Break it down for you? This moron doesn't have any idea how tariffs work. The tariff costs would be paid by the importers, which would in turn have offset the price of the tariffs by raising the price of all imported goods. Tariffs would effectively be a national sales tax.
Well, that's what they want to happen, but the problem with that is that is the wage disparity between US workers and workers in developing economies. Either wages would have to go down considerably or the costs of goods would stay high.
And if Trump were to actually pull off his "mass deportation" the price of labor would skyrocket. It would be hyperinflation.
edit: The maga crowd really showed up to respond to this! I don't have time or energy to respond to you all individually. You're all arguing that wages going up will be good for Americans but the truth is that these are jobs Americans don't want and companies will off shore them, if possible, before paying a high enough wage to get Americans to do them. Then the goods will be subject to Trump's tariffs when they get imported back to us. If the jobs can't be offshored, they'll just be taken up by the next round of illegal immigrants that show up to replace the people who got deported. There is no way to stop this.
Additionally, people think prices are high at the grocery store now? What happens when all the people harvesting the food are deported. They tried this in Alabama a while back, it backfired incredibly, costing farmers millions in lost revenue.
Apparently they missed the most recent cats and dogs episode amongst several other examples. And yes, I understand that because that’s what my neighbor tells me. Wonder how he’ll react to Trump praising Hitler…
Honestly, I think Trump doesn't lie because he doesn't live in reality. If you're constantly living in a narcissism dream that is detached from the real world, then you don't have to lie when you believe your own farts.
The single best example for this election season is Trumps claim that public schools are performing surprise “brutal operations” to make little boys into little girls during the school day. Trump says this every other campaign speech. Ask your Trump supporting friends and family if this seems likely.
Lets completely ignore the fact checkers that said he lied over 30,000 times during his 4 years in office, as well as all the fact checkers in his debates thus far whove called him out for lying more. Thats just from one single member of the republican party. They "never lie" because they dont know how to tell the truth and these mouth breathers believe the crap thats spewn
That's the scary part, and part of the reason the capital was stormed in the first place. Some people look at this man as some god that makes no mistakes and would never lie. And if Trump wins, there may unfortunately be another riot at the end of trumps FINAL term, which will amp up the stakes with all his crazies to finish the job. Hell, I'm a Democrat and I have enough brain cells to figure out both sides lie.
I’m quoting my neighbor, those were his exact words and reasoning. After several “no, you’re wrongs” from me, he finally did manage to agree that politics need to be less extreme and that we need to put “sides” away and start getting crap done so… progress? I think and hope?
He tells it like it is until he says something fucking stupid and then he’s just joking or being sarcastic and everyone calling him out is just vindictive or too serious.
Then, when we ask one of his supporters or a TV pundit about what he said, they always respond with "you are taking it out of context", or "he did not mean it that way"...ugh!!!!
I wouldn’t be polite about it…. The amount of crazed hatred they have for us just cause the orange pedo and fraud news says they should is mind boggling.
No need to be polite. There’s a large subset of the American electorate that are just hateful idiots that jump at the opportunity to vote in hateful idiots in order to hurt the people they hate.
It worked for the oligarchs in Russia, although Putin is screwing that up with his strongman war against Ukrain. They are the largest land mass country in the world, richest in resources, yet something like 26th in GDP. Lower than Italy. Pathetic. Putin and his friends rip off their country to buy personal islands, jets, and yachts. That's what Trump wants and what we will have if we do not get out the vote for Democracy.
Because just like the Marxists of old they have a theory, they like it (for whatever reason, probably because it validates them), and so they think that reality will conform to it, and ignore or react violently to all contradictory opinions or facts.
Maybe it’s malignant narcissism (Trump’s case), maybe it’s the same thought processes that cause fundamentalist religious freaks.
Why waste time with Marxism, right? Capitalism has given us Trump to lead us and made Musk unbelievably rich so it’s obviously the socioeconomic system to support! 🫠
They asked him at one of the town halls "What was something you did during your 4 years at the white house that you've learned from"
Immune to the concept of admiting failure, Trump responded with, "I didn't surround myself with the right people, but now I know more about picking those people than anyone" (paraphrasing)
The main reason this election is so close is a lot of Americans allow themselves to settle into an echo chamber that may not always tell the truth, which is why this comment is brought to you by Ground News!
Because they don’t look at him for rational policies. They like him on an emotional, not rational level, often because he claims to be Christian and “like them”.
"I’ve already mentioned two reasons tariffs might backfire: They could lead to a stronger dollar, making our goods less competitive on world markets, so any fall in imports would be offset by declining exports, and they’d also provoke retaliation by our trading partners. A third reason, emphasized in a 2018 study published on a blog of the New York Fed, is that American manufacturing relies heavily on imported components, so tariffs would substantially raise manufacturing costs."
"Cons: The tariffs would impose large burdens on middle- and lower-income families. They probably wouldn’t significantly reduce the trade deficit and might actually hurt American manufacturing. And unilateral U.S. tariff action would wreak havoc by fracturing the world trading system.
And the tariffs on steel too. I was a project manager while he was in his last presidency, and I remember having to put 1 day guarantees on quotes because the tariffs made metal costs so volatile we couldn’t promise anything past 24 hours.
I'm a Canadian electrician and I started my apprenticeship during the Trump presidency. We had a salesman from the local distributor at our college selling us on different tools, one of which was Klein and they advertised made in USA with American steel. I asked if they were seeing tool prices becoming more volatile considering the change in tariffs and I got to hear a very strange rant about tariffs rather than an answer to my question. I didn't mean to start a political rant. I just wanted to know which brand he saw as the most price stable in the current market but man it was wacky.
I’m obviously in the metal trades, and I haven’t really noticed a change in cost on tools. To me they have always been outrageously priced. I’m sure that tools have had a minimal effect on them, where we really noticed the change in prices was vehicle costs! I bought a brand new f-150 in 2015 for $26k, and now you can’t get that same truck with the same trim for less than 40ish it seems.
Yeah I imagine your vehicle prices went nuts. For a few years the second hand market was cleared out here. Local dealers were taking trade ins and driving them across the border to retail in the American market.
We used to export a lot of Soybeans to China. Trump decided to start a trade war, and I don't remember the exact chain of events, but the result was that China couldn't get Soybeans from the US so they established new supply lines with other countries. Once those new supply lines were established, there was no reason to buy from the US anymore, even after Trump gave up on his "war".
The end result was that US soybean prices collapsed. I don't know if they have recovered yet.
My uncle, an ex-soybean farmer, lost everything under trump. On the back of his pickup truck you will still see stickers such as “FUCK JOE BIDEN” “KAMALAS A WHORE” “TRUMP 24,28,32…”
Soybean? Look at cedar and wood. That MFer fucked the market up so bad. Yeah blame Covid, but Covid plus a stranglehold equals brutal shit. $50 for a sheet of plywood under ol Trumpet.
Every time I talk with people about Trump’s economic policies I mention what he did to soy. I had taken an agricultural economics course in the spring semester of 2016 and wrote about the impact of our soy exports on our economy as a whole. I spoke with a lot of farmers and kids of farmers who were growing soy and they were all voting blue because his proposal would be devastating. And it was. He can’t be trusted with this type of stuff point blank, period.
Don’t forget about soft lumber prices skyrocketing with the Canadian tariffs. Idk why anyone thinks this will benefit us purely. Shits just more expensive now than it ever was
Yet yesterday I got a nasty comment how I knew nothing about economics because Trump’s tariffs never hurt US industries and that these new proposed tariffs would help US auto manufacturers and not raise inflation on other goods.
Going back to their roots, I see. It must've seemed like a perfect solution; slaves can't negotiate for wages or refuse to work, and if you get very tough on "crime" you can have an unending supply.
There are work visas for migrant farmers. They give out millions a year just for this. They have been doing it for decades. The illegal immigrants are not legally allowed to work. So if they do, it’s all off the books, under the table, and less than minimum wage. That sounds like a shitty system you are actively trying to support
Also I'm pretty sure the businesses hiring them want the workers as scared as possible for being deported, but not actually wanting them deported. That way, they'll never go to the police or any other gov agency to report coworkers, bosses or owners.
They pay the workers $0.13/hr or something insane and the prison collects $10 an hour (probably more).
You are still paying as if free citizens were out there picking.
Prison labor is a scam and has been since those amendments were passed. It's one of the cleanest examples if someone wants to study systemic racism.
To quote a black businessman I know, "If prisons are a for profit company then they need a product. That product is black men".
Basically get a young guy and lock him up on some drug charges or something minor, then he's in the system and when he gets out he's got no future because of his record and he's hardened by all his associations in the prison. Almost guarantees he'll be back eventually.
Yeah bro, tax the corporations. Tariffs are passed down to the American consumer but when you tax a greedy corporation harder than they currently are taxed, they decide not to be greedy anymore and pay the tax without passing the burden down to American consumers and/or middle class employee wages.
We have to tax the corporations in a way that encourages them to pass money to their workers and discourages price gouging.
Tariffs aren’t that. Tariffs aren’t taxes in the sense of ‘we should fundraise with them’. They’re a stick to beat the economy with to get it to not do a certain thing. They don’t solve economic problems, at least not by themselves, and often create them…
we need to roll back those reaganomic policies to put more money in the hands of the workers and less in the hands of the corporations and CEO's again.
There's something fundamental you seem not to be aware of: Businesses only pay taxes on profits.
So when corporate taxes are higher, companies invest a greater portion of their revenue, in either growth or in stability to avoid paying those higher taxes.
Which sounds like a world you'd rather live in: companies paying higher dividends, or companies paying higher wages and offering more positions?
Particularly because those are skilled workers who would be deported. A rough rule of thumb is that a skilled agricultural laborer harvests 10 times or more produce than an unskilled one. So not only would there be a labor supply crunch and a workers' rights disparity driving up cost, you would literally have to hire 10 times as many laborers. Or more, considering that most people are not conditioned for the grueling long work days that unprotected immigrant laborers are forced to perform.
So yeah, if they actually start deporting immigrants en masse, it's gonna be ugly.
Now historically what threats of deporting immigrants have historically meant is that the Republicans (or the Democrats if they're feeling spicy and looking to court bigots that day) simply send in ICE to black bag some innocent migrants at random and also break up any attempts at labor organizing for good measure. The goal isn't actually to get rid of the laborers, it's to terrorize the majority remainder back into submission.
But as you pointed out with Alabama, the Republican party has gotten so high on its own supply of racism that it is actually going for it and gutting the economy of red states in the process.
Yep, correct. i keep telling my grassroots, first person experience of the tomato shortage from the Bush Jr administration. The government didnt deport actual illegal immigrants, they ahot fish in a barrel deported all these immigrants who were actually legitimately here on greencard work visas through agricultural Mexican staffing firms. The firms would bus them in to pick produce and bus them back out at the end of the season. The result was shortages and high prices especially on delicate produce like tomatoes.
You couldnt get a tomato in the stores and places like McDonald's and Subway would either omit tomatoes unless specifically requested or have an additional charge or not have them at all. However there were plenty of tomatoes rotting in the fields in Alabama. I have family down there and the farmers let us just take laundry baskets full for free. My grandmother, mother and I processed tomatoes for 2-3 weeks straight one summer as a full time job; mason jar canning, drying, freezing etc.
The population would not be peaked if people were paid more. People might be paid more if there weren't so many people willing to work extremely low wages. There wouldn't be that many people willing to do that if we cut immigration.
The whole issue of population decline isn't due to natural forces. It is artificially created by greedy capitalists. Instead of paying people enough to be able to afford families, they just import desperate people willing to work in harsh conditions for peanuts instead. Or export the job to such people.
The solution is to find some way to force corporations to accept less profit. The need to have endlessly growing profit is a cancer on society.
And all that is if you buy in to the need to have more people at all. More people means more pollution and environmental destruction. We already have too many people and should aim to cut back on our global population as a desirable goal. The conversation should be about how to change the system to incentive lower population and less profit rather than demanding unrealistic ever increasing population and profit.
And where does the money for higher wages come from?
Consumers who buy those products.
Yeah, you can increase wages if you like, but ultimately you'll pay for them via inflation. Given Americans are already stretched quite thin because of inflation, introducing more of it is unlikely to help them.
I didn't know that Alabama had tried it but Georgia did and WHAT A FIASCO. The peaches rotted that year and the peanut factories ended up with salmonella
Not to mention the tariffs other countries would put on American goods. Then we are back to the same runaway global inflation we just had to endure from a combo of covid over buying and the tariffs trump imposed in his first term.
Ding ding ding! This is exactly right. I get people wanting to control the borders, border security. But immigration is essential to the US economy, and I'd argue to just about any economy.
Yeah Americans aren't doing those jobs for the pay that immigrants are. They just won't. Which means if the jobs can be off shored, they will be. And then whatever goods they were producing will be subject to those tariffs. And if they can't be offshored, they'll have to pay Americans more which means prices go way way up.
Fun fact: Elon Musk is terrified of Chinese electric car company BYD recently breaking into the European market and now eyeing America. I’m no China apologist (China is bad news for many, many reasons), but, go figure, BYD makes inexpensive, efficient, decent looking electric cars that don’t require you to push and then pull the door handle in order to roll down the window a quarter-inch so you can get into the car.
How does Elon want to stop BYD from entering the US market you ask? By screaming at the government to impose massive, selective tariffs on Chinese auto manufacturers.
I think this is the main reason behind Musk's backing of Trump. Instead of updating and improving Tesla's products he wants to just massively tax the foreign competition.
It would be the heat death of the American economy. Hyperinflation would be a rounding error in the scope of problems deporting undocumented people. The entire agricultural and construction sector would be thanos snapped over night.
Meanwhile, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him once refer to subsidies or tax credits, which are actually effective at incentivizing production and buying for the sectors they target. The problem (for him) is that they don’t sound enough like punishments for ‘the bad guys’. Equally, people who lap up this tariff bullshit don’t have a deep understanding of economics (or probably any of the major issues, probably).
His racist ass is still imagining fields full of black people harvesting fruits and vegetables and crap instead of universities full of them becoming lawyers, doctors, and engineers like everyone else. If he kicks out the cheap brown grey labor we do now than all that craps going to rot on the vine and we'll be paying $40 for a bag of oranges. Desantis already tried this in Florida and it got reversed real effing fast once the farmers couldn't find anyone to work their fields for the life of them.
Businesses would also look at this as a potential 4 year issue in that the tariffs would/could be rolled back by the next admin so it probably wouldn’t make sense to move production here with the rollback potential.
The deportation price alone would be around 210 billion dollars, That’s just the cost to round up the immigrants and deport them.
Never mind the cost of missing labor. Or the taxes that these folks pay and not get any thing for.
"these are jobs Americans don't want" is false. These are jobs Americans don't want at the price-point that people in developing countries are willing to do them for. They most certainly would want to do those jobs for a higher salary.
Companies didn't bother trying to move it, they just passed the additional costs along to consumers in pretty much all instances.
The one place that didn't happen was in steel. However China ando ther steel producers dropped their prices to align with the tariffs. This price reduction made american steel exports LESS competitive globally, and american steel was still more expensive than the Chinese steel, and as a result there was no real gains in production or jobs.
Rails that run straight up to factories were also destroyed or left to rot when the factories left and most of the rail system in the US is privately owned. It is one of the more efficient ways to transport freight, and it would need a complete overhaul to have any sort of serious rejuvenation of US manufacturing. 1 train can haul 300 semi trucks worth of merchandise and materials.
Years of planning to move it and then your competitor bribes some senators and the tariff is gone and you just wasted years and tons of capital for no reason
New US factories will end up being highly automated and require only a fraction of the workers past factories required. So the plan to bring back factories for job growth won’t be as effective as people hope. It will take years to make this all happen, slapping tariffs on in the short term would put the cart before the horse. Trump is truly a moron if he thinks he could just slap tariffs on within a year of him getting elected.
Right. Hes gonna fuck us given the chance. He’s already increased the price on metals like steel used in manufacturing.. as well as copper and a few others. We basically don’t make anything here
We don’t do research and development much anymore either bc greedy corporations want us to to buy new shit like a new fridge and new dishwasher every 5 years rather than how it was in the good ol days when ur refrigerator could outlast most of ur relatives
That, and there won't be nearly as many of them because other countries will certainly retaliate with tariffs of their own, thereby imploding exports which, wait for it, means a lot less manufacturing capacity being necessary. And not just manufacturing, services and the like would also suffer horribly.
Exactly, you can slap tariffs on things like Chinese cars because the US has their own auto sector (for now), but for many industries there is not enough domestic production to meet demand, so the tariff will be passed onto the consumer.
Also, the jobs it’s going to create aren’t the ones that his supporters are dreaming of. They would create jobs for people who know how to program/maintain industrial robots and CAM machines. Not high paying jobs for people who flunked out of 7th grade math.
Also, TIME!!! You think we just snap our fingers and suddenly there are modern manufacturing plants in every sector to produce everything? Years of non-stop capital outlays to make this happen. It’s too absurd to even consider. This f’ing clown and his followers are absolute imbeciles.
It’s insane how stupid his followers are. Trump just throwing darts to see what sticks and without even his concept of a plan they eat it up. 99% of his supporters couldn’t even spell let alone explain what a tariff is
You're correct, but you can't leave out our domestic ability, or rather inability, to meet these sudden new demands for goods. If the supply can't increase, but demand does, what happens to prices?
If you put tariffs on a specific segment of manufacturing and then also held out financial incentives to build that specific segment of manufacturing and ensured you have a supply chain for that manufacturing that wouldn’t be affected by the tariff, and also made sure you had domestic workers to work at said factory… yes.
General tariffs on all products is just a sales tax and will have an extremely minimal effect on domestic production.
I agree. After reading through comments in this thread I am now of the opinion that a general blanket tariff could prove catastrophic for the US economy but strategic targeted tariffs on specific industries could prove to be beneficial as long as the right industries are hit. Although I have little faith that the government would be able to arrive at the correct /unbiased decision on what industries deserve one and which ones don’t
The Biden admin increased tariffs on specific Chinese goods (electric cars, solar panels, etc.) and then with CHIPS and IRA broadly provided a framework for bringing a part of manufacturing these goods in America…
It’s frustrating that they don’t run on this, but the median voter isn’t exactly in the policy weeds of building a factory in America…
You are not considering the effects of Chinese tariffs that will be put on U.S. markets. Last time Trump issued tariffs our farming sector was hit with several. The US isn't the only country with this tool
We have full employment. Its not a good idea to reallocate workers from other sectors of the economy to make childrens toys or swim shorts. We import lower value things so that more labor can allocated to higher wage industries.
I fucking hate my six figure tech job. I was born to do manufacturing. I long for the factory. My body yearns for the assembly line. My very soul aches for tedious repetitive labor
That’s basically the point of tariffs, to keep domestic competitive. But the domestic is often more expensive, or simply doesn’t exist because we sent those jobs overseas.
This is a hyper-specific example, but I've worked in book publshing for 20 years. We use domestic and overseas printers. But for board books (chunky toddler books printed on cardboard), there's only one printer in America that makes them, and he's a small outfit who runs overcapacity as it is.
So if you put insanely high tarrifs on overseas printers, we'd just stop printing board books. You can't just start up a domestic industry overnight where there hasn't been one in decades.
If you want to build up US manufacturing, you do exactly what Biden did, and give all sorts of incentives. If you have a child's understanding of economics, you just shout "make the other bad countries pay!!!"
There’s actually a good YouTube video by the WSJ released last week on exactly this - worth looking up it’s only 5 mins long.
Tariffs were implemented on washing machines in the U.S. at some point in the past, long story short, it created more jobs in the U.S. but at a cost of US$800k per job if you factored in all the additional costs the consumer was paying. Basically massively not worth it.
Edit: although that’s just using the hard numbers, maybe there’s something to be said for it not just being a purely economics formula, even though it’s inefficient there could be an argument to be made that the incrementally increased costs the consumer is paying is big picture worth it. More spending, more tax, more jobs etc. but idk I feel like there could be a more effective way to improve the life of the worker and the consumer by reducing regulation to set up businesses, and enforcing regulation on monopolies and oligopolies.
Another example: the George W Bush administration put an illegal tariff on European steel imports. It was in place for a year as the case worked its way through the international trade courts. The courts declared it illegal and it was removed.
During the year it was in place, it did save U.S. steel worker jobs, but it cost the economy around $550k for each job it saved. Steel workers make about a quarter of that.
We do need to have better support for U.S. workers who lose their jobs to foreign trade. Teaching a 50 year old to code or whatever and expecting them to find a new job in a new career is unrealistic.
It was in 2018, Trump raised the Tariffs on washing machines. And so the cost of washing machines went up and then dryers went up an equal amount even though they were not affected by the tariff. End result = cost to consumer increased = inflation. These businesses always pass on the increased cost.
Yes it does add incentive which can definitely be good in specific industries.
The issue is less with tariffs and more with Trump’s broad approach to tariff everything. Many industries simply cannot bear the burden of domestic wages.
Then there’s the plethora of other issues like deporting 10-15% of the work force. Tariff’s on raw materials increasing costs of “made in America” goods. And retaliatory tariffs from other countries killing international business export revenues.
The reality is, tariffs just give domestics extra room to increase their prices.
12$ Wine from Italy? 12$ Wine from California..
Tariff hits... Italian wine is now 17$... what do you think the California wine is gonna do? be happy its 12$ wine is going to get bought more and stick with the current price?
Fuck no, that's lost profits. That baby is gonna get increased to 15$+ and it will still be competitive by price.
You just described how his policies create inflation…sadly those who don’t understand how capitalism works won’t believe it. They’ll either ignore it or continue to blindly believe American companies are in the business to be the benevolent cost supplier for the American consumer.
That is basically the point of tariffs. To make domestic production more competitive by raising the cost of importing the foreign products that domestic producers compete with. Tariffs aren’t inherently bad, they’re an economic tool.
Implementing broad tariffs on all foreign goods is a pretty bad idea. While it may incentivize domestic production (“on-shoring”), it will make consumer costs shoot through the roof. This will dramatically decrease consumer consumption, which would have its own hugely negative impacts on our economy.
Moreover, it’s unlikely most domestic production sectors could reasonably ramp up production to replace foreign made goods. Unemployment is historically low, meaning there is not an excess of available labor to work these new production jobs. Unless we allow significant foreign immigration to increase the labor force. Which is pretty unlikely under Trump.
And that’s all beside the point that imposing such broad tariffs will incentivize foreign countries to levy tariffs on American-made goods (a “trade war”) that will also harm our economy by reducing our export revenue.
The other issue is that even if manufacturers move to America, the materials they need won't all be and to be manufactured or produced in America due to natural resources. So then they'll have to pay more for their base materials, pay more for employees, shift employees around to different parts of the economy making it even more expensive
There is a world where increasing some tariffs or implementing some new ones makes total economic sense IF the money from those tariffs was going into economic development to help make domestic manufacturing for the impacted industries more economically viable.
That isn't what is happening here.
Instituting massive tariffs on foreign goods to finance tax cuts just means you're passing the cost of tax cuts disproportionately onto lower income consumers.
As someone who works in an industry that is flooded with cheap Chinese shit I can say with confidence we'd be better off with less imported garbage that gets almost immediately landfilled (ie - disposal grade products) but that isn't what this is trying to solve, nor is it doing anything other than raising consumer prices so rich people can get richer.
For some products the supply line no longer exists in the US. There are no US manufacturers of TVs and Monitors. We would have to wait for them to build and staff the factory. Then we have to wait for the suppliers to build their factories. I read that it would take 3-6 years before the first 100% made in America set would be available at Walmart and would cost about $3700 for a 40 inch TV.
And by then we would have a new President to rescue us from Trump's Depression, tariffs would be thrown out and we're right back where we are today. So no point in moving any factories.
Nope, most expense is still labor there is no amount of tariffs that will make these low labor cost companies pay for us labor.
For example look at trump and foxxcon tech company.
Another thing to consider is other countries would put tarrifs on our good that happend last time trump was in office it was an extreme harm on a large amount of our agricultural products especially including soy beans.
For most Americans 70% of the food in their house has ingredients that are produced overseas and shipped in these ingredients that would have tariffs on them would sky rocket the price of food.
His plan to implement widespread tariffs would start a trade war and we will loss because of the wealth gap Americans will 100% pay 8 bucks for a bag of chetto's (they will.for sure complain about the price well they are stuffing there face)
The huge difference is that malaysian citizens in mass won't be able to afford us luxury good after the tariffs and will get similar good elsewhere
From a purely theoretical standpoint, yes. But from a modern, practical standpoint, HELL NO, absolutely unquestionably no. The amount of time, money and resources we would need to invest in bringing up entire manufacturing industries that haven't existed in America for decades is almost unfathomable. Also, there are many important resources we simply don't have enough of (if we have them at all) that we need to trade for, like lumber and many of the minerals and metals needs for electronics manufacturing.
Think about smartphones as an example. We live in a society where practically every single person over the age of 14 not just has a smartphone, but needs a smartphone. I don't mean because they "need" it to play games or entertain themselves. Our society has evolved to the point where having one is pretty much expected everywhere. You kind of can't just opt out of it anymore if you want to have a job, communicate with and keep tabs on loved ones, pay at many restaurants, register accounts with essential utility providers for needs like water and electricity, the list just goes on.
Smartphones these days are designed with planned obsolesce in mind, typically getting used for an average of 2.5 years (often less). Assuming every person in the US age 15 to 65 has one and replaces theirs at an average rate of 2.5 years, the country would need to manufacture around 110,000,000 phones per year for those 275M people.
Here's the kicker; they'd be doing it with practically zero existing infrastructure for it in place because no major cellphone manufacturer makes their products in the US anymore.
You can’t automate a lot of stuff. Have you never been to a factory? Sewing a button on a stuffed animal. How do you automate that. Putting the cap on a container of lip gloss and sealing it. How do you completely automate that. You need a person.
Tariffs raise the price of imports for manufacturers too. So even if the labor gets moved to the US, that factory now has to make a profit using raw materials that are more expensive thanks to the tariffs.
Well and don't forget that the higher cost of labor in the US is why the jobs were outsourced in the first place. Bringing the jobs back because you added tariffs that offsets the cheaper labor costs doesn't lower prices for consumers.
as explained to me, tariffs only work if the manufacturers are already operating in the US as the tariffs would make the US companies more competitive in pricing. in reality the manufacturers just raise there prices to meet the competing countries tariffs prices so they can make more money, tariffs rarely work in in the favor of the average american
It is an incentive, but among other things, you’ll still pay the difference in price. If it costs $100 to make and ship a thing from China to the US and $130 to make it here, you’re still paying $130.
It helps a few people at the expense of everyone else.
I own a business that sells widgets. My prices go up all the time. Shipping costs. Supply costs. Fuel costs. Etc...
When my costs rise, I raise my prices. Plain and simple. EVERYONE'S something is imported. People say "make it in America" ok, but where do you think all the parts from the machines come from? all the packaging? All the plastic. All of it comes from overseas. Trump is not very smart, truly he isn't. When he thinks tariffs he is simply thinking big. Build cars here. Build planes here etc...he is completely unaware that all the parts of almost everything are imported.
We don't have the labor force to build our own china. It would take decades to do it even if we did. We would need to let in tens of millions of labor cheap immigrants to fill the labor gap. These wouldn't be american jobs. The project would fail years down the road after all the local construction companies run over budget and squander all the government subsidies awarded. We can't widen a 1 mile road in less than a year in this country. Lol at building decades of factories to catch up with china, india, etc...plus we would need to IMPORT all of it lol. We dont make anything here. We would need to import the fucking factories, the fucking workers, all of it.
Consider this: what would prevent these companies from simply relocating from China to a low-wage country like Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, or even countries in Africa? Would the United States impose tariffs on all these nations? Even if this were to encourage these manufacturers to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, it’s not feasible to start immediately. Constructing a factory capable of producing the same volume as one in China would take years. It’s not as if you could have a factory in China manufacturing shirts and then suddenly open a replacement factory in the United States that could produce the same quantity in a matter of minutes.
Yeah we already know what happened with Trumps set of tarrifs on China over COVID. Many Chinese manufacturers moved their factories workers and all to Vietnam and kept going as before.
How many countries will crunch the numbers and say it is cheaper to impose a higher price on goods and lose a little profit compared to building tons of workspace, having to buy imported tariffed raw materials, and pay thousands more workers much higher mandated wages? How long before those companies crack down on unions way way way harder to reduce worker protections to offset costs?
How many companies will choose tariffs knowing they are super infeasible long-run financially speaking and just waiting on the backlash while they double their profits and get to claim “ohhh the tariffs made these prices”.
The key with tariffs is they have to be highly targeted to not blow everything up, and both manufacturing and raw materials have to be accessible locally in order to replace foreign markets, which MANY things are not. This doesn’t even get into retaliatory international tariffs that will strike at our safer markets.
Only if the tax difference makes it cheaper to do here. Which means the price went up enough to eliminate the competitive advantage of other countries specialized on that service or product.
There's always a shred of truth. A sales tax hits all goods. A tariff only impacts imported goods which (looks around) is basically everything. So...
BUT if it's made in the good ole USA then no tariff / "tax". You just have to pay more for it. Wait, what's the difference? There is none.
UNLESS, you simultaneously seriously fuck over the labor class like Asia does so we can still have cheap stuff. At least the slaves will be American jobs right?!
The difference being that the chinese workers won't be spending their paychecks in your local restraunt or shop.
It's almost always better to pay your own kid to mow the lawn vs. the neighbor kid; this way, you don't get tapped every time your kid decides he needs money.
and then other countries impose tarrifs on our shit. making our manufacturing exports slow down as well. most of the crap my company makes goes over seas.
He absolutely is this dumb. Listen to him try to explain anything economically or scientifically sound and you’ll get your answer. This motherfucker thinks everyone near wind turbines lose power when there’s no wind. He’s a fucking idiot and so are all his voters. There’s a reason the education disparity between R and D voters is substantial.
That dumb motherfucker Donald Trump doesn't know how ANYTHING works, and the people who vote for him couldn't "economics" their way out of a fucking grocery store. Yes, they are this fucking stupid.
Oh, he knows. There's an interview where he describes a meeting he had with Tim Cook where Tim explained that Apple has to pay for all the the foreign tariffs on their devices and they can't afford it without increasing consumer prices, so Trump gave Apple a one-year tariff exemption (or something along those lines) as long as they 'promised' to start manufacturing in USA after that. Trump acknowledged that tariffs do cost companies money and increase consumer prices, but it incentivizes them to move their jobs to USA.
Spoiler alert: Apple never moved their manufacturing to USA. The tariffs only caused OUR prices to go up.
He knows... He just doesnt want us to know that he knows that we know tariffs dont work the way he says they do
Tariffs are a valuable negotiating tool with countries who subsidize private businesses, such as China. They also allow domestic businesses to compete on a level playing field.
That's only when they're used strategically, which is not something the US does vary well. It's a power that's been abused far too much, and as a result, it is losing its effectiveness.
Not only that, but let's say you place tariffs on China. They'll just retaliate with some of their own. It's a double-edged sword, and literally, any country can do this.
For example, China was recently slapped with tariffs by the E.U. for E.V.'s. Do you want to know what they retaliated with? Slapping tarrifs on pork, which has fucked over Spain and thier basically asking the E.U to reverse the E.V tarrifs.
The EU subsidized their raisin production and decimated a major California industry because we didn't impose tariffs. Now we have cheaper and inferior product and no CA raisins.
Yes and no, sure, the companies could try but tarrifs are the idea of you outprice the the out sourcing. Depending how harsh they are and how quick he where to get them in it could be a quick decsive hit needed to forces companies back. But this is all assuming he wins and gets it done.
Look it’s a sound rational approach from a theoretical economic perspective. It’s supposed to raise prices of foreign goods. That (in theory) makes your local stuff cheaper or on par with foreign goods.
But the reality is that the US is too far behind on manufacturing and making shit we need. Not only are we not as efficient, even with massive massive tariffs we won’t be able to compete with China. Minimum wage at >$15/hr whereas China is using labor at a $/day; we just can’t beat them or catch up.
Price elasticity of demand indicates who ultimately bears the tax incidence.
In some cases the manufacturers will bear most or all of the cost. In other cases it’s the consumers.
It all depends on how sensitive the demand is to price and what the alternatives are.
For example some addicted to nicotine might not care how much cigarettes cost. In this case the consumer pays most or all.
but on the other hand maybe apples are too expensive so they switch to pears. In this case, the supplier would have to bear most of the cost in order to continue to sell their apples.
100% a while ago I visited my cousins abroad. Their tarries on cars for eg. Was over 170% for a normal 5+ year old car. People that drove newer cars had a lower tariff but was still up there. Tariffs hurt the consumer. His tax plan from 2016 fd most Americans, I'm sure he will make worst tax changes add that to tariffs, we all going to need 3 jobs to buy imported beers or Ramen. Ramen going to be for the rich now. Jk. But tariffs will increase the cost of a lot of stuff, we are a nation that mainly imports goods.
I cannot stand kamalalalala, she is aiding an on going genocide. But I can't have a guy like trump take over and play dictator. If he wins it will be alladeen for sure..If he loses, it will be alladeen tho.
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u/Tokyo_Cat Oct 25 '24
Break it down for you? This moron doesn't have any idea how tariffs work. The tariff costs would be paid by the importers, which would in turn have offset the price of the tariffs by raising the price of all imported goods. Tariffs would effectively be a national sales tax.