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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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You don't pay the import tax if you buy goods from within the country.
The goal seems to be to drive sales to American businesses with American goods. Until it's cheaper to buy American goods than it is to buy Chinese goods. Reversing the roles.
That's the face value goal, if they were being honest and following classical economics. It's entirely moot when tariffs are put on goods that can't sufficiently be brought stateside.
For example, coffee and chocolate.
all you need to do is look at events like brexit, the companies just abandoned the UK and moved to europe. i suspect that will happen with some of the companies.
I was taught that was the point of free trade. Not offshoring human misery and environmental destruction.
Yeah but you need to have some sort of industrial policy in place as well - to build infrastructure and subsidize onshoring. He's doing the opposite. He even cancelled the CHIPS Act, which was aimed at onshoring semiconductor production. No company is going to open manufacturing facilities in the US under this enormous economic volatility and without any government help to get started.
He's an abject fucking moron who, I'm convinced, is trying to reset wages and create a class of low paid wage slaves while funeling huge amounts of money to the wealthy. He's certainly going to cause stagflation and astronomical wealth inequality. If he succeeds fucking with interest rates he may cause hyperinflation. If the US loses global reserve currency status, they are proper fucked.
At this point, it can only end one way. Even if he's out of the picture, the damage he's done will last for a generation at least. He may have already torpedoed US economic superpower status.
Of course you pay it - just not directly - because there is basically no good from "within the country" whose inputs are not affected by the tarrifs.
The idea that the US is suddenly gonna massively ramp up its production of coffee, electric machinery, shoes and other products that are produced by countries with a massive competetive advantage is just ridiculous.
Also don't forget greed!
There are going to be so many business raising their prices across the board ("you know, because of tariffs, we have no choice"), like the greedflation you saw during the worst of the pandemic ("supply lines! Everyone's hurting").
Some of it is genuinely to offset the cost of tariffs (fair), others will be trying to keep steady income levels in a cooling consumer economy (less fair), and yet others will be just an excuse to extract more profit from consumers (these are the bad guys).
The reciprocal tarifs aren't. He mostly calls trade deficits other countries changing us which it isnt and uses that to compute the rates.
I mean not really the white house released the math, you can verify each of the rates proposed and realize that yeah it's not reciprocal tariffs, it's literally making a tariff based on trade deficits and even where there are trade surpluses, i.e we sell more than we buy, he was still trying to put tariffs on those countries. It's brain dead and does nothing but kill trade relationships and harm the economy. We do not have all the raw materials needed to produce everything in the US. Nor do we even have the capacity to manufacture everything in the US without the price of goods skyrocketing (not even talking about the time it would take to build up manufacturing facilities which just further deflates this whole 'plan') or the salaries of those workers falling so far below minimum wage the wealth gap would skyrocket past its already incomprehensible levels. There is one side using completely bad faith arguments and narratives with a group of people with so much cognitive dissonance that you could tell them trump said eating shit will make the economy better and they would eat it up in a heartbeat. Then you have another side just pointing out how completely brain dead these takes are but apparently there must be nuance and a global agenda to hide how eating shit makes the economy better. There is no "can't see what's going on" its just you willingly putting your head in the sand so you don't have to realize how fucking stupid is to even have to argue about this.
EVERYONE except you knows what