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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

#491

Post by groundzeros2015 »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #409
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“people who disagree with me must do it because they are stupid and/or manipulated” It’s true on its surface - most people don’t know about economics, across all political spectrums, and so rely on leaders (which I thought is what liberalism advocates for?). It’s not a helpful model if you want to understand what’s going on. So then the interesting parts to explore are the reasons they want to believe it, and the rea…

Let's keep in mind that a tariff is, by definition, a tax that is paid by an importer to their own government for importing some good. > the educated economists who also support the position > the tariffs are something other countries are paying the US I'm quite sure the provided definition of a tariff is accurate. Given that, who are these economists and what are the reasons they give for supporting this belief that…

Is your position that nobody educated in economics would ever support a tariff?

edit: in the context of giving good economic advice.

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

#492

Post by chimprich »

eudamoniac wrote: post #156
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…

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…

> Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened.

But what about the other side of the coin - that exports will now become more difficult, because of retaliatory tariffs? How does that help your domestic economy?

Trumps solution seems to be to try to bully other countries into accepting tariffs and not imposing tariffs on American goods. But how is this supposed to work? Quite apart from the appalling moral and fairness aspects of this strategy, trashing the economies of other countries is a bad idea, because you want other countries to be wealthy so they can buy stuff from you.

Free trade has built the modern Western world, and has already made the US the world's leading economic superpower. I can't even see what Trump is trying to achieve.

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

#493

Post by tzot »

wjfuu32984 wrote: post #445
rootusrootus wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We honest users of the emdash are sad at LLMs making it unwelcome.

Most honest users of the em-dash use it in pairs. I have never — not once — seen an LLM use it in pairs.

I always have been using em-dashes with specific spacing:

1. replacing parentheses —given that the em-dash in pairs for me mark more-relevant-to-the-main content than a parenthesized expression would— so I use the same spacing as `()`

2. replacing colon or just finishing the sentence with a subsentence— so the spacing goes like for a colon.

Probably unfounded grammatically and against any style guides, but this spacing makes sense to me.

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

#494

Post by jacquesm »

cdrnsf wrote: post #403
jacquesm wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amazes me is that all of the checks and balances have either failed or have been disabled. The US is always full of their 'Founding Fathers', I can't help but think that they'd be horrified to see the situation as it has developed so far and that's with a serious note that I suspect it will get a lot worse still.

The heritage society has worked for decades to tilt the ideological balance of the judiciary and the Supreme Court specifically. The GOP base’s cult-like devotion to Trump and his power to target the reelection prospects of individual representatives and senators has lead to them sidelining themselves. Unlike Trump’s first term, his cabinet and agency heads are little more than loyalists and yes men. Checks and balan…

Well, they've 'won'. Now they get to own the damage they are inflicting because this isn't going to end well.

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

#495

Post by RandomTisk »

BanAntiVaxxers wrote: post #209
nathan_compton wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this - Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race and I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything . This bullshit that American's won't vote for a woman is just an excuse not to run women and to deflect blame towards a culture war issue and away from the fact that the democrats don't actually have popular policies. I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but…

You know what’s interesting though is I think that a Republican woman would be unbeatable. Many Democrats would be salivating at the historical opportunity.

Most likely the first Republican female president will be a former Democrat.

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

#496

Post by jlarocco »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #349

I think there's an implicit assumption here that because Americans pay the costs of tariffs it means there isn't a knock on impact (where for instance goods from other countries aren't bought, in preference of US local goods), in turn affecting the other economy. And that therefore Trump's tariff plays are without impact, whereas I'm not convinced that is the case.

It definitely has knock on impacts.

Most directly, when foreign products become more expensive, people may choose a local product that was previously seen as too expensive. So it generally has a negative effect on the foreign economy and boosts local production.

Unfortunately, it also drives the foreign companies to become more efficient so they can get their prices back down, while giving the local producers a crutch to justify higher prices and stagnate.

And there are other side effects, and all of the side-effects have side effects of their own. Economies are complicated.

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

#497

Post by amelius »

aj7 wrote: post #422
jkaplowitz wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind of older tourist visiting a foreign religious site is definitely going to be relatively indoctrinated regardless of their origin country. But yes, many Americans are indoctrinated. They also tend to be dominant in wide swaths of US geography and highly motivated by their indoctrinators to vote, thus maximizing their electoral impact. Many other Americans are pretty open-minded to new facts, even today. Unfor…

In Israel, virtually every Christian relic is fake. Some are hundreds of years old, but nevertheless fake. This is not a comment on Christianity as a religion. Religions need relics, and if they can’t find them, they are created. This is operating in modern times. I was working as a contractor for Intel Israel. They took everybody on a day trip. To an LDS temple to “see the organ” (what else?). An American LDS church…

Relics are only a way of advertising the religion.

We should ban advertisements of religions. If their gods are so powerful then they shouldn't need advertising. And if you are a believer AND god turns out to be real then banning advertising could lead to the return of Jesus. Win win.

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

#498

Post by PNewling »

Aurornis wrote: post #456
lovlar wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy. If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change. Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outr…

> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, The age groups who spend the most time on TikTok and Instagram are the least likely to have voted for this administration. There were populist demagogues getting elected before social media and cell phones, too. This isn’t a modern thing. I know everyone wants to use this moment in politics to blame their own pet peev…

The age groups who spend the most time on Facebook feeds though are the most likely to have voted for this administration...

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

#499

Post by threethirtytwo »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #452
threethirtytwo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weather prediction is the more apt analogy here. Astrology is total bullshit, while economics and weather is an attempt to predict the chaos.

Right, but what people miss is that some people (usually not academic economists) are able to predict the economy with good levels of accuracy. It is not hard, there is a ton of data, the problem is that you have to drop your own personal interest in politics...for 99.99% of people feeling politically validated is more important than being right on the economy.

Isn't there reams of data on weather patterns too? I thought that like the weather, economic systems are fundamentally chaotic and thus demonstrably unpredictable. There's a whole field of math where we can create these mathematical models that simulate chaos and are fundamentally unpredictable. I was under the impression that Economics falls under the purview of this mathematical theory in terms of unpredictability.

If I may ask, who are the people that do these predictions? What is there methodology and how do you know it's not luck?

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

#500

Post by Sharlin »

sciencejerk wrote: post #254
embedding-shape wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also can't fathom why the crowd (not just a HN subset) that was clamoring for tariffs thought it'd be anyone other than them shouldering the increase. Perhaps their influencers didn't spell it out for them? Now I'm neither in the US, American nor Democrat/Republican, but as far as I understand their argument, is that they know it means higher costs for those products for them, and it'll eventually lead to compani…

Thank you for offering an additional perspective. The article reads like the tariffs were a complete and total failure. You are saying it is too soon to tell, correct?

For many if not most of the affected imports, it would never ever make economical sense to try to rebuild a local industry from scratch, at least not without major subsidies. And as for local alternatives that already exist, they carry a premium higher than any tariff (because a local workforce likes to be paid living wages), even if magically scaled up to achieve some degree of economies of scale. Western economies are truly and irreversibly post-industrial.
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