Amazon Rules Out Displaying Tariff Impact After White House Attack
wsj.com
wsj.com
What's the text of the law about this? Was there a free speech lawsuit over it, or is state censorship of the app store fine now? Just asking because in another thread someone is complaining that EU doesn't have free speech compared to the US.
(edit: wow, we're already flagged off the front page, huh)
From the Amazon shopping side, you can build quite a profile on someone based on their past order history. Want to find protesters? There’s been a number of folks who don’t usually order office supplies suddenly ordering the thick Sharpie markers in a certain area...
Hopefully AWS steers clear of this, I suppose. That’d have even worse implications.
That’s small potatoes. Think of all the corporate and government data stored in 365 and other cloud services.
- or -
Who has read books critical of the Trump Regime in the past x months?
This has been rumbling on for years, regardless of administration, because the security services love overreach. This is the basis of the whole "EU safe harbor" dispute, because Microsoft can't guarantee to EU customers of their Ireland datacenter that they will follow GDPR and not leak customer secrets to US security services.
Ah yes. When a company does something at the ask of a Democratic administration it’s an act of valor or bravery. When they do it at the ask of a Republican one, it’s fear or fealty.
In reality it’s neither. It’s always just business.
The problem for the Administration, however, is that they’ve been telling the American people the tariffs are not a tax on consumers, but rather a tax on foreign countries. This is a lie.
So we have a situation where the administration is intimidating Amazon into going against its own values so that it doesn’t expose the lie the Administration is still telling the American people.
I agree with you that Amazon‘s decision to bend to the administrations demand is just business. There are millions of dollars in military cloud infrastructure contracts that could be rescinded as retribution. And we see that the justice department is used by the president in ways that are far outside the norm.
But do you believe this administration is acting like any we’ve seen in living memory?
If they actually cared what consumers think, at some point over the past 35 years they would have added country of origin to product pages. Much simpler and higher impact. Does not require any recalculations or interpretations of local profit margin vs import value. Yet they've explicitly chosen never to add it.
Is that in the interests of the consumer?
> The problem for the Administration, however, is that they’ve been telling the American people the tariffs are not a tax on consumers, but rather a tax on foreign countries. This is a lie.
It is a tax on foreign countries. Some portion of it gets passed on to consumers who chose to purchase imported products. But it's not 100% of the tariff amount. And if there is local competition for the good, it may be 0% of the amount. Unless you're doing direct China to consumer sales (i.e. Temu style), you're not going to be able to come up with a perfect figure for these things either.
> So we have a situation where the administration is intimidating Amazon into going against its own values so that it doesn’t expose the lie the Administration is still telling the American people.
Ha! I agree that we have an administration that is leveraging the bully pulpit quite effectively. I see no change in Amazon's values here. They value money.
> I agree with you that Amazon‘s decision to bend to the administrations demand is just business. There are millions of dollars in military cloud infrastructure contracts that could be rescinded as retribution. And we see that the justice department is used by the president in ways that are far outside the norm.
> But do you believe this administration is acting like any we’ve seen in living memory?
No, I think they're effectively using the tools at their disposal to bring about the change that was promised during the years leading up to the 2024 election. None of this is a shock to anybody that was paying attention. And honestly none of this, at least so far, is particularly out of the norm for what's possible with executive authority. The speed of change is likely a bit much for the faint-hearted, but it's not unexpected either. The man ran on a platform of restructuring trade and 145% tarriffs on China is one piece of that puzzle.
Please name a single comparable situation in the last 20 years where the Democratic president was the one threatening a company and the company reversed course.
I found this unreasonable and confusing until one day I read a conservative argument that this is actually a good thing, because it stops the government from increasing sales tax too much. It constantly reminds residents of how much extra they're paying for sales tax and encourages voting for politicians who will reduce sales tax if it's too high. Okay, it's a reasonable argument, I wasn't super against it anymore.
It's fairly shocking to now see this happen, not even as a result of any law but just one of the biggest companies deciding to obey in advance.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/EU_VAT_T...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Sales_ta...
Apparently the New Hampshire median home price is 487K. With a property tax of 1.89% that's 9.2K/yr or $767 per month.
EU property taxes are a fraction of that: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/real-property-taxes-eu...
Overall, Europeans do pay higher taxes but Americans really overlook how much property tax they pay, and how this closes the gap significantly.
It is fully possible to show full price along with tariffs and taxes, if you want to show them. It does not necessitates misleading prices. This is just conservatives being pro-manipulation and against informed customers.
When I was ordering package to a country that had tariffs, an online store shown me item price, shipping, tariffs and total price. Nothing new or shocking about showing a full price along with its breakdown.
How do you put the final price on an ad that will be broadcast over a large area or distributed in a newspaper that goes to same, with different tax rates in different parts of the area? You won’t know the price until you know which location they’re shopping at.
I show two prices. Or, I show price for food and then price for packing separately. This is not a difficult problem at all.
>ow do you put the final price on an ad that will be broadcast over a large area or distributed in a newspaper that goes to same, with different tax rates in different parts of the area?
Are we now in some kind of completely different hypothetical example that is neither online shopping nor "prices in the store" we discussed before?
However that requires a centralization of power that is politically unpalatable in the US currently.
In practice, I think that this issue largely persists in the US because of tipping culture though. It perpetuates an acceptance of final cost uncertainty that makes the insanity of all the examples you describe seem somehow not so weird after all.
It's not really reasonable. Like, at all.
You can know how much sales tax/VAT is without having to do math every time you pay a bill. For one thing, receipts can and AFAIK always include VAT separately in the EU, with a line for each VAT amount if different (e.g. in France food and alcohol are under different VAT rates, so on the receipt it says you paid X in VAT, of which Y was under 20% for alcohol, Z under 5.5% for food).
You retain the same "power" while being more informed and you're spared quick mental math every time you pay.
It used to be limited to the state run channel Fox News. Even they would screw up once and a while.
Depending on the severity, they'd either be dragged on X or receive an unhappy on-air call from the Palace in Mar-a-largo.
As I keep saying, this is the other way round. In the west we don't have state controlled media, we have a media controlled state. Private propaganda organizations can very effectively steer policy by getting people to believe nonsense.
If tariffs are a good thing why not allow them to be 'advertised' that much more? Don't you want credit for the good idea you came up with?
If a change in tax policy is the short term goal, is manufacturing a long term goal? Wouldn't a robust manufacturing sector mean decreased tariff revenue? The picture isn't clear because Trump is being very opaque with his policies.
Time to wake up and smell the coffee --- tariffs are really a tax on *YOU* --- not China.
No country has ever taxed it's citizens into greatness.
Why do people repeat this? The greatest era of middle-class growth and success was when the rich paid much more in taxes. Perhaps a better phrase is "No government maintained a middle-class by letting the rich soak up all the gains".
Or since the middle class constitutes the majority of citizens, "No country has ever taxed *the majority* into greatness"?
One must tax the rich heavily because otherwise their money will just snowball until there's little left for anyone else. Cute phrases too often reinforce that reality.
If something cost $50 yesterday and now suddenly it's $75 or $100 with no explanation wouldn't that make more people think it's inflation which in turn has its own set of negative impacts?
No one is just going to blindly forget a massive price hike on a wide range of things.
All this does is allow businesses to raise their prices arbitrarily and blame tarrifs on the side if anyone complains. Basically the same thing that happened with inflation after covid. I guess this explains why they are not showing it. If that's not the truth, that's ok. That's what happens when you're not transparent. People will make assumptions based on their beliefs.
I think you’re right about the cover this provides for businesses, too, which makes it interesting from a political standpoint. The president clearly recognizes that the tariffs are a political liability if voters are allowed to see the unblended costs but if the costs are hidden, that gives carte blanche to every business to raise prices now knowing that consumers will assume it’s tariff-related like all of the other price increases they’re seeing.
They could also show the pre-tariff and post-tariff prices; that would be the most helpful thing. Or a price chart, which would be interesting ex-tariff.
either WH says nothing and the values are shown.
WH says something in outrage (like they did) and amazon backs down.. but its such big news that the awareness has been heightened. Now even the most rabid MAGAhead knows that this is going to cost them at the hip pocket, and knows that the WH knew, and used their power to shut amazon up.
JB won this round.
They’re free to do whatever they want, but it’s hardly some conspiracy theory. It’s just business. That includes deciding to or deciding not to show tariff impact on prices.
Though I agree with the prevailing notion that the simplest explanation would seem to be a mere concession to the Trump admin.
How else can we show the people that the Trump team is stealing their money, not china!