this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Ok. The bottom line is, either it "won't do all that much"-- meaning it won't affect prices, it won't affect the economy, it'll be basically useless--or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The "disastrously expensive for ordinary people" is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it's the mechanism by which the plan operates.
There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There's just no real leverage, because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll wreck the country that was snipped out.
That's true if all other things were equal, but they're not. The US is the largest economy in the world, based on GDP, so it has a lot more weight to swing around than others. So theoretically, the US should have more leverage than smaller countries.
That said, I don't think the US has enough leverage to get away with this. Retaliatory tariffs will come and the net result is that trade in all regions will suffer. When you tax something, you get less of it...
The US might be able to get some leverage if we had an economist in power w/ strong diplomacy skills, but we have Trump.
Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.
Maybe, but I think you're overselling the EU a bit. Yeah, there have been some high profile changes (in terms of stuff that makes the media), but I wonder how much that actually matters.
The EU hasn't really ever been a big importer of US goods anyway, at least not for decades. The biggest importers of US products are Mexico, China, and Canada. The US imports a fair amount from the EU, so if they retaliate with tariffs of their own, the US will just buy less from them, which will hurt the EU more than the US.
The US will have a bunch of negatives in the short term too, but I guess we'll see if those are permanent or just represent a shifting in trade partners.
Oh, to be clear, I don't think the US has been dethroned on the world stage in terms of being the largest single elephant in the room. It's just that the weight between the US elephant and all the other elephants (combined) has evened out quite a lot.
These tariffs might well do a lot to swing that even further.
They absolutely could. What matters is what other countries do in response.
As an American, I'm not happy right now because things are more expensive without a good reason. Tariffs just end up being a hidden sales tax, and that sucks. We don't need more manufacturing jobs here unless we can do it cheaper or better. Keep good paying jobs here and send the lower paying jobs where they'll be appreciated.
I'm also an American. And I am frankly livid about the tariffs.