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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic

This is the rationalization being projected onto the situation, but it doesn’t make logical sense.

The administration launched a trade war with 100+ fronts and left no time to negotiate with all of them, let alone the biggest players.

The biggest players are already calling the administration’s bluff with counter-tariffs. If there was an expectation to use the threat of irrational tariffs as a bargaining chip, they didn’t leave enough time to do it.

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I don't see how else they could've done that - if they decide not to tariff some countries, countries that did get tariffed could trivially reroute their goods to go through said exempt country - I'm not even sure goods would need to move physically to said country or they could get away with cargo ships registered under them and/or ports handed over to be the territory of said country.

tariffs are assessed based on the country of origin. you can't skip a tariff by routing your goods through another country. or maybe you can, but that's called smuggling and the only way to do it is outright fraud and lying on the import forms.

if your product is sourced from china, you pay the tariff on china whether you are importing it from a canadian supplier, a cambodian supplier, or a chinese supplier.

> the only way to do it is outright fraud and lying on the import forms.

It seems like the incentive to do this has just gone up immensely.

There are also more creative ways to get around country of origin labeling, as I understand it. For example, do 90% of the work in the high-tariff country and the final 10% in the low-tariff country which becomes the point of origin.

If your product is imported through China as the supplier, depending on how you structure your arrangement, it can be sourced from wherever you like, at least on paper.

again: that's fraud, it's illegal, and the consequences begin with getting your whole shipment seized.

if you want to smuggle products illegally, that's on you. but the parent's assertion was that tariffs can be trivially bypassed by changing the country of origin. maybe we have different understandings of "trivial", but for me it being illegal makes it non-trivial.

It's fraud, and illegal, any way you cut it. It's trivial to commit fraud.

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