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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

So the tariffs had the intended effect? That’s great!

Is it great because the US will start manufacturing African and Dutch gifts? Or is it the reduced choice and inflated prices that you prefer?

People can pay a 10-20% premium for African and Dutch gifts if they want to.

Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.

I think it's a fair compromise. As Americans we are used to having an overwhelming amount of choice, partly due to our previous open trade policies. Something you don't really see in other countries. Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand.

taking an example from the article, the USA currently produces 0.2% of coffee it consumes domestically (Hawaii and Puerto Rico).

Could coffee be grown in reasonable quantities inside the USA? I find some mention of very expensive high-end 'boutique' coffee grown in California but it is not generally a crop that grows well in the continental USA.

(until global warming reduces the chances of frost in Florida perhaps?)

Another example from the article was a tea grower. Again, niche growing is limited to just some regions of the USA, with less than 0.1% of consumption domestically produced.

And of course with these products they have distinctive tastes that reflect where they were grown, so tea from California is distinctive tasting and not a direct substitute for tea from Japan from the article.

The growers in the article had been heavily disrupted by tariffs.

Yes, but American labour laws / minimum wages would result in it costing more.

Where are you growing coffee in the us, purely from a climate and land perspective?

That's a strawman. Obviously if there's no American competition then I see no problem with lower tariffs for those products.

I don't mind at all reducing tariffs for things we dont manufacture or can't for various reasons.

I believe the administration is lowering tariffs for things like that.

Beef on the other hand should be temporarily lowered since our cattle herd is half of what it should be. (It plummeted under Biden takes awhile to return as the herd matures) Soooo import from Argentina until it's back up.

That is not the reason that Japanese people don't buy many American products.

The reason is that there are hardly any products made in America.

It is. Japanese don't have the opportunity to buy most American products. You won't see them stocked or available apart from import stores where prices can be 2-3x the price they are in America due to import fees. Many items aren't even available there due to strict restrictions. Meanwhile America has been an open market for a long time.

My point isn't that American products aren't expensive to import into Japan (I don't know). My point is that even if they weren't expensive to import into Japan, what American products would you even import? Most stuff is not made in America in the first place.

There are plenty of food, household, and tool products we make.

Pretty much everything I buy, apart from computer tech, is from an American company.

That can be true, but that doesn't mean it was manufactured in America. More often it means it was either labeled, packaged or assembled in America. But the supply chain does not end where you buy a finished product.

I don't buy many American products because whenever I've tried in the past, the quality, and customer service has been shoddy. Americans can't assemble things correctly, ship wrong or obviously defective products, fail to fill in customs forms properly, and then expect me to just shrug my shoulders and accept all that rather than acknowledging issues and trying to fix them.

I realise that my experience is limited to the handful of times I've tried to buy stuff from the US. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky, but frankly, the odds are against it.

Your comment just reminded me, I bought a circuit board from the US recently and some of the pins were not soldered properly, I had to fix it myself.

Rumour has it that Shanghai manufactured Teslas have better manufacturing quality than Fremont

Here in Ireland we have items from all over the world, except the US.

That’s not a new thing. It seems like you guys are the only ones whose goods aren’t interesting.

I no longer care about my layabout countrymen.

Everyone knew that already. You want infinite foreigners to spite them.

I'm struggling to think of what goods are made in the US that I might buy - certainly not food or cars?

Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.

Or you know, drive us into a recession. You do recall tariffs (Smoot-Hawley) were a contributing factor to the length and depth of the Great Depression, right?

You do know that Lincoln’s tariffs helped turn US into an industrial superpower right?

> Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand.

I'm living on Japan right now and this is absurd. There are American brands everywhere (although as usual who knows where the products are made). American food brands. American steak. American sportswear. American backpacks. Entire shops in the mall devoted to American fashion. I'd say appliances and cars are more rarely American brands but there are reasons beyond trade barriers why that's true.

Lived there for 6 years. You're not buying American steak, most likely it's Australian.

There are certain clothing brands (at a much higher cost), large fast food chains, and Apple are the exceptions. Basically really large companies that make specific deals.

Just checked my local grocery store circular, and as you can see (upper left) they sell American pork, at least. I believe I have bought American steak but it's not on sale at the moment.

https://www.seiyu.co.jp/assets/images/flyer_blackfriday25112...

You are comparing apples and oranges.

For food items, the import regulations are much stricter in every country than for stuff like electronics or clothes. Meat especially is very highly restricted, due to differences in feeding, antibiotics, etc...

And how are "large companies" making deals? The same import duties apply to everyone.

I didn't focus on just food, I was simply replying to GP about meat.

You don't see GE appliances over there either.

Yet LG, Samsung appliances are plentiful in the states.

>Or shop American and help keep manufacturing and jobs alive here.

This kind of myopic view completely misses the scope of manufacturing chains that are simply missing in the US. Things like stainless steel rebar and LCD screens take many years to build up efficient production for.

>Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand

Do you honestly think that Japan makes almost everything domestically? There's a good reason for the absence of American products in Japan. You are so close :)

Yeah, walk around any popular shopping area in Japan and you’ll see box after box of items marked “Made in China”

Or it can be like Brazil and everyone just pays 2x the cost for a large swath of things because there is no reasonable way that someone can make a competitive version of an iPhone - even with (in this case) 200 something million ‘captive’ customers.

Yep, just visit a country that does a lot of high tariff stuff, like Brazil, Argentina. Yes they have strong local industries of very odd stuff sometimes, but on the other hand, they have people travelling outside the country to buy electronics because nothing is made locally.

If that's the model the US chooses, then i guess that's their choice.

Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Depends on which "intended effect" you mean.

Which part of the mutually exclusive triangle of "add manufacturing" or "add revenue" or "reduce deficits" do you consider to be "the intended effect"?

None of the above. Intended effect is to manufacture a more compliant populace through a new Great Depression.

Intended effect of increased prices and less choice?

Tariffs are not intended to benefit the consumer

Literally yes. "Tariffs on imports are designed to raise the price of imported goods to discourage consumption."

I'm hoping smuggling makes a major comeback.

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