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American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

kielinstitut.de

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Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#331

Post by dboreham »

riffraff wrote: post #302
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are using "believed" - past tense. Facts change nothing. This report means nothing. These people still believe. The report is wrong. They are right. The truth is whatever they want it to be, not something out of their control.

I have a friend who works with american tourists visiting europe, mostly older folks, mostly to religious sights. They are, for the vast majority, indoctrinated beyond any chance of reasonable change of opinion. Talking with him makes _me_ worry about my own beliefs, because if these people can be so blind, maybe I am too.

The Americans visiting Europe are a sample very skewed towards sanity due to their socioeconomic situation and interest in history/culture. So this is either not true or highly troubling.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#332

Post by rendall »

gtirloni wrote: post #268
eudamoniac wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like you observed, no one with a grasp of economics thought exporters would absorb the cost of these tariffs. That includes myself, a person who supports tariffs. I don't think it should be necessary to explain why tariffs might be desirable, because they were not invented by idiots, but I will explain briefly. Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people w…

Let's say it works and we're in the future where the manufacturing has returned to the US and you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day? Do you have faith the US has an edge in manufactoring automation and won't need these semi-slaves? Do you have faith the nation…

> ...you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day?

The observation was that the wage boost of a minimum wage can be undercut by importing cheap goods made with slave labor. Workers can't get hired, domestic manufacturers cannot afford to hire.

The point is not that snapping phones together is some aspirational career. The point is that a legally mandated wage floor is meaningless if domestic producers cannot hire at all because they are competing with goods made under conditions that would be illegal here.

If you support minimum wages and labor standards, you either accept trade barriers that enforce those standards at the border, or you accept offshoring as a structural feature that permanently shrinks the set of jobs available to low-skill workers. You cannot have both.

No one is arguing that people should be forced into factory work. The argument is that a living wage should be available to anyone willing to work, and that requires domestic production capacity. Whether those jobs are in manufacturing, logistics, or automated facilities is secondary. What matters is that the price system does not systematically reward labor exploitation abroad while penalizing it at home.

I'll respond with a question: why wouldn't you want a living wage available to anyone willing to work? One way to enable that might be to ramp up US manufacturing and production.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#333

Post by Workaccount2 »

bartread wrote: post #56

I'm glad they've done the work here and put a figure on it - the impact absolutely needed to be quantified - but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function. People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common cur…

Most people seem totally unaware that Bernie Sanders was (and probably secretly still is) a big proponent of tariffs.

Horseshoe theory and all that, populists gonna populist.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#334

Post by DrScientist »

bartread wrote: post #56

I'm glad they've done the work here and put a figure on it - the impact absolutely needed to be quantified - but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function. People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common cur…

Depends on your goals - what I see is it increases US government income to help reduce deficit ( without the political fall out from raising direct taxes ), and at the same time encouraging businesses to move manufacturing to the US to avoid tariffs.

And in terms of burden - the cost hits the poor the most - but if your a billionaire funder of US political parties that's the point.

For a non-US person the most worrying aspect of this is that it also helps make the US more self-sufficient which means it's better prepared to go to war - which is not really good news.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#335

Post by treis »

dyauspitr wrote: post #262
treis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the opposite. These were announced 9 months ago and none of the doomsday predictions have come to pass. There's been major impact to some things but for the most part the economy has hummed along without a blip. Certainly not the everything in Walmart is going to get 34% prognostications that some were making: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253

Prices are wild right now. Meat has almost never been at $9-10/lb. Just a few years ago they were at $3-4/lb

Eggs were the same way. Now they are at their lowest point since 2019 and cost 5% of what they peaked at. There's an inherent volatility in food prices that can't really be helped.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#336

Post by wat10000 »

pinnochio wrote: post #157
BanAntiVaxxers wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What's the intersection of Americans who won't vote for a woman presidential candidate and Americans who support MAGA? I imagine it's fairly high. That said, I don't believe there's a single factor that determined the election. A flip in any of a dozen or more factors could have resulted in a different outcome.

I’m sure it’s only a small percentage of voters who would have voted for a male Democrat. But that’s all it would take to flip that election.

Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#337

Post by sethev »

sowbug wrote: post #257
eudamoniac wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like you observed, no one with a grasp of economics thought exporters would absorb the cost of these tariffs. That includes myself, a person who supports tariffs. I don't think it should be necessary to explain why tariffs might be desirable, because they were not invented by idiots, but I will explain briefly. Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people w…

How do you reconcile attitudes about climate change with your generalization about short/long-term pain?

I suspect the answer to this lies in who feels the short term pain vs who benefits from the long term gain.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#338

Post by Aromasin »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #266
PaulRobinson wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in. You're assuming that modern politics across most of the World has something to do with rational, logical thought. Russia, China, Europe, the US, the Middle East - they are all in a quagmire of irrational fractures between the public and the political classes who want power/cont…

You are using "believed" - past tense. Facts change nothing. This report means nothing. These people still believe. The report is wrong. They are right. The truth is whatever they want it to be, not something out of their control.

That is populism in a nutshell. It is anti-rationalism at its heart. There's no real ideology - that's how it applies to both Chávez and Trump, Corbyn and Orbán. People want to believe what feels "instinctively" correct, because the intellectual overhead of modern society leaves the majority of the population unable to deal with the reality that political and economic systems are incredibly difficult to understand without hours of study and thought. That is uncomfortable, so people rebel against intellectualism, because it's easier to be told lies through 30-second videos and feel well informed, rather than sitting through a 20-hour session that one might need to truly understand a niche of a niche. The more they read, the less they understand, so disengage from it altogether and go with their gut (designed for tribes of monkeys) because the cognitive overload is too much to bear.

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#339

Post by notahacker »

mikepurvis wrote: post #264
mothballed wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well when we look at rational economic policies take a look at top ~10 in terms of GDP, purchase parity adjusted, per capita: monaco, liechtenstein, singapore, luxembourg, ireland, macau, qatar, bermuda, norway, switzerland Monarchy: monaco, liechtenstein, qatar One party state w/ elections: singapore, macau direct democracy: switzerland represented democracy: Norway, Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg Multi-party represen…

But a monarchy/autocracy hardly guarantees you success either. Isn't this Bill Gates and charter schools all over again? Basically, the boring solution (democracy) gets you boring, middle-of-the-road results, while a monarchy is more likely to get you an outlier. The outlier might be at the top or the bottom of the pack, but because it's not democracy any more you don't have any say, so tough toenails if it's the wro…

There's no connection with monarchy at all - the only absolute monarchy is Qatar and we know their money comes from a lot of oil per capita. The other countries all have legislatures involving multiparty democracy with or without quirks/flaws (Switzerland has referenda, the microstates still give their constitutional monarch significant executive powers, Singapore's major party has completely dominated since the 1960s). The more obvious thing they have in common is low populations [relative to resources]

Re: American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

#340

Post by lijok »

bartread wrote: post #56

I'm glad they've done the work here and put a figure on it - the impact absolutely needed to be quantified - but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function. People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common cur…

> to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function

So roughly 98% of the population was surprised?

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