Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.
Explanation: to a well off person, 25% higher gas or food prices is just an annoyance. Nothing in their day to day life will change because of that. To a poor person it's brutal.
You could set up a deduction system... But that's retroactive (poor people still don't have that money for a whole year) and dramatically complicates their tax filing burden and financial record keeping requirements.
The rich can afford lawyers and accountants, so the IRS has been going after lower and lower income folk for their slip-ups more often. So yet more punishing the poor.
Yes. But that cost can be absorbed across the board. The manufacturer can lower their margins. The importer / distributor / wholesaler can do the same. The B2B / B2C seller can do the same.
It doesn’t all necessarily get directly passed to the buyer.
Another question that few are asking is: what has the off shoring of so much manufacturing cost the USA? Looking at the resident of the WH, it appears to be quite a bit.
Realistically, what's he gonna do? Shut down the company, which he oh so desperatly wants in the US? Tax them more, driving their cost up more?
Lots of options.
Other ways of reducing value are possible such as reducing quality control effort, reducing quality of inputs, and reducing manufacturing costs in ways that are known to reduce product quality.
Pushing costs to effectively underregulated externalities can also avoid price increases.
It is also sometimes possible to increase efficiency. Even a long term commodity can have potential for efficiency improvements that were considered not worth exploring under stable pricing pressures. (I suspect value reduction is easier and much faster than efficiency improvement.)
Sadly, reducing value can have a disproportionate cost to consumers. Reducing manufacturing costs for a Watchman's boots by 20% may reduce the lifetime of such by 30% and reduce the quality of use by 50% (which may be related to Samuel Vimes' theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory ).
Also market competition can be a factor: if competitors are not raising prices (or by smaller amounts), you might lose market share.
Of course the practical problem with this playing out in increased domestic production is that it's reasonably likely that in 2028 the tariffs will get rolled back, and any company that was depending on them to survive will die. That's a large amount of uncertainty for any industry where there's a significant income investment required to get going.
[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-...
Not to mention that tariffs on directly imported goods reduce the lowest earners' ability to pay for domestic products.
If the goal was onshoring too benefit the population, it would be coupled with a strong wealth redistribution to the least wealthy to allow them to buy domestic goods. But that's not the goal.
That's not true, even for items which undergo relatively little processing like milk:
1. Cows need feed, and in the US this is mostly corn. This corn is mechanically harvested, shucked, and transported.
2. Cows are milked by machine.
3. This milk is then transported to a larger processing facility where it gets filtered, clarified (fat removal for 2%, skim, etc), pasteurized, homogenized (fat is evenly dispersed), and bottled in a blown plastic jug.
4. After bottling, the milk gets palletized and trucked to grocery distribution centers, which will re-palletize it for shipment to individual stores.
At every step of the way, we use machines that require frequent maintenance and whose supply chains rely extensively on imported parts. On-shoring all of this would be expensive and risky both because Trump flip-flops so often and because our next administration may just reverse the tariffs.
A question that I see ignored by people who ask your question, is 'what has off-shoring brought the US?' The answer is massive economic growth and improvements in quality of live.
Off-shoring allows you to make stuff cheaper by keeping the economic circumstances of the creator worse than your own. We can get cheap stuff from China because they work many more hours than people in the west do and they live in conditions that are much worse. Because we can get cheap stuff (like pocket computers, clothing, shoes, couches, cars and more) and off-shore most of the downsides (pollution, long working hours, dangerous workplaces), we improve our quality of life significantly.
So unless you prefer working in mines or working 80 hours a week in a dirty, dangerous factory, I think you're probably better off with globalization than you would've been without.
Where? Here in the USA? Hint: No. The point is, those gains elsewhere have come at the cost of the US middle class.
We don’t have who we have in the WH, we don’t have the federal debt we have because globalization has been good for the US. Full stop.
p.s. We can get into USA citizens being down graded to consumers, some other time. But that’s not a positive either.
This analysis fails to realise that there are simply other countries with which to trade with.
This is not correct. The cost of tariffs are shared by the distributor and customer. The proportion is determined by the elasticity of demand. By this I mean that for goods and services which people rely on, like gas, they will pay almost all of the cost of the tariff because they need the gas to survive. For luxury goods and services, like Louboutin shoes, most of the cost of tariffs is paid by the distributor. This is because customers are willing to substitute for other options, or simply not buy that item. They don't need it.
The downstream effects are quite complex to calculate. For this reason, neoliberals prefer to avoid any tariffs at all. For example, the U.S. is a net gas exporter, meaning that total net local consumption can be satisfied without imports. In a perfect market, there would be no change to the cost of gas. However gas is a commodity, and there is the risk that cartels abuse their market positions to exploit the fact that locals must buy gas from them if they wish to avoid the tariff. For other goods like imported food, locals can substitute. They don't have to buy imported avocados. There are plenty of other affordable and nutritious foods available locally. However, the loss of avocados is, by some metric, a loss of quality of life. This isn't generally captured in economic data. Further still, some of these additional costs are offset by the fact that local businesses become more profitable thanks to said tariffs, and this ends up in the pockets of consumers. Because so much menial labour is currently offshored, the primary benefactor of tariffs is expected to be the poor and working classes.
Because by and large, most of the jobs offshored by the U.S. have been lower skilled. As these jobs return, it is the lower skilled workers who will primarily benefit.
I agree that there are likely examples of necessities which cannot be produced cost effectively locally which will become more expensive.
The system is set up to ensure efficient allocation of capital. If it's more profitable for manufacturers to produce goods in-country, that is exactly what they will do. It's a bold claim that tariffs will have no impact whatsoever on investment and spending, because it's clear that they absolutely will.
Far too many people think of markets as some kind of magical supercomputational system. They're really just a heuristic that does avoid some spectacular failure modes, but easily gets stuck in local maximums. China did the work over decades to prime the pump so that industry picked up and moved, while our "leaders" facilitated the looting. One pathetic man throwing policy tantrums for spectacle isn't going to reverse these now-entrenched dynamics.
There is also the glaring issue that Chinese companies can just as easily set up factories in other countries with low US tariffs. They won't be paying import taxes on the equipment they bring there to do so (like setting up a factory in the US would require), and in fact they will probably receive favors from those countries' governments for the investment. So these ham-fisted import taxes actually encourage the expansion of Chinese influence into other countries.
See, I was with you until this (OK, mostly with you, luxury goods are price inelastic so the buyer definitely pays).
The primary beneficiary of a carefully designed tariff policy might be some working class people in some industries (and some wealthy owners, natch), at the expense of direct and indirect customers of those industries who may or may not be poor themselves. But an idiot imposing blanket unpredictable tariffs with promises to negotiate "great deals" that lift them in future costs far more of those manufacturing jobs than it protects, because on the one hand it creates enormous supply chain risk to US manufacturing, and on the other hand overseas companies aren't investing in building new facilities in the US because of a 40% tariff levied until the POTUS changes his mind in a few months time...
Luxury items are price elastic. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040715/which-factor...
see also: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012915/what-effect-...
Not a great example since energy and food are overwhelming domestically produced in the US. That doesnt mean there is no effect of tariffs in those categories, but it is much more muted than the headline numbers might suggest.
You also have little nuggets like https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dio...
The Cultural Revolution marches on. Carbon Dioxide is woke.
Climate change does not mean just rising sea levels, but more extreme weather as well, which can include more flooding: warmer air holds more moisture, so when it eventually gets released it can be in downpours. See recent flooding in Texas.
Poor people tend to live in the highest risk areas because the safer areas are desired most and so the people with money bid up prices there.
When you hear headlines like "Trailer Park Destroyed by Tornado", and people ask "Who would live in 'Tornado Alley'?", the answer is "Poor people.".
It's hard to get a good measure of damage caused by climate change. There are much touted statistics that say billion dollar weather events are more common than ever, but that's mainly due to things being more expensive and increased development (i.e. beach front properties)
A more objective measure, although no perfect, is deaths caused by climate events. If climate events were more catastrophic over time, you would expect deaths to go up somewhat proportionally. To my knowledge, there haven't been major advances in rescue technology in the last 50 years or so.
But we see this number has come down pretty drastically over the last 150 years. In the US it has also come down or stayed about the same
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269715/global-reported-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatality-rates-in-the-us-...
It sounds a bit like the "Boots theory" of Discworld [0].
> insurance rates are often highly subsidized by federal government and actually a really good bargain
This feels a bit inconsistent with your previous comment about living in Tornado Alley being "not exactly a bargain".
What do you think about studies like this [1] which find a correlation between economic disparity and tornado risk?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), for one, may disagree:
* https://thepointer.com/article/2025-08-02/ontarians-are-payi...
* https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/ca/news/catastrophe/can...
* https://www.lexpert.ca/news/finance-law/insurance-bureau-of-...
* https://www.ibc.ca/news-insights/in-focus/canadian-governmen...