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.
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.
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.
Yeah because drugs aren’t already prohibitively expensive.
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.
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 You know these tariffs are going to end up wildly unpopular and will be rescinded sooner rather than later.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?”
To wit, you can send a message by adding a “Trump Tariff Tax” instead of changing your base price, just to clearly articulate to the simpletons that thought this would lower costs
The factory decision is exactly the calculation that will go through hundreds of MBA-educated business leaders.
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?
Pretty sure they had BIC windsurf boards in Canada when I was a kid.
Edit: Shit, they still do too, as of 2008.
Fascinating
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.
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!”
tariffs are just a tax on the plebs. more money for them to funnel into billionaire pockets.
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:
- 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
- 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.
- assumes that domestic producers can produce with similar costs as their international competitors, which obviously isn’t the case in most circumstances. In fact, the entire point of tariffs, that are meant to protect domestic industry, is raising domestic competitiveness. If they’d already be equally competitive to international producers, tariffs wouldn’t do much.
Anyone who thinks tariffs will do anything at all positive for the American working class is absolutely clueless.
That’s the entirety of trump’s followers.
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
They’ll carve out a spot so Muskrat doesn’t lose any of his hundreds of billions.
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?
It’s possible AI data centers will just be outsourced to other countries. You don’t really need the data center to exist locally in the US
Yes you do.
So, Americans will need to pay ~25% extra for cars, medicines and gadgets? Smells like inflation.
Anyone who thinks we’re not heading for a deep, deep recession is deluding themselves
And America is taking everyone with them.
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.
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.
They plan to import workers with visas and then hold those visas over their heads to force them to work for peanuts.
I mean, they do this small-scale already.
As the standard of living and pay in the USA quickly tanks and becomes less desirable than where they’re from, those people will stop applying for those positions.
They can’t force foreigners to sign up for H-1B visas. The whole point is the salary is currently and the USA is currently a desirable place to live. Won’t stay that way long. They’re literally tearing down all the things that made it desirable to begin with.
Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.
Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.
I’ve been saying this for years now. The wealthy here are now international wealthy. They don’t care about borders. Musk hops his private jet and goes wherever the fuck he wants whenever he wants and no governments seem to be in his way.
They are done with the high standard of living in the US. They think we’re coddled and don’t deserve it. They’re done trying to bring up international living standards to match America and are all-in on bringing American living standards down to match the rest of the planet.
This is the strip-mining stage of American capitalism. They’ve turned all the economic tools that they used to subjugate South America (Chile for example), using Milton Friedman’s Economic Shock Treatment here at home in the US.
They really don’t give a damn, they’re done with us. We’re being dropped like a jilted lover.
Why would anyone want to come over here right now? I don’t even want to be here.
A lot of immigrants are paid more highly in the US than they are in their home countries.
The Indian Rupee, for example, has a poor exchange rate with the US dollar and they have higher salaries in the US.
So they take an H-1B job and they make enough to take care of themselves in the US and usually have US dollars they can send home to their family which can be exchanged for large amounts of rupees.
Current exchange is rougly $1 USD to about ₹80 rupees.
This will change as the US economy tanks and people stop using the US dollar as a reserve currency.
That’s how Twitter is run
The factory TSMC opened in the USA was mostly staffed with workers from Taiwan, because Americans won’t work 996.
It also only makes dies (the functional part of the IC), that still have to be exported to Taiwan for packaging.
Do they have 996 in Taiwan? I thought that was just the PRC?
all of asia works stupid long hours
Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China are not all of Asia. All of East Asia perhaps.
correct that’s what I meant to say thank you
India does too. Not sure about the rest of Asia.
996? PRC?
You mean 007?
Ohh computer chips.
Freedom fries.
How is the Department of Education relevant? It was created in 1980, and it’s not like we didn’t have good education before then. It doesn’t run schools, and it does a whole bunch of stuff largely unrelated to running schools. Schools are largely funded and run locally, and there really wasn’t any standardization of education until Obama’s “Common Core,” and a lot of states still don’t implement it.
Cuts to the Department of Education will largely not impact schools, at least not K-12. Universities could be impacted if federal loans and grants are cut, but that could also be a good thing since it’ll cut the cash cow that allowed universities to jack up tuition and dramatically expand administration.
That said, even if engineering departments at universities are gutted, it’ll be many years before we see impacts in industry, and there’s a very good chance companies like Intel will fund scholarships and whatnot to keep those programs alive.
The Department of Education is one of the areas I think we should make cuts. End the federal student loan program but keep grants (should help cut university costs), end whatever created Common Core (should be an independent nonprofit that states and private schools fund for education research), and keep most of the rest (and probably rename it since it doesn’t touch education much anymore). Oh, and investigate university costs to see what else is pushing prices up.
I think you’re underestimating the Department of Education’s role in preventing red states from destroying public education. They can now do whatever they want with their education system and there is absolutely zero federal oversight coming their way. And you better believe Republican state legislatures are chomping at the bit for this one.
Edit: “champing at the bit” per u/slumberlust
It’s kind of fascinating. In Germany recently the idea of a federal education ministry has been floated and the general answer was “no”. Other states don’t want to have to deal with CSU politicians trying to get “the purpose of the school is to instil fear of god” into law applicable on their turf, that BS can stay in Bavaria. The federation is co-responsible for tertiary education (university etc) because they have responsibility when it comes to research so they can set, in practice, some standards regarding secondary graduation but that’s it.
The phrase is champing at the bit. I was 35 years old before I learned that, so thought I’d pass it on. Thanks for posting!
I love learning new things, thank you for helping update my phrasing! Also 35, maybe this is just when we’re supposed to learn this phrase?
I think you’re overstating how effective the DoEd is at coordinating curriculum, as well as how effective state governments are at the same.
I’m in a red state (Utah), and we’re pretty competitive in terms of scholastic attainment (top 15 in most metrics), above many blue states that spend way more on education. Higher spending does not seem correlated with higher achievement. Also, from non-rigorous comparison of some state lists of academic achievement (like this wiki page), I don’t see a clear relationship between how states vote and academic performance that can’t more convincingly be explained by rural vs urban/suburban demographics.
So while it’s a popular talking point, I’m not convinced the DoEd is actually helping here. Schools will do better in areas with more parental engagement, and curriculum choice, funding, and rigor in testing don’t seem have much of an impact. We’re spending more than ever, have strict education standards, etc, yet test scores continue to drop across the country.
So no, I don’t think the DoEd is effective, and in fact I think they’re largely to blame for tuition outpacing inflation, because student loans are easier to get, so sold m schools can get away with raising prices.
What we should have are laws that states must maintain a secular education, and if religion is taught, all major religions are given equal treatment. That, and that states must provide a free K-12 education for all residents, and that public universities must be affordable for all residents who qualify (with grants as appropriate). That’s it, no common standard, no loans, etc. Education is better handled locally.
That said, I don’t trust Trump or Musk to handle this properly.
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.
That’s covered in “lol”
Illegal immigrants went to America because their home countries are fucking miserable. They’re not going back because they don’t feel welcome. And they’re definitely not engineers, much less the “most qualified” engineers.
I said immigrants, not illegal immigrants. But in the end, legal immigrants get deported too.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-born-stem-workers-united-states
As of 2019, immigrants made up almost one-fourth, or 23.1 percent, of all STEM workers in the entire country.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/migrants-legal-status-trump-biden/index.html
The Trump administration is preparing to revoke legal status for many migrants who entered the United States under a Biden-era program, according to a source familiar with the planning, expanding the pool of people who could be deported.
legal immigrants get deported
You have evidence of this?
A search turns up some hits legal migrants are put in detention centers. But you can also wait a few weeks and evidence should be on the news.
Ah yes, the classic “look into it” argument. When evidence finds itself in the news I will consider this a threat. Until then, your claims are unfounded.
Physically removed Americans from the United States
A number of Americans have been placed in immigration detention centers to be deported but were later released.[15][16] Up to one percent of all those detained in immigration detention centers are nationals of the United States according to research by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University.[21]
The following is an incomplete list of Americans who have actually experienced deportation from the United States:
Pedro Guzman, born in the State of California, was forcefully removed to Mexico in 2007 but returned several months later by crossing the Mexico–United States border. He was finally compensated in 2010 by receiving $350,000 from the government.[22] Mark Daniel Lyttle, born in the State of North Carolina, was forcefully removed to Mexico but later returned to the United States from Guatemala and filed a damages lawsuit in federal court,[13] which he ultimately won.[2] Andres Robles Gonzalez derived U.S. citizenship through his U.S. citizen father before being forcefully removed to Mexico. He was returned to the United States and filed a damages lawsuit in federal court, which he ultimately won.[3][23] Roberto Dominquez was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was deported to the Dominican Republic. The government is unconvinced in this case as it claims that there are two people by the same name, both born during the same month and year. According to the government, both children were born to parents with the same addresses, and that one child was born in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic.[24] Esteban Tiznado-Reyna was born in Mexico to a father who had an Arizona birth certificate, which was found unreliable in an immigration court.[25] Tiznado was found not guilty of illegal reentry into the United States in 2008, but ICE still deported him despite the verdict. Documents were uncovered that the USCIS withheld in the 1980s, showing his proof of citizenship.[24]
https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-citizens/
and this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_the_United_States
I want to point out that this list is INCOMPLETE and you should go to the bottom of the Wikipedia page you will see numerous articles depicting the stories of the people above.
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!
Even then, as a democracy, you can only do really mild tariffs as companies won’t trust the tariffs to stay high come the next government. You instead subsidise, in whatever form, including things like long-term supply contracts. If you want to push domestic ball point pen production, just order your administration to prefer buying domestic ball point pens if they’re within what 20% of the import price, then slowly reduce that rate but keep the preference to make sure your ballpoint pen industry is productive, efficient, and competitive. Make it a 10-year supply contracts the next government can’t just cancel. If you’re the US, give them to teachers to give children.
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 over water is actually pretty green, since they have huge ships carrying a bunch of containers with relatively little energy.
Building new factories in the States will create a lot more pollution. Concrete is the opposite of green.
Yet he supports oil… Which accounts for a sizeable share of international shipping. This is while the US doesn’t have enough refining capacity for the type of oil we produce.
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.
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.Unless, of course, you need to build new production facilities. That’s not going to be as green as using the ones that already exist
Except for China-made Tesla right?
For better or worse, all Teslas sold in USA are built in Fremont or Austin.
My 2024 MSLR is made in Freemont CA but you can be certain the display, CPU and sensors aren’t made in America.
Yes that would be covered under “chips” but not under autos.
Ghost chips too?
But hey, at least we have bird flu infested eggs
Make H5N5
greatkill everyone again!
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.
Spicy chips?
You know, just things that nobody really needs to begin with, right?
You forgot your sarcasm tag
