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Was he actually thinking that those $450 were just gifted by the exporter?
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Leopards Ate My Face
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The propaganda on tariffs is that foreign imports are bad and domestic manufacturing is good. And plenty of the conservative community accepts this, because they aren't trying to buy direct from overseas. This guy is an outlier - a MAGA dude who is attempting to import a $2000 widget from Spain for whatever reason - and not representative of the average American voter.
Trump's statements on tariffs aren't even strictly false. Businesses can and do shave their margins, eating some percentage of the cost of tariffs, in order to keep their bulk exports competitive. You're just not going to see that happen on a one-off specialty import, because the guy in Spain isn't trying to be competitive at scale with a rival US industry.
We're already seeing more high value manufacturing happening within the US to evade Trump's tariffs. US tariffs on Japanese imports during the 1987 trade war brought electronics and auto manufacturing into the country in the same way. That's why we've been building Toyota Cars in Kentucky for decades.
Now we're seeing Samsung and LG planning plants in the US. We're seeing the same from BMW and Volkswagon. Is this smart trade policy? Feel free to inject your own economic orthodoxy below. But to say its not working as intended... No. The US has enormous influence in global trade. What Trump's doing has absolutely reversed the flow of manufacturer outsourcing.
Right, but you put the tariffs in place after you have the domestic manufacturing capabilities, not before.
When you can attract large foreign investments, the order matters less. You'll experience more pain by imposing tariffs first and building out infrastructure second. But we're governed by a party that seems to relish in the pain of their constituents. So this might be more of a feature than a bug.
It's interesting that you openly call it propaganda, and then go on to parrot it over and over.
Eh no. The simplification that the customer pays is for practical purposes basically correct. There is little will to shave margins when industries and nations are broadly effected, insufficient margins to absorb much, and little reason even bother to do so save to preserve future business with the expectation that tariffs will be dropped.
What you are seeing sometimes is markets operating on coyote time. Goods are already purchases/imported. Goods are purchased on contracts that don't account for tariffs screwing the importer. Tariffs are applied then yanked before prices have to adjust. When they haven't there is suspicion that they will soon be based on prior TACO behavior and future expectation is that much profit at prior margins will be lost if not carefully managed.
Long term you will absolutely see prices rise to cover 100% of the .
How much actual work vs future commitments again?
There's plenty of will when a commodity is fungible and margins are high. We can see this in retail prices relative to tariff rates.
When profit margins on a product are high, the retailer is more comfortable absorbing the tariff rate through lower marginal profit. Its on products with lower margins that we're seeing the highest inflation rates.
What's more, as imports rise in price they raise the clearing rate for all products, which encourages domestically produced products to rise in price to match. So you're "paying the tariff" on goods that aren't even being tariffed, because they're chasing rising prices of low margin imports.
More actual work with each month these tariffs linger. There's other factors, of course. The declining value of the dollar is inducing demand for US capital and real estate from overseas, as well as cheapening the cost of US labor. And with three more years of Trump in office (plus the real possibility that we get more MAGA Republicans in years to come) business leadership is inclined to believe a high-tariff / low-tax economy is the future for America.
This makes the US an ideal tax haven. We've been a popular safe-harbor for Chinese, Japanese, English, German, and French billionaires to shield their own wealth from their home countries. And if the EU commits to a uniform income or wealth tax policy, this trend will only continue.
the logic should be partner with your allies and find trade that is not economic but holistically beneficial, considering all scientific factors. It's hard and inconvenient but long term deescalating.
That's a very materialist approach to international trade. Unfortunately, we don't have a government run by people with a materialist mindset.