Trump’s tariffs are hurting American manufacturers instead of helping them

Yeah, this was by design, whether just bad improv or not. This admin has all the wrong people sitting at the head of the table.

Literally everyone left of center was saying it all of 2024. Too many people didn’t listen.

You would think the Covid research crowd would've researched this before the election but Facebook and fellow idiots aren't good resources for information.

> who could have foreseen this Ronald Reagan.

Literally anyone and everyone who passed 6th social studies at any point after 1935. That so many of our countrymen can't even hit that same low bar is a pretty damning indictment about how willfully f****** stupid we are as a whole.

Literally everybody who said this was a bad idea. And that we had tried this once before about 90 years ago with the same result.

Just every expert since I can recall, and I was alive in the 80s

I'm no economist, but f****** duh.

Not the Trumpy business owner profiled in the beginning of the article. He later recounts how he is flabbergasted that tariffs are hurting manufacturing and working class people

Trump main goal is to help Russia. MAGA are delusional by assuming otherwise.

Breaking news for morons!

Overqualified for a cabinet position

You sound like a coastal elite.

You on that ballot?

This is the real problem. The rules constantly changing means that you're constantly scrambling to adjust. When the prices of materials you use to make stuff change radically week to week your planning team is constantly struggling just to cover basic things such as forecasting or calculating what the total cost to make an item is going to be. So not only does it ensure that the item you build costs more, you also throw in a mountain of inefficiency thanks to trying to keep up with the *constant* changes. I'd wager that the costs of trying to figure out what the hell to do about magnets consumed *millions* of worker hours last year, as an example, and millions more trying to figure out how to comply with the ever changing rules for what made in America mean in practical terms.

I work for a manufacturer that has contracts with large customers. Much of the pricing is fixed and cannot pass thru those increased costs. Company is losing so much money.

So they raise prices on consumers. 

Man, I own a manufacturing business in the United States and I still can't get most the Republicans in my life to believe me when I show them how this hurt my business. They didn't believe me when I was telling them how it would hurt my business in 2024, and now that I've got receipts to show that it did everything I told them it would do, they still won't believe me

Who needs experts? What has an expert even done for anyone? - magq.

Buckle up, pal! At least 2.5 years more to go.

Yet they can never use that logic against trump who actually claims to know everything.

Same industry. This last year has been a roller coaster but the last 3 weeks have been f****** brutal.

Bold of you to assume they'd do studies when there's firewood to be collected

We all are. I wish we could pass the entire cost to the ones who voted for him. I literally do not give a f*** if Trump voters are feeling the pinch. They wanted this, so they can f*** themselves.

You mean to tell me that the guy that fired Brett Michaels from a fake company on a fake reality TV show is a bad business man?

I guess the idea was that import taxes were supposed to *incentivize* buying domestic goods, which in turn would increase profitability and demand for domestic production.  They failed to take the actual complexity of real life into account. The fact that we don't just import c**** consumer goods, but also tons of raw materials, fertilizer. Essential stuff we can't produce here. The fact that we've off-shored so much manufacturing that it would hypothetically take years, if not decades, to actually get US manufacturing up to par with our overseas suppliers, especially with high quality technical stuff like microchips.  It was sheer goddamn stupidity and hubris, if not an actual concerted effort to weaken our own economy for market manipulation purposes.  It doesn't get said enough: the "elite" capitalist class have sold the American people out, period. 

It was never intended to. That was just the excuse given. Trump has repeatedly mentioned getting rid of income taxes with tariffs, which shifts the tax burden from income to consumption, making more of the tax burden fall on lower income brackets and less on upper income.

Trump's prior career can be more accurately characterized as "reality TV pop star in the field of large real estate" - the relationships of international trade on manufacturing is a contractor/subcontractor issue at most in that perspective. Even his estimation of aesthetic value is based on price tags and branding, not nuances of materials and design. Trump's use of tariffs in the past decade has been "products more expensive, therefore people buy locally, or government gets more of a mafia-style cut" - the implementation doesn't show an understanding of macroeconomic effects of broadly cutting supplies to both consumers and manufacturing simultaneously. Tariffs have historically been used as a more precise tool to encourage domestic purchases of specific products, but the use of broad tariffs is in line with the anti-globalism/pro-isolationism rhetoric of cutting down international trade and keeping money in the country. If his goals were really to flip the trade deficit however, he should also consider the effect of international goodwill. His international policies - economic, militant, and personal - have been having a kind of negative advertising for American products. If Americans have been importing less, it hasn't been enough to offset how demand for American products has decreased.

Those are just there to give votes at the convenient time

It's this exactly. They don't have a middle-school level understanding of public policy. IDK about you but that's when I learned what tariffs are. And by high school I had learned about all the corruption in the NYC customs house in the gilded age and so on. (Maybe the corruption was always part of the appeal to Trump.)

They didnt even understand who had to pay them. I heard multiple people insist China had to pay them. If you asked them to elaborate on how we would collect the money they would just stare at you and blink a lot.

Drank the Flavor-aid. Sad.

Doesn't seem to be the case since 401ks were increasing under Biden. Now it is pretty red.

The tariffs are hurting the stock market, not helping it.

Is that some kind of new car? Most Americans