I agree that the price increases were already coming and tarriffs provided an easy scapegoat to blame it on. If the tarriffs never came, the prices still would have gone up but they just wouldn’t have publicly announced it.
If tarrifs are objectively bad, why did China enact tarriffs in retaliation? Why would they damage their own economy to do basically nothing to the US? The Chinese economy is way more dependant on trade than the US economy is.
Tarrifs in general aren’t good or bad, they’re a standard mechanism every country uses. “Hey steel from over there costs less. If we tax it, it will be at a similar/higher price than our steel and our factories will stay in business producing steel here.”
But what Trump is doing is blanket country based Tarrifs. Instead of using a scalpel he’s using a nuke.
The retaliatory Tarrifs aren’t against everyone. They’re against the US. So American companies have to pay more for electronics, steel, bananas. And when they try to sell their products on the global market, which is what everyone’s been trying to do since the 90s, it costs more in China for American goods. Why buy Ford when you can buy a Chinese vehicle that has local support, is an EV that fits on your road, and costs half the price. (There’s a recent Wendover Productions video about how much Volvo is struggling the last few years, and that’s without a Tarrif war making buying materials and selling product harder.)
The goal of a Tarrif is to get people to buy domestic because the foreign thing is now expensive. When there is no domestic, because it’s all been moved to foreign factories, it just makes everything more expensive for the purchaser.
China isn’t paying for a price increase. You’re paying more tax to the US government for the priviledge of buying goods from China.
China is comfortable being retaliatory to the US because they’re where the US was in the ~90s and selling to the rest of the world. And they have all the (for them) domestic production and market because we outsourced it to them.
I’m no expert, but; its retaliation. Harm for harm. Hell maybe even a pride thing. They do hurt China to some extent (in a vague capitalistic sense), it’s just worse for America.
Edit: their tariffs might not hurt them as much as ours hurt us, either. They do, what, A third of the planets manufacturing or something? They’ll be far less invested in imports than America is.
I agree that the price increases were already coming and tarriffs provided an easy scapegoat to blame it on. If the tarriffs never came, the prices still would have gone up but they just wouldn’t have publicly announced it.
If tarrifs are objectively bad, why did China enact tarriffs in retaliation? Why would they damage their own economy to do basically nothing to the US? The Chinese economy is way more dependant on trade than the US economy is.
Tarrifs in general aren’t good or bad, they’re a standard mechanism every country uses. “Hey steel from over there costs less. If we tax it, it will be at a similar/higher price than our steel and our factories will stay in business producing steel here.”
But what Trump is doing is blanket country based Tarrifs. Instead of using a scalpel he’s using a nuke.
The retaliatory Tarrifs aren’t against everyone. They’re against the US. So American companies have to pay more for electronics, steel, bananas. And when they try to sell their products on the global market, which is what everyone’s been trying to do since the 90s, it costs more in China for American goods. Why buy Ford when you can buy a Chinese vehicle that has local support, is an EV that fits on your road, and costs half the price. (There’s a recent Wendover Productions video about how much Volvo is struggling the last few years, and that’s without a Tarrif war making buying materials and selling product harder.)
The goal of a Tarrif is to get people to buy domestic because the foreign thing is now expensive. When there is no domestic, because it’s all been moved to foreign factories, it just makes everything more expensive for the purchaser.
China isn’t paying for a price increase. You’re paying more tax to the US government for the priviledge of buying goods from China.
China is comfortable being retaliatory to the US because they’re where the US was in the ~90s and selling to the rest of the world. And they have all the (for them) domestic production and market because we outsourced it to them.
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I’m no expert, but; its retaliation. Harm for harm. Hell maybe even a pride thing. They do hurt China to some extent (in a vague capitalistic sense), it’s just worse for America.
Edit: their tariffs might not hurt them as much as ours hurt us, either. They do, what, A third of the planets manufacturing or something? They’ll be far less invested in imports than America is.