Hacker News Reader

Comment by riku_iki | Hacker News Reader

> Convincing Americans to stop buy their wares is a huge task.

Its actually super easy, you impose 200% tariff, and people will start buying from Korea, Indonesia, Brasil and India.

You're skipping the step where all of the US retailers must switch to new suppliers at the flip of a switch. How long does that take before their current supplies run out and customers go else where? Looking at the current supply chain conundrum, I'd suggest that would be a larger issue than you're giving it credit.

You can do it gradually (2-3 years). Trump already imposed 25% tariff on China goods, and nothing dramatic happened, and I bet many people switched to goods from other countries. One example: I am into electric guitars, and almost all manufacturers moved from China because of tariff risks.

I still think that the global supply chain debacle was partly due to the Trump tariffs. People were already scrambling to find new suppliers before the pandemic. The situation is a culmination of all of the stuff that happened in just a short time frame.

This disruption actually makes things worse for China, since once/if new supply chain components established outside China, it will be hard for them to get business back.

It has more to do with ship docks being backlogged. Then when a docks storage fills up, they turn the ship away or make it circle.

Yeah, when you control the global economy like the USA does, it’s pretty easy to just make sure there are always starving countries to move your sweatshops to.

Another way to look at this, since you know since the US literally had nothing to do with why it’s starving, is the US is trying to help a smaller country (and gain an ally) by trading with that country.

Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night.

Here you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Ukraine

Where’s the part where the US caused poverty?

These items were already purchased, so the payment was in the past. OR, they buy the item from the supplier the minute it’s sold, in which case they can just return the items to the supplier.

A market that can support fair trade, carbon-neutral, organic, and gluten-free markups can support a human-rights /value-subtracted/ tariff: goods produced by slave or child labor or under authoritarian regimes can be assessed a tariff to bring their prices in-line with those produced in better countries.

Stickers marked "Three children assembled this iPhone for you." or "These sneakers were stitched by slave laborers in Xinjiang" might be as effective as the USDA's "Certified Organic" in persuading those with money and a conscience.

Sounds as likely to deter as much as cigarette packages with "Causes cancer, birth defects, etc" warnings. Majority of consumers just don't care about the package, and just care about what's in the packaging.

The sticker is to explain the price increase: why do these sneakers which cost $109 last week cost $179 now? The price increase is the deterrent, not the information.

Companies would be free to market their products as they see fit: “Nike Freedom Airs now made with 33% less slave labor.”, “IPhone 14: Apple’s first Child-Labor-Neutral phone.”

You would need to do that slowly or you'd really piss off voters. And even if you do it slowly, you'll probably piss them off enough that they'll vote in someone who will erase what you've done.

I think if things will come to 200% tariff, it would mean something serious happened already, and voters will be enraged/educated to some extent already.

But yes, it is multi-factor optimization (voters, economy, geopolitics), though it looks like there is some consensus over certain topics between politicians, e.g. Biden didn't remove Trump tariffs, and didn't stop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That's a great way of skyrocketing inflation.

Wouldn't China just ship their wares there, change it to say "Made in (Not China)", and then ship ot to the U.S.?

I don't know how this work. I assume tariffs work on direct import from China. China can try to ship through different country with relabeling, which makes it more complicated on large scale, and that country will want cut, but it also can be tracked and penalized.

People will throw out whoever in the Whitehouse …

Reply on news.ycombinator.com