How does this help with inflation? He is screwing the people he claims to help.
Tariffs (originally from Arabic: تعريفة) are a tax paid by the consumer. All inputs will be more expensive even for US produced goods.
That 25% magic number
He’s incapable of complex thought. Tariff use is supposed to be nuanced and in line with price differences between American production costs and foreign ones. They are meant to make American products competitive but balanced to limit inflationary side effects. Not done in big dumb across the board numbers like this. He’s fucking stupid.
Spicy chips?
Ghost chips too?
Yeah because drugs aren’t already prohibitively expensive.
Except for China-made Tesla right?
tariffs are just a tax on the plebs. more money for them to funnel into billionaire pockets.
Those new AI datacenters will get hit hard by that if it goes through. And Elon Musk is still trying to build them. That is a 25% tarrif on every CPU, motherboard, NVME drive, GPU, network switch, and optic.
Unless import duties only apply to chips not soldered into devices in which case all the foreign produced stuff is fine and the American assembled stuff is no longer competative. Oops
For facist exceptions are the point. If you can curry favor you can get exceptions.
You really think Elon is paying tarrifs? Or bills? Or his employees?
So, Americans will need to pay ~25% extra for cars, medicines and gadgets? Smells like inflation.
But hey, at least we have bird flu infested eggs
Make H5N5
greatkill everyone again!
I was at a hibachi place in December and one of the managers was trying to light a candle. The lighter didn’t work and he made a joke that it “must be made in China. It’ll cost 25% more soon!” A guy at the table said “well you’ll just need to buy one made in Pennsylvania!”
I asked him if he knew of any companies that manufactured disposable lighters in Pennsylvania, and he just said “Trump will make it happen!”
The disconnect is crazy.
BIC probably produces lighters in the US, they have a couple of locations there. It could also be razor blades or ballpoint pens though and the lighters are coming in from Mexico. Or surfboards. Still can’t believe they produce surfboards.
Or BIC might exit the US market, the French aren’t exactly known to be forgiving or accommodating. If you make their US factories pay 25% on the flints they’re importing from another factory elsewhere they might just say fuck it, let’s burn this place down, we’ll go somewhere where these lighters aren’t hit by 25% retaliatory tariffs.
Bic lighters are made in France. 25% is peanuts to them, they get much higher tariffs in south america.
BIC is a French surfboard manufacturer?
I know you’re talking about disposable lighters but the funny thing is that Zippo is from PA. I doubt they still make lighters in PA and also as a company they only survive off nostalgia because their lighters are pretty bad. You can’t leave one sitting in a drawer for more than a few days before the fuel dries up.
I bought a knockoff Zippo lighter insert from China and it’s so much better because it’s sealed and the fluid doesn’t evaporate.
That’s the thing that the person in the made up story doesn’t understand:
Even the majority of “made in america” products are actually “assembled in america”. Just like the majority of “chinese knockoffs” are after hours runs at the same factories that make the real thing. Sometimes crappier and sometimes actually better because they sourced better materials from a different factory.
And… that is why we are so fucked. Because there will be the “Well, product A costs more because of tariffs so product B can sell for more too”. But also? Product B’s profit margins will go down because they are paying for tariffs too. Which gets passed on to the consumer.
I have no way to prove it obviously but nothing in that story was made up.
For what it’s worth I do believe your story only because I have family who have used a very similar “Trump is gonna fix it!” line to me and when I asked what he’d fix their response is “everything!”
Disposable lighters are pretty easy to make though, it’s just a lot more expensive to do it here (much more than 25% more). Things will just get more expensive, with maybe a handful of items being made here, but the net result will be more expensive stuff and some new, poorly paying jobs. Yay.
In the off chance that domestic producers can make those goods at a price cheaper than overseas_cost+25% guess what they’ll charge? The same high price.
It’s like somewhere in the grapevine this dude found out I was doing financially better and right before I am able to afford nice things I’ve worked toward he’s like “lol fuck you in particular”
Potato chips are already overpriced!
Really thought they’d grow their own potatoes.
Guess there will be a market in importing whole ones, and cutting them up there.
Anyone who thinks we’re not heading for a deep, deep recession is deluding themselves
And America is taking everyone with them.
You know, just things that nobody really needs to begin with, right?
On the one hand, fostering local production of these goods is positive for national resilience, and also has a chance to reduce shipping around the world, which is bad for the environment.
On the other hand, good fucking luck, lol.
I agree, tariffs will be a net positive for the country. Problem is, the people taking the brunt of that impact will, as always, be the poorest and most vulnerable. There are many ways we could solve that problem but of course authoritarians have no interest in that.
That being said, anyone who voted for Trump thinking he would fix the economy is a fucking moron. Tariffs make shit worse before they get better. It will probably be a decade before we start to see any positive impact from them.
Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we’d already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.
There’s no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.
[citation needed]
Wikipedia has a whole list of citations on this very sentence lol.
There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating and have a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare
Oh well, you have a single sentence from a Wikipedia article, I guess I was wrong!
The citations are all concerning the concept of “free trade” which is an incredibly generic phrase.
We don’t manufacture cars in the United States we assemble them. Most of the parts for cars are made outside of the states. Mainly in China.
No country manufactures cars 100% locally. We live in a global economy. All cars are made from components sourced from countries all over the world, in varying degrees.
Shipping is incredibly efficient, only a tiny fraction of emissions of products and foods.
First of all, that’s not correct. Second: emissions aren’t the only form of pollution.
Third: the word “shipping”, despite the name, includes air transportation;
Fourth: assuming, disingenuously of course, that the factors of the local production process are the same as the remote one, NOT shipping is always going to be more environmentally friendly.
