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.
The fact that they’re sending this message now means they will use this as an excuse go raise the prices even higher than nessesary to increase their profit margin. If they really cared about consumers then they should have been yelling from the treetops BEFORE the election.
They said this the last time it happened… During his last presidency.
Walmart Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs said in an interview that higher tariffs will result in increased prices for consumers.
If only someone else said something about how bad these tariffs would be…
https://amp.miamiherald.com/opinion/article292867514.html
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/11/04/how-much-could-trumps-tariffs-damage-europes-economy
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4938752-trump-economic-policies-impact/amp/
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/10/16/politics/trump-fact-check-john-deere-economy
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/18/2024/what-are-the-consequences-of-trumps-tariffs
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tariff-threat-john-deere-economists-baffled-2024-9
https://fortune.com/2024/08/16/trump-tariffs-trade-war-inflation-economic-policies-joachim-klement/
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/yellen-speech-tariffs-will-increase-inflation-risk-trump/
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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.
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.
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.
That’s the point
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.
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.
Yeah, no shit. How the fuck do people think tariffs work?
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.
If they knew how tariffs worked, fewer of them might have voted for the dumbass proposing to make things cheaper by raising them.
“Think”?
They are also super easy to explain. It is a tax. That is increasing yet another tax - vat.
USA doesn’t have VAT
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.
My new job came with a 10k sign on bonus and I just got the first half 3 months in. I have to pay the whole thing back if I leave within 2 years. I was planning on keeping all of it in high yield savings in case I need to slap it back down on the table and run, and best case scenario at the end I have a house downpayment.
Y’all. I got taxed more on this check than I made in working hours. I got the 5k bonus and 3k of working hours. I paid over 3k in taxes and didn’t even net 5k this check. It was 4900 something.
I understand that I’m not “poor” anymore but I’m still paycheck to paycheck (I wound up just paying off some credit card debt; I’ll get a loan if I need to run). More importantly I have a real job. I’m not some marketing desk jockey or a landlord or an MLM “entrepreneur,” I’m an inpatient bedside nurse. I don’t want to sound full of myself but how does Jeff Bezos not pay any taxes and I’m over here paying 37%???
You will definitely get a lot back. They tax it like you make $8k every month.
Taxes are usually taken out using the monthly amount like a yearly amount. You’ll probably get a lot of it back when you pay taxes for the year.
You should reduce your tax amount that your company is paying for you to the IRS. You can calculate it yourself and tell your company to modify it.
I would check with your local laws but it’s very rare those kinds of policy are enforceable. If you need to pay them 5k to quit, it’s akin to slavery.
In the end, this glues China and Europe together to prepare the next disaster…
Oof. Dorian Gray just looked at the portrait.
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.
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.
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.
