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Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

Tariffs are great for local businesses and bad for consumers. They can also be good for lower-skill local employees. They are bad for multinationals.

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I think this is a little too reductive. Local businesses are consumers too, just in the middle of the chain. If they get hurt as consumers more than they gain in reduced competition they hurt.

I'm not so deeply read on this, but I'd imagine this is why things like brexit and tariffs get sold but result in everyone being net worse off.

Brexit was never about tariffs, the Brexiteers all promised tariff free access to the EU and to be fair to them that is largely what we got.

A significant burden is actually the lack of regulatory alignment. Before Brexit there was a largely customs-check free flow of goods in and out of the EU. Now we have more delays and paperwork. This is not a tariff, but it imposes costs like one.

That is true although it doesn't really change the point. The proponents for Brexit mostly wanted to free themselves from EU regulation and the voters wanted to cut down on immigration. The only people complaining about tariffs were remainers (including myself), we were arguing they would increase and we were wrong.

Tariffs will be good for some portion of local _producers_. They’re generally bad for everybody else, and the list of local producers they’re good for is not always very long. If your business is selling products, you don’t want your products tariffed. If you need to import parts of your supply chain to make stuff, you don’t want that tariffed either.

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