Tariff Isn't Tax on Other Countries?🤪

So ask yourself we someone who voted for Trump whines about tariffs. Is this person just dumb or a total piece of shit?.

I say both. They are stupid racist homophobic assholes and deserve any pain they get for their choices. And though we should do everything we can to help those who will be hurt by Trump's policies, I sincerely hope that every single person who voted for that POS experiences an absolute fuck ton of pain and suffering in the coming months and years.

yeah, the point of being nice is to create a better world with better people who will be more capable of being nice.

and because it feels good.

but being nice to nazis doesn't feel nice, and it makes the world a more dangerous place, where being nice is harder and riskier and less pleasant.

laughing at their suffering is pretty great though. pointing and laughing at their suffering maybe makes the world a slightly better place, long term.

They're a tool for correcting price alterations on the seller side. If China is subsidizing the manufacturing of Fidgets, a matching tarrif on the import of Fidgets protects domestic manufacturing from artificially cheap competition by preventing consumers from seeing those low prices.

The subsidies don't even need to be hostile. The US subsidizes food to lower domestic costs, ensure a stockpile, and keep farmers happy. The side effect of driving down world grain prices is incidental.

Additionally, they strike me as the stick that pairs best with a carrot to spur domestic production of whatever you've put tarrifs on, along the lines of the CHIPS act.

It was killing me with the pandemic. ''I'm not sure about mRNA vaccines, I'm doing my own research'' homie, researching a vaccine means you are running a immunology lab. You're not researching, you're listening to a nut trying to sell you an unregulated vitamin in place of real medicine.

Here in the UK properly researching topics was something we did in multiple classes in secondary/high school. Not just googling shit for an essay but checking our sources as well as source authors and dates.

Schools should really put much more focus on explaining what science is and what it does

Hard agree. The US is currently speed running to third world status and its entirely because of education, and i assume its happening elsewhere based on the rise of conmen in leadership. Anyone who thinks for themself who has ever had a conversation with anyone MAGA on why they believe what they believe, will know that it was just because they were told to believe it. They do not have any sort of internal reasoning, they look to someone that fits their world view of what a leader looks like and then they believe every word that they say. It is the same way most people relate to religion, do not think about it, just have faith.

So when you mix together a wildly de-funded and heavily politicized education system that turns out followers who outsource reasoning to authority figures, with modern American solipsistic culture that allows the worst human beings alive to be seen as role models, then it was always just a matter of time before conmen took the reigns of the country. Anyone who is ever trying to argue their point with reasoning and facts will appear on the defense to any conman that is just riffing innacuracies, and the uneducated masses will see the conman as in control, which will then make them trust that person, it doesn't go any deeper than that.

Humans are fucking stupid.

I long for the time when people said "I read a Facebook page"

Generally my circle watches 12 45-second videos on TikTok which gave them bias from assuming seeing it more places made it more right. They don't even have to go to the comments to get bamboozled.

I have had "researcher" jobs that were not 'doing science'. I needed either journal access, or scihub/libgen, putting together shit my boss wanted to know.

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.

It's not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that's fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.

What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?

You can't get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that's all they've ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone's ears, for their entire adult lives.

I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don't obliterate my quality of life when they come due.

But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World's Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they're going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.

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

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.

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.

Yeah there are too many poorly educated lefties here. Or worse, well educated and deliberately deceptive.

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?

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:

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.

It's why they're called "pass-through costs."

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 ?

I don't see how that would help. In the ideal case of a finished product, tariffs artificially raise the effective price for the buyer; they don't change the math on the cost of production. Usually, they hurt the producing/exporting firm by forcing it to increase the asking price, which reduces sales. It reduces sales because the buying/importing firm has to pay higher prices. If the buying/importing firm gets tax reductions that are directly tied to the tariff, then its out-of-pocket expense hasn't changed, and it can just keep buying the imported product with no effect on its profits. That means that the producing/exporting firm can still sell exactly the same volume of product at the higher price, covering the tariff cost, with no effect on its profits. Nothing much has changed, except a bunch of extra paperwork and transactions.

There's only incentive to move production locally if the buying/importing firm can switch to a cheaper, local product, but retain the tax benefits, allowing it to keep more money. But that means the tariff money is no longer being collected, so somebody else is paying the taxes while not getting the benefits. In short, tariffs can only work by causing pain to somebody locally.

That's 2 if's. Sure, IF both of those things were true, maybe it would net out, but still be a paperwork and cashflow delay for the company (pay the duty today, get the money back at some point in the future) which sucks liquidity out of the market and generally holds back growth and investment.

But that isn't particularly relevant since neither of those two things will ever happen. The tax cuts will go to the top earners, and retaliatory tariffs are very much a thing and cannot be ignored.

Orrr... ya missed the "another one of our guys" part

Man, I wonder how basic reading comprehension played a role in the last election.

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.

I don't think he'll live more than 4 years anyway. Hopefully the movement collapses when he does

If you're a republican at this point you're one of two classes:

1. Elite, business owner, capitalist. Out for yourself and with enough money and resources and support to do what you want and evade hardships with ease while blaming people below you for their own problems. These are the people who know that if the system changes, they will lose their benefits and comforts and have every motivation in the world to keep pushing right-wing ideology even if they don't actually believe in it on some level. They have the luxury of not actually caring.
2. One of the people below the elite who work two or more jobs or can't get ahead no matter what they do because the system is designed to keep the poor where they are and keep filtering the wealth upwards. These are the people without the time or education to learn why their lives are trash, and manage to watch 30 minutes of FOX or OAN news clips on facebook every Sunday night before bed so they truly, honestly believe that immigration and trans people are the source of all their problems and genuinely don't understand why the good guys aren't doing something about all the bad guys, because this is the extent of their mental strength.

Fox News got around that by claiming they're entertainment, not news.

Ignorance is not an excuse. Fire all MAGAs for taxifs.

You’re doing god’s work in the hellish 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.

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

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.

"Are you saying 1 fouth of Americans are removed?" "Yeah at least 1 fourth."

"The Big Lie" is what Sanders is calling it.

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.

How does the saying about selling a lie go?

The real hard part is it's a partial truth.

The sellers do pay the tariffs, they just don't talk about what that does to the prices.

The other problem is it cuts both ways, and a number of the idiots will say as long as you're hurting them too, fine.

And then we have retaliatory tariffs, which also cut both ways.

IMHO, our biggest issue is we've been using cheap Chinese products and labor as a crutch instead of increasing wages. They've been able to cut down wages because Amazon, Temu and Shein have been providing products WAY WAY under marketable US made prices.

The problem lies where they "find" their "research" when they see the answer they want to see on social media rather than an actual study or any factual references.

I don't understand why this even needs to be researched. I'm no economist and I don't know much about tariffs, but: costs more to get product to me for any reason = product costs me more. When has that ever not been the case? What am I missing?

What kills me is that we shouldn't be researching a thing that was taught in school.

Actual footage of us GenX kids learning about The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.

What do you tell the people who are in fact thinking themselves and concluding that:

adding tariffs is a good thing for the US workers. for one, it ensures that resources (like aluminum) are being sourced from within the US, adding extra mining jobs. For two, it means that complex goods tend to be manufactured/assembled within the US, again adding labor/assembly jobs. For three, why should the product become more expensive to the end user if it's the same production process being employed?

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.

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.

Where did you get the idea that tariffs are supposed to increase domestic production in any way?

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

...next election?

nice of you to assume there's gonna be a NEXT election.

I bet a coworker $20 that "tariff" and "tax" were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. "fake news".

That’s actually a huge problem I’ve had with a right winger.

Even though he was relatively reasonable, we got stuck because we could not agree on what fascism means.

I was good to use a dictionary or better yet Wikipedia. He said it can only mean what Mussolini meant when he came up with the term.

What was annoying is that all I wanted to do was say, group X does Y things, Y things are fascism and fascism is bad.

It’s just mental gymnastics because it doesn’t matter what we call it, group X is still doing bad things, but instead we got stuck on details.

Imo this is pretty much all right wing’s only play, dismantle the tools of logic so the conversation doesn’t even happen in the first place.