Harley 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.
https://www.nordea.com/en/news/mar-a-lago-accord-explained-a...
So, despite being labelled "tariffs", the actual basis for calculating the "reciprocal tariffs" has nothing to do with tariffs.
I rather doubt Walmart is going to increase the price of only Chinese made goods 25%. I think everything goes up 25% and they pocket the margin as long as they can get away with it.
It doesn't work because it's basically illegal to be poor in America, or rather to live like a poor person in a developing country. Because of theories about gentrification and such we just banned everything like SROs, company dorms, etc.
It worked for a little while in the 2000s because earlier flight from cities had left a lot of empty housing open to gentrify, but none of that is left.
There's a few classes of people left like supercommuters and people who live in RVs in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, but not going to run a big factory like that.
But memes about suicide nets aside, Chinese factory workers are there by their own choice, because it's better than their alternatives, and we've eliminated such choices by simply making it illegal to have the low cost of living it requires.
This was done to make the poor underclass go away (homeless people) but it also makes this type of working class (factory workers) go away. Luckily for us, we have a service economy with email jobs for them to work instead.
Well pack it up, that, the Evangeline legend and the Katrina episode of Boondocks round the tale out. Nothing else to see here.
(Actually, the slave labor camp is Mississippi these days [1])
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9354922; https://web.archive.org/web/20201108140152/https://in.news.y...
The problems I described are mostly in blue states, although Texas has different problems that somehow result in basically the same issues. Like Houston doesn't have zoning, but still ends up with sprawl due to other restrictions.
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
The TLDR is Miran sold to Trump US can Plaza Accord everyone, devalue USD to reindustrialize US, draw down US debt/commitments, keep exorbitant privelege... all by slapping tariffs (Trump's fav hammer) to scare countries into signing (converting) existing US commitments to "century bonds" in US favour while tying them to US orbit for foreseeable future. Is US strong enough to coerce others to sign on? IMO doesn'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 -> US strength and monetary manipulation skills can force others to fall in line. And TBH countries have fallen in line in the past.
Why Trump’s tariffs are better than you think — and much worse
subscribe! https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/03/06/donald-trump-tariffs-im...
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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.
Wikipedia's articles on Smoot–Hawley and the Tariff of Abominations both have sections on their effects.
In short, we'll see a brief rise in the domestic economy, then a sharp recession. One of the reasons SE Asia, BRICS, and the EU have been so active to disconnect themselves from the U.S. is they don't want to get caught up in the U.S. economic failure like they did in the 1930s.
1) raise tax revenue in a way that partially falls on foreign nationals
2) 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
None of the GOP budgets reduce the deficit. Trump’s blew them out even further.
My understanding is that yes, the national debt is still increasing, although the administration is counting on tariff funds to supplement revenue. Would you agree?
Not the debt, the deficit. The debt is the card balance. The deficit are new swipes. Nothing in the current policy package is about deficit (let alone debt) reduction.
(Valid on trade deficits. I guess we can run trade surpluses if we give up dollar hegemony. That, of course, means no more deficits.)
Let me see if I am following. The tariffs are ostensibly about spurring domestic industry so that American companies can flourish and we don’t have to pay tariffs on imports of foreign goods in the long term. Is that right? If so, then long term, aren’t we hoping that the “tariff funds” are small? But they are simultaneously supposed to supplement revenue to pay down debt too?
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.
1. has no US parts in the supply chain
2. has a importer that is willing to sacrifice itself for the greater good
A faint drop of hope in an intergalactic ocean of despair.
Be calm, ask right questions and you will got truth.
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's some monestizing of debt. But in less than 4 years these tariffs will go away, which is why companies won't spent billions of dollars investing in state side manufacturing that'll take maybe 5 years to plan and build. Therefore I'm not sold on the montizing debt motivation yet.
FRB won't reduce interest rates if there's inflation alone. They'd only reduce interest rates if the economy also slows down into recession territory.
That's the short term view.
In the long term view, they are the biggest tax increase in the history of the country, therefore they are potentially the biggest tax decrease in the history of the country. Political fodder, even for a corpse.
(c) Should any trading partner take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters, I may further modify the HTSUS to decrease or limit in scope the duties imposed under this order.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
"I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. Bow and appease me".
It's impressive they got to forty odd Presidents with only one civil war so far, but it's just luck and it didn't last.
Tariffs are a tax. Tax on us, the people buying goods.
It's a massive tax increase. People are slowly waking up to that fact.
Rolling back the tariffs is giving everyone a tax cut. Well, tax cut back to baseline of what everyone expected.
As people realize that they are the ones paying the tariffs, this is going to be very unpopular.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-cou...
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.
[1]: https://www.polaris.com/en-us/snowmobiles/owner-resources/he...
And wait for the response from the trading partners...
"I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-chi...
Politically it'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 "I didn't really support it" to "we were misled". With a lot more visible economic pain, of course.
Then that anger from having been "tricked" 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.
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.
Whether invading Iraq would have still happened without that popular support is besides the point. The point is there was full-throated support from many people, who would reflexively reject dissent while parroting corpo media talking points, and who then only came to see what a poor idea it had been over time.
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.
What a massive and moronic blow to our soft power.