re: Question for those that oppose the tariffs

Such a dumb take, if my kid grows up creating screws for a living in place of some random kid from china, our country has truly failed.

Imagine competing with lessers instead of better

One- be patient.

Two- if ya kid makes screws really well and it’s better than the screws the Chinese kid was making - congrats, dad!

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Are other country’s tariffs on US products okay and why?

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Other countries tariffs are their business and have nothing to do with our decisions.

Tariffs artificially hurt domestic consumers and artificially protect domestic producers. In many, if not all, of these countries, there isn't as much emphasis on free trade as there is here. And I don't mean that in an international sense, I mean that in the sense that barriers to entry for starting and then costs for owning a business are greater there than here.

So does it make sense for them to protect their producers at the expense of their consumers? I couldn't say without knowing all of the details, but I can say that it makes a lot more sense than it does for us to pick producers over consumers.

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Are cheap goods and labor more important than economic fairness and longterm reliability for the US economy?

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"Economic fairness" is a specious term that sounds good as a sound bite but means nothing.

And, the cost of goods and labor directly affects the health of the US economy. So you tell me whether it is worth prioritizing or not.

I don't know what you mean by "longterm reliability." There's an inherent claim being made there, but I'm not sure I want to address it without being more certain exactly what the claim is.

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How would you level the trading playing field and give the US either fairness or the advantage minus tariffs?

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Again, "fairness" in this context is a junior high level way of looking at this.

Would it be better if we could achieve more free trade?

In my opinion it would be. In my opinion if Trump can get everyone else to drop their tariffs and then we drop ours, that would be the bast case scenario and the only valid reason to use tariffs like he's using them.

But those of you who are for these tariffs shouldn't like that outcome.

Not if you're going to argue that American needs more manufacturing jobs and it's a threat to national security to rely on other countries for making certain things (which is what I suspect you mean by "longterm reliability above).

Because the above scenario—everyone dropping their tariffs—is basically NAFTA extended globally. It's literally the Globalism that causes 90% of the posters here to spit through forked fingers after typing.

More free trade probably means MORE jobs outsourced from America (to be fair, it probably also means the creation of some stateside as American businesses grow...but most of the growth will be factory labor overseas).

Ya'll have got to understand some things about this and stop just spouting whatever comes to mind to try to argue for it because "Orange Good."

If you think more American jobs and national security in manufacturing is the top priority, then you don't want Canada and the UK and Vietnam and whoever else to drop their tariffs.

You want them to dig in and tell Trump to go screw. You want the EU to follow through on their threat to cut off certain American imports altogether.

You want Japan, China, and S. Korea to send back a fortune cookie that says, "Trump is asshoe."

Them dropping the tariffs is the opposite of what you want. That ensures that the manufacturing stays right where it is...overseas.

Now if free trade is your highest priority, then great! You can celebrate when other countries cave. But you need to understand that what that means is that American producers will sell more stuff overseas—which will grow their overseas operations more than their domestic ones—and since we aren't heavily tariffing many products from overseas right now, we probably won't notice much difference in anything else. American producers win, American consumers don't notice much difference. Jobs continue to get outsourced, we continue to buy cheaper goods from overseas.

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It says those organizations sponsored the study. So it’s not like they did the study, the two authors did.

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Right, but the organizations did sign off on it and there was also a letter that was sent to the USTR signed off by a lot more organizations asking for a reevaluation of things. Now did they sign off on it to maintain the status quo? It's certainly possible. Or did they sign off out of genuine concern? That's possible too. We are represented by one of the organizations that signed it. I can promise you that price increases are happening now after a lot of heads up from our suppliers. I just saw an item that is produced in Mexico and it is now close to 25% higher than it was in early March. So price increases are hitting and those will hit our clients which include businesses of various size and industry, schools, and government. But it won't end there as consumers will pay too. Crap rolls downhill after all. How much damage are we willing to absorb to try and get manufacturing back here is what I'm sitting back and watching for. I think it needs to happen for certain industries (medical for example) and not so much for others. The same businesses that are seeing costs increase may pull the plug on marketing (which would hurt us in some areas), lessen bonuses, cut hiring, cut expansion plans and so on. These are just some of the possible hits we take. But in the long run I do believe if we can weather this I think we come out stronger. Which is what this is all about. I am unsure whether John Q Public has the stomach for it. Here's to hoping they do.

just take the L man, go chatgpt for a few and come back

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What levers would you pull to make the US economy the best in the world?


Who has the best economy in the world?

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Is the man that is maxing out his credit cards to buy nice things, rich?

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This is a short sighted view of tariffs. Tariffs are leverage and tools for creating environments an actions that are good for the USA.

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Tariffs are many things. Yes they raise prices on the goods taxed AND they’re a tool that can be used to try to level a playing field.

. I thought the latter went without saying.

An example of how tarriffs can level a playing field and raise prices is right in our back yard. Shrimp. It gets imported from overseas and sold here below what we can profitably sell them for. Our shrimpers are put at a competetive disadvantage as they have higher overhead than Mexico or China.

So I support putting tarriffs on imported shrimp to level the playing field. To the consumer, it will certainly mean higher prices. Consumers suffer. Shrimpers benefit.

America has high trade deficits bc of low interest rates.

Thanks to regulation and low savings.