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.
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.