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.
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.
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 You know these tariffs are going to end up wildly unpopular and will be rescinded sooner rather than later.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.
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.
Bic lighters are made in France. 25% is peanuts to them, they get much higher tariffs in south america.
BIC is a French surfboard manufacturer?
Pretty sure they had BIC windsurf boards in Canada when I was a kid.
Edit: Shit, they still do too, as of 2008.
Fascinating
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.
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.
I have no way to prove it obviously but nothing in that story was made up.
For what it’s worth I do believe your story only because I have family who have used a very similar “Trump is gonna fix it!” line to me and when I asked what he’d fix their response is “everything!”
Yeah because drugs aren’t already prohibitively expensive.
tariffs are just a tax on the plebs. more money for them to funnel into billionaire pockets.
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.
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
They’ll carve out a spot so Muskrat doesn’t lose any of his hundreds of billions.
For facist exceptions are the point. If you can curry favor you can get exceptions.
You really think Elon is paying tarrifs? Or bills? Or his employees?
It’s possible AI data centers will just be outsourced to other countries. You don’t really need the data center to exist locally in the US
Yes you do.
So, Americans will need to pay ~25% extra for cars, medicines and gadgets? Smells like inflation.
Anyone who thinks we’re not heading for a deep, deep recession is deluding themselves
And America is taking everyone with them.
Except for China-made Tesla right?
For better or worse, all Teslas sold in USA are built in Fremont or Austin.
My 2024 MSLR is made in Freemont CA but you can be certain the display, CPU and sensors aren’t made in America.
Yes that would be covered under “chips” but not under autos.
Ghost chips too?
But hey, at least we have bird flu infested eggs
Make H5N5
greatkill everyone again!
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”
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.
Spicy chips?
You know, just things that nobody really needs to begin with, right?
You forgot your sarcasm tag
