And laptops, and phones, and literally every other electronic thing you might want to buy
People that can still afford stuff will be so cool. The hippest tech, biggest cars and newest kicks, everything will be uber exclusive. This is good for america because reasons.
This is good for america because reasons.
People with lifted pickup trucks can now go into even more debt, so they can flex on the “poors” (while complaining about their “economic anxiety”).
Especially because every grift that trump has made, his shoes and the like, were all made internationally. Wonder who will pay for those tarrifs when he does the same?
Thing is all that crap can be stitched together by 12 year olds in Alabama instead of 12 year olds in China.
I don’t think he can really comprehend a chip fabrication plant costing 10 times his entire net worth. He probably thinks that what they make in “Silicon Valley”…
If that is truly their plan, they are dumber than we fucking figured.
If a billionaire wants to buy a swimming pool, he needs a considerable amount of other people to be able to afford swimming pools or it it becomes impossible for him to get one at all eventually.
To have a swimming pool, there needs to be an industry of specialized labororers who can manufacture and install. There has to be electricians who specialize in mixing water and electricity. There has to be people working the factories where the chlorine gets manufactured and bottled.
This is true for every product that billionaires consume. You really gotta think that these people with all this wealth would have people on the payroll pointing this out to them.
This will boost the American job market and increase manufacturing ability.
Faces will be cheap though, there are plenty of those to go around for the next few years
And now do some basic Google Foo and find out what is manufactured in Taiwan. If China gets it’s way, because Trump thinks Xi is cool and he’s a good guy, China will just waltz in - TSMC, ASML and Trumpf have some safeguards in place as far as I know to destroy anything valuable. So while you might want to buy shit, you can’t because the Cheeto and his cronies collapsed it.
That would in long term be good. I’m serious. Keeping all your eggs in one basket is bad, and other than that - said one basket may, for example, not scale production fast enough so to keep profits, that’s basic supply and demand and that’s what oil producers do too.
Short term, though, would be similar to a collapse of civilization.
Short term, though, would be similar to a collapse of civilization.
Would it? Civilization doesn’t depend on bleeding edge high tech. Sure, it depends on tech, but look around who’s making ICs or basic processors that are in machine control panels and all the millions of appliances. AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom do the “heavy lifting” in terms of monetary value, but in overall quantity? Samsung, SK Hynix, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, Sony, Renesas and NXP are the ones that make the world go round. Infineon is German, NXP is Dutch, Renesas is Japanese, STMicroelectronics is Swiss. The thing that’s really going to hurt is Foxconn, but they are probably global enough to withstand that. There’s also many, many more local players. BOSCH for example has very high capacities for everything up to 80 Nanometers (Pentium 3/4, Athlon 64…)
Civilization would crack, sure - but i don’t think it would collapse. Society on the other hand…that’s a different paper.
From this article
But in the case of the hefty tariffs that Trump put on China during his first term, economic studies found that most of those costs were passed on to American consumers.
Economists believe this could happen again. One study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, for example, calculated that Trump’s current tariff plans would increase costs for a typical American household by $2,600 a year.
Paying more for everything to own the libs! 🤡
These tariffs create American jobs and long term boosts American skills and manufacturing abilities.
Unlikely. In the age of globalism, it’s much more likely that manufacturing will leave the US to dodge counter-tariffs. The combined markets of Europe and Asia is for most products larger than the US market, and that trend is only likely to increase in the future as Asia develops. Manufacturers know making stuff in Asia is just cheaper, and that American consumers are more likely to go into debt to buy stuff than other consumers. They also know that these tariffs are unlikely to last for long, because if the US takes the expected economic hit here then it becomes less likely that Trump/the GOP remains in control (eg midterms flip control back to the democrats).
Not much reason to move factories to the US, which is wildly expensive, when taking the hit and waiting it out is ultimately most likely cheaper.
And fridges, washers, dryers, tvs, vacuums, cars, phones.
Basically anything that has a microcontroller you’re going to be fucked.
I’m actually really excited about the smuggling opportunities such a high tariff presents. It’s a real job creator. It’s been a long time since we’ve had major smuggling operations on the great lakes. Will be a big boom for Chicago too, since that’s the point where the smuggled goods get put on trains. Maybe even get the outfit back together.
Al Capone watching his successors continue his legacy by smuggling PS5s and pirating games lol
I thought Republicans were the anti-tax party?
People think that foreign countries pay the tariffs and I’m not sure trump doesn’t think that as well.
Also, that food magically appears in grocery stores.
Gawd or something
waves hands
I think the “logic” is that if things are too expensive to import then companies will start manufacturing them domestically and create jobs. But that almost never works out. An economist could probably explain why better than I can.
I do know that the better approach is to support those industries here. That’s why we recently dumped a bunch of money into the CHIPS and Science act.
I am actually in favor of tariffs in a couple of limited situations:
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Foreign goods are cheap due to non-existent labor laws
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Foreign goods are cheap, but produce more emissions than domestic manufacturing
#2 is also called a carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, and the EU voted to implement one last year that goes into effect in 2026. The USA desperately needs one IMHO. I’m involved in a nonprofit that’s been lobbying Congress to implement our own CBAM.
It’s silly though to think that a tariff is anything but a tax. It’s not any different than any other way that we use our tax laws to try to regulate “pure” capitalism by encouraging certain behavior and discouraging other behavior.
