My job has been impacted by Trumpas well. Stock prices falling and tariffs have caused them to do layoff of 2500 people. I fucking hate this so much. I work with many international customers and Trump/Musk has been brought up constantly and in my line of work people typically avoid political discussions but it’s kinda nice to hear our allies don’t actually hate Americans and know what the real problem is.
Your telling me the US government can’t just demand other countries pay them money for no reason?
/j
There are people who don’t know how tariffs work?
If America is the sole buyer, then the tax would be shared between both countries. (Lower demand will lower the price that the foreign supplier can ask for, making up some of the extra tax cost). But since USA is doing these tariffs on so many countries, other countries will just lay new trading routes.
So yeah, USA will feel it.
Okay so, continuity error.
In the beginning his hours are being cut almost entirely, and at the end they’re in no danger of being cut?
It’s not good story but this is either a weird grammatical error or this is one those “things that didn’t happen” stories.
Not that I doubt people think that other countries pay for tarrifs because Daddy Trump has been saying that for months and months but …
Orrr… ya missed the “another one of our guys” part
That seems to be what happened. Oof.
Man, I wonder how basic reading comprehension played a role in the last election.
Actually the blame on this is his lack of paragraphs .
Thoughts should be separated!
Thoughts apartheid 🧐
Or dyslexia/ADHD
Read again - it was two different people he was talking about. It’s implied that they have different job positions so their hours were impacted differently.
Ahh okay so that makes sense.
So bring on the downvotes, but can anyone tell me what the alternative plan was to bring manufacturing back to the states? And wasn’t that always going to make things more expensive?
Granted, this is being done with complete reckless regard, and the effects could’ve been spread out, but what’s the alternative?
can anyone tell me what the alternative plan was to bring manufacturing back to the states?
what’s the alternative?
A better plan would have involved local subsidies and tax rebates for various industries that have the ability to be cheaper than existing outsourced infrastructure if they were to be developed with a large enough economy of scale, to incentivize them to engage in local production.
And for industries in which we wouldn’t experience lower prices even with larger local economies of scale, such as those involved in mining mineral deposits we simply don’t have enough of here in the states, we just… wouldn’t do anything to tariff anybody or provide incentives if it wouldn’t be something we were capable of benefiting from via local production?
And wasn’t that always going to make things more expensive?
These other methods would make things more expensive too, (albeit much less so) but they would directly incentivize local production, and crucially, only cost money when production was actually made locally. Nobody would get a tax rebate or subsidy if nobody was actually starting local production. With tariffs, however, everyone begins paying a higher cost, regardless of if local manufacturing is even happening, let alone if it’s cost effective or possible in the first place.
Tariffs are just an inefficient way of incentivizing local production compared to other options, because they primarily exist to punish other countries and their economies, rather than uplift our own. They can be used to incentivize local production, but if not properly linked with subsidies, rebates, and job programs, they aren’t terribly effective at doing that, and they will almost always lead to higher prices on an ongoing basis.
You’re singing my song. Everything you’re saying is spot on.
I think the eventual solve will be small batch manufacturing capability, progressively complex according to population density. But those means of production will need to be nationalized for planning & control, and it’s simply not possible under capitalism.
But the current power structure is built on “market solutions” by using collective punishment to force capitalists to make concessions without directly regulating them. It’s the whole reason the fed manipulates interest rates.
Bring on the downvotes but the correct answer is don’t. Free trade causes jobs in each country to align with recardiant advantage in those countries. We have the jobs we want now. Unless we are in the middle of a depression we don’t want government to “provide more jobs”. We don’t need more jobs. We want better jobs. The whole reason why manufacturing has slowed down in the US is that the global market for manufacturing doesn’t pay as well per man hour as other opportunities we already have.
Tariffs disrupt existing jobs to bring back old jobs. Old jobs we shouldn’t want as much as the jobs we have now.
If you want to work a job that someone else is doing right now you should probably expect to make close to what they are making while doing it. Actually less because you are increasing supply. Do we want Americans to make Chinese wages? Now some manufacturing in the US doesn’t pay Chinese wages because its work only we can do, hence why it is here, and pays American wages. But if you want to “take back manufacturing” then you are talking specifically about manufacturing they have already demonstrated they can do. So any of that manufacturing will pay at most a Chinese wage. Why the hell would you want those jobs?
People will tell you subsidies and positive reinforcement but honestly that is just more government spending to make a few rich. The answer is, there isn’t an alternative. All options aren’t great.
Manufacturing working conditions are horrible. As a country develops workers rights, unions, safety regulations, etc, it becomes almost impossible to compete on a global scale for manufacturing. Naturally the manufacturers in countries where those things don’t exist do very well.
In certain countries, the labor is just a few steps off of slave labor, which we all know is highly profitable and highly unethical. In other countries their dollar is so weak that net exports are the obvious choice for profitable businesses. Manufacturing thrives in these conditions and attracts a great deal of foreign investment - because hey, if the shipping costs are outweighed by the operational savings - it’s a sound business plan!!
Tariffs upset that equilibrium and guess who pays American tariffs? AMERICAN COMPANIES. The government gets a benefit, US becomes less likely of an export destination for countries to trade with, the dollar gets messed with in funky ways, and there is some amount of global loss of productivity due to this forced shift.
Basically, I view tariffs as a tax on the benefits of cheap overseas labor.
I think you’re right. And I think the unspoken policy off anti-tariff politicians is, ‘We’re never bringing those jobs back.’
Where did you get the idea that tariffs are supposed to increase domestic production in any way?
That’s the openly stated goal of tariffs from both parties.
I can tell you! It’s just not a quick, easy, single bill that we can pass. It takes a fundamental change in the way Americans think, it’s gonna take at least 2 generations to make this move.
Here’s the plan: we’re gonna promote cooperation. We’re gonna get people to notice the systematic problems in the way they are treated by their authorities. We need to aggressively be better than our enemies, both in practice and knowledge.
Here’s the method: (Essay ahead).
We need to disrupt almost every single system that currently exists. They’re basically all fucked. Start with the ones that get the most people motivated - their basic needs first, entertainment second, their wellbeing third. That feels wrong and it is, we need 2 generations to fix this because we’ve been beat down by this system so bad the priorities aren’t even correct anymore. I’ve been using this tagline recently “People in homes, food in bellies, minds entertained and health maintained.”
You as an individual can and, if you want to have an impact of saving literally the world and not just America, probably should start doing your part for this plan. Give away what you can, but never what you need. And be careful, because you might need that later. Never let that get in the way, though, of giving what you can. Bring your neighbors grocery money when you have a bit of extra cash, and offer to start a food co-op to make sure they never go hungry. It sucks, because I know damn well I wanna go spend that extra 20 bucks to treat myself and you probably do too. But if you go give it away instead, it’ll come back to you. Not immediately, and not always symmetrically. But it will come back to benefit you in some way. We need to shift the focus towards the community instead of the individual. I have plans for the other steps, if you’d like I can go into them. But the food co-ops are the best first step IMO
Why would it take generations to fix an issue that only started a few decades ago? What a load of shit.
A few generations to fix
An issue that only started a
a few decades2 generations agoBecause generations are only 25 years, not the 100 that your generation will survive. These issues started, or at least became severely worse, about 3 generations ago with Reagan.
It took that long because they were attempting the slow boil method. We can course correct immediately.
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
We can but how do you as an individual plan to convince Americans to start the revolution? Personally, I think we need to build them up and show them the systemic issues they’re dealing with in order to convince them.
There are decades where nothing’s happensThere are decades where you don’t pay attention to what’s happening in the background, andthere are weeks where decades happenweeks where those decades of planning come to fruition.I’m not an accelerationist, but if I was then I would say Trump is doing it quite well. If this keeps up, people will be more open than you’d think to revolution.
I don’t disagree with you, and I’ve made this point to someone else as well. I’m not a revolutionary yet because people haven’t been burned enough to be convinced by a revolutionary yet
It’s a dead industry to an economy that doesn’t need it anymore. The same way you don’t kill your chicken, produce your own oil, make your own shoes, shoelaces, clothes…etc. That’s how the imbalance of economies work.
What you don’t understand is that Trump knows this, and he cultivated both hope AND fear in enough people to get him into office. His end goal is to force you into buying dumb shit that is made better elsewhere because him and his cronies can’t sell it elsewhere for profit, and they own all of it. He’s literally trying to force you into paying money to people who own dead resources.
Trump is the guy walking up to you on the street asking you to buy the watches he just “found in a dumpster”. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
Democrats have been selling the promise of bringing back manufacturing jobs for just as long. The difference is they never had any intent on following through. Granted, the GOP didn’t intent to keep those promises either, but Trump works outside of that dynamic. So regardless of how badly this goes, to the common voter, this is going to look like Trump is the only one willing to follow through on his promised policy goals. By doing what both party’s always promised to do, he’s forced them to openly admit it was always a lie.
They may snag a few wins here and there, but I don’t see the Democratic Party ever making a full recovery from this. It’s a capitalist party, and they will always be subservient to capitalists. They’ll never be in a position where they can deliver on their promises to voters.
If a socialist and/or pro worker party manages to gain a foothold in our country’s electoral politics, they will peel off so many people from the base of both parties that they would completely dominate American politics. Both parties know this, and that’s why both of them are working to ban ranked choice voting and suing leftist candidates off of the ballots.
It’s not that simple and presenting it as such is disingenuous. Your fellow employee asked an important question, why cant we produce our own stuff? Relying on a frienemy to manufacture what your country needs to function is an extreme oversight of national security. Europe is experiencing that lesson as we speak.
This isn’t even even economics 101, this is just what trade is. You have something I need and I have something you need. If we both have extra and we trade, we both win.
So, how about you produce everything you need without anybody’s help, subsistence living. Drop your phone drop, your clothes. Go out into the woods, pick your own food and find your own clean water.
Because that is exactly the position Donald Trump has put our whole country in in relation to the rest of the planet.
So, if you don’t want to get along with society, if you want to do everything on your own, more power to you. But don’t make claims that other folks are being disingenuous because you didn’t bother to understand what trade is.
Subsistence living
I don’t disagree with your point but I think this argument could have been more compelling. The way you’ve phrase it here almost makes these tariffs sound good to a socialist and we don’t want to accidentally push people to the other side. Basically, your intentions are great but execution could have been just a hair better if you don’t mind a bit of pedantry from someone who has studied debate for a few years:
A lot of us want to be producing everything we need and giving away/trading what we can. That sounds ideal. We need to be certain how how we do it though. Tariffs are a bandaid to a bigger, more systematic issue. We need to build up the infrastructure required to take care of our people, create the systems to ensure our people are taken care, and export every bit of excess. We also need to make sure people don’t say they’re going to do that (Like the orange and the melon did) and then turn around and do the opposite (like the orange and the melon did).
If you’d like, I can give you a some more specific pointers on what to say to be more effective as well (bring solutions along with problems)
The way you’ve phrase it here almost makes these tariffs sound good to a socialist
Hey, democratic socialist here, this does not sound good at all, nor does it sound remotely socialist to me.
That’s because you’re probably smart enough to hear what they’re meaning and not take it at face value. Not everyone is, so we need to pick very careful words. Subsistence living is something that sounds nice to a lot of socialists, so we can’t call our enemies policy subsistence living. We need to call it what it really is, isolationism. They didn’t build the infrastructure required for subsistence living first
I’ve never seen subsistence living as a core belief of any large number of socialists. At least, no larger than the average amount of people in the general population that also find subsistence living to be a good idea.
Most socialists understand that many goods can’t be fully produced by any one individual, and that we get a benefit from working together as a group. Hell, most of Socialist ideology revolves around groups of workers owning the means of production, and a government/society that shares resources between people to keep everyone as reasonably comfortable as possible.
The notion that subsistence living is something that more socialists would support than the average person isn’t exactly something I’ve seen to be true in my personal experience. In fact, I see a lot more of that on the very much anti-socialist right, what with all the homesteading and “rugged independent man” stereotypes you’ll see thrown about over there.
You’re right, subsistence living in an individual level is impossible. There’s a lot of Americans though, and they could do subsistence living if they worked together. Again, you and I aren’t disagreeing. We just need to make sure to use the right words. Even if subsistence living isn’t a commonly held thought, it’s one with a more positive connotation than Isolationism. We should use words with negative connotations to describe negative bills
All right so you were just being pedantic.
Because my examples did not make it sound appealing lol
And I personally prefer to use neutral words, as folks have a lot of defense mechanisms toward words with negative connotations.
Meaning, they will just tune it out.
Because we don’t have every resource in the world contained within our small slice of a single continent? Not to mention, it isn’t 19-dickety2, so Europe and the rest of the world aren’t brain-draining into the US as much as they once were, thanks to local-stability and our newfound US-instability. And, speaking of which, thanks to the morons grabbing the wheel and directing us into a brick wall, well…that brain-drain we benefitted from since the Nazis…yeah, the opposite is happening now. Turns out smart people don’t want to live under fascism…weird, I know. Why can’t they just hate the same people I hate???
hows the brexit going, kitty?
Assuming the theory that tariffs pushes local manufacturing is true: We could produce our own stuff, but it takes time between the institution of the tariff and when a factory starts producing <item>, so there’s still going to be a lot of expensive stuff in the mean time.
More expensive steel (for example) means lots of things like cars get more expensive, which means fewer people can afford them…which means fewer cars to produce…which means less need for related industries (textiles, plastics, rubber, etc.), which (in general) means fewer employees needed to build those cars and supply those related industries…which means more people with less money…which means those people are going to buy fewer things, which means less money for all of the other businesses… and so on. It just spreads. Everything depends on everything else.
You can’t just build a factory and start producing say, steel, overnight. And what happens if the tariff is dropped right after you finish your factory? You’re going to get hosed, so it’s a huge risk - especially with someone as inconsistent as Trump.
Or, we can hold the fucking media accountable for telling blatant lies about the impacts of tariffs.
Ignorance is not an excuse. Fire all MAGAs for taxifs.
Fox News got around that by claiming they’re entertainment, not news.
Per their own arguments in court, no reasonable person would consider Fox News to be factual.
They should have been forced to rename to Fox Entertainment
They should have been forced to air disclaimers every 30 minutes
That stop the broadcast, and cover the screen before commercial breaks. “ATTENTION: THIS PROGRAM DOES NOT PRESENT FACTUAL INFORMATION. IT IS AN ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM AND NOT A NEWS PROGRAM”
The OP is battling against what Faux Newz, Dipshit Donnie, and other right-wing propagandist shitrags are telling his employee, all which the employee takes as indesputable truth. If he can override that much brainwashing he can convince anyone of anything.
“The Big Lie” is what Sanders is calling it.
How many “big lies” are we up to now?
But the guys in OP, they don’t turn on daddy Trump. It can’t be that they were lied to, then they’d have to do something alien to them like introspection. No, it must be…an honest mistake? Honestly have no idea how they’d justify it internally.
Because to these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. You may thank certain types of Christianity for this nonsense.
So the thinking goes something like: ‘I’m a Good Person. And as a Good Person, I only vote for/support Good People, because I am Good. So the people I voted for are Good, because only a Bad Person would vote for Bad People, and I’m not Bad, I’m Good. So Trump can’t be Bad; he must have just made a mistake.’
This is also why they favor punitive jailing instead of trying to reform criminals; criminals are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things. It’s also why they do stuff like try to get rid of abortion. If a woman got pregnant from ‘sleeping around’ then she’s a Bad Person and deserves to be punished by carrying the child to term.
How does the saying about selling a lie go?
Well, a lie can be half around the world before the truth even has its boots on.
That’s because the lie’s boots have already been licked clean.
Three liars makes a tiger
didn’t understand why he was told the other countries pay the tariffs
that’s easy: you were willing to vote for a guy who lied over 30 thousand times in his first term so he realized you’re a fucking idiot and he could say anything without you thinking even half a second about it.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
The real Russian plot we’ve all missed completely has far, far less to do with paying Trump to sell them documents. That’s the 2-dimensional public face of a cold-war that never ended and has been devastatingly effective against the USA.
The real Russian attack that we may never fully comprehend is exactly what they’ve done in other countries that they’ve subsequently annexed, which is making the general population stop caring about what’s true or not. It’s frighteningly easy to poison the well of public knowledge. You simply pour funding into efforts to boost BOTH SIDES of every social issue. When social debates and your nation’s interests are ramped up and the rhetoric gets more and more extreme on both sides of an issue, when every story on both sides becomes suspect, people simply tune out or stop caring about what’s true or not, and this is exactly where we are. Most people are more willing to just throw their arms up and go find a distraction than try to sift through what’s real or not.
It was even easier to pull off in the USA than anywhere else because we have a built-in policy of fierce independence and individuality. We don’t have communities around us, we don’t have social circles that will make us want to step up our game, we don’t have groups of people we care about telling us we’re wrong, we don’t have help from anywhere but inside our own heads. And if you’ve never been taught how your own thoughts can be wrong, if you’ve been fed the “special birthday boy” narrative for so long that you think highly of yourself, truth will seem toxic and poison because it will tell you things about yourself that will hurt. We don’t seek out pain as a species, we use pain a signal to avoid a thing.
You can google “KGB tactics for destabilizing nations” and spend weeks reading about what’s being done to us right now. But most people who read my message here will immediately feel that sneaking doubt or words of caution because “how do we even know what’s real anymore.”
They willing pay the extra funbucks tariff monies for the privilege and honor of shipping it to America (at cost) on a chance some red-hatted half-wit will waste it.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
Yeah this is grade school level reasoning telling you that it obviously doesn’t work that way.
A country’s aluminum exports for example aren’t extra aluminum they want to get rid of because it’s junking up their basements and America is 1800-got-junk taking it off their hands at cost. It’s a fucking series of material production companies in a different country. They too are based on capitalism and they too require profits in order to function.
Especially when tariffs go above 100%!
Like, do you believe French companies would be paying the shipping costs to give you free Champagne?
and every one of the millions who
wereare just as dumb, will forget the lessons learned well before the next election and vote for it all over again.…next election?
You know, the one Trump wins with 106% of the totaled votes.
nice of you to assume there’s gonna be a NEXT election.
Delete Elon and Trump from existence and nothing will get better.
Why?
Because Americans are dumb as fuck and they’ll still be dumb as fuck when and if those two are gone.
I’m old enough to have seen the same pattern multiple times. Republican leadership fails spectacularly, even pissing off many conservatives in the process. But as soon as the next cycle begins, those conservatives are back onboard voting for the absolute shittiest candidates.
Because to them an actual, literal dictator is better than a Democrat as president.
Our society is circling the toilet and it almost certainly won’t get better within our lifetimes. Prepare yourselves for that.
I actually don’t consider this an issue of being dumb. It IS an issue with being under-educated (often deliberately in R states) and fed a ton of propaganda
There’s ignorance and there’s stupidity. Stupidity will stubbornly resist any attempt to correct its ignorance.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.
Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
…
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.
That’s willful ignorance. While the willfully ignorant can be stupid (lack of intelligence) more often it seems to be due to arrogance and/or just being an asshole in general
It took Rome 1000 years to collapse. I expect instability in the us for the rest of my lifetime. I’m struggling to balance that reality and also living my life.
Also- I think COVID is to blame too. More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.
It took Rome 1000 years to collapse.
I mean, if you want to get extra snarky, Rome’s still there. Still one of the wealthiest cities on earth, to this day. The infrastructure is what makes the city and that can be repaired or rebuilt, improved even, as generations come to their senses.
More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.
I pin this far more on the toxic media atmosphere than COVID, although the pandemic definitely took its toll. That said, the current hysteria around migrants and Woke feels a lot more like the post-9/11 moment than COVID. Democrats rolling over sheepishly while a Republican wields unitary executive power to disappear dissidents and intimidate
What folks on here don’t want to accept is that this isn’t the first time we’ve had a President behave like this. Its not even the first time in our lifetimes (for the most part - sorry teenagers). This is more normal than not, in fact. Reagan’s War on Drugs, Nixon’s War on Crime, Eisenhower’s Red Scare, and FDR/Truman’s Japanese Internment echoed all the same fascist tendencies.
What’s really changed in 2025 is the abysmal long term economic outlook. Liberals in 1984 could duck their heads and glare at the rampant poverty around them and mutter “If those hippie slackers had earned an education rather than smoking dope and fucking around, they wouldn’t get picked on by the police”. But now… fucking kids at Columbia University are being targeted. Surgeons are getting targeted. Judges are getting targeted.
Literally the only thing you can do to avoid these purges is Be MAGA. And “Just be MAGA, you won’t get hurt” isn’t something liberals can quite bring themselves to do yet (although keep an eye on Gavin Newsom and Richie Torries and Andrew Cuomo, because its coming).
Dictatorship isn’t making people feel safe. It’s making them feel terrified and helpless.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not. That is the long term future of the us.
The brain drain is necessary for the dictatorship to fully take over. Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.
Dictatorship only scares the non maga. Maga feels safer with it.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not.
That’s because its called Vatican City now.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not.
Absent that brief ill-conceived stint at empire under Mussolini, sure. But the roadways and the ports and the political connections and the religious iconography that centered Rome within the ancient world continue to persist. It isn’t the center of a sprawling intercontinental kingdom, but it holds a privileged place within the modern sprawling intercontinental kingdom of NATO.
Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.
Russia’s in a peculiar place precisely because brain drain and privatization and punitive sanctions and the latest round of pointless horrifying bloodshed has sapped it of so many talented and driven young people. But the dictatorship - the bourgeois dictatorship, anyway - came under Yeltsin, following the Gorbachev coup. It brought in an entirely illegal dismantling of public industry and services, a looting of pensions and public reserves, and a fire sale of military hardware which set off a wave of ugly overseas wars in Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.
Only after the country had been hollowed out economically, by a cartel of untouchable oligarchs, did the public warm to the idea of a new singular strongman dictator. And the call for dictatorship was, at its heart, a plea for someone to drag the cartels back into line as part of a national project.
People have to play along in every system, because we’re not self-sustaining little monoids. We are hugely interdependent and most efficient when we are working together in concert as collaborative specialists. What we’re searching for is leadership. But all we seem to be offered is different flavors of oligarchy or autocracy.
They’re symptoms, not the problem. Even if they were vanished from existing by will of a djinni or something, another would just take their place.
I wrote a comment explaining Tariffs on a Fox News YouTube video a few weeks back, and the entire reply chain was people arguing with eachother about how tariffs work because “Trump said it’s a tax on other countries, so that’s how they work”
You’re doing god’s work in the hellish trenches
That’s front line in “Trench Crusade” level of trenches.
It’s the problem that reality is more complicated than the simplified version trump gives his followers.
If you don’t know how something works and someone very confidently tells you how it works and it sorta maps onto familiar concepts, boy is that catnip.
Maybe all the countries are just sitting around like people and Canada is like a guy buying our stuff and we are just making that guy pay a tax. I’m a guy, I pay taxes, sucks to be that guy but probably rules to be the guy getting the tax revenue, and now trump made that us, awesome!!!
Transmitting this wrong idea is fast because it maps onto their lived experiences. It’s easy for them to conceptualize Canada as a single monolithic entity that is buying shit and having to pay a tax. So in one stroke they get a double dopamine hit.
- I’m not dumb, I get how this all works, and it was pretty easy!
- we get to collect these taxes instead of having to pay them, awesome!!!
So here you come to explain, “that’s not how any of this works” Canada isn’t one entity, it’s many. Sure the tariff is on their stuff, but it’s paid by the person buying it, us. And you can go on about all the ways they are wrong but you are threatening the fact that they are not dumb and they already understand this and their understanding means they are winning. So you want them to admit they are dumb and getting fucked and that’s a hard sale.
This is the real danger of hypernormalization, it allows people like trump to replace the complexity of reality with a fake but simpler version. And it’s so dangerous because the people that buy in to that fake but simpler version have this weird insane incentive to defend it.
Even if it were a tax paid by foreign companies, what difference does it make? They would just increase the prices the goods are sold at.
So, lets say, a smartphone that is priced at $1000:
With the 20% tariff in place:
If the Chinese conpanies pay the $200 per device, they just sell each phone at $1200 to the US importer.
If the US importers pay the $200 per device, similarily, they would tack on the $200 (on top of the usual markups), making it $1200 per phone.
There is zero difference, the end consumer always foots the bill.
This is so simple to understand, how are people this stupid
Not necessarily: the company can choose to absorb part or all the tariff, since the demand would drop at the higher price anyway, and they might make more overall profit at a lower margin per item. But generally yes, most of the cost will be passed on to the consumer and prices will increase on average.
Example:
found the economics student
It’s why they’re called “pass-through costs.”
the end consumer always foots the bill.
Or the consumer can’t/won’t take on the extra burden of cost, and the business loses enough sales to go under.
The only difference would be that money we spent would be going to the companies instead of the government. Tarrifs are a government putting taxes on their people to strangle industries in other countries. In both scenarios we pay the same, but the flow of money is different
The difference is that this way it’s much easier to calculate prices.
If the tax were 20%, the exporter would have to do the inverse calculation. That is, “which price will result in me gaining $1000?” Which is not 1200, since 20% of 1200 is 240. x = 0.8y -> y = (1/0.8)*x -> y = 1.25x. so the exporter would have to price it at 1.25x the price, $1250. 20% of 1250 is 250.
So it’s unintuitive that a 20% tax would result in a 25% price increase. That’s my guess why tariffs are applied to the importer instead of exporter.
Wouldn’t refunding the amount of the tariff to the customer fix this? Ignoring the very important diplomatic and retaliation tariffs which makes the whole post unusable for real life
- Canada sells a product A $100.
- Tariffs makes it $120 when you buy it
- so Canada gets $100, USA gets $20, USA customer pays $120.
- USA has now $20, they can directly refund the customer for $20 via a policy to reduce the price of the category of A.
- So customer gets $20 reduction of the product A via tax something, so USA now has $0 and USA customer actually paid only $100.
- Except now if USA company make the product A they can sell it for like $100 and customer pays $80.
- There is a slight increase of imported goods price here because tariffs cannot actually refund $20, it will be a % of the local vs imported production.
- Over time you can expect to get a local advantage because of this price inequality, so local companies will be subsidized by imports until imports are no longer significant.
Where am I wrong here ?
In your scenario how is the local made $100 item bought at $80? Where is a $20 refund paid from? You are double spending it on both imported and local goods
In the scenario local good is still worth $100 but given that you refund all good by the amount added by the tariff later, you have $20 refunded (not really $20 as i tried to show previously, but
$20 x total_tariff / total_amount_of_good_bought_locally_and_imported, so somewhere between $80 and $100 net for local production and between $100 and $120 for imported good, depending on the ratioimport/import+localprod
I recently learned that almost 1 in 5 Americans are illiterate.
How many Americans do you think are reasonably well educated, so that they would understand somewhat complex issues like tariffs? Or could seek out information if they didn’t understand?
Im still surprised by that , the quality of education in my country is low but holly fuck im stunned by the lack of education in the states
It is highly regional, too.
Despite the existence of the Department of Education (which Trump is trying to dismantle), there is no national standard for education in the US. In general, each state is free to decide upon its own policies and standards.
Some states, such as those in the northeast, have very high-performing school systems. So when that “1 in 5 are illiterate” statistic is mentioned (I actually have not verified that number, just quoting the prior claim as an example), it would be caused by low-performing states where the situation is much more dire dragging down the national average.
Here’s a general look at quality of education in the US by state, though recommend folks look up their own numbers because I haven’t validated the numbers pulled in the article I grabbed this from.
It’s not a perfect divide between red states and blue states (Florida appears good, California less so, as an example), but in general we see the lower performing states located mainly in the South where the Republicans have more support. Basically, a less educated populace is easier to manipulate.
I was reading into this recently and the reason Florida is so high on these lists is because post-secondary education is very cheap. Their K-12 education is on the garbage end of the spectrum.
For extra fun, look into where school districts allocate their funding and how it relates to their rankings. Some of the worst performing public schools spend a lot more on athletics than they spend on anything else. It’s like they want to be professional athlete mills instead of functioning adult mills.
It’s by design.
Important note - literacy isn’t simply about being able to recognize and pronounce letters and words. A person can sound out every word in English, and understand what each word says, and still be illiterate if they cannot comprehend the message the words express together.
That’s where this illiteracy arises - it’s a failure of reading comprehension. In this light, I imagine many of us have attempted conversation online with somebody functionally illiterate.
Literacy is also about English (at least as commonly reported in the US). About 1/3 of functionally illiterate adults in the US are foreign born. I have never seen literacy stats that measure “literate in any language”.
That’s still really bad. If 2/3 of illiterate people were born in America, that really highlights how inconsistent education is in America.
When I was a kid, I lived in a regular suburban neighborhood but the middle school and high schools that I was zoned for were so awful that my parents enrolled me into a charter school. (The elementary school was fine) Since then, some of the crappy schools in my city are now magnet schools and so my parents’ house appears to be zoned to different schools. There appears to be less public schools now. That’s probably not a good thing.
“Are you saying 1 fouth of Americans are removed?” “Yeah at least 1 fourth.”
After brexit, the searches of “What is the European union” skyrocketed in Britain.
Most people are morons who don’t think for themselves.
From what I’ve heard most pro brexit voters thought that leaving ment no non white immigrants allowed, they failed to understand the EU only let European labor in, the people from not white lands gained access from England’s colonial past.
