The more I hear about TARIFFS, the more it irks me. Because people are plain being lied to. Tariffs are taxes.
I came from a country (Australia) back in the 1980s, that had extensive customs & duties on everything that landed on its shores. Even through the 1990s the wharf worker unions controlled the entire inflow and outflow of goods into Australia and they had ridiculous high salaries and minimum working requirements to get it. That's because they could control the entire supply chain into and out of an island. That is pure power.
But even though the government had extremely high taxes on individuals, they would continue to think up cunning plans to add more and more taxes. They would call these things GST, customs fees, stamp duty (although they stopped stamping anything back in the early 1900s), etc. to the point of ridiculousness. People were lied to, extorted and bankrupted - all in the name of making the government coffers full. Meanwhile the government officials were incompetent at best in managing money and to this day infrastructure has suffered at their hands. Sure, there has been some relaxation in taxation of the people as an incentive to elect Party A over Party B, but the reality is that taxes are just more and more hidden into the prices of goods and services - to the point where filling up your tank with gas costs in excess of $150 or buying a packet of cigarettes is $50. This is just government extortion of the populace.
So when I see the news in the USA about "Fair Trade" and "Tariffs", I've seen it all before. It is another way to hide taxes on the American people by increasing the costs of goods that they consume.
Look, let's be fair.... The USA has a massive debt crisis. It loses money each year, and $21 trillion is just the current scorecard of how poorly it has been losing money over the years. And with another $150 trillion in unfunded future liabilities by way of social security & Medicare, there are going to be some seriously pissed off retirees in the next 10-20 years. No economic "magic" can make this problem go away.
Politicians need to be honest with the citizenry and tell them the truth - we are broke. We got that way because we spend more than we earn. And we all will have to fix the problem by paying more for goods.
But god forbid they use the evil 3 letter word - TAX. Nope, it will never be uttered out of a politician's mouth because they think of it as political suicide. How about for once that they stop treating us like kindergarten children and realize that we can see through this game.
If you think that your political party of choice is reducing your tax bill, think again. Total up the cost of buying groceries, filling up your tank with gas at the pump, paying for your cell phones, going to Walmart, buying a new TV at Best Buy, replacing your gutters on your house, etc. Realize that everything here will go UP in price. 25% seems to be the going number they are spinning on this, and since we don't make much in the USA and we import everything in, that means EVERYTHING will go up in price 25%. And this price point will be snowballed in that the integration of assembly of pieces of things where a piece comes from one country and is joined with a piece from another, results in constant increasing of price. With the middle men who live on this supply chain wanting a piece of the action, it wouldn't surprise me if we see 50% increase in price.
They can call it what they want, but this is a forced tax on all US consumers and who gets that money? The government get it. They collect it at the docks on imports, and it goes into the general fund to help pay down this debt we've done to ourselves. But of course they could mismanage that money and spend it on military hardware we never can use, and make big defense contractors richer. $1 trillion a year seems to go to them, rather than using it over 20 year period to pay down the current debt levels.
So all this political BS is hurting you. You will pay way more for EVERYTHING and it is by design. The banks know this and they have to ratchet up interest rates to try and keep the inflation at bay. They feel that by making the cost of getting access to money you didn't earn or save higher, they might create a dis-incentive for people to borrow. This just slows down the engine of the economy more. If you can't find cheap financing for that McMansion you want to buy, you will either rent or buy something cheaper on the outskirts of town. The wonderful thing about economics is that you can spin stories anyway you want, but when it comes to simple "I don't have the money to buy that", only those that are willing to take enormous risks for themselves and their families are likely to do it anyway. Unfortunately we have a population of financially poorly educated people who will fall prey to all of this.
So the winners here will be the financial vultures who are flush with cash and can pickup the pieces of a bankrupted estate sale. Because no matter what you read in the newspapers, hear from the politician's mouth or see on TV, the economy is FAR FROM GOOD when you are carrying this level of debt and more lies and spin are required to extort the population from their financial savings.
If you want to do really well in the upcoming economy, start to buy storage lockers. The surplus crap that people have bought will be forgotten about and for pennies you will be able to make millions in arbitrage of these failed life decisions of others to your benefit.
Good luck to you all! You are going to need it.