Plot twist: the person writing this is President Musk and the employee he’s referring to is Trump.
So bring on the downvotes, but can anyone tell me what the alternative plan was to bring manufacturing back to the states? And wasn’t that always going to make things more expensive?
Granted, this is being done with complete reckless regard, and the effects could’ve been spread out, but what’s the alternative?
Where did you get the idea that tariffs are supposed to increase domestic production in any way?
That’s the openly stated goal of tariffs from both parties.
It’s a dead industry to an economy that doesn’t need it anymore. The same way you don’t kill your chicken, produce your own oil, make your own shoes, shoelaces, clothes…etc. That’s how the imbalance of economies work.
What you don’t understand is that Trump knows this, and he cultivated both hope AND fear in enough people to get him into office. His end goal is to force you into buying dumb shit that is made better elsewhere because him and his cronies can’t sell it elsewhere for profit, and they own all of it. He’s literally trying to force you into paying money to people who own dead resources.
Trump is the guy walking up to you on the street asking you to buy the watches he just “found in a dumpster”. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
Democrats have been selling the promise of bringing back manufacturing jobs for just as long. The difference is they never had any intent on following through. Granted, the GOP didn’t intent to keep those promises either, but Trump works outside of that dynamic. So regardless of how badly this goes, to the common voter, this is going to look like Trump is the only one willing to follow through on his promised policy goals. By doing what both party’s always promised to do, he’s forced them to openly admit it was always a lie.
They may snag a few wins here and there, but I don’t see the Democratic Party ever making a full recovery from this. It’s a capitalist party, and they will always be subservient to capitalists. They’ll never be in a position where they can deliver on their promises to voters.
If a socialist and/or pro worker party manages to gain a foothold in our country’s electoral politics, they will peel off so many people from the base of both parties that they would completely dominate American politics. Both parties know this, and that’s why both of them are working to ban ranked choice voting and suing leftist candidates off of the ballots.
I can tell you! It’s just not a quick, easy, single bill that we can pass. It takes a fundamental change in the way Americans think, it’s gonna take at least 2 generations to make this move.
Here’s the plan: we’re gonna promote cooperation. We’re gonna get people to notice the systematic problems in the way they are treated by their authorities. We need to aggressively be better than our enemies, both in practice and knowledge.
Here’s the method: (Essay ahead).
We need to disrupt almost every single system that currently exists. They’re basically all fucked. Start with the ones that get the most people motivated - their basic needs first, entertainment second, their wellbeing third. That feels wrong and it is, we need 2 generations to fix this because we’ve been beat down by this system so bad the priorities aren’t even correct anymore. I’ve been using this tagline recently “People in homes, food in bellies, minds entertained and health maintained.”
You as an individual can and, if you want to have an impact of saving literally the world and not just America, probably should start doing your part for this plan. Give away what you can, but never what you need. And be careful, because you might need that later. Never let that get in the way, though, of giving what you can. Bring your neighbors grocery money when you have a bit of extra cash, and offer to start a food co-op to make sure they never go hungry. It sucks, because I know damn well I wanna go spend that extra 20 bucks to treat myself and you probably do too. But if you go give it away instead, it’ll come back to you. Not immediately, and not always symmetrically. But it will come back to benefit you in some way. We need to shift the focus towards the community instead of the individual. I have plans for the other steps, if you’d like I can go into them. But the food co-ops are the best first step IMO
Why would it take generations to fix an issue that only started a few decades ago? What a load of shit.
A few generations to fix
An issue that only started a
a few decades2 generations agoBecause generations are only 25 years, not the 100 that your generation will survive. These issues started, or at least became severely worse, about 3 generations ago with Reagan.
It took that long because they were attempting the slow boil method. We can course correct immediately.
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
We can but how do you as an individual plan to convince Americans to start the revolution? Personally, I think we need to build them up and show them the systemic issues they’re dealing with in order to convince them.
There are decades where nothing’s happensThere are decades where you don’t pay attention to what’s happening in the background, andthere are weeks where decades happenweeks where those decades of planning come to fruition.I’m not an accelerationist, but if I was then I would say Trump is doing it quite well. If this keeps up, people will be more open than you’d think to revolution.
I don’t disagree with you, and I’ve made this point to someone else as well. I’m not a revolutionary yet because people haven’t been burned enough to be convinced by a revolutionary yet
can anyone tell me what the alternative plan was to bring manufacturing back to the states?
what’s the alternative?
A better plan would have involved local subsidies and tax rebates for various industries that have the ability to be cheaper than existing outsourced infrastructure if they were to be developed with a large enough economy of scale, to incentivize them to engage in local production.
And for industries in which we wouldn’t experience lower prices even with larger local economies of scale, such as those involved in mining mineral deposits we simply don’t have enough of here in the states, we just… wouldn’t do anything to tariff anybody or provide incentives if it wouldn’t be something we were capable of benefiting from via local production?
And wasn’t that always going to make things more expensive?
These other methods would make things more expensive too, (albeit much less so) but they would directly incentivize local production, and crucially, only cost money when production was actually made locally. Nobody would get a tax rebate or subsidy if nobody was actually starting local production. With tariffs, however, everyone begins paying a higher cost, regardless of if local manufacturing is even happening, let alone if it’s cost effective or possible in the first place.
Tariffs are just an inefficient way of incentivizing local production compared to other options, because they primarily exist to punish other countries and their economies, rather than uplift our own. They can be used to incentivize local production, but if not properly linked with subsidies, rebates, and job programs, they aren’t terribly effective at doing that, and they will almost always lead to higher prices on an ongoing basis.
You’re singing my song. Everything you’re saying is spot on.
I think the eventual solve will be small batch manufacturing capability, progressively complex according to population density. But those means of production will need to be nationalized for planning & control, and it’s simply not possible under capitalism.
But the current power structure is built on “market solutions” by using collective punishment to force capitalists to make concessions without directly regulating them. It’s the whole reason the manipulate interest rates.
People will tell you subsidies and positive reinforcement but honestly that is just more government spending to make a few rich. The answer is, there isn’t an alternative. All options aren’t great.
Manufacturing working conditions are horrible. As a country develops workers rights, unions, safety regulations, etc, it becomes almost impossible to compete on a global scale for manufacturing. Naturally the manufacturers in countries where those things don’t exist do very well.
In certain countries, the labor is just a few steps off of slave labor, which we all know is highly profitable and highly unethical. In other countries their dollar is so weak that net exports are the obvious choice for profitable businesses. Manufacturing thrives in these conditions and attracts a great deal of foreign investment - because hey, if the shipping costs are outweighed by the operational savings - it’s a sound business plan!!
Tariffs upset that equilibrium and guess who pays American tariffs? AMERICAN COMPANIES. The government gets a benefit, US becomes less likely of an export destination for countries to trade with, the dollar gets messed with in funky ways, and there is some amount of global loss of productivity due to this forced shift.
Basically, I view tariffs as a tax on the benefits of cheap overseas labor.
I think you’re right. And I think the unspoken policy off anti-tariff politicians is, ‘We’re never bringing those jobs back.’
Bring on the downvotes but the correct answer is don’t. Free trade causes jobs in each country to align with recardiant advantage in those countries. We have the jobs we want now. Unless we are in the middle of a depression we don’t want government to “provide more jobs”. We don’t need more jobs. We want better jobs. The whole reason why manufacturing has slowed down in the US is that the global market for manufacturing doesn’t pay as well per man hour as other opportunities we already have.
Tariffs disrupt existing jobs to bring back old jobs. Old jobs we shouldn’t want as much as the jobs we have now.
Your telling me the US government can’t just demand other countries pay them money for no reason?
/j
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You forgot that the tea now costs $7.50 which is paid by the consumer. The tea company sure as shit isnt taking a 50% loss to sell tea now. So the american consumer pays the tariff. Shitler and goebbels pocket the 25% that comes out of an american workers paycheck.
Even worse. The company selling it needs to meet percentage profit margins. So before when they paid $5 and charge 50% markup, it was 7.50. Now that it is $7.50 cost, they don’t charge $10, they charge $11.25.
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The difference is that this way it’s much easier to calculate prices.
If the tax were 20%, the exporter would have to do the inverse calculation. That is, “which price will result in me gaining $1000?” Which is not 1200, since 20% of 1200 is 240. x = 0.8y -> y = (1/0.8)*x -> y = 1.25x. so the exporter would have to price it at 1.25x the price, $1250. 20% of 1250 is 250.
So it’s unintuitive that a 20% tax would result in a 25% price increase. That’s my guess why tariffs are applied to the importer instead of exporter.
The only difference would be that money we spent would be going to the companies instead of the government. Tarrifs are a government putting taxes on their people to strangle industries in other countries. In both scenarios we pay the same, but the flow of money is different
It’s why they’re called “pass-through costs.”
Not necessarily: the company can choose to absorb part or all the tariff, since the demand would drop at the higher price anyway, and they might make more overall profit at a lower margin per item. But generally yes, most of the cost will be passed on to the consumer and prices will increase on average.
Example:
found the economics student
the end consumer always foots the bill.
Or the consumer can’t/won’t take on the extra burden of cost, and the business loses enough sales to go under.
Wouldn’t refunding the amount of the tariff to the customer fix this? Ignoring the very important diplomatic and retaliation tariffs which makes the whole post unusable for real life
- Canada sells a product A $100.
- Tariffs makes it $120 when you buy it
- so Canada gets $100, USA gets $20, USA customer pays $120.
- USA has now $20, they can directly refund the customer for $20 via a policy to reduce the price of the category of A.
- So customer gets $20 reduction of the product A via tax something, so USA now has $0 and USA customer actually paid only $100.
- Except now if USA company make the product A they can sell it for like $100 and customer pays $80.
- There is a slight increase of imported goods price here because tariffs cannot actually refund $20, it will be a % of the local vs imported production.
- Over time you can expect to get a local advantage because of this price inequality, so local companies will be subsidized by imports until imports are no longer significant.
Where am I wrong here ?
In your scenario how is the local made $100 item bought at $80? Where is a $20 refund paid from? You are double spending it on both imported and local goods
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Im still surprised by that , the quality of education in my country is low but holly fuck im stunned by the lack of education in the states
It’s by design.
It is highly regional, too.
Despite the existence of the Department of Education (which Trump is trying to dismantle), there is no national standard for education in the US. In general, each state is free to decide upon its own policies and standards.
Some states, such as those in the northeast, have very high-performing school systems. So when that “1 in 5 are illiterate” statistic is mentioned (I actually have not verified that number, just quoting the prior claim as an example), it would be caused by low-performing states where the situation is much more dire dragging down the national average.
Here’s a general look at quality of education in the US by state, though recommend folks look up their own numbers because I haven’t validated the numbers pulled in the article I grabbed this from.
It’s not a perfect divide between red states and blue states (Florida appears good, California less so, as an example), but in general we see the lower performing states located mainly in the South where the Republicans have more support. Basically, a less educated populace is easier to manipulate.
For extra fun, look into where school districts allocate their funding and how it relates to their rankings. Some of the worst performing public schools spend a lot more on athletics than they spend on anything else. It’s like they want to be professional athlete mills instead of functioning adult mills.
I was reading into this recently and the reason Florida is so high on these lists is because post-secondary education is very cheap. Their K-12 education is on the garbage end of the spectrum.
Important note - literacy isn’t simply about being able to recognize and pronounce letters and words. A person can sound out every word in English, and understand what each word says, and still be illiterate if they cannot comprehend the message the words express together.
That’s where this illiteracy arises - it’s a failure of reading comprehension. In this light, I imagine many of us have attempted conversation online with somebody functionally illiterate.
Literacy is also about English (at least as commonly reported in the US). About 1/3 of functionally illiterate adults in the US are foreign born. I have never seen literacy stats that measure “literate in any language”.
That’s still really bad. If 2/3 of illiterate people were born in America, that really highlights how inconsistent education is in America.
When I was a kid, I lived in a regular suburban neighborhood but the middle school and high schools that I was zoned for were so awful that my parents enrolled me into a charter school. (The elementary school was fine) Since then, some of the crappy schools in my city are now magnet schools and so my parents’ house appears to be zoned to different schools. There appears to be less public schools now. That’s probably not a good thing.
“Are you saying 1 fouth of Americans are removed?” “Yeah at least 1 fourth.”
He’s a sucker. And his news media knows it.
There are people who don’t know how tariffs work?
If America is the sole buyer, then the tax would be shared between both countries. (Lower demand will lower the price that the foreign supplier can ask for, making up some of the extra tax cost). But since USA is doing these tariffs on so many countries, other countries will just lay new trading routes.
So yeah, USA will feel it.
Okay so, continuity error.
In the beginning his hours are being cut almost entirely, and at the end they’re in no danger of being cut?
It’s not good story but this is either a weird grammatical error or this is one those “things that didn’t happen” stories.
Not that I doubt people think that other countries pay for tarrifs because Daddy Trump has been saying that for months and months but …
Orrr… ya missed the “another one of our guys” part
That seems to be what happened. Oof.
Man, I wonder how basic reading comprehension played a role in the last election.
Actually the blame on this is his lack of paragraphs .
Thoughts should be separated!
Thoughts apartheid 🧐
Read again - it was two different people he was talking about. It’s implied that they have different job positions so their hours were impacted differently.
I don’t understand how they think this works
A lot of them think that the country with the tarrifs levied against them needs to pay the country they are exporting to to sell the goods there like a “If you want to do business here” tax on the country exporting.
But in all honesty even if it did work that way, the exporting country would just jack the prices up to cover it. The end result for US citizens would be the same.
I think it actually can’t work that way at all if he does that. Theoretically, it’ll work upto 100% tarrifs but it’s way worse.
Imagine mr T says 100% tarrifs on product X, that costs $20.
If consumers pay it then it just costs $40 and it’s over. If the original country pays it then they have to pay $20 to sell $20 product, which is not profitable at all. But if they jack the price to $40, then they have to pay $40, again not profitable. So this system only works for smaller % tarrifs so that they can raise the price to cover that.
Suppose you have $2 profit (10%) on $20 item, and 20% ($4) tariffs. You can’t pay more than your profit, so you increase the price from 20 to 26, now you have 30% ($8) profit, you pay 20% ($5) tarrifs and get total 10% profit. So you see with 20% tariff you get 30% increase in cost. So this would work worse than consumers directly paying 20% tariffs.
You’re right on the math front, what I’m saying is that the exporting company/country isnt going to take a loss to sell their goods.
The question is “How do they think it works?”
But in all honesty even if it did work that way, the exporting country would just jack the prices up to cover it. The end result for US citizens would be the same.
This. It doesn’t matter whether the exporter or importer is payign the tariff, the result is the same - it increases the cost of goods, and that cost is going to get passed down the line, plus margin.
To be fair, economics is not intuitive. Half of it is built out of unicorn dust and human imagination. How else would bitcoin even exist? For those of you who are economists and love the money side, vs the behavioral side, that’s great, we need people like you to explain it to the rest of us.
I work with a real system that will still exist no matter what happens with politics or money, so it takes work, for me. That said, tariffs and inflation are not difficult concepts provided you simply take the time to learn.
I know someone who lost their job in December due to tariffs anticipation, and they were not alone in that group of layoffs. The effects are there even if you fail to learn the reasons.
For extra sad - what is economical is more intuitive bcs it’s not just a human skill, it’s a skill nature forces all species into in one way or the other.
‘Economics’ (the human science) however adds so many extra steps, scales, and logistics that is def not immediately intuitive (even in the simple cases when it is).In both cases there is a certain element of future uncertainty so risk management is essential.
I’m of average intelligence so if I can understand it, so can they.
Honestly I’m dumb as hell, and when I didn’t understand something I just trust my friends who I know share my values. MAGAs seem to have decided they trust Trump over their children, for the most part.
He probably shares more of their values, to be fair…
It’s not that complicated that when a company with thin margins has to pay a tax, they have to pay it on to consumers.
Your finance department doesn’t care about the difference between a more expensive part due to scarcity vs a more expensive part due to a tax.
Half of it is built out of unicorn dust and human imagination.
Economics is applied psychology at scale hiding behind the idea of math and using “businesses” and “markets” to depersonalize their findings and play pretend at describing natural laws. All it’s really describing is the behavior of people, and a wildly nonrepresentative subset of people at that.
Isn’t this the same debate as to how one country can (or cannot) force another country to pay for a random construction project that isn’t in anyones interest (that wall)?
It’s not like the concept is beyond (basically, 99.9+%) anyones cognitive abilities. It’s just how ads (the science behind it is plentiful, it’s a giant business sector) work on human brains.
Hire smarter employees.
Those cost more, and with the tariffs I doubt he can afford it
Man, this isn’t even “doing your research” it’s just knowing what very basic words mean.
That’s actually a huge problem I’ve had with a right winger.
Even though he was relatively reasonable, we got stuck because we could not agree on what fascism means.
I was good to use a dictionary or better yet Wikipedia. He said it can only mean what Mussolini meant when he came up with the term.
What was annoying is that all I wanted to do was say, group X does Y things, Y things are fascism and fascism is bad.
It’s just mental gymnastics because it doesn’t matter what we call it, group X is still doing bad things, but instead we got stuck on details.
Imo this is pretty much all right wing’s only play, dismantle the tools of logic so the conversation doesn’t even happen in the first place.
Mussolini also said that fascism was whatever it needed to be in the nation it was in, for future reference. There is only the pragmatic consolidation of power.
It does not even matter if is the state consolidating power, or the church, or corporations, only that the process is aimed at merging their powers in the end.
It’s anti-intellectualism.
You don’t need to understand any of it, you can just ask people who spend their lives researching this stuff.
I bet a coworker $20 that “tariff” and “tax” were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. “fake news”.
I would’ve made you pay him. Every tariff is a tax but not every tax is a tariff. Of course your actual point still stands.
According to Merriam-Webster, “income tax” is a synonym of “value-added tax” and “property tax”. And it can be, depending on context, but few people would argue that they are always synonymous. It’s the same with “tariff” and “tax”. Whether or not they are synonymous depends on context.
That’s not what a synonym is.
My point exactly. The bet was about whether “tariff” and “tax” are synonymous. They aren’t synonymous if they describe different things, even if one of those things is a subset of the other. (This is complicated a bit by the fact that synonymity is context-dependent so in some contexts they can be synonymous. I’m assuming a general context.)
To give a different example, every iPhone is a smartphone but not every smartphone is an iPhone. The two terms aren’t synonymous except in specific contexts like when discussing the inventory of an Apple store.
In a general context, I would argue that the bet is lost – tariffs are taxes but taxes encompass more than just tariffs. The definition of synonymity is not fulfilled.
The actual point of the bet, namely to illustrate that tariffs are paid by people in the country that raised them (because they are taxes on imported goods and services), remains valid.
thesauris.com, merriam-webster, and collins all disagree with you.
They aren’t synonymous if they describe different things
This is clearly false. Obviously the degree of difference determines whether terms are synonymous. You’re correct that not all taxes are tariffs. Apparently however that doesn’t mean they’re not synonyms.
Additionally one term being a subset of the other evidently does not preclude being a synonym.
If you have a bet, and every dictionary says that you’re wrong, then you should just graciously pay up.
There are various definitions of synonymity with varying degrees of strictness. Whether something is considered synonymous depends both on how strictly one defines synonymity and on which context one operates in.
I assumed a relatively strict definition: Two terms are synonymous if and only if they can be used interchangeably in most contexts, e.g. “bigger” and “larger”. Under that definition, “tax” and “tariff” are not synonymous; “tariff” usually implies something crossing a border while “tax” doesn’t.
However, an equally correct definition is that two terms are synonymous if they have similar or related meanings within a context. Under this definition, “tax” and “tariff” are synonymous since they describe similar things – even if they aren’t interchangeable. This definition is usually used by synonym lists because it makes it a lot easier to write those lists. Annoyingly, this means that two words that are listed as synonymous in such a list aren’t necessarily synonymous in the context you’re using them in.
For example, Collins lists “tariff” and “tithe” as synonymous. Do you know anyone who pays a tariff to a church? The synonym list for “tithe” doesn’t even mention a church-specific reading; it just assumes that a tithe is some kind of tax and that’s close enough. You can write like that but your style would be seen as very flowery and wouldn’t be suitable e.g. in a scientific context.
Another correct definition, by the way, is that the two words must have exactly the same meaning in all possible readings. That one is so strict it’s practically useless for natural languages but can be use in different contexts.
Let’s look at how Merriam-Webster describes synonyms:
1: one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses
2a: a word or phrase that by association is held to embody something (such as a concept or quality)
“a tyrant whose name has become a synonym for oppression”2b: metonym
3: one of two or more scientific names used to designate the same taxonomic group
→ compare homonymAll three definitions I gave above match Merriam-Webster’s first definition, depending on whether one chooses “the same” vs. “nearly the same” and “some” vs. “all”.
Interestingly, Collins’s definition of “synonym” is very strict due to excessive brevity:
A synonym is a word or expression which means the same as another word or expression.
This doesn’t allow for similar meanings (which their own synonym lists heavily rely upon as illustrated above), which is probably not intended.
I didn’t check Thesauris since you messed up that link but so far one dictionary says “it depends” and the other one says “the meaning must be the same” (and then completely ignores its own definition). “It depends” is the best we can do.
Oh man. Do you really want to have a debate about the meaning of the word synonym?
Please, by all means, continue believing you’re right about everything.
Pretty sure everyone else will continue finding you insufferable.
Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.
A tariff is a tax or custom duty on an imported good.
Tariffs can lead to a reduction and higher prices on foreign imported goods.[1] Like the corporate income tax, domestic consumers ultimately pay the tax in higher prices.Your mistake was referencing a woketionary.
Of course the employee is wrong, but the OOP isn’t tackling the argument in a really productive way. There’s an opportunity to meet the employee where they are.
People caught in the right wing noise machine always seem to understand that businesses pass on business taxes to the consumer. So, if other countries were paying the tariffs, why wouldn’t they pass those costs on?
Did you read the post? It sounds like they explained it thoroughly to them prior to the tariffs going into effect and it went in one ear and out the other.
I read the post. I understood the post. Did you understand what I said?
You can be perfectly correct, or you can reach people who reject reality. You gotta decide on your goals, and understand that peacocking on the Internet isn’t useful.
You gotta decide on your goals, and understand that peacocking on the Internet isn’t useful.
Is that what I did?
You implied that they didn’t read the short post, when they clearly did.
Yeah, whenever people say “the other country pays” (well, before this election cycle) what they meant was that the higher price would encourage shoppers to buy domestic this the other country “pays” because they get less revenue. Prices would go up either way though because of the domestic goods were cheaper they would’ve already been the first pick. The thing about taxes is that it doesn’t really matter if it’s placed on the supply or demand side, the end effect is the same. Sure, it will feel different and there might be different short term effects, but it’s the same regardless. The price is higher and government gets a cut.
So I don’t really understand why people believe that even if the foreign country/company was paying the tariff why people would think prices stay the same. As if other countries are just going to get a 25% fee and not increase prices by ~25% to cover that.
The most charitable argument for Trump would be that foreign businesses reduce their prices such that the price paid by their US customers is the same as before the tariffs to remain competitive in the US market, but I think most MAGAs literally just never thought about it.
I get what you’re saying but you’re reinforcing the belief that other countries are paying the tariffs. They’re not paying anything. A tariff is a direct tax on anyone importing products into the country.
I’m not reinforcing anything. I’m saying bypass that part entirely, and use the conservative talking points against taxes to discuss this. That the end consumer is ultimately the one that pays, no matter what.
