[keithxm23]

> but many on this very site would need to give up a little bit of their privilege to reduce the pain felt by many of their fellow citizens.

Agreed. However, by imposing tariffs it is not the privileged who are going to be affected the most. The pain is felt most by the low-skill workers you mentioned earlier.

If the solution was instead along the lines of changing tax-brackets to tax the 'privileged' more, that might have better addressed the problem you mention in the beginning.

[baranul]

Not only are the poor going to bear the brunt of these tariffs, but this has been tried multiple times before, and failed. As in, catastrophic failure.

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it"

People should check out all the tariff insanity before and during the period of The Great Depression. That includes the justifications given.

[Yeul]

This is HN. Nobody here understands how "plastic crap from China" is what keeps poor people alive.

There are folks who earn $1000 per month who also occasionally want to buy a birthday gift for their nephew. I advise everyone to just occasionally go to a budget store and walk around looking at the customers.

[scottLobster]

The older I get the more I appreciate that those proverbs aren't just rhetorical.

I always assumed people would learn from history, because everyone knows that proverb. And yet now as I'm pushing 40 it seems more a warning, people will refuse to learn from history, and they will repeat it. So be as prepared as you can.

[jopsen]

Yeah, isn't this just regressive taxation?

How much all the imports are realistically going to be made in the US?

[garciasn]

If the tariffs remained in effect for three decades, or more, there may have been incentive to move manufacturing back to the US; however, with the changing of the guard on the regular, most companies are just going to ignore it for 3.5 more years and hope that someone stops this from continuing.

Because, if you think about it, it took decades to get us to where we are today and it'll take decades to reverse, even logistically. This is a bunch of stupidity and meaningless saber rattling that will do nothing but hurt everyone except the extremely wealthy who can afford the additional taxation on the consumer side because the Republicans will further reduce the taxation on the income side.

[ty6853]

Somewhat yes. But more precisely it is a reallocation from things we have the best comparative advantage to things where we have less comparative advantage. The main effect is to make almost everyone poorer.

[Jtsummers]

> How much all the imports are realistically going to be made in the US?

For some of the hardest hit locations, very little. The US would have to invade and claim other countries to start producing, for instance, vanilla or coffee (the US essentially doesn't produce vanilla, and for coffee we grow less than a percent of what we consume). But Madagascar got hit with 47% tariffs.

[mbfg]

Even at this tariff rate, it's unlikely US manufacturing will compete on price with china, etc. So likely won't help US business, and will crush lower/middle class people. This is true, imo, even after whatever long ramp up period companies need to start manufacturing here.

[shirro]

Yes it is regressive taxation. It can't be judged in isolation without considering how that revenue will be spent. If that revenue went into massive public works and social programs the stimulus could increase consumer spending which in combinations with tariffs might possibly benefit US business and jobs (gut feeling, not an economist) though perhaps the overall economy might still suffer. Clearly that isn't the plan though.

If it funds tax cuts for the extremely wealthy then potentially its going to be a colossal shit show.

Meanwhile countries are raising barriers against US exports and those losses will need to be made up with increased domestic demand. It is a very brave experiment.

[rayiner]

Look, this is basic economic theory. The kinds of taxes you levy alter primary behavior. You tax the things you don’t want and don’t tax the things you want. So looking at incidence of taxation (who pays the tax) isn’t enough. You need to look at how taxes alter economic incentives.

[justonceokay]

It is to be seen. Capitalists are the closest thing we have to rational economic agents. If there is a buck to be made in American manufacturing then that buck will be made.

My layman concern though is that these tariffs are not going to be stable enough to convince daddy warbucks to build a $10m factory.

[LinuxBender]

By low-skilled workers do you mean the working class in general? If so it is my understanding that the overall goal is to help them at the same time as the privileged by shifting taxes at the same time as tariffs start to come down to create a re-balance of sorts in theory. Here [1] is a quick interview of Treasury Secretary Bessent by CNN Kaitlan Collins that I think covers this idea at least a little bit. I am curious to see how this plays out in practice. It's explained a little more in depth here [2] including how this was done in the past. I know videos are an unpopular medium on HN but I believe they are both worth the time to watch.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8WWvBEiFvE [video][10 mins][cnn interview]

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ts5wJ6OfzA [video][24 mins]

[hattmall]

How can a lack of tariffs AND the presence of tariffs both hurt low skill workers. Secondly why do all of these countries have tariffs if they are so bad for the economy.

[greycol]

Because tariffs can be applied on specific goods rather than the current blanket tariffs.

i.e. You could place a tariff on steel to ensure local manufactures use American steel while placing a tariff that includes cocoa does not necessarily mean American chocolate producers can buy more from American cocoa producers so it only injures the local chocolate producers (and downstream consumers) without protecting or improving another local industry.

You could still argue that the steel tariff is not a net positive but at least the positives and negatives of tariffs are arguable.

To your second question three (inexhaustive) possible reasons are that the industry has large political sway, or it's part of a plan to stop the quick collapse of an industry while the economy develops other industries, or it's a defense against the artificial short term lowering of external prices (i.e. foreign government subsidies either to grow an industry in their country or to destroy the industry in other countries).

[nurettin]

Taxing the rich is wishful thinking. They don't just give up wealth. They will simply look at it as an additional cost and hike the prices of their products up causing more inflation and that means even more trade deficit.

[autoexec]

If companies could hike up their prices and still get consumers to pay them they'd already have done it. In fact, companies are constantly increasing prices as high as they possibly can up to the point where sales suffer.

They've taken advantage of recent events to prevent customers from feeling too ripped off though. When covid happened there were legit supply chain issues but even once they let up, and there were warehouse shortages because companies had so much unsold inventory, the companies continued to artificially restrict supply and blame the pandemic for higher prices.

Egg producers were busted colluding to inflate prices far higher than normal using the excuse of "bird flu" even as the largest supplier of eggs in the nation wasn't impacted at all by it (that's less of an excuse this time around though) and "inflation" is the new boogeyman companies are using to set expectations with consumers so that they can deflect blame for overcharging them, but even that only works for so long.

Nobody is going to pay $30 for a happymeal while their wages stagnate and their real earnings decline year after year.

Taxing the rich works just fine. We know it does because we used to actually do it. They'll spend billions trying to convince you that taking taxes from them is impossible and not worth trying tho. Why wouldn't they? That tactic has worked for them for a long time. Don't fall for it.

[autoexec]

> Agreed. However, by imposing tariffs it is not the privileged who are going to be affected the most.

I thought the idea was that the billionaires would buy up all the crashed stocks then suddenly the tariffs would be lifted so that they can sell them off as soon as they recover. If so, the privileged will be affected the most but only in terms of how much money they'll make while everyone else suffers in the meantime.

[dalyons]

I never really understood this argument. The billionaires wealth is mostly in stock. In a crash like this their wealth goes down 10% like of all us. They can buy assets on the dip, but it will only regain that 10% they lost.

[DSingularity]

Nobody has faith in the governments ability to put that money to good use. The US gov uses significant amounts of its budget to fund weapon development, promote weapon sales, change unfriendly foreign governments, support friendly foreign governments, and genocide troublesome foreign populations. Who will support raising more taxes to maintain and expand such efforts?

[mjevans]

Offhand, I'm unaware of where to even look to get an easy to digest version of 'where tax dollars go'. Would the GAO make such a report? Something for Congress otherwise? Would there be a classified and an public version?

Even better would be a tool that, E.G. with your IRS filing number, shows how much 'you' paid in, breaks down where that went, and shows how 'you' compare to other areas.

Such tools and reports would cost money, but making them is practically an audit anyway which is a good use of resources in a bureaucracy (part of the self-calibration system).

[sirbutters]

Letting billionaires hoard all the money has gotten us to where we are today. It seems worse than government mismanaging the budget. Was that concern also there in the 50s and 60s when the wealthy was taxed at a substantial higher rate? I don't believe so. It all seems to point at the failure of trickled down economics of Reagan.

[jollyllama]

> However, by imposing tariffs it is not the privileged who are going to be affected the most. The pain is felt most by the low-skill workers you mentioned earlier.

I don't think this is necessarily true. 1 day into tariffs and things are probably the same for the low-skill workers. So far, the stockholders are the ones taking a beating. Sure, that includes some low income retirees, but for the working poor, I would bet that proportionally they consume fewer foreign made goods. They're not drinking imported booze.

[HDThoreaun]

Everything at Walmart is about to be 34% more expensive but you think the rich are hurt more than the poor?