The whole thing is a mess and shows how incompetent the current implementation is.
That should not be possible. The kickback from this mania is going to be pretty extreme pain for these clowns.
If history is any indication, then the blowback will be leveraged (successfully) to point fingers at other parties (doesn't matter who), and then the proposed remedy will be to double-down:
"It didn't work the first time around because we weren't strong-willed/determined/patriotic enough, this time We Must Go All In, and stamp out any dissidents with extreme prejudice, for they are the Enemy holding us back from our Finest Hour!"
etc, etc.
What will happen is either a collapse of the US economy or a collapse of the Trump administration.
Even if the administration grows a brain and reverses course, we are on course for a COVID-like supply chain shock that will cause major pain. Not to mention the loss of trust that will absolutely depress the needed regrowth.
Seeds sourced from China - which a lot are - have skyrocketed in price.
I’m actually not sure this is all bad. A flatter more multipolar world is probably better for everyone, including America. But I think it’ll be a tough time in our history and the people who voted for Trump will be the ones who bear the most pain for his delusional misunderstanding of the way the world actually is vs what he wishes it were.
But if I were to put $5 down, I’d wager this lasts until the GOP political fortunes have been decimated through their hubris and magical thinking and Trump is personally hung out to dry for his strategic blunder in launching a 195 front war.
That's a pretty big caveat.
To frame the question another way -- which does China want more, an international rules based order or Taiwan and nine dashes of maritime territory?
You might argue that absent American military hegemony, Russia and China become belligerent. But the US isn't really doing much about either, so that's a moot point. All the world really loses is America's interference in their affairs, which I think the world can do without.
It's very easy, indeed common, for the "something" to be worse than the status quo.
The republicans in congress are so lost in the sauce that they won't challenge the great orange hope in the quarter. The soonest I think we can see anyone fighting back, politically, won't happen until the midterms AT BEST.
This is assuming that the republicans/trump don't come up with some issue that they can swing the midterms on and/or don't gut the electoral system to the point that they can't lose.
And even then I'm not sure that congress can actually do anything to fix this issue while trump is still in the white house and impeachment and removal seems unachievable. Say congress reverses it's delegation of tarrif power to the president. What happens if trump just does not obey congress, much like they are not obeying the supreme court. Do the republicans in congress have enough of a spine to actually remove him? How do we assure that removal actually takes place in the event that we can even meet the threshold? The man still, ostensibly, still has control of the military. Perhaps the military, secret service, any other guys with guns just refuses to help him resist congress like they did when he tried to deploy the military after jan 6th.. but they seem to have already cleaned house at the pentagon, with hagseth getting rid of more people who aren't sufficiently loyal enough to do crimes and/or coup the fucking government for trump.
shit is getting scary.
It takes 20 of 53 Republican senators for impeachment. That's a high bar, but Nixon was close when he resigned.
Useful reading: "How the Good Guys Finally Won" (1975), by Jimmy Breslin. This covers how Nixon and Agnew were ejected. The Internet Archive has full text.[1]
[1] https://archive.org/details/howgoodguysfinal00bres/page/n9/m...
If they didn't vote for impeachment in the two times he was impeached in his first term, and if they supported him after January 6th then they're not going to vote for impeachment now.
The Republicans under Nixon were the same party in name only, and they did not have the same blind loyalty to Nixon. They had opposing voices. They had separate factions. Now the only faction is Trump-worship.
The real test will be the summer and fall as natural disasters and the accumulation of cuts and the trade war all converge into a crescendo of negativity.
It's worth considering the possibility that as a party they're nowadays more into fascism than republicanism. Rome was a republic too, until it wasn't.
The difference though is the Roman republic had a constitutional order that was implicit rather than explicit. The American constitution and bill of rights is very difficult to change, and the order is fairly explicit. This was intentional with the assumption that even if a Sulla like figure emerges and consolidates power, it’ll revert over time to a liberal humanist republic. The anti federalists examine this in some depth and the scenario we are in was definitely considered carefully. It’s remarkable it took 249 years - but it was 430 years before Sulla seized the dictatorship by declaring emergency powers and cracked the constitutional order of Rome.
With the way current events unfold there might not be any more elections.
Edit: it is also can be treated as a consumer right to know, by analogy with food labeling), what are the major components of the price they are paying, and thus allowing for informed choice.
That said I wish they would.
“Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.”
If anything, what can be more American than making clear when and how much the government is taxing the people? It is like at the core of this nation’s founding.
Of course the importer will pass the costs along, but that isn't the real point.
The real point is that it is _expected_ that the costs will be passed along to the end consumer. The whole _goal_ of a tariff is to make people not want to buy the product anymore because it isn't worth the money.
There is an uproar about these tariffs, and I get that, people hate trump and everyone who supports him, totally get that too, and when he does a thing, people are going to lose their minds about it.
The point of the tariff isn't to tax citizens, it is meant to discourage spending, so the thing isn't imported, so the country of origin loses money and whatever they were selling now has even _less value_ because there is an oversupply.
China needs somewhere to dump their slave-labor made garbage much more than US consumers need to buy it.
When your value-add is fronting the cash for a container of something, doing paper pushing and sending the resultant product to an Amazon warehouse people will ask tough questions like "who are all these parties you're pushing papers to? What is their purpose and should they even exist in 2025" all of which is just a proxy for "if we fixed the system you wouldn't exist" and you can't really fault them for that.
The tariff charge may also naturally include say the directly related charges like for example the increased insurance premium for the increased, due to the tariff, insured value of the goods while they are being transported/stored. Add to that increased financing required to cover all those costs, etc., and that can snowball to feel significant even for the ones with higher markup.
Let's say 1 pay x for a product. Gross markup is say 100%. Do I sell it for 2x. Let's say there's a tariff cost of y. That means the cost price is x + y. I mark that up to 2x + 2y. It's easy to up the price by 2y and disclose the tariff as "z%".
But this of course presumes all your expenses remain flat. And they likely don't. As your expenses go up (2nd order effects) that 100% markup starts to not be enough. So the markup goes up a bit.
Plus since things are going up anyway, and since there's uncertainty (which has a cost) we need to bump the price up even more (because hey, free market.)
And when the tariffs go away, we can remove the primary cost, but all the secondary hikes remain. Because that's all just extra profit, and, like, free market right?
This round of inflation is going to make covid look mild. (And as I point out to my Republican friends, just remember, you voted for this.)
The way out of this is to devalue the dollar. That would erode the real value of the outstanding debt (which is delimited in dollars.) Alas the US has worked very hard to make the dollar the world currency, so devaluing it is complex.
The US consumer (voter) is of course the big loser. At least this generation is. Folk born around 2030 may be the big winners.
Tariffs are in the news and the percentages are known. If I'm selling a wallet made in China, in the US for $80, and list a tariff line item of $2 - people will calculate and easily know that I imported said wallet from China for <$1 and start to question why I'm charging so much.
If they're clever enough to do that math, they're clever enough to infer the result from the quality and fact that it's made in China. The ways of obscuring that would be to have paid more for a higher quality item made in China (make a convincingly costly product), or make it difficult to evaluate the quality in the first place.
But I know you're talking hypotheticals and all. It is maybe worth wondering whether in aggregate it'll become more transparent that the U.S economy is based on adding a negligible amount of value to anything from top to bottom.
They backed down immediately after Trump (or someone at the Whitehouse) called Bezos.