to central va...
Oh, yes, and on a separate note...
You said “...This is why we need tariffs to protect us from fools, like you.”
You make three assumptions here:
1. that I’m a fool (I just think that’s funny.)
2. that I oppose tariffs and you support them. (that’s just wrong; I like tariffs, primarily because they give us the carrot of an offer of duty-free status to make free trade agreements desirable).
3. that tariffs stop undesirable importing.
This last is the one I’ll concentrate on. As a revenue tool (since all countries must collect taxes somehow), tariffs can be a legitimate tool in the toolkit. Morally and societally, I’d rather tax imported luxuries than my citizens’ real estate or income, for example.
The problem with tariffs is that the price differences between countries are often so great that even a high tariff doesn’t always have much of an effect.
I believe we should have outright sanctions against a lot more countries. We shouldn’t be trading with China at all, for example. We had to go from four or five percent up to 30% on a lot of products, during the Trump years, in order to get many American companies to even consider re-sourcing away from China.
The piece price differential is just too great for tariffs to be the effective tool in a right-sourcing effort.
What we really need is for purchasing departments and CFOs to understand the real total cost of ownership - TCO - of their purchases, and to realize that this apparent cost savings in importing from China is actually overwhelmed by the damage it does to lead time, the cost of flying employees overseas for meetings and tests and verification builds, the risk of IP theft, and especially, the transportation cost when shipments need to be airfreighted because ocean is too slow.
It’s a culture change we need. A culture change that needs to begin in the business schools and the boardrooms.
Not every change can be effectively driven by government. Government can be a part of it (hence my compliments to President Trump for initiating those 25% punitive tariffs)... but it’s not going to do the trick on its own.
We need the American people to start being sensible at the office, and start finding new vendors closer to home.
JFD
Myth. You don't know that. Labor is only 7-8% of the retail price of US manufactured goods 3% for 3rd world crap. So a small tariff really would level the playing field.