Gamers Nexus essentially produced a 3-hr doc on how changing tariffs affect the US computer industry: "The Death of Affordable Computing | Tariffs Impact & Investigation" https://youtu.be/1W_mSOS1Qts?si=pBVt65SMqb1p-Zte . Best part is having a product manager show a spreadsheet of costs and margins and explain in real terms ($$$) what tariffs do to their business.
Two interesting things I took away from that were first that the uncertainty and constant changes of mind by the President on the actual rates and lack of reliable communications were almost as harmful as the tariffs. Second, that there is a "snowball effect" in that you often have to pre-pay, so you take out more loans at a worse interest rate to make your order and then if because costs went up, you order fewer items as well as being hit with a higher per-item cost.
The whole thing is a mess and shows how incompetent the current implementation is.
It’s why the government needs to curb and heel billionaires. A bunch of techbros who mistake money for smarts pushes an obviously dumb strategy to a pack of populist clowns and grifters.
That should not be possible. The kickback from this mania is going to be pretty extreme pain for these clowns.
If history is any indication, then the blowback will be leveraged (successfully) to point fingers at other parties (doesn't matter who), and then the proposed remedy will be to double-down:
"It didn't work the first time around because we weren't strong-willed/determined/patriotic enough, this time We Must Go All In, and stamp out any dissidents with extreme prejudice, for they are the Enemy holding us back from our Finest Hour!"
What will happen is either a collapse of the US economy or a collapse of the Trump administration.
Even if the administration grows a brain and reverses course, we are on course for a COVID-like supply chain shock that will cause major pain. Not to mention the loss of trust that will absolutely depress the needed regrowth.
Maybe I am being foolishly optimistic, the section in the video (~ 4:50) where it is mentioned that some giant seed corporation is staying the course betting that this thing will blow over in a quarter or so actually gives me some hope ?
IMO, which isn’t worth a lot, it’ll go on as long as Trump refuses to eat crow. China hunkered down under extreme duress during COVID and emerged stable. We barely managed to survive much milder restrictions. And that was a global natural disaster of no one’s choosing. In this situation it’s all artificial, but it stokes the nationalism of literally every other country than America. The imperialism and condescension at work, the pure malice towards our allies and partners, it all works against America. China will never bend and nor do they need to or should they. In fact at this point it’s probably a point of national pride to maximize the embarrassment of Trump, and national strategy to push him into a corner hoping he lashes out more and further isolates America from its partners. This is an opportunity for China to break out of the corner America and its partners put it into and flip the roles. Once done, and Trump is neutered and America reduced, China will have a clear path to ascendancy as the primary global super power.
I’m actually not sure this is all bad. A flatter more multipolar world is probably better for everyone, including America. But I think it’ll be a tough time in our history and the people who voted for Trump will be the ones who bear the most pain for his delusional misunderstanding of the way the world actually is vs what he wishes it were.
But if I were to put $5 down, I’d wager this lasts until the GOP political fortunes have been decimated through their hubris and magical thinking and Trump is personally hung out to dry for his strategic blunder in launching a 195 front war.
It definitely isn't better for America or the world. We had a "flatter more multipolar world" during the "long 19th century". Pax Americana is certainly subject to a lot of valid criticism, but it was an even bigger mess before that.
Except I think as long as the “new world order” built around globalized trade networks of interdependence and agreements with dispute arbitration that China and the EU are leaning into was the framework Pax America built and was built to withstand unilateralism. Global organizations built around mutual benefit are ultimately going to win the day here, and it’ll be without American leadership - which will solidify the power of those organizations independently and through multiple power players rather than one. This is probably better than the prior order, and distinctly different than the pre-WW2 order.
Mostly because everyone has benefited so much from the world order as it exists that no one really wants to lose it other than some fringe wackos. China definitely is a huge winner in the current world construction, Europe as well. The only losers are those that actively fight it - Russia, North Korea, and Iran. I think very few countries really see global domination through conquest as a legitimate goal, and the domination through trade alliances is more enriching, stabilizing, and easier to maintain. China especially I think has little desire beyond Taiwan and the south China seas as trade dominance allows them all the wealth of empire without the administrative headache of managing the internal affairs of conquest states. It’s better to have nations in debt to you than to own their problems.
I feel like relying on this thesis that people won't overthrow the world order because everyone has benefited so much is an odd choice at this particular moment.
We had a flatter more multipolar world primarily run by the Church and imperialist absolute monarchies. There is no reason to assume a world not dominated by American imperialism but primarily made up of modern democracies and republics must revert to a 19th century status quo.
There's also no reason that whatever it does look like would be better than that, or even that the "modern democracies" we currently have would actually survive.
I disagree. The biggest destabilizing force in the world right now is the US. The loss of American superpower status will make the world and its democracies more stable practically by definition.
You might argue that absent American military hegemony, Russia and China become belligerent. But the US isn't really doing much about either, so that's a moot point. All the world really loses is America's interference in their affairs, which I think the world can do without.
I've also read that China's leadership really learned from the experience of the tarrifs during the first Trump admin. They made strategic changes that they wouldn't be vulnerable to that again. They spent the last 4+ years preparing, unlike the US which got maybe a quarter to stockpile and prepare. The asymmetry is huge.
The republicans in congress are so lost in the sauce that they won't challenge the great orange hope in the quarter. The soonest I think we can see anyone fighting back, politically, won't happen until the midterms AT BEST.
This is assuming that the republicans/trump don't come up with some issue that they can swing the midterms on and/or don't gut the electoral system to the point that they can't lose.
And even then I'm not sure that congress can actually do anything to fix this issue while trump is still in the white house and impeachment and removal seems unachievable. Say congress reverses it's delegation of tarrif power to the president. What happens if trump just does not obey congress, much like they are not obeying the supreme court. Do the republicans in congress have enough of a spine to actually remove him? How do we assure that removal actually takes place in the event that we can even meet the threshold? The man still, ostensibly, still has control of the military. Perhaps the military, secret service, any other guys with guns just refuses to help him resist congress like they did when he tried to deploy the military after jan 6th.. but they seem to have already cleaned house at the pentagon, with hagseth getting rid of more people who aren't sufficiently loyal enough to do crimes and/or coup the fucking government for trump.
It takes 20 of 53 Republican senators for impeachment. That's a high bar, but Nixon was close when he resigned.
Useful reading: "How the Good Guys Finally Won" (1975), by Jimmy Breslin. This covers how Nixon and Agnew were ejected. The Internet Archive has full text.[1]
The Republicans are the party of Trump. You're going to get nowhere near 20 out of 53 to convict. They will not let him get thrown out of office.
If they didn't vote for impeachment in the two times he was impeached in his first term, and if they supported him after January 6th then they're not going to vote for impeachment now.
The Republicans under Nixon were the same party in name only, and they did not have the same blind loyalty to Nixon. They had opposing voices. They had separate factions. Now the only faction is Trump-worship.
The senate is less the party of Trump as they have to win state wide elections and Trump barely beat Harris. They also tend to have longer tenures that spans presidents. While he is ascendant he can command loyalty, but once his ship is sinking the rats will abandon him faster in the senate than the house. The house takes care of itself with its relatively rapid turnover, making incumbents more likely to stick by him. There are a handful of sycophant senators that would have trouble distancing themselves too much, but they are also well known chameleons so I think no one would be surprised when they flip.
The real test will be the summer and fall as natural disasters and the accumulation of cuts and the trade war all converge into a crescendo of negativity.
We went through all this during his previous term. They GOP Senate had the perfect excuse to make a break with the past during the impeachment following January 6, all they had to do was huff and puff a bit and stand on the Constitution, and they could have moved on with their political lives. But they fielded a bunch of BS excuses and stood behind the guy who called a rally that resulted in the Congress being overrun and trashed by a mob. Only a few voted to remove him from office.
It's worth considering the possibility that as a party they're nowadays more into fascism than republicanism. Rome was a republic too, until it wasn't.
I think of Trump as a Sulla like figure - not the guy who ends the republic but who cracks the republic opening the door to someone more calculating - Julius Caesar.
The difference though is the Roman republic had a constitutional order that was implicit rather than explicit. The American constitution and bill of rights is very difficult to change, and the order is fairly explicit. This was intentional with the assumption that even if a Sulla like figure emerges and consolidates power, it’ll revert over time to a liberal humanist republic. The anti federalists examine this in some depth and the scenario we are in was definitely considered carefully. It’s remarkable it took 249 years - but it was 430 years before Sulla seized the dictatorship by declaring emergency powers and cracked the constitutional order of Rome.
Small but important nitpick: Senators first have to win their primaries. That's where they're most vulnerable. Followed by fund raising (access to major donors), probably.
It's a party of spineless hypocrites... given the choice of the embarassment, admitting they were wrong, and coming out somewhat ok vs. the choice of supporting a dictatorship that erodes free and fair elections, my pessimism says most Republicans will vote for the latter. As a bonus, they'll get to have Trump-level immunity. Then it'll be a simple email to the businesspeople of the state asking who wants to be an oligarch, start opening your wallets. And for the weekend fun, line up those girls (and boys!) and get grabbin'!
I'm wondering how this will change if the US goes into a deep recession. Polling at the Business Roundtable indicates that support for Trump takes a dive at the CEO level when the market is down 20%. 30% for the hardcore Trump supporters.
The retailers need to start showing tariff charge as separate line. People have the right to to see what they voted for. Yesterday Trump frantically called Bezos when Bezos threatened to do it, and Bezos seems to have backed up (probably got some concession for that).
Edit: it is also can be treated as a consumer right to know, by analogy with food labeling), what are the major components of the price they are paying, and thus allowing for informed choice.
Retailers and middlemen typically don't like exposing how much -they- paid for an item. Exposing tariffs would show how much things are marked up from time of landing to reaching the shelves.
Varies based on market. Where middle men actually do things and add lots of value they don't generally care.
When your value-add is fronting the cash for a container of something, doing paper pushing and sending the resultant product to an Amazon warehouse people will ask tough questions like "who are all these parties you're pushing papers to? What is their purpose and should they even exist in 2025" all of which is just a proxy for "if we fixed the system you wouldn't exist" and you can't really fault them for that.
Just that the steps you do to import things ought to be simpler and cheaper and probably could be if not for all the entrenched interests that are mostly not visible to the consumer.
Those with high markup wouldn't get affected that much. Those with lower markup will get affected more, and they need to show the tariff charge.
The tariff charge may also naturally include say the directly related charges like for example the increased insurance premium for the increased, due to the tariff, insured value of the goods while they are being transported/stored. Add to that increased financing required to cover all those costs, etc., and that can snowball to feel significant even for the ones with higher markup.
Let's say 1 pay x for a product. Gross markup is say 100%. Do I sell it for 2x. Let's say there's a tariff cost of y. That means the cost price is x + y. I mark that up to 2x + 2y. It's easy to up the price by 2y and disclose the tariff as "z%".
But this of course presumes all your expenses remain flat. And they likely don't. As your expenses go up (2nd order effects) that 100% markup starts to not be enough. So the markup goes up a bit.
Plus since things are going up anyway, and since there's uncertainty (which has a cost) we need to bump the price up even more (because hey, free market.)
And when the tariffs go away, we can remove the primary cost, but all the secondary hikes remain. Because that's all just extra profit, and, like, free market right?
This round of inflation is going to make covid look mild. (And as I point out to my Republican friends, just remember, you voted for this.)
The way out of this is to devalue the dollar. That would erode the real value of the outstanding debt (which is delimited in dollars.) Alas the US has worked very hard to make the dollar the world currency, so devaluing it is complex.
The US consumer (voter) is of course the big loser. At least this generation is. Folk born around 2030 may be the big winners.
I'm rather aware of the concept of markup. Marking up itself isn't the problem, it's completely understandable -why- that must exist in most cases. But either way, companies don't like to disclose their landed costs for obvious reason - people will think they're being ripped off.
Tariffs are in the news and the percentages are known. If I'm selling a wallet made in China, in the US for $80, and list a tariff line item of $2 - people will calculate and easily know that I imported said wallet from China for <$1 and start to question why I'm charging so much.
> Tariffs are in the news and the percentages are known. If I'm selling a wallet made in China, in the US for $80, and list a tariff line item of $2 - people will calculate and easily know that I imported said wallet from China for <$1 and start to question why I'm charging so much.
If they're clever enough to do that math, they're clever enough to infer the result from the quality and fact that it's made in China. The ways of obscuring that would be to have paid more for a higher quality item made in China (make a convincingly costly product), or make it difficult to evaluate the quality in the first place.
But I know you're talking hypotheticals and all. It is maybe worth wondering whether in aggregate it'll become more transparent that the U.S economy is based on adding a negligible amount of value to anything from top to bottom.
If anything, what can be more American than making clear when and how much the government is taxing the people? It is like at the core of this nation’s founding.
A subtle but important point: the people aren't getting taxed, the importer is getting taxed. If the importer passes those cost increases on to their customers, that is their decision.
Of course the importer will pass the costs along, but that isn't the real point.
The real point is that it is _expected_ that the costs will be passed along to the end consumer. The whole _goal_ of a tariff is to make people not want to buy the product anymore because it isn't worth the money.
There is an uproar about these tariffs, and I get that, people hate trump and everyone who supports him, totally get that too, and when he does a thing, people are going to lose their minds about it.
The point of the tariff isn't to tax citizens, it is meant to discourage spending, so the thing isn't imported, so the country of origin loses money and whatever they were selling now has even _less value_ because there is an oversupply.
China needs somewhere to dump their slave-labor made garbage much more than US consumers need to buy it.
