It&#x27;s not just soft power.  It is also economic power.  Also, note that there is a baseline 10% on all countries.

Might cause a global recession, though. And that might be less funny.

America&#x27;s leading supply chains just went up in smoke. The fallout is going to be pretty funny from an international POV, methinks.

The cost to move these industries to the U.S. exceeds the cost of these tariffs. The market will pass the cost of what are import taxes to the American consumer, resulting in inflation.True, the shareholders will take a pay cut too, because something less than 100% of American consumers will just suck it up without changing their behavior. But in aggregate, we will all save less.If inflation takes off again, maybe eventually there&#x27;s some monestizing of debt. But in less than 4 years these tariffs will go away, which is why companies won&#x27;t spent billions of dollars investing in state side manufacturing that&#x27;ll take maybe 5 years to plan and build. Therefore I&#x27;m not sold on the montizing debt motivation yet.

It depends.. For some goods possible to just immediately raise prices, for others, business will try to compensate from another source.As example, Daimler stated, they will cut cheapest models from export to US, so some segment will got less concurrent market, and probably prices will raise.Probably, this is because Daimler have much higher profits on expensive models, so they could just lower profits on them. Other variant, also possible, expensive niches are more tolerant to price raise.For small countries, tariff raise nearly guarantee prices rise, but US is big country, things are not so simple.

Really curious on how it will blow-back on Americans. Because, make no mistakes, it will.

Correction: average tariffs on China prior to today was 42% <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.piie.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;piie-charts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;us-china-trade-war-tariffs-date-chart" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.piie.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;piie-charts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;us-china-trad...</a>. This means after today, average tariffs on China will be 76%.China is already in a Great Depression, and this tariff hike guarantees China to be in 30+ years of economic depression.

Effective total tariffs on China will be 54% effective 9 April. No way US does not go into recession...And wait for the response from the trading partners...

Yeah, billions and billions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;u_aLESDql1U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;u_aLESDql1U</a>

The more I think about Trumpian strategies the more I suspect that he got some friends together (or they came to him) and decided they&#x27;ll short everything, then he&#x27;ll do this for a while. He and those friends would be able to &#x27;generate billions&#x27; that way, by legal insider trading (since we learned that anything he does &quot;in an official capacity&quot; is legal and he can pardon anyone who ever got caught).Last term he did some tax on bauxite that had a similar effect of costing billions to a whole industry that processes or buys aluminum, but one of the few bauxite mines in the US, run by a Trump ally of some kind, made bank.

Don&#x27;t worry, acoording to Trump this will generate billions and billions of dollars and America will be rich as it never has been before. &#x2F;s

&gt; but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time.It is generally not cool to blame the voters. There was a ton of misinformation preceding the Iraq war as you point out, but even then there was a massive popular opposition to it. Hundreds of thousands protested against the war before the invasion in New York and Washington DC. Some polls showed that 5% of all Americans participated in a rally or a protest in the weeks leading up to and following the invasion. And despite that popular opposition, among politicians there was a bipartisan support and just a handful of MPs opposed to it. Meaning the public was never really given a choice. In short, the Iraq war was the fault of the politicians and the politicians alone, the voters came nowhere near it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protests_against_the_Iraq_War" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protests_against_the_Iraq_War</a>

Can&#x27;t hear you! USA. USA. USA.Politically it&#x27;s going to be just like how most everyone fell into line fervently supporting the Iraq War when the corpo media told them to. Then after the unavoidable truth finally seeped in, equivocation and rationalization from &quot;I didn&#x27;t really support it&quot; to &quot;we were misled&quot;. With a lot more visible economic pain, of course.Then that anger from having been &quot;tricked&quot; will be used as raw energy to drive the next con, and so forth. A broken clock is at least right twice a day, but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time.

People like Navarro believes a non-trivial amount of manufacturing can be coaxed back to the US from China and Vietnam.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;fba87dd3-514a-41c2-b2b9-ea597ffbdfbf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;fba87dd3-514a-41c2-b2b9-ea597ffbd...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hudsonbaycapital.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;FG&#x2F;hudsonbay&#x2F;research&#x2F;638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hudsonbaycapital.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;FG&#x2F;hudsonbay&#x2F;rese...</a>The TLDR is Miran sold to Trump US can Plaza Accord everyone, devalue USD to reindustrialize US, draw down US debt&#x2F;commitments, keep exorbitant privelege... all by slapping tariffs (Trump&#x27;s fav hammer) to scare countries into signing (converting) existing US commitments to &quot;century bonds&quot; in US favour while tying them to US orbit for foreseeable future. Is US strong enough to coerce others to sign on? IMO doesn&#x27;t matter, this seems like plan specifically tailered to Trump preferences and ego, so as long as Trump thinks so Miran gets the job.E: there is logic to the plan, logic that appeals to Trump -&gt; US strength and monetary manipulation skills can force others to fall in line. And TBH countries have fallen in line in the past.

Can we please stop acting like Trump and MAGA behave rationally?

Category error to think there&#x27;s a strategy. Trump doesn&#x27;t even know what a tariff is. People try to project a strategy because it&#x27;s probably too discomfiting to believe that the greatest superpower the world has ever known elected a complete nimrod king.

I&#x27;m on the side of free trade and dont think there is a single policy. The strongest arguments I can think of are:1) raise tax revenue in a way that partially falls on foreign nationals2) reduce trade deficits and foreign purchasing of treasuries.3) Increase relative power if other economies are damaged more than the US. There are situations where zero and negative sum strategies are optimal, like war, where it is better to have a larger % of a smaller overall pie.4) stimulate demand for us labor

Trump is using century-old misinformation about tariffs to raise tax revenue to pay for tax cuts on the wealthy. In reality, it&#x27;s an added tax on all spending that accelerates inflation.Tariffs are theoretically supposed to encourage domestic production, but rely on the false premise that all raw and intermediate materials can be sourced domestically at a cost below the import price. That has generally proven to not work unless tariffs are in the hundreds of percent. But at that level, import taxes tend to poison entire sectors due to supply lag instead of drive domestic economies.

Here is what they say anyway:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;fact-sheet-pr...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;presidential-actions&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;presidential-actions&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;regu...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-adjusts-imports-of-automobiles-and-automobile-parts-into-the-united-states&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;fact-sheet-pr...</a>

They claim that they are &quot;reciprocal&quot; tariffs, and their chart shows them at exactly half the tariffs they claim are imposed by the target or 10%, whichever is higher. But it is suspicious that the column on their infographic showing the foreign tariffs has fine print indicating that includes other non-tariff things that you can&#x27;t easily calculated as a neat rate the way tariffs are. And, some people running the numbers have determined that the quoted foreign &quot;tariff&quot; amounts are consistently the US trade deficit in goods with the target country divided by that country&#x27;s exports to the US, with a minimum of 10%.So, despite being labelled &quot;tariffs&quot;, the actual basis for calculating the &quot;reciprocal tariffs&quot; has nothing to do with tariffs.

It&#x27;s hard to have insight on what the US admin is thinking behind the public facing statements, however this might be of interest:Why Trump’s tariffs are better than you think — and much worsesubscribe! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crikey.com.au&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;donald-trump-tariffs-impact-global-economy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crikey.com.au&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;donald-trump-tariffs-im...</a>or read now, maybe subscribe later: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;H46RG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;H46RG</a>

A rebirth of mercantilism. Peter Navarro is a huge fan of it, and in his heterodox fever dreams, laments that most of the world abandoned it several centuries ago. In his mind, a net surplus of currency is every bit as important as having a strong military. People like Lighthizer have drunk the coloured sugar-water.

What&#x27;s the actual strategy behind the current US administration slapping tariffs on everything? Feels like they&#x27;re handing them out like Halloween candy. Is there a long game here, or is it just managed chaos and alienating trade partners for short term optics?

Just think how many companies moved production from China to Vietnam to avoid China tariffs, and now tariffs on Vietnam are larger than on China.

This underscores the difficulty companies have trying to navigate through this. Even if Trump doesn&#x27;t change his mind tomorrow, as he&#x27;s liable to, he&#x27;s only around for another four years and for most companies that&#x27;s not enough time to justify a supply chain overhaul.

&gt;25% on South Korea, 32% on Taiwan, 36% on Thailand, 46% on VietnamHarley Davidson moved some of its production to Thailand in 2018 to avoid a 31% tariff the EU had on US manufactured motorcycles, announced in 2024 it was moving more production there, and prior to today had plans to sell the Thailand produced bikes back into the US, as the US had a 0% tariff on bikes. Not surprisingly Thailand has a 60% tariff on imported motorcycles.This tariff jumping is real. I guess we will see how it works out for the US.

Both Svalbard and Jan Mayen are inhabited. Jan Mayen only by about 35 people, though. Svalbard has both Norwegian and Russian settlements, but of course entirely too small to have impact on US trade.

Those first two islands aren&#x27;t even thought to have been visited by any human for many years!

The full list:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;02&#x2F;trump-reciprocal-tariffs-countries-chart-imports-united-states.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;02&#x2F;trump-reciprocal-tariffs-cou...</a>10% tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands which are uninhabited, and can be reached only by sea, which from Australia takes two weeks by vessel. 
And also 10% on Svalbard and Jan Mayen which is also uninhabited. That will teach them not to ripoff the USA!Oh NO tariffs on Russia or Belarus. None.

25% on South Korea, 32% on Taiwan, 36% on Thailand, 46% on VietnamWhat a massive and moronic blow to our soft power.

As long as it is less than $10000 in value. It is an interesting point though, if tourism outside the country will increase just for shopping.

If you bring back goods worth more than $800 it has to be declared and a duty paid.Judging from the changes (currently paused) to the de minimus shipping rules (also formerly $800) I’d expect the threshold to be lowered substantially. Possibly arbitrarily while I’m on a trip and have already bought the goods.The risk being if detained by DHS for who knows how long is not worth saving $400 on a MacBook personally.

This is how a lot of people around the world live their lives. Dubai wisely provides this as a service to surrounding countries, to their great enrichment.

Well, US has a &quot;beautiful ocean&quot; around which makes this plan a little costly.

Can always vacation somewhere you can pickup gear and bring it back with you. Not customs advice.

I guess I didn’t want to buy any new tech anyways.Thanks Tim Apple.

For China maybe, I doubt any serious analysts were expecting this high of tariffs on most other countries, like Mexico, the UK, and Canada.The methodology of counting non-price barriers on certain goods then applying it across the board on all goods as tariffs is bonkers.
Doubtlessly they aren’t including all the non-price tariffs the US imposes on other countries either.I’m extremely skeptical the EU has effective tariff rates of 40% on all US goods, and furthermore skeptical that if so the US doesn’t have countervailing effective tariff rates at the same rate.

Matches the expectation analysts have had from December 2024 [0]&quot;In the baseline scenario, we assume that the US will raise its effective WATR against Chinese goods by a total of 20 percentage points over 2025-27. We expect the effective tariff rate on China to rise by 5-10 percentage points in 2025, owing to the imposition of tariffs related to fentanyl smuggling disputes. Mr Trump will further phase in tariffs from late 2025 with a wider range of excuses and policy tools, eventually bringing the effective WATR facing Chinese exports to about 30% by 2027.&quot;[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eiu.com&#x2F;n&#x2F;the-impact-of-us-tariffs-on-china-three-scenarios&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eiu.com&#x2F;n&#x2F;the-impact-of-us-tariffs-on-china-thre...</a>

So 54% on China, and this might not be the end of it as countries will retaliate and Trump might increase them even further.

&gt; Yes (Edit: not sure now, I&#x27;m hearing some say they include the 2017 tariff regime of flat 10% - smh shows how this was just a political ploy that answers for such a critical question are mixed)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;EamonJavers&#x2F;status&#x2F;1907540655871521264#m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;EamonJavers&#x2F;status&#x2F;1907540655871521264#m</a>

&gt; And I assume Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and other countries will hurt for other good that are made cheaply thereVietnam and Bangladesh would hurt American consumers (clothes). Cambodia not really.Silver lining, Brazil and Colombia (edit: and the rest of Latin America) are kept at baseline, and Philippines is now the lowest tariff developing Asian economy.We&#x27;ll probably see a significant amount of capital returning to Philippines (who saw de-industrialization when South Korea signed their FTA with Vietnam).&gt; Are those in addition to existing tariffs?Yes (Edit: not sure now, I&#x27;m hearing some say they include the 2017 tariff regime of flat 10% - smh shows how this was just a political ploy that answers for such a critical question are mixed)(Edit 2: was right initially - thanks u&#x2F;inverted_flag)

Are those in addition to existing tariffs?And there are a lot more countries in that list, South Korea and Taiwan are going to really hurt for electronics. And I assume Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and other countries will hurt for other good that are made cheaply there.

They responded with a middle finger plus a boycott and the message was received loud and clear ?

You obviously don&#x27;t put tariffs on your own states &#x2F;s

At the moment, the automotive tariffs still stand and go into effect ... tonight? tomorrow?Looks like they got cold feet on a blanket Canadian tariff.But the whole process is so chaotic and subject to mood swings that I expect more holes and carve-outs than a block of PDO emmentaler.

There’s a 0% chance other countries were charging tariffs across the board on US goods at the rates claimed.The EU simply doesn’t charge 40% rates on the bulk of US goods. Let alone the random countries that all somehow have 10% tariff rates in the US.

&gt;the tariffs are half of what the other country is chargingAnd that figure is questionable. Read &quot;including currency manipulation and trade barriers&quot;. This is the same presidency that believes the &quot;EU was made to screw USA over&quot;, and accused them, Japan and practically every other major economy of manipulating their own currency to harm US. It&#x27;s improbable that rate has any basis in reality, but surely a detailed breakdown of how they came to that number will be published.. not.

It&#x27;s even wild to consider that countries like Ecuador are taking advantage of the US. An absolutely absurd idea.

Yeah, no, those numbers in the left column are not correct.

An interesting observation is that the tariffs are half of what the other country is charging. Does that mean this was a common strategy across the board? Or was strategic importance of goods considered?

Complete tariff list - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.xcancel.com&#x2F;pic&#x2F;orig&#x2F;3B0CC9EA63B82&#x2F;media%2FGnjqyhrW8AE_WK6.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.xcancel.com&#x2F;pic&#x2F;orig&#x2F;3B0CC9EA63B82&#x2F;media%2FGnjqy...</a>

&quot;Hey China, pay the tariffs or we&#x27;ll go to another country.&quot;&quot;You mean the countries with tariffs even higher than ours? Best of luck.&quot;

Walmart has been trying to strong arm China into eating the cost of tariffs.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2025-04-02&#x2F;walmart-keeps-price-pressure-on-suppliers-after-beijing-pushback" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2025-04-02&#x2F;walmart-k...</a> | <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;Q5CNc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;Q5CNc</a>

It’s not like mom and pop stores are equipped to source things locally any better than Walmart. They would also be relying on the same imports from abroad, but would not have the bargaining power that Walmart has.

I’d rather buy from Walmart than Amazon.  At least Walmart pays local taxes and has some level of quality assurance on their merchandise.

&gt; aren&#x27;t their employees on food stamps at some ridiculously high rate?Welfare like food stamps is a subsidy &#x2F;against&#x2F; Walmart, not for it. You are supporting the employees by paying for their food, which means they can negotiate for higher wages, which means Walmart pays them more.An example of the other kind would be literal wage subsidies, which are sometimes paid so companies will hire mentally disabled people.

Walmart is a drain on communities anyways, aren&#x27;t their employees on food stamps at some ridiculously high rate?

Just leaving this here from 2023...&quot;In America, estimates say that Chinese suppliers make up 70-80 percent of Walmart’s merchandise&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retailwire.com&#x2F;discussion&#x2F;walmarts-open-call-continues-to-support-products-made-in-the-usa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retailwire.com&#x2F;discussion&#x2F;walmarts-open-call-continu...</a>

what is stopping everybody from exporting to the one guy that knuckles under completely and circumvent the circus?

Well, the unfortunate beauty of touching the incredibly hot stove of Tariffs is that the pain is immediate and obvious. So assuming that these tariffs go through as is, we&#x27;ll immediately launch into one of the worst recessions we&#x27;ve seen with price increases unlike anything Americans are used to.

&gt; It&#x27;s going to be hard lesson to be learned by Trump and his working class supportersThey won’t learn any lessons.The impacts will be felt years from now, when the Democrat are in power, and… you know the rest.

Yes. They - or other poor countries - are. And it&#x27;s their responsibility to grow their citizenry in a neoliberal world. Economics doesn&#x27;t care about liberal concern tools.China eliminated poverty through neoliberalism. The rest of the world can, too. This is the benefit of neoliberalism: it lifts the world out of poverty through free trade and self-selected efficiency.

These tariffs are a disaster, but this is is quite a neoliberal take. So if we aren&#x27;t the oxen, who is? Vietnam? And that&#x27;s morally acceptable?

We have less than zero workers who want to do the physical labor of factory jobs for prices paid to workers in places like China and Vietnam.

We have plenty of workers that want that kind of work, we&#x27;re just deporting a good chunk of them.

Hey now, we&#x27;re also using AI to automate debt collection phone calls.

Yes. Outsource the manufacturing. We have important intellectual work to do like optimizing ad sales.

He has repeatedly invoked the 1890s actually. Big fan of McKinley.

&gt; I do think a missed opportunity is not increasing defense manufacturing in the US.They are trying to. But zero chance EU capitulates on this:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;us-officials-object-european-push-buy-weapons-locally-2025-04-02&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;us-officials-object-european-p...</a>

Obama was completely blocked by Republicans. That is when they started to oppose anything accross the aisle on principle.

&gt; Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.I agree how Obama continued Bush&#x27;s &quot;war on terror&quot; was a disappointment, but to state that as the reason for his relatively limited accomplishments is profoundly unserious. The Mitch McConnell&#x27;s strategy was to do anything Obama did for no other reason than to make him look bad, because McConnell realised that Obama had the potential to be the most consequential president since FDR, with broad public support.They used every trick in the book to hold up votes, to not schedule votes, voting against popular policy they themselves supported just a few years ago out of principle, etc.I don&#x27;t know how anyone could have forgotten this; the Republican party was not serious good faith participant in the democratic process long before Trump came along.

I agree with this. People seem to forget that factories and other manual labor positions were hard to fill. No one wanted to do them anymore in America. I don’t remember the timing, but there were articles about the whole situation. Well, those jobs went to other countries.Bush Jr. was all about outsourcing to India and other countries. The India population were thrilled to take office gigs for Microsoft and Google and any other tech company.The whole “put me to work” in middle-America doesn’t exist anymore. They don’t want to do that type of work.I do think a missed opportunity is not increasing defense manufacturing in the US. That could mean a lot of jobs and skill-based jobs. NASA is another failed opportunity where it could be a huge skill and labor opportunity for America. I remember the thousands of workers on the shuttle program being devastated. I’m not saying we need another shuttle program, but the next evolution of NASA, aerospace, and defense would be great for jobs and America.We have no one left thinking about the long-term big picture for America - and we now have a president trying to destroy America. Any current politicians are focused on just staying in power, more so than they ever have.I think Bill Clinton was the last president to focus on America.Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.

Pretty sure the broadcast plan as been to make more Americans oxen for the cart…

Trump really thinks America is in the 1950&#x27;s. He thinks people want to work at factories doing manual labor. He doesn&#x27;t understand that we DON&#x27;T want to work at factories. Americans like our plush corporate office jobs building intellectual property. We aren&#x27;t oxen doing physical labor.And we designed it that way. We pay thousands of dollars to each citizen in our public schools to teach them calculus, literature, world history, and science, so that they DON&#x27;T work at factories doing manual labor like we were oxen. We&#x27;re supposed to be doing more valuable jobs in intellectual property and services.It&#x27;s going to be hard lesson to be learned by Trump and his working class supporters when the inflation hits them because our economy doesn&#x27;t have any workers that want to work at factories, but it&#x27;ll have to be a lesson they learn the hard way.The correct economy is to let people do labor they&#x27;re best at. If a foreigner can make a shirt cheaper than an American can, LET THEM. Our economy is already taken by the people that design the shirts.

These guys are untrustworthy liars. I assume there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of carve outs for the tariffs, based on bribing the POTUS or approved affiliates.

Some of the workers won&#x27;t understand that EU companies also have to pay the same VAT in the EU, so they think it&#x27;s correct reasoning.

My company pays VAT surplus to government every quarter since the VAT we collect on our products and services is higher then the VAT we pay for our purchases. How are we not paying it?

No, VAT is actually paid by companies (and also consumers of course), it&#x27;s one of the subtle differences between VAT and sales tax.The &quot;thought experiment&quot; you can make is the case of something not ending up being sold. In a VAT regime the manufacturer will have already paid the VAT on the inputs but since the customer hasn&#x27;t paid the VAT on the finished product the manufacturer won&#x27;t get their money back on the VAT they already paid (there might be other tax rebates or write offs, but that&#x27;s a different matter)In a sales tax regime the tax is only paid by the final consumer so if the manufacturer doesn&#x27;t sell the product they are not out for any additional taxStill doesn&#x27;t change that neither of those are a tariff by any definition

VAT is not paid by companies. It is paid by consumers and collected by companies. The US have the sales tax, which is similar.It absolutely does not make sense to count VAT as a &quot;tariff&quot;. I am sure they know it.

Uhh... Whether you&#x27;re a citizen isn&#x27;t a factor. There&#x27;s no federal sales tax, although these tariffs act as an import tax that will increase the wholesale costs. And state sales taxes don&#x27;t apply to imports or wholesale transactions, they are retail tax (or also often a use tax if a sales tax wasn&#x27;t previously imposed).VAT is not only a retail sales tax, it&#x27;ll apply anytime the widget is somehow modified (value is added).

Not really, because the point of tariffs is that they apply only to imported goods, creating a preference for local ones. If VAT is applied equally to imported and local goods it&#x27;s not a tariff, it&#x27;s a tax that consumers pay in any case.

Maybe that applying VAT to imports is done asymmetrically? If, for example, I&#x27;m a US citizen importing a european widget, will federal and state sales tax be applied on import?If they&#x27;re not, then this might be why they&#x27;re considered thus.

People keep making the mistake of thinking there is no logical consistency to Trump policies.He has an agenda.

Trump has had a thing for tariffs for like 40 years now.

People keep making the mistake of thinking that there is any sort of logical consistency to Trump policies.

He has talked about VAT, but in terms of how they ended up with those numbers, people noticed that the claimed rates don&#x27;t have anything to do with the actual tariff&#x2F;VAT&#x2F;etc. rates, they&#x27;re just based on the relative size of the US trade deficit with each country.The gloss will be &quot;this way captures all the various unfair things they&#x27;re doing to us that are the cause of all these trade deficits&quot; but that&#x27;s just, well, gloss.

Not if you include trade barriers like the DMA, a law which is used to milk US technology companies through vague court rulings with arbitrary fines.The EU is the undisputed king of vague laws that are applied principally to competitors with arbitrary fines.How do you implement GDPR? Don&#x27;t ask us, but if you violate it watch out!How do you comply with DMA? Don&#x27;t ask us, but if you violate it watch out!

How did the value added tax (which is paid by all companies including domestic ones) become the same as import duty?The only way that you can make that tariffs charged to the USA is the level Trump claims (ie. 39% in the EU) is if you include VAT.

Agree with everything you wrote.It’s almost like Trump and his administration are trying to purposely hurt America.I don’t want to be melodramatic, but if Russia had a ultra long-term plan to hurt America, it might look like this.

If there is a deficit at all. Looking at the monetary flows it seems most of the deficit outflows where just flowing back into the US through the stock market.

&gt; just about to end its fight with inflationInflation will decline only when the deficit declines.

The US economy was not strong in 2024. Cost of living was literally the most important election issue, and it is what decided the election undoubtedly.It&#x27;s partially because elites said &#x27;the economy is great! look at my stocks!&#x27; while consumer goods had increased in price by 100% or more in only 4 years.

That&#x27;s the part where &quot;unprecedented wealth inequality&quot; comes in. By most metrics, 2024 was an excellent year and the US was far ahead other developed countries [0] in growth, labor market, consumer spending, net household wealth, and much more; the fundamentals were solid and no figures could point to a major economic downturn at that point, certainly not in a predictable manner. In 2025 the 90th percentile accounts for over half all consumer spending, the median household hasn&#x27;t reaped the same benefits high-income, high-spending ones have. There is no indication this will change, and may get worse with the current and proposed policies.0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;1201f834-6407-4bb5-ac9d-18496ec2948b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;1201f834-6407-4bb5-ac9d-18496ec29...</a>

The economy has not been &#x27;strong&#x27; since at least 2019.CPI is a joke that just subs out everything when it gets more expensive. Oh food is only up 3%, let&#x27;s ignore we were pricing beef and eggs and now we&#x27;re subbing in chicken and tofu.Inflation has been borderline runaway from 2019-2024. Just ask anyone who isn&#x27;t rich.

Inheriting a strong economy beating all expectations that was just about to end its fight with inflation and burning it all away in a pump and dump crypto scheme fashion, while doing nothing (or even working to expand) unprecedented wealth inequality. Good luck, going to need it. The world reserve currency status is faltering, and so will the benefits it allowed US economy.

Pushing Vietnam into Chinas arms I see. Oh America.

I&#x27;m sorry, but could you provide link, where stated, VATs applied to import?- As I know, usually VAT deducted from exported goods, but I really don&#x27;t know how VAT work with import - usually on import used tariffs.

Trump thinks VAT is comparable to a tariff.  VATs are not directly comparable to tariffs.

Weren’t things like that 25% steel and aluminum tariff added in response to Trump’s earlier tariffs, and allowed to lapse in 2020?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;eli&#x2F;reg_impl&#x2F;2018&#x2F;886&#x2F;oj&#x2F;eng" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;eli&#x2F;reg_impl&#x2F;2018&#x2F;886&#x2F;oj&#x2F;eng</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gtlaw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;insights&#x2F;2025&#x2F;3&#x2F;eu-to-impose-tariffs-on-us-goods-steel-aluminum-and-more-in-april-2025" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gtlaw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;insights&#x2F;2025&#x2F;3&#x2F;eu-to-impose-tariff...</a>

That&#x27;s a bit misleading.
Make no mistake, current US tariffs are UNIVERSAL. Not specific to e.g. chicken or automobiles or purebred horses. They cover absolutely everything.
While you may see 38% or more tariff on chocolate, chocolate export to the EU from the US is hardly an important issue. And for dairy products, the tariff is a fixed euro amount per weight, not %.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;commission&#x2F;presscorner&#x2F;detail&#x2F;en&#x2F;qanda_25_541" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;commission&#x2F;presscorner&#x2F;detail&#x2F;en&#x2F;qanda_...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trade.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;access-to-markets&#x2F;en&#x2F;search?origin=US&amp;destination=AT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trade.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;access-to-markets&#x2F;en&#x2F;search?origi...</a>

&gt; Second one because afaik it&#x27;s legal to call &quot;chocolate&quot; something that does not contain any actual cocoa in the US.Well, no. It cannot be called &quot;chocolate&quot; if it is something that consumers would expect to be made from actual chocolate. However, it can contain the term &quot;chocolate&quot; if cocoa or another cacao product is the sole source of its chocolate flavor, and as long as consumers have a pre-established understanding that it is likely to not be made from chocolate. For example, people generally understand that chocolate cake is likely made with cocoa, not chocolate, and so it can be labeled &quot;chocolate cake&quot;. If there is no such general understanding, the product must be labeled &quot;chocolate flavored&quot;.(See the US FDA CPG Sec 515.800, &quot;Labeling of Products Purporting to be &#x27;Chocolate&#x27; or &#x27;Chocolate Flavored&#x27;&quot;)Now if we could just get them to stop calling chocolate products with dairy in them &quot;dark&quot; (I&#x27;m looking at you, Hershey...)

Cheese is the obvious one here. I can get a variety of foreign cheeses even at my local big-box grocery. Much better options than most domestically produced cheese.Irish&#x2F;Finnish butter (Kerrygold&#x2F;Finlandia) is also fairly popular here.If properly refrigerated, milk can last for months especially if pasteurized.You can also evaporate milk and it will last nearly forever unrefrigerated if kept dry

I wasn&#x27;t touching the first two categories anyway, tariffs or no tariffs.First one because I don&#x27;t understand why i should risk a milk based product that has traveled for months across an ocean. Or even from another EU country, when I can buy stuff made in a 200 km radius around me.Second one because afaik it&#x27;s legal to call &quot;chocolate&quot; something that does not contain any actual cocoa in the US.

Careful: The rate mentioned for alcoholic beverages (and confectionery) may include Excise Duty.
Excise Duty usually have the non-discriminatory aspect of VAT : they’re also applied on local production.

Interesting that people are downvoting heavily those information. If reality does not match our view of the World, well, let&#x27;s ignore reality. The truth is that EU kept higher tariffs on US goods than the other way, Trump is changing that and there is an outcry, because it was Trump who did that. If that was Kamala, nobody would even notice.

Current EU tariffs on US goods...<pre><code> Product Category Tariff Rate
 ----------------------------- --------------
 Dairy Products (e.g., cheese, butter) Up to 50%
 Processed Foods (e.g., chocolate, confectionery) 30-40%
 Alcoholic Beverages (e.g., whiskey, bourbon) 25%
 Steel and Aluminum Products 25%
 Automobiles 10%
 Industrial Goods 5-10%</code></pre>

that some new deals have been struck.I believe that was the plan all along. He&#x27;s just doing it aggressively with tariffs.

3.5) rescinded&#x2F;paused [30-61) days.  There will be some bluster, and then announcements with the large trading partners like Japan, South Korea, etc., that some new deals have been struck.

I&#x27;m taking bets, do you think the tariffs will:1. be rescinded&#x2F;paused in [0,2) days;2. be rescinded&#x2F;paused in [2,4) days;3. be rescinded&#x2F;paused in [4,7] days;4. not be rescinded&#x2F;paused.

Because when the blowback comes, people will be looking to cast blame for starting this whole trade war, and when that time comes Trump will point to the word &quot;reciprocal&quot; and say &quot;we didn&#x27;t start this, we were only reciprocating&quot;.

It&#x27;s so quaint to me that people actually believe his rhetoric. How long do you think people will put up with high prices before they turn on him?

&gt; If he&#x27;s correctHe&#x27;s not.According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam&#x27;s trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan&#x27;s claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU&#x27;s claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn&#x27;t buy a lot of US stuff is because they&#x27;re poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they&#x27;re nowhere near 90%: [3].)America&#x27;s government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;WhiteHouse&#x2F;status&#x2F;1907533090559324204&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;WhiteHouse&#x2F;status&#x2F;1907533090559324204&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ustr.gov&#x2F;countries-regions&#x2F;southeast-asia-pacific&#x2F;vietnam" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ustr.gov&#x2F;countries-regions&#x2F;southeast-asia-pacific&#x2F;vi...</a>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investmentmonitor.ai&#x2F;news&#x2F;vietnam-gives-us-tax-breaks-ahead-of-tariff-announcement&#x2F;?cf-view" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investmentmonitor.ai&#x2F;news&#x2F;vietnam-gives-us-tax-b...</a>

&gt; If he&#x27;s correctTrump is not in the business of being _correct_, or indeed caring about correctness as a concept.And no, these are, obviously, not the actual tariffs, don’t be silly.

&gt; Is the US just matching the tariffs set by the other countries?No. Trump claims that the new tariffs are a 50% discount on what those countries tariff US goods at. (Even if that&#x27;s questionable - is VAT a tariff?)If he&#x27;s correct, or anywhere close, this is a &quot;tough love&quot; strategy to force negotiations. We&#x27;ll see how it goes. It also plays to his base - why should we tariff any less than they do us? And they have a point, it&#x27;s the principle of the thing.

That&#x27;s a bit of a messed up way to calculate things.I also think the US deficits are hugely overstated because much of what the US produces is intellectual capital rather than physical goods and the profits are made to appear in foreign subsidiaries for tax reasons. Like if I buy Microsoft stuff in the UK, Microsoft make out it was made in Ireland for tax purposes, but really the value is created in and owned by the US. The US company both wrote the software and owns Microsoft Ireland. So much of the perceived unfairness Trump is having a go at isn&#x27;t real.

Thanks for pointing this out. As a follow up, if the US has a trade surplus, they seem to just slap 10% in both columns.

Someone calculated the formula used. They divided the trade deficit of each country by total trade of each country and assumed that was all a tariff.So for example Indonesia and the US traded $28 billion. The US has a 17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. 17.9&#x2F;28 =0.639, or 64%, which is assumed to be all caused by tariffs. So they divide by two and impose 32%.Anyway no the US isn&#x27;t matching tariffs they&#x27;re dramatically exceeding them.

It&#x27;s just spin. The new duties are purely punitive.

It&#x27;s like the blaming in a playground fight; who started first?
For context:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;KushDesai47&#x2F;status&#x2F;1907618136444067901" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;KushDesai47&#x2F;status&#x2F;1907618136444067901</a>

Genuine questions: why are they calling it “reciprocal”? Is the US just matching the tariffs set by the other countries?Also, this announcement has wiped out any plans of buying tech products this year, plus a holiday to the US and Canada later in the year. Good thing too, as the entire globe is probably staring down the barrel of a recession.

I am certain they didn&#x27;t use any liberal math or science or history to arrive at these numbers.  It&#x27;s all just made up by incompetent yes men.

its not tariffsTrump took the trade surplus the US has with those countries and calcuated the percentage from that.

According to the BBC reporting, it appears that for each country he&#x27;s charging 50% of the tariff they place on US goods coming into those countries, or a baseline of 10% for some countries like the UK.(sorry, this is a BBC live news ticker link):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;live&#x2F;c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A3a34b977-a7be-4159-837c-40b082a54c72#post" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;live&#x2F;c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A3a34...</a>And a picture of the chart they had showing the per-country tariffs:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;live&#x2F;c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A7f78539b-dfc0-4b31-889d-8c28546949d9#post" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;live&#x2F;c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A7f78...</a>

It&#x27;s trade deficit divided by total exports divided by 2.

Would be good to know -Who are the people coming up with these specific rates?How are they modeling this system?

I can&#x27;t think of any positives.Trump is saying the positives are the it will force companies to build stuff in the US, thus increasing our domestic manufacturing and increasing jobs. I don&#x27;t see that happening in a significant way, but who knows?But if that does happen, then the huge amount of revenue that Trump thinks is going to come to the government&#x27;s coffers won&#x27;t happen, and that revenue is meant to offset some of the tax breaks for the wealthy, so we&#x27;re kinda screwed either way.

Well it&#x27;s positive for various countries that benefit from an end to US dominance over the world. :pSo for the US itself? The theory would be that the tariffs will increase US manufacturing sector. But the cold hard truth is that it isn&#x27;t the 1830s anymore and last time tariffs were tried happened to line up exactly with the Great Depression.Even an competent administration would have great difficulty making tariffs to restore manufacturing work in the US, if that is even at all possible. It fails because other countries just put the same tariffs back on the US.So with the Trump&#x27;s administration some kinda of serious economy meltdown is almost certainly the result.

&gt; The US loses the most however, both economically and in soft power.Yes. It loses most because 10-20% of world trade is for value added in the USA. The one exception is the USA of course, because their percentage is 100%. So USA is 100% effected, the rest of the world is 10-20% effected as they continue to happily trade with each other without tariffs.I dunno about everywhere else, but in Australia the effects are already noticeable. Trade with the USA is dropping, and trade with Canada is growing.

&gt; This isn&#x27;t even the China modelIt&#x27;s 1400-1840 China model<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Isolationism#China" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Isolationism#China</a>

Autarky is just bad economic policy because comparative advantage is too powerful. Nobody benefits from this. The US loses and everyone else loses. The US loses the most however, both economically and in soft power.This isn&#x27;t even the China model. Slapping tariffs on raw inputs guarantees that US industry cannot compete internationally. This is more like the North Korean model.While there are positives to targeted industrial policy, there are no positives to autarky.

Buying American stocks and companies is about to be a lot cheaper.

It may reduce consumerism in the US and therefore be beneficial to the environment.

It is possible for things to simply be foolish. Insisting on balance is not the same thing as curious discussion.

As someone interested in &quot;curious discussion&quot;, what are some of the positives we can take away from this? Is this a new standard for economic policy?

It’s all a grift for the wealthy anyway. He doesn’t care about the hurting 50k a year worker. Low income MAGA voters are just fodder for Trump to enrich himself and the wealthy around him.

&gt; It also puts republicans in a choke hold to force the tax cut legislation through, because the fallout of tariffs with no tax cuts would be a death knell for the party.I mean, they could vote down the &quot;emergency&quot; Trump is using in order to obtain the authority to enact these tariffs instead, and that would be so much less work. But of course they won&#x27;t go against their Dear Leader.

omg do you think elon started playing simcity recently, trying out all these ridiculous things, and now he&#x27;s advising donald to do same in the real world, because he&#x27;s convinced it&#x27;ll work based on the simcity experience?

Trump is going for a 1-2 punch. First tariffs and then tax cuts to soften the blow of price increases. It also puts republicans in a choke hold to force the tax cut legislation through, because the fallout of tariffs with no tax cuts would be a death knell for the party.Maybe in a sim city game this would balance out, but it&#x27;s a tall order for a real world scenario. Prepare for a bumpy road ahead.

For taxes to work in raising money, they have to be paid. So, if the goal is to make revenue from the taxes, then raising costs is expected?If the goal is to incentivize alternatives, then the tax has to be such that it raises the price above the gap there now. So, even if you do drive people to an alternative source, the new price will be higher than the old. (Unless the thought is that people were choosing to not buy the cheaper source to begin with?)I suppose you can argue that some suppliers have such a margin that the tax could be an effort to get them to cut into that? I have not seen evidence that that is the case?

Of course! That definitive statement is rhetoric.The payer of a tariff is decided by the relative elasticity of supply and elasticity of demand.Sometimes the seller will eat it. Sometimes they buyer will eat it. Sometimes the product wont get made or sold.

The objective reality of the situation is that there is a transaction between a buyer and a seller. That transaction is what pays the tariff, VAT, property transfer tax or whatever vampirical suckage by whatevername.Both transacting counterparties are robbed.How that is distributed between them is a matter of which has more alternatives. E.g. if the seller has lots of prospective buyers, most of whom are not subject to the tax, then the market price they demand is not sensitive to the rare buyer who does pay the tax.If a big fraction of the seller&#x27;s prospective buyers face a tax, then it makes their product or service look more expensive to a good chunk of the market, which exerts downward pressure on the price. The downward pressure on the price means that the seller effectively pays some of the tax, through lost revenue.So, the transaction pays the tax as such, but how much of it is distributed between buyer and seller depends on the degree of influence of the tax on the price point.

&gt; This example implies producers are already in competition with one another, so it&#x27;s unlikely that any of them can lower the price much.Non sequitor. Differing production conditions between countries would result in differing profit margins.

&gt; If a company can purchase the same clothing from Chinese, Vietnamese, or Mexican vendors, a tax on China only could make the Chinese vendors lower the price or risk losing the business.This example implies producers are already in competition with one another, so it&#x27;s unlikely that any of them can lower the price much. On the other hand, if some producers leave the market due to the tariffs, then there&#x27;s less competition overall and the other producers can charge more.

The concept you are describing here is &quot;tax incidence&quot; [1].Tariffs are taxes.I&#x27;m sure lots of hours will be spent researching the incidences of these across many industries.As you note, one major factor is the presence of substitutes, but there are several others.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tax_incidence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tax_incidence</a>

This is true, but the amount of production in China dwarfs everyone else, and definitely what America can bring up anytime soon, so two consequences:A. Tariff for Chinese goods will be reflected in consumer prices pretty much directly.B. Domestic suppliers if the same goods have very limited capacity, giving them the pricing power to raise their prices by the tariff amount, and take it as extra profit.Take for example cars. We will see American cars go up by the same amount as imports as long as they are oversubscribed on capacity.

I don’t buy the blanket statement that the consumer always pays the tariff. It depends on what alternative companies have. If a company can purchase the same clothing from Chinese, Vietnamese, or Mexican vendors, a tax on China only could make the Chinese vendors lower the price or risk losing the business.However, a blanket tax on every country, regardless of available alternatives, would leave businesses with fewer options and make it more likely that the cost is passed on to consumers.

I thought the tariff goal was also to fix the issue with Pharmaceuticals where the R&amp;D happened in the US, the company then “exported” the IP to the EU factories, and now import the drugs back. This results in a US tax rate of 0%.

Exempting chips alone doesn&#x27;t make sense. Does Intel have to pay 20% on ASML lithography machines or more on Japanese ones? Meanwhile TSMC can fab chips in Taiwan and export to the US without tariffs.

The exemptions...&gt;Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel&#x2F;aluminum articles and autos&#x2F;auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States.

No it makes it cheaper because the US is in a unique position of issuing debt in its own currency.

Devaluing the dollar makes paying national debt more expensive

How about steel mill jobs paying $35&#x2F;hr?Saying Americans haven’t been hurt they’ve benefited applies to white collar workers only - no change to jobs and cheaper goods.

The error is assuming that Americans are homogenous. Wealthy ones benefited tremendously by reducing their production costs while the less fortunate were put into international labour productivity competition.

&gt; They&#x27;ve benefitted from it.They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.&gt; Because now most Americans don&#x27;t slave away in unsafe factories 7 days&#x2F;week for dollars an hour.Now they&#x27;re collecting disability in their unsafe neighborhoods, getting morbidly obese while their substance abusing kids play vidya games in the basement into their 30s.Yes, it&#x27;s really like that. People want their factories and incomes back. I don&#x27;t claim that anything happening here is going to deliver that, but that&#x27;s the pitch they&#x27;re voting for. To their credit, at least they&#x27;re pursuing that in lieu of some UBI ideocracy made of fantasy money.As for you: it&#x27;s fine to point out all the ways they may be misguided and&#x2F;or misled, but unless you have an alternative that doesn&#x27;t amount to expecting everyone to somehow earn an advanced degree, and then discover it&#x27;s next to worthless (even before &quot;AI&quot;,) your really not contributing much. So what do you have?Anything?

Now they&#x27;re safely home, unemployed.

Yeah … talk to someone who worked in the 50s and 60s in Detroit.

I&#x27;ve met a lot of people in St. Louis working various factory jobs. Making different kinds of specialized equipment, food products. I think they get paid $25+ an hour starting out. A fair amount seem like tedious jobs.There&#x27;s around 12.8 million people in the US working in manufacturing.

&gt; No they haven&#x27;t. They&#x27;ve benefitted from it.some benefit. many have been in a state of perpetual poverty&#x2F;welfare, but we don&#x27;t see those in the official stats because the rich are so rich here it skews numbers

&gt; Americans have been hurt for 50 yearsNo they haven&#x27;t. They&#x27;ve benefitted from it.Because now most Americans don&#x27;t slave away in unsafe factories 7 days&#x2F;week for dollars an hour.

&gt; Americans have been hurt for 50 years … yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers. Buuuuuut - placing tariffs on our allies that will likely lead to a recession makes no sense.Yeah, some tariffs aren&#x27;t a bad idea. But this plan? Just stupid, without any thought or strategy behind it.The tariffs should be used more strategically to reorganize supply chains, not these blanket tariffs of low cost and high cost places. And probably ratchet them up slowly, to give time for production to move, instead of a big bang of putting them up everywhere.So tariff China and Mexico, not Canada and Germany.

I live in NJ and people often make a lot of noise every time there&#x27;s a report of people moving out of NJ because of high taxes and high housing costs (yet NJ&#x27;s overall population has increased).To me, it makes sense: NJ is a place where you live to make a high salary (proximity to NYC and Philadelphia) and raise a family (very good public school systems as a result of those high taxes). When you no longer have a need for those circumstances, you move.Likewise, the US is not a great place for certain types of manufacturing because the labor and raw material supply chain simply isn&#x27;t there. Why not focus on the things that we are good at instead?

It was never going to last if the US allowed for very low cost imports from those countries. This is literally one of the largest points of tariffs - protecting domestic manufacturing. We could have had high tariffs the whole time and offshoring would have been much less pronounced. I&#x27;m not saying that would have been a net positive, but to say it would never last is only true under certain circumstances.

America got richer and outgrew the phase where tons of factory jobs made sense. It seems pretty clear to me that well-paying manufacturing job in developed countries were the product of a particular moment in time where poorer countries couldn&#x27;t do it yet. Now they can. It was never going to last.

&gt; Americans have been hurt for 50 yearsCan you please explain a bit more about this &#x27;hurt&#x27;?My understanding is that a significant majority of sources of US &#x27;hurt&#x27; are internal and there has been ample opportunity to vote at least some of it away, but the votes keep going in the direction of making it worse.The worst thing about it is that the situation has essentially been perpetrated on the citizens of the US by those with power and influence for the simple human weakness of greed. Unfortunately they&#x27;ve got the power and resources to effectively do large scale &quot;convincing&quot;.

&gt; yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workersManufacturing didn’t go overseas - it got automated. The US is still the world’s 2nd largest manufacturer, the share of GDP going to manufacturing has been flat since 1950, and so on.What happened is automation made manufacturing need vastly fewer workers. Nothing is “being jobs back” from a fairy tale reason.

Americans have been hurt for 50 years … yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers. Buuuuuut - placing tariffs on our allies that will likely lead to a recession makes no sense.Devaluing the dollar and subsidizing production in the US makes far more sense.But I’m not an economist or anything.

Most of the stuff on amazon comes from China, so I doubt it.

Do you expect their annual turnover to go up? They might get a bigger slize of the pie but the pie itself is getting smaller.
Pre trade AMZN was down 7%

Well, given that 90% of stuff on Amazon is relabeled crud from Ali Express...

Down 6% in premarket, will have to wait and see but likely wont help them much as tariffs will impact a significant amount of their products regardless.

In addition to what everyone else has said, if Europe goes through with the new &quot;Big Tech tax&quot; and&#x2F;or tariffs on digital services, AWS would presumably take a big hit.

Courier will only pay the tax if it&#x27;s a DDP solution, and then bill it back to the actual merchant. FedEx, DHL, and UPS provide this as an option. If it goes USPS, or no DDP solution is in place, it&#x27;s going DDU and it will simply be stuck in a sufferance warehouse or at the local post office until the recipient comes in and pays the bill.

They&#x27;re going to try to make sure we never have fair elections again. I&#x27;m not saying they&#x27;re going to succeed, but they&#x27;re sure as hell going to try, which is terrifying.

Actually one policy that Biden kept in place after the 2020 elections was the Trump Tariffs.I think we are underestimating how popular protectionism is with progressives, it may turn out to be an unusual alliance between disaffected voters on the far right and left outnumbering free trade advocates in the center of both parties.

Well, the good news is almost nobody is gonna like this, so I don&#x27;t anticipate it lasting beyond Trump&#x27;s presidency, assuming he makes it 4 years at this rate. The bad news is that even after tariffs are removed, it will take years for prices to recover, if they ever do.

Here&#x27;s a much more detailed analysis of the effects of the executive order: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;67ee10c6-4690-8006-83d7-8e9b22bccfad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;67ee10c6-4690-8006-83d7-8e9b22bccf...</a>The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,500-4,000 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be about 30% more expensive, electronics will be about 25% more expensive, tires and jewelry about 15% more expensive, and industrial buyers are going to get hosed when they buy equipment.There were major carve-outs for the auto industry (yay Michigan) and petrochemical industries (yay Gulf Coast); they’ll still get hosed on equipment but will mostly escape increases in cost of materials. Imported cars&#x2F;trucks aren’t directly affected either.------------------------------------Meta discussion:I can&#x27;t do an analysis on the de minimis situation, I don&#x27;t know of any public datasets that would allow such an analysis, and it&#x27;s obvious that it will have extremely complex effects (and therefore, any first-order analysis would be very low-quality).Note on ChatGPT-4.5 &quot;Deep Research&quot;: I spot-checked the calculations for HS codes using my own research and the numbers seemed reasonably close to my own. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atlas.hks.harvard.edu&#x2F;explore&#x2F;treemap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atlas.hks.harvard.edu&#x2F;explore&#x2F;treemap</a> is an invaluable resource for this kind of analysis. ChatGPT fumbled the bag on HS 30: Pharmaceutical products, by not excluding products listed in Annex II, which overestimated total tariffs by about 6% ($30 billion), but the net effect on households is still in the right ballpark (+&#x2F;- 20%).Edit: This isn&#x27;t one of those simple low-effort posts that say &quot;omg look what ChatGPT said&quot;. I&#x27;m capable of doing this analysis on my own, and I checked ChatGPT&#x27;s work for the largest contributing categories of goods. Sometimes we disagreed by 10% or so, but overall the results checked out except for Pharmaceuticals, which I caught and didn&#x27;t repeat misinformation in my &quot;practical effects&quot; tl;dr. The only way it is significantly wrong is if both myself and ChatGPT missed some large tariff category and assumed it was small - that could raise the real costs above the numbers in the analysis - but I checked all the largest categories that ChatGPT identified as well as all the largest categories from our largest trade partners shown by the Atlas of Economic Complexity, so it&#x27;s somewhat unlikely that happened.I purposefully didn&#x27;t include 2nd and 3rd order effects (e.g. chained CPI) because they are usually relatively small, massively uncertain (my analysis would be worth as much as dog poop on a shoe) and those higher-order effects take too long to manifest. It&#x27;s not worth predicting costs out 2+ years because the political environment is far too unstable. Just today, the U.S. Senate voted to block all the Canadian tariffs and end the &quot;state-of-emergency&quot; that this executive order is standing on. Front-page diplomacy or private back-room deals could make Trump adjust tariffs up or down on various nations multiple times this year. Who knows what the situation will be 6 months from now, let alone 5 years from now when global supply chains and pricing elasticity might re-normalize. The fact that ChatGPT didn&#x27;t include these effects is a point in its favor, not a glaring oversight.I&#x27;m not complaining about downvotes but if you are downvoting this, please let me know why so that I can improve. I put a lot of work into this far beyond just typing some crap into ChatGPT and I think these numbers add a lot to the discussion.

Aliexpress does that as well, with a warehouse in Hungary. They ship the products there, import them en masse as a business, then relabel and send them off to the recipients.

They may be compelled to do that; there&#x27;s 1.3 million packages from Chinese retailers a day coming in through the Netherlands, but since they&#x27;re all individual packages, they fall under a threshold for import taxes. There&#x27;s now calls to drop that threshold so that people pay import taxes for small items as well, and &#x2F; or to compel Temu and co to stop shipping individual packages but do it in bulk.

In Europe, Alibaba has their own warehouse in the Netherlands. I wonder if that&#x27;s to be able to do a single &quot;international&quot; import. Could the same happen in the US?

&gt; Until Temu&#x2F;AliExpress&#x2F;etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.The thing is, the EU specifically set up a structure to make this easier for sellers and transparent for customers (the &quot;import one-stop shop&quot;) and I don&#x27;t see the US government doing any effort to make importations more seamless.

If I buy something from amazon.co.jp or Apple and it arrives from Japan or China with DHL&#x2F;UPS, I don&#x27;t do anything at all in Poland. It&#x27;s all transparent, I just get the package for the price on the website.

&gt; This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you&#x27;re paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.Not the big China exporters, not any more. They all include taxes in the price on your country specific web site, ship to their warehouses inside the EU, handle taxes and your local courier just delivers.Now if you&#x27;re talking DHL yes, they have you fill forms upon forms and charge you for the forms you didn&#x27;t ask for. But if that happens, no one will have time to process all the forms so private imports from China will simply ... halt for a while. Until Temu&#x2F;AliExpress&#x2F;etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.If in the US, I&#x27;d hold on any direct purchases from China for 3-6 months.&gt; So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.Hah. That&#x27;s DHL commission territory :) Definitely hold from direct purchases until Temu sorts it out for you.

Many of extra bills are absolutely not going to get paid.

FWIW eliminating the de minimis exemption had already been proposed by President Biden late last year:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov&#x2F;briefing-room&#x2F;statements-releases&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;13&#x2F;fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-actions-to-protect-american-consumers-workers-and-businesses-by-cracking-down-on-de-minimis-shipments-with-unsafe-unfairly-traded-products&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov&#x2F;briefing-room&#x2F;statement...</a>

I&#x27;m inclined to believe they&#x27;re already doing something like this.  I don&#x27;t shop them but my wife uses Shein and Temu pretty often, and commented last year that more and more stuff was shipping from the US rather than overseas now.

De minimis exemption expiring has been a planned thing for years through administrations of both parties. Trump admin has been delaying the already planned expiration during the Biden years to use as a negotiating carrot.Basically it just means Temu&#x2F;Aliexpress&#x2F;Etc. will ship their goods to the US in bulk instead of bypassing customs on individual small orders, and distribute from domestic warehouses, having to now compete with US producers who do the same thing.It does completely kill any business built on dropshipping individual orders from chinese factories without ever touching inventory however.

&gt;&gt; If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu &#x2F; AliExpress&#x2F; Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround.

&gt;&gt; If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu &#x2F; AliExpress&#x2F; Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround. Based on your edit I would guess that they would import a bunch of orders in one shipment to make the &#x27;per shipment&#x27; charge small per item&#x2F;order.

I wonder how item will be defined. If I order a pack of 100 tiny magnets from AliExpress, is that $30 or $3000?

Realistically, the $25 minimum is to cover the costs of handling the imports (with some premium), so it doesn&#x27;t make sense to charge it for every item in a batch separately.

I suspect that this $25&#x2F;50 per item policy is to prevent people from claiming a lower value than the actual price of the item. I&#x27;ve received international packages marked &quot;gift&quot; with a value of $10 that I had paid much more for.I doubt the US will even manufacture substitutes for most of the things I liked and ordered from AliExpress. People with hobbies primarily supplied by Chinese manufacturing (like mine- electronics, 3D printing, FPV drones) are just going to be paying more for the same thing. There&#x27;s no way we&#x27;ll get an American substitute for niche products- all the US chip fabs are going to be filled with orders for higher dollar parts.Note that the fact sheet says per item, not per shipment. So there doesn&#x27;t even seem to be a way to make one big purchase of several items to pay a single fee. They will hit you for every item in the shipment.Quick edit: I also note that the fact sheet makes a distinction between things sent through international post vs. other means. If you send via UPS&#x2F;FedEx&#x2F;DHL there will be regular customs fees (34%?), and through post you will have the $25&#x2F;50 per item fee. So I will definitely have to pay attention to the shipping method for anything bought from AliExpress from now on.Quick edit 2: I literally have a PicoCalc from ClockworkPi coming in the mail in a few days- I guess we&#x27;ll see if DHL charges me any extra fees.

Based upon someone&#x27;s imaginary example?&quot;less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world&quot;I ordered from Temu and it&#x27;s shipped from China and arrives at my door with my local sales tax applied -- because Temu abides by Canadian law -- but otherwise with no additional fees. Got a pair of headphones and a three timer device yesterday for $10 CAD.Or you know, Trump&#x27;s constant yapping about Canada&#x27;s diary tariff. In reality the US ships 4x more dairy to Canada tariff free than the reverse, and we, by design, do not target sending dairy to the US. But Trump takes advantage of the poorly informed and&#x2F;or stupid, and it works amazingly.&gt;U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it&#x27;s own detrimentIf you&#x27;re sitting in the richest large country in the world, literally at the height of its economic accomplishment, and you really buy it when someone tells you that you&#x27;re the victim, you might be profoundly misinformed and with literally zero context of reality.The US has an amazing amount to fall, and it&#x27;s going to happen. And when you&#x27;re working on the assembly line doing extremely low value work, having been ostracized by the entire planet, enjoy how you made the libs pay.

&gt; This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10This is what strikes me about these new tariffs... for all the concern about how it&#x27;s going to impact the US economy (and I don&#x27;t doubt it will), this is STILL far, far, less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world. Donald Trump&#x27;s justification for all this is that the U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it&#x27;s own detriment, and I&#x27;m not sure he&#x27;s necessarily wrong here.

Yeah, the stopping drugs thing is just performative propaganda. It’s really about the money, and the attempt to punish China (which will in fact mostly hurt Americans as much or more, anyways). If it were about the drugs only, there wouldn’t be such punitive measures, and the press release wouldn’t mention the fact that China doesn’t have a de minimus exception.

Sounds like a good idea, but how are they actually going to implement and enforce that?Do they open every package? What stops Temu or whatever from just keep sending them? I mean drugs get through so ..

People will just ship large quantities and then warehouse them in the US.Sounds like you have some cool projects planned.... do you have any pics&#x2F;links you can share?

This is what happened in Sweden about 10 years ago, when they started charging a $7 &quot;administrative fee&quot; on all packages privately imported from China. Prices for resistors went from $1 for a pack of a hundred to $8. As a student at the time, it effectively made the hobby non-viable over night because it got too expensive.Lately, there have been some domestic actors filling in the gap. But it&#x27;s still a significant cost increase compared to the glory days.

Great. AliExpress was the RadioShack of 2025. No way I’m spending $25+ for a strip of SMD resistors, and I expect to never see them available in the US at a price that makes sense as a hobbyist. This isn’t helping anyone, will prevent a lot of prototyping, and just be a bad experience in life. Thanks for ruining the fun of the last 5-10 years of DIY electronics golden age.I had plans to build some animatronic Halloween decorations for this year over the summer. I’m not going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on parts that nominally cost less than $50.My own pain is minor though compared to everyone I know who uses Temu and other things to basically outfit their life. This will be insanely regressive as they have the least to spend on “on brand” products, which themselves are imported too. This is like “super sales tax for the poor.” Me, I’ll just save my money and wait for the next president to undo the mess. My buddies not as successful monetarily as me? Their quality is life is going down the drain.

I had not heard about the de minimis removal. That would be crazy. I assume that would be the end of every dollar store in the country right?

&gt; make this make sense.Sure. Modern Chinese RoRo vessels fit more than 1 shirt on them. The average shipping manifest to America looks more like 125,000 shirts, 10,000 tons displacement of natural gas, 40,000 sex toys, 20,000 Macbooks and a few dozen merchant marines making the trip. The &quot;great cost to the environment&quot; was manufacturing these products. The carbon footprint for shipping linens around the world is negligible, and cheaper than buying American-made.It doesn&#x27;t take a genius to see that this isn&#x27;t an environmental issue, China will fuel up their boats regardless and take their surplus elsewhere. This is about American businesses outright failing to compete in the free market in places that matter, like car manufacturing and $1 tee shirt factories.

crazy thought, maybe a $1 item shouldn’t be shipped from overseas at great expense to the environment? 5 years ago all anybody would talk about is the environment and now people are burning down EVs and complaining that they’ll have to pay more for a cheap $1 shirt they don’t need to be moved 6000 or more miles? make this make sense.

From what I understand, de minimis exemption has also been removed.That is a huge, huge deal. It effectively means that all goods imported from China will be slapped with a 30% import tax, as soon as said goods arrive the US border &#x2F; customs.Usually what happens then, is that the courier will pay that tax, and then bill the recipient later on - as well as charge some fee&#x2F;fees for the work done.This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you&#x27;re paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu &#x2F; AliExpress&#x2F; Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.(That&#x27;s just from the most obvious consumer example...then you have pretty much everything else. Goods, commodities, etc.)EDIT: I found more info here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-closes-de-minimis-exemptions-to-combat-chinas-role-in-americas-synthetic-opioid-crisis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;fact-sheet-pr...</a>So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.a $1 item with $1 shipping will end up costing you as much as $52 after June!

US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU