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.)
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.
Oof. Dorian Gray just looked at the portrait.
Trying to speak sense to Americans. You are in for a rude awakening. They will blame the high prices on space lasers.
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.
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.
Correct. Trump’s 2017 tariffs raised the price of foreign made dishwashers by 20%. American manufacturers also jacked up the cost of their appliances, in order to match that price that customers were paying for the other brands, pocketing the difference.
