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Tariffs
- Thread starter Confluence
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I'm pretty sure tact was never anything that was taught to him. He is a unique individual as he has NEVER worked for anyone that he had to defer to or had anyone tell him no.
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I don't for a minute believe that these companies will wait until their prior inventory is sold to increase prices. They are all against what Trump is doing so I fully expect them to immediately raise prices because they see a chance for a windfall profit and the ability to blame it on Trump, while the sheep will believe then.
We just paid a shitton in taxes. I agree
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why does it matter if Nike/Sketchers/Reebok uses child slave labor in the Phillipines or Philadelphia?
Foreigners (and domestics who can't even balance their own checkbook) who get up in our **** aboot how we do business should mind their own, and go **** themselves while they're at it
We're way past fn broke and we can't be the world's bank any longer. Do you want a controlled descent or a fiery crash?
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So the consumers in the US will pay more immediately, investors just lost $3 Trillion withe the American markets down sharply(and more globally), Stellantis cut US jobs today........but this will make America better.....when and how much?
Short term there will be an impact. Long term there will be a benefit.
The model for bulk importing shipping manufacturing overseas often shaved only a fraction of a cent to a couple pennies per item off the overall cost, but when dealing in huge numbers, it makes large profit margins...
Many of the jobs shipped overseas to save on labor safety and environmental concerns can be done here with minimal impact on customer price... and a much greater impact on quality and safety...
This should have been done 30 years ago... the american economy is still superstrong enough to do it, but it would have been way better before we dropped to only controlling a quarter of the worlds market...
The stuff stores like Walmart have been doing should have been flagged years ago as monopolistic market manipulation... now it and its mimics will just have to shave its profits by a small amount to fairly compensate its suppliers, rather than force them to move overseas for minimal savings
Yet the Earth keeps turning and life goes on...The Sun set (here anyways) and will rise again tomorrow.
The price of rubber dog **** from China is up .03. Thinking we can do without a lot of the crap we buy.
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Tariffs are like laws: individually written with uniquely different terms and very different regulation and enforcement.
A good example might be the now-famous Canadian tariff on American cheese and dairy products:
The headlines said that Canada has a 280% tariff. That is salacious, but not the salient point.
Apparently, the tariff is not actually applied until US exports reach a certain level that would harm Canadian farmers (remember Trump 45 negotiated this, because he does not seem to recall). This level of US exports -- with zero tariffs ever applied -- has never been close to being met!
So the salient point is why does it exist? 2 points: 1) food is a national/regional/local security issue, so local farmers must exist and 2) because the US has 10x more farmers/production, domestic American farm subsidies (very real!) could dramatically drop US costs, literally putting the much smaller Canadian market out of business, and damaging local food production/security.
So the smart guys on both sides actually negotiated a level of American dairy/cheese export supply that would not extinct Canadian farmers, and made a very steep tariff to stop that possibility.
All negotiated and signed by POTUS 45.....apparently in bad faith.
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In part though, the money you make from what you sell now has to buy the replacement items which may be at a higher price.
Who said anything about having to be in the US? Are you trying to say humongous American companies like Apple and Nike,Amazon don’t knowingly use child labor to increase their profits. As long as it’s not in your country it’s ok?
Good God man.
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Actually we are but don’t capitalize on it.
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Here’s a little history I found JMM
So how have tariff wars played out in the past?
1930: The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs
In 1929, the stock market crashed on Wall Street, sending shock waves through the US and the rest of the world. The Great Depression, a period of global economic turmoil that would last a decade, had begun.Months later, in June 1930, US President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Act into law. The law was originally aimed at imposing tariffs to protect US farmers from foreign competition, but it was extended to a wider array of products and increased tariffs on agricultural and industrial goods by about 20 percent.
The law was named after its top supporters, Republican Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Republican Representative Willis Hawley of Oregon.
Almost immediately, the act caused trade wars. Several countries, including Canada, France and Spain, imposed retaliatory tariffs on US products. Canada slapped tariffs on 16 US products which accounted for about a third of US exports at the time, according to US-based nonprofit research organisation, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The slowdown of trade weakened the US economy. By 1933, US exports dropped by 61 percent. Smoot-Hawley is often cited by experts as a factor which aggravated the US economic crisis.
Hoover’s popularity tumbled and his re-election bid failed, when Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt defeated him in the 1932 presidential election.
In June 1934, Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which called for bilateral trade deals with other countries to negate the effects of Smoot-Hawley. The Act said “that a full and permanent domestic recovery depends in part upon a revived and strengthened international trade”. Between 1934 and 1939, the Roosevelt administration negotiated trade agreements with 19 countries.
1960s: Chicken War
In the 1960s, the US and European nations played an expensive game of chicken across the Atlantic Ocean.During World War II from 1939 to 1945, red meat was rationed. The US government began a campaign to encourage Americans to eat fish and poultry instead. In the years that followed, the US ramped up the factory farming of chicken, which lowered the price of poultry.
The period after World War II also saw the acceleration of globalisation. Europe started buying cheap chicken from the US. As a result, European farmers were scared of being priced out of the market with fast, inexpensive American chickens out-clucking slower, pricier European ones.
In 1962, members of the European Economic Community (EEC), which was later absorbed into the European Union, imposed tariffs on American chicken. France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg increased their tariff on US poultry to 13.43 cents (around $1.4 today), per pound of chicken.
US poultry exports to Europe fell sharply. Between 1962 and 1963, US global chicken exports dropped by about 30 percent, according to a report by the United States Department of Agriculture.
In 1963, President Lyndon B Johnson imposed retaliatory tariffs on: potato starch, 25 cents ($2.57 now) per pound; brandy, $5 ($51.3 now) per gallon if over $9 ($92.4 now) per gallon; dextrin, a chemical used to manufacture paper, 3 cents ($0.31 now) per pound; and automobile trucks valued more than $1,000 ($10,267.7 now) by 25 percent.
The “chicken tax” on light trucks remains in force. This has led to a cat-and-mouse game between foreign manufacturers trying to access US markets, and regulators. Manufacturers tried to build models that could either meet specifications for passenger vehicles, or could be assembled in the US. Eventually though, Asian automakers, particularly from Japan, mostly set up factories in North America.
1982: The lumber war between the US and Canada
The US was convinced that it could see the wood for the trees, as it battled Canada over softwood lumber.The root of the conflict was the fact that Canada grows and harvests lumber from public land, with prices determined by the government. On the other hand, the US harvests lumber from privately owned lots.
In 1982, the US argued that Canada was unfairly subsidising its softwood lumber, which led to several rounds of conflict, tariffs and retaliatory tariffs.
The lumber war continues. Canadian lumber faces an existing 14 percent tariff in the US, even before Trump’s threat to add 25 percent more.
The US imports almost half of its wood products from Canada, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
1987: Tariffs on Japanese automobiles
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan imposed 100 percent tariffs on $300m worth of Japanese imports, affecting, in particular, automobiles from the East Asian nation.The Reagan administration said it had imposed these tariffs as a result of Tokyo reneging on the terms of a 1986 semiconductor trade agreement with Washington. The agreement asked Japan to open its market to exports of computer semiconductors made by the US.
Japan did not retaliate. “Hoping to prevent this issue from causing severe damage to the world’s free-trading system, the Japanese government has decided, from this broader perspective, not to take any retaliatory measures immediately,” Japan’s international trade minister, Hajime Tamura, told the press.
Things soured for the Japanese economy, the value of the yen appreciated and exports dropped. In the 1990s, Japan fell into a recession which ended in 2002.
Prior to the tariffs, the US had a massive trade deficit with Japan. In 1986, the deficit was about $55bn. The deficit dropped slightly, to under $52bn in 1988 and $43bn in 1991. The deficit has since fluctuated, rising in recent times. In 2023 it stood at $72bn.
To be continued below
1993: Banana split
In 1993, soon after the EU was formed, the bloc placed tariffs on bananas from Latin American countries to give small farmers in its former Caribbean and African colonies an upper hand in the market.The US argued that this went against the rules of free trade. Its interest? Most banana plantations in Latin America were owned by American companies whose profits were at risk.
The US filed eight separate complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO), an international body that oversees trade between countries. In the first case filed in 1997, the WTO ruled in favour of the US. The WTO then consistently ruled against the EU.
While the EU said that it was lowering the tariffs, the US argued that fair trade had not been restored. In retaliation, the US imposed 100 percent tariffs on European products such as Scottish cashmere or French cheese. It was bananas for brie.
The resolution began with the Geneva Banana Agreement in December 2009, agreed upon by the US, EU and 10 Latin American countries. It called for tariffs on bananas from Latin American countries to be reduced from 148 euros per tonne to 114 euros per tonne by 2017.
In 2012, the EU signed an agreement with the Latin American countries to formally end the WTO cases. The Latin American countries were Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela.
2002: Steel war with Europe
To boost the American steel industry, President George W Bush places tariffs ranging from 8 to 30 percent on steel from foreign countries. Mexico and Canada were exempt from this, but it hit Europe.Imports of steel from countries affected by Bush’s tariff targets plummeted by about 28 percent on average in 2002, and a further 37 percent by 2003, according to an analysis by the French research institute Centre d’Etudes Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII). However, the US started importing more steel from countries that the tariffs were not targeting. Overall, US steel imports grew by 3 percent in the 12 months after the tariff was imposed.
These tariffs affected the US steel industry. Some smaller steel companies either went bankrupt or were acquired by larger ones.
In retaliation, Europe threatened tariffs on a range of American products worth $2.2bn (about $3.85bn now), ranging from oranges from Florida to Harley Davidson motorbikes. Days before Europe would have imposed these tariffs, Bush lifted the steel tariffs in 2003.
2018: Trump’s first tariff war
Trump’s first term as president was from 2016 to 2020.In January 2018, he introduced tariffs on all solar panels and washing machines. While the tariffs didn’t differentiate between the source country of these products, China is the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. In June 2018, Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on more than 800 products from China.
In between, in April 2018, Beijing responded with a retaliatory 178.6 percent tariff on sorghum from the US. These tariffs were removed in May 2018. China also imposed 25 percent tariffs on 128 US products including soybeans and aeroplanes.
That year, Trump also slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel, and a 10 percent tariff on aluminium, from Canada, Mexico and EU countries.
Like China, other targeted countries also hit back.
Canada placed 25 percent tariffs and 10 percent tariffs on a range of products coming in from the US. From the summer of 2019 into 2020, the US and China imposed multiple tariffs on each other, while trying to negotiate an end to their dispute. China lost its position as the top trade partner of the US to Mexico in 2019. After negotiations between the US and China, a truce was announced in January 2020.
However, Democratic President Joe Biden, who inherited the trade war when he won the election in 2020, extended Trump’s solar panel tariffs in 2022. In February 2023, the tariffs on washing machines finally expired.
What makes the recent tariffs that Trump has threatened different is “the breadth of the tariff standouts,” Sweet said. “The first trade war included mostly targeted tariffs but this time around across-the-board tariffs are being proposed, making it nearly impossible to hide from them.”
He added: “Another big difference is that Trump is threatening tariffs on economies that are extremely integrated with the US economy, including Canada and Mexico.”
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It’s all in what you perceive as making a country better. As someone who has lost a job due to downsizing and had to make hugely difficult decisions I sympathize with others, but not enough to protect their jobs while we hit the iceberg. Trump knows that he is going to bear the heat, but is still willing to do what needs to be done. I can’t think of a better character trait this country needs right now.
Trump’s efforts to fix things are not the problem, the problem is that we have had people in power with no backbone or were in it to steal all they could for as long as possible. Any normal company or household would have long since gone under. The ONLY reason America is still afloat now is because spineless politicians can continue to vote to print more money to kick the problem down the road while getting their piece of the grift pie.
I am perfectly willing to deal with the hardships if it gets us to a better footing. Tariffs aren’t really going to impact me to a huge extent, as I don’t buy much anyway and almost nothing new that will be affected. It costs us right about $800-900 a month to survive bare bones, and can do that for years even if we were to not have Social Security available in 2 years. Chances are that the worse it gets the better our investments will do, unless a total collapse wipes out all our assets. Rising interest rates mean our huge number of CD’s will get better rates.
Hard times are much more preferable to catastrophic times. Yes, Trump may cause hard times but that is much better than the other option.
BTW - I have been seeing that the oil market is on the verge of crashing, so that will be good for energy costs and allow Trump to claim victory over high gas prices. He has already been able to claim better egg prices, much to the Democrats dismay.
I hope you are all stocked up on toilet paper for the next upcoming release of a pandemic virus.
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You offer a good concise explanation, one that 99% of the people don’t actually understand.
The thing is that tariffs also have a completely different usage too. They can be used as a penalty to companies that move production out of a country, to improve profits, then want to sell their products in the same country they left. I believe that THIS is what Trump is really doing, except his critics are focusing on a different aspect that can be made to look not well thought out.
Attacking American companies (Ford, GM) for abandoning the US workers to make better profits is the right thing to do. This means that the Canadians who now benefit through employment and increased tax revenues will see this dry up because (Ford, GM) will lose a huge marketshare to their competitors if they don’t return. Yes, they could try andwait it out like Ford showed today, by offering EVERYONE employee pricing on new vehicles, hoping that things change in 28. They have shown that they are willing to take lesser profits in hopes that they can return to much higher profits before they go under. Myself, I hope that Americans realize that we are now on a correctional course and give his plans another 8 years under someone else, thereby causing Ford to go belly up because they refused to take actions that would benefit the country over their shareholders.
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True, this is a valid point. But that decision will be driven by greed of companies.
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Money post brother. I agree 100%
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great explainer, appropriate tune: