Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers
punchbowl.news
punchbowl.news
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cpvrrre4zlkt?post=asset%3A0240...
“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” the company said in a statement. “Teams discuss ideas all the time. This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-29/white-hou...
I'm worried businesses are going to use tariffs as an excuse to have a fake list price, then hit you with massive hidden fees at the point of sale. Some sectors have been doing this for years - "service fees" at restaurants, "regulatory response fees" in the telecom industry, all sorts of nonsense in event ticketing.
Physical goods have mostly been spared this type of fake pricing - aside from sales tax not being included, but that's been universally true in the US forever so everyone is used to it.
Tariffs could be the end of that if businesses see sales plummet. Especially because these scams actually work - the reason restaurants give for not just increasing their menu prices is because higher listed prices drive people away.
(And in the fast food example, the customer's home location doesn't matter. The store's does.)
The juice is not worth the squeeze for online retailers. Users are used to seeing the final amount at checkout and you know, it's really not that hard to mentally estimate <price of thing I'm buying plus 10%> (which is actually usually an overestimate).
The EU has a similar smattering of disparate jurisdictions (with varying VAT rates) just like the US does.
Cool, great place to start. Let's fix that. Both have similar land mass, similar populations, similar balance of federal-ish and state-ish and local-ish governance, similar cultures, etc.
> And for what? Making the checkout process slightly more convenient for people who lack the mental ability to estimate their total?
Surely handling 13k tax jurisdictions is expensive for businesses and consumers on many levels?
Unintended consequences: None?
Prices are already quite different between online and in-person shopping.
You in the US keep saying "we are so special, so it is impossible to change things for the better in any way". While other countries also have complex rules for similar things yet they still manage to provide a better experience for shoppers, citizens, sick people - everyone.
In Germany different tax rates apply to items that you need to survive such as food and other goods. It can be difficult to know which rate applies to a product. The good thing is you don't need to know because the total price is displayed
Most of the developed world pre-calculates sales tax.
If McDonalds charges you $10.32 in Australia, the government gets $0.84(8181812...) of it. Rounding isn't an issue because you don't write a check for each individual $0.84(8181812...), you pay them the aggregate amount on a regular basis.
Los Angeles County Measure H: 0.25%, 10-01-2017 to 03-31-2025
City of Orland Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2017 to 03-31-2025
Rio Dell City Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 04-01-2015 to 12-31-2024
City of El Monte Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2009 to 03-31-2025
City of San Pablo Reduction Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 10-01-2017 to 09-30-2022
Town of Truckee Trails Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 10-01-2014 to 09-30-2024
City of La Habra Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2009 to 03-31-2025
City of Seal Beach Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 04-01-2019 to 03-31-2025
City of Westminster Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 04-01-2017 to 12-31-2022
City of Pismo Beach Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 10-01-2008 to 03-31-2025
Pacific Grove City Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 10-01-2008 to 09-30-2022
Town of San Anselmo Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2014 to 03-31-2023
City of Sausalito 2014 Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2015 to 03-31-2023
Mariposa County Healthcare Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2005 to 03-31-2025
Mendocino County Mental Health Treatment Act Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2018 to 03-31-2023
Mendocino Library Special Transactions and Use Tax: 0.125%, 04-01-2012 to 03-31-2023
City of Atwater Public Safety Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 07-01-2013 to 03-31-2023
City of Capitola Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 04-01-2005 to 03-31-2025
City of Campbell Vital City Services Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 04-01-2009 to 03-31-2025
City of Davis Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 10-01-2014 to 03-31-2025
See also: American healthcare, college, etc. "Our setup is absurdly complex in bad ways" is not an argument for keeping that setup, it's an argument for making fixes.
And why should we eliminate sales taxes, etc. for online sales? Isn't the whole point of software that it makes it trivial to handle multiple sales taxes?
[1] Sales tax, VAT, etc. are taxes on the buyer but are collected by the seller as a matter of administrative convenience. Use tax / reverse charge covers the situations where a non-local seller doesn't collect the tax, but compliance was so low in the first several decades of e-commerce that every government around the world decided to expand sales tax compliance for online sales to non-local sellers.
Because it's an immense amount of paperwork, compliance, legal risk, etc. all to avoid just setting a more reasonable state/federal level of taxation. The US has a deeply weird attitude towards any changes to taxation.
> And why should we eliminate sales taxes, etc. for online sales?
No one's proposing that. Online sales just introduce the issue of not knowing the tax jurisdiction that's applicable for a brand-new shopper.
We have reasonable levels of taxation right now. 0% federal rate, because the Constitution does not allow for a federal sales tax. States can set their own rates based on their own needs, just like every member of the EU can set its own rate. And counties and cities can tag-along with their state's sales tax.
This was complicated back in the day when it was all paper tables. Software makes it easy. Excel makes it easy, and the dedicated sales tax SaaS make it even easier.
At my last company, we handled hundreds of thousands of sales a day globally and my tax department spent less than four hours each month on sales tax/VAT compliance because we used Avalara to handle sales tax rate lookups and compliance. (The four hours were for filing the VAT returns in the two dozen countries we couldn't file through Avalara.) To put it in terms a programmer would understand: each month, my entire department spent less time on sales tax compliance than the average Typescript programmer spends on compiling.
Online sales just introduce the issue of not knowing the tax jurisdiction that's applicable for a brand-new shopper.
That has been an issue for decades, and people got along just fine in the days when they had to do it by hand.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sales_tax
"The federal government could theoretically levy a nationwide federal sales tax under Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, but Congress has declined to do so."
(And I'm advocating for a higher state/Federal income tax rate so we don't need sales tax rates to make up the budget gaps we fill with sales taxes today.)
> To put it in terms a programmer would understand: each month, my entire department spent less time on sales tax compliance than the average Typescript programmer spends on compiling.
Sure. Because you outsourced that work to a third-party. Who doesn't work for free. You pass that cost to your customers, yes?
That sure is a HUGE rounding error! 9¢ savings by doubling up is nothing to sneeze at!
> they will get you for those pennies
Was your restaurant ever audited? That is a lot of pennies!
One penny times the thousand or so meals per day over a year adds up. I don't know if we were audited - but I' s we would have been shut down for failing the audit.
Sales tax is not uniform for all products depending on your state. My home state for example does not charge sales tax on food items and clothing. Some other special categories also have different sales tax depending on what they are - e.g. vice taxes for some items.
Bump em because of tariffs, bump em some more to pad the margins because what is an extra 5%, bump em even when they're not affected by tariffs because everyone else is doing so, and delay un-bumping them once tariffs fall again.
People have a hard enough time understanding who pays tariffs. Stores'll be able to muddy the waters this way pretty much at will.
Stores often sell common staples like bananas, generic milk, and other basics at close to cost. They’re the things that get people in the door. They make their profit on things like cereal, deli meats, packaged goods, and other non-staple items that people also buy once they’re inside.
It’s similar to how many gas stations compete on cost of gas to get people there, but hope that you’ll stop inside and get a $6 drink or some $5 packaged snacks.
Then you have to consider all of the other things that go into a store are also tariffed. The parts for the trucks that transport the bananas have tariffs. Many of their cleaning supplies. Parts for the checkout registers. The light bulbs they have to replace. Many of those tariffs could be well over 100%. They have to make up that price in the cost of bananas and everything else.
I’d happily take 2-3% margins of their $11B in revenue (2020 per Wiki).
If tariffs increase the wholesale cost of an item by $1, but you can make consumers think $5 retail is what the increase should be, that’s an extra $4 in your pocket.
Economics education doesn’t stop at 101 for a good reason. “Supply and demand” is like “veins carry deoxygenated blood” - it’s largely true, but further learning reveals complexity.
Supply and demand is impacted by many factors, but it’s still supply and demand.
You can put different labels on different components of the influences, but at the end of the day it’s still supply and demand.
What a pity we accidentally gave Nobel prizes out for things like game theory, then.
Supply and demand isn't the only thing that exists, but basically everything else feeds into and informs it. It isn't the only starting position, but you can reach basically any point from it.
People should remember that it isn’t just the corporations who raise the price that are at fault, it is the people who are unwilling to go without it when the price is overinflated. Yes, then we nit-pick into things like medical necessity and … thus back to the point that it is both supply and demand, and not.
Revenue =/= profit. OpenAI has similar amount of revenue, but is nowhere near profitable.
>I certainly don't doubt they've purchased other investments with the proceeds over time, but they're making plenty.
The point isn't what they did with the profits, it's whether the profits are commensurate with the capital they put in (ie. return on equity).
I’m well aware. The assertion that gets made is “oh they’re low margin!” They are. But they have massive volume. So they make lots of money still.
> The point isn't what they did with the profits, it's whether the profits are commensurate with the capital they put in (ie. return on equity).
Well, they certainly didn’t start as billionaires a hundred years ago. The profits seem fine.
I’d be very happy to be in the business of selling $1 bills for $1.02, if the customer base is big enough.
"Many grocers earn more profit from agreeing to carry a manufacturer's product than they do from actually selling the product to retail consumers."
Of course, I didn't know this, which was very weird when I saw someone those stocking shelves, only to be met with a 'sorry, I don't work here' response when asking them a question.
Yes. But the tariffs are on the import price, not the shelf price.
The shelf price went up as if it were on the shelf price, because consumers won't realize/understand the distinction. (Hell, a good proportion of the population still thinks someone else eats the costs entirely.) We saw the same thing during COVID - "it's because of COVID / supply chain issues" was the magic wand you could wave around to raise prices. Some of those increases were warranted, for sure. But all? Almost certainly not.
The prices before these tariffs were arrived at by some confluence of factors such as cost and competition, it wasn’t some universally agreed “fair pricing” scheme that determined them. So what does it mean for a price to be warranted?
Now businesses have to raise prices because of the aforementioned tariffs, and, you speculate, they will add some extra margin because they think the customer is primed to accept higher prices right now than they’d normally be.
First of all, is that the end of the world? If this is only made possible because the wool has been pulled over the customer’s eyes, then at some point there will be a correction in the other direction - unless you’re saying that there is actual and widespread price-fixing (which is illegal and enforced as such). This particular mechanism on its own won’t cause prices to spiral out of control or anything.
Secondly, even if you think it is bad and don’t want it to happen, how would you prevent it? I can’t come up with a single feasible approach that isn’t basically halfway to socialism (which is fine if that’s your preference, but then that’s a larger conversation).
In this case, I believe many companies raised pricing more than they needed to, because people misattributed the source of those increases. If, say, ice cream doubled in price in normal times, people would cry foul. COVID gave an ironclad excuse.
> unless you’re saying that there is actual and widespread price-fixing (which is illegal and enforced as such)
I see very little evidence of this. We're great at innovating new ways to price fix without attracting (or successfully fighting off) regulatory attention.
Like outsourcing the price decisions to a third party…
https://www.propublica.org/article/senators-introduce-legisl...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/data-company-agri-s...
So the one is necessarily influence by the other. I'm not sure where the breakdown in your understanding is. Trying to make a distinction doesn't really make sense. Somebody IN THE UNITED STATES is taking the brunt of this. More often than not, it will be the end-consumer.
"We saw the same thing during COVID" hints that you might understand the larger picture. You're on the right track: This comes down to supply chain costs.
And i know i simplifying things A LOT here.. but that is the mentality behind it..
When crude oil price go up then gas station raise their prices because they know next they they buy it will be more expansive and they will need more money to afford it, so they raise their prices prices immediately..
On the other hand, if crude oil prices drop, it means that next time they buy it will be cheaper, but the gas they currently have was expensive, so they need to keep the prices up to recover what they already paid for it..
If I bought a gallon of water for a dollar and then there was a terrible water shortage I would not let it go for two dollars
Everyone does this. If someone was trying to sell their old car and they saw news of upcoming tariffs on cars, they’d expect to sell their car at a higher price even though the tariffed cars haven’t arrived yet.
A second factor is that volatility and unpredictable policy raises risk, which increases prices. There will be a lot of price increases in excess of base tariff rates simply because everything is changing rapidly on the whims of this administration and businesses need more buffer for unexpected shocks.
If you’re a company who set up manufacturing in China, placed orders 4 months ago, and you’re watching the tariff rate change from 65% to 125% or more in the span of days with threats of more, you have to increase your prices a lot to have more buffer. Those parts you ordered now have an unpredictable price tags attached when they arrive at the port. It’s completely out of control.
In Japan the US Military buys fuel and sets the price at its on base stations according to what they purchase it for. On several occasions when I lived there this resulted in the Base CO having to address everyone and tell them if they don’t buy the fuel (that is now significantly cheaper outside the gate) then the Exchange cannot buy new fuel, and they may have to shut the station down permanently.
It never came to that; everyone just went and paid the higher price for a tank and the issue was resolved.
My point is that trying to price a commodity that moves prices like that by a lagging indicator is a great way to capture business on one side and a great way to go bankrupt on the other.
The price will rise until it gets high enough that the product of sales * price falls.
It has always been that way. Businesses haven’t been selling goods and services out of the goodness of their hearts at an arbitrary price. It’s always supply and demand.
Tariffs are expected to reduced demand because they increase prices. This is why the stock market is down and nearly every economist is calling the tariffs a big problem. Companies won’t have room to raise prices infinitely because they feel like it, because consumers are about to be able to afford fewer things because the things they need are getting more expensive.
In the current circumstances, though, companies do not have a choice to lower prices. The basic cost of taking an item into inventory from these suppliers has risen significantly, in most cases well above 2024 margins.
The net effect is that, despite the market's best effort to correct prices to within an affordable range, costs may rise considerably and availability may still fall regardless. Under severe shock to the system, the usual maxims that account for nominal shifts in day to day trading no longer apply.
Then supply and demand reach equilibrium.
Supply and demand doesn’t mean that either or both supply and demand remain constant. Both supply and demand change depending on the price.
But that's a massive oversimplification. It's like saying programming is "just typing". Technically, sure; accurate, no. There's latency in the real world. Bad actors. Information asymmetries. Regulations. Monopolies. Stuff you can't do without and can't even always decline (ambulance ride for an unconscious person). Fake news about a supply crunch changes demand without changing supply for a while.
One of the primary reasons for combination in low-margin markets is to gain pricing power. And even if there are 2-5 entities in a given market, informal price collusion is far from unheard of.
If OP wants an intro to the determinants of price elasticity, starting here would be a good idea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
It's especially galling because if markets actually worked this way, then central planning would work as well.
"The price went up 10%, that must be the 10% tariffs" is something consumers will inherently understand… but it's not the case. The 10% is not on the on-the-shelf price; it's on the wholesale price the importer's charging. The $20 shirt at Old Navy is probably $4 (with $0.40 in tariffs added) for tariff purposes… but they'll add $2 to it anyways, because consumers will go "oh ok". There's a massive information asymmetry here.
The unpredictable nature of these specific tariffs is fairly unique, too. The rates change randomly, with zero warning, and how they're set isn't sensical. With ships across the ocean taking weeks, that's gonna chill the supply side as well.
1. The average apparel retail store margin is nominally 50%, but half of that margin is given back to the consumer for their ubiquitous sales. So that $20 shirt costs the store $10, but the average selling price is actually $15. So if they directly pass through the 10% tariff, it adds $1 to the average $15 sale on that $20 shirt.
2. Increased prices reduce sales. Non-product costs are fairly fixed, so just passing through the tariffs will have a significant impact on store profitability. Retail stores are going bankrupt left and right in this Amazon age. They don't have the capacity to absorb increased costs, if they don't pass them on they'll just go bankrupt more quickly. So that $1 in tariffs turns into a $1.50 price increase.
"You can see that the money runs out before the month is gone, you can see that people are buying smaller pack sizes at the end of the month," McMillon said.
They do need to eat, but they are eating less - and not by choice. They don't have the money to buy what they want to. No amount of advertising will fix that.
People think they're saving money that way. They often aren't.
Being poor is expensive!
I would humbly suggest that you start engaging with more poor people and help educate them. (And I don't mean shouting advice as you walk by)
Everything after that is preference substitution.
This doesn't invalidate consumer demand. People judge society and ultimately governments based on if they are able to obtain their preferences.
My approach was a little more engineered than most people's would be, but definitely possible if maybe you expanded it to $3/day or $4/day.
There was never any risk of any of those things, and if anything the diet proves out the quality of our understanding of nutrition.
Rice is $20/25 lbs, and 1600 calories/lb for 2000 calories/$
They are 6.5lbs after deboning. Cooked chicken skin on is 950 calories per pound. That is 620 calories/$.
Tortillas themselves are 110 cal, and 4.99 for 100ct, or 2200 cal/$
Normally I'd make a joke about econ 101 but I'm pretty sure you'd lose points for answering with this in an econ 101 class
True, but human psychology is a huge confounding factor. One area where this is evident is gas prices that "go up like a rocket, and come down like a feather" in response to crude oil prices. Simple supply and demand does not explain this.
I see two items for $5, but when I add the imported one, suddenly it costs more — and Amazon didn’t tell me that ahead of time or give me any way to choose the one without tariffs on the grid/list view.
This makes tariffs more effective because they can’t bump the domestic price to match — while giving customers a negative chock each time they choose an importer for a product.
This is were tariffs can go horribly wrong: it destroys the incentive for competition between companies.
They'll just raise the price of the domestic good to $13 and we will all pay $8 extra on a thing that used to cost $5.
If the price displayed is still $5 but tariffs added at the end, the domestic seller's $13 sticker price will not look attractive to buyers.
For goods that have alternatives, businesses may choose to under-price (relative to their tariffed competitors) in order to gain sales and customers.
The choice for consumers won't be "choose between a $5 item and $15 item" it will be "choose between $13 and $15", like I mentioned above.
This doesn't work as easily if the sticker price for the imported good is $5 and the real price displayed at the end of the purchasing funnel. The local business will have to keep its sticker price at $5 to avoid losing customers when they initially compare goods or rely on customers to come back to them once they get faced with the tariff tax, which will also lose customers.
Why are you putting this under the rug so easily? It's never too late to changes those ludicrous behaviors, even if everyone is accustomed to it.
This is different from most other countries, where the tax is the same nation-wide.
The regional supermarket chain in new england that is owned by kroger ALREADY localizes their weekly sales flyer TO THE STORE despite every store in the state having the exact same tax rates.
They STILL don't include the tax in the price listed because fuck you, this is america
Do they actually "localizes their weekly sales flyer TO THE STORE", or you only think that way because they ask for the exact store location to view their flyers? It could very well be that they ask the exact store for analytics purposes, but all the stores have the same flyer.
Not all ads are weekly sales flyers, obviously. And not all states have the same sales tax throughout, of course.
Also, you know that most items in a Kroger's don't even have sales tax in the first place? So that's an odd place to use as an example.
It strikes me as just as petty as when restaurants started listing “Living Wage Fee” on their bills. They’re bitching and moaning directly to the customer just because they need to pay their staff more and they’re butthurt about it. Why not list all the restaurant’s costs as line items on the bill? They could list the customer’s proportion of the restaurant’s rent, electricity charge, water bill, licensing and taxes if they wanted to. But no, all they put in your face is the Living Wage Fee.
Why would they not want to make this political point?
I can see that, but these tariffs seem unique in that they are 1) sudden 2) significant 3) broad 4) totally unmotivated
Rates that change from day to day is a serious problem when shipping containers on a boat takes weeks or months.
Amazon is obviously trying to pressure the Trump admin into easing the tariffs. Why wouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? Amazon is as much a political actor as any other company, and they have a major stakeholder when it comes to tariff policy.
Mainly with the concept of letting a ginormous multinational megacorp with more money and resources than 99.9% of the rest of America combined influence our political process is literally how we got here.
The CEO of Amazon is welcome to lobby as himself but letting an extremely already privileged legal fiction (an LLC) have more power over our society is just dumb.
Like sales taxes? Or environmental disposal fees? Both are listed separately in my experience.
If the additional fees is government-forced, such as taxes, then it makes sense to display it separately. You are throwing government-forced costs and regular business costs in the same bucket. If tariffs should be included in the listed price then why not taxes?
When the rent goes up, the prices change. When insurance goes up, prices change. When labor costs go up it's a "service charge"? That's garbage, just set your prices accordingly.
That way there's no surprise at the checkout and you still see how much of the money goes to whom.
It works very well in the rest of the world
I stopped trying to buy stuff from the US, because there's always a ton of added costs
Is there a good way to account for the loss of customers from this practice? I have certainly opted out of restaurants with extra fees.
Good for Amazon.
> * White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she had discussed the Punchbowl News report with Trump, and his message about it was: "This is a hostile and political act by Amazon." * [1]
The Trump administration has expressed a clear expectation that businesses like Amazon should pretend tariffs are paid by foreign countries. Transparent pricing is now disloyal.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/white-house...
The simplest explanation is that they want to deceive consumers/taxpayers into blaming higher prices on corporate whim, instead of their decision to take the money away by import taxes.
My point was simply that since nothing like that has happened, prices spiking is almost certainly due solely to the tariffs.
1. https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-th...
It's as if you told a guy working in a ski station that “the temperature cannot be above 0°C as there's snow everywhere and everyone knows that snow melts above zero”.
It's not how it works, and the economy doesn't work in the simplified fashion you seem to believe it does either. You cannot reason from first principles using “basic supply and demand” arguments like that any more than you can make statements about the weather using the second law of thermodynamics.
Price change all the time for variety of reasons, seasons being one of them (that's why CPI figures are said to be “seasonally adjusted”, BTW).
I appreciate the mix of unwarranted condescension with the assertion that the theory that sudden tariffs cause sudden price increases doesn’t have predictive value, when basically every sober analyst predicted what we are seeing now.
It’s not exactly a secret that prices fluctuate seasonally but what we’re seeing now is spread across the entire economy, suddenly, and in sectors which do not normally experience that seasonal volatility.
Including in sectors that aren't affected by tariffs at all, that's the thing.
> the assertion that the theory that sudden tariffs cause sudden price increases doesn’t have predictive value, when basically every sober analyst predicted what we are seeing now.
You are misunderstanding. Tariffs will cause price increase with certainty. But so will lowering the USD value on FX markets, and so will adding massive uncertainty to businesses (including, but not limited to, the prospect of higher inflation in the near future), etc.
Tariffs will cause price hikes, but attempting to measure tariffs effect by observing price variations simply cannot work.
Real life prices are influenced by much more than just supply and demand.
That's theoretical economics, meanwhile in the real world, retail stores change the prices of goods depending on the weather or holidays.
Similarly, weather could explain the decline of winter gear sales in the northern hemisphere or specific commodities being hit by a storm but that wouldn’t affect the whole economy and we’d all have seen coverage of some epic monsoon or drought if it was that impactful.
Prices vary based on many more factors than what you think it does, that's it.
> all randomly did this in the same direction at the same time
Who says it's random? Most of the variation is very likely linked to the US government actions, but the first order effect of actual tariffs is far from the only way the Trump administration is messing up the economy. In fact, the mess started long before the tariffs actually went enforced and it didn't stop when they where suspended.
Again, the question is simply what non-tariff factor would explain non-trivial prices over a month? If there isn’t one, it doesn’t seem unfair to attribute the increase to a huge policy change.
Having the most economically clueless US president in a century and watching his erratic behavior in real time.
Tariffs are only a small piece of the puzzle.
I mean, passing along tax information is a political act (in the same way not showing items on the shelf with sales tax, and then including it on your bill is an anti-sales-tax political statement—the point is to blame the government for an annoying surprise), but it is (I think, at least) widely seen as sort of… normal acceptable behavior in the US.
priceIncrease := (newPrice - oldPrice) / oldPrice var trump_tariff bool
if priceIncrease > 1.0 { trump_tariff = true }
const trump_tariff = priceIncrease > 1.0
const
I wonder if they will just allow their suppliers to add in an additional “my tariff costs” number, which the supplier can compute however they want and be responsible for. (This would be on top of the main tariff price, the one paid directly by Amazon, which of course they’ll have receipts for).
Wouldn’t “custom duties paid” be on each individual component?
Unless they're registered as an importer? I could see that as a service they might provide to certain sellers, just like warehousing and other logistics.
But generally, they will receive their merchandise from a corporate entity who paid the tariff already.
It doesn’t apply to parts imported and assembled in the US before going to the Amazon fulfillment warehouses, but it does work for their direct to warehouse imports.
It is "playing politics" the same way listing the effect of taxes on the final cost of something is "playing politics".
This is just useful information for the consumer. It's absolutely absurd to think informing a customer of a cost increase is political.
Company B imports lumber and pays a tariff, manufacturers it into furniture rails in the US.
Company C buys furniture rails from Company B and screws from Company A and assembles them into an end table.
Company D buys the end tables wholesale from Company C and distributes them on Amazon.
How does Amazon display the tariffs paid by Company A and B and correctly show the price difference in the final product?
Isn't this the horn everyone keeps trumpeting? It doesn't seem complicated.
Well, realistically they'll do that _anyway_. If you decrease price competition, prices go up. That is the order of things.
Another friend of mine was just laid off, as a transportation broker, directly because of the tariffs.
The tariffs have the potential to drive tens of thousands of small- and medium businesses into bankruptcy, overnight.
I feel as if this was not well thought-out. Maybe megacorps, like Tesla, can weather it, but many smaller businesses have no buffer.
That said, the manufacturing imbalance and trade imbalance is a very real problem that needs to be solved. I just feel as if we are approaching it in a manner that is simplistic, and favors only very large corporations.
No need to hedge. Anyone with their head on the right way around can see how much thought went into it.
That is their goal - to drive out the small and medium businesses so that the president's donors can swoop in with private capital offers to enrich themselves.
On top of that the reasons they gave are contradictory, because in the end the truth is the tariffs were based on the vibes one specific man had held since the 80s. However the world is very different since then.
Not even the numbers make sense. If the goal was to punish people with whom the US has a high trade deficit, why slap a 10% fee on those who don't have a trade deficit at all? This tells countries: "No matter what you do, we will abuse our position of power anyways" instead of telling them "If you behave we both will benefit".
But maybe that wasn't the reason, instead it was manufacturing? Then why on earth not pair tariffs with incentives and help for corporations who want to move their production lines to the US? With the current volatile climate in the US nobody is going to move anything, except maybe away from the US.
Sorry, but I have first semester art students who apply more care when choosing electronic components for their first project after 8 hours of instructions. And art students are not exactly known to be math-heads.
The first thing you'd do is to check for edge cases, like how the formula treats countries that you just extract wealth from like Lesotho. If you have 10 interns spending 20 minutes on each of the 194 countries that takes you a single 8 hour work day tops.
I just think we should be careful to use rigorously correct criticisms of the cheeto. There's still plenty to say.
Ed: thinking more, I think the best way it could still be vibes based is if they only evaluated the formula for China, said "looks good", and mass-applied it with no further thought.
The elastic constants in the divisor of that formula were 0.25 multiplied with 4, which obviously results in 1. And something divided by 1, well stays the same. So why the hell even have them? It does not appear anybody had any real basis for the why of that formula.
Your idea that they went with the result for China and applied formula without more checking sounds surprisingly plausible..
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/white-house-blasts-amazon-ov...
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier she had discussed the initial news with Trump and his response was: “This is a hostile and political act by Amazon.”
People are going to notice when prices are jacked up or stores are empty.
Quit assuming he wants what he says he wants and start assuming he wants the obvious, easily-predictable consequences of his actions.
It's a classic cult of personality. They ignore reality as Trump demands.
There is no way out of this by insisting that they will naturally snap out of it. That's never been how cults of personality end.
I don't understand your point. Am I supposed to be shocked that people could be politically hostile towards Trump? Am I supposed to be shocked that his press secretary accused Amazon of being politically hostile towards Trump? Is there a new "norm" of Presidents never accusing critics of being hostile or trying to score political points?
Apparently Amazon's temporary spine was made of slugs, and it just got salted.
I've been checking out some of the aliexpress / temu / etc. subreddits, and US consumers are losing their marbles over the new import duties. Most stores have now rolled out those on check-out.
AliExpress added this last week as a line item cost during checkout.
I took up a new hobby in 2021 and was buying materials from Amazon and eBay. There’s more transparency on eBay for products shipped directly from China. As a result I stated to realize when shopping on Amazon (and not buying a known Branded Manufacturer, but choosing same category product at lower price) I was buying the exact same low quality Chinese products on Amazon as I was buying on eBay and paying more. Of course, Amazon has better customer service and more consistent return policies compared to eBay stores. There’s benefits for the price, but the products are the same.
Then I discovered AliExpress, and found the same products I was buying on eBay, and Amazon, but my costs were even less. Downside was longer shipping times, and (effectively) no returns.
Last week I looked to buy more materials at AliExpress, and found the line item tariff cost had doubled the price.
I think you see the differences I’m highlighting here are cost and customer service—ALL for the SAME products.
I’m bummed my hobby costs are going up for the same quality products. I’m bummed the sub-800$ exemption is going away.
I believe AliExpress is the Chinese equivalent of eBay. Everybody is buying from the wholesale marketplace, Alibaba. If an Amazon seller is adding tariffs, then I think they’re an AliExpress seller on the Amazon platform.
It seems like no seller would want this.
Stop buying “brands”, and looking for “deals” and acting like a consumer. Do research and find high quality products, pay more for those products, buy less disposable junk. This isn’t just a “China” thing it’s in general.
At least (maybe it varies state by state) Massachusetts has an “implied warranty of merchantability,” the thing has to basically work at least for a little bit.
I mean, if the bolt-holes don’t line up, they didn’t just sell you a bad <thing>, they sold you a random sheet of metal that is not <thing>.
But, I wouldn’t characterize it as “karenesque” to expect your tools to do what they say on the box.
But yeah, what people think of as good, high-quality brands often are not.
If you're buying good copper cookware the manufacturer "brand" matters, they build a reputation for having quality products, ideally continue to make those quality products at a fair price, etc. and life is good.
But then there are brands and unfortunately when we use the term brand we wind up lumping together "high quality brands" with "cheap, useless dog shit products" and it can be difficult to differentiate. At least for me and my limited vocabulary.
Avoid the former like the plague, but the latter is one of the best methods to find legitimately great stuff.
If you have any recommendations or ideas I'd be happy to collaborate! Doesn't need to be something that makes money, though hopefully something that doesn't cost money either! Lol
Craftsman for example.
Smuggling is the world's second-oldest profession. Trade finds a way.
The majority of parts of "Swiss Made" watches are made in China, utilizing a loophole that requires 60% of the watch's cost to be manufactured and assembled in Switzerland. So they make a rotor made out of gold in Switzerland, which accounts for 60% of the COGS of the watch, pop the rotor on the movement, and the sapphire glass on the watch, and it's "Swiss Made."
Best source, a rabbit hole: https://monochrome-watches.com/h-moser-cie-launches-swiss-ma...
Replicas are also manufactured in the same factories as "authentic" watches, but are fully assembled in China. (my personal insider anecdote)
"Investigators who work for Rolex and others say high-end fakes are “made in the same industrial parks and on cloned CNC machines”": https://www.businessinsider.com/how-counterfeit-rolexes-work...
"2025 “superfake” TAG Heuer Aquaracers used real Swiss Sellita movements inside Chinese-made cases—proof of parts leakage, if not identical factory floors": https://www.heddels.com/2025/03/spotting-a-superfake-4-real-...
You start with this, but then the rest of your comment is totally unrelated. Could you elaborate?
That's the argument as I see it at least. I tend to mostly agree, with some carve-outs for highly specialized industry and general "social" differences in how business is typically done.
At this point, if you need basic manufacturing - China seems unbeatable on both price and quality for the vast majority of items. Not to mention lead times and iteration speed.
Also on that note Robots are going to have to become real cheap, I suspect the reason they are so good at everything is because there is so much competition from 1+ billion people its that cutthroat
Robots will have to become cheaper than all these people assembling a generic bluetooth speaker or the price will go up eventually tariffs or not...go ahead count the number of people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
Disregard my comment.
> What kind of idiot US seller hasn’t had their Chinese factory also write in a lower value on the import invoice?
Why do people on X think Americans don’t cheat the system too?
This has to be illegal. You can't slap on a $20 sales tax fee at the end when it's actually $12 and pocket the difference as profit.
It might be like shipping and handling: $20. The shipping is probably $5, the handling is $15. The handling is just a fee they charge to sell it to you. They want you to think it's shipping that's why they put "shipping" first. Uber Eats calls it "taxes and other fees," which are mostly fees, but they want you to think it's taxes, that's why they put "taxes" first.
Many business are scummy like that, we've just gotten used to it.
The point being, they are signaling a price hike and they are trying to attribute it to tariffs, which maybe or may not be true down to the penny. If they were exact in what the tariff was, people can easily calculate their cost, which Amazon doesn't want. I'm sure they will sneak in some extra profit in there at some point using similar tactics as described above.
It would be more obfuscated than that. They're scummy, I didn't say they weren't clever. A company probably wouldn't make the exact same product in three different countries and Amazon probably wouldn't stock all three, they'd just pick the version they could make the most money on. Also, they probably wouldn't make the difference obvious, just a few cents or dollars here or there. They would say the tariff is $5, when it really was $4.50 and they'd just round up. At scale that really ads up.
>Seems like a very fast way to completely lose the trust of your customers.
Most of them lost trust a long time ago. I mean, what companies do you trust? I don't trust very many, if any.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we should all trust Amazon...
Edit: Amazon said displaying tariffs was never approved and won't happen. More junk news.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/amazon-considers-displaying-...
Not sure where you are, but this is pretty much de rigueur in the US for a whole bunch of stuff, notably telecom (mobile and fixed line), ISP, cable TV, electric utilities, as well as other stuff. On your invoice, you'll see stuff like "regulatory recovery fee", "franchise fee", "FCC Admin fee" and the like. None of which are taxes or government imposed fees. Rather, they're just using standard cost-of-doing-business expenses to tack on to your bill while claiming the price is at least 10-15% less.
My favorite is the $23/month "broadcast TV surcharge," which the cable company claims is to cover fees paid to the networks they carry. Since they have to pay these folks to carry their content anyway, they should just include it in the normal price, right? But if they did, that alone would increase the "price" by at least 15-20%.
As such, at least in the US, what law makes this "illegal?" Please tell me as it would save me at least $100/month in such fees/surcharges, or at least the "price" would be the actual "total you owe" price on the bottom line.
I wish.
With the amount of day-to-day and place-to-place variation in tariffs, I'd say that's highly unlikely. Simpler: check their public filings for aggregate statistics.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2025/apr/29/hsbc-t...
> The Trump White House is furious with Amazon over reports that it plans to display the cost of tariffs on items it sells.
> Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has just given the company both barrels, at her briefing with the media today.
> Leavitt claims the move is “a hostile and political act by Amazon”, and asks why Amazon didn’t take a similar step when inflation hit 40-year highs under the Biden administration.
Why do you think you get a breakdown of governmental fees in your electric or phone bill, but not the tax subsidies?
I recently had to buy some transformers, and had no other choice but to get bent over. The price more than doubled at checkout.
Imagine waving your phone, or having on your VR glasses and getting this feedback "instantly".
Plus, you can sell what you learned to sellers so they can out-compete one-another (and drive prices down for consumers).
In a sci-fi world this would turn grocery stores into Faraday cages quickly.
Maybe not useful for the Doordash generation, but the majority of human life can't afford such.
But yah, completely with you on the "sales is hell" part, that bit was for the startup bros.
Prices shown should be post-tax post-fees all-in wherever possible, though. Otherwise you get Ryanair.
Yes, all of the parts and assembly for a product can occur in the United States, but what about the tools they use? What about the semi and the fuel it uses to bring you those tools? While there will certainly be companies that don’t directly pay tariffs, it will be hard for just about every domestic manufacturer to be completely shielded from their effects.
People are going to be pissed that a basic clothes iron now cost $80, but they will not go buy the $225 that is made in texas or wherever. Especially when it is no better, and likely even worse, than the $80 one.
Update: oh and they also said stores won’t lower it because of the tariffs, making the stores more money.
How does that work?
I think you mean that Trump people will get mad at them for highlighted his screwup. I'm sure that's true -- they've decided to back Trump no matter what, which leads them to numerous irrational positions -- but it's not like Amazon or anyone else can do anything about it. Trump and his supporters just thrash about destructively and we all pay the price.
The idea being that folks would pay attention to this stuff. There are a zillion tariffs affecting prices and they just sit there for decades.
“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products. This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.” — Jeff Stein
Its good to know if Amazon's cut is on the total price including the tariff or the price excluding the tariff. It'll help understand whether Amazon is profiting from the situation or not.
I hope other retailers follow suit
> According to e-commerce software company SmartScout, 900 products on Amazon saw increased prices since April 9, with an average increase of 29%.
Tariffs aren't having a big impact yet.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/04/29/wh_hostil...
My uninformed guess is that this hurts the bottom line in at least the short term if customers are less likely to purchase an item which sports high tariffs (even if they might otherwise buy the item if the precise tariff were hidden). And the long term benefit to global trade (inasmuch as one sees that as a good thing, which I mostly do) isn't something that's very testable, much less certain.
They won't. It's clearly meant to target Trump specifically. It's not as though there were absolutely no tariffs of any kind on various products before this year, so ask yourself why they're so concerned about showing tariffs NOW and not say, any time in the past.
Their Brazilian site might be one place that it would make sense, in that Brazil does have rather high tariffs.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/white-house...
"Trump complained to Bezos before Amazon said it scrapped idea to display tariff cost" - April 29 2025 9:01 AM EDT: [2]
"Amazon denies tariff pricing plan after White House calls it "hostile and political"" - April 29, 2025 12:01 PM EDT: [3]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/white-house... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/white-house-blasts-amazon-ov... [3] https://www.axios.com/2025/04/29/tariffs-amazon-prime-day-se...
Intimidation tactics are working.
WH is now filled with extremely dumb people. The other day, the Orange clown was telling automakers to not raise prices due to tariffs, instead absorb them <face palm>
They actually already do this in Amazon stores in other countries for good that are shipped from overseas. They display the cost of customs processing and it's either included or in addition to the base cost. Then they tack on shipping if applicable. This of course is only for products that do not require further customs processing due to the cost of items going over allowed limits, number of units that are considered commercial purchases, whether the product is in a list of products with different requirements etc.
I really do doubt Amazon will do something much different in the US. Can someone with access to the article comment on this?
> Tariffs on sellers' goods are putting Amazon in an awkward position for Prime Day, said Arun Sundaram, an analyst at CFRA Research.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/some-amazon...
> You voted for American energy dominance—and the Trump Administration is delivering. From solar to oil & gas, they’re unleashing it all. More energy. More jobs. Higher wages. America is booming—because when we lead, we win.
You can't argue against that, he was right. It all did BOOM.
The extorter will never stop increasing the ask. Columbia University found this out.
If consumers see two products, one from China and another from Vietnam, both with their tariff markups listed, I have a feeling they’d pick the Vietnam product more often due to the lower markup. This makes Trump happy because he clearly wants us to stop buying Chinese products.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/29/tariffs-amazon-prime-day-se...
One of the Republicans' (conflicting) rationales for the import taxes was Americans would notice the higher prices and be motivated to seek out domestic alternatives.
If they were telling the truth, they should be happy to see these factors clearly displayed, since that makes it easy for consumers to compare and switch to other products that aren't being tariffed.
Instead, they're freaking out, indicating they want to deceive consumers and voters into blaming higher prices on "greedy companies", instead of (correctly) blaming the federal government which is taking the money for unprecedented new "national emergency" taxes.
I mean call them the Democrats tariffs. 2024 was a gift-wrapped election victory and the Democrats (shockingly) bungled it in staggeringly impressive fashion.
I'm curious; I currently don't think that election was so easy for them, with having to run a different candidate, and the overton window shifting right (not just US; EU too).
Of course the republicans are just as guilty as democrats in letting their people keep running as they get old in office.
I have a personal policy of never voting for someone who has held the office more than 1 time. If more people would do this we would solve a bunch of problems. (2 terms is a good number if you like the person since they have some experience in the second term). This also means I oppose too small districts in local issues - if there are not several people interested in running for the office than either it shouldn't be elected (why do I elect my country treasurer - it shouldn't have any power), or the district is too small.
2. Democrats believe that "anybody who's not the other guy" is a winning strategy despite it failing over and over. They think that a candidate that people are excited to vote for is not a necessity and have been proven wrong over and over and over again. They got beat with this strategy in 2000, 2004, 2016 (and now 2024). It barely worked in 2020.
If the plan in 2028 is somebody who's a hold-your-nose and say "Well I'll vote for anyone who isn't republican" they will get absolutely smoked again.
> They think that a candidate that people are excited to vote for is not a necessity and have been proven wrong over and over and over again. They got beat with this strategy in 2000, 2004, 2016 (and now 2024). It barely worked in 2020.
Who, specifically, is "they"? I think either party just picks the candidate that can muster the most internal support and money, and those are both pretty good proxies for probability of success.
I strongly disagree with your examples. I think Al Gore was an excellent candidate (and he was very close to winning, too). 2004 was basically unwinnable for democrats against an incumbent after going through a crisis that fused the country together.
Trumps success I believe is mainly owed to a media landscape that is extremely helpful for populism in general, a bit of an overton "backlash" after achieving a lot of progressive goals (LGBT, black president, environmentalism) and his success in building a cult of personality out of voters with conflicting beliefs (=> the whole anti-woke movement) as well as diametrically opposed interests (working-class voters that don't stand to profit from neither isolationism-light nor gilded-age-v2 policies).
I personally don't see the republicans holding on to the presidency either way, because in my view, Trump was basically heaping a lot of blame as central part of his rethoric, but after actually getting all the power, people are gonna expect results at some point. Blaming "deep state obstructionism" and "the media" is just not gonna cut it to justify mediocrity, and looking at present policies and past results, mediocrity is about the best I'd expect from him as administrator (thats simply not what he is good at).
Would I have voted for a Democrat or a Republican if they ran the "right" candidate? I suppose anything is possible, but given the history, I would consider that to be very unlikely.
C'mon. This isn't even an attempt at "both sides" shit.
The last couple of years have seen a massive post-COVID backlash to incumbent parties all over the world—Democrats were just caught in the wave.
Why on Earth would anyone not call them anything but Trump Tariffs when he is the one who imposed them and when they’re uniquely his idea?
Fix the problem which is electing people like this.
If my toddler scribbles on the wall I better put the markers away next time not put up a little sign that says, "Junior's Doodles."
The point of "Trump Tariffs" is not to make the Trump the scribbler face that wall and feel shame for his output--everybody knows he's too damaged for that.
The point is to ensure everybody else (i.e. voters) recognize that the government is taking their money and understand how it came to occur.
To return to your analogy, it's some message that tells other adults to stop giving Junior their markers, from a source that is beyond your direct control.
Why do you believe that is the point of “Juniors Doodles”?
> The point is to ensure everybody else (i.e. voters) recognize that the government is taking their money and understand how it came to occur.
If you put “Trump’s Tariffs” there then you are fundamentally ignoring how it came to occur by blaming the person who enacted the tariffs.
You don’t blame the bomb for exploding, you blame the person who lit the fuse.
> To return to your analogy, it's some message that tells other adults to stop giving Junior their markers, from a source that is beyond your direct control.
Sorry, either this makes no sense or I’m too stupid to understand it.
Interesting
It just tells the administration there’s more where that comes from.
Vader: “I’m altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.”
As far as I'm concerned, this is dumb as shit and straight reverse-robinhood.
Unfortunately, parasites get fucked up by these policies, and so they will fund right wing fascist revolutions to make absolutely sure that NOTHING that Henry George ever proposed is implemented.
Henry George is among the greatest humans who ever lived.
Free Trade! Free Land! Free Men!
That said, China makes a lot of good quality things too and a whole lot of things that we have no hope of being competitive in producing.
Also, it's not like anything we bring back to the USA under the circumstances is going to be higher quality.
I was already buying a lot of clothes from brands that pride themselves on trying hard to do Made in America, like Schott Nyc. It'll be interesting to see how this impacts them or brands like Thursday.
I really want the impact of this to be to force Americans to buy fewer, higher quality things instead of bloat loads of cheap shit. I don't think that this will be the impact of the policy, unfortunately...
Also, given that Cheeto promised no more IRS, I shouldn't have to pay federal income taxes this year. Don't tread on me zion don.
There's nothing partisan about this, it's Amazon. They like free trade. It's about policy not the party
100%+ fees added overnight are interesting, no one is writing features to show 0% that hasn't budged in decades.
Also, I thought these were bigly beautiful tariffs, Trump's proudest achievement; surely he will be pleased to see them displayed so prominently, so that people can marvel at them?
All respected economists on all sides of the political spectrum agree that tariffs hurt the economy. The current President is the only political actor pushing for tariffs.
Reminding people that tariffs are a tax on the consumer is not a partisan issue; it is transparency and plainly economics 101.
But it still seems like you’re disagreeing with my conclusion?
Yes, consumers love cheap goods. And businesses love to make short term profits even if it means selling out the future by gutting American companies and turning them into mere distributors for Chinese companies. That’s why you need the government to intervene to change peoples’ behaviors.
There is a reason we tax cigarettes and other things that are bad for us. We do it to change people’s behaviors, to get them to consume less of the bad thing. Yes, like with tariffs, it makes the bad thing more expensive. That’s the whole point! Amazon is a bad company with a bad business model, and I don’t actually care who is the one who takes them out.
On a less sarcastic note, pretty much zero mainstream economists believe that tariffs will bring back manufacturing to the US. There are economists who think the US should manufacture more. They talk about taxing consumption more and savings/investment less. When you cite economists to tariff-enthusiasts, they usually reply with "economics is a scam!" or some such nonsense. That's only a breath away from an equally dumb Marxist line: "economists are just servants of The Capital". Bleh.
And I love Amazon. They're a fantastic company and have been since day 1. I'm a grown-up. If I want to buy cheap Chinese goods, I should be able to. And if that hurts Americans, that sucks for them, but I shouldn't have to pay a tax because some US company can't compete with Chinese companies. And if I lose my job because someone in China does it better/cheaper, I won't whine about it. I'll find something else to do.
Mainstream economists also widely agree corporate taxes and capital gains taxes are bad: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Should we eliminate those taxes and have everyone pay a large VAT?
I don’t have confidence that economists have fully figured out how economies work or what the relevant trade offs are. Economics is somewhere between the social “sciences” and real science in terms of methodological reliability.
I’m not a Marxist, but I’m also not a religious zealot. I believe in aerospace engineers enough that I’m comfortable getting into a metal tube that’s 35,000 feet in the air. But I don’t have similar confidence in the postulates of economists.
> And if that hurts Americans. that sucks for them
The whole point of government is so people can vote to override anti-social individual behavior like this.
You don't have to go all the way. Just experiment with a VAT and lowering corporate taxes.
> I don’t have confidence that economists have fully figured out how economies work or what the relevant trade offs are. Economics is somewhere between the social “sciences” and real science in terms of methodological reliability.
What economists have is better than vague feelings about the dignity of working in a factory as opposed to a service job.
> The whole point of government is so people can vote to override anti-social individual behavior like this.
Is that the point of the government? Not in the American tradition. Americans are remarkably invididualistic. If that's anti-social, well, the experiment has been running for a few hundred years and it's worked pretty well. I don't believe the past 20 years have been so bad that the US should start acting like a third world country.
You've got it backwards. If people have the feeling that there is more dignity working in a factory than delivering Door Dash, that's a preference that should be factored into the economic analysis. Similarly, economic analyses considers factors like labor laws and environmental laws as detracting from "comparative advantage," even though it probably better reflects peoples' preferences for those things to be a minimum standard that no country is competing on. And it's certainly relevant that being a manufacturing powerhouse provides a long-term military advantage compared to a services-based economy. Prior to World War II, the U.S. had largely demilitarized. It built the world's largest military within a couple of years, because of its industrial capabilities. Those are real-world considerations, but aren't factored into simplistic comparative-advantage analyses.
Bringing back manufacturing with tariffs is like banning fossil fuels to combat climate change. It's not good policy.
I agree with this completely. But I think most economists simply disagree with this goal and aren’t thinking of ways to advance the goal. So we’re stuck with tariffs, which at least is something we have used in the past to support industry.
I would posit that this attitude is at the root of a lot of the distrust of and consternation at experts. If people say: “we want a society with more manufacturing/fewer immigrants/etc.,” the expert response is “you’re stupid to want that.” They’re not thinking of ways to leverage their expertise in service of those outcomes.