[d1sxeyes]

> Trade deficit aside, we shouldn’t let others collect a larger % of their imports from America than we collect of our imports from them.

Why should you care how much another country charges its residents to import stuff from the US?

Just sell at the price you want to sell at and who cares what goes on after your goods land.

[another-dave]

> Why should you care how much another country charges its residents to import stuff from the US?

Because tariffs hurt trade — if you charge someone an extra $4 on a $20 bottle of French wine, they _may_ still buy it, or they may buy different wine.

Or they could go, everything's gotten so expensive these days, I'll buy wine less often altogether.

[motorest]

> Because tariffs hurt trade — if you charge someone an extra $4 on a $20 bottle of French wine, they _may_ still buy it, or they may buy different wine.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if the US public is even aware of this. I mean, what is the point of tarrifs other than raising the prices in the domestic market of imported goods and services? That's all they do.

The rationale from the perspective of the central government is that this will finally make foreign goods and services uncompetitive with regards to domestic alternatives, and thus will finally render them viable. But that childish assumption is based on so many absurd notions that are plainly unrealistic. The only thing that's real is the direct impact of tarrifs: increase the price of goods and services in the domestic market.

[d1sxeyes]

I think the problem is that because of the huge disparity between the cost of imported and domestic goods which has developed over decades, the choice that people face is not 'oh, now imported goods are a little more expensive, I will instead buy American', it's 'now I can't afford to buy anything at all.'

You have to get more money into the hands of the consumers in order to be able to implement something like this.

[Aurornis]

> Or they could go, everything's gotten so expensive these days, I'll buy wine less often altogether.

And with this, we’re almost getting to realizing why tariffs in the United States are a bad thing.

Cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

[d1sxeyes]

Wine is a good example because it’s not fungible: one bottle of red wine is not like any others. If you have a domestic wine industry, it likely can’t compete on quality with French wine.

So if France can export wine at a price that’s reasonable enough, your domestic wine industry will fail, undercut completely by cheap French imports.

Tariffs in and of themselves are not all dreadful. They help level the playing field and support domestic industry.

But you can’t go from decades of offshoring manufacturing to suddenly charging punitive tariffs without making imported goods (which were the only ones your citizens could afford) much more expensive, and therefore, yes, folks might buy wine less often altogether.

[wqaatwt]

IMHO it’s pretty fungible at least outside the high-end stuff. Most people would hardly notice where the wine comes from (aside from specific types of grapes and such)

[d1sxeyes]

I'm surprised to hear that. In my experience, most people tend towards the other end (believing themselves to be connoisseurs, etc.) rather than 'just give me the house red'.

[disgruntledphd2]

Yeah, but they mostly can't tell the difference in blind tests.

[_bin_]

Because tariffs aren’t actually a good thing. If you hurt my producers by $1, I should hurt yours by $1 to maintain some level of credibility in our repeated game. If I don’t punish foreigners for tariffing my guys they have no incentive to reduce or remove those tariffs.

I don’t actually care about t-shirts being made in china. That’s not an industry that matters at all. I do care about china closing her entire market to American tech, for instance.

[d1sxeyes]

If you start looking for justice in the world economy, you've already lost the game. The only thing that matters is money. You can stick tariffs on left, right and centre, and all you'll end up doing is pushing goods out of the hands of your consumers.

You can try to 'hurt' another country's producers, but they're likely to just go and find another market for their goods.

[_bin_]

I'm not really looking for "justice", I'm looking to uphold our interests. I don't particularly care if we raise more revenue than some other country does from our imports. I don't think tariffs are the best or only weapon to fix our problems. I do think they have a place, that selling off more and more of our country via trade deficit is unsustainable, and that our priorities as a nation are beyond screwed up.

[d1sxeyes]

Looking at the stock market, do you believe that tariffs are upholding US interests?