Summary
Trump announced that 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will take effect on February 1, though a decision on including oil remains pending.
He justified the move by citing undocumented migration, fentanyl trafficking, and trade deficits.
Trump also hinted at new tariffs on China.
Canada and Mexico plan retaliatory measures while seeking to address U.S. concerns.
If oil imports are taxed, it could raise costs for businesses and consumers, potentially contradicting Trump’s pledge to reduce living expenses.
Someone make this into that Gru meme:
- Slap a 25% tarrif on goods coming from your 3 biggest economic allies
- Economy will strengthen due to American consumers preferring American made alternatives
- There are no American made alternatives
- There are no American made alternatives
Here you go
lol thank you so much
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If they really wanted this to work it should be something like a steadily increasing tariff over time instead of 25% right off the bat. But I don’t think they really care about it working as intended.
i gotta be honest, i’m not entirely sure what is intended. this decision doesn’t make sense to me!
And even if there were American made alternatives, they’d still be more expensive than importing.
Enjoy your higher prices, suckers.
I’m sad seeing all these “Enjoy the collapse, losers!” comments.
Most people on most Lemmy instances, especially here, probably made it VERY clear we didn’t want this pathetic handbag-hobgoblin in charge. Yes, a lot of our countrymen voluntarily gave up their brains for his bullshit, but not all of us, by a long shot.
Policy stopped being directed by the will of the people a long time ago. We aren’t levying tariffs. He is. We , human beings just like you, are trying to keep it together as a grotesque parody of the fall of the Roman Empire plays out around us.
Stop falling for that tribalist nonsense. Love has no borders, and hate is too busy drawing them. Support your brothers and sisters on this Earth, because when the evil wealthy masters of this world set their sights on your democracy, it could happen to your home just as easily, don’t be fooled.
Edit: I’ve gone over my comment multiple times…where the heck did I even insinuate I didn’t vote? We only get one, and like many others, I said a prayer and ticked the box for Kamala’s half-hearted efforts to stopgap and buy us more time to fix this thing. For all the friggin’ good it did.
I’m sorry you’re getting the thoughts you didn’t vote, but I’ll admit I’m very much in the “Enjoy the collapse, losers!” territory so at least I’ll express mine, hopefully it helps make sense, and honestly, I appreciate your feeling to try to do better. If you figure out a way to move forward, fantastic. I just remember the top post of a comment when Trump won however and it so truly fits, “I’m tired, boss.”
I have been fighting to get people to vote for years, trying to keep them involved. Not trying to get to vote every 4 years, but every year, local stuff, this shit is important, people need to stay up on it. I’m considered a news hound amongst people I know… I listen to the morning news on the 30 minute commute to work, that’s how much time I put in to the news, that’s it. It’s not hard. Some days I say fuck it and listen to an audiobook.
People I’ve known who vote R, lets be honest, they went through the last Trump era and learned nothing. I remember back in the W. era people saying it should be illegal to speak against the president, who turned around and called Obama a muslim who should be deported. End of Trump era I knew republicans who were just starting to get it, maybe healthcare is fucked, maybe a lot of big corpo things are the problem… but immediately turned around and jumped right back in to Trumps circle the moment it came around “I couldn’t just vote for Kamala” just like “I just couldn’t vote for Hillary” and so on. Hell my state voted to repeal the strictest abortion ban and make abortion legal in the state, but still voted pretty much straight R despite a history of the party overturning ballot initiatives “Because the voters didn’t know what they were voting for.” So yes… after years of this, there’s the tribal “If you’re republican, you can go fuck yourself with a pineapple” especially as this collapse is coming.
On the non-voters. I’m sorry, I consider them just as culpable. In 2016 at least Trump was a… well anyone who paid fifteen minutes of attention knew what he was about but fuck it, I’ll give the people who said “Fuck it lets try something new” a bit of a pass. This time, there were no surprises on the table. You had Kamala, which yes was about as dead standard democrat as you got, and you got Project 2025 Trump back with a vengeance. Those that say “I didn’t vote for Trump” but by doing so stayed home gave their voice to “meh” and whatever happens they agreed to it. People I directly know who were in this, I know of one at least in a gay marriage, a few hispanic workers, and a trans individual, all who were “I’m just not interested in politics.” Well, suddenly they’re REALLY interested in politics. And many wanting to “rise up”, well I’m not going to trust someone who couldn’t be faffed to even do the basic fucking minimum to try to prevent things to watch my back when shit hits the fan.
So yes, we’re all hosed and anyone who didn’t see it coming had their heads so far up their own asses in the past 8 years they’ve proven they can’t be taught. I’m sitting in the fire too, I’m not going to like the collapse. But after years of the fighting and still witnessing the apathy, my empathy is dead. The tribalism is useful, these were the people who were willing to do the basic minimum to resist, so maybe we can actually help each other. I’ll help them as I can. The others I expressed about, no, I don’t want bad to happen… but at least the schadenfreude can be a little bit of light through some very dark times coming. Don’t weep for the stupid, you’ll be crying all day.
You didn’t vote. So enjoy the collapse
Nowhere in my post did I even hint that I didn’t vote.
Your vivid imagination can be put to better use than inventing reasons to heap smugness on internet strangers.
(Not enjoying the collapse BTW thx. 👍👍)
You should have voted then lmao
Nowhere in my post did I say I didn’t vote.
Were you responding to someone else maybe, or you just clownin’?
Just like the war on drugs, you’ll be able to buy black market tacos in alleys.
You aren’t already?
I am. Black market tacos taste fantastic if you ignore the numerous issues.
May the American people enjoy the fruits of their voting and sitting on their asses.
It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t get fucked by proxy of America electing an old senile fascist.
I am Canadian and I will feel Trump’s presidency for a while
This massively violates the USMCA that he signed
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He doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s so tiring that people assume that he is rational and he cares.
I’m morbidly fascinated to see how all of this shakes out.
Everyone on the left is saying it’s a terrible idea with very predictable and deleterious consequences.
Trump seems to think it’s as great as it sounds at face value - tax things that sound bad and get money.
Either way it will be a feature of economics text books for centuries to come.
Obviously I want to see Trump fail spectacularly, but it fucking sucks that would harm those of us who can least afford it.
If you went shopping last week and half value of your purchases originated in Canada or Mexico, then will the same purchases next week cost 12.5% more ? That’s pretty staggering inflation
i come from a tariff heavy country. you want a sneak peak? inflation. shit is gonna get more expensive. that’s it
No no no he is going to stop all taxes, pay off the national debt, bring manufacturing back to the US, and build a Nazi mars base for Elon.
pay off the national debt
As if
Obviously I want to see Trump fail spectacularly, but it fucking sucks that would harm those of us who can least afford it.
I thought that was the plan…
Seems like Trump is trying to get rid of the income tax. He can’t just do that with an EO order though, congress has to do it.
He can do all these tariffs though, which will act as a quasi sales tax. And when everything starts to become more expensive, which will be blamed on something else, he will say he’s not removing the tariffs and congress should just get rid of the income tax to help people. He will say, look we are making so much money off tariffs and we have reduced government jobs by so much, we don’t need an income tax anymore anyways!
One trick pony
Master of negotiations!
Mama didn’t love him, now he’s a grumpy old man with grievances.
I’ll enjoy seeing the US go down.
We’re reaching the “find out” stage.
If you are a non-Trump voter in a red state, especially if you work for the flagship company or industry in that state, I would like to apologize on behalf of all Canadians for what our government is about to do. We don’t want to do it but it is the only way to deal with a bully.
I do ultimately think tariffs will be good for the US. I feel bad for other countries I guess, but I think the US needs to be more productive.
California, seen as a relatively “progressive” state, has a sales tax on everything, and pretty extreme sin taxes. A tariff is like a sales tax, and a sin tax on specific imports.
The way you increase productivity is via exports, not artificially increasing the cost of goods. A sin tax is when you want to stop people from doing things so you make it more expensive. If you want to increase American cement production, you subsidize production.
Adding a tarrif to Canadian cement imports increases cost for imported cement, and encourages domestic producers to increase costs to match. If the competition just got 15% more expensive, there’s no reason for me to not raise my prices 14%.
If the government comes in and says they’ll pay me $15/ton of cement I produce, that encourages me to produce more cement and lower the price to sell it. Now I’m producing more, and I need to hire another machine operator and the economy grows because the lowered cost of cement makes people more willing to do things that need cement.Tariffs are really only good for counteracting other countries subsidies. If Canada were paying manufacturers $20 a ton to produce cement, then applying a $20/ton tarrif makes the prices unbiased.
It’s why our agricultural subsidies are viewed poorly by food scarce nations: we lower the overall market cost for food, and they can’t afford to subsidize their own production, and returning equilibrium on imports would starve people, so they’re trapped in a cycle of being dependent on imported subsidized food while living next to fallow farms.
Canada and Mexico aren’t subsidizing their export industries, and a lot of what we’re trading is in things we can’t or don’t want to handle. You can’t increase American uranium production, off the top of my head.
We had a position of trade strength, which meant that we could afford to import more than we produced because our intangibles were worth more, and what we exported was worth more. Import steel and export tractors. Now we’re saying we want to stop importing steel, making it harder to export tractors, so that we can bring back low paying dangerous jobs.
If you want to see productivity grow trumps way, go get a job as a farmhand picking spinach. Because his policy is basically that we need less engineers and more farm hands.
I’m glad you started your dissertation with “the way you x is via y” because it immediately informed me that I was reading the work of an expert genius and as a smooth brain, when a genius writes, I read.
One question, wouldn’t higher prices on imported cements sort of make local cements automatically cheaper, giving them an advantage without asking them to cut corners? In a free market you will often see a “race to the bottom” on goods, whereby manufactures and producers will cut costs so low that they lose money, so long as there is some other incentives that would lead to profit. Video game consoles are a common example. The console is sold at a loss with the expectation that they will make up the difference on the consumables, games and related services.
If local competitors can produce for lower cost than competitors it may drive more people, who generally just want to save money, to local businesses, creating demand, driving growth.
Tariffs only makes thing more expensive for everyone.
Let’s say you import steel at X$/ton and it cost Y$ locally where X < Y. You add a tariff T to make the imported steel on par with local steel.
Local steel still is as expensive and any production that uses imported steel now cost more.
Nothing went down in price, only up.
Now, there is a discussion to be had about buying local, but the immediate effect is that things will cost more even if manufacturers switch to local steel because they pay more for the same quantity no matter what.
This is a simplified version of the situation, but it explains the issue.
This assumes the local product wasn’t already cost competitive. If they are close and you slap a tariff on the import that adds further incentive to pick local. Assuming local would capitalize on the added revenue via reinvestment/expansion, it would create jobs and more demand, may even make the product or services even more affordable.
Picking local versus imported has no effect whatsoever on the price of the transformed product.
Business will find the source of primary resources that is the cheapest for their needs. Best case scenario, local is what’s used already and prices won’t change.
Otherwise, the transformed product will cost more because either the businesses pay the new inflated price for imported resources or they switch to a local resources which is more expensive. Prices will raise no matter what.
Guess which one we’ll see happening?
Video game consoles are sold at a loss on occasion because the marginal cost of game sales is extremely high. There’s no associated product to pair with cement that would drive you to sell it at a loss.
My point was that yes, it will drive people to local businesses, because they will be cheaper. Local businesses have no reason to keep their prices the same if the competition just got more expensive however.
I’m glad you found my comment informative. I’d hate to think I was talking to someone who wanted to say their opinion and then got defensive if someone disagreed with them. It’s a sign of someone with at least a wrinkle or two that they’re open to discussing their thoughts.
For more insight from people even more knowledgeable than me:
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-tariffs
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-end-of-north-america
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/
Well the console example demonstrates long term payout strategies. Another example is in free to play games with microtransactions. You develop a game at a cost, you give it away for free, and you hope that it’s good enough to hook people and get them to spend on “hats”. It’s a lot of money up front to make more later.
So do either of those strategies apply to the manufacturing of physical goods as are being tarifed?
Do you think that Ford is going to sell cars at a loss to make money on service contracts now that their costs are rising because some parts are fabricated in Detroit, assembled in Windsor, and then shipped back for installation in Flint? If it didn’t make sense to sell at a loss before, why would it make sense to do so now?
Do you think that there’s money to be made on getting people hooked on buying wheat perks?
We’re not talking videogame DLC, we’re talking about food, manufacturing materials, electrical power, and physical goods. The price of these things are going up, just like they went up with previous tariffs. This is a super easy case, because he did it to a lesser extent before, and it didn’t do what he’s saying it will. There’s no reason to believe that making the bad choice more vigorously will make it suddenly have a different outcome.
Google “byd china car sell at a loss” and “chicken tax”.
You will see price wars or the race to the bottom in the auto industry and you will see how tariffs on imported cars are one way we have protected domestic manufacturing.
Dude, go reread my first comment. I specifically mention tarrif as a counter to restore market balance after manipulation. These aren’t being used to counteract an anticompetitive subsidy. Raising prices to restore equilibrium and raising prices to disrupt it are very different things.
I know you want this to be something that works, but there’s a reason why reputable economists think this is just the worst idea.
I think the problem is that these tariffs are, for the most part, untargeted. They aren’t a “tax” on “specific imports”. They’re a blanket tax on all imports from many countries.
I thought it was targetted but again in California its all items sold are taxed and some at a higher rate.
If oil is excluded the truly boss move on Canada & Mexico’s part would just be to introduce a 25% export premium on those products while the tariffs are in effect.
Keep going higher, i bet Canada imports more from US than exports.
Exactly, clearly they’ll still pay for it if it’s important enough to exempt. In Canada’s case we could give Alberta the extra revenue just so they won’t get too cranky.
Canada’s boss move is to remove the intellectual property laws that the US asked for and let Canadian companies and consumers thrive again.
This makes no sense. If Canada could make a phone viable without any changes to tariffs, why wouldn’t it have already happened? Why would tariffs make that less likely to happen?
You may have misunderstood the article.
There’s a trade agreement that says no tarrifs in exchange for respecting IP which includes not breaking digital locks.
If the agreement is out then there’s nothing preventing Canada from allowing their citizens to circumvent restrictions against repairing their own tractors for example.
Do you honestly think that reducing the cost of fixing a tractor will reduce the cost of agricultural production by 25% across the board?
Probably not, but it could open up a whole new set of business possibilities for creative Canadians. As the article points out, building repair kits for cars & tractors to sell world wide or selling printer ink bypass kits or mandating in country app stores.
I’m no economist, but I don’t think this will offset the cost of the US tariffs to everyday Canadians, but it will steal profits from US companies who will cry to uncle trump that Canada’s stealing their lunch money. He may reconsider the tariffs.
If I had my way, Canada would also make a statement that US copyright works are not copywritable in Canada, so copy & distribute to the world. Worst case, Canadians get free US music, movies & software. Best case, concerned US companies establish a presence in Canada and pay taxes, bring jobs, etc.
As the article points out, building repair kits for cars & tractors to sell world wide or selling printer ink bypass kits or mandating in country app stores.
Canada deciding to not follow IP laws doesn’t mean the rest of the world no longer follows IP laws. These ideas would be for products that could only be sold in Canada and they’d have to compete with US products in the Canadian market. because under this proposal there would be no tariffs on US products.
This is one of those ideas that people in a single issue frame of mind come up with. Don’t like IP laws? Every single problem is an opportunity to get rid of IP laws and getting rid of IP laws will solve every problem.
Everyone so god damn snarky on Lemmy.
I don’t “honestly think” that. I don’t really have an opinion. I’m just explaining the article to you.
I dunno, maybe something to do with the possibility of millions of people in my country losing their jobs because some dumbass in the US is pushing an agenda has made me snarky towards people exploiting it as an opportunity to push their own bullshit agenda.
This would be beautiful. I remember when there were mod-chip stores beside internet cafes, where i could bring my xbox and pay to have a chip and a hard drive installed that let me copy any game i wanted from a rented disk or downloaded off the internet right onto the console. I still have that console and pulled it out during quarantine to make use of the huge library of games on the hard drive. Having this sort of freedom for all types of goods and electronics would be incredible, but i doubt it will ever happen.
This is a really good read. Thank you.
I really like this idea.
A friend of mine works for an electric semi truck company. The vast majority of their parts are manufactured in Canada and Mexico; they’re just assembled in the US. His mom voted for Trump and really wants him to move back to Ohio so he can have space and be close to family. He wanted to go back, too, and had a transfer and promotion within the company set up before the election. Now there’s a company-wide freeze and his transfer is gone. The company’s internal financial projections are not good.
His mom refuses to recognize that she just voted for her son to stay in Seattle indefinitely, even though he wants to move back. She keeps thinking that any day now, the economy will be so booming that his company will be doing great. He can’t talk to her about it anymore.
Why the fuck would you want to go back to Ohio?
That state sucks balls.
Especially compared to Washington
I have been to Ohio exactly ONCE, and I can confirm that the state does in fact suck balls. It’s so fucking FLAT…
Ooh you missed out on Athens Ohio. Beautiful city in the mountains
I’d use the term mountains loosely when describing Athens, Ohio.
That said, it is pretty with some great natural rock formations at Hocking Hills.
Can confirm am leaving it to move to Seattle funnily enough
For real though, aspects of Ohio are awesome. Republicans ruined it though
Has the second best CoL/MedianSalary ratio in the US. Ironically, the only state I saw that was consistently better was Michigan.
Plus we have Hocking Hills, which pretty consistently showed up on r/earthporn. If you want flat, we’ve got flat. If you want hills and mountains, we’ve got Appalachia.
Nice try Ohio
Lol
Not to mention roller coasters. Two of the largest thrill parks in the US.
Yeah but any time the state does anything good by ballot initiative the state government does something regressive out of spite
The entire state smells like balls too.
Can’t say I disagree lol
Part of me thinks this is so they have an easy way to drop prices after people get used to everything costing more, but I’m sure it’s mostly just trying to destroy the the US’s relationship with it’s most important allies.
Even if they do, I expect that businesses won’t drop their prices much. If the consumers have gotten used to it, it’s free money for the business. Same with the supply chain issue pricing from COVID.
Part of me thinks this is so they have an easy way to drop prices after people get used to everything costing more
This is a technique commonly employed by Sisi in Egypt so while it’d be surprising that America sunk that low that quickly I can see it happening. And by the way, yes America is now being compared to Egypt out of all countries so… Uh… Good luck.
I’ve compared to Afghanistan many times.
It’s already destroyed.
Not by him, his threats and tariffs are old news. By the people - The People, the royal We - who actively, unironically and with great power of democracy, chose an aggressive, compromised, and stupid fascist with ample evidence that this, hate, and war were a consequence.
Because the hate and apathy was stronger I guess. For electing a woman. For people being bullied by a juvenile government wielding adult violence for who they aren’t - a cis white right male.
They went to the dark side and joined a tri-polar world of evils to bully and rape the rest of us until we all burn to death. So yeah.
Never again.
Never again.
Optimistic
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Its very possible to enrich corrupt elites without taking an axe to the US’s strategic position. That would be preferable for securing the wealth of the ruling class in the future.
Of course they want to make the rich richer, but this level of systemic destruction isn’t the most efficient way to do that. The damage is clearly part of the goal.
Its very possible to enrich corrupt elites without taking an axe to the US’s strategic position.
Yes. But not for a very stupid easily manipulated “businessman”.
Part of me thinks this is so they have an easy way to drop prices after people get used to everything costing more
Trump is running the US the same way I ran my cities in SimCity2000
“Oooh it’s December, time to raise taxes to 20%. Ok January again, lowering taxes to 0%. The people love me!”
