Devaluing the dollar and subsidizing production in the US makes far more sense.
New debt is only more expensive if you have to exchange something of value to obtain the USD to pay down the debt. But since the Fed can expand the money supply at will, it's essentially creating new USD out of thin air which can be used.
(This is how the US has been able to sustain such a large debt without any real consequences.)
What will happen though is that interest rates on T bills will rise, so yes, in that sense, it does eventually become "more expensive" to service new debt. But again it's in nominal dollar terms and so it's just a matter of issuing more dollars. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't devalue the dollar thus triggering an inflationary cycle.
> Saying Americans haven’t been hurt they’ve benefited applies to white collar workers only - no change to jobs and cheaper goods.
And that's a big reason why Trump won: white collar workers, like the GP, lecturing blue collar workers, while being ignorant of their actual situation.
And what Trump has been doing does not actually serve blue collar workers. Republican policies don't serve blue collar workers in general: anti union policies, for one.
Republican policies serve billionaires and make no attempts to hide this, but they win blue collar votes from foolish people who believe culture war narratives matter.
The culture war was invented to distract from class war waged by billionaires against the working class, hello.
You've just repeated the Democratic party line, designed to cover their ass for their inaction and inattention. Democrats will lecture the blue collar working class to not believe their lying eyes and trust the Democrats, then lecture them on how they have to because Republicans are so much worse.
It's a dumb strategy, and it isn't working anymore.
The error is assuming that Americans are homogenous. Wealthy ones benefited tremendously by reducing their production costs while the less fortunate were put into international labour productivity competition.
Well, does the American public make it viable for a politician to push for expenditure of taxes on supporting the "less fortunate", say in terms of re-education or, you know, subsidizing social safety nets? If income inequality was such an issue, why did Americans put into power a billionaire to design the economy twice? Lol
Income inequality does not have a chance of standing as relevant issue in corporate media. Furthermore social media has become a significant suppressor by shaming (perhaps not the right word) people of their circumstances. As a result the perceived public opinion is far from actual opinion of the people on the relevant issues that Bernie Sanders often speaks about.
Whereas some did vote for the Trump in spite to make others suffer as they already do.
And yet, we have a system where the less fortunate could, simply by choosing to, make the government use some of the wealthy people’s money to make things better for themselves. This has been done in the past in the US, during the years that many consider America’s best. In other countries, the poor don’t have this option.
But, they choose not to. To some this choice is noble, to others it’s foolish. Either way, what can you do?
When the wealth redistribution were done in the past there happened to be a strong movements that backed the change. I don’t see prospects of that happening in the foreseeable future given the new technologies of surveillance and deception.
They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
> Because now most Americans don't slave away in unsafe factories 7 days/week for dollars an hour.
Now they're collecting disability in their unsafe neighborhoods, getting morbidly obese while their substance abusing kids play vidya games in the basement into their 30s.
Yes, it's really like that. People want their factories and incomes back. I don't claim that anything happening here is going to deliver that, but that's the pitch they're voting for. To their credit, at least they're pursuing that in lieu of some UBI ideocracy made of fantasy money.
As for you: it's fine to point out all the ways they may be misguided and/or misled, but unless you have an alternative that doesn't amount to expecting everyone to somehow earn an advanced degree, and then discover it's next to worthless (even before "AI",) your really not contributing much. So what do you have?
> They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
This conundrum, like so many others in public discourse, is downstream of the widespread but fundamentally incorrect belief in free will (which in turn is downstream of belief in supernatural powers, because free will sure as hell isn't explained by anything in nature).
Nothing is in anyone's control. There's no such thing as "eyes wide open". People's behaviors are 100% downstream of genetics and environment. Some people behave rationally some of the time, and to the extent they do so it is because the environment set them up to do that. There is absolutely no coherent reason to generalize that into the idea that most people vote (or do anything else) rationally.
I mean in their actual self-interest rather than, say, what they have been made to believe is in their self-interest.
> Deindustrialization and Nikefication in the past several decades isn't "rational" long-term behavior either.
Maybe, but I was responding to "They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice."
There's an implication here, and in a subsequent reply that people voting against their interests is "[t]he go to midwit rationalization for every electoral loss", that people exercised free will when they voted.
This is plainly incorrect, because free will quite clearly does not exist. No one has ever shown the kinds of violations in the laws of physics that would be required for free will to exist.
Since free will does not exist, there is simply no a priori reason to believe that people voted in their interests. People's voting decisions, like everything else they do, are out of their control. To the extent that they vote in a particular way that's good or bad for them, it's driven purely by luck and circumstances.
It is this a priori belief that people vote or act in their own interests that's the real "midwit rationalization".
> There's an implication here, that people exercised free will when they voted.
There's no such implication.
> This is plainly incorrect, because free will quite clearly does not exist.
> Since free will does not exist, there is simply no a priori reason to believe that people voted in their interests.
What are you even talking about.
People (and living beings in general) acting in their own self-interest - pretty much all the time - it is the most universal general principle of life if there ever was one. This doesn't require or involve free will.
How well a biorobot (no free will!) executes in pursuing his self-interests, is the selection critereon.
Now, the people make mistakes pursuing their self-interests, doesn't mean they aren't acting in their self-interest. Because they sure as hell are - all the frigging time! It's their whole firmware!
Deindustrialization / nikefication all the way through the value chain except the very, very top last step of the value add - hasn't been in their self-interest, it isn't in the interests of their nation either.
It's only in the self-interests of short-term thinking shareholders that min-max asset valuations with great costs to everyone else but themselves.
> People (and living beings in general) acting in their own self-interest - pretty much all the time - it is the most universal general principle of life if there ever was one.
Base evolutionary instincts to survive don't translate to humans living in complex modern societies acting in their self-interest.
>Base evolutionary instincts to survive don't translate to humans living in complex modern societies acting in their self-interest.
What are you talking about?
Base evolutionary pressures and instincts have translated in exactly that.
Complex modern societies, and emergent behaviors and strategies arise from agents acting in their own self-interest (organizing in groups or otherwise to further their goals).
The idea that not only people don't act in their self-interest, but you - in fact - know better what's in their best interest is truly some mid-tier thinking. Or that you have some unique ability to know what's in their best self-interest, but they... for some reason... don't.
Now it doesn't mean that acting in self-interest doesn't sometimes result in ruin, because it surely can!
That however doesn't mean that all these choices weren't made with self-interest in mind, front and center, despite people claiming otherwise.
The groups and societies that enact the winning, most sensible strategy, economic and industrial policy will win out.
Those individually or in groups that don't, will go to shitter and or be selected out. It's that simple.
I think people with expertise and training do generally know what's in people's interest more than untrained people themselves, yes. I also think that the fact that this isn't blindingly obvious to most folks is at the heart of a lot of the rot in modern society.
> I think people with expertise and training do generally know what's in people's interest more than untrained people themselves
For petes sake dude, people act in their own self-interests.
That includes so called "people with expertise and training", or more correctly put - credentialed people.
They worked towards getting these credentials (fancy law or economics degree at a fancy university) - not because they were interested in acting in interests of the "untrained people". They just wanted a cushy, high status, well paid job.
What do you think governments are ran by - generally speaking? People without "expertise"(cough, cough) and "training"?
No, they are ran by people with "expertise and training" (ie. credentialed)!
The problem is that they mainly act in their self-interests (and interests of their social group) first and foremost, and not for their expertise or lack-thereof. And the people that vie for positions of power and status act in their self-interests and interests of their social clique squared or cubed. Everything else is an afterthought.
>I also think that the fact that this isn't blindingly obvious to most folks is at the heart of a lot of the rot in modern society.
> Experience and training makes you better at things. What can I say.
The orange has a degree in economics by the way (from a ivy league uni too). So you could say he has both the credentials, the experience and the training. You could even... dare I say... call him an expert.
Or you could just accept the obvious - any barely functioning middling brain can get credentials and become an "expert". And that they do. It is neither a competency nor an intellect filter.
Neither is there personal responsibility or real liability if they are wrong about their economic and other policies that lead to ruin (endless list of examples of this in past). Seen any heads on the pike lately? Yeah, me neither.
Nor are there incentives in place to think what's in other "common" peoples best interests. So why would they?
There's a long line of "expert economists", Paul Krugman among others who advocated for free-trade policies that directly led to nikefication, deindustrialization of US. Now they are nowhere to be seen to take the credit, woops!
The presumption that the credentialed ("expert") knows (or even cares frankly) what's in other common peoples best interest is completely baseless and extremely naive.
The credentialed "experts" being so incompetent and confidently wrong is what gave you the orange. Now orange is the "expert"! And you better listen!
No, I wouldn't call him an expert. I'd call him deeply incompetent and missing basic skills.
Simply having a credential is not enough. You need actual training and expertise — to be good at what you do. I'm thinking of all the scientists and bureaucrats who run things like the NIH, vaccine programs, and air quality/pollution control. Many people do not perceive those programs to be in their self-interest. But in reality they are, regardless of someone's personal opinion.
Instead of going "hmmm, they oppose green policies, which means pollution IS in their self-interests -
ie. they are probably from a coal mining town, working in a fossil fuel petro chemical related industry
or an area with industrial outputs wherein their livelihood solely depends on pollution to a large extent".
Or maybe they can't afford an expensive electric vehicle and an old dirty gas guzzling clunker is the only means of transportation they have.
Or that they move from a pollution free country-side to a polluted dirty city, not because they seek the pollution, but because the opportunities and jobs are more in their self-interests than... ODing on fenta in pristine clean air.
Naah, midwits don't do this.
They presume they are smart and everyone else is stupid and need guidance from the expert (that would be me, the midwit of course), and everything else is derived from it.
When the "expert" gets rejected on basis of incompetence or not acting in their self-interests,
that always upsets the midwit, because the midwit always self-identifies as an expert. And rejection of the "experts" equals rejection of the midwit.
Of course, the midwit never has demonstrated competence (nobody doubts demonstrated competence!), all they have is credentials and university degrees and papers. This frustrates the midwit to no end.
Demonstrated expertise and competence is always outside their abilities and reach - they are far from somebody like John Carmack, Michael Abrash, etc who has many shipped products, you can see his code. Nobody doubts their competency, etc. All they have instead is some sort of paper that says "believe me I'm an expert".
No matter what training, education or experience midwit has... he still is just a midwit at the end of the day.
As per modus operandi of the midwit, you didn't demonstrate anything. You just disagreed.
I implore you to bring evidence where demonstrated competency of John Carmack or Michael Abrash is called into question. Demostrate how that is a phenomenon or a trend. And if you can't, I rest my case.
It is obvious to any reasonable person that in the statement "nobody" doesn't literally mean not a single entity within 8 billion population of the planet.
You said "demonstrated competence" in general, not Carmack or Abrash.
My own competence has repeatedly been questioned, even though I've consistently delivered results on the teams I've been on. My body of work is almost all public so feel free to verify yourself. It turns out that how much you're questioned has a lot to do with race and gender — basically every single highly skilled minority I know has been in this position.
> You said "demonstrated competence" in general, not Carmack or Abrash.
I did specifically mention Carmack and Abrash to give a concrete example of what demonstrated competence is.
And to avoid having to argue some vague, watered down, abstract pedestrian notion of what "demonstrated competence" is.
>My own competence has repeatedly been questioned, even though I've consistently delivered results on the teams I've been on. My body of work is almost all public so feel free to verify yourself. It turns out that how much you're questioned has a lot to do with race and gender — basically every single highly skilled minority I know has been in this position.
It looks like my intuiton has been on point here. You see yourself as a highly skilled, competent expert.
Except others are apparently not always sharing in your self aggrandizing perception of self.
Since you can't come to terms with this, hijinx insues wherein you assume that everyone else is just stupid, irrational instead. Or you surmise that they reject your "competency and expertise" based on irrelevant immutable characteristics.
People who voted that wouldn't want to work at factories with working conditions and salaries Chinese factories make everything they consume. They also don't support the unions that would make working bearable in factories. Even if somehow factories would return and pay reasonable compensation, that would make the products so expensive most Americans couldn't afford them. People would have to consume a lot less. Which may be a good thing for the planet, but I doubt that's what the voters are prepared for.
The richest country in the world cannot save their own citizens from poverty. Not to mention most number of millionaires and billionaires. Obviously the solution is to impose tariffs based on some made up numbers. Wonderful idea!
> Now they're collecting disability in their unsafe neighborhoods, getting morbidly obese while their substance abusing kids play vidya games in the basement into their 30s.
> People want their factories and incomes back
Sounds like what they really want is safety and hope for their futures. I'm not sure going back to the way things were - good or bad - is the way for society to move forward though.
> They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
Have you considered the platform that the Republicans have actually been running on? Was it one of economic policy? Did you consider why they attacked DEI and minority groups (including LGBTQ)? Because they would not have won on this roughshod economic policy.
Did you ever work at a factory? I did. I would most certainly prefer to collect a pension and play video games (which I do now in retirement). Anyone would.
Doomsaying prognostications, odd questions, free will talk for some reason, evidence free assertions about voters and their interests, doubts and fears...
And precisely 0.0 alternatives offered.
I can't imagine anyone being surprised that we've ended up with Trump et al. When all you offer is un-actionable thoughts and cowardly status quo, no one will listen to you. Meanwhile, the cohort of disenfranchised, disposable people grows around you until they fear the status quo more than they fear change.
I've met a lot of people in St. Louis working various factory jobs. Making different kinds of specialized equipment, food products. I think they get paid $25+ an hour starting out. A fair amount seem like tedious jobs.
There's around 12.8 million people in the US working in manufacturing.
some benefit. many have been in a state of perpetual poverty/welfare, but we don't see those in the official stats because the rich are so rich here it skews numbers
> Americans have been hurt for 50 years … yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers. Buuuuuut - placing tariffs on our allies that will likely lead to a recession makes no sense.
Yeah, some tariffs aren't a bad idea. But this plan? Just stupid, without any thought or strategy behind it.
The tariffs should be used more strategically to reorganize supply chains, not these blanket tariffs of low cost and high cost places. And probably ratchet them up slowly, to give time for production to move, instead of a big bang of putting them up everywhere.
So tariff China and Mexico, not Canada and Germany.
America got richer and outgrew the phase where tons of factory jobs made sense. It seems pretty clear to me that well-paying manufacturing job in developed countries were the product of a particular moment in time where poorer countries couldn't do it yet. Now they can. It was never going to last.
I live in NJ and people often make a lot of noise every time there's a report of people moving out of NJ because of high taxes and high housing costs (yet NJ's overall population has increased).
To me, it makes sense: NJ is a place where you live to make a high salary (proximity to NYC and Philadelphia) and raise a family (very good public school systems as a result of those high taxes). When you no longer have a need for those circumstances, you move.
Likewise, the US is not a great place for certain types of manufacturing because the labor and raw material supply chain simply isn't there. Why not focus on the things that we are good at instead?
It was never going to last if the US allowed for very low cost imports from those countries. This is literally one of the largest points of tariffs - protecting domestic manufacturing. We could have had high tariffs the whole time and offshoring would have been much less pronounced. I'm not saying that would have been a net positive, but to say it would never last is only true under certain circumstances.
You were still going to lose export markets as international competition grew, and you were still going to shift to higher value-added service jobs as the economy developed.
Can you please explain a bit more about this 'hurt'?
My understanding is that a significant majority of sources of US 'hurt' are internal and there has been ample opportunity to vote at least some of it away, but the votes keep going in the direction of making it worse.
The worst thing about it is that the situation has essentially been perpetrated on the citizens of the US by those with power and influence for the simple human weakness of greed. Unfortunately they've got the power and resources to effectively do large scale "convincing".
> yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers
Manufacturing didn’t go overseas - it got automated. The US is still the world’s 2nd largest manufacturer, the share of GDP going to manufacturing has been flat since 1950, and so on.
What happened is automation made manufacturing need vastly fewer workers. Nothing is “being jobs back” from a fairy tale reason.
From what I understand, de minimis exemption has also been removed.
That is a huge, huge deal. It effectively means that all goods imported from China will be slapped with a 30% import tax, as soon as said goods arrive the US border / customs.
Usually what happens then, is that the courier will pay that tax, and then bill the recipient later on - as well as charge some fee/fees for the work done.
This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.
If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
(That's just from the most obvious consumer example...then you have pretty much everything else. Goods, commodities, etc.)
So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.
a $1 item with $1 shipping will end up costing you as much as $52 after June!
Do you expect their annual turnover to go up? They might get a bigger slize of the pie but the pie itself is getting smaller.
Pre trade AMZN was down 7%
Yeah, but it sounds like the tariff is a higher percent for single item shipments. That means that aliexpress would sell less to individuals and more to Amazon resellers.
Down 6% in premarket, will have to wait and see but likely wont help them much as tariffs will impact a significant amount of their products regardless.
In addition to what everyone else has said, if Europe goes through with the new "Big Tech tax" and/or tariffs on digital services, AWS would presumably take a big hit.
Courier will only pay the tax if it's a DDP solution, and then bill it back to the actual merchant. FedEx, DHL, and UPS provide this as an option. If it goes USPS, or no DDP solution is in place, it's going DDU and it will simply be stuck in a sufferance warehouse or at the local post office until the recipient comes in and pays the bill.
Well, the good news is almost nobody is gonna like this, so I don't anticipate it lasting beyond Trump's presidency, assuming he makes it 4 years at this rate. The bad news is that even after tariffs are removed, it will take years for prices to recover, if they ever do.
They're going to try to make sure we never have fair elections again. I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but they're sure as hell going to try, which is terrifying.
After this, I don't think they'll succeed. This is Trump's Afghanistan pullout moment. His approval will crater and never recover. He's not surrounded by adults like the first time around.
Actually one policy that Biden kept in place after the 2020 elections was the Trump Tariffs.
I think we are underestimating how popular protectionism is with progressives, it may turn out to be an unusual alliance between disaffected voters on the far right and left outnumbering free trade advocates in the center of both parties.
I haven’t seen any progressives in favor of this. Disaffected voters on the left want more housing and universal health care, not tariffs on avocados. Disaffected voters on the right just like to see libs getting owned… but they won’t appreciate their wallets being liberated of their money.
You know back in the 80’s free trade was a right wing Ronald Reagan Republican position and it was the left wing democrats who supported protectionism.
Even in the United Kingdom. The neoliberal Margaret Thatcher supported free trade and an end to the manufacturing jobs of North England and it was the left wing socialist Labour Party of the UK back then that wanted protectionism for English manufacturing workers
Yeah, I know protectionism used to be a ‘left’ position. I agree with parts of the reasoning, like opposing transnational DRM schemes, which the TPP tried to push. But hardcore protectionism has always felt more populist than leftist to me, kind of like how hardcore nationalism isn’t inherently right-wing, but often ends up there.
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,500-4,000 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be about 30% more expensive, electronics will be about 25% more expensive, tires and jewelry about 15% more expensive, and industrial buyers are going to get hosed when they buy equipment.
There were major carve-outs for the auto industry (yay Michigan) and petrochemical industries (yay Gulf Coast); they’ll still get hosed on equipment but will mostly escape increases in cost of materials. Imported cars/trucks aren’t directly affected either.
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Meta discussion:
I can't do an analysis on the de minimis situation, I don't know of any public datasets that would allow such an analysis, and it's obvious that it will have extremely complex effects (and therefore, any first-order analysis would be very low-quality).
Note on ChatGPT-4.5 "Deep Research": I spot-checked the calculations for HS codes using my own research and the numbers seemed reasonably close to my own. https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap is an invaluable resource for this kind of analysis. ChatGPT fumbled the bag on HS 30: Pharmaceutical products, by not excluding products listed in Annex II, which overestimated total tariffs by about 6% ($30 billion), but the net effect on households is still in the right ballpark (+/- 20%).
Edit: This isn't one of those simple low-effort posts that say "omg look what ChatGPT said". I'm capable of doing this analysis on my own, and I checked ChatGPT's work for the largest contributing categories of goods. Sometimes we disagreed by 10% or so, but overall the results checked out except for Pharmaceuticals, which I caught and didn't repeat misinformation in my "practical effects" tl;dr. The only way it is significantly wrong is if both myself and ChatGPT missed some large tariff category and assumed it was small - that could raise the real costs above the numbers in the analysis - but I checked all the largest categories that ChatGPT identified as well as all the largest categories from our largest trade partners shown by the Atlas of Economic Complexity, so it's somewhat unlikely that happened.
I purposefully didn't include 2nd and 3rd order effects (e.g. chained CPI) because they are usually relatively small, massively uncertain (my analysis would be worth as much as dog poop on a shoe) and those higher-order effects take too long to manifest. It's not worth predicting costs out 2+ years because the political environment is far too unstable. Just today, the U.S. Senate voted to block all the Canadian tariffs and end the "state-of-emergency" that this executive order is standing on. Front-page diplomacy or private back-room deals could make Trump adjust tariffs up or down on various nations multiple times this year. Who knows what the situation will be 6 months from now, let alone 5 years from now when global supply chains and pricing elasticity might re-normalize. The fact that ChatGPT didn't include these effects is a point in its favor, not a glaring oversight.
I'm not complaining about downvotes but if you are downvoting this, please let me know why so that I can improve. I put a lot of work into this far beyond just typing some crap into ChatGPT and I think these numbers add a lot to the discussion.
I spent the past 30 minutes calculating this all manually using the sources listed below:
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,488.27 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be (mean) 26.9% more expensive, electronics will be 24.4% more expensive, tires and jewelry 16.2% and 17.1% more expensive, respectively.
If this is more acceptable to you, please voice your approval.
That actually checks out. If you take the median U.S. household income ($74,580) and factor in the effective tax rate (10.9%), eliminating federal income taxes would save the average household $8,167.50 per year. Subtract the $3,488.27 in extra costs from tariffs, and the net savings is still $4,679.23.
So yeah, if those numbers hold up, the median American household actually comes out ahead after everything is accounted for.
I'm sorry, what? Federal income taxes have not been eliminated. Trump can't even do that; Congress would have to, and they won't.
The federal government currently collects on the order of $2.5 trillion in income taxes. These tariffs would only generate $500 billion of federal revenue. But in reality they'll generate less, due to any amount of second-order effects where less stuff is imported due to higher costs. It's very myopic to only look at the household finances and not have anything to say about a proposed loss of $2 trillion of federal revenue.
With allies like you in this discussion thread, who needs enemies?
In Europe, Alibaba has their own warehouse in the Netherlands. I wonder if that's to be able to do a single "international" import. Could the same happen in the US?
Aliexpress does that as well, with a warehouse in Hungary. They ship the products there, import them en masse as a business, then relabel and send them off to the recipients.
They may be compelled to do that; there's 1.3 million packages from Chinese retailers a day coming in through the Netherlands, but since they're all individual packages, they fall under a threshold for import taxes. There's now calls to drop that threshold so that people pay import taxes for small items as well, and / or to compel Temu and co to stop shipping individual packages but do it in bulk.
The exemption for low value imports was removed a few years ago, see other comments near this one in the discussion.
Purchases from Temu pay EU VAT according to the location of the purchaser, and an electronic system means the money sent to Temu gets to the EU and the package can sail through customs.
> This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.
Not the big China exporters, not any more. They all include taxes in the price on your country specific web site, ship to their warehouses inside the EU, handle taxes and your local courier just delivers.
Now if you're talking DHL yes, they have you fill forms upon forms and charge you for the forms you didn't ask for. But if that happens, no one will have time to process all the forms so private imports from China will simply ... halt for a while. Until Temu/AliExpress/etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.
If in the US, I'd hold on any direct purchases from China for 3-6 months.
> So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.
Hah. That's DHL commission territory :) Definitely hold from direct purchases until Temu sorts it out for you.
> Until Temu/AliExpress/etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.
The thing is, the EU specifically set up a structure to make this easier for sellers and transparent for customers (the "import one-stop shop") and I don't see the US government doing any effort to make importations more seamless.
Incidentally, even Amazon US uses that facility. They charge me my local VAT plus some change ("exchange rate whatever" commission, something under 1%) and the package arrives in my hands via courier without any further interaction.
Even Mouser has set up a warehouse inside the EU in the past years. They went from a pain to order from to a pleasure.
Just to emphasise, this system has been set up for ages because you did need to pay VAT on imports anyway. Even without any special tariffs. And that means a visit to the post office in person.
Yeah EU doesn't have a special tariff per se, but they wanted a responsible legal entity in EU to deal with taxes and customer rights so they created this structure.
US just doesn't want anything imported. Doesn't help to set up US entity. You will have to pay this amount. Though, it helps with $1 orders if they import them and process them in bulk.
Well, the point of the action in the US is to stop imports, not just tax them, so manufacturing moves into the US. The minimum fee per item is clearly punitive.
Not that that matters, most manufacturing will simply never be in the US ever again, and having punitive taxes like this will simply drive up costs massively.
If I buy something from amazon.co.jp or Apple and it arrives from Japan or China with DHL/UPS, I don't do anything at all in Poland. It's all transparent, I just get the package for the price on the website.
From which Apple store? If it's your local store of course they have VAT built in.
Interesting about amazon japan, never tried it. Have you tried amazon us?
Edit: interesting, amazon.co.jp seems to be its own thing. My login works on amazon US and all european country sites, but it doesn't work on the JP site.
Amazon is pretty good at handling VAT and all the import paperwork if it's sold as "Fulfilled by Amazon", regardless if it's the local Amazon site, or the US or Japan sites. I've ordered from all 3.
Even eBay has sorted this out now for orders from the US, with VAT and import fees baked into shipping costs. They give sellers the address for their warehouse in Chicago. eBay then forwards as the seller of record.
Fulfilment doesn't have to go through eBay for this.
If I sell a package on eBay.de to a buyer in the UK, I get a customs tracking number to show eBay has collected the required UK VAT. That goes in the form when buying the delivery label and completing the customs (export) declaration.
The EU prepared for years setting this up. It meant all the national post offices updating their systems, and integrating the private parcel delivery companies. It was planned before Covid, then delayed because of the concern for possible disruption.
The USA seems not to have done this planning, and certainly hasn't allowed the months it will take to prepare for it. At least they may have some of the other half of the system, having set that up for exports to the EU/UK.
De minimis exemption expiring has been a planned thing for years through administrations of both parties. Trump admin has been delaying the already planned expiration during the Biden years to use as a negotiating carrot.
Basically it just means Temu/Aliexpress/Etc. will ship their goods to the US in bulk instead of bypassing customs on individual small orders, and distribute from domestic warehouses, having to now compete with US producers who do the same thing.
It does completely kill any business built on dropshipping individual orders from chinese factories without ever touching inventory however.
I'm inclined to believe they're already doing something like this. I don't shop them but my wife uses Shein and Temu pretty often, and commented last year that more and more stuff was shipping from the US rather than overseas now.
>> If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround.
>> If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround. Based on your edit I would guess that they would import a bunch of orders in one shipment to make the 'per shipment' charge small per item/order.
I suspect that this $25/50 per item policy is to prevent people from claiming a lower value than the actual price of the item. I've received international packages marked "gift" with a value of $10 that I had paid much more for.
I doubt the US will even manufacture substitutes for most of the things I liked and ordered from AliExpress. People with hobbies primarily supplied by Chinese manufacturing (like mine- electronics, 3D printing, FPV drones) are just going to be paying more for the same thing. There's no way we'll get an American substitute for niche products- all the US chip fabs are going to be filled with orders for higher dollar parts.
Note that the fact sheet says per item, not per shipment. So there doesn't even seem to be a way to make one big purchase of several items to pay a single fee. They will hit you for every item in the shipment.
Quick edit: I also note that the fact sheet makes a distinction between things sent through international post vs. other means. If you send via UPS/FedEx/DHL there will be regular customs fees (34%?), and through post you will have the $25/50 per item fee. So I will definitely have to pay attention to the shipping method for anything bought from AliExpress from now on.
Quick edit 2: I literally have a PicoCalc from ClockworkPi coming in the mail in a few days- I guess we'll see if DHL charges me any extra fees.
I'm not sure how it'll work in the US but in the UK when I'm buying cheap Chinese stuff on eBay there are usually two options - have it posted from China which is cheapest but slow, or order it from a UK distributor who has bulk imported from China which costs a bit more but arrives in a couple of days. I guess everything will move to the latter system?
To add some color: when I've placed orders like this in the past the small items didn't come packed like consumer goods in a nice box but in something like a zip lock bag or an envelope.
Realistically, the $25 minimum is to cover the costs of handling the imports (with some premium), so it doesn't make sense to charge it for every item in a batch separately.
> This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10
This is what strikes me about these new tariffs... for all the concern about how it's going to impact the US economy (and I don't doubt it will), this is STILL far, far, less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world. Donald Trump's justification for all this is that the U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it's own detriment, and I'm not sure he's necessarily wrong here.
"less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world"
I ordered from Temu and it's shipped from China and arrives at my door with my local sales tax applied -- because Temu abides by Canadian law -- but otherwise with no additional fees. Got a pair of headphones and a three timer device yesterday for $10 CAD.
Or you know, Trump's constant yapping about Canada's diary tariff. In reality the US ships 4x more dairy to Canada tariff free than the reverse, and we, by design, do not target sending dairy to the US. But Trump takes advantage of the poorly informed and/or stupid, and it works amazingly.
>U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it's own detriment
If you're sitting in the richest large country in the world, literally at the height of its economic accomplishment, and you really buy it when someone tells you that you're the victim, you might be profoundly misinformed and with literally zero context of reality.
The US has an amazing amount to fall, and it's going to happen. And when you're working on the assembly line doing extremely low value work, having been ostracized by the entire planet, enjoy how you made the libs pay.
Yeah, the stopping drugs thing is just performative propaganda. It’s really about the money, and the attempt to punish China (which will in fact mostly hurt Americans as much or more, anyways). If it were about the drugs only, there wouldn’t be such punitive measures, and the press release wouldn’t mention the fact that China doesn’t have a de minimus exception.
Great. AliExpress was the RadioShack of 2025. No way I’m spending $25+ for a strip of SMD resistors, and I expect to never see them available in the US at a price that makes sense as a hobbyist. This isn’t helping anyone, will prevent a lot of prototyping, and just be a bad experience in life. Thanks for ruining the fun of the last 5-10 years of DIY electronics golden age.
I had plans to build some animatronic Halloween decorations for this year over the summer. I’m not going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on parts that nominally cost less than $50.
My own pain is minor though compared to everyone I know who uses Temu and other things to basically outfit their life. This will be insanely regressive as they have the least to spend on “on brand” products, which themselves are imported too. This is like “super sales tax for the poor.” Me, I’ll just save my money and wait for the next president to undo the mess. My buddies not as successful monetarily as me? Their quality is life is going down the drain.
This is what happened in Sweden about 10 years ago, when they started charging a $7 "administrative fee" on all packages privately imported from China. Prices for resistors went from $1 for a pack of a hundred to $8. As a student at the time, it effectively made the hobby non-viable over night because it got too expensive.
Lately, there have been some domestic actors filling in the gap. But it's still a significant cost increase compared to the glory days.
Since around 2020, you've been able to pay Swedish VAT when you purchase from Ali Express etc. The resistors increase from $1 to $1.25, with the $0.25 going to the Swedish treasury.
crazy thought, maybe a $1 item shouldn’t be shipped from overseas at great expense to the environment? 5 years ago all anybody would talk about is the environment and now people are burning down EVs and complaining that they’ll have to pay more for a cheap $1 shirt they don’t need to be moved 6000 or more miles? make this make sense.
Sure. Modern Chinese RoRo vessels fit more than 1 shirt on them. The average shipping manifest to America looks more like 125,000 shirts, 10,000 tons displacement of natural gas, 40,000 sex toys, 20,000 Macbooks and a few dozen merchant marines making the trip. The "great cost to the environment" was manufacturing these products. The carbon footprint for shipping linens around the world is negligible, and cheaper than buying American-made.
It doesn't take a genius to see that this isn't an environmental issue, China will fuel up their boats regardless and take their surplus elsewhere. This is about American businesses outright failing to compete in the free market in places that matter, like car manufacturing and $1 tee shirt factories.
A RoRo freighter is designed for vehicles to "roll on, roll off". They don't haul regular freight.
I agree that it's very unlikely that near shoring simple electronics and T-shirts will be the big needle mover for emissions. What's much worse is the human rights violations but that's a totally different conversation from what the GP said.
I think price uncertainty is already hitting eBay. A few days ago I looked at the price of cheap musical instruments (a student violin and a trumpet that each cost $25 several years ago) and the low price is now $129. Some things seem to have disappeared almost entirely from eBay (most small portable ozone generators). Maybe this is temporary until sellers figure it all out.
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[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 1708 ms ] threadWhat a massive and moronic blow to our soft power.
True, the shareholders will take a pay cut too, because something less than 100% of American consumers will just suck it up without changing their behavior. But in aggregate, we will all save less.
If inflation takes off again, maybe eventually there's some monestizing of debt. But in less than 4 years these tariffs will go away, which is why companies won't spent billions of dollars investing in state side manufacturing that'll take maybe 5 years to plan and build. Therefore I'm not sold on the montizing debt motivation yet.
FRB won't reduce interest rates if there's inflation alone. They'd only reduce interest rates if the economy also slows down into recession territory.
That's the short term view.
In the long term view, they are the biggest tax increase in the history of the country, therefore they are potentially the biggest tax decrease in the history of the country. Political fodder, even for a corpse.
(c) Should any trading partner take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters, I may further modify the HTSUS to decrease or limit in scope the duties imposed under this order.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
"I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. Bow and appease me".
It's impressive they got to forty odd Presidents with only one civil war so far, but it's just luck and it didn't last.
Tariffs are a tax. Tax on us, the people buying goods.
It's a massive tax increase. People are slowly waking up to that fact.
Rolling back the tariffs is giving everyone a tax cut. Well, tax cut back to baseline of what everyone expected.
As people realize that they are the ones paying the tariffs, this is going to be very unpopular.
As example, Daimler stated, they will cut cheapest models from export to US, so some segment will got less concurrent market, and probably prices will raise.
Probably, this is because Daimler have much higher profits on expensive models, so they could just lower profits on them. Other variant, also possible, expensive niches are more tolerant to price raise.
For small countries, tariff raise nearly guarantee prices rise, but US is big country, things are not so simple.
1. has no US parts in the supply chain
2. has a importer that is willing to sacrifice itself for the greater good
A faint drop of hope in an intergalactic ocean of despair.
Be calm, ask right questions and you will got truth.
And wait for the response from the trading partners...
China is already in a Great Depression, and this tariff hike guarantees China to be in 30+ years of economic depression.
"I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-chi...
Last term he did some tax on bauxite that had a similar effect of costing billions to a whole industry that processes or buys aluminum, but one of the few bauxite mines in the US, run by a Trump ally of some kind, made bank.
Politically it's going to be just like how most everyone fell into line fervently supporting the Iraq War when the corpo media told them to. Then after the unavoidable truth finally seeped in, equivocation and rationalization from "I didn't really support it" to "we were misled". With a lot more visible economic pain, of course.
Then that anger from having been "tricked" will be used as raw energy to drive the next con, and so forth. A broken clock is at least right twice a day, but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time.
It is generally not cool to blame the voters. There was a ton of misinformation preceding the Iraq war as you point out, but even then there was a massive popular opposition to it. Hundreds of thousands protested against the war before the invasion in New York and Washington DC. Some polls showed that 5% of all Americans participated in a rally or a protest in the weeks leading up to and following the invasion. And despite that popular opposition, among politicians there was a bipartisan support and just a handful of MPs opposed to it. Meaning the public was never really given a choice. In short, the Iraq war was the fault of the politicians and the politicians alone, the voters came nowhere near it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
Whether invading Iraq would have still happened without that popular support is besides the point. The point is there was full-throated support from many people, who would reflexively reject dissent while parroting corpo media talking points, and who then only came to see what a poor idea it had been over time.
I rather doubt Walmart is going to increase the price of only Chinese made goods 25%. I think everything goes up 25% and they pocket the margin as long as they can get away with it.
It doesn't work because it's basically illegal to be poor in America, or rather to live like a poor person in a developing country. Because of theories about gentrification and such we just banned everything like SROs, company dorms, etc.
It worked for a little while in the 2000s because earlier flight from cities had left a lot of empty housing open to gentrify, but none of that is left.
There's a few classes of people left like supercommuters and people who live in RVs in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, but not going to run a big factory like that.
But memes about suicide nets aside, Chinese factory workers are there by their own choice, because it's better than their alternatives, and we've eliminated such choices by simply making it illegal to have the low cost of living it requires.
This was done to make the poor underclass go away (homeless people) but it also makes this type of working class (factory workers) go away. Luckily for us, we have a service economy with email jobs for them to work instead.
Well pack it up, that, the Evangeline legend and the Katrina episode of Boondocks round the tale out. Nothing else to see here.
(Actually, the slave labor camp is Mississippi these days [1])
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9354922; https://web.archive.org/web/20201108140152/https://in.news.y...
The problems I described are mostly in blue states, although Texas has different problems that somehow result in basically the same issues. Like Houston doesn't have zoning, but still ends up with sprawl due to other restrictions.
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
The TLDR is Miran sold to Trump US can Plaza Accord everyone, devalue USD to reindustrialize US, draw down US debt/commitments, keep exorbitant privelege... all by slapping tariffs (Trump's fav hammer) to scare countries into signing (converting) existing US commitments to "century bonds" in US favour while tying them to US orbit for foreseeable future. Is US strong enough to coerce others to sign on? IMO doesn't matter, this seems like plan specifically tailered to Trump preferences and ego, so as long as Trump thinks so Miran gets the job.
E: there is logic to the plan, logic that appeals to Trump -> US strength and monetary manipulation skills can force others to fall in line. And TBH countries have fallen in line in the past.
1) raise tax revenue in a way that partially falls on foreign nationals
2) reduce trade deficits and foreign purchasing of treasuries.
3) Increase relative power if other economies are damaged more than the US. There are situations where zero and negative sum strategies are optimal, like war, where it is better to have a larger % of a smaller overall pie.
4) stimulate demand for us labor
None of the GOP budgets reduce the deficit. Trump’s blew them out even further.
My understanding is that yes, the national debt is still increasing, although the administration is counting on tariff funds to supplement revenue. Would you agree?
Not the debt, the deficit. The debt is the card balance. The deficit are new swipes. Nothing in the current policy package is about deficit (let alone debt) reduction.
(Valid on trade deficits. I guess we can run trade surpluses if we give up dollar hegemony. That, of course, means no more deficits.)
Let me see if I am following. The tariffs are ostensibly about spurring domestic industry so that American companies can flourish and we don’t have to pay tariffs on imports of foreign goods in the long term. Is that right? If so, then long term, aren’t we hoping that the “tariff funds” are small? But they are simultaneously supposed to supplement revenue to pay down debt too?
Tariffs are theoretically supposed to encourage domestic production, but rely on the false premise that all raw and intermediate materials can be sourced domestically at a cost below the import price. That has generally proven to not work unless tariffs are in the hundreds of percent. But at that level, import taxes tend to poison entire sectors due to supply lag instead of drive domestic economies.
Wikipedia's articles on Smoot–Hawley and the Tariff of Abominations both have sections on their effects.
In short, we'll see a brief rise in the domestic economy, then a sharp recession. One of the reasons SE Asia, BRICS, and the EU have been so active to disconnect themselves from the U.S. is they don't want to get caught up in the U.S. economic failure like they did in the 1930s.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...
So, despite being labelled "tariffs", the actual basis for calculating the "reciprocal tariffs" has nothing to do with tariffs.
Why Trump’s tariffs are better than you think — and much worse
subscribe! https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/03/06/donald-trump-tariffs-im...
or read now, maybe subscribe later: https://archive.md/H46RG
Harley Davidson moved some of its production to Thailand in 2018 to avoid a 31% tariff the EU had on US manufactured motorcycles, announced in 2024 it was moving more production there, and prior to today had plans to sell the Thailand produced bikes back into the US, as the US had a 0% tariff on bikes. Not surprisingly Thailand has a 60% tariff on imported motorcycles.
This tariff jumping is real. I guess we will see how it works out for the US.
https://www.nordea.com/en/news/mar-a-lago-accord-explained-a...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-cou...
10% tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands which are uninhabited, and can be reached only by sea, which from Australia takes two weeks by vessel. And also 10% on Svalbard and Jan Mayen which is also uninhabited. That will teach them not to ripoff the USA!
Oh NO tariffs on Russia or Belarus. None.
[1]: https://www.polaris.com/en-us/snowmobiles/owner-resources/he...
Thanks Tim Apple.
Judging from the changes (currently paused) to the de minimus shipping rules (also formerly $800) I’d expect the threshold to be lowered substantially. Possibly arbitrarily while I’m on a trip and have already bought the goods.
The risk being if detained by DHS for who knows how long is not worth saving $400 on a MacBook personally.
Anything more powerful I will rent or colocate outside of the US in a rack somewhere, moving bits instead of atoms. In short, unless you spend a lot on tech, or tech that isn't portable, workarounds in some cases are available. Certainly, if you’re trapped in the US (or you need goods that are impossible to import on your person), you’re hosed and will be exposed to the tariff costs.
I am allergic to kowtowing to stupidity.
It’s not at all uncommon in Latina America from my understanding for wealthier people to fly up to Miami, buy a ton of iPhones for family and friends, then bribe the customs agents to look the other way.
[1] https://www.southernborder.org/border_lens_southern_border_r...
My parents did certainly smuggle a fair bit on their trips. I'm so happy Americans can learn that experience too! :> (I don't. Why are you hitting yourself.)
If the savings is enough, it’s guaranteed that people are going to try this. San Diego claimed a 158% increase in egg seizures last month, there’s no way you aren’t going to have people try that with iPhones.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/nx-s1-5342554/eggs-border-sei...
"In the baseline scenario, we assume that the US will raise its effective WATR against Chinese goods by a total of 20 percentage points over 2025-27. We expect the effective tariff rate on China to rise by 5-10 percentage points in 2025, owing to the imposition of tariffs related to fentanyl smuggling disputes. Mr Trump will further phase in tariffs from late 2025 with a wider range of excuses and policy tools, eventually bringing the effective WATR facing Chinese exports to about 30% by 2027."
[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/the-impact-of-us-tariffs-on-china-thre...
The methodology of counting non-price barriers on certain goods then applying it across the board on all goods as tariffs is bonkers. Doubtlessly they aren’t including all the non-price tariffs the US imposes on other countries either.
I’m extremely skeptical the EU has effective tariff rates of 40% on all US goods, and furthermore skeptical that if so the US doesn’t have countervailing effective tariff rates at the same rate.
And there are a lot more countries in that list, South Korea and Taiwan are going to really hurt for electronics. And I assume Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and other countries will hurt for other good that are made cheaply there.
Vietnam and Bangladesh would hurt American consumers (clothes). Cambodia not really.
Silver lining, Brazil and Colombia (edit: and the rest of Latin America) are kept at baseline, and Philippines is now the lowest tariff developing Asian economy.
We'll probably see a significant amount of capital returning to Philippines (who saw de-industrialization when South Korea signed their FTA with Vietnam).
> Are those in addition to existing tariffs?
Yes (Edit: not sure now, I'm hearing some say they include the 2017 tariff regime of flat 10% - smh shows how this was just a political ploy that answers for such a critical question are mixed)
(Edit 2: was right initially - thanks u/inverted_flag)
Depends on the country. India is negotiating a Bilateral Trade Agreement by mid-2025, Vietnam has sent a trade delegation to DC to negotiate as we speak, and tariffs on Colombia, Brazil, Philippines, and Turkiye are the lowest for middle income countries.
The harshest pain will be felt by Cambodia and Vietnam, because both are part of ASEAN like Philippines and share similar trade partners (Japan, SK), Bangladesh as they have an FTA and significant capital from India, and China as EU (looking at you Poland and Czechia), Turkiye, Japan, SK, and India are now cost competitive
You'll be seeing more "Made in Philippines", "Made in Colombia" "Made in Turkiye", "Made in Brazil", and "Made in India" shirts, auto parts, and assembled electronics now.
We might also see a return of Malaysia in the semiconductor industry, as they are now cheaper than Taiwan - great for whoever buys Intel Foundry Services (Penang reax only)
Stability is necessary for any big shifts to be worth taking.
You mean since 1971 when Intel opened their OSAT in Penang?
Malaysia was THE hub for electronics manufacturing until 20 years ago when China became cheaper.
In fact, it was the same businessmen in the Penang electronics industry who largely invested in China's electronics industry.
Also, semiconductors are exempted so my whole thread is moot about that. Electronics manufacturing though will return (and already started due to most companies China+1 strategy).
Supply chains have gotten way more resilient after Zero COVID in China and Vietnam caused a lot of supply chain craziness.
Hence I listed countries where manufacturing in those industries was significant until 10-15 years ago or where investment has largely moved beforehand.
https://xcancel.com/EamonJavers/status/1907540655871521264#m
Looks like they got cold feet on a blanket Canadian tariff.
But the whole process is so chaotic and subject to mood swings that I expect more holes and carve-outs than a block of PDO emmentaler.
The EU simply doesn’t charge 40% rates on the bulk of US goods. Let alone the random countries that all somehow have 10% tariff rates in the US.
And that figure is questionable. Read "including currency manipulation and trade barriers". This is the same presidency that believes the "EU was made to screw USA over", and accused them, Japan and practically every other major economy of manipulating their own currency to harm US. It's improbable that rate has any basis in reality, but surely a detailed breakdown of how they came to that number will be published.. not.
It's made up. It's based on our trade deficit with them, which has absolutely nothing to do with tariffs.
Also includes British Indian Ocean Territory. The only people who live there are on a US military base on Diego Garcia.
"In America, estimates say that Chinese suppliers make up 70-80 percent of Walmart’s merchandise" - https://retailwire.com/discussion/walmarts-open-call-continu...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-02/walmart-k... | https://archive.today/Q5CNc
"You mean the countries with tariffs even higher than ours? Best of luck."
Welfare like food stamps is a subsidy /against/ Walmart, not for it. You are supporting the employees by paying for their food, which means they can negotiate for higher wages, which means Walmart pays them more.
An example of the other kind would be literal wage subsidies, which are sometimes paid so companies will hire mentally disabled people.
And we designed it that way. We pay thousands of dollars to each citizen in our public schools to teach them calculus, literature, world history, and science, so that they DON'T work at factories doing manual labor like we were oxen. We're supposed to be doing more valuable jobs in intellectual property and services.
It's going to be hard lesson to be learned by Trump and his working class supporters when the inflation hits them because our economy doesn't have any workers that want to work at factories, but it'll have to be a lesson they learn the hard way.
The correct economy is to let people do labor they're best at. If a foreigner can make a shirt cheaper than an American can, LET THEM. Our economy is already taken by the people that design the shirts.
They won’t learn any lessons.
The impacts will be felt years from now, when the Democrat are in power, and… you know the rest.
The real damage is business uncertainty, inefficient capital allocation, etc… all of which takes years to fully impact the economy.
Tariffs on literally everything have an immediate outsized impact as businesses need to rapidly readjust and renegotiate prices on everything. Not only that but there's the second order effects too, such as Trump's interactions with Canada resulting in destroying tourist and seasonal travel from up north to the border states.
China eliminated poverty through neoliberalism. The rest of the world can, too. This is the benefit of neoliberalism: it lifts the world out of poverty through free trade and self-selected efficiency.
Did you even think for a second before writting this?
Did YOU think for a second about what you wrote?
The neoliberal trajectory is a gradual growth from agrarian economy to a services/IP economy. Factories are a step along that way.
> So if we aren't the oxen, who is? Vietnam? And that's morally acceptable?
> Yes. They - or other poor countries - are. And it's their responsibility to grow their citizenry in a neoliberal world.
Here you clearly state that the way for vietnam to stop being oxens is by growing in a neoloberal world. Then:
> China eliminated poverty through neoliberalism. The rest of the world can, too. This is the benefit of neoliberalism
You praise China for growing this neoliberal world, but you forgot that Chineese people are still oxens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
It's impossible to engage meaningfully with you if you're going to rely on argumentative fallacies and ignoring everything that is said to you.
Besides, many countries are not poor by accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...
So, if you'd like to address my original comment, I'm all ears, otherwise this discussion is a complete waste of time. Before you do that, though, it would be prudent to learn about what neoliberalism actually is, and why foreign intervention is directly related to it and your original premise. Once you do that, we'll be able to have a fruitful discussion.
An excerpt from The Divide:
> People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extension of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of state intervention. The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral free-trade agreements – with reams of new laws, backed up by the military power of the United States
https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9781786090034
I provided resources. Read them and get back to me, otherwise there is no reason to continue, since your aim seems to be controlling the narrative and not actually engaging in substantial discussion.
You complain I brought up the straw man of poverty, but that's the entire point of neoliberalism: to make people wealthy. It's NOT to start wars or bring disease or famine or whatever. It's an economic system designed to bring about wealth, as demonstrated by neoliberal policies that removed poverty from much of the third world.
This is why I don’t trust socialist: I have never heard a socialist say “I want to eliminate poverty”. And in fact, they seem to take pride in being impoverished while being ashamed of any bit of wealth.
It’s Ok to have nice things. You DON’T have to be poor.
We don't care if people are rich. We are if they are poor, and we believe that's a problem.
And our track record of eliminating poverty around the world over the last 50 years through neoliberal free trade should be celebrated, not discouraged.
You're welcome.
I'd recommend you take a point-by-point look at what you're saying vs what I said and see if what you said had any relevance to any of my literal sentences.
Neoliberalism is what I say it is, not what YOU say it is.
Additionally, you have yet to answer why you believe poverty shouldn’t be eliminated.
Not everyone gets to have a cushy intellectual office job. Somebody has to do the coal mining.
Oh, you didn't think neoliberalism was free-market libertarianism, did you? If it was that, it would be called that already.
And Trump expects our population of suburban aristocrats to work hard at factories...
Bush Jr. was all about outsourcing to India and other countries. The India population were thrilled to take office gigs for Microsoft and Google and any other tech company.
The whole “put me to work” in middle-America doesn’t exist anymore. They don’t want to do that type of work.
I do think a missed opportunity is not increasing defense manufacturing in the US. That could mean a lot of jobs and skill-based jobs. NASA is another failed opportunity where it could be a huge skill and labor opportunity for America. I remember the thousands of workers on the shuttle program being devastated. I’m not saying we need another shuttle program, but the next evolution of NASA, aerospace, and defense would be great for jobs and America.
We have no one left thinking about the long-term big picture for America - and we now have a president trying to destroy America. Any current politicians are focused on just staying in power, more so than they ever have.
I think Bill Clinton was the last president to focus on America.
Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.
They are trying to. But zero chance EU capitulates on this:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-p...
I agree how Obama continued Bush's "war on terror" was a disappointment, but to state that as the reason for his relatively limited accomplishments is profoundly unserious. The Mitch McConnell's strategy was to do anything Obama did for no other reason than to make him look bad, because McConnell realised that Obama had the potential to be the most consequential president since FDR, with broad public support.
They used every trick in the book to hold up votes, to not schedule votes, voting against popular policy they themselves supported just a few years ago out of principle, etc.
I don't know how anyone could have forgotten this; the Republican party was not serious good faith participant in the democratic process long before Trump came along.
The only way that you can make that tariffs charged to the USA is the level Trump claims (ie. 39% in the EU) is if you include VAT.
It absolutely does not make sense to count VAT as a "tariff". I am sure they know it.
Then, as the company is VAT-registered what it purchases is either VAT-free or VAT paid can be deducted from the amount of VAT collected from consumers (as you said).
Bottom line: companies do not pay VAT on their own purchases, they only pass on VAT collected from consumers.
Obviously companies do make actual payments to the tax authorities but the point is that these are not from their own funds, they only effectively act as tax collectors.
And when selling products, you'll send 100% of the VAT collected from consumers to the tax office.
VAT doesn't affect a company (besides the bookkeeping).
The "thought experiment" you can make is the case of something not ending up being sold. In a VAT regime the manufacturer will have already paid the VAT on the inputs but since the customer hasn't paid the VAT on the finished product the manufacturer won't get their money back on the VAT they already paid (there might be other tax rebates or write offs, but that's a different matter)
In a sales tax regime the tax is only paid by the final consumer so if the manufacturer doesn't sell the product they are not out for any additional tax
Still doesn't change that neither of those are a tariff by any definition
Effectively VAT is only paid by consumers.
NB: in you example if the company has paid more VAT than it has collected in the period then it gets an actual refund.
Yes, absolutely, in 99% of cases that is true. But conceptually there is a difference.
> NB: in you example if the company has paid more VAT than it has collected in the period then it gets and actual refund.
Yes, which is what I said as well. But the refund in itself is an additional step on top of the tax system and the money does get paid by the company in the first place. There is indeed a difference in how the cash flow of a company looks like.
That's the entire point of VAT, to make tax evasion harder by making everyone pay at every step and figuring out later the refunds
This is not a criticism of VAT or anything else by the way, as I said, in 99% of cases the company will get the VAT fully refunded and not pay anything on net over the fiscal year
The manufacturer has paid VAT, and will get back the paid VAT from the tax authorities. It then adds value (value added tax). It has to charge VAT of the full amount. So, the company in the chain pays VAT over the profit of that product/service. For example (assume 20% VAT):
Company 1 creates something with 0 cost, and sells for 100. Needs to add VAT (20) and pay that to the tax authority. 20 has been collected.
Company 2 buys it for the 120, packages and labels it, then sells it for 180 but needs to add 36 VAT. The company will file a tax return of 20-36, so will effectively have to pay 16 to the tax authority. Another 16 has been collected.
Consumer buys it for 216 and doesn't get any VAT back.
Effectively, 20 + 16 = 36 VAT has been collected over time. The tax return can only be done by companies with a VAT registration. In some cases the VAT burden can be inverted in b2b transactions and within the EU. This is there so companies don't have to do cross-border tax returns.
If they're not, then this might be why they're considered thus.
VAT is not only a retail sales tax, it'll apply anytime the widget is somehow modified (value is added).
He has an agenda.
He's most entertained by messing up anything good he runs into.
A clown costume.
The gloss will be "this way captures all the various unfair things they're doing to us that are the cause of all these trade deficits" but that's just, well, gloss.
The EU is the undisputed king of vague laws that are applied principally to competitors with arbitrary fines.
How do you implement GDPR? Don't ask us, but if you violate it watch out!
How do you comply with DMA? Don't ask us, but if you violate it watch out!
It’s almost like Trump and his administration are trying to purposely hurt America.
I don’t want to be melodramatic, but if Russia had a ultra long-term plan to hurt America, it might look like this.
Inflation will decline only when the deficit declines.
But it was US monetary policy for decades now that the deficit doesn't really matter, because the world trusts the US and loans the money back.
Consumer borrowing is paid back, so it does not contribute to inflation. Government just issues more debt to pay off the debt, and that leads to collapse.
> US monetary policy for decades now that the deficit doesn't really matter
AKA kicking the can down the road. The bill will come due.
It's partially because elites said 'the economy is great! look at my stocks!' while consumer goods had increased in price by 100% or more in only 4 years.
CPI is a joke that just subs out everything when it gets more expensive. Oh food is only up 3%, let's ignore we were pricing beef and eggs and now we're subbing in chicken and tofu.
Inflation has been borderline runaway from 2019-2024. Just ask anyone who isn't rich.
0. https://www.ft.com/content/1201f834-6407-4bb5-ac9d-18496ec29...
- As I know, usually VAT deducted from exported goods, but I really don't know how VAT work with import - usually on import used tariffs.
I feel like Trump or whoever is running this import tax show has lost the plot on what they’re trying to accomplish.
Country A is less dependent on B than the other way around, and they are able to enrich their country with the extra tax revenue. Maybe they even use this tax revenue to invest or incentivize what's needed to become even less dependant on country B. Now suppose country B increases their tariff until the trade balance is zero. In this scenario, all country B is really doing is increasing their own tax revenue to match that of country A.
>Yes, imports of goods are subject to VAT, with taxation taking place when the goods clear through customs.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_impl/2018/886/oj/eng
https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2025/3/eu-to-impose-tariff...
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/search?origi...
First one because I don't understand why i should risk a milk based product that has traveled for months across an ocean. Or even from another EU country, when I can buy stuff made in a 200 km radius around me.
Second one because afaik it's legal to call "chocolate" something that does not contain any actual cocoa in the US.
Well, no. It cannot be called "chocolate" if it is something that consumers would expect to be made from actual chocolate. However, it can contain the term "chocolate" if cocoa or another cacao product is the sole source of its chocolate flavor, and as long as consumers have a pre-established understanding that it is likely to not be made from chocolate. For example, people generally understand that chocolate cake is likely made with cocoa, not chocolate, and so it can be labeled "chocolate cake". If there is no such general understanding, the product must be labeled "chocolate flavored".
(See the US FDA CPG Sec 515.800, "Labeling of Products Purporting to be 'Chocolate' or 'Chocolate Flavored'")
Now if we could just get them to stop calling chocolate products with dairy in them "dark" (I'm looking at you, Hershey...)
Irish/Finnish butter (Kerrygold/Finlandia) is also fairly popular here.
If properly refrigerated, milk can last for months especially if pasteurized.
You can also evaporate milk and it will last nearly forever unrefrigerated if kept dry
But why take the risk when you can have fresh?
> You can also evaporate milk and it will last nearly forever unrefrigerated if kept dry
Is that still milk?
Cheeses yes, I randomly buy fancy cheeses. But most of my purchases are still boring predictable recent local cheese.
Some people just find it things like evaporated milk convenient. e.g, Coffee drinkers who don't want to bother with refrigerating the cream, so they use the powdered stuff.
In the case of European butters/cheeses, they just taste despite the higher cost.
I doubt anyone would actually prefer American butter, except maybe Americans, but it could be the American producers can make it more cheaply.
So maybe just let the consumer decide ?
Infidels! Coffee is the black as night stuff! The rest is just kiddy drinks!
When I say milk, I'm talking about drinking it as-is.
> In the case of European butters/cheeses, they just taste despite the higher cost.
Ok but I'm European. My favourite butter - with taste - is manufactured 124 km away from me :) It's nothing fancy, just butter. Not even expensive. Maybe 10% more than the average local butter.
This subthread started with the post that said the EU is taxing US dairy and chocolate products prohibitively.
1. be rescinded/paused in [0,2) days;
2. be rescinded/paused in [2,4) days;
3. be rescinded/paused in [4,7] days;
4. not be rescinded/paused.
I believe that was the plan all along. He's just doing it aggressively with tariffs.
Also, this announcement has wiped out any plans of buying tech products this year, plus a holiday to the US and Canada later in the year. Good thing too, as the entire globe is probably staring down the barrel of a recession.
No. Trump claims that the new tariffs are a 50% discount on what those countries tariff US goods at. (Even if that's questionable - is VAT a tariff?)
If he's correct, or anywhere close, this is a "tough love" strategy to force negotiations. We'll see how it goes. It also plays to his base - why should we tariff any less than they do us? And they have a point, it's the principle of the thing.
There is another camp that thinks that trump doesn't really have a goal per se, and is rather doing all this as an exercise in showing off his strength and to draw attention to himself. This camp holds that eventually trump will get bored, or the public will turn on him, and he'll need to get rid of tarrifs to save face. We call these people "optimists".
He's not.
According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.
According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam's trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.
The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan's claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU's claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.
Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.
Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn't buy a lot of US stuff is because they're poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they're nowhere near 90%: [3].)
America's government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.
[1]: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1907533090559324204/photo/1
[2]: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/southeast-asia-pacific/vi...
[3]: https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/news/vietnam-gives-us-tax-b...
Trump is not in the business of being _correct_, or indeed caring about correctness as a concept.
And no, these are, obviously, not the actual tariffs, don’t be silly.
So for example Indonesia and the US traded $28 billion. The US has a 17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. 17.9/28 =0.639, or 64%, which is assumed to be all caused by tariffs. So they divide by two and impose 32%.
Anyway no the US isn't matching tariffs they're dramatically exceeding them.
I also think the US deficits are hugely overstated because much of what the US produces is intellectual capital rather than physical goods and the profits are made to appear in foreign subsidiaries for tax reasons. Like if I buy Microsoft stuff in the UK, Microsoft make out it was made in Ireland for tax purposes, but really the value is created in and owned by the US. The US company both wrote the software and owns Microsoft Ireland. So much of the perceived unfairness Trump is having a go at isn't real.
Secondly, if Microsoft or Apple makes the profit appear in Ireland, it cannot move that money back to the domestic US, right? So as long as the money sits overseas, it would not count towards US trade and thus the deficit calculation is fair.
You may not like a tech company succeeding at exports and having a rising share price, but that is distinct from the overall point which is that properly considered these are US exports obscured by the US tax code which incentivizes profits abroad.
However, in practice even if not repatriated those exports show up in the us economy. Profits raise the share price, which allows stock grants at higher values, effectively a wage as one example.
I wonder how big an effect this phenomenon you highlight has. Must be a fairly large overstatement of the US trade deficit.
Like, if I scribble on a piece of paper and then trade you the piece of paper for an incredibly engineered brand new laptop, is that bad for me? Is this a sign of my weakness?
I know economics can be complicated, and probably "it depends", but why is a trade deficit bad? Why does the Trump administration want to eliminate trade deficits?
What is the phase called? What is this amputation and what spreading is it stopping?
Lenin's Imperialism
> but bad for economic growth
Yes, it is bad for economic growth, but this is not the tactic of protectionism. It is in the name that the purpose is to protect domestic production. It is done by forcing competition barriers on external producers
> What is the phase called?
Economic crisis / intense rivalry. US is economically threatened by the rise of China, it has been on the radar for many years. Things have reached a point where US can't just sit there and do nothing as China challenges the global status quo.
> What is this amputation and what spreading is it stopping?
The spreading is the slow but ongoing rise of Chinas economic power. The amputation is thr free-trade bariers
If the production cost portion increases, because of tariffs, then Apple either has to take less profit (shareholders unhappy) or increase the cost of the phone (shareholders happy).
If the tariffs are increased enough, Apple could be forced to move production to the USA. But this only happens if the workers in the USA are willing to work the same wages as external production. If USA workers cost more than external production, then again, Apple loses profit or raises prices.
Am I missing something? Unless USA workers are willing to work for wages as external production (give or take the tariff amount), then this simply doesn't work.
Who are the people coming up with these specific rates?
How are they modeling this system?
(sorry, this is a BBC live news ticker link):
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A3a34...
And a picture of the chart they had showing the per-country tariffs:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A7f78...
Trump took the trade surplus the US has with those countries and calcuated the percentage from that.
For example, in 2024, the total value of US trade in goods with China was approximately $582.4 billion, comprising $143.5 billion in exports and $438.9 billion in imports. [0]
(438.9-143.5)/438.9=67.3%
[0] https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peo...
It's an incredibly simplistic calculation that definitely doesn't equate to the country's tariff rate.
I saw that your president said:
> “We imported $3b of Australian beef last year alone… they won’t take any of our beef because they don’t want it to affect their farmers.”
Just FYI, the reason we don't import much beef is because we have about as many cows as we do people here :)
If these products are labelled as being from the US I don't see anyone buying them unless they're dirt cheap.
Too bad that I actually like bourbons. Let's see if the retaliatory tarrifs make them more expensive than the fancy japanese whiskey bottles next to them... I've been meaning to try those.
https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf
I wish your type of thinking didn't exist. The world would be a much better place.
If you prefer living in a broken system I guess you have a lot of options available. What we have been doing in America has utterly failed humanity, sounds like your making a lot of money off a failed state and don't want your income to be threatened. I wish your type of thinking didn't exist, the world would be a much better place.
Trump is saying the positives are the it will force companies to build stuff in the US, thus increasing our domestic manufacturing and increasing jobs. I don't see that happening in a significant way, but who knows?
But if that does happen, then the huge amount of revenue that Trump thinks is going to come to the government's coffers won't happen, and that revenue is meant to offset some of the tax breaks for the wealthy, so we're kinda screwed either way.
So for the US itself? The theory would be that the tariffs will increase US manufacturing sector. But the cold hard truth is that it isn't the 1830s anymore and last time tariffs were tried happened to line up exactly with the Great Depression.
Even an competent administration would have great difficulty making tariffs to restore manufacturing work in the US, if that is even at all possible. It fails because other countries just put the same tariffs back on the US.
So with the Trump's administration some kinda of serious economy meltdown is almost certainly the result.
This isn't even the China model. Slapping tariffs on raw inputs guarantees that US industry cannot compete internationally. This is more like the North Korean model.
While there are positives to targeted industrial policy, there are no positives to autarky.
Yes. It loses most because 10-20% of world trade is for value added in the USA. The one exception is the USA of course, because their percentage is 100%. So USA is 100% effected, the rest of the world is 10-20% effected as they continue to happily trade with each other without tariffs.
I dunno about everywhere else, but in Australia the effects are already noticeable. Trade with the USA is dropping, and trade with Canada is growing.
It's 1400-1840 China model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolationism#China
Maybe in a sim city game this would balance out, but it's a tall order for a real world scenario. Prepare for a bumpy road ahead.
I mean, they could vote down the "emergency" Trump is using in order to obtain the authority to enact these tariffs instead, and that would be so much less work. But of course they won't go against their Dear Leader.
However, a blanket tax on every country, regardless of available alternatives, would leave businesses with fewer options and make it more likely that the cost is passed on to consumers.
If the goal is to incentivize alternatives, then the tax has to be such that it raises the price above the gap there now. So, even if you do drive people to an alternative source, the new price will be higher than the old. (Unless the thought is that people were choosing to not buy the cheaper source to begin with?)
I suppose you can argue that some suppliers have such a margin that the tax could be an effort to get them to cut into that? I have not seen evidence that that is the case?
The payer of a tariff is decided by the relative elasticity of supply and elasticity of demand.
Sometimes the seller will eat it. Sometimes they buyer will eat it. Sometimes the product wont get made or sold.
Both transacting counterparties are robbed.
How that is distributed between them is a matter of which has more alternatives. E.g. if the seller has lots of prospective buyers, most of whom are not subject to the tax, then the market price they demand is not sensitive to the rare buyer who does pay the tax.
If a big fraction of the seller's prospective buyers face a tax, then it makes their product or service look more expensive to a good chunk of the market, which exerts downward pressure on the price. The downward pressure on the price means that the seller effectively pays some of the tax, through lost revenue.
So, the transaction pays the tax as such, but how much of it is distributed between buyer and seller depends on the degree of influence of the tax on the price point.
This example implies producers are already in competition with one another, so it's unlikely that any of them can lower the price much. On the other hand, if some producers leave the market due to the tariffs, then there's less competition overall and the other producers can charge more.
Non sequitor. Differing production conditions between countries would result in differing profit margins.
Tariffs are taxes.
I'm sure lots of hours will be spent researching the incidences of these across many industries.
As you note, one major factor is the presence of substitutes, but there are several others.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
A. Tariff for Chinese goods will be reflected in consumer prices pretty much directly.
B. Domestic suppliers if the same goods have very limited capacity, giving them the pricing power to raise their prices by the tariff amount, and take it as extra profit.
Take for example cars. We will see American cars go up by the same amount as imports as long as they are oversubscribed on capacity.
>Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States.
Devaluing the dollar and subsidizing production in the US makes far more sense.
But I’m not an economist or anything.
(This is how the US has been able to sustain such a large debt without any real consequences.)
What will happen though is that interest rates on T bills will rise, so yes, in that sense, it does eventually become "more expensive" to service new debt. But again it's in nominal dollar terms and so it's just a matter of issuing more dollars. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't devalue the dollar thus triggering an inflationary cycle.
No they haven't. They've benefitted from it.
Because now most Americans don't slave away in unsafe factories 7 days/week for dollars an hour.
Saying Americans haven’t been hurt they’ve benefited applies to white collar workers only - no change to jobs and cheaper goods.
>> No they haven't. They've benefitted from it.
> Saying Americans haven’t been hurt they’ve benefited applies to white collar workers only - no change to jobs and cheaper goods.
And that's a big reason why Trump won: white collar workers, like the GP, lecturing blue collar workers, while being ignorant of their actual situation.
It's a dumb strategy, and it isn't working anymore.
The point is that as a country it has adapted by people moving into industries that aren't able to be easily outsourced.
Those jobs aren't coming back.
Whereas some did vote for the Trump in spite to make others suffer as they already do.
But, they choose not to. To some this choice is noble, to others it’s foolish. Either way, what can you do?
They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
> Because now most Americans don't slave away in unsafe factories 7 days/week for dollars an hour.
Now they're collecting disability in their unsafe neighborhoods, getting morbidly obese while their substance abusing kids play vidya games in the basement into their 30s.
Yes, it's really like that. People want their factories and incomes back. I don't claim that anything happening here is going to deliver that, but that's the pitch they're voting for. To their credit, at least they're pursuing that in lieu of some UBI ideocracy made of fantasy money.
As for you: it's fine to point out all the ways they may be misguided and/or misled, but unless you have an alternative that doesn't amount to expecting everyone to somehow earn an advanced degree, and then discover it's next to worthless (even before "AI",) your really not contributing much. So what do you have?
Anything?
People vote against their own interests constantly. This is literally evidence of that.
The go to midwit rationalization for every electoral loss.
Note the abject lack of anything resembling an alternative.
This conundrum, like so many others in public discourse, is downstream of the widespread but fundamentally incorrect belief in free will (which in turn is downstream of belief in supernatural powers, because free will sure as hell isn't explained by anything in nature).
Nothing is in anyone's control. There's no such thing as "eyes wide open". People's behaviors are 100% downstream of genetics and environment. Some people behave rationally some of the time, and to the extent they do so it is because the environment set them up to do that. There is absolutely no coherent reason to generalize that into the idea that most people vote (or do anything else) rationally.
Just because free will doesn't exist, doesn't mean they didn't act "rationally" (whatever that even means in this case).
Deindustrialization and Nikefication in the past several decades isn't "rational" long-term behavior either.
> Deindustrialization and Nikefication in the past several decades isn't "rational" long-term behavior either.
Maybe, but I was responding to "They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice."
There's an implication here, and in a subsequent reply that people voting against their interests is "[t]he go to midwit rationalization for every electoral loss", that people exercised free will when they voted.
This is plainly incorrect, because free will quite clearly does not exist. No one has ever shown the kinds of violations in the laws of physics that would be required for free will to exist.
Since free will does not exist, there is simply no a priori reason to believe that people voted in their interests. People's voting decisions, like everything else they do, are out of their control. To the extent that they vote in a particular way that's good or bad for them, it's driven purely by luck and circumstances.
It is this a priori belief that people vote or act in their own interests that's the real "midwit rationalization".
There's no such implication.
> This is plainly incorrect, because free will quite clearly does not exist.
> Since free will does not exist, there is simply no a priori reason to believe that people voted in their interests.
What are you even talking about.
People (and living beings in general) acting in their own self-interest - pretty much all the time - it is the most universal general principle of life if there ever was one. This doesn't require or involve free will.
How well a biorobot (no free will!) executes in pursuing his self-interests, is the selection critereon.
Now, the people make mistakes pursuing their self-interests, doesn't mean they aren't acting in their self-interest. Because they sure as hell are - all the frigging time! It's their whole firmware!
Deindustrialization / nikefication all the way through the value chain except the very, very top last step of the value add - hasn't been in their self-interest, it isn't in the interests of their nation either.
It's only in the self-interests of short-term thinking shareholders that min-max asset valuations with great costs to everyone else but themselves.
Base evolutionary instincts to survive don't translate to humans living in complex modern societies acting in their self-interest.
What are you talking about?
Base evolutionary pressures and instincts have translated in exactly that.
Complex modern societies, and emergent behaviors and strategies arise from agents acting in their own self-interest (organizing in groups or otherwise to further their goals).
The idea that not only people don't act in their self-interest, but you - in fact - know better what's in their best interest is truly some mid-tier thinking. Or that you have some unique ability to know what's in their best self-interest, but they... for some reason... don't.
Now it doesn't mean that acting in self-interest doesn't sometimes result in ruin, because it surely can! That however doesn't mean that all these choices weren't made with self-interest in mind, front and center, despite people claiming otherwise.
The groups and societies that enact the winning, most sensible strategy, economic and industrial policy will win out. Those individually or in groups that don't, will go to shitter and or be selected out. It's that simple.
For petes sake dude, people act in their own self-interests. That includes so called "people with expertise and training", or more correctly put - credentialed people.
They worked towards getting these credentials (fancy law or economics degree at a fancy university) - not because they were interested in acting in interests of the "untrained people". They just wanted a cushy, high status, well paid job.
What do you think governments are ran by - generally speaking? People without "expertise"(cough, cough) and "training"?
No, they are ran by people with "expertise and training" (ie. credentialed)!
The problem is that they mainly act in their self-interests (and interests of their social group) first and foremost, and not for their expertise or lack-thereof. And the people that vie for positions of power and status act in their self-interests and interests of their social clique squared or cubed. Everything else is an afterthought.
>I also think that the fact that this isn't blindingly obvious to most folks is at the heart of a lot of the rot in modern society.
You vastly overestimate your mental acuity
The orange has a degree in economics by the way (from a ivy league uni too). So you could say he has both the credentials, the experience and the training. You could even... dare I say... call him an expert.
Or you could just accept the obvious - any barely functioning middling brain can get credentials and become an "expert". And that they do. It is neither a competency nor an intellect filter.
Neither is there personal responsibility or real liability if they are wrong about their economic and other policies that lead to ruin (endless list of examples of this in past). Seen any heads on the pike lately? Yeah, me neither.
Nor are there incentives in place to think what's in other "common" peoples best interests. So why would they?
There's a long line of "expert economists", Paul Krugman among others who advocated for free-trade policies that directly led to nikefication, deindustrialization of US. Now they are nowhere to be seen to take the credit, woops!
The presumption that the credentialed ("expert") knows (or even cares frankly) what's in other common peoples best interest is completely baseless and extremely naive.
The credentialed "experts" being so incompetent and confidently wrong is what gave you the orange. Now orange is the "expert"! And you better listen!
Simply having a credential is not enough. You need actual training and expertise — to be good at what you do. I'm thinking of all the scientists and bureaucrats who run things like the NIH, vaccine programs, and air quality/pollution control. Many people do not perceive those programs to be in their self-interest. But in reality they are, regardless of someone's personal opinion.
Or maybe they can't afford an expensive electric vehicle and an old dirty gas guzzling clunker is the only means of transportation they have.
Or that they move from a pollution free country-side to a polluted dirty city, not because they seek the pollution, but because the opportunities and jobs are more in their self-interests than... ODing on fenta in pristine clean air.
Naah, midwits don't do this. They presume they are smart and everyone else is stupid and need guidance from the expert (that would be me, the midwit of course), and everything else is derived from it.
When the "expert" gets rejected on basis of incompetence or not acting in their self-interests, that always upsets the midwit, because the midwit always self-identifies as an expert. And rejection of the "experts" equals rejection of the midwit.
Of course, the midwit never has demonstrated competence (nobody doubts demonstrated competence!), all they have is credentials and university degrees and papers. This frustrates the midwit to no end.
Demonstrated expertise and competence is always outside their abilities and reach - they are far from somebody like John Carmack, Michael Abrash, etc who has many shipped products, you can see his code. Nobody doubts their competency, etc. All they have instead is some sort of paper that says "believe me I'm an expert".
No matter what training, education or experience midwit has... he still is just a midwit at the end of the day.
Absolute statement, confidently made, obviously incorrect. Is there a level of "wit" you feel this represents?
I implore you to bring evidence where demonstrated competency of John Carmack or Michael Abrash is called into question. Demostrate how that is a phenomenon or a trend. And if you can't, I rest my case.
It is obvious to any reasonable person that in the statement "nobody" doesn't literally mean not a single entity within 8 billion population of the planet.
My own competence has repeatedly been questioned, even though I've consistently delivered results on the teams I've been on. My body of work is almost all public so feel free to verify yourself. It turns out that how much you're questioned has a lot to do with race and gender — basically every single highly skilled minority I know has been in this position.
I did specifically mention Carmack and Abrash to give a concrete example of what demonstrated competence is. And to avoid having to argue some vague, watered down, abstract pedestrian notion of what "demonstrated competence" is.
>My own competence has repeatedly been questioned, even though I've consistently delivered results on the teams I've been on. My body of work is almost all public so feel free to verify yourself. It turns out that how much you're questioned has a lot to do with race and gender — basically every single highly skilled minority I know has been in this position.
It looks like my intuiton has been on point here. You see yourself as a highly skilled, competent expert.
Except others are apparently not always sharing in your self aggrandizing perception of self.
Since you can't come to terms with this, hijinx insues wherein you assume that everyone else is just stupid, irrational instead. Or you surmise that they reject your "competency and expertise" based on irrelevant immutable characteristics.
Timeless classic.
But are they willing to work for below minimum wage for ridiculously long hours ?
Because otherwise that factory will be uncompetitive against China, Vietnam, India etc.
Unless of course you want to resort to tariffs which will instead transfer that cost onto everyone.
> People want their factories and incomes back
Sounds like what they really want is safety and hope for their futures. I'm not sure going back to the way things were - good or bad - is the way for society to move forward though.
Did you ever work at a factory? I did. I would most certainly prefer to collect a pension and play video games (which I do now in retirement). Anyone would.
And precisely 0.0 alternatives offered.
I can't imagine anyone being surprised that we've ended up with Trump et al. When all you offer is un-actionable thoughts and cowardly status quo, no one will listen to you. Meanwhile, the cohort of disenfranchised, disposable people grows around you until they fear the status quo more than they fear change.
Congratulations!
There's around 12.8 million people in the US working in manufacturing.
some benefit. many have been in a state of perpetual poverty/welfare, but we don't see those in the official stats because the rich are so rich here it skews numbers
Yeah, some tariffs aren't a bad idea. But this plan? Just stupid, without any thought or strategy behind it.
The tariffs should be used more strategically to reorganize supply chains, not these blanket tariffs of low cost and high cost places. And probably ratchet them up slowly, to give time for production to move, instead of a big bang of putting them up everywhere.
So tariff China and Mexico, not Canada and Germany.
To me, it makes sense: NJ is a place where you live to make a high salary (proximity to NYC and Philadelphia) and raise a family (very good public school systems as a result of those high taxes). When you no longer have a need for those circumstances, you move.
Likewise, the US is not a great place for certain types of manufacturing because the labor and raw material supply chain simply isn't there. Why not focus on the things that we are good at instead?
Can you please explain a bit more about this 'hurt'?
My understanding is that a significant majority of sources of US 'hurt' are internal and there has been ample opportunity to vote at least some of it away, but the votes keep going in the direction of making it worse.
The worst thing about it is that the situation has essentially been perpetrated on the citizens of the US by those with power and influence for the simple human weakness of greed. Unfortunately they've got the power and resources to effectively do large scale "convincing".
Manufacturing didn’t go overseas - it got automated. The US is still the world’s 2nd largest manufacturer, the share of GDP going to manufacturing has been flat since 1950, and so on.
What happened is automation made manufacturing need vastly fewer workers. Nothing is “being jobs back” from a fairy tale reason.
That is a huge, huge deal. It effectively means that all goods imported from China will be slapped with a 30% import tax, as soon as said goods arrive the US border / customs.
Usually what happens then, is that the courier will pay that tax, and then bill the recipient later on - as well as charge some fee/fees for the work done.
This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.
If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
(That's just from the most obvious consumer example...then you have pretty much everything else. Goods, commodities, etc.)
EDIT: I found more info here https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.
a $1 item with $1 shipping will end up costing you as much as $52 after June!
I think we are underestimating how popular protectionism is with progressives, it may turn out to be an unusual alliance between disaffected voters on the far right and left outnumbering free trade advocates in the center of both parties.
Even in the United Kingdom. The neoliberal Margaret Thatcher supported free trade and an end to the manufacturing jobs of North England and it was the left wing socialist Labour Party of the UK back then that wanted protectionism for English manufacturing workers
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,500-4,000 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be about 30% more expensive, electronics will be about 25% more expensive, tires and jewelry about 15% more expensive, and industrial buyers are going to get hosed when they buy equipment.
There were major carve-outs for the auto industry (yay Michigan) and petrochemical industries (yay Gulf Coast); they’ll still get hosed on equipment but will mostly escape increases in cost of materials. Imported cars/trucks aren’t directly affected either.
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Meta discussion:
I can't do an analysis on the de minimis situation, I don't know of any public datasets that would allow such an analysis, and it's obvious that it will have extremely complex effects (and therefore, any first-order analysis would be very low-quality).
Note on ChatGPT-4.5 "Deep Research": I spot-checked the calculations for HS codes using my own research and the numbers seemed reasonably close to my own. https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap is an invaluable resource for this kind of analysis. ChatGPT fumbled the bag on HS 30: Pharmaceutical products, by not excluding products listed in Annex II, which overestimated total tariffs by about 6% ($30 billion), but the net effect on households is still in the right ballpark (+/- 20%).
Edit: This isn't one of those simple low-effort posts that say "omg look what ChatGPT said". I'm capable of doing this analysis on my own, and I checked ChatGPT's work for the largest contributing categories of goods. Sometimes we disagreed by 10% or so, but overall the results checked out except for Pharmaceuticals, which I caught and didn't repeat misinformation in my "practical effects" tl;dr. The only way it is significantly wrong is if both myself and ChatGPT missed some large tariff category and assumed it was small - that could raise the real costs above the numbers in the analysis - but I checked all the largest categories that ChatGPT identified as well as all the largest categories from our largest trade partners shown by the Atlas of Economic Complexity, so it's somewhat unlikely that happened.
I purposefully didn't include 2nd and 3rd order effects (e.g. chained CPI) because they are usually relatively small, massively uncertain (my analysis would be worth as much as dog poop on a shoe) and those higher-order effects take too long to manifest. It's not worth predicting costs out 2+ years because the political environment is far too unstable. Just today, the U.S. Senate voted to block all the Canadian tariffs and end the "state-of-emergency" that this executive order is standing on. Front-page diplomacy or private back-room deals could make Trump adjust tariffs up or down on various nations multiple times this year. Who knows what the situation will be 6 months from now, let alone 5 years from now when global supply chains and pricing elasticity might re-normalize. The fact that ChatGPT didn't include these effects is a point in its favor, not a glaring oversight.
I'm not complaining about downvotes but if you are downvoting this, please let me know why so that I can improve. I put a lot of work into this far beyond just typing some crap into ChatGPT and I think these numbers add a lot to the discussion.
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,488.27 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be (mean) 26.9% more expensive, electronics will be 24.4% more expensive, tires and jewelry 16.2% and 17.1% more expensive, respectively.
If this is more acceptable to you, please voice your approval.
[0]: https://wits.worldbank.org [1]: https://dataweb.usitc.gov [2]: http://atlas.hks.harvard.edu
So yeah, if those numbers hold up, the median American household actually comes out ahead after everything is accounted for.
The federal government currently collects on the order of $2.5 trillion in income taxes. These tariffs would only generate $500 billion of federal revenue. But in reality they'll generate less, due to any amount of second-order effects where less stuff is imported due to higher costs. It's very myopic to only look at the household finances and not have anything to say about a proposed loss of $2 trillion of federal revenue.
With allies like you in this discussion thread, who needs enemies?
Purchases from Temu pay EU VAT according to the location of the purchaser, and an electronic system means the money sent to Temu gets to the EU and the package can sail through customs.
Not the big China exporters, not any more. They all include taxes in the price on your country specific web site, ship to their warehouses inside the EU, handle taxes and your local courier just delivers.
Now if you're talking DHL yes, they have you fill forms upon forms and charge you for the forms you didn't ask for. But if that happens, no one will have time to process all the forms so private imports from China will simply ... halt for a while. Until Temu/AliExpress/etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.
If in the US, I'd hold on any direct purchases from China for 3-6 months.
> So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.
Hah. That's DHL commission territory :) Definitely hold from direct purchases until Temu sorts it out for you.
The thing is, the EU specifically set up a structure to make this easier for sellers and transparent for customers (the "import one-stop shop") and I don't see the US government doing any effort to make importations more seamless.
Incidentally, even Amazon US uses that facility. They charge me my local VAT plus some change ("exchange rate whatever" commission, something under 1%) and the package arrives in my hands via courier without any further interaction.
Even Mouser has set up a warehouse inside the EU in the past years. They went from a pain to order from to a pleasure.
Just to emphasise, this system has been set up for ages because you did need to pay VAT on imports anyway. Even without any special tariffs. And that means a visit to the post office in person.
US just doesn't want anything imported. Doesn't help to set up US entity. You will have to pay this amount. Though, it helps with $1 orders if they import them and process them in bulk.
EU simply wants to collect taxes.
Not that that matters, most manufacturing will simply never be in the US ever again, and having punitive taxes like this will simply drive up costs massively.
Interesting about amazon japan, never tried it. Have you tried amazon us?
Edit: interesting, amazon.co.jp seems to be its own thing. My login works on amazon US and all european country sites, but it doesn't work on the JP site.
Even eBay has sorted this out now for orders from the US, with VAT and import fees baked into shipping costs. They give sellers the address for their warehouse in Chicago. eBay then forwards as the seller of record.
Shit. Telling me that can be expensive. I might check ebay US now for some retrocomputing fun...
If I sell a package on eBay.de to a buyer in the UK, I get a customs tracking number to show eBay has collected the required UK VAT. That goes in the form when buying the delivery label and completing the customs (export) declaration.
The EU prepared for years setting this up. It meant all the national post offices updating their systems, and integrating the private parcel delivery companies. It was planned before Covid, then delayed because of the concern for possible disruption.
The USA seems not to have done this planning, and certainly hasn't allowed the months it will take to prepare for it. At least they may have some of the other half of the system, having set that up for exports to the EU/UK.
From some amount I assume I'd have to go to the post office and fill in find paperwork, but I never had to for the cheap junk I get from Ali.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
Basically it just means Temu/Aliexpress/Etc. will ship their goods to the US in bulk instead of bypassing customs on individual small orders, and distribute from domestic warehouses, having to now compete with US producers who do the same thing.
It does completely kill any business built on dropshipping individual orders from chinese factories without ever touching inventory however.
All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround.
All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround. Based on your edit I would guess that they would import a bunch of orders in one shipment to make the 'per shipment' charge small per item/order.
I doubt the US will even manufacture substitutes for most of the things I liked and ordered from AliExpress. People with hobbies primarily supplied by Chinese manufacturing (like mine- electronics, 3D printing, FPV drones) are just going to be paying more for the same thing. There's no way we'll get an American substitute for niche products- all the US chip fabs are going to be filled with orders for higher dollar parts.
Note that the fact sheet says per item, not per shipment. So there doesn't even seem to be a way to make one big purchase of several items to pay a single fee. They will hit you for every item in the shipment.
Quick edit: I also note that the fact sheet makes a distinction between things sent through international post vs. other means. If you send via UPS/FedEx/DHL there will be regular customs fees (34%?), and through post you will have the $25/50 per item fee. So I will definitely have to pay attention to the shipping method for anything bought from AliExpress from now on.
Quick edit 2: I literally have a PicoCalc from ClockworkPi coming in the mail in a few days- I guess we'll see if DHL charges me any extra fees.
Not per item within the package. Per shipping item.
This is what strikes me about these new tariffs... for all the concern about how it's going to impact the US economy (and I don't doubt it will), this is STILL far, far, less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world. Donald Trump's justification for all this is that the U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it's own detriment, and I'm not sure he's necessarily wrong here.
"less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world"
I ordered from Temu and it's shipped from China and arrives at my door with my local sales tax applied -- because Temu abides by Canadian law -- but otherwise with no additional fees. Got a pair of headphones and a three timer device yesterday for $10 CAD.
Or you know, Trump's constant yapping about Canada's diary tariff. In reality the US ships 4x more dairy to Canada tariff free than the reverse, and we, by design, do not target sending dairy to the US. But Trump takes advantage of the poorly informed and/or stupid, and it works amazingly.
>U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it's own detriment
If you're sitting in the richest large country in the world, literally at the height of its economic accomplishment, and you really buy it when someone tells you that you're the victim, you might be profoundly misinformed and with literally zero context of reality.
The US has an amazing amount to fall, and it's going to happen. And when you're working on the assembly line doing extremely low value work, having been ostracized by the entire planet, enjoy how you made the libs pay.
Do they open every package? What stops Temu or whatever from just keep sending them? I mean drugs get through so ..
I had plans to build some animatronic Halloween decorations for this year over the summer. I’m not going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on parts that nominally cost less than $50.
My own pain is minor though compared to everyone I know who uses Temu and other things to basically outfit their life. This will be insanely regressive as they have the least to spend on “on brand” products, which themselves are imported too. This is like “super sales tax for the poor.” Me, I’ll just save my money and wait for the next president to undo the mess. My buddies not as successful monetarily as me? Their quality is life is going down the drain.
Sounds like you have some cool projects planned.... do you have any pics/links you can share?
Lately, there have been some domestic actors filling in the gap. But it's still a significant cost increase compared to the glory days.
Do you not have electronics shops in Sweden? Copenhagen has ElEkstra: https://www.elextra.dk/en-gb/components/modstande/smd-modsta...
Sure. Modern Chinese RoRo vessels fit more than 1 shirt on them. The average shipping manifest to America looks more like 125,000 shirts, 10,000 tons displacement of natural gas, 40,000 sex toys, 20,000 Macbooks and a few dozen merchant marines making the trip. The "great cost to the environment" was manufacturing these products. The carbon footprint for shipping linens around the world is negligible, and cheaper than buying American-made.
It doesn't take a genius to see that this isn't an environmental issue, China will fuel up their boats regardless and take their surplus elsewhere. This is about American businesses outright failing to compete in the free market in places that matter, like car manufacturing and $1 tee shirt factories.
I agree that it's very unlikely that near shoring simple electronics and T-shirts will be the big needle mover for emissions. What's much worse is the human rights violations but that's a totally different conversation from what the GP said.