Comment by johnnienaked | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnienaked | Hacker News Reader

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Haven't tariffs been paused since they've been announced?

Some of them yes, some of them no. There are now several thousand different "tax brackets" for imported items and the apparent rates on them fluctuate by the day.

Most global post offices are just suspending packages to the US because they don’t know what the price is or how to pay it.

Makes it hard to believe the administration's claims of hundreds of billions in revenue

The best data I could find* was that tariffs Jan - Jun raised 93b in revenue (or 180b / year if it were constant- unlikely but who knows). For comparison, the 2025 deficit is $1865b, so tariffs could take a bite out of the deficit, but never come close to balancing the budget.

The most positive argument I have heard is that it would be a small consumption tax that is regressive. Small because the US doesn't really import that much compared to most global economies. It's just things we fixate on like cars or steel, which actually aren't that economically important anymore. Maybe strategically? I feel like people are trying to make economic sense of an emotional / populist policy.

* https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff...

this isn't true, tariffs are assessed within the US by the receiving firm, not on the sender's side. We run a business with a foreign supply chain and our suppliers have changed nothing, we just get an extra bill to pay to the government when our inventory arrives.

This is related to the removal of 'de minimis' rule that exempts parcels under $800 to ship duty free. This has caused some European postal services to stop/delay shipping some packages to the US [0]. The Dutch postal service for instance has stopped shipping to the US [1]

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/us-tariffs-goods-services-suspens...

[1]: https://www.postnl.nl/campagnes/online-frankeren-vs/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-26/australia-post-commer...

>"Specifically, the requirement for duties and taxes to be prepaid on all shipments prior to their arrival in the US,"

It's more the public postal services with very cheap international shipping, they typically can't or won't handle import customs/tariffs and operate under the assumption that the packages aren't valuable enough. Many of them don't even have tracking.

It changes every week :)

Which is also very destructive because such instability is very bad for long-term business planning.

Some have been paused, some have been raised (India for example). It seems to be pretty chaotic.

The originally announced tariff rates have been “paused” (in reality they were never implemented), but in their place has been a 10% global tariff. China already had tariffs of 25% from the 1st Trump admin, plus 20% from February, so tariffs on goods from China are currently at 55%. But the rest of the world is at 10% right now (only the UK has actually signed a trade deal).

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