Chinese people would understand that tough times are because Americans elected an idiot.
Americans would understand that tough times are because their fellow Americans elected an idiot.
It will be a crisis for both countries, but it will unite one and divide another. I think everyone will lose but America is likely to lose harder, bigly even.
What? The US President has said repeatedly that tariffs are an easy money maker with no adverse side-effects. China is about to experience the boom times just like everyone in the US is now. You heard the US President’s comments about the recent jobs report, right?
Well, Chinese don’t have proper elections so there, I don't know.
But you can be sure that in the USA, this will all stop in 2 years with the midterms, and be reversed in 4 with the presidential elections. No one other than Trump’s fan base likes this even now, imagine in a few months when people start feeling the terrible repercussions.
The whole issue is that no one can be sure it will stop in 2 or 4 years. That's precisely the risk: will it stop? Will it not? Either way, I'm not investing some millions of dollars to setup shop in the USA if all that investment will go bust if the next election cycle removes tariffs.
Anyone saying they are sure about what is happening in the next 2-4 years in the USA is delusional.
Esp. considering how they've always got someone to blame for the issues that they cause. It's an ancient playbook
1. Identity a problem
2. Blame $group of people for the issue and rally citizens to you
3. Oust previous administration/rulers with rallied citizens
And then to stay in power
1. Create or identity a problem
2. Blame $group of people for the problem
3. Rally citizens to ostracize the new group of ppl
4. Back to 1
The issues never need to be resolved, as long as the citizens blame someone and feel empowered to lash out against someone (the people getting blamed).
Hopefully so, but I'm not certain elections will be the same as they have. There's reason to believe Trump has no intention of leaving office, and the Republican party has not intention of losing power. This is their chance to remake America long term, and they can't really do that if it gets overturned every 2-4 years.
Democrats have been saying exactly the same since Bush Junior was elected: "OMG, this will surely become an autocracy by the end of his mandate! There's no way we will ever have democratic elections again!"
Really, I don't like Trump, I think he is a buffoon, but Democrats are so tiresome, calling wolf every time they don't get what they want. I know toddlers with more self restrain.
You're not paying attention. Doesn't matter what was said before. It matters what the Trump administration is doing this time. I wasn't saying this after Trump won the election. It was everything he's done since taking office.
Trump himself, out of his own mouth, with his own tongue, using the air from the breathe inside his lungs, has literally and explicitly with no ambiguities said on multiple occasions that he wants to violate the constitution and have a third term. Republican leaders are humoring the idea.
You mentioned there are multiple occasions: You got a quote on that? I did a quick Google search, but the most recent events are hogging up the results and I didn't hear anything literal about him saying what you claim he was saying. If you're referring to the most recent question asked by a reporter, what you're saying is false -- there was nothing literal or explicit about it.
The specific text in the 22nd Amendment states:
"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once"
And many people seem to have collective amnesia about the January 6 Capitol riots, the Trump-Raffensperger phone call, the fake electors plot, etc. Trump has shown us many times who he is, and yet somehow many conservatives still refuse to believe the evidence that is right in front of their eyes.
I am not part of Trump's fan base, and I am in favor of taking action to reverse decades of negative trends I've seen happening as a result of American corporations selling their souls to the highest outside bidders. It's going to be short term pain for long term gain.
Tariffs are not a magic button for "short term pain, long term gain". The way they're being implemented is more like "short term pain, long term pain".
You genuinely think the corporations will stop "selling their souls to the highest outside bidder" with tariffs? Like, how exactly could such a thing happen?
Besides, corporations are actually better equipped to deal with sudden expenses then small businesses. Corporations will suffer the lest and possibly will pay for exceptions for themselves in white house. Smaller businesses wont be able to do the same.
I keep hearing people say short term gain, but no one wants to put a time on short term, nor do they want to do the math on how long it would take for their their plans to come to actual fruition using tariffs. There is nothing short term about setting up steel mills, rare earth extraction, chip factories, growing coffee...
This isn't short-term pain for long-term gain; it's short-term pain for long-term catastrophe.
The tariffs aren't some carefully-devised scheme to work out how to reshore manufacturing to the US; they're a slapdash scheme based on such idiotic economics that people had to do a double-take because the President of the United States and his cabinet couldn't possibly be that stupid. And once that sinks in, it becomes extremely counterproductive to the ostensible aims.
Why should anyone bother reshoring anything to the US? You might escape 30% tariffs on your product, but only for 30% tariffs on the inputs to your product. And living in the US means your long-term plans are always at risk of the toddler-in-chief throwing another tantrum because, as we've already seen, a deal he makes yesterday can become the worst deal in the world that is proof of how much the US is getting cheated tomorrow.
Negative trends of what? Exchanging highly paid services for cheap goods?
EU needs to start taxing heavily any services provided here by the USA. Having the USA moron in Chief pretending that the comercial balance is solely made of physical goods to create an Excel sheet warrants a nice lesson.
>EU needs to start taxing heavily any services provided here by the USA.
Their services are provided by companies/branches in the EU not the US.
When you buy a EC2/S3 bucket from AWS you get invoiced by Amazon Luxembourg, not Amazon Washington. When you buy a Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Meta or Apple service, you'll be buying from a company registered in Ireland or Netherlands. And most of them also have datacenters in the EU for their EU customers.
So how do you tax them more than other companies in the EU? Make The Great EUSSR Firewall?
What you see here is entirely about "corporations selling their souls to the highest outside bidders", who do you even think benefits from all this if not the oligarchs?
Small US companies near me, reliant on Chinese inputs, aren't suddenly getting hundreds of millions to build factories that'll take years to finish. Trump’s plan assumes most small businesses can pause everything for long, expensive factory construction/toolup projects. In my area our three big manufacturers depend on Canadian aluminum and Chinese subcomponents. Tariffs won’t bring jobs back but they’ll kill the ones we still have.
Which is likely one reason among many why Biden didn't cancel the Trump v1 tariffs. Instead the IRA included a good chunk of money to invest in green infrastructure. We had Trump sticks and Biden carrots working somewhat harmoniously, and a smooth transition.
It will suck on both sides, but the majority of American households can weather a $2-4k blow over the next year as supply chains react.
Congress stepping in to exclude Canada and Mexico and the NAFTA exemption cushions the blow significantly.
Most of Latin America being placed at the lower end of the announcement means manufacturers who used to be competitive until China Shock set around 2014-16 can be cost competitive again.
Other large markets like India, UK, and Vietnam are negotiating as well and India expects as Bilateral Trade Agreement to be closed by Aug-Oct.
Half of Americans say they live paycheck to paycheck, so no - the majority of households will not be able to survive for long if they have to spend an extra few thousand to stay where they are today.
Those that can will be cutting spending, which will ripple across the rest of the economy.
There's no sign that negotiation is even possible, never mind likely.
One tell is that tariffs have been applied to the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are inhabited by penguins and produce no imports or exports.
These are not the actions of a rational administration.
Mexican cartels just got handed the biggest payday of their wildest dreams. 30% profit on the entire global economy if only they can get it past the border.
Strangely, I was thinking about this yesterday, that smuggling now became profitable :) It used to be and still is very profitable in some countries with goods that attract big tariffs like cigarettes. Gray markets will boom.
>Half of Americans say they live paycheck to paycheck, so no - the majority of households will not be able to survive for long if they have to spend an extra few thousand to stay where they are today
What do you think the death toll will be? A majority of households not surviving would put it over 160 million.
$4k per capita (not household) loss would put the US in 2022 territory [1].
Holy bad faith bs from someone who pretends they're a straight shooter. “...the death toll.” What a trash response to Americans suffering.
So kind of you to volunteer that the poorest among us have nothing and should be happy about it.
You admit this is a $4k hit that Congress didn’t pass. Guess after all your talk here, you don’t actually believe in the Constitution or separation of powers just “I should be able to do what I want with power.”
$4k no biggie, right? From my experience, it just means when things wear out, they don’t get replaced. So shoes for kids get stretched to last longer. Car maintenance gets skipped. (You can judge a bad president by the number of broken-down cars on the side of the road.). It’s food not bought, medical/dental care skipped, rent coming up short.
The real death toll won’t be a one-time body count. It’ll be slow and quiet: worse health, more homelessness, more suicides. And for what? So we can LARP like we’re rebuilding American industry without giving businesses the capital, labor, or time to do it?
This isn’t strategy. It’s cruelty pretending to be policy.
Nah, you're just the one OK with Trump unilaterally imposing tariffs, something that the Constitution says only Congress can do. And like your failure to address that point in your response, caring about the Constitution isn't a thing to you.
> the majority of households will not be able to survive for long if they have to spend an extra few thousand to stay where they are today.
The median American household has an income of around $78,000 [0]. They can survive the blowback. The Trump admin on the other hand will not.
As a Sullivan, Raimondo, and IRA supporting Dem, it's a win-win for me. Harsher policies against China have been enacted which will not be rolled back (just like how the Biden admin let Trump 1 era tariffs remain) and it will cause a severe blow as midterm fundraising season has started. The NY by-election for Stefanik's seat itself proved that the tariffs and DOGE have made plenty of purple to light red seats vulnerabile.
The whole trump thing went from prospects of economic boom to "the median household is enough wealthy to tolerate the price increase" really, really quick
I like how you talk about them like there is any "game" involved. Neither individual knows what the hell he's doing. Just greedy self-serving bulls in a china shop.
You do understand that means half of all American households make less than 78k? If your reasoning is based on the upper half of wealthiest Americans, it ignores virtually all the most vulnerable.
They call it blowback because 'increased homelessness, suicides, kids not getting new shoes as they grow, people having teeth pulled instead of dental work' and 'you will have nothing and be happy' make their policy look bad.
Then later they will make fun of the people that have missing teeth because they chose food for their kids over dental work and call those people trash.
> but the majority of American households can weather a $2-4k blow over the next year
- Wasn’t this the administration that campaigned on lowering costs of goods? Now, not even a half-year in, the narrative is “Sorry, deal with it, while we chaotically disrupt global markets.”
- The administration is apparently intent on a strategy that builds the U.S. manufacturing base. That’s not a one-year horizon, if ever.
Manufacturing isn't returning to the US due to these tariffs.
Just like before the tariffs, the US is still too expensive.
On the other hand, it has killed cost-competitiveness for Chinese exports directly from China or via transshipment from Vietnam.
The tariff regime has now made Latin America (Brazil, Colombia), Turkiye, Philippines, parts of the EU (Poland, Czechia, Romania), and India cost competitive. And NAFTA/USMCA exemptions still remain and this was something Congress pushed back HARD on to ensure.
> Manufacturing isn't returning to the US due to these tariffs.
Even if it did, who cares? It wouldn't make anything less expensive or better and unemployment was already basically as close to zero as it will ever get. If wages go up that would just increase inflation more.
I can't figure out what they even imagined this was going to accomplish.
> Manufacturing isn't returning to the US due to these tariffs.
Even if it did, is it even desirable?
Countries that actually tried to keep manufacturing beyond its usefulness typically punch beneath their weight, such as the case of Germany.
The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.
The US, being the most advanced economy in the world, transitioned a long time ago into a finance and service economy. It's kind of fascinating (viewing from the outside) that it want to revert to a more rudimentary economy, and there are people applauding that.
> Countries that actually tried to keep manufacturing beyond its usefulness typically punch beneath their weight, such as the case of Germany.
Can you explain to me how Germany is punching below their weight?
Like, I personally think that having manufacturing in multiple places is good for resiliency reasons at the very least.
> The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.
This is a complete myth. The US lost manufacturing because capital controls were removed, and capital went looking for new margins. Like, all of Microsoft's English customer service and technical documentation were in Ireland in the 90's. Is that because Irish people have comparative advantage in these fields? No, it's because wages were super super low compared to the US. We used to have a bunch of clothing factories too, because we were cheap.
Fundamentally, stuff actually needs to be made if you want a modern society. You can outsource that to cheaper countries/Asia for a while, but it's not gonna end well. Like, a large proportion of the population are not cut out to be tech or finance professionals, and if you outsource all the factories that they could have worked at, then they'll get really depressed and angry and vote for Brexit/Trump/Le Pen/AfD.
And given that most of the rich west are democracies, you can't just pretend these people don't exist.
> Congress stepping in to exclude Canada and Mexico and the NAFTA exemption cushions the blow significantly.
I know the senate voted this through. But it still has to pass the house doesn't it? I doubt it will even get to be voted on with Mike Johnson as speaker.
The expanded child tax credit was ~3k per year. It absolutely clobbered child poverty rates. This sort of delta in expenses can change a family's fortune significantly.
It's too bad that INS v Chadha essentially gutted the National Emergencies Act, which could allow Congress to end some/all of the tariffs. In it's original form, the NEA allowed Congress to pass a concurrent resolution to terminate an emergency without needing the president's signature. Now it has to be a joint resolution, which can be vetoed by the president, and what president is going to sign off on the termination of an emergency they themselves declared?
And, of course, all those Americans who were already poor and are now even poorer will have the extra time and money to start businesses and manufacturing lines. Especially with the 30% increase on prices for all the machinery and raw goods they may need to import.
Chinese don’t get to protest or voice dissent and Americans can’t be bothered to