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Notes -
Tariffs aren't as cooked as they seem
I saw this video on YT about the tariffs from the perspective of a dropshipper, and they are actually less than they might seem. In his example, on an item that retails for $600, 50% tariffs apply to the wholesale price of the item of $200, and the overall tariff tax burden is $100, or 17% of the retail price of the item.
This might seem bad, but to put it in perspective, countries in Europe have a VAT tax (similar to sales tax) of 20-30% on the retail price, and that's on top of any customs import duties/tariffs. Even though the calculation is different than sales tax, my understanding is that the total tax burden is always equal to the percentage of the final sale price of the item. And nobody is complaining that the sky is falling in Europe or that retail prices are crazy over there.
Even more so for cheap crap, the tariff burden is even less important. For <$20 crap sold on Scamazon, the wholesale price may be only $1-3, which is possibly less than the cost of the sea freight to ship it to the Scamazon FC. Then Scamazon will take $5-10 on FBA fees. So in the end even a 50 or 100% tariff may only account for $1-2 out of a $20 item.
It remains to be seen if US manufacturers can actually pick up any of the slack after the tariffs. A huge amount of manufacturing heavily automated and done in china due to the preexisting large manufacturing base as well as the lack of any good reason not to do it there. I saw this tweet about gpus, where semiconductors are tariff-exempt, but finished gpus are not.
A top of the line AI gpu is simply a relatively small circuit board, with a huge chip on it and a handful of supporting components. There isn't even a cooler or bracket to worry about. You could order all of the components from china (negligible bom and tariff besides the chip itself) and set up a factory with just a pick & place machine and reflow oven, and pump out 100 $30,000 gpus per hour. There's no reason we can't do this, we just don't do it because we never had a reason to.
There’s an idea I keep reading that “lower/middle income buy most of their goods overseas and so will be hit harder by tariffs”, but I bet that if you look at actual dollar amount of imported goods, the wealthiest 10% eat up 99% of the dollar amount of imported goods. The Rolexes, foreign cars, lululemons, Canada goose, the multiple consumer electronics, the French fashion, the French wine, the obscure ingredients and cutlery at their restaurants, and so on. I hate all of this. So if Trump really does replace the income tax in the lower/middle class with the tariff proceeds, this may be incredible for redistribution. (Not that I think this will happen; who knows what he is going to do).
Uh, lower and middle income Americans drive Asian cars, wear clothes from foreignstan, have electronics from foreignstan, etc. A lot of these aren’t really luxuries; they’re cheaper than the US made versions. Nissan is a great value for the money and Kia is the cheapest on the American market, after all.
No problems there:
https://www.kiageorgia.com/about-kia-georgia/the-plant/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Smyrna_Assembly_Plant
Cars have been tariffed for a long time of course -- if anything it's a POC that tariffs can produce the desired effect. (onshoring manufacturing)
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