The self-inflicted part is what really has left me reeling.
For Christmas wish lists, my daughters always have ways of surprising me with items from Africa retailers, Netherlands… I had to tell them this year to stick with U.S. only because of tariffs. I guess that's awesome for the U.S.?
(The political cartoon of Santa having to pay tariffs kind of draws itself at this point.)
I’ve personally got an ever-growing list of clothing items to get when tariffs come down. No US equivalents, and I don’t need them, so they can wait.
Britain, Canada, and one Nordic country or another are getting some business within a few months of tariffs dropping, lol. Maybe also Spain or Portugal.
What really blows is watching great stuff come up used on EBay overseas and not being able to buy it. It’s used, FFS! Sometimes it’s even US-made, which is extra goofy.
You’d need a long term stable tariff regime for the investment required for that to happen.
The current administration has not proven itself to be stable. Even for their base they’ve walked back beneficial tariffs when the anticipated price increases happen (e.g. beef).
And that’s before you get into the constitutionality of their actions or how likely they are to be reversed with the next congress
This is correct. But the main argument against tariffs in this comment section seems to be "Waaah! You can't make me pay more" which completely misses the point.
I’m actually for trying to bring manufacturing back to the US. I’m for decoupling from (and hopefully weakening) China.
I’m entirely against Trump’s chaotic lunacy because it’s not going to accomplish any of the good things I’d hope for from such a thing. He’s got whole sectors treading water waiting for him to die, while smaller players simply shutter operations, because you can’t make huge capital investment decisions with this much uncertainty in the air. To say nothing of how bad an idea it is to try to decouple from China while also launching trade wars against your own allied trade bloc.
That means either a) making all clothes way more expensive for Americans, as our standards for labor and compensation are high compared to less developed countries, or b) lowering the standard of living in America such that we're forced to accept less pay for more labor.
Or C) deploying machines to do almost all of it (developing said machines if necessary). Which is more likely to actually happen than either A or B, even though the current regime is making it difficult. It also won't create very many jobs.
I believe this is the actual plan. They're forcing manufacturing back to America where we will automate the jobs out of existence. This isn't about creating jobs, it's about controlling production.
In a dark humor way, it is the intended effect by Trump but really, how many Americans dream of a sweatshop job?
Reminds me of a famously documented conversation between Cohn and Trump during the first administration (Bob Woodward's book):
Cohn starts assembling every piece of economic data to try and convince Trump that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories.
“See,” he says to Trump at one point, “the biggest leavers of jobs – people leaving voluntarily – is from manufacturing.”
“I don’t get it,” replies Trump.
Cohn soldiers on. “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or I can stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you rather do for the same pay?”
Trump still wasn’t buying it. Eventually, exasperated, Cohn simply asks Trump: “Why do you have these views?” “I just do,” Trump replies. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” says Cohn. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football.”
Right, because that is a national emergency on the level of severity and immediacy of a foreign military invasion - which is the actual legal arguement put forward.
That might be the goal, but that implies the US should have low-skill labor, sweatshops, etc. And that enriching the owners of such factories is a good thing.
It's a net gain for everybody for low-skill products to be produced in regions with lower wages, like China, Vietnam, etc.
Super simple example... socks.
Due to lower wages, China can produce socks with a retail price of $1/pair.
A US-made equivalent costs $1.10/pair.
Trump placed a 20% tariff on Chinese goods, leading to Chinese socks having a retail price of $1.20.
US sock producer can now charge $1.19 and take 100% of the market. That's an additional, unearned $0.09 cents flowing to the owner of that sock business.
If the tariff had been set at 10%, creating equal retail prices, that might be good, as it would tend to shift more of the market to US-made socks.
Or, leave the prices alone, let us buy Chinese socks, and use that extra 10-20 cents for consuming something else.
I dunno. American nicer-clothes brands were already consolidating, selling to foreign buyers (J. Press, now Japanese-owned), or moving down-market and shifting manufacturing overseas (Brooks Brothers, Hickey Freeman). This certainly hasn’t reversed any of that.
I don’t have any particular insight into their operations, but all the ones that still manufacture in the US that I pay attention to seem to be showing signs of distress more this year than ever. Shrinking product lines, steep sales, desperate-looking promotions, shifting more of their catalog to imported lower-quality products (despite the tariffs!). My current concern is that tariffs are going to cut the legs out from under what remains of that sector, and there’ll soon be way fewer US-made clothing options.
I think broad prosperity is a ton more important to their health than tariffs. When people don’t have much disposable income they’re not going to buy American-made leather shoes and wool shirts and suits and fine cotton shirts, they’re going to pay the 100% (or whatever) tariffs on a $50 (pre-tariff) Chinese outfit made mostly of petroleum and still pay way less than for a hypothetical similar outfit made in the US.
US labor only makes sense for pretty-decent or better goods (it’s the reason it’s an alright signal of quality, doesn’t make sense to spend up for American labor then use shit materials to save a penny, if you’re using US labor you’re already priced out of the lower half or more of the market) and those markets are getting fucked as prosperity concentrates to the top.
I expect the next shock to what’s left of the middle class is going to kill a bunch of these companies, and tariff chaos is rushing us into that. Plus almost all of them use foreign goods or labor in parts of their processes, so this shit’s forcing them to raise prices or eat reduced profit. Pendleton? The cloth is made in a US mill, but the shirts are assembled in the DR or wherever. Rochester suit makers? The cloth is Italian or maybe British, obviously, or why bother. Can you even get US-made linen? LOL.
People can pay a 10-20% premium for African and Dutch gifts if they want to.
Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.
I think it's a fair compromise. As Americans we are used to having an overwhelming amount of choice, partly due to our previous open trade policies. Something you don't really see in other countries. Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand.
> Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand.
I'm living on Japan right now and this is absurd. There are American brands everywhere (although as usual who knows where the products are made). American food brands. American steak. American sportswear. American backpacks. Entire shops in the mall devoted to American fashion. I'd say appliances and cars are more rarely American brands but there are reasons beyond trade barriers why that's true.
Lived there for 6 years. You're not buying American steak, most likely it's Australian.
There are certain clothing brands (at a much higher cost), large fast food chains, and Apple are the exceptions. Basically really large companies that make specific deals.
Just checked my local grocery store circular, and as you can see (upper left) they sell American pork, at least. I believe I have bought American steak but it's not on sale at the moment.
For food items, the import regulations are much stricter in every country than for stuff like electronics or clothes. Meat especially is very highly restricted, due to differences in feeding, antibiotics, etc...
And how are "large companies" making deals? The same import duties apply to everyone.
taking an example from the article, the USA currently produces 0.2% of coffee it consumes domestically (Hawaii and Puerto Rico).
Could coffee be grown in reasonable quantities inside the USA? I find some mention of very expensive high-end 'boutique' coffee grown in California but it is not generally a crop that grows well in the continental USA.
(until global warming reduces the chances of frost in Florida perhaps?)
Another example from the article was a tea grower. Again, niche growing is limited to just some regions of the USA, with less than 0.1% of consumption domestically produced.
And of course with these products they have distinctive tastes that reflect where they were grown, so tea from California is distinctive tasting and not a direct substitute for tea from Japan from the article.
The growers in the article had been heavily disrupted by tariffs.
That's a strawman. Obviously if there's no American competition then I see no problem with lower tariffs for those products.
I don't mind at all reducing tariffs for things we dont manufacture or can't for various reasons.
I believe the administration is lowering tariffs for things like that.
Beef on the other hand should be temporarily lowered since our cattle herd is half of what it should be. (It plummeted under Biden takes awhile to return as the herd matures) Soooo import from Argentina until it's back up.
>Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.
This kind of myopic view completely misses the scope of manufacturing chains that are simply missing in the US. Things like stainless steel rebar and LCD screens take many years to build up efficient production for.
>Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand
Do you honestly think that Japan makes almost everything domestically? There's a good reason for the absence of American products in Japan. You are so close :)
I don't buy many American products because whenever I've tried in the past, the quality, and customer service has been shoddy. Americans can't assemble things correctly, ship wrong or obviously defective products, fail to fill in customs forms properly, and then expect me to just shrug my shoulders and accept all that rather than acknowledging issues and trying to fix them.
I realise that my experience is limited to the handful of times I've tried to buy stuff from the US. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky, but frankly, the odds are against it.
It is. Japanese don't have the opportunity to buy most American products. You won't see them stocked or available apart from import stores where prices can be 2-3x the price they are in America due to import fees. Many items aren't even available there due to strict restrictions. Meanwhile America has been an open market for a long time.
My point isn't that American products aren't expensive to import into Japan (I don't know). My point is that even if they weren't expensive to import into Japan, what American products would you even import? Most stuff is not made in America in the first place.
That can be true, but that doesn't mean it was manufactured in America. More often it means it was either labeled, packaged or assembled in America. But the supply chain does not end where you buy a finished product.
Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.
Or you know, drive us into a recession. You do recall tariffs (Smoot-Hawley) were a contributing factor to the length and depth of the Great Depression, right?
Or it can be like Brazil and everyone just pays 2x the cost for a large swath of things because there is no reasonable way that someone can make a competitive version of an iPhone - even with (in this case) 200 something million ‘captive’ customers.
Yep, just visit a country that does a lot of high tariff stuff, like Brazil, Argentina. Yes they have strong local industries of very odd stuff sometimes, but on the other hand, they have people travelling outside the country to buy electronics because nothing is made locally.
If that's the model the US chooses, then i guess that's their choice.
Which part of the mutually exclusive triangle of "add manufacturing" or "add revenue" or "reduce deficits" do you consider to be "the intended effect"?
For Christmas wish lists, my daughters always have ways of surprising me with items from Africa retailers, Netherlands… I had to tell them this year to stick with U.S. only because of tariffs. I guess that's awesome for the U.S.?
(The political cartoon of Santa having to pay tariffs kind of draws itself at this point.)