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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I don't really have any idea if tariffs are good or bad. What I do know is that just announcing that they will go into effect with very little notice and then they won't go into effect and then they do but then they are decalared illegal because they weren't passed through the official methods isn't good.

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It was _great_ for the companies that collected billions in tariffs and got refunds when the obviously illegal tariffs were declared illegal while training their customers to accept higher prices... that certainly won't go back to pre-tariff levels.

> I don't really have any idea if tariffs are good or bad.

tariffs are objectively* bad from a "big picture" perspective.

There are some situations where they create winners and losers so that some people in some countries will win, but they always do more damage than good "overall"(or in aggregate across all parties).

A link to the math behind it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

*in almost all cases... For certain goods where you actually want to lower consumption such as cigarettes, then maybe arguably they are good? Same argument as for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

The “big picture” perspective is missing a bunch of reasons beyond just lowering consumption in the short term. For example even if you can buy cheaper food elsewhere it is still important to have a domestic food production industry.

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