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.
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.
One possible silver lining:
By removing dirt-cheap goods from the market, this could make it more difficult to ignore the underlying problem: People are not being paid enough for their labor to afford the things they need at home. Instead, they are expected to depend on subsidized/sketchy foreign manufacturing, while corporations and the super-rich are being allowed to extract a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth from everyone else, hoard it, buy favorable legislation and policies, and avoid paying their fair share in taxes. This is already unsustainable; tariffs will make it more obvious.
(I don’t imagine this is why Trump wants tariffs, but perhaps he’ll accidentally place the straw that breaks the camel’s back, leading lawmakers to face either reform or revolution. Unfortunately, I think it’s likely to make things worse for the rest of us before it makes things better.)
