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I mean it's an inherently anti-consumer policy, the question is if that hit to consumer choice is worth it for the manufacturers that are getting a leg up, or to kneecap a foreign adversary who's making a play at market capture.
Trump doesn't have anything close to the market awareness to make these judgement calls with any degree of accuracy outside of tariffing literally everything that's imported and hoping it hits some of the right spots.
I mean, tariffs can definitely make sense if a country is making extremely cheap alternatives that destroy the local industry or if another country sells insanely cheap options to get a monopoly on the market to then increase the price.
There is an economic argument that goods are selling at the clearing rate. We sell widgets for $5 because that's the price point at which we move the most number of widgets and therefore generate the most revenue.
If we start taxing imported widgets by $1/ea, the retailer has to choose between stocking the domestic widget (expensive but no tax) versus the imported widget (cheap but taxed). But they still want to maximize the units sold, so they won't raise the price above $5.
There is a counterargument that tariffs will cause importers to redirect their supply to other countries. That drives the gross inventory down over time and raises the clearing price above $5.
But, broadly speaking, tariffs will raise the price of goods that we can't efficiently make in the US while the price of goods we can make will remain largely unchanged. So this then raises the question, What Do We Make in the United States Today?
Retailers in the US should add a second price tag with the 20pct included as an example
That should be the exact attack ad Harris uses.
Is there really any way to get us making things again?
Part of me feels like that would be better for workers, but I'm kind of a dumbass
Do you want things to be cheaper or wages to be higher (especially wages for those in low wage jobs).
There were ideals about competitive advantage. But the whole economy has been undercut by lower wages elsewhere that things got cheaper but not because of increases in productivity in the economy so wages went down.
There are a lot of pressure to deflate wages with free trade and immigration. But things that increase wages like market forces and limited labour aren't really a factor anymore.
Making things again would be taxes on imports, free education, tax breaks for RandD and investment. Also subsidies and blocks on exporting IP and knowledge.
To be fair, it's corporations choosing to raise the price instead of making less money. You see this exact argument from the other side when the left wants to make the wealthy pay taxes. Either way it's a deeply flawed argument.