> Packages sent to the US from mainland China and Hong Kong with a value of up to $800 now face a 120% tax rate or are subject to a flat fee. The fee started at $100 and is due to rise to $200 at the beginning of June.
In that case us importers will pop up to import them in bulk and your uc goes up to $8.
Maybe it makes sense to order something from Parallax or TI in that case.
The cheapest alternative now will be to go through a middleman who adds some markup but can pay “merely” the 145% tariff rate because they’re buying a ton of them at a time. 400% total markup on the direct-priced $3 board beats $100 (and soon $200) per parcel ordering just a couple at a time. Though, these businesses may not be viable at the higher prices, and supply might just dry up.
(In fact, the cheapest alternative will probably be “Vietnamese” boards that are lying about where they were manufactured…)
There’s a whole cottage industry over there where they harvest semiconductors from junk/e-waste and turn them in to usable products again. I assume that’s where the actual FPGA chip came from.
Could you expend on this? In my understanding (armchair-youtube-expert), seminconductor "recycling" is basically burning the device and to scrap the metallic parts then using as usual cyanide+boiling chloride (or mercury) to extract gold. Then throw away everything else.
The less industrial method involves human dissection of such devices (with pre and post burning) to extract Silver/Cooper
It can be a source of fake chips, but also a source of chips that aren't made anymore.
Now prototypes will cost at least 2x, if not more.
These tariffs are essentially shooting US technology development in the foot. Chinese engineers will have the greatest access in the world to manufacturing and components, while engineers in the US who don't already have a large company to bankroll them will just find something else to do.
I had some projects in the pipeline that I might not bother with now. It's simply not worth the money. US PCB fabs are probably even worse, they still get a lot made overseas, but now they also hate you because they exist to do large orders for the DoD, not joe schmo democratizing hardware.
If I'm designing something that would need 100 units though, that's going to send a design cost from reasonable to out of reach rather quickly.
Another perverse incentive is that to get items sitting in a US warehouse (eg Amazon), the seller has to pay the high tariffs before they can even start selling them, while also hoping that tariffs aren't lowered before they can sell them all (and the expectation is that Trump is going to have to dial back this idiotic "plan" of his some time). Meanwhile the seller of a direct shipped item has a confirmed sale and cash-in-hand by the time the shipment gets to the border. So I expect the selection of US-stocked items is about to drop dramatically, and the poor economic conditions and abjectly poor leadership is going to leave many people not feeling too bad about (or even gleefully embracing) shopping direct.
The sad fact that we lost all of these because of the entire electronics supply and design chain moving to Taiwan and China, is why we are where we are. These barriers might bring some back, who knows.
Ultimately global open borders, for goods and services, had their own issues. For example open competition between free market economies and centrally planned economies creates rather obvious advantages of scale that are skewed...
And yet almost all the actual design was still happening in the U.S.
It’s almost like the origin of the components didn’t matter. Access did.
And even if the origin might have shifted the fact that access increased made Americans stronger in Tech not weaker.
Right now, we don’t have origins of manufacturing nor access. Even if some parts of the industry does reshore to the U.S., the access will still be limited primarily to those parts of the industry that re-shored and even there access would be lower due to higher costs.
It’s incredible how America had the fastest growing major economy, was the leader in nearly all the industries of the future, has insanely high per capita income that continues to grow, and decided to throw all that away all because it refuses to undo the decisions that allow all that growth in wealth to accumulate with a tiny minority of the country.
Think for a second. Would you rather there be a new aluminum plant in the US? Or would you rather there be another successful airplane manufacturer. In no world does prefering the aluminum plant get you anywhere close to the same GDP of a airplane factory
https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/trump-tariffs-vira...
Was there a real example of centrally planned economies after the fall of the ussr? More like centrally guided: Korea, Japan, China are all equally good examples.
Which is where? A country outpacing everyone else in growth and recovery after COVID?
This assumption that globalism = bad because we don't have people assembling electronics for $10/hour is strange. Does some of that need to be reshored for national security? Definitely, and that's why we have the CHIPS act but Trump is trying to kill it so I'm not really sure what these tariffs are trying to accomplish and I don't think this administration does either.
There's constant clamoring about increasing STEM engagement and then they go and kill off accessibility of tech.
Tech access is important all the way up and down the cost spectrum. The way people — kids as well as adults — get interested in this stuff is by having things to play with and use. You have an idea and want to work on a prototype? Now it's more expensive. Want to build something with your kid to get them interested in hardware? More expensive.
I support free trade, and in an ideal world we’d have no tariffs at all. But enforcement around imports is hard. You still need some mechanism to regulate goods entering the country, and duty taxes are a practical tool for that. When a U.S. retailer imports goods from China, they pay duties. When Temu ships a nearly identical product directly to U.S. consumers under de minimis, no one pays anything. That’s not a level playing field.
If one group has to follow the rules and bear the costs, while another gets a free pass because of a legal loophole, you're not fostering innovation or accessibility, you're just subsidizing arbitrage. That’s not sustainable, and it warps both pricing and incentives.
I’m all for lowering costs and increasing access to STEM tools. But if the policy that does that relies on systematically undercutting domestic importers and eroding trade enforcement, then we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Let’s push for smarter, broader reforms (like targeted STEM subsidies or tariff carve-outs for educational goods) instead of defending a workaround that happened to benefit us temporarily.
I didn’t realize there was so much sympathy for non value providing middle men in the U.S.
I do actually agree with the de-minimus issue and that the system needed to be redone, but not because I think more Americans should be spending their lives being middle men leeching money off the American user, but because the de-minimus exemption was distorting the markets leading to highly inefficient individual packages instead of bulk packages being shipped.
But the problem isn’t the elimination of de-minimus. If that had been eliminated a year ago, a $1000 import from AliExpress would see a $100-$200 additional cost which while not ideal would have been reasonable.
The problem is the raising of tariffs to extremely high levels that mean that the $1000 goods now carry a $1100-$1500 duty on top.
This isn’t about protecting "middlemen" for the sake of it, it's about applying consistent rules across different channels of commerce. If a domestic retailer has to pay duties to bring in inventory from abroad, but a foreign seller can ship the same item directly to a U.S. consumer with no duty via de minimis, that's a structural arbitrage opportunity, and yes, that does distort the market.
Whether the intermediary adds value or not is a fair debate, but the real issue is the system favoring one pathway over another based on a technicality, not merit. If you want to argue for a globalized market with no tariffs or friction, I’m sympathetic to that. But that’s not what we have, and pretending that eliminating de minimis while raising punitive tariffs are the same problem is a conflation.
I’m with you on criticizing high tariffs — retaliatory or otherwise, especially when they become a blunt weapon. But de minimis wasn't a free-market policy, it was an exploit. Fixing it doesn’t mean embracing protectionism, it means closing a loophole that had gotten too large to ignore.
1. I guess I think mechanisms for regulating goods entering the country should be based on specific articulated harms, and targeted through law enforcement or tariffs with a specific harm reduction goal. It's a bit absurd to me that China is being hit with a giant tariff based solely on source of product, and things like tainted Indian generic drugs continue to be an ongoing issue with actual medical harms.
2. I'm not sure why US consumers should be paying a middleman. If you can buy a product direct from the source, why not? The gains from a middleman should be intrinsic to what the middleman can bring, like savings through bulk purchases or shipping. Maybe more directly, I think tariffs should be eliminated completely, not just de minimis (except for those targeting a specific aim, with articulated goals and endpoint conditions).
3. These discussions have gotten so bizarre to me at some level because the US constitution specifically empowers Congress, not the president, with tariff powers. I don't think they should be allowed to shift those powers to another branch. Grievances about tariffs established by an executive were one of the reasons for the establishment of the US as a separate country to begin with, and just because Congress screwed up one time with tariffs doesn't mean they should be able to abdicate their responsibilities. I think having tariff powers reside with a large distributed body increases the burden of establishing a tariff probably. But this is an entirely different issue from the focus of the article.
I don’t support broad tariffs either — I’d love a world of free trade. But duty taxes aren't the same thing. They're not necessarily protectionist; they exist to fund the enforcement of customs and import regulations. If we agree that there are things we should regulate at the border, plants, animals, counterfeit goods, etc. then you need a mechanism to fund that enforcement. Duty taxes are that mechanism.
De minimis creates a loophole where foreign companies can flood the market with small direct-to-consumer shipments, bypassing both duties and most scrutiny. A U.S. importer pays duties and follows import regs. Temu doesn’t. That’s not about "harm reduction", it's about uneven enforcement and subsidized noncompliance.
I'm all for optimizing enforcement of small package imports and making compliance easier for individuals and small businesses. But we can’t pretend that zero enforcement cost is viable at scale, or that eliminating duties across the board is somehow neutral in its effects.
If you're arguing for removing all import duties and funding border enforcement from general taxes, fine but say that. Otherwise, it feels like folks just want all the upside of globalization with none of the costs or responsibilities.
I don't know how hard the manufacturers themselves are complaining, but to some extent you have to imagine that they anticipated this and are looking to recalibrate production and reroute goods.
I was chatting with my wife about this, and we came to the conclusion that 1000RMB in China gets you more stuff than 1000EUR in Europe. And, honestly, there's not that much of a quality difference.
China is facing an economic situation similar to the COVID lockdowns. The export economy is collapsing, and factories are engaged in "suicidal price wars" just to get a little bit of money from their stock.
https://www.rfa.org/english/china/2025/04/29/china-us-tariff...
That sentence sounds like an exaggeration—if not outright propaganda. I mean, will their 15% of exports to the US impact their economy? Will it cause a slight slowdown? Possibly. But people often forget that around $50–100 billion worth of exports were excluded from the tariffs.
Do you have any sources other than those funded by the U.S. government—especially ones without a history like this?
"On May 10, 2020, RFA published a news article titled "China Border Inspection Strengthens Inspection of Entry and Exit Nationals, International Students Had Their Passports Cut," [83] which contained a screenshot of a Reddit post by a user who said his passport had been clipped by China's border inspections. However, it was later revealed that the user's attached picture was stolen from someone else. The news triggered criticism from mainland Chinese media, saying that the claims stated in the news were incongruent with the situation.[84]
On 11 May 2021, Fact-checker First Draft News found that Chinese- and Cantonese-language versions of Radio Free Asia (RFA) published anti-vaccine misinformation regarding the Chinese vaccines, particularly the ones manufactured by Sinopharm and Sinovac. The investigation found the RFA articles amplified misleading claims about the vaccine programs, and its stories were reprinted by popular tabloid newspapers to reinforce the anti-vaccine misinformation. The RFA site did not cover suspected adverse events related to Western-made vaccines. Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, program director at the National Cancer Institute, believed these articles caused vaccine hesitancy and global public health risks. Masato Kajimoto, a misinformation expert and journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong, suggested the articles were biased toward anti-Beijing messages and repeated unsubstantiated claims made by unreliable sources, such as The Epoch Times.[85]"
Basically cheap cloths from Shein/Temu, cheap electronics on eBay, etc all just doubled in price.
The externalities for all the cheap stuff we import are too high and the market will never do anything about them.
The US should be self-reliant on things like electronics, software, industrial equipment, but for many classes of items there is no benefit in pushing up prices for US consumers.
If a $20 pant doubles to $40, it still beats a domestic one (if there is even one) with one hand.
If the US really wants to reboot manufacturing, first I agree with what you said, it should focus on national security goods as well as higher value add goods. Second, the US should actually lower the tax for machines that build these items and import them to build up these businesses, and third, then it should move upstream i.e. to build those machines domestically and push the taxation higher.
The current policy seems to be the most idiotic.
I imagine it was easier to do this than to inspect every shipment from china for microcontrollers.
Again I don’t agree with the way they are handling it.
Culturally, I don't think we're going back to that. And if you talk to any boomer or older person who remembers what that was like when they were kids they'd hated it.
People find it hard to conceive of another human being so mentally degraded that they just don't understand what's going on. But that's what's happening here. Watch the interview segment where the photograph of a guy's knuckle tattoos with inserted text labels in helvetica font is discussed for an example of how stupid this person is.
Teenage fashion (e.g. Shein) is probably a poor example to focus on though since, even disregarding fast fashion, teenage clothes don't have a long usage period - they get outgrown or fashion changes, etc. The price/quality point of Shein is well suited for this.
Then comes the human rights factors of forced and unfair labor. Your cheap t-shirts are made off the backs of ethnic minorities not allowed to leave the factory site after their 12+ hour shifts.
Finally comes industry hallowing. Yes, America and Canada and Mexico DO want to produce clothing. No, it will never be $5 or less for a t-shirt. Maybe that's fine. The issue is not that clothes are too expensive - almost everything you see at the thrift store is headed for the trash bin.
Perhaps, but we could also help save the planet by all becoming vegetarian, or by staying home rather than flying, etc. In any case, I don't think Trump is looking to reduce consumption or international trade - he (appears) to just want to reduce trade imbalance and/or increase US independence.
> Then comes the human rights factors of forced and unfair labor. Your cheap t-shirts are made off the backs of ethnic minorities not allowed to leave the factory site after their 12+ hour shifts.
Do you think these workers would be happier without a job, or that US adding import taxes to Chinese-made clothes is going to cause Chinese manufacturers to pay more, or reduce working hours? What scenario are you thinking of where US import taxes on Chinese goods would be beneficial to Chinese workers?!
"America" meaning what?
American government - really? Why prefer low paying jobs vs high paying ones?
American CEOs - want to increase share price and their annual bonus. Would prefer to offshore.
American consumers - may like "Made in USA", but given a choice prefer cheap "Made in China" vs expensive
American workers - would prefer high paying jobs, or just stay at home collecting government handouts.
We're basically at "full employment", with even fast food companies finding it hard to hire people. I'm sure unemployed US software developers would prefer if US companies would hire them vs offshoring, but where is the demand for low paying jobs?
There are other ways to diversify sourcing and encourage internal production.
There's nothing rational about these tariffs in stated aims or implementation.
Then let's look at some of the second order effects. A container of cargo going to a US (eg Amazon) warehouse has to pay tariffs up front, whereas a direct-from-China purchase can pay the tariffs at the border with cash-in-hand. So that gives a leg up to Chinese vendors and marketplaces.
Think about Chinese companies building out factories in other countries. The tariff tax enthusiast response is to imagine we'll respond by raising tariffs on those countries as well like some game of wack-a-mole. But the reality is that trend will be spreading Chinese investment and influence even further throughout the world, and any post-facto attempt at punishment will just push that country fully into the Chinese sphere of influence!
When examined, every single action by this administration seems to be much closer to supporting the desires of our adversaries rather than helping our own situation. It's hard to know exactly whether these people are directly working for foreign interests, just following the winds of social media campaigns working hard to promote edgy feel-smart but society-killing memes, or somewhere in the middle with a wink-wink. But regardless, we need to pull up hard from this societal embrace of team-sport ignorance if we want to have any future that isn't being a hollowed out backwater.
Temu is not grandma so that's where the loophole comment comes from. It wasn't meant to be used large-scale commercially where you ship 100 small packages instead of 1 large package to avoid the tarrif.
$800 is a meaningful exception for personal use. If you want a turkish $400 rug or a $300 indian wedding dress, it was always meant to be for personal, not corporate, use.
Can we agree that the law as it was intended was completely abused ?
EDIT: for graphic language
To me well it is a tax, but in the end not that significant one.
Not really, is there a source for the rationale of the de minimis exemption?
So now we have to deploy a less than perfect solution. Doesn't make it wrong, its just flawed.
(The likely result looks like CBP problems from before are coming back, correct? Curious on your take - has demand shifted since the rules were set ?)
FINDINGS.—Congress makes the following findings: (1) Modernizing international customs is critical for United States businesses of all sizes, consumers in the United States, and the economic growth of the United States. (2) Higher thresholds for the value of articles that may be entered informally and free of duty provide significant eco- nomic benefits to businesses and consumers in the United States and the economy of the United States through costs savings and reductions in trade transaction costs. (b) SENSE OF CONGRESS.—It is the sense of Congress that the United States Trade Representative should encourage other countries, through bilateral, regional, and multilateral fora, to establish commercially meaningful de minimis values for express and postal shipments that are exempt from customs duties and taxes and from certain entry documentation requirements, as appro- priate
What exactly does suggest to you that this is intended for personal, non-commerce use?
Granted, the US' $800 de minimis, which was created because of a lack of funding to deal with the volume of shipping, was probably a bad decision in retrospect. But removing it entirely is another extreme.
The internet facilitated a direct to consumer model that allows foreign companies to almost completely bypass import taxes.
If you look at the amount of de minimis goods shipped the year after the amount was raised vs today, they have increased over 10x.
Also the pre 2016 limit was $200, still low enough to allow the temu business model.
That's why it is called a loophole
Temu and Shein were exploiting the rule.
The new business model enabled by the internet and cheap/fast international shipping created a loophole that allowed companies to import billions of dollars of goods without paying any import taxes on them.
Standard retailers using distribution have to pay it. But if you put the warehouses outside the US and ship direct you don’t. That’s not how the law was supposed to work.
De minimus is a legal term that means something. It means so small as to not matter. When retailers figured out how to use this approach to send hundreds of billions of dollars of goods without the intended tax, they were exploiting a loophole.
It being closed should have happened ages ago it’s just confusing now because it’s in the midst of a lot of other tariff activity that makes a lot less sense.
Anyone who thought about it critically for like 10 minutes?
The loophole may have been visible, but the ecosystem to take advantage of it at this level simply wasn’t in place yet. So no, this wasn’t as obvious as you’re pretending it was.
In 1930? Sure, you couldn't expect them to know that everyone would have a wireless telegraph in their pocket and they'd have cheaper and more skilled Chinese labor/manufacturing available.
In 2016? Really? Amazon was already going full steam. Ali Express was well known. It absolutely should have been obvious to legislators and those that lobby them professionally what would happen. How many people regularly, or even annually, buy items for over $800 from either of them?
As far back as the 1950s the textile industry was against raising the de minimis threshold because they wouldn't be able to compete with duty free mail order imports. We keep increasing it. We get SHEIN. Surprised Pikachu, nobody could have foreseen this.
It’s the same pattern with discussions of rent control. Despite overwhelming evidence that the third-order consequences make things worse for far more people than the first- and second-order effects help, proponents seem unable to reconcile that “preventing rent from increasing” could possibly make housing less affordable.
We focus on businesses like Temu because everyone agrees they sell cheap garbage, but a lot of overseas businesses sell high-quality or even essential goods. (And clearly, for many people, whatever Temu sells is good enough.)
We focus on Temu because they are running a large dollar value business on imports that skirt duty tax. The dollar volume is the important piece here as they playing on an unfair advantage.
In your view, what are the factors in addition to customs labor costs that were weighed in 2016 the choice to increase the de minimis exemption? I'm curious, because you seem to feel very strongly that global economic integration is not one of them.
That’s very different from encouraging large-scale commercial exploitation. When entire logistics chains are built specifically to stay under the threshold, intentionally bypassing duties that domestic importers would have to pay, that’s a policy failure, not a success. You can absolutely argue that it incidentally helped smaller exporters or increased consumer access, but that’s a long way from saying it was intended to support global e-commerce platforms arbitraging regulatory gaps.
You asked what factors were weighed—labor costs and shipment volume handling, sure. Maybe some light consumer benefit. But "building duty-free pipelines for billion-dollar drop-shippers" probably wasn’t in the memo.
The exemption existed for stuff like samples, initial batches, one-off items, etc. not so the entire industry could run off these exemptions.
As an example if you ship a $3196 product in four packages, each valued at $799, you are following the letter of the law but not the spirit.
It makes no sense for the United States to charge 145% tariffs to normal American companies, and then allow a loophole so that large Chinese e-commerce giants essentially benefit by structuring their business to not operate in the United States. The purpose of the tariff’s is to increase American employment not decrease it.
A loophole to minimize administrative burden makes no sense when applied to companies selling tens of billions of dollars into the US every year.
> The European Union has also proposed plans to scrap duty-free exemptions for parcels worth less than €150 (£127.50; $169.35).
Does the threshold apply the package entering the border (a container) or the package for the foreseen destination (the cardboard in your mailbox)?
It’s only really worth importing stuff that’s well over the theoretical threshold, as you’re going to be paying the flat rate fees anyway.
Article notes that if the tariffs don't get dropped shortly, the cost of warehousing will exceed the tariff cost, and the goods will get dumped into the Canadian market. (Win? Maybe?)
Then we have companies that set up their distributor model to be North American wide, screwing Canadian consumers (adding in tariff overhead for them and taking it as profit) because they still route their goods through the US: https://petapixel.com/2025/04/30/leica-raises-prices-in-cana...
Everything is a mess
Weddings are about to get interesting. May regress (“regress”, arguably this is totally fine) to the 1980s and earlier where having special complex color-coordinated dresses for all your bridesmaids was something only the upper-middle and higher could afford. Lots of perfect Disney wedding dreams about to get a ton more expensive.
[edit] it could keep up, of course, especially with depressed demand from higher prices, but it’ll take quite a while to ramp that up, and there won’t be a lot of takers for that investment while de minimus remains in place for other markets that could take over that manufacturing cheaper than the US—India, Vietnam, Indonesia, DR, et c.
On what timeline? Does the current environment even encourage companies making huge investments into the U.S. (and no, the pinky promises that we hear about aren't investments) since it'll just change in four years?
There is no central industrial policy being proposed or passed via Congress, just a mad king imposing tariffs on a whim.
So the mad king theory, I think it was initially defendable, but I'm not so sure now. The people have spoken, through their representatives, and through a president that advertised his tarriff plan during elections.
The American people have spoken, they want this pain.
Yes it is because Trump can take it away or add more at any moment. Congress doing nothing still means they're not crafting coherent industrial policy and not introducing legislation which would be more stable than one man's whims.
What parent refers to is small parcel exemption to VAT, however every larger retailer adjusted to that and are now declaring VAT on their end.
Personally, I would say this is a net win
glimshe•11h ago
IG_Semmelweiss•11h ago