It seems we’re now entering the “find out” stage, and it’s incredibly frustrating.
As a tinkerer who loves building things, this is heartbreaking stuff. I have projects in progress that may have to be put on hold.
I tend to order things as I need them, but it’s tempting to stockpile the basics. But I don’t think it will help much in the long run if this continues, and truly hope this madness will be seen for what it is and an appropriate backlash/correction will follow.
It’s not just that I may not be able to continue some projects, but that I may not be able to continue pushing the boundaries of my knowledge and experience as I learn more.
Thinking about this in terms of younger aspiring builders, this will stagnate the technical growth of a generation.
When covid hit, I def sold a lot of junk that I had sitting around for years
We did it with air conditioner upgrades, among other things. Now? Five figures of previously-probable, but optional, spending for the rest of the year is on hold indefinitely. Prices on lots of things (construction materials, holy shit) are already way up, so we'll be sitting on as much cash as we can until that eases up. We don't need that much, really....
It seems that China has the upper hand for now, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
We can buy goods by printing money, which no other nation can lay claim to, because the U.S. Dollar is the default world currency. Everyone accepts USD, and wants USD. Every other nation on Earth in fact is always looking to buy dollars, because dollars are what everything is purchased in. Further, our standing in the globe and favorable geographic location means we can import anything from virtually anywhere, but most especially China, Korea, and Japan.
Yeah we don't "make things" here anymore, the pundits say, apart from dozens of product categories over hundreds of industries. "Everything comes from China!" Okay, and? I don't want a job in a factory and I suspect a shitload of other people here also don't, and my source for that is every factory and logistics center near me is constantly trying to hire people and seemingly being unable to.
If we assume China is an adversary, then I would say it logically follows that the vast majority of American executives are in fact collaborating with the enemy, because they played critical roles in getting China to where it is today.
Free markets don't care about moral concerns like that though, just what's most economically efficient. And in the absence of tariffs, trading with China is very economically efficient.
As opposed to an authoritarian, Democratic regime making military threats against neighboring free, democratic nations (Canada)?
> If everything stayed exactly the way it is today, except the Communist party rulership were dissolved and replaced by a multi-party constitutional republic with representatives appointed through free, open elections I don't think the US would have nearly the same incentive to divest from China.
Why does the U.S. have the right to declare unilaterally what forms of government are acceptable and what aren't? And no I'm not saying we have to necessarily trade with them, obviously, apart from the fact that the CCP came into power in 1949. We're a bit late to suddenly have issues with their government NOW after nearly half a century spent working with them in the open, and giving them shit tons of money.
Our right to declare that rule apart from the consent of the governed is unacceptable comes from the fact that it is unacceptable, not because the US has any special rights to declare it so. We hold these truths to be self-evident, now just as we did then.
The US has always had that same fundamental issue with China's government; we've just chosen to react to that reality in different ways over the years. China being more of an economic powerhouse now makes it a larger threat to human freedom than it has been in the past, so there are valid reasons to re-consider the status quo.
Fill in the blank with preferred major nation power of your choice.
Have not heard anything about 1,000 years fight for global supremacy
Watching these people discover where the world's rare earths come from is equally amazing and terrifying.
There are reasons that the Chinese (government) want so many dollars, and the external funds are not easy to replace (or they would have done it already). This is not to support the current trade ‘war’, but just to point out that it’s a bit more complicated than you can describe in a pithy comment.
Yes, sounds like something that should be changed to increase the strength of the US. China has protectionist economic policy and trade barriers. If that equals strength why shouldn't we do it too?
Tall order to prove this. Does it actually equal strength? What is strength and does China actually have said strength? None of this is defined.
Additionally, China has economic policies that if the US followed would be very, like the games they play with their currency valuation for example. They also have stringent capital controls, many of their largest businesses are the government has a large slice of the ownership, they subsidize export corporations to a much broader degree etc.
Are you also arguing for those things as well? Because its not simply tariffs that mark the only difference in economic policy between the US and China
The other asinine thing is we implemented tariffs against all countries, without a plan, and without a definitive proven reason as to why. As many economists have pointed out, the trade deficit is very deceiving and does not equate to there being a problem for the US inherently.
Actually righting the severe damage done to our industrial base would take constructive direction by the government to build it back - once again the complete opposite of what they're actually doing by attacking our still-existing educational/research institutions.
At best high tariff taxes are just closing the barn door long after the horse ran away. But really it's just the same old pattern of the same type of hollow politicians using pent up frustration about the last scam to drive support for their next scam.
In all seriousness though, China is also not some young slick economic powerhouse. It's largely propped up facade with serious structural issues that the US doesn't have.
Also keep in mind that while countries are annoyed with the US, that doesn't mean they are going to welcome Chinese ships into their waters.
I think the answer fairly conclusively in the global south is that, yes, yes they will let Chinese ships in their waters.
It will be bizarro-land if we have people in Kenya, Colombia, South Africa, and Peru driving around in 10000 dollar Chinese EVs and using 5000 dollar Chinese robots to clean their homes. While we pay 5 to 10 times that for the same conveniences.
I seriously think there's a really good chance the world 25 years from now may have a fundamentally different structure than it has had for the past 100 years.
Yes, their housing market is messed up and that causes problems in the financial sector, but it's a real stretch to call everything else in the country "propped up".
I was Peru last year and saw nothing but Chinese made electronics, especially phones, and a lot of cars. I see more and more Chinese electric cars in Mexico too. Talking to the locals they seem to like Chinese tourists just wish they spent as much as Americans.
The source thinks the opposite. You can complain directly. I don't think it gives a flying fuck
I still think this approach to addressing that issue is complete madness.
Not only is there no coherent plan for how that reliance will be reduced, but we’ve now crippled ourselves in the meantime.
And their approach is to cripple our own government.
> I still think this approach to addressing that issue is complete madness.
You're assuming the 'total reliance' argument and corresponding actions are being done in good faith. The original 'emergency' declarations justifying large initial tariffs in February were because of a 'fentanyl crisis'. Which then morphed in to 'well, we should be manufacturing here for defense purposes' and assorted other arguments along the way ("we're getting ripped off!", etc).
There's a danger in being cynical about this, but also danger in taking everything at face value. There's been no coherent communicated policy with justifications and expected outcomes or timelines ever put forward the same way twice from this administration.
To clarify, I’m not assuming the administration is acting in good faith.
But in casual conversation, I try to assume the person who worries about total reliance is acting in good faith, so my reply was primarily directed at the comment itself which I have to assume comes from someone who may believe the administration is actually attempting to address the issue.
I think there are numerous ways to split this:
- The reliance concern as a standalone consideration
- How the current administration sees/uses this concern
- How the public perceives this concern
- How the current administration claims they’re addressing it
- Whatever the current administration’s true goals are
And in many cases, these products are neither cheap nor expensive, they’re simply the only option, because no one else in the world manufactures them. So, what exactly are we comparing them to? And if the assumption is that producing the same goods in Europe or the US would be more expensive then that’s likely true but only because we still expect to earn a living wage, even in factory jobs
This is exactly it. And even if an item can be US-supplied, it's components are only available from China.
Tariffs are how we get it to stop being built in the US.
Do you think he's acting when he does things like keep preventing an interviewer from moving on because he wants to make extra sure everyone knows he entirely believes that obviously-photoshopped, not-trying-to-look-like-anything-but-an-overlay letters and numbers on a picture of someone's hand were in fact real tattoos?
When this administration focuses solely on one side of that (Goods vs Services), they miss the forest for the trees. I'm not saying we shouldn't bring back manufacturing, because we should, but we can't pretend that we get the short end of the stick in this trade partnership.
China makes the cheap shit that isn't economical here, and the only way to make it economical here is to pay a tax on the cheap shit we want if it isn't made here, but the crazy thing is we could do a 400% tariff on Chinese imports, and it is still too expensive to buy American for most goods. Not even getting to the point that we don't have the infrastructure here because that also costs money, which would rise the price for American goods even higher.
Does Bill Gates mow his own lawn? No!
Does Donald Trump grill his own Big Mac? No!
Because when you hit a certain "wealth bracket" you stop doing things that are below that and hire them out. We hired China because we were too rich.
The incentive for their companies is that they can access US markets. But their government is a bit different. That government has clearly been serious about 2 things for the past couple of decades, one is developing an internal market. (Which, prior to our imposition of tariffs, they were failing miserably at). The other is their pivot to the global south. (Which, prior to our imposition of tariffs, they were wildly successful at).
Now that we started a trade war, they will be more successful at both. Especially the pivot to the global south. I guess I just can't see why the government of China feels more urgency to talk with us, than it feels to accelerate their pivot to, and development of, markets in the global south for instance? Why is talking to us the better choice for their government strategically speaking?
I mean, if I were sitting in their shoes, I'd just be like, "Man, this is be the perfect illustration of why it was so important to pivot to the global south in the first place."
They can't tell businesses "Look, we've dramatically increased your cost of doing business, made your products more expensive (which will likely lead to lower sales) and we're forcing you to spend extra capital by paying tariffs on your products... Now all you need to do is come up with billions of dollars to build the factories that build your product and eat the high costs for the 5 - 10 years it will take to build the factories. We don't care if you're a small business that only sells $1M of product a year, if you want to reduce your costs, you need to build the factories."
Of course, the question is whether Americans really want those factory jobs -- do parents aspire to have their children work in a factory assembling iPhones? There's only so many Robot Technician jobs to go around (despite the promise of unlimited high paid technician jobs, for the forseable future there will be plenty of menial factory jobs)
"Cheap foreign products are a necessity when so-called American companies don't love Americans enough to pay them what they're worth. It's the whole reason things went overseas in the first place. It's gonna be nice if we can finally get American companies to actually support America and pay citizens what they're worth."
The above sounds nice, but it's oversimplified, like a lot of political rhetoric recently. Now, if this does end up making real living wages for the American worker a commonplace thing, that's awesome, but I'm pessimistic given the history of things, how money can influence politics, and how corporate lawyers can find loopholes.
I'm not even completely anti-tariff. I just think the way we're going about doing these tariffs is pretty much the opposite way anyone who was trying to bring manufacturing back to the US would do them. Low, clear ratcheting up tariffs are tariffs that allow businesses time to change their strategy without disrupting their income streams. Instead, we're going to bankrupt basically anyone who isn't already a multi-national.
Maybe I'm an idiot and I'm missing something clear, but to me, the reason why the S&P500 and passive investing have been so successful since basically the 1940's is simply that we have had competent, technocratic administrations for the last hundred years. Other countries' markets have not fared so "efficiently."
Again, maybe I'm missing something, but I'm looking at this much more defensively than I did under the first administration. The one thing I can't figure out is the dollar. My brother is obsessed with the "dollar milkshake" theory, whereas it seems clear that we are messing with reserve status and are trying to intentionally weaken the dollar... I just don't know. It doesn't really make much sense what we're doing, and I haven't found anyone who can make an argument that makes sense to me.
The goal is to eliminate income taxes and replace it with tariffs. An added bonus (for the administration), is that tariffs can be changed if the party in question pays for access to make their case.
The stated reasoning of supporting domestic industry is a smoke screen for the above.
Maybe there is an equilibrium in there, but I don’t see it.
Taxes don't incentivise earning less, but tarriffs most definitely incentivises spending less!
This theory does not make sense.
The theory "makes sense" in that it's what he's stated as a goal. But as policy, it's nonsensical. This is our world now.
Import-substitution is bad for econ 101 reasons that most people who have an axe to grind against Dems would've been absolutely capable of grasping only a few years ago. Now, it seems so many are willing to turn off a part of their brains for this short-sighted wishful thinking. "Well, the official narrative is that we're doing this to get manufacturing back, so let's wait and see" is something most people would immediately perceive as bs if a Dem was sitting in the Oval Office. Seeing a politician campaign on a stupid platform, and then getting surprised he actually shoots himself in the foot spending political capital pursuing is also very Latin American.
The good part is that the soon-to-be-coming recession the federal government just fabricated out of thin air is fully self-inflicted, and therefore somewhat easy to fix. The bad part is you have (at least) 4 more years of this lunacy, so it might take a while.
Many people in America seem to be convinced that their involvement in the democracy ended after voting in the elections, and cannot conceptualize how to deal with an adversarial government. The scale of the protests and pushback Trump administration has received is laughably small compared to the scale of America as a country. People are lacking a basic political immune system, or even a sense of self preservation.
And the most puzzling part is that the entire situation is 100% self-inflicted. It usually takes a major war or a sustained external campaign to inflict the kind of damage Trump administration has done to the country in such a short period of time.
Tinkers are inventors, which are future entrepreneurs. This administration can't think as far ahead as its nose.
I'm so sick and tired of Cloudflare at this point.
Like cmon you're running a shop and a blog, not a missile launch facility
This is going to smash the cash flow of so many small businesses
I wonder how much stuff is going to be completely wasted by this process.
I ordered their Orion O6 Mini ITX board back in December, for $430.49 total ($85 shipping).
The email this morning said they had to cancel all un-shipped orders, and I could re-order and prepay the tariff through 4XL (they dropped DHL and FedEx due to tariff complications).
I put the board in my cart, and now the total is $1500.90 ($1,150 in shipping).
I'm happy to pay for the actual cost of shipping a single item across an entire ocean, but maybe that increase is a bit much...
The Import-ant thing (heh) is that the additional money you must pay is not going to the manufacturer or the shipper. It won't be improving working-conditions of foreign sweatshop laborers, or upgrading cargo ships to reduce pollution, etc.
Instead, it's going to a US government official that basically seizes goods crossing the border who won't give them back without a payment.,
Worse: These higher import-taxes all US companies and consumers are being made to pay will probably go towards the benefit of... lowering what rich Americans pay on their personal income taxes.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3532216/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
e.g. https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/tax-rules-for-the-sup...
I don't think I should be able to order a little plastic trinket for $10 shipped direct from China, when just shipping the same thing inside the US costs $10+!
Skipping the reseller saves you money and pollutes the environnement less.
You think that makes sense?
Once again, tell me how that makes any goddamn sense.
https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c450
You should really research UPU rules.
A few possible factors off the top of my head:
1. Shipping is much cheaper in bulk.
2. A local delivery service has different markups for different kinds of delivery.
3. Local delivery services that pick up from you may have additional expenses, like a wide but shallow network of pickup locations and daily collections.
4. It costs more because somebody is charging what the market will bear and the local market is more affluent.
These are small parcels. Its not really "bulk", as in shipping whole pallets from point A to B. Even then its still cheaper even if you look at commercial bulk account rates. You're ignoring UPU rules.
> 2. Sea-shipping is extremely cheap compared to over land--and has been for literally thousands of years.
And then once it gets to the port it goes on the same trucks that would be driving to drive it across town. It's still driving hundreds to thousands of miles compared to driving 300mi between Dallas and Houston. So its paying for sea shipping and then paying to put it on a truck and drive it even further. It still doesn't make sense it would be cheaper overall, and massively cheaper at that.
For example, say you lived in LA, even right on the water across the street from the port.. Lets say you have widget A shipped from China and widget B shipped from a warehouse at the docks. Cost to ship widget A from China, which includes the cost to get it to their port, on to the boat, across the ocean, off the boat, inspected by customs, resorted, put on a truck, and sent to your home is probably several times cheaper than from that warehouse, sorted, put on a truck, and delivered to your house. Delivered by the same truck, sorted at the same parcel sorting facility.
Once again, tell me how that makes sense or how that should obviously be cheaper.
> 3. A local delivery service charges more for one kind of delivery so that they can charge less for another kind.
> 4. The local delivery service charges more to cover additional expenses, like a wide but shallow network of pickup locations and daily collections.
I didn't realize UPS and USPS and FedEx are bespoke local delivery services, news to me! In fact, the bespoke "local" delivery services that only offer specific services tend to be cheaper in those specific domains, such as overnighting documents between common city pairs (like DFW<->Austin, DFW<->Houston, etc). But they really only do documents and only do overnights between commercial buildings.
These orgs I'm talking about (USPS, for example) are the same people doing the delivery for those China Post parcels. It's not like China Post is driving through my neighborhood delivering these things. So any idea of that cost being a part of it is once again not based in reality, at least not in the way you're putting it.
> 5. It costs more because somebody is charging what the market will bear and the local market is more affluent.
Its shipping to the same people. This isn't a change of affluence at all. And once again, UPS, USPS, and FedEx aren't some local delivery companies at least to my knowledge.
The biggest factor are UPU rules.
> A few possible factors off the top of my head:
Try actually looking into the topics instead of just throwing out random ideas that aren't based in reality or facts and acting like I'm the one that has logical fallacies in my arguments. Yours is filled with logical fallacies such as an argument from ignorance and a hasty generalization. Maybe this doesn't make sense because it's an illogical state to be in outside of appeasing bullshit international laws.
Why do they choose to deliver it to me for so cheap while charging me a fortune to deliver my packages to my family the next town over? Because they're required to by international law. In fact, me paying a ton more to ship domestically subsidizes that cheap delivery from China.
What is the fundamental harm or injustice that needs to be fixed or reduced here?
I'm confident there are much better ways to tackle those things (e.g. pollution, consumer waste, moral failings) than a blanket import tax on an entire country-of-origin, even one done in a proper and legal way.
When shipping from China instead of the US, the first segment is cheaper, the middle distribution and last mile are the same, and there's a ship segment that splits a couple thousand dollar container cost across a massive pile of packages. I don't expect a particularly big difference.
It's gotta be... bad, right? It seems like it'd be bad.
Is it a net good or bad thing to try riskier stuff? Maybe some moonshots pay off, maybe a ton of money gets wasted on stupid ideas.
This is pretty much what’s been happening since 2008.
Investment in anything that may move certain indicators a good direction (some of the money pays workers; GDP perhaps even goes up as a result of the activity) but worsens the economic position of "doers" across the overall population doesn't just fail to transfer money downward and stimulate consumer demand, but does the opposite. Investment in ways to more efficiently and effectively deny people healthcare coverage they're supposed to have, for instance. Lots of activity in weakly-competitive markets falls under this heading, and since we all but entirely stopped enforcing anti-trust in the '70s, that describes an increasingly large proportion of the economy with each passing year.
Real estate: demand for houses means demand for house building and maintenance.
Crypto: demand for chips and electricity (yes, this is super-dumb demand for dubious benefit, but demand nonetheless, just like paying people to dig holes and fill them in is also demand).
Stock: I almost agree with you, but 1) stockbroking is a whole industry funded by taking a percentage on stock purchases, 2) if you buy some stock for some cash, the counterparty now has cash, which they are either going to keep, spend, or invest in something else, so the transaction is neutral-to-positive in terms of demand generation.
Bonds: why do governments issue bonds? To get money to spend on stuff! Every penny of your bond purchase gets spent on government activities. Some of that is paying interest, but that interest is income for other bondholders (who then typically spend it)
With taxes and transaction fees skimming a little bit off the top of everything, it’s actually almost impossible to engage in any financial transaction without that transaction stimulating all kinds of additional activity. Not all of it is valuable or even ethical activity, but the point is that the scenario posited (“everyone is just investing and there’s no real demand underpinning it”) is very unlikely to happen.
I'd expect "more investment dollars chasing smaller returns" (because the demand-side doesn't have enough cash) to show up as a declining velocity of money, and from what I can tell that has been trending downward from a peak in the late '90s (M2) or around '08 (M1). I'd also expect this to cause some apparently-goofy valuations in the stock market, and... ditto. Increasing reliance on investments that rely on the price of the investment simply going up for returns, not on returns from productive activity, and... yep (real estate sure appears to be caught in a nasty trap of this sort, in particular). Or an enthusiastic boom in "investment vehicles" that permit near-zero-actual-economic-value speedrunning of the entire history of financial scams, and... yep, again.
You used to occasionally see bailouts of too-big-to-fail companies or industries, now the White House holds buy-a-Tesla day, presumably to boost TSLA. Just today the US Commerce Secretary announced that a UK airline would buy at least $10 billion of Boeing airplanes (Boeing stock is up ~4%).
Maybe it's just me paying more attention to stock market news these days, but my impression is that politicians have recently begun to care a lot more about the overall stock market going up because a lot more voters care about the overall stock market going up.
What?
Index fund investors do not do that; they just buy the securities that are listed in the index, which are selected typically because they have large market capitalization or are old, not because they are underpriced. So, to whatever extent the market conforms to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, it's not doing so because of the index fund investors.
I don't disagree. I also don't believe this observation in isolation supports the assertion "too many index fund investors really inhibit price discovery." Remember, that statement was made in the context of today, not in a hypothetical world where only a few lone traders at home trade individual shares and high frequency traders, hedge funds, and pension plans are for some reason no longer willing to place their own bets.
I'd rather not let some of the anti-index investing tropes gain traction, since they're insanely stupid and, to the extent that index investing is good for people who aren't very skilled at investing, quite damaging.
One slight quibble, though: high frequency traders make their money by providing liquidity, not (as far as possible) betting on the future profits of companies.
I think the question of what percentage of the market could be invested in index funds before things got weird is an interesting one. It really is hypothetical, though. Independent investors have more sway, not less, as an increasing number of people put money in index funds. There will always be a lot of people who are very rationally (and also depending on the investor... less rationally) unwilling to give that up.
I'm not excited to see how an administration that seems to enjoy manipulating market swings pairs with investors that treat the labor force as a stock price lever.
This estimate was produced today (May 8), and represents increasing GDP growth vs. the previous estimate
The model is likely based on fundamental economic factors and rational decision making. The latter is why Q1 ended up with -0.3% growth. You could call this the Trump effect.
https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow/archives
This wild of a swing makes me re-assess depending on this data for anything.
That's something I hadn't though about in the context of tariffs with interesting implications.
Does following IP rules mean that any products and technologies that wont manufacturer in the US but holds IP protections become subject to a permanent tariff? Giving countries a permanent 125% advantage over US businesses when using that IP?
What's the plan here?
…
As far as the Trump administration goes, there doesn't seem to be a coherent plan. Among themselves they can't even decide if they were or were not already negotiating with China.
I've yet to see someone who is a part of the administration who is clearly educated about trade making an coherent argument about the tariffs.
"Jamison and I working together couldn't have put this deal together in 3 years, but President Trump was able to pull this off in less than 45 days!" (paraphrasing but IIRC it was pretty close).
Putin would love the US government destroying large portions of its economy for no discernible gain. I think Putin probably encouraged Trump by telling him all the idiotic things he keeps repeating like how the trade deficit shows the US is getting ripped off. Or that huge tariffs will bring manufacturing back to the US. Or that countries would be lining up to make a deal.
But no actual sane person can explain the end game because anyone with even a basic understanding of economics and trade knows that none of those things are or were ever true.
I think this because the right wing think tanks published that Project 2025 plan and it's clearly being followed even though Trump lied and said he wasn't aware of it
This makes zero sense.
Based on what? They’re going up and down every day. And the Trump administration is clearly desperate enough for a deal with China to be caught lying about engaging in talks.
In the absence of IP protections, it would hurt the countries with the highest tariffs on their products because there would be an incentive to produce an equivalent product domestically or source it from another country whose products are taxed at a lower rate. In practice, it still doesn't work out to impose broad tariffs because no one has a fully domestic supply chain. It really only makes sense to tariff very specific items in new-ish markets where you have a foreign player whose government is subsidizing production, e.g. Chinese EV's, Chinese EV batteries, solar panels, etc.
What do you call necessary? What about non-necessary items? What about IP that improves manufacturing efficiency by 5% in some process? Better battery tech? Better UI? Better chips? Better sensors? In some cases the answer is yes, in some cases the answer is no. If the answer is yes then the US pays 125% more for that item, if the answer is no then the US has worse efficiency, worse prices, worse technologies.
You talk in absolute which makes me feel like you're missing all the nuances at play.
Unlike sales taxes or income taxes they are paid up front, before the sale.
If they don't make a sale due to tariffs they still have to pay them and end up with unprofitable inventory.
Tariffs can change at any time, and order/shipping times are long, so they are very difficult to plan for. Products may have been ordered months before tariffs but end up liable.
> Since they are electronics products/components, there’s a chance we may be able to request reclassification on some items to avoid the 125% ‘reciprocal’ tariff, but there’s no assurance that it will succeed, and even if it does, it is many, many months until we could see a refund.
I did not realize exemptions were processed as refund requests. So even if they are granted, it still kills cash flow in the meantime.
Tariffs are working as intended: if somebody can manufacture similar things here they will be in advantage.
This isn’t an endorsement of tariffs, just an observation: their goal is to give domestic manufacturers an edge when similar goods can be made locally. In that sense, they’re functioning exactly as intended.
I’m doing what most people who can are - freezing capital spend, unwinding positions and contracts that will be hit and planning for the inevitable crash in the fall. The companies that rely on advertising for revenue are going to be purging workforce — there nothing to sell.
Ironically the idiots rallying for the clown will be hardest hit when the farms loans are due and the cotton and soybeans are rotting in the fields.
If the 'intent' was to spur manufacturing, you'd enact laws with long term financial stability planned in. Few are going to commit to spending millions equipping factories when the 'tariff moat' that might make those factories sustainable will go away if Trump sees a movie in six weeks that says tariffs are bad.
The 'intent' seems to be to create financial instability and chaos, to allow Trump to position himself as the financial savior, and we are concentrating huge amounts of economic power in the hands of a single person.
I suspect that's wrong, and that they didn't even try to calculate those price points, which will vary per kind of good, not per country. If the per-country tariffs happen to match those unknown numbers they didn't even try to calculate, that can't be due to intention, it can only be dumb luck.
They can't and it's not worth the multi-year effort to start up a factory to do so. That's why these tariffs are so dumb, they aren't protecting US manufacturers, they are just hurting consumers needlessly.
Gotta pay tariffs on the machines to manufacture the stuff first.
So just a few steps and we'll be good.
1. Donald Trumps tariffs are bad for everybody in the USA.
2. Donald Trumps tariffs are bad for everybody in the world.
3. Other countries don't have tariffs.
4. The tariffs that other countries have are good for their countries.
5. The tariffs that other countries have are good for the world.
6. The European Union does not have tariffs.
7. The European Union tariffs are good because they protect domestic workers and production.
8. Donald Trump tariffs are bad because they hurt domestic workers and production.
Great if you only need a few square inches.
They are also insanely expensive if you are used to China prices. Boards with 10-15 components being $100+ each. Couple that with a domestic PCB manufacturing which is ~10x the cost of China, you are looking at something like an Arduino costing $250.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I haven't ever had to 'go over' the board with PCBWay. Maybe why they are so cheap, but I've only ever had one quality issue.
I send the gerbers and pick and place and take it from there. I approve photos If they have any question (which is rare) its over email. I don't even mind sourcing the parts/pcb/stencil myself. Its the components which make the tariff painful.
From what I’ve seen the biggest impact is just the carriers requiring a huge fee (relative to my $40 worth of PCBs) just to deal with the tariffs at all. I almost wonder if there’s a profitable side gig for someone couriering PCBs from Canada -> US, mailing them, and then flying back. A single suitcase can carry a LOT of PCBs. Obviously declaring it all still but just structured as a single import so the fees as a percentage would go down.
Biggest tax hike in my lifetime.
Spoiler alert: There hasn’t been any noticeable reaction yet. You might expect to see price increases or higher order volumes when searching for items like the ESP32, but that hasn’t been the case so far.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the potential impact of removing the de minimis threshold on shipments. It’s hard to imagine how the postal system could efficiently handle tariffs on a dozen small $1 packages from AliExpress landing in the mailbox. I suspect we’re moving beyond that point, with private companies likely clearing these shipments in bulk before they reach USPS—if they even make it that far.
That's a nice thing to do, but it might be more sustainable to increase the cost some now, so that you don't have to increase it as much to cover the tariffs in the future.
De minimis in Canada has been $20 (and sorta $40) for a loooong time. That's like US$14 these days.
Usually brokers and brokered shipments (like UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc) will charge any and every tax/duty absolutely correctly. Possibly charging you more than the cost of the item to calculate all that. And notoriously delivering the parcel and mailing you a bill 2 weeks later. Virtually every Canadian that shops online has some horror story about it.
For stuff coming by post and directly assessed by customs, they used to be sticklers and assess charges on everything worth >$20, even if it's $2.60 in taxes and a $8.95 fee for the privilege of calculating it. In the last ~15 years, they pick and choose.
They seem to ignore China stuff since it's mostly low value and have a sharp eye to spot stuff from, e.g. Japan that's probably higher value.
No idea how Aliexpress and others that use gig workers for last-mile delivery do it. Maybe they just pay the tariffs/taxes because the item value is still low once you exclude the final delivery costs from the valuation.
What was free shipping to the US is now $60 on this item: https://www.ebay.com/itm/388222776222 (a $200 shipping version at https://www.ebay.com/itm/405822192434).
Here’s a keyloading adapter for one of my radios at $600 shipping(!) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/146313261605
Absolute frustration.
Timing is good for phone makers here honestly because phone innovation is slowing down so high prices for the same stuff can be blamed on tarriffs instead of lack of innovation.
The second most expensive electronics would be game systems, and that'll be painful, but I do wonder if e.g. Nintendo would pair with cellular companies and do installment plans like phones, and/or if PS/Xbox would try to do something similar with ISPs (e.g. AT&T Gamer Deal) or rent their consoles instead of selling them.
Gamer PCs are gonna take a serious hit though, and the price of individual games is certain to increase.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report...
$252 million was collected from excise tariffs on May 6. You can look at this PDF day to day.
EDIT: adding on to this... most days are between $150m and $300m. There's been a few days north of $300m this calendar year. There was also one day - April 16? 17th? - with $11.5b coming in. Under 'excise taxes'. I have to assume that was something to do with early April tariff announcements? But haven't seen anything remotely similar since.
So this "billions of dollars are pouring in from tariffs!" is... simply not true. There's not been a huge shift one way or the other yet.
EDIT 2 - April 22 - https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report.... $11b in excise taxes deposited.
Free trade combined with cheap labor led to a massive loss of national capability. We outsourced 75% of the supply chain for electronics, and provided decades of free training to foreign companies. Then we pulled a surprised mug when those same companies decided that they don't need us any more.
As a parent of young kids, I'm also keenly aware of how much random plastic garbage we import - just to throw it away after maybe one use. Party favors are a big one. Families are drowning in low-cost, low-quality products that wind up in a landfill. Free trade created this situation, and I don't think it's good for anybody except importers and factory owners.
I don't know what the solution is, and the current tariffs clearly aren't it. But free trade with China hasn't exactly been great for the US in a longterm sense, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise just because we're getting cheap consumer goods.
The situation in electronics manufacturing specifically I will concede is concerning.
Energy costs (particularly natural gas prices) are much lower in the US than in the other manufacturing powerhouses, and some manufacturing is very energy-intensive.
Chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Average_...
Domestic manufacturing decreasing as tariffs decrease implies that increasing tariffs would increase domestic manufacturing. With their argument being that you needed to do it 50 years ago when the shift started because if you do it now it's really painful.
That's a misnomer if ever there was one. The current batch of tariffs will destroy enough American wealth to nosedive the economy before any long-term change. Manufacturing is not coming back, there's just not gonna be enough wealth in the US to warrant it. Plus there are counter-tariffs, so if you make it in America, you can't reliably export it.
How would you solve it differently?
There is no overnight solve at this point. But a solution would be working to help countries with more friendly government to your own to build up their manufacturing with the promise of guaranteed business to help prop it up by moving away from the hostile government.
This is also why you pass the tariffs through the legislature and not via some literal "emergency" order, which means that the tariffs could disappear at literally any point, and probably will if things get bad. So what's the point of investment if you have a better than 50-50 chance and you're going to feel the pain either way?
It's just exactly the opposite way anyone who is seriously trying to shift manufacturing would go about doing it. There is also some strong dollar issues, but that's really complicated.
Of course as other comments in the thread have pointed out: a much smarter way to roll out tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing is by slowing ramping them up to give industry time to react.
My lathe was $3400. A week later the price is now $4000 thanks to tariffs. There are no domestic manufacturers left and banks/Wall Street aren't going to finance someone spinning up a machine tools company. The difference in price isn't enough to erase China's excessive subsidies to their industry combined with their lower labor pay rates so even if someone did try to compete they still couldn't match $4000. My best guess is more like $6-7k. In the end all the tariffs are doing is making it more difficult to get into machining.
If idiots and sycophants weren't steering the ship the US would have a state-run investment bank that partnered with private capital to offer investments to anyone who wanted to start a business. Frankly I think there is lots of opportunity in various spaces like machine tools to make innovative products at all scales from the small hobbyist to big industrial shops. It won't be a 1000x return though so no one cares.
In defense of the comment you're responding to: measures like making it impossible to compete by subsidizing their domestic competition. (I wasn't trying to suggest China and others do not use tariffs)
What does this mean?
The clearer wording is probably:
>Then we were surprised when those same companies decided that they don't need us any more.
If we only tariffed China, this argument would hold water. Instead, we’re handing every country’s imports to China on a platter.
No, free trade did not create this situation. People like you did. I'm not over here drowning in useless plastic and we've lived in the same globalised world together.
I expect Mexico and Canadian warehouses will have a lot of business. Stocking a warehouse in USA would be insanely risky because of this upfront cost.
This will kill smaller and medium sized businesses and concentrate capital. Corporations with deep pockets must be elated. This kills their mid sized competitors.
Even if it only caused a 20% drop in spending, a lot of powerful people would take notice.
In capitalism you vote with your wallet. If we continue buying stuff like nothing has happened, whatever happened must be fine. It’s not fine and the quickest and cleanest way to say that is to simply stop.
No new cars, no new appliances. No new anything. Don’t buy any foreign goods, go on a spending diet. If you absolutely must, buy used and buy local.
If some policy brings the economy to a screeching halt smart money pays attention real fast.
duxup•3h ago
If you're a business used to selling at a certain price point, and the value proposition is established with your customers .... do you bother risking shattering that expectation if the future is unknown?
Do you risk customers saying "Oh crap my hobby that I did with Adafruit is now untenable ... well I'm out." vs "Well they're low on stock, I'll check back when this is all over."
I don't know if it is all or nothing but it seems like there's a lot of risk either way.
Workaccount2•3h ago
duxup•3h ago
Also if there's a lot of "I'm out" you just bought a lot of stuff nobody wants to pay anything near the cost of.
SketchySeaBeast•3h ago
grey-area•3h ago
If you're small enough I guess you might get a way with it, if you're big enough you'll be threatened into compliance.
Either way the US customers and the rest of the world lose, everyone is a little poorer because of these tariffs.
tantalor•3h ago
duxup•3h ago
dylan604•2h ago
jacobyoder•3h ago
mlinhares•3h ago
QuercusMax•3h ago
Why doesn't Wal-Mart or whoever make a loud pronouncement that they'll fund primary campaigns against any congressperson who supports these tariffs? These companies got Citizens United passed so they can spend unlimited amounts of political money, so why don't they use this power when their business is threatened like this?
SketchySeaBeast•3h ago
amanaplanacanal•2h ago
SketchySeaBeast•1h ago
vkou•3h ago
That's how autocracies work, my friend, you can't rules lawyer your way out of one, because the rules can always be changed to fuck you over some more.
seunosewa•3h ago
mrguyorama•3h ago
Like always, the morons who carry water for the fascists think they can "control" them, or radically underestimate the damage a moron with no accountability can do.
Amazon tried to barely show consumers the tariff hurt them, and Trump called Bezos directly, and that plan went away instantly.
Companies are rightly afraid of an administration that demonstrably has nobody stopping them from doing outright criminal and illegal things, and has a rabid fanbase ready to plan bombings of whoever is the target. They know the courts can't protect them. They know the law means nothing right now. They know an entire board can be murdered and the culprits pardoned if Trump feels like it.
Trump's entire shtick is that people who go against him in the Republican party already get primaried. He doesn't even need to ask his supporters, because loyalty is an expected and intrinsic part of the MAGA movement.
This is also assuming that future elections are free and fair, or at least follow previous US rules.
jm4•3h ago
_DeadFred_•3h ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/business/scott-bessent-wa...
anjel•3h ago
Neywiny•3h ago
Symbiote•3h ago
simple10•3h ago
But this is new for US consumers. My hope is that US companies will add temporary price increases if they can't eat the tariffs in their existing margins and then reduce when tariffs are reduced. But my guess is that most companies will increase prices, blame the tariffs (rightfully so), but then not fully reduce prices if/when the tariffs decrease.
It's similar to what happened with tipping for takeout food during Covid. It's now a permanent tax.
dtech•3h ago
Only if you buy from a foreign store directly which is relatively niche. It's much more common for an importer to pay the duties and then put the product in local stores.
Symbiote•2h ago
carlosjobim•2h ago
Dylan16807•1h ago
mvdtnz•1h ago
sleepyguy•3h ago
It is fair, and the consumer deserves to know.
duxup•3h ago
Consumers ... going to have to learn something new.
CSSer•3h ago
The reality, of course, which they reveal when interviewed, is that they know they're completely powerless. In the best case, all they can do is delay the inevitable and they know it. This approach exists purely to keep themselves from being made into the enemy. As you noted, some business owners admitted to considering if they should just shutter their business too.
advisedwang•3h ago
duxup•3h ago