But they’re not going to increase wages to account for us having to spend 55 dollars on something that used to cost 5. So the end result is just that people end up with less overall. I’m cool with limiting consumerism, but this isn’t the way to do it imo. And it’s not going to make us “richer” as a nation.
Comment on Do people really think setting up domestic manufacturing in the USA is easy?
yarr@feddit.nl 6 days agoAnd we haven’t even addressed the whole reason manufacturing left in the first place. It’s so much cheaper to do it overseas, even accounting for shipping.
Well, I think the idea is that with the tariffs this will no longer be true. There will be a Chinese widget that cost $5 from China with $90 of tariffs on it (making it $95 to the end user) and an American product that costs $55. That American one is only cheaper in a tariff’d world.
FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world 6 days ago
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
In both scenarios the profit margin is removed, or the customers are bearing the significant increase in cost. Hence the recession - the stock market plummets or inflation goes up. Or both.
Ciderpunk@lemmy.world 6 days ago
The other problem is that the $55 American made one will mysteriously become $94 because doing anything else would be leaving money on the table and therefore unconscionable to American business owners.
Tariffs have a nasty habit of making local goods increase in price accordingly too.
Prok@lemmy.world 6 days ago
This is exactly the thing I can seem to get anyone to agree with me on … Imported goods will never become significantly more expensive than American for the reason you just said…
There’s a lot of money in figuring out the right margin below the imported product such that they’ll lose some sales but ultimately profit more because of the increased profit margins. Not that you were seriously saying it would be a dollar cheaper but most I talk with tend to think that difference is much bigger than I expect which tends toward single digit percentage differences