And laptops, and phones, and literally every other electronic thing you might want to buy
Faces will be cheap though, there are plenty of those to go around for the next few years
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”…
This will boost the American job market and increase manufacturing ability.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t video game consoles all have offices in the US? Why would the US apply tariffs on companies residing in and paying tax the US?
Are tariffs applied when a company produces something in one country and transports them to their own company in another country? I thought they only applied to sales.
You can’t just import something and put it in a local warehouse to avoid tariffs. Then nobody would pay them ever
I thought they only applied to sales.
What do you suppose these companies might want to do with their products once they transport them to this other branch location?
The only thing tariffs do is raise the price of imported and exported goods. The intent behind that is to encourage domestic production of a given good. However, we largely do not have domestic production of many, many, many different goods in the USA. So the primary outcome is going to be a decade or more of much higher prices for literally every single kind of consumer, business or industrial grade electronic device or good. It’s terrible for the economy. It will lead to a record recession or even a depression. Tariffs do not punish the target country. They punish Americans attempting to buy from those countries. This means new start-ups and new businesses will not be able to afford things from third-party manufacturers in China.
Even products “made in the USA”, like an automobile, rely on parts from overseas suppliers, especially China.
And fridges, washers, dryers, tvs, vacuums, cars, phones.
Basically anything that has a microcontroller you’re going to be fucked.