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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 ret
by JKCalhoun 1y ago
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.)
- rayiner 1y agoSo the tariffs had the intended effect? That’s great!
- supermatt 1y agoIs it great because the US will start manufacturing African and Dutch gifts? Or is it the reduced choice and inflated prices that you prefer?
- theultdev 1y agoPeople 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.
- willvarfar 1y agotaking 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.
- trollbridge 1y agoYes, but American labour laws / minimum wages would result in it costing more.
- kasey_junk 1y agoWhere are you growing coffee in the us, purely from a climate and land perspective?
- theultdev 1y agoThat'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.
- jstanley 1y agoThat is not the reason that Japanese people don't buy many American products. The reason is that there are hardly any products made in America.
- theultdev 1y agoIt 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.
- jstanley 1y agoMy 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.
- theultdev 1y agoThere are plenty of food, household, and tool products we make. Pretty much everything I buy, apart from computer tech, is from an American company.
- jacquesm 11mo agoThat 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.
- alextingle 1y agoI 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.
- Filligree 1y agoHere in Ireland we have items from all over the world, except the US. That’s not a new thing. It seems like you guys are the only ones whose goods aren’t interesting.
- BeFlatXIII 1y agoI no longer care about my layabout countrymen.
- rayiner 1y agoEveryone knew that already. You want infinite foreigners to spite them.
- arethuza 1y agoI'm struggling to think of what goods are made in the US that I might buy - certainly not food or cars?
- alistairSH 1y agoOr 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?
- rayiner 1y agoYou do know that Lincoln’s tariffs helped turn US into an industrial superpower right?
- tdeck 1y ago> 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.
- theultdev 1y agoLived 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.
- tdeck 1y agoJust 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. https://www.seiyu.co.jp/assets/images/flyer_blackfriday251125_aichi_a_01.jpg https://www.seiyu.co.jp/assets/images/flyer_blackfriday25112...
- tacker2000 1y agoYou are comparing apples and oranges. 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.
- theultdev 1y agoI didn't focus on just food, I was simply replying to GP about meat. You don't see GE appliances over there either. Yet LG, Samsung appliances are plentiful in the states.
- anthonybsd 1y ago>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 :)
- pirates 1y agoYeah, walk around any popular shopping area in Japan and you’ll see box after box of items marked “Made in China”
- estearum 1y agoDepends on which "intended effect" you mean. Which part of the mutually exclusive triangle of "add manufacturing" or "add revenue" or "reduce deficits" do you consider to be "the intended effect"?
- salawat 1y agoNone of the above. Intended effect is to manufacture a more compliant populace through a new Great Depression.
- matwood 1y agoIntended effect of increased prices and less choice?
- terminalshort 1y agoTariffs are not intended to benefit the consumer
- user982 1y agoLiterally yes. "Tariffs on imports are designed to raise the price of imported goods to discourage consumption."
- lazide 1y agoOr 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.
- jeromegv 1y agoYep, 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.
- lazide 1y agoDemocracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
- BeFlatXIII 1y agoI'm hoping smuggling makes a major comeback.
- phantasmish 1y agoI’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.
- trollbridge 1y agoPerhaps the intended effect is to ultimately have more clothing items manufactured in the U.S., creating jobs that meet things like minimum wage.
- kasey_junk 1y agoYou’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
- terminalshort 1y agoThis 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.
- phantasmish 1y agoI’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.