Aside from everything else one thing what strikes me as particularly insane is how it’s not even defensible as a protective measure. My favorite everyday olive oil comes from Tunisia. They now have a 38% tariff on them. There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
The orange man wanted tariffs, the orange man is going to get tariffs. Now we have to hope the American people aren’t so dumb as to still be convinced only he can solve their issues. I don’t hold out hope for that.
If Jan 6th didn't dissuade people, I don't think anything will.
Additionally, his base will not blame him, they will swallow whichever of the many narratives the propagandists are currently cooking up that suites their fancy.
I disagree with this. Jan 6th didn’t affect 99% of peoples lives directly. It was clearly bad, but few people saw impacts in their own lives.
Higher prices and a possible recession will affect every person in the country and even globally.
His MAGA base might not blame him, but that’s only like 30-40% of the electorate. The other 60-70% won’t be happy if their lives are negatively impacted.
IMO the only thing that can get through is actual personal consequences for the voter themself
Well, yes. And his approval rating has been steadily declining in tandem with the stock market declines he's caused. If/when prices suddenly skyrocket because of tariffs, you can bet his approval ratings will decline further.
That won't work. WaPo, LAT, etc. have run numerous articles where MAGA voters talk about the consequences of his actions to them or immediate family members (getting laid off, losing medical coverage, deportation, etc.) and they say it's worth the sacrifice because they just know that Trump is actually looking out for them and won't let them suffer for too long.
What exactly on this list is a day to day item that is going to adversely affect the middle class/blue collar Trump voter enough to cause them to flip their alliance? On that list maybe clothes and shoes. But even still those are generally bought only a couple of times a year and any increase will be griped about in the moment, but come election time will be forgotten.
There are only four things that will make a middle class voter feel pain enough to re-align their vote. Fuel/energy costs, general food costs, rent/housing costs, and job insecurity. If these tariffs do not adversely touch those areas, they will have little to no impact on switching votes. Also of note, over the last four years those items are the ones that drove Trump back into the Oval Office.
You may be right here. The tariffs might not directly cause enough pain for the average person to matter.
The big unknown still is the impact on the economy and job market. His actions may reduce competitiveness of American companies globally due to retaliatory tariffs and resentment.
If the tariffs cause a recession, people will punish him for it.
My guess is that the stock market losses will be a greater driver than any cost increases on goods. And stock market losses will not necessarily push the middle class much, but will push GOP politicians into contention with Trump.
Ultimately Trump needs GOP in congress to be friendly…more than he needs the public at this point. He cant (and wont, despite the trolling) run again.
Well he needs the public not to vote in a bunch of democrats in the midterms. And, if his MAGA movement is going to live on in Vance or others after his term, he will need public support.
Middle class people also have to buy new cars, maybe want to treat themselves with some foreign alcohol, they still need furniture, coffee is still one of the most traded commodities in the world and americans guzzle it down.
New cars - They are not purchased very often by the middle class and they will lean domestic if they desire new or buy foreign cars on the used market if they really desire them.
Foreign Alcohol as a treat - If it’s a “treat” it’s already likely a more expensive choice than a domestic equivalent and any cost increase becomes part of the luxury of it being a treat. If your $60 bottle of Italian wine that you occasionally treat yourself with is now $80, you won’t really notice that $20. If you do, maybe you opt for a better domestic instead. If the $20 california wine you daily drink becomes $30, you notice that. But I assert that there is quite a bit of exceptional alcohol produced in the US and the middle class electorate is not going to starve for decent alcohol.
Furniture - Like cars, this is not a regular purchase and frankly not one where a price comparison with a prior purchase of a similar item will really notice any price increase due to tariffs. How often do you replace a dinner table? 10 years? Of course it’s more expensive than the last time you needed one.
Coffee is the one example where you have daily consumption and like I said on my original comment, food is one area that if affected, people will notice.
> It was clearly bad, but few people saw impacts in their own lives.
It did though, they just didn't know how to measure it, and it wasn't felt immediately. It was like the flash of light that dazzles before the pressure wave of the nuclear bomb blasts everything (which in the analogy is this moment, now).
What happened on Jan 6, and in the leadup and response to it, was the erosion of democratic norms. Before Nov 2020 they were stronger, and after Jan 6 they were significantly weakened. Our institutions are essentially built on trust, and Trump in his campaign to overturn the 2020 election spent every waking moment for months attacking those foundations. He purposefully eroded people's trust in Democracy for no reason, because there ultimately the fraud he alleged in that election was not found.
That impacts everyone. They just don't feel it in the supermarket; they just have no "democracy meter" that they can use to gauge how healthy their representation is in government. But the reason he's able to do what he's doing now is he because he laid the foundation in 2020.
What in your mind should have happened differently in response to Jan 6?
No widespread fraud was ever proven that could have swayed the election.
Should we have pretended there were major flaws with our voting system just to help you with your feelings?
Or maybe we should have let Trump be president again for no reason just because you were really upset about it.
And did you ever wonder why, if Democrats were able to magically steal the election in even red states like Georgia and Arizona in 2020, they didn’t bother to try it again in 2024?
The elite reaction to January 6th was just raw hostility towards the American nation.
I don't claim to have access to secret knowledge about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the elections. My view on the actual election fraud claims is agnosticism. I have no access to information that would allow me to independently come to any conclusion on the matter.
However, a large volume of very plausible evidence was put forward. And, instead of honest engagement with those concerns, we got extreme censorship, gas lighting, and a violent crack-down on everyone involved.
We cannot allow people that have this attitude towards us to continue to rule over us.
A violent crackdown against who? The people who stormed the capital and assaulted police officers?
Even AG Barr said there was no evidence of widespread fraud. The “plausible evidence” you speak of was a firestorm of unsubstantiated claims on social media that incited a violent attack on the capital.
Yes. Put your actual decision makers on social media, and have them engage openly with the people making unsubstantiated claims.
> Even AG Barr said
Almost all of the information that was put forward that seemed plausible was deleted from the internet, and never addressed.
We can figure out what happened after we get rid of everyone that played a role in that; once we have a truth-finding apparatus that is made up of friendlies.
The only thing that matters from all of this is that unfriendly people are in power, and the only solution to that is to get rid of them and replace them with friendly people.
Trump, for all of his many flaws, at least pretends to be friendly.
At the end of the day we either live in a world where laws, process, and provable facts prevail - democracy; or we live in a world where conjecture, conspiracy, and opinions and ad hoc decision making rule the day - anarchy.
I prefer to live in democracy, where we follow a process to redress grievances. In 2020, President Trump's claims were given great deference. He was given the opportunity to prove them in court. He was heard by state legislatures and governors. The vice president weighed his claims. The Congress did as well. Even after the election states like Arizona handed over their voting machines to groups like the "Cyber Ninjas" who attempted to prove claims that ballots were tampered with in that state.
Nobody found the evidence Trump claimed.
Because it doesn't exist, it never did.
Because the alleged fraud did not happen.
What happened was a man lost a close but fair election. That's what the facts show, despite any threads you feel are "seemingly plausible", it was the most audited election in history. Eventually if you can't put up, you really have to shut up. It's that simple when it comes to a) living in a democracy and b) being an adult. Sometimes you don't get your way, and the response to that cannot be to burn down the entire system.
That's what I mean when I said that this impacted everyone - when childish temper tantrums like Jan 6 are allowed to stand, when the people who acted that way are pardoned and the person who instigated that event is reelected.... well that to me means we are trending away from democracy and toward a different way of dealing with reality.
Great idea, I’m sure that would have helped. Maybe they also could have had Anthony Fauci personally reply to antivax conspiracy theories on Twitter. That would have won hearts and minds.
You think Trump is “friendly” and of course he is. He is the primary beneficiary and spreader of lies about the 2020 election, so why wouldn’t he also be the best arbiter of truth on the subject?
Don't expect much. Modi's overnight demonetization of Rs. 1,000 bills back in 2016, caused a lot of inconvenience to almost all the Indians for 3/4 months at-least. Demonetization and flawed implementation of GST caused many small scale companies to shut doors.
With media in their pockets they can get away with anything.
One thing worth noting is that congress isn't pleased about the executive branch high jacking the powers of appropriations from them (i.e. imposing a tax on the people in the form of a tariff).
I see no evidence of your claim. A total of 4 senators of the President’s party voted symbolically on a non-binding resolution against his Canada tariffs. The Speaker of the House, who also belongs to the President’s party, won’t even bring it up for a vote. There has been no motion from the legislative branch to undo the President’s direct subversion of the power of the purse by effectively eliminating the staff required to disburse Congressionally-approved funds.
> There has been no motion from the legislative branch ...
Surely you mean there is no motion from those in power in the legislative branch, namely the Republicans. The Democrats and Democrat-aligned independents make motions which are blocked by the Republicans.
People's inability to recognize who is responsible for bad acts leads to throw-the-bums out elections. People are disgruntled, whether based on facts or false beliefs fostered by propaganda. They throw the bums out. They hope for better things.
If we want the government to function better, we need to assign responsibility, not let Senator X and his pals, or Representative Y and her pals, screw everything thing up and then hide in the crowd. "Oh, look what the legislative branch has done! Throw them all out!"
The root cause is the IEEPA (1977) which was vaguely worded to supposedly shrink executive authority under TWEA (1917) which allowed essentially unlimited executive authority "emergencies" to be declared for an unspecified amount of time. IEEPA was used to block TikTok, which still may get blocked, and used to set these arbitrary tariffs. IEEPA needs to be fully abolished. (And we also need to bring back the Tillman Act (1907) and get an amendment to overturn CU.)
trump would love a government shutdown, as he has proven. I really doubt shutting down the govt would change any situation when trump is legislating by executive order, and mostly a shutdown would hurt Americans. You're trying to simplify something that isn't simple at all, and blame the Democrats for not doing what an armchair expert wants.
It's not just about what Trump wants. Most Republicans in Congress would like to get reelected.
In the comment above you suggested there's nothing congressional Democrats can do. That is incorrect. Any time the Republicans don't have unanimity, and any time they need sixty votes in the Senate, the Democrats have leverage. They need the guts, and/or the understanding of basic game theory, to use it.
Calling me an "armchair expert" and waving your hands about how things are complicated is not a counterargument.
> I already mentioned the budget. If Republicans want to pass any actual tax cuts, that's another opportunity.
Not really, given the budget reconciliation process and its applicabilty to that: bypasses the filibuster entirely and only a simple majority is needed with a 20-hour capped debate time ij each house.
> Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Thursday that he planned to support the Republicans’ funding bill; he needed at least seven other Democrats to overcome a filibuster and set the vote up for final passage. Nine others who caucus with Democrats joined him and nearly all Republicans voted to advance the measure....The 62-38 vote came after days of turmoil among Senate Democrats who were split on either working with President Donald Trump and Republicans to pass a continuing resolution that includes $13 billion in cuts to nondefense spending or allowing the government to shut down.
You're crying that Democrats won't do anything, when they do not have the power to stop this. You're in need of some education about how the government works.
Jan 6 was far from many people's lives. It was a philisophical debate at most. When they get to the stores to buy groceries and they are 30-50% higher and their next TV, laptop the same way, they will realize that voting for an Oompa Loompa was a bad idea, and will want him out.
Spoke to a friend who is a big Trump supporter just yesterday - his view is that we shouldn't react to short term impact, these policies and tariffs should be viewed and judged in the long term. These tariffs will remake american manufacturing. I dont know if thats the current faux news talking point.
Yep, that's the talking point. Howard Lutnick has been out there saying this.
For better or worse, though, voters don't judge politicians based on the impact their policies have in 10-20 years. They're going to judge these tariffs in 18 months when they vote in the midterms and again in 2028, long before a widespread shift in manufacturing can occur.
Folks who try to make "the insurrection!" a thing don't really have a good read on the pulse of the average American. This is a failed branding attempt for what amounted to an unscheduled tour around the Capitol.
The same people pushing "Jan 6th" can normally take home the gold medal in mental gymnastics when discussing the events ending with numerous American cities being on fire just 6 months prior. Multi-city infernos were "mostly peaceful" protests, but when a Republican is shot by Capitol security, it's an "insurrection."
> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
Is that because we can't grow olives here, or because we don't have federal subsidies propping up a domestic olive industry that can compete with corn and soy?
I ready don't know the details well enough there, but it feels like this could just be selection bias at play.
You can grow olives in the US and there are some farms in CA. The quantities produced are orders of magnitude off though and given the time it takes to grow olive orchards we cannot replace our imports of olives in a reasonable time period.
There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.
Hawaii is the only U.S. state where you can grow coffee and their coffee costs a fortune. You need tropical weather and high altitude. Florida won't cut it. Besides, we already have fruit rotting in the fields in Florida because there's no one to pick it.
Want to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars or batteries? Ok, fine. But tariffs on all imports? It's the most brain dead policy in my lifetime. I can't think of any products that are produced 100% domestically without any foreign inputs. These tariffs will drive up the price of just about everything.
Leverage over importers, i.e. all of industry. If you're a captain of industry and want an exemption or a lowered rate, they you approach the deal table, cap in hand, with tears in your eyes and beg like a dog. "Please, sir..."
In return for a minor reprieve, you ensure your factory bathrooms and hiring policies are aligned with the president's agenda, among many other things. This can be a cudgel over the heads of the Apples and Costcos of this country who dare to defy the edicts of POTUS on social policy.
Other popular options are very publicly taking your card of the Party, writing odes and poems to the Great Leader, and give your firstborn daughter's virginity as a token of vassality.
The problem is not so much that people don't like doing such things - they get by - it's that, at some point, enough people will start getting more favours than you do, and you'll start feeling the need to stage a coup, which is a lot of work.
I wonder how it will work out in a world where tiktok is always there as a much less exhausting form of entertainment than revolutions.
Sure, but that's the rationalizing of someone who can't get strawberries in winter. Getting food that's not grown locally much less in the current local season is one of the most QoL-improving parts of the modern world.
Kinda sad to go from that back to "well I guess I don't really need these nice things we took for granted. I suppose I can live off jellied eels again."
> If we could snap our fingers and domestically produce most or all of our own products, would you not prefer that?
That's like saying "If we could snap our fingers and every state would have mild weather, abundant capital, and a highly talented workforce, would you not prefer that?"
Yeah, then every city could be like SF or LA or NYC.
But it's not even worth it as a thought exercise because it completely ignores reality. The reason I live in NJ and pay high taxes is because this is where the high paying jobs and good schools are. Cottontown, Alabama theoretically could be a financial capitol of the world and if you want to base your position on that, then you should probably re-examine your position.
This is called rejecting the hypothetical. Just because it's not worth it for the arguments you care about doesn't mean it doesn't have value as a thought experiment to explore the consequences.
That potential end state isn’t possible is the point of my initial comment. It is as infeasible as the weather to control where natural resources are located.
Lets talk plastics. Plastic needs oil. We’re the largest oil producer in the world now. But we still import oil! Why? Because the oil we produce isn’t entirely the right kind for everything we do with it.
An end state where the US is an island cannot exist without massive shifts in production and consumption habits.
Maybe you’re saying though that shift should happen and that end state is good?
> But we still import oil! Why? Because the oil we produce isn’t entirely the right kind for everything we do with it.
Just wanted to elaborate a bit on this. Oil is a fantastic example for "why international trade good?" Oil is weird in that it is a fungible commodity (one barrel here is the same as one barrel there), but at the same time, functionality it's not. Each oil formation has different geology and chemistry. There are light sweet crudes, sour crudes, heavy crudes, and so on [1], and refineries (which are massive capital investments with specialized work forces) are typically tooled out to only process one type or family of types of crude oil products.
One paradox of the USA crude industry is that nearly 70% of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude, but our shale crude is lighter. Thus, 90% of crude oil imports into the United States are heavier than U.S.-produced shale crude [2]. So even if we had perfect supply/demand of crude within the USA, we would not be able to run our refineries efficiently without a massive overhaul. They have been built under decades of the assumption of a high degree of free international trade.
And these companies will be loathe to invest in retooling if they believe that the tariffs will just be rolled back in four years.
> That potential end state isn’t possible is the point of my initial comment. It is as infeasible as the weather to control where natural resources are located
You might as well not have commented in the first place if you wanted to throw out my entire premise.
Your premise is the goal of globalism though. You just draw larger lines. If your premise is the lines _must_ contain only the US as it is today then it’s impossible to have enough coffee for the entire country among other thing.
But what are you even asking? Would it be good for Americans if the US could produce every single thing conceivable to fully meet demand domestically? Yes, it would be. But it will not and cannot happen, so it’s not a useful thought exercise.
Would it be amazing if I was 6’7”, super athletic, played in the NBA, and I was also super smart and everyone loved me, especially the ladies? Sure. But I’ve gotta play the cards I’ve been dealt (I think there are some people who love me, at least).
No, it's not a desirable end state. If we produced everything in the US — just assuming we had magic tech to make it possible - we'd have less and be poorer. Americans today live like kings from 200 years ago, in large part due to global trade.
I had said this somewhere else in the thread as well, but domestic production is a pretty bad idea if success metrics revolve around prices, quantity, or some specific quality metrics.
Where it would potentially be a good approach is if the primary goals are relates to self reliance, sustainability, resilience, etc. I don't think many people actually care about that at the national level though, and our economy as-is almost certainly couldn't allow it.
No, I would not prefer that. A robust distributed system is less likely to crumble under local pressures. A blight could more easily sweep through a single nation and take out a staple crop or two, where it'd be impossible for that to happen globally. You can't spin up additional global trade quickly after you've shut it down, which could lead to people starving in America. I like systems that can't fail. That's especially true when that system is how I'm able to eat food.
Global trade isn't a security issue, national or otherwise. We don't increase safety or stability by reducing sources of consumables.
Edit; super timely example because this isn't an unlikely hypothetical: egg availability due to bird flu.
We've had plenty of wars since globalization came in post-WWII though. Its impossible to know what wars would have happened without it, and how much war may have been prevented due to trade rather than the threat of nuclear war, for example.
Those were good wars, though, apparently, since they bolstered US dominance and the spread of a certain flavor of "liberal democracy" based on progressive politics and consumerism.
I could have sworn they were bad wars when they were happening ("No blood for oil"?), but opinions on that seem to have shifted all of a sudden for some reason.
I think my answer to this question would be no? The food example is specific, all food can't be grown here, but for other products that aren't commodities, I want different cultures competing to build the best products i.e. cars, and I want other cultures innovating things that maybe their culture is optimized for (video games, electronics in Japan, in the 1980's?). There are some interesting questions recently about how maybe globalization have turned luxuries into commodities (i.e. all cars look the same) but I think my point still stands.
No, I wouldn't; Ricardian comparative advantage is a thing, and the kind of extreme autarky you suggest means sacrificing domestic prosperity available from maximizing the benefits of trade for the aole purpose of also harming prosperity in foreign countries (but usually less sonthan you are denying yourself, because they have other potential trading partners) by denying them the benefits of trade.
I have, and that depends on whether you are concerned at all with where we externalize our costs to. We had it good while messing up a lot of other places.
Maybe that's fine, maybe its not, but its not as simple as trade makes everyone better off.
Then regulate those negative externalities. Huge progress has been made on that front over the years. This tariff approach is demolishing the whole bathroom full of people to get rid of the bathwater.
I don't want a cost of living increase either. However, this raise the question of what the real cost is. The prices might be cheaper, but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections? Is it just because I'm greedy and I'm not willing to pay someone a liveable wage here or go without whatever it is? I'm not sure, but it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
Right, and there's a good case to be made for tariffs that are explicitly tied to another country's worker and environmental protections, where the country has actionable steps to improve their worker/environmental protections in order to avoid the tariff.
But the current administration is itself actively opposed to worker or environmental protections, and the result of the current tariffs will just be that the poor people overseas end up even more impoverished and still lacking in protections.
For some things that's true. For others it is not, or at least not enough to make up for the difference. For example, "housing" might cost less, but the definition of housing might be different. Even if we adjust the standards and built the exact same thing, it would be cheaper, but likely still out of reach for the average person in the poorer market.
> but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections
That's definitely happening, but there are other possible reasons. For example a good could be more efficiently grown or produced in a country because of geographical reasons.
Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is simply not the case that all wages and wealth across the countries of the world are equal. Maybe that could be a goal but is anyone talking about that? Either way, it does not follow that the workers in that country are necessarily exploited when paid lower wages compared to the importing country, unless we are using different definitions.
This is not to mention that untargeted tariffs can increase the cost of living _for no gain at all_. If Germany manufacturers some specialty tool (not with slave labor, I would hope!), and no US manufacturer wants to make it, then I suddenly have to pay X% more for no reason at all.
Sure, not every country needs the same pay. Things like cost of living can vary. It seems hypocritical to say that people in one country deserve better protections than in another though. If we aren't creating the same protections as the workers here, it would seem that we are exploiting the less protected group. Workers here deserve real unions, but not in China. Workers here deserve OSHA, but not in China. We've decided as a society that people deserve certain protections, benefits, and even environmental protections. These costs factor into the cost of the goods. To not extend these protections (or the remuneration to pay for them) to the poorer group is exploitation by definition.
If tariffs were being added as a response to poor working conditions, and a requirement of lifting the tariffs was to improve working conditions, that could potentially be seen as a generally positive outcome for the world.
Producing the same good in the US, at anywhere near the same price, requires automation or prison labor (legal slavery in the US) and likely won't result in more manufacturing jobs and likely won't result in higher wages for workers. Florida's approach here is child labor, which is both exploitative and cheap.
If the good is so cheap that we can't get close to it here, that might actually be a good case for a targeted tariff depending on the circumstances. It's essentially similar to anti-dumping depending on the specifics even if it isn't tied to overseas conditions.
"because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections"
This can easily be overdone. If you stop doing business with poorer people, you all but guarantee that they stay poor. Counter-productive to say the least.
In my lifetime, I saw a lot of countries grow at least somewhat wealthy from extensive commercial contact with the West, including mine (Czechia).
Yeah, you don't want to stop business, but if the price gap is massive, it might be good to ask why. Sometimes it's because something is more efficient in that country. Others it's just people getting taken advantage of.
I’m not familiar with any arguments that would lead somebody to prefer that. Maybe to avoid giving adversaries leverage over you, but isn’t that better solved by diversifying your supply chain? Maybe to salve the domestic effects of the trade adjustment, but isn’t that better solved by reallocating the surplus wealth rather than eliminating it?
Self reliance and resilience, at least to certain pressures, would fit. I don't think many people would be willing to give up cheap electronics and only buy stuff we produce here, but those are reasonable goals even if uncommon.
Environmental concerns would actually fit the bill too, if one is willing to consider externalized costs. Its easy to ignore mining damage in other countries and all the oil burned shipping over the oceans. When that all happens at home people would more acutely feel the costs and may be more likely to fix it.
describe how a entirely domestic food chain would be more resilient than one that is global?
Self reliance is a defective meme that breaks down once you want anything other than individual survival. Dependence on a community allows humans to specialize. Humans being able to specialize is the only reason this comment, or this thread exists. More simply, not just the Internet, but modern life couldn't exist without it.
Once you acknowledge that interdependency is a reasonable trade-off for the other nice things about life. A simple infection no longer being a death sentence is a nice thing we've commoditized reasonably well. The only question is, how do you build a robust and resilient system?
EU depends on the US for many things. That was clearly a mistake, and it's now working to work out backup solutions.
Having your government depend on foreign cloud and software was always a bad idea in my opinion, but IT security is not high on the list of the people that make decisions.
Russia depended on Europe, but got wiser after 2014 and certainly after 2022. To the point of having it's own Linux distribution (which I ridiculed along with everyone, and now it turns out they were right). Geopolitics change, friends become enemies and enemies become friends. Barring a civil war, a country will never refuse to work with itself, so it's the most reliable partner possible.
You're describing problems, in fact the exact same problems that you'd have with an entirely domestic source as well. I'm asking about how it would be stronger, or better than a purely domestic source. The EU absolutely should have it's own cloud infra. Couldn't agree more. How does an exclusively domestic IT infra benefit the EU, is the question. If they had their own, and were also able to source from the US, from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, [insert other allies] they'd be faster at adapting to a change in supply.
Russia is a bad example, they're doing stupid shit, the same as the US. Hurting itself in it's confusion. But I guess it's a fair point, if you're willing to cut off your own feet, you don't need to depend on importing shoes. And it might make sense to build exclusively domestic leg stub sock factories, given the rest of the globe doesn't want to cut off it's own feet.
I wouldn't actually suggest that as something the us should strive to emulate.
Are relations and allies impossible to have with trade tariffs? Historically we have had both, I'm not sure why they would be considered mutually exclusive.
No, for the same reason I don't try to manufacture my own car in my backyard or build my own house, or grow all of my own food, or ...
This is basic fucking common sense: I'm good at some things and other people are good at other things. We each specialize in the things we're best at, and everyone ends up better off.
You went to the extreme though. I didn't ask if one wants to do everything themselves. In the US, for example, there are still hundreds of millions of people to specialize in various roles.
The exact growing conditions for olive production aren’t common in the US, so most of the production comes from California - west of Sacramento and south along the San Joaquin river. There are a lot of barriers in bringing specialty crops to market related to know-how and contracting sale of product, so even in other areas where growth may be possible it may be infeasible.
Most likely the answer in many such examples is it needs cheap human labor. US seldom lacks anything in terms of natural resources and always comes down to this.
US does produce olive oil, particularly in states like California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Oregon, and Hawaii. So you do have a few options:
1. Support local producers. There are high-quality olive oils made right here in the US that might surprise you.
2. Work with Tunisia manufacturers to move their production to the US
3. If you don't want to support local producers, pay extra and enjoy your Tunisia olive oil as much as you want
4. If politics is the real issue for you, move to Tunisia, there is no "orange man" there
That said, refusing to support local production out of principle isn’t really a solution.
I don't know how much you know about olive oil, but it comes from olives, which grow on olive trees. Olive trees are famously long-lived and, together with the very specific types of land that they grow on, they represent extremely persistent and valuable investments for the people who produce olive oil.
This is not true. Next time you grab an olive oil bottle read the fine print: unless it’s very expensive it will be a blend of oils from 4-8 countries, ie production doesn’t have to be in the same country where olives grow on olive trees, as you eloquently put.
> There are a few olive trees in my neighborhood. I should plant some too.
They are nice trees, but beware you won't be eating the olives unless you put a lot of work in. They have to be de-bittered or "cured", which is done by soaking them in things like caustic soda. https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8267.pdf
So if you are after a nice compact tree that doesn't need a lot of water, then an olive tree is a good choice. But if you want a garden of Eden fruit tree, there are much better choices.
US consumption of olive oil is more than 10x domestic production of olive oil. It is not possible to spin up olive orchards in even a medium timespan as the trees take many years to grow. It’s not about wanting to support domestic producers, it legitimately is not possible.
That's why I believe that long-term tariffs will result in a net positive effect. Domestic production will keep growing. Things that cannot be produced locally will somehow get resolved on their own through a self-organizing chaos, so to speak.
You are right about olive oil. So why did he do it? The trade imbalance with Tunisia. Why is there are trade imbalance with Tunisia? US consumers have money to buy products from Tunisia, Tunisian consumers don't have the ability to afford products from the US. Why can't Tunisian's afford US products? This is the central question for every country in the trade war and it has myriad factors, but two of the biggest are: A higher cost US dollar, suppression of wages in countries like Tunisia (and Germany, and China, etc).
There is this group-think on HN today that services are intentionally left out as part of the US trade balance. That confusion likely comes from tax and corporate structures. Ie all those profits are locked into sub-corps, so Apple-Cayman Islands or Google-Ireland (corporate tax havens) which is why they don't show up on the balance sheet as "trade" into the US (typically those sub-corps buy financial assets with those profits). Read the first chapters of Trade Wars are Class Wars for more depth.
It's not a weird take if you reasonably assumed that OP meant: "they don't have the ability to afford the same value of products from the US." Which makes total sense because their income per capita is only a fraction of that of the US.
>Onagri data show that Spain is the leading destination for Tunisian olive oil, with 47.4 percent flowing to Spanish ports, followed closely by Italy at 42.2 percent and the United States in third at 33.8 percent.
Oh yeah, that is weird... something not adding up there.
Someone else mentioned a lot of Tunisian olive oil gets repackaged as Italian. I wonder if it could be double counting stuff like that (Italy + final destination). But yeah something is not right there.
This is interesting to me, because Spain and Italy are also exporters of olive oil. And there have been famous discoveries of fraud in the EVOO market as it has boomed. I wonder what percentage of Spanish and Italian EVOO exports are actually blended with (or wholly!) Tunisian imports?
Many Spanish and Italian oil blends do indeed use (unprocessed) olive oil from Tunisia. This is a problem for Tunisia because we’re missing out on the meat of the profit margin generated by the final bottled product.
We have had recent successes with developing & selling our own bottled products directly - Terra Delyssa is one good example that has gained traction in the US market.
From what I've understood from that chart, the "percentage" is just a difference between imports/exports with the USA. It's not actual tariffs in place by Tunisia ON USA goods. Am I right/wrong ?
Or is Tunisia tariffing the hell out of US Olive Oil in order to protect their local production base
So, we can and do grow olives here in California, but it is a very small industry compared Spain, Italy, etc.
However, one thing we absolutely cannot grow here in any sort of money-making way, is coffee. So 32% tariffs on imports of coffee from Indonesia.... when we do not even export coffee.
California produced 1.94 million gallons of olive oil in 2023. That same year the US used ~98.5 million gallons of olive oil. There just isn't enough space to produce that much olive oil in CA much less produce it profitably or in ways that wouldn't devastate the environment. And all that is ignoring that it takes around 10 years for an olive tree to get to consistent production.
Because they will price their product to be just a little cheaper than the imported alternatives. This has been discussed to death, with citations, and I believe it to be true. We will see, I guess.
And even if they don't raise their prices to below the imported alternatives immediately, the increase in demand means they'll sell out so quickly, they'll raise their prices anyway
I mean, if their main competitor just got price jacked by taxes, that will push the demand to them. Since they cannot scale up to satisfy the demand, a correct choice is to raise prices. You can argue that this is price gouging, but the easy counter is that this is the market reacting to the taxes and adjusting the going price.
We get a lot of titanium from China. That's because the largest natural Ti deposits are in Eurasia. That is due to geology, not politics, and now US companies who need it (read: high performance transport, medical products) will pay substantially more for it.
>> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
I'm not sure this is true. I buy olive oil specifically from California. It's niche but could be larger if they weren't competing with lower overseas labor costs.
Not 50 times larger which is what it would need to be to supply the current domestic consumption. California only produced 1.94 million gallons of olive oil in 2023, that same year the US used ~98.5 million gallons of olive oil.
Even if we could snap our fingers and create the orchards out of thin air there's not enough land and water to grow 50x our current production. Then where's the worker population coming from? They're also trying to drive overall immigration to essentially zero.
According to Trump Tunisia has to buy olive oil from you for the same amount of money that you spent on Tunisias olive oil. Otherwise one side has a trade deficit and that's unfair!
Except none of that 38% extra in price is going to the farmers. It's a tax not extra profit for the producer. Crazy how many people still do not know how tariffs work.
You may want to re-read GP's comment because they did not indicate whether they cared if the 38% went to the government or the farmer. Reading their comment as written, they simply said they would happily pay the tariff to continue enjoying Tunisian olive oil. It's "crazy" of you to imply they don't understand how a tariff works when you're the one mis-reading what they wrote.
I did not misread. He used `undervalued` which implies that there is a difference between quality of the product and its price. Slapping on 38% tax to Tunisian olive will undermine this value proposition without improving the producer or the consumers product experience. If anything the relative price (due to the repetitively high tariffs on Tunisia vs Italy) will ruin the value to price ratio that attracts GP to the Tunisian olive oil.
Moreover, his use of the word 'happily' suggests he is not aware of the negative consequences for both the Tunisian exporter, who may have to lower prices or even reduce product quality standards to compete with the now relatively similar-priced Italian olive oil, and the American consumer, who ends up paying more without any improvement in value.
Why would someone be happy with a price increase if it is not helping the producers of the good (which his comment implies he is sympathetic to) or adding any value?
15 dollars for a liter of my favorite Olive Oil is a trade I would happily make. I didn't say I was happy that the price increased, nor did I say that I am happy about the tariff, nor did I say that I happy relative to how I felt about the trade last week.
In a thread about tariffs, praising the value of Tunisian olive oil and lamenting the rough state of its producers while saying you’d happily pay the tax increase it seem like you misunderstand what tariffs will actually do. Based on the reception of my initial comment, I am not the only one who came to that conclusion.
If anything those Tunisian folks would have to reduce the price to compete. The tariffs go straight to the US coffers at the customs, nothing to do with the farmers.
It's not about a respect, it's about not sounding childish. I swear discussions about American politics are the most infantile and tribal things on the internet, and that says a lot.
If someone can't even express their opinion without restoring to ad-hominems I assume they can't be readoned with.
Are you truly upset that someone called Trump "orange man"? Trump? The individual who led the way in childish name calling such as Sleepy Joe, Pocahontas, and who mocked a guy who is disabled?
I hope you were equally as outspoken about his childish name calling.
The comment above was clearly constructive criticism. If you want to be taken seriously, don't recite name calling (if you are going to resort to name calling, at least don't join the mob and be original).
I along with a large portion of people who saw your comment immediately wrote off what you said because of name calling. You could be a nobel prize winning economist well versed in tariffs, but if you make fun of the person you disagree with because of his spray tan, then you just seem like a foaming at the mouth radical that can be ignored.
Why wouldn't they? They can immediately raise prices by however many percent the tariff is. Probably a bit less because higher price causes lower demand. So let's say raise by half of the tariff.
Maybe it will partially offset the increased cost of everything they need to buy and sell olives.
They still probably use equipment, packaging and other materials that come from overseas. Or they work with suppliers impacted by tariffs. Their costs are going up. Everyone's costs are going up, although some more than others.
> what strikes me as particularly insane is how it’s not even defensible as a protective measure
You must not have read many of the comments here. Way too many people are trying to defend this just because they don't want to have to admit that they were wrong on Trump being better for the economy.
Why do you think it's a good idea to buy olive oil from Tunisia instead of from California? Are you aware of how much CO2 is released to ship a trivial commodity across the atlantic ocean?
Just a guess as he said his favorite olive oil so could it be one tastes better? I imagine like many other things taste can be effected by the region it is grown in.
As for your other point in a perfect world we would all care about global climate change but many are not going to eat something they don’t like to do their part. But really cargo ships are small fish in such a big problem. Ban private jets or cruise ships would be way more beneficial.
Help me understand your viewpoint here - is the assumption that an entire ship is dedicated to shipping trivial commodities and the cargo isn't co-mingled with anything else? At the same time, what isn't counted as a "trivial commodity", and should ships _only_ be used for those items?
It just seems like the only things we should be importing from across the globe are things that absolutely cannot be produced domestically. For example, I've heard that coffee beans only grow in certain climates, so that would be a commodity that makes sense to import.
Pretty much everything else, including this supposed Tunisian olive oil, just sound like luxury goods to me, and should be priced accordingly.
GHG emissions from boat transport are actually a very low % of the total GHG emissions from producing that food. Moving it across the country on a truck would certainly produce more emissions than shipping it by boat from abroad.
The orange man is saying: "Looks like you are sending a lot of $$$ to those olive oil farmers in Tunisia. With my tariffs you now have two choices at your disposal: either you keep buying their Olive oil but then you are going to have to give me $$$ as well to pay for our national debt. You are going to buy less of it; and help your country in the process. Alternatively, you can decide that maybe you don't need olive oil all that much. We have this amazing product called 'corn oil' which is produced locally and is now comparatively less expensive, buy that instead and support your local farmer. Choice is yours".
Maybe you don't like either of these choices; but at the same time; saying "I believe that having cheap access to product produced halfway across the globe is a god given right to American people; how dare you imposing me to make such a choice" is part of the reason why we need 13 earth to sustain the modern US lifestyle.
I am really not a Trump supporter at all. But at the same time the gradual reduction of tariffs has been a key factor of increasing global trade; which in turn is a key component of the increase of CO2 emissions. Finding a way to dampen a bit the international component and making sure that locally sourced products and services are not affected seems not that bad.
The whole "decide that maybe you don't need olive oil that much" thing is what's going to crush the economy in the US. The problem is that demand does not shift to alternative supplies elastically. It takes years and sometimes decades to build an alternate supply chain for some industries. So what you're saying is that an entire generation of children in the US are going to have to grow up materially worse off than their parents and grandparents. And that's assuming that a bunch of businesses magically start overnight to fill the enormous gaps caused by a lack of access to international supply chains. If you look at other countries such as in South America or for example Italy where there are huge protective tariffs, the industries you expected to magically appear didn't. Instead people just have less and work less.
So your dichotomy applies, but it's not some magical ratchet out of globalization unless there's a corresponding push on the federal or state level to build competitive domestic industries to replace the international supply chains we've been cut off from.
> I am really not a Trump supporter at all. But at the same time the gradual reduction of tariffs has been a key factor of increasing global trade; which in turn is a key component of the increase of CO2 emissions. Finding a way to dampen a bit the international component and making sure that locally sourced products and services are not affected seems not that bad.
I'm not sure about that part.
International shipping in particular isn't a huge part of the energy cost of the goods that get shipped, so making the same things locally doesn't save much. This is from 2016 so things will have changed since then, but back then it was 1.6% of emissions from shipping, vs. 11.9% from road transport: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
What trade does increase directly is the global economy, and that in turn means more money is available to be spent on energy; historically the energy has been carbon intensive, but everyone is now producing as much green energy as they have factories to work with, and are making factories for those green energy systems as fast as they have bureaucracy to cope with.
I am from Western Europe and the story that "the majority of the meat we eat is imported from Argentina at great environmental costs while we have farmers unable to make ends meet; this is what's wrong with globalization" is a key story that gets repeated constantly by environmental activists and NGOs. Similarly, there's a big push by the same green parties to "stop consuming pineapple in November, buy locally sources seasonal veggies instead".
I almost never see anyone disagreeing with that, and anyone that does is immediately qualified as "climate change denier". To me it looks like tariffs similar to those introduced by Trump would constitute a step in the right direction (make stuff more expensive = less consumption + if you buy it anyway you have disposable income so you give more to the state) . It feels weird to me that now it suddenly doesn't seem to be so much of an issue anymore; if it's only 1.6% why is it such a key argument.
Similarly; almost everyone agrees that "it's not normal that we depend so much on foreign countries for things that are essential for our future". That idea really came up during the COVID crisis and never left. The EU is launching "big plans" to address this issue (as usual; with barely any impact at all). Again; the reason why we have FFP2 masks made in china is purely because it's cheaper. Make them more expensive; and local options can pop up, naturally. It will take decades; but the ideal moment to begin working on your goals was yesterday. The next best opportunity is today.
There are many many things wrong with the way Trump computes the tariffs rates; the way they are announced, handled etc. But at its core: "less trade, less global & more local" is a key pillar of virtually every Green Parties over here; it's so weird to me to see Trump (!!!) actually do something that looks like it aligns with those goals.
> But at its core: "less trade, less global & more local" is a key pillar of virtually every Green Parties over here; it's so weird to me to see Trump (!!!) actually do something that looks like it aligns with those goals.
But it’s not for the same reasons. Also, the Green parties explicitly want to reduce everyone’s consumption. Do you think American Trump supporters have intentionally voted for being able to afford less stuff, have less variety at the grocery store, etc?
IMHO the idea is that they are ready to accept the suffering of Tunisian oil lovers for the greater good, which is the empowerment of certain type of people like them.
It's basically Europe but hundred or more years ago.
The COOC web site lists California olive oils that they've certified. Last time I checked California Gold Olive Oil was certified, and they even sell it in half and full gallons. That's just one I've tried and liked-- there are a bunch of others listed on the COOC web site. (Edit: there are probably certification trade associations for other countries/regions, COOC is just the one I'm familiar with.)
The orange man wanted tariffs, the orange man is going to get tariffs. Now we have to hope the American people aren’t so dumb as to still be convinced only he can solve their issues. I don’t hold out hope for that.