Yup. I am the international buyer at my Made in America company. We pay the tariffs. We do not absorb them it gets added into the price. And when China is 50-75% lower than American made, another 30% tariff isn’t going to bring the business back here. I kept posting that on my Facebook for weeks before the election. No one listens.
Everyone seems to be wringing hands about policy, but this is just another datapoint that propaganda won this election.
Even worse, China has already begun moving their Chinese-owned production to Malaysia, circumventing the tariffs on Chinese imported finished goods.
I heard about this a few months back on a podcast about auto parts. China just shipped the fan belts they were making to a warehouse in Vietnam, rebranded them, and shipped them to the US, tariff free.
They did some sort of chemical analysis on the Made in China and Made in Vietnam belts and the formulation of the rubbers was identical.
Enforcement to counter this would likely eat up too much of the tariff money, so it just won’t be done. China will still get paid the same, and at minimum we’ll eat China’s additional shipping costs.
Yeah, no shit. How the fuck do people think tariffs work?
If they knew how tariffs worked, fewer of them might have voted for the dumbass proposing to make things cheaper by raising them.
In their minds, they literally think of them as some sort of “cover charge” that foreign manufacturers pay to get their goods into the US, and that they will do so gladly and neither seek other places to sell nor raise their prices. They think that these companies will eat the losses until they decide to build factories in the US, or they will simply wither away and American factories will sprout up like dandelions in a sidewalk.
The fact that all of it is completely wrong doesn’t matter, because the people telling them otherwise don’t have on a red hat and an ill-fitting suit.
They are also super easy to explain. It is a tax. That is increasing yet another tax - vat.
USA doesn’t have VAT
The same way they thought “Mexico will pay for the wall” was gonna work - they didn’t think about it at all.
They just blindly trusted the habitual liar, despite all evidence to the contrary.
“Think”?
Glad they said this after the election
/s
They don’t give a shit that the customers will be paying more. In fact, if anything, they probably love the excuse to jack up prices further - or further cut their workforce to the bone, or whatever the latest fad in padding executive compensation packages is.
I’m sure they probably do - shit as Walmart is a depression in consumer spending is overall bad for them.
What are the customers going to do? Buy from someone else? Wal-Mart is already often the cheapest option around.
It’s already often the only option around. So many small businesses like local supermarkets and hardware stores got closed down in small towns by Walmart moving in and now there’s no alternative. I see it all over in central Indiana and Illinois.
No but they’ll buy less overall even from Walmart.
Buying less, but they’ll be spending the same amount of money, barring rises in other expenses not directly related to tariffs (rent, utilities, etc). Their quality of life will simply go down. Wal-Mart doesn’t care about that. We could all be medieval peasants for all they care.
Once again, corporate america will use this as an excuse to raise prices more than necessary, gouging the people and stuffing the pockets of CEOs.
That’s the point
The average American is already stretched to the breaking point with what overinflated goods they can afford. We’ll soon see people either buy just the bare essentials or start stealing at a much higher rate than we already have. Food riots might very well be a thing in the world’s richest country soon.
The genius part is now that Republicans are in charge of the government here, deficits no longer matter, and they will push through huge tax cuts on the rich. These massive tax cuts will only trickle down to working folks in the form of direct rebate checks, just to give Trump an excuse to have his signature all over them. Trump will convince these people that the additional money is to help offset rising prices, and his voters will believe it.
Deficits will no longer matter until after the midterms, and then if Democrats can gain back control of either house of Congress, the deficit will become a big problem again, that can only be solved by slashing more programs. The checks will stop, and Trump will blame Democrats.
Yep, and the prices will stay high even after the tariffs are gone.
Grocery stores are the worst about this too. Prices are still absurdly high despite there being no more supply issues from covid.
Trying to speak sense to Americans. You are in for a rude awakening. They will blame the high prices on space lasers.
And immigrants, “wokeism,” and Obama, Joe Biden.
It’s amazing we’re having this conversation given that the pinnacle of conservative thought is that you can’t make the rich pay for anything because they’ll just pass the costs down to you, and yet that seems to go out the window when you can be racist about it.
Yes, anyone reasonable knew that this would lead to higher costs. Americans are expensive to employ. The point of the tariff package is to bring back manufacturing and production to the USA. Stop importing so much crap from China and other places, and things will balance out. That increase in costs should be compensated for by jobs for American citizens across all sectors if people respect the purpose of the tariffs - to disincentivize imports whenever and however possible.
I buy parts internationally for a domestic manufacturer. The parts are as good if not better than us made. They are also 50-75% less than US WITH the current 25% tariff. Another 20-30% increase isn’t going to bring it back to the US, it will just increase costs.
This is one of those things that Trump never actually said, his supporters have just been saying for him for months now. Another one of those “what he really meant was…” Because that’s what won’t happen, even if it did it would take decades to move production back.
Except, this measure won’t result in that at all. Punishing companies for importing is only going to punish consumers. The company wants it for as cheap as possible, and that will often be importing. Even ifbit becomes expensive to import, it will be cheaper than the capital needed to set up the infrastructure for manufacturing domestically. Rewarding companies for sourcing materials and labor domestically will incentivize them to bring jobs here. At least more so than making them pay more to bring it in.
The point of the tariff package is to bring back manufacturing and production to the USA.
That was the claim.
But in reality, American businesses will do whatever is more profitable for them.
And even if it becomes more profitable to build a factory (including paying the tarrifs on the machinery needed 'cause that factory hasnt been built in the US yet) and hire (and train) a workforce, that will take years to do, and even more years before the capitol cost is recovered and it starts being profitable.
By which point Trump will be dead and gone and maybe a more sane government will have eliminated some of Trump’s more stupid impacts. And then the owner of the new factory may not be able to compete with overseas factories at a level of extreme profit they want…
That’s never going to happen. What will happen is that companies will raise their prices slightly higher than the tariffs cost them, fire more of their workforce, and then brag to investors about their most profitable quarter ever. Plus, that would require the tariffs to be on finished products only. I’ve already heard of several companies announcing no Christmas bonuses this year because they need to stock up on materials in anticipation of the incoming tariffs.
And most of the people supporting tariffs thought that they were going to make things cheaper AND that China was going to pay them.
Oof. Dorian Gray just looked at the portrait.
This is why Trump wants immigrant labor camps
inb4 products that have absolutely no supply chain dependence to China ‘somehow’ increase in price.
Hey now, the Waltons need some extra cash. Who could even get by on a measly four million dollars a hour in this economy?
Gotta prepare just in case one of them gets drunk and murders a person with a car again.
- It’s Walmart: what item they sell has no connection to China?
- It’s important tariffs actually the board not just China
I think a lot of their food items aren’t from China, and a few random things are even domestic. I think they sell Lodge cast iron pans, which are fully made in America.
I think his “plan” is a really big tariff on China and a moderate one on every other country?
That’s my understanding as well.
But, as the original comment suggested, it doesn’t really matter.
If every other cast iron pan goes up 15% in price, what do you think Lodge will do?
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keep their price the same, see modest relative increase in market share with a demand for investment in additional production, knowing full well the tariffs aren’t going to be permanent leaving them over-invested in production whenever they drop the tariffs.
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Also raise their prices by 15%, immediately show increased revenue at no additional cost to shareholders next quarter. CEO gets massive bonus.
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Tariffs make companies able to compete better within the walled garden, but weakens their competitiveness worldwide. It creates a race to the bottom inside the garden, but makes them weak outside the border. They also makes prices increasefor the local buyers. Costs get passed along, it’s not as if manufacturers are going to absorb increases, they don’t need to. GM, Ford, Chrysler are all going to pass them on (as any domestic manufacturer)
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In the end, this glues China and Europe together to prepare the next disaster…
No shit.
Tariffs alone will not revive domestic manufacturing, the demise of which has numerous causes, but two in particular.
1.) Corporations maximising profits. I don’t think this needs much of an explanation.
2.) Consumer apathy. By which I mean consumers not giving a shit and consistently buying the cheapest garbage possible without regard for the long term cost. Quality products cost more money up front and ideally have a lower total cost of ownership. But, the average consumer only cares about the price tag on the shelf. The long term costs of this behavior and the related disposable culture are enormous.
Unfortunately, one of those costs are the loss of middle class jobs cranking out products at a plant in Ohio because now the plant is an empty field and the jobs got shipped overseas.
Reminds me of this Jib Jab video from like 2005.
2.) Consumer apathy. By which I mean consumers not giving a shit and consistently buying the cheapest garbage possible without regard for the long term cost.
This has some validity, but it is not as simple as just saying, “American consumers are stupid” and having done with it.
Quite a few shoppers, possibly even the majority, are living paycheck-to-paycheck and cannot afford anything other than whatever the cheapest thing on the shelf is. They are barred from making sound long-term purchasing decisions because they don’t bring in enough income to afford the superior product, even if they wanted to. It’s a case of, buy what they can afford regardless of low quality, or nothing. This is the real life version of the Vimes’ Boots Economic Theory.
I will also point out that a huge portion of spending by individual Americans is on perishable commodity goods with largely inelastic demand, the purchasing of which cannot be put off. In plain English, that’s food and fuel. I will also point out that these are two categories that are to many decimal places absolutely not tied to Chinese importation in any way whatsoever (in fact, the vast majority of food sold in America is grown and packed in America, and when you take prepared foods into account that number rises to near as makes no difference to 100%) so we automatically know that any supposed “tariff” increases on these products are in reality just a bullshit profit grab by retailers and/or Kraft-Heinz or Nabisco or whoever the fuck.
There is a link between tariffs and food prices, the vast majority of American agriculture is mechanized and the machines and their parts are mostly manufactured overseas. As are the trucks that account for a huge percentage of the distribution network.