Technology

It doesn’t hurt him and his rich cronies.

He doesn’t care about the people who elected him.

He’s just trying to be a tough guy and flex.

He’s always made others pay the price for his actions, whether it be bankruptcy, stalling them in court, or just outright not paying.

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.

Here's what I would tell someone that thinks manufacturing is coming back.

Say you're a factory owner and goods are costing too much to import from China. Your trusty Excel sheet tells you that, with the tariffs, you can make your widgets for the same price in America.

But you're a smart capitalist! You know these tariffs are going to end up wildly unpopular and will be rescinded sooner rather than later. In any case, the economy may tank and no one will be able to afford widgets.

Yet another problem is that tariffs will make American widgets toxic on the international market. Canadians are already looking to shed American imports.

Now are you, Mr. Smart Capitalist, going to risk building an American factory and get left holding the bag?

Alternate:

"Know what the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was?"

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.

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.

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.

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

Anyone who thinks tariffs will do anything at all positive for the American working class is absolutely clueless.

All they do is make prices jump for consumers. It doesn't put domestic goods at an advantage because the domestic producers of those goods increase their prices artificially to achieve parity with import pricing.

So prices go up for the consumer with the extra money going to either:

1. For imported goods, to pay the tariff, a tax, to the government, which in this case wants to use that tax revenue to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.

or

2. For domestic goods, it's pure straight profit for the unethical corporations who are price gouging their domestic customer base. They're not giving the consumer a break on price and they're not sharing the profits by giving employees raises. Hell, they're not even taking advantage of the competitive advantage to ramp up production and create jobs. They're just pocketing that extra cash for doing exactly what they're always doing...passing it on to, you guessed it...the wealthy.

No way we're making chips stateside with the Department of Education on the chopping block.

So many schools will close and you sure as shit ain't training people who can make top of the line chips with no fucking schools.

When a quarter of the most qualified engineers to make the stuff and a lot of the cheap manual labor are immigrants and you do a campaign against immigrants so they leave, maybe you don't have enough people left to to create local production.

If that's the goal, you announce tariffs are coming in a few years so that people scale up local production to avoid the higher costs.

In this case, there was like 4 months notice where all of it was undefined, so of course nobody did anything and now we still don't have local production. Now, prices will go up and local producers (if they even build up) will match the new prices instead of keeping them low.

Congrats, worst of both worlds! We still have no local production and prices have gone up! Yay!

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.

And America is taking everyone with them.

For better or worse, all Teslas sold in USA are built in Fremont or Austin.