Posted on 08/13/2025 3:10:54 AM PDT by TBP
The proper response to foreign tariffs is nothing. Here is why.
1. A tariff is a tax on your citizens. Retaliation means you tax your buyers and your producers to “punish” a foreign government. You hurt the innocent to spite the guilty.
2. Imports are the benefit of trade. Exports are the cost you pay to get them. Blocking imports means you block the benefit and keep the cost.
3. Unilateral free trade raises real incomes. It lowers input costs for businesses, speeds innovation, and forces domestic firms to win by serving customers, not by lobbying.
4. Tariff tit for tat creates a spiral of higher prices and uncertainty. Even if others later drop theirs, you have already damaged your economy.
5. If another country taxes its people or subsidizes you with cheap goods, they harm themselves. Let them. Do not copy their mistake.
6. A rights-protecting government does not violate peaceful trade among its citizens to chase geopolitical leverage. Its job is to protect consent, contract, and property, not ration who may buy what.
Foreign tariffs are their mistake. Retaliation makes it our mistake too. Do nothing, buy freely, get richer.
Sigh - tariffs have been used to take our jobs away and to undercut our own producers - actual free trade is the way to go and the only way to get there is to match tariff for tariff - unless you like letting the rest of the world 💩 on you.
Yup. This thread is [mostly] a demonstration of the idiocy present even here at FR.
No wonder it’s so easy to divide MAGA.
smh
Excessive regulation and anti-manufacturing policies drive/drove away industry.
Americans are the most sophisticated consumers in the world.
They balance: benefits, cost, value, etc their whole lives - choosing the best fit.
If something is too expensive, they don’t buy it.
The foreign company. can then decide to lower prices or go out of business when no one buys.
If a market demand remains in the US, companies will fill it.
The article assumes a static world, which is false.
Tariffs simply tax our people and raise prices across the board, enabling domestic producers to raise prices by significant amounts and still undercut foreign producers.
***********
Tariff supporters believe that imports are bad and exports are good, that we can prosper if we only export and never import. Favoring producers over consumers and thinking we can return to the economy of the 1950’s, they’re always cooking-up reasons to call imports unfair.
Well thanks.
Luckily free traitors like you will die off soon.
The exporter can lower their price to cover some or all the tariff.
All these economic traitors love the income tax and hate the tariff. Go figure.
Tell me how do you live with being a traitor?
Free Traitors are stuck on the 20th century.
That action does not negate the fact that the American consumers ultimately pay the tariff
And Unions.
It the exporter reduces whole sale prices to cover the tariff then the consumer paid nothing. Who pays corporate income taxes?
The importer pays the tariff, but prices for many of these imports may not be elastic enough to handle the increased cost (Steven's point) ... so in many of the cases I'm coming across the exporter is looking to reduce their own costs to offset the higher price for the end customer.
For example ...
Suppose a product is imported today at a cost of $100, with no tariff. The importer sells X of these every month.
If a 20% tariff is now applied to the import, the price will rise to $120 and the importer will likely see a reduction in sales to customers. Perhaps they only sell 60% of X at the higher price. So there is now pricing pressure on the importer (directly) and the foreign exporter (indirectly) to do whatever they can do to reduce the $120 price back down to something closer to the "market price" of $100.
One potential measure is for the foreign exporter to reduce their own costs so they can sell it to the U.S. importer for $90 instead of $100. The 20% tariff now makes this a $108 item, which is higher than the original $100 price but lower than the unadjusted $120 price.
Tariffs are taxes. You and I pay them.
Unions are less than 7% of workers so get another red herring.
Don’t buy, don’t pay.
You might be the single biggest source of digital pollution on Free Republic.
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