Trump says he will introduce 25% tariffs on autos, pharmaceuticals and chips.
Trump says he will introduce 25% tariffs on autos, pharmaceuticals and chips.
Trump has long railed against what he calls the unfair treatment of U.S. automotive exports in foreign markets.
I was at a hibachi place in December and one of the managers was trying to light a candle. The lighter didn't work and he made a joke that it "must be made in China. It'll cost 25% more soon!" A guy at the table said "well you'll just need to buy one made in Pennsylvania!"
I asked him if he knew of any companies that manufactured disposable lighters in Pennsylvania, and he just said "Trump will make it happen!"
The disconnect is crazy.
Here's what I would tell someone that thinks manufacturing is coming back.
Say you're a factory owner and goods are costing too much to import from China. Your trusty Excel sheet tells you that, with the tariffs, you can make your widgets for the same price in America.
But you're a smart capitalist! You know these tariffs are going to end up wildly unpopular and will be rescinded sooner rather than later. In any case, the economy may tank and no one will be able to afford widgets.
Yet another problem is that tariffs will make American widgets toxic on the international market. Canadians are already looking to shed American imports.
Now are you, Mr. Smart Capitalist, going to risk building an American factory and get left holding the bag?
Alternate:
"Know what the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was?"
To wit, you can send a message by adding a "Trump Tariff Tax" instead of changing your base price, just to clearly articulate to the simpletons that thought this would lower costs
The factory decision is exactly the calculation that will go through hundreds of MBA-educated business leaders.
Disposable lighters are pretty easy to make though, it's just a lot more expensive to do it here (much more than 25% more). Things will just get more expensive, with maybe a handful of items being made here, but the net result will be more expensive stuff and some new, poorly paying jobs. Yay.
In the off chance that domestic producers can make those goods at a price cheaper than overseas_cost+25% guess what they'll charge? The same high price.
BIC probably produces lighters in the US, they have a couple of locations there. It could also be razor blades or ballpoint pens though and the lighters are coming in from Mexico. Or surfboards. Still can't believe they produce surfboards.
Or BIC might exit the US market, the French aren't exactly known to be forgiving or accommodating. If you make their US factories pay 25% on the flints they're importing from another factory elsewhere they might just say fuck it, let's burn this place down, we'll go somewhere where these lighters aren't hit by 25% retaliatory tariffs.
I know you're talking about disposable lighters but the funny thing is that Zippo is from PA. I doubt they still make lighters in PA and also as a company they only survive off nostalgia because their lighters are pretty bad. You can't leave one sitting in a drawer for more than a few days before the fuel dries up.
I bought a knockoff Zippo lighter insert from China and it's so much better because it's sealed and the fluid doesn't evaporate.
That's the thing that the person in the made up story doesn't understand:
Even the majority of "made in america" products are actually "assembled in america". Just like the majority of "chinese knockoffs" are after hours runs at the same factories that make the real thing. Sometimes crappier and sometimes actually better because they sourced better materials from a different factory.
And... that is why we are so fucked. Because there will be the "Well, product A costs more because of tariffs so product B can sell for more too". But also? Product B's profit margins will go down because they are paying for tariffs too. Which gets passed on to the consumer.
That 25% magic number
He’s incapable of complex thought. Tariff use is supposed to be nuanced and in line with price differences between American production costs and foreign ones. They are meant to make American products competitive but balanced to limit inflationary side effects. Not done in big dumb across the board numbers like this. He’s fucking stupid.
tariffs are just a tax on the plebs. more money for them to funnel into billionaire pockets.
Those new AI datacenters will get hit hard by that if it goes through. And Elon Musk is still trying to build them. That is a 25% tarrif on every CPU, motherboard, NVME drive, GPU, network switch, and optic.
Unless import duties only apply to chips not soldered into devices in which case all the foreign produced stuff is fine and the American assembled stuff is no longer competative. Oops
You really think Elon is paying tarrifs? Or bills? Or his employees?
For facist exceptions are the point. If you can curry favor you can get exceptions.
They’ll carve out a spot so Muskrat doesn’t lose any of his hundreds of billions.
Anyone who thinks tariffs will do anything at all positive for the American working class is absolutely clueless.
All they do is make prices jump for consumers. It doesn't put domestic goods at an advantage because the domestic producers of those goods increase their prices artificially to achieve parity with import pricing.
So prices go up for the consumer with the extra money going to either:
- For imported goods, to pay the tariff, a tax, to the government, which in this case wants to use that tax revenue to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.
or
- For domestic goods, it's pure straight profit for the unethical corporations who are price gouging their domestic customer base. They're not giving the consumer a break on price and they're not sharing the profits by giving employees raises. Hell, they're not even taking advantage of the competitive advantage to ramp up production and create jobs. They're just pocketing that extra cash for doing exactly what they're always doing...passing it on to, you guessed it...the wealthy.
- assumes that domestic producers can produce with similar costs as their international competitors, which obviously isn't the case in most circumstances. In fact, the entire point of tariffs, that are meant to protect domestic industry, is raising domestic competitiveness. If they'd already be equally competitive to international producers, tariffs wouldn't do much.
Anyone who thinks tariffs will do anything at all positive for the American working class is absolutely clueless.
That’s the entirety of trump’s followers.
On the one hand, fostering local production of these goods is positive for national resilience, and also has a chance to reduce shipping around the world, which is bad for the environment.
On the other hand, good fucking luck, lol.
No way we're making chips stateside with the Department of Education on the chopping block.
So many schools will close and you sure as shit ain't training people who can make top of the line chips with no fucking schools.
How is the Department of Education relevant? It was created in 1980, and it's not like we didn't have good education before then. It doesn't run schools, and it does a whole bunch of stuff largely unrelated to running schools. Schools are largely funded and run locally, and there really wasn't any standardization of education until Obama's "Common Core," and a lot of states still don't implement it.
Cuts to the Department of Education will largely not impact schools, at least not K-12. Universities could be impacted if federal loans and grants are cut, but that could also be a good thing since it'll cut the cash cow that allowed universities to jack up tuition and dramatically expand administration.
That said, even if engineering departments at universities are gutted, it'll be many years before we see impacts in industry, and there's a very good chance companies like Intel will fund scholarships and whatnot to keep those programs alive.
The Department of Education is one of the areas I think we should make cuts. End the federal student loan program but keep grants (should help cut university costs), end whatever created Common Core (should be an independent nonprofit that states and private schools fund for education research), and keep most of the rest (and probably rename it since it doesn't touch education much anymore). Oh, and investigate university costs to see what else is pushing prices up.
When a quarter of the most qualified engineers to make the stuff and a lot of the cheap manual labor are immigrants and you do a campaign against immigrants so they leave, maybe you don't have enough people left to to create local production.
If that's the goal, you announce tariffs are coming in a few years so that people scale up local production to avoid the higher costs.
In this case, there was like 4 months notice where all of it was undefined, so of course nobody did anything and now we still don't have local production. Now, prices will go up and local producers (if they even build up) will match the new prices instead of keeping them low.
Congrats, worst of both worlds! We still have no local production and prices have gone up! Yay!
Even then, as a democracy, you can only do really mild tariffs as companies won't trust the tariffs to stay high come the next government. You instead subsidise, in whatever form, including things like long-term supply contracts. If you want to push domestic ball point pen production, just order your administration to prefer buying domestic ball point pens if they're within what 20% of the import price, then slowly reduce that rate but keep the preference to make sure your ballpoint pen industry is productive, efficient, and competitive. Make it a 10-year supply contracts the next government can't just cancel. If you're the US, give them to teachers to give children.
We don't manufacture cars in the United States we assemble them. Most of the parts for cars are made outside of the states. Mainly in China.
No country manufactures cars 100% locally. We live in a global economy. All cars are made from components sourced from countries all over the world, in varying degrees.
Shipping over water is actually pretty green, since they have huge ships carrying a bunch of containers with relatively little energy.
Building new factories in the States will create a lot more pollution. Concrete is the opposite of green.
Yet he supports oil.. Which accounts for a sizeable share of international shipping. This is while the US doesn't have enough refining capacity for the type of oil we produce.
I agree, tariffs will be a net positive for the country. Problem is, the people taking the brunt of that impact will, as always, be the poorest and most vulnerable. There are many ways we could solve that problem but of course authoritarians have no interest in that.
That being said, anyone who voted for Trump thinking he would fix the economy is a fucking moron. Tariffs make shit worse before they get better. It will probably be a decade before we start to see any positive impact from them.
Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we'd already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.
There's no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.
Shipping is incredibly efficient, only a tiny fraction of emissions of products and foods.
First of all, that's not correct.
Second: emissions aren't the only form of pollution.
Third: the word "shipping", despite the name, includes air transportation;
Fourth: assuming, disingenuously of course, that the factors of the local production process are the same as the remote one, NOT shipping is always going to be more environmentally friendly.
So, Americans will need to pay ~25% extra for cars, medicines and gadgets? Smells like inflation.
Yeah because drugs aren’t already prohibitively expensive.
Anyone who thinks we're not heading for a deep, deep recession is deluding themselves
And America is taking everyone with them.
How does this help with inflation? He is screwing the people he claims to help.
Tariffs (originally from Arabic: تعريفة) are a tax paid by the consumer. All inputs will be more expensive even for US produced goods.
It doesn’t hurt him and his rich cronies.
He doesn’t care about the people who elected him.
He’s just trying to be a tough guy and flex.
He’s always made others pay the price for his actions, whether it be bankruptcy, stalling them in court, or just outright not paying.
But hey, at least we have bird flu infested eggs
Make H5N5
greatkill everyone again!
Ghost chips too?
Potato chips are already overpriced!
Really thought they'd grow their own potatoes.
Guess there will be a market in importing whole ones, and cutting them up there.
It's like somewhere in the grapevine this dude found out I was doing financially better and right before I am able to afford nice things I've worked toward he's like "lol fuck you in particular"
You know, just things that nobody really needs to begin with, right?
You forgot your sarcasm tag
Spicy chips?