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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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Assuming for a moment that the purpose of tariffs is to shift consumer spending away from foreign imports and towards domesticly manufactured products,

Shouldn't you want retailers to break-out the tariff cost into a seperate legible line item?

A story broke this morning that Amazon was going to start labeling products with the tariff charged on each item to make the price changes legible to the consumer. From the perspective of a protectionist economic policy, this is a good thing. It makes it unignorably clear which items are made in China and which items are made in America. It also shows the direct monetary incentive for you the consumer to but the Made in America item over the Made in China item.

From the perspective of whatever the hell the Trump administration is trying to do, this is a disaster. I understand that governments would prefer the populace not be particularly mindful of how much money they pay in taxes, but it is another thing alltogether to hear this articulated by the press secretary as something that they think makes the administration look good to the public. The official line from the MAGA infuencer types on Twitter is that retailers are doing this as a distraction from the fact that they sell cheap slop from Asian sweatshops, but this is actually highlighting the fact that they sell cheap slop from Asian sweatshops.

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, Hanania was right again.

As a total aside it's interesting to me that you quote that Whittier poem, which I remember from an afternoon at my grandparents' house (probably 45 years ago at least) when I had hauled out my mother's high school poetry class textbook--meaning the book from the class she took in high school in 1958. I don't know if I've even seen that poem since then.

I first encountered that poem at my Grandma's house too, about 30 years ago, but it survived to the modern day in the configuration I assume Quantum is referencing - Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, /Pol was right again.

I think the problem is that this is the first time they've done it. California specifically has messed with shipping and importing a lot recently. Things like the Advanced Clean Truck Act (and similar bills) as well as increased port fees.

But they never added on a "California compliance charge". So this would be seen as a direct protest because it's Trump.

Plenty of restaurants in SF have an "SF living wage" or "employee benefits" line item or similar.

Even still, there have been other direct protests in this vein before, so I don't see what the big deal is. In 2008 Allegheny County instituted a "poured drink tax" of 10% on alcohol sold in bars and restaurants to cover a funding gap for public transit. It was passed by county council and signed into law by county executive Dan Onorato over the objections of the local bar and restaurant owners association. All the bars and restaurants that weren't chains immediately added an "Onorato Tax" line item to their receipts, in addition to putting signs in their windows protesting "Dan Dan the Tax Man". Onorato defended the tax but didn't seem to take any of the protests personally, and never suggested they should stop doing it. And the proposals here aren't saying "Trump Tariff" or anything similar.All this demonstrates is the inability of republicans to handle any criticism.

I agree. I am strictly more likely to buy the same item MiUSA or from a lower tariff country if I see the tariff cost as a line item than if I see the total cost.

Where restaurants eat the credit card cost or raise prices across the board, I am pretty neutral between using a card and paying cash. Where they charge a fee to use a credit card, I'll nearly always pay cash.

I probably consistently overpay for shipping by paying more for items from stores with "free shipping" rather than paying shipping as a separate line item.

Consumers consistently dislike fees and markups on phones/cars/bank accounts etc.

I think I'm more likely to look at a $35 MiChina hoodie with $20 marked as tariffs vs a $65 MiUSA hoodie and pick the MiUSA product if the tariffs are marked separately. First of all, I as a consumer have a limited understanding of quality, I'll anchor to the idea that the MiChina product is "really" a $35 that they're now charging extra for while the MiUSA hoody is "really" a $65 product. Second, I just don't like paying taxes and fees, and will prefer not to. Third, if I consistently find that shopping on Amazon I don't know what the "real" price is until the I get to checkout, that's a hassle that I don't want to deal with, I'll be more likely to shop on LA Apparel and American Giant where the price is the price.

This seems aimed at making me buy American.

Third, if I consistently find that shopping on Amazon I don't know what the "real" price is until the I get to checkout

How so?

If they list one price when I'm browsing on the website, and then add tariffs in when I go to checkout, I need to constantly do math while scrolling around.

Sales tax is calculated after discounts. How are LA Apparel and American Giant different?

6% difference vs 145+% difference?

Was "Third, if I consistently find that shopping on Amazon I don't know what the "real" price is until the I get to checkout" a reference to sales tax or not? I'm not following you.

No, it was a reference to reports that stores like Amazon are displaying a base price when shopping, and then displaying a "tariff adjustment" at checkout.

So on a MiUSA item it's 50 in the store, 53 at checkout. A MiChina it's 50 in the store, then somewhere between 52 and 120 at checkout.

It is kind of a funny idea to show tariff costs because you are then revealing to savvy customers what the margins are across different products and brands!

Depends on how they do it. I've read so many tariff stories from industry insiders, and they all go "We used to import this for $80, shipping, handling and fees brings it to $100, and to account for our overhead we sell it for $300 plus tax. But now, we import it for $80, tariffs brings that to $110, shipping and handling brings that to $130, and to maintain our margins, we have to sell it for $390 plus tax."

They ignore that because of tariffs, they now make $260 of profit instead of $200, and half-heatedly claim that this is because of "margin" and because of "overhead". This insistence to preserve the gross margin percentage (instead of preserving the dollar amount margin per product) makes absolutely no sense to me, but they literally all do it. Margin is a percentage, end of story.

So, you probably can't learn much from looking at what Amazon claims are tariff costs.

But even with this I can infer relative gross margins on Nike vs Reebok.

The total preservation of gross margin percentage, I agree, does not make total sense, but neither does only preserving absolute gross margin. At minimum, covering the tariffs requires more working capital, which adds some cost.

From the perspective of whatever the hell the Trump administration is trying to do

I think the most charitable interpretation of the current incomprehensibility of "a thing" that the Trump administration is trying to do... is that there are different factions within the administration, each of which has its own perspective on what they're trying to do, and that those perspectives are not, indeed, coherent with one another. For example, if you're someone in the administration who thinks that tariffs can be used as a tool to help secure supply chains for critical defense/etc. products, you probably don't care one whit whether there is a tariff on cheap slop rubber ducks bought on Amazon from Asian sweatshops.

I mean, it's a lie. Highly misleading, at least. It's clearly intended to communicate to the consumer that they're assuming the whole burden of the tax. This simply isn't how taxes work. The burden is split between buyers and sellers according to the relative elasticity of supply and demand. This is hard to measure in practice but you should never expect to see it go 100% one way or the other. They can list the tax as a line item if they like, it doesn't change the reality of the situation for them: if they want to maximize their profits, they'll have to reduce their margins. Of course, the maximum possible profit may in fact be negative now...

As @anti_dan says, so far as the consumer is concerned, it's no different from any other government-imposed cost, including both non-tax impositions like costly regulatory requirements and each direct and indirect tax on a business's operations: sales tax, which is often reported, but also corporate income tax, capital gains paid on their stock (which reduces share price, which reduces the amount of liquidity they can raise through sales, which can be compared to the cost of loaning that capital to get an equivalent rate), their employees' income tax (of which, again, they bear some of the incidence). Sellers love to complain about their costs, but at the end of the day all that matters to the consumer is the product they offer and the cost they offer it at.

(Though, as others have intimated, perhaps the real goal is to propagandize against the tax in the hopes they will later be able to offer the same product at a lower price. That does raise the question why they weren't already doing this for all those other taxes, however.)

For that matter, where do all these people who think taxes being paid is a bad thing go when the discussion turns to income tax, or payroll tax, or social security? I'm not convinced the marginal government dollar isn't net-negative, but Democrats don't generally hold that position. The money actually paid into the tariffs is no better or worse than any other source of tax dollars: the downside is all the transactions that don't occur because of the tariffs. I suppose that's harder to communicate, though.

Tariffs are generally bad. They can play a part in a net-positive strategy, but these obviously don't: the tariffs are the whole strategy. Are they bad enough to justify lying to make them look worse than they are, or bad in different ways? I'm not sure.

This simply isn't how taxes work. The burden is split between buyers and sellers according to the relative elasticity of supply and demand.

While this is technically true, I think that it is directionally false. Some products are very cheap to produce and have a high profit margin. If Trump is adding tariffs to ransomware payments, then I would expect competent ransomware gangs to keep the price after tariffs the same, because that is based on what their victims are estimated to be willing to pay, not what what it costs to infect their system. (It you tax it at 10000%, it might no longer be profitable, though.)

But most products do not have a very high profit margin. Take non-brand electronics, such as a digital thermometer. The manufacturer of the cheapest acceptable thermometers typically has the ability to scale their production up, so through competition, the market drives the profit margin down. To absorb a 100% tariff, a manufacturer would have to cut their profit margin from 50% to zero. But if they had such a high profit margin, they would probably have long been out-competed.

Now, most non-brand digital electronic toys have a high elasticity of demand, customers might buy all sorts of things just in case because they are cheap, and would be much more reluctant to buy them at 10x the price. So in many cases, what the tariffs would do is simply to prevent a sale.

Trump's world model seems to be that sellers are generally ripping buyers off by taking dollars for what costs pennies to produce, and if he forces them to hand half of their profits to the US government, they will gladly do so because ripping of Americans will still be insanely profitable. I just don't think that he is right.

Broadly agreed. I suspect many products are no longer profitable to sell in America at all and many others have a vastly reduced customer base. And, like I said, that's the actual deadweight loss here: preventing transactions that would otherwise have happened. When the tariff is paid there's no actual loss, the government just takes some of the value for itself. But a prevented transaction doesn't merely extract value, it destroys it.

My point was just the technical truth. Pedantic, maybe, but this isn't the sort of information environment where you can't afford nuance and must prioritize being merely directionally correct. I'm certainly not claiming cheap consumer imports secretly have enormous margins -- I don't know if Trump really believes that, but I don't.

Actually, I’d say there’s a better case for itemizing tariffs than sales tax, since the latter doesn’t actually give you any choice. The state of Texas is going to get its cut no matter which goods Amazon sells to Texans.

This does make me wonder if tobacco companies are prohibited, in some way, from itemizing vice taxes. I’d have thought they would be eager to remind customers why they’re paying more.

For that matter, where do all these people who think taxes being paid is a bad thing go

They don’t think that. They think having to pay a tax is a bad thing. What happens after that is handwaved.

Nor do they really go anywhere. If a traditional tax hike was on the table, they’d flip out about it, too. But Trump is a populist, and has demonstrated less than zero interest in the normal legislative process, so that’s a non-starter.

Actually, I’d say there’s a better case for itemizing tariffs than sales tax, since the latter doesn’t actually give you any choice. The state of Texas is going to get its cut no matter which goods Amazon sells to Texans.

I suppose that's true: the seller's costs don't matter to you, but it could at least signal to you that you might be able to find cheaper options elsewhere, at least in the small niches where there is a vaguely competitive American-made option that isn't itself dragged down by tariffs on part imports.

They don’t think that. They think having to pay a tax is a bad thing. What happens after that is handwaved.

Nor do they really go anywhere. If a traditional tax hike was on the table, they’d flip out about it, too. But Trump is a populist, and has demonstrated less than zero interest in the normal legislative process, so that’s a non-starter.

Would they? I've heard a decent amount of flipping out about Trump's proposed 'tax cuts'-- scare quotes because they're almost all extensions of 2017 cuts. (He is, bizarrely, considering removing the cap on SALT again, though? I'd always considered that his single best policy move; why should the Federal government subsidize rich states' high spending?) In other words, they're complaining about the absence of a hike. Granted, most of them seem to think these cuts just benefit the wealthy (fairly ridiculous; doubling the standard deduction and the child credit disproportionately benefit the middle class) so I suppose they're at least not knowingly advocating for raising their own taxes.

Cuts aren't just the absence of a hike. They can be painted as hypocritical, irresponsible, buying votes. I think Democrats saw the cuts as a possible wedge between Trump and the deficit hawks.

I also suspect that the benefits of the original cuts were, in fact, concentrated in the wealthy. See table 3 here. It also definitely benefited corporations. This wasn't contested by Republicans, who preferred to justify it as stimulating investment.

This does make me wonder if tobacco companies are prohibited, in some way, from itemizing vice taxes

Not sure, but tobacco and hard liquor companies are definitely prohibited from selling directly to the public- everything is marked up from the taxed price.

The state of Texas is going to get its cut no matter which goods Amazon sells to Texans.

I'm old enough to remember a time before online retailers regularly collected sales taxes (apparently nationwide starting in 2017 after a SCOTUS decision).

(apparently nationwide starting in 2017 after a SCOTUS decision)

Huh, you’re right. Somehow I never noticed this.

Wayfair would have been the biggest tax news in the tax consulting business by far if it weren’t for a certain piece of legislation passed that same year.

Those were the days. Technically you still owed sales tax and you were supposed to report it to the state yourself, but nobody did that. It was probably unavoidable that online retailers would start to collect sales tax (state governments weren't just going to give up a big revenue source), but it was nice while it lasted.

Could you get a PO box in a tax free state and then tell USPS to forward it?

This is very illegal in the US. You would have to ship it overseas from your PO box and then import it back again relying on exemptions there, which ofc has been made non-viable due to tariffs...

The question is how/if it could be enforced.

Hey, I guess Trump actually closed a tax loophole!

Been illegal long before Trump. Funnily enough I as a non-US person can buy stuff and have it shipped to my virtual address in NH without any sales tax and then sent to me overseas but people in the US get busted by the feds if they try to do the same...

Ah, that point was not directly relevant to Amazon's decision here. At least, there's a legible business motive in addition to the presumed political one. Nonetheless, it's a common complaint that misses the mark. Apologies if it wasn't clear that was a digression.

I'm no Republican; at most I'd say they are, perhaps, slightly better on taxation than Democrats on average. Even these tariffs aren't as bad as a tax on unrealized gains would have been, for instance, though I've got no idea how serious that proposal really was; not very, I thought, but I also thought Trump was too market-focused to really move forward with extreme tariffs either. Well, I suspect it would have been harder to pull off via executive fiat, at least. But you're certainly right they're doing their very best to tear up that lead right now.

More generally, it's hardly surprising that both sides are hypocritical on this issue: polarization means they both prioritize opposing the other over any particular principle. This is the default scenario.

It's clearly intended to communicate to the consumer that they're assuming the whole burden of the tax. This simply isn't how taxes work.

Sales tax is also not 100% burden on the consumer but it's very frequently broken out as a separate line item in the US.

Agreed. That's deceptive in just the same way. I don't think there's any particular movement to get sales tax repealed, though, so I suspect the motive is slightly different: advertising a slightly lower price in the hopes that marginal customers will be too lazy/ignorant to calculate the true price before getting far enough into the sale for the sunk cost fallacy to set in.

Looks like Amazon has given up on this idea; were they planning on hiding the tariff charge until checkout? At least on Chinese goods, I suspect it's high enough to overcome sunk cost reasoning anyway, though I suppose there's always some marginal consumer on whom it'd have worked.

But that’s in part because they want to say the price to the consumer is X. They then say the cost is X plus Y (the sales tax).

Amazon already paid the tariff prior to selling to a customer and indeed didn’t pay tariff on the price charged to the customer (unlike sales tax).

It is more akin to CIT which Amazon doesn’t break out.

I don’t really have a problem with Amazon doing that but at the same time wish they’d do it for other government taxes or inefficiencies.

I always assumed that was less as anti-tax sentiment and more as a misleading "this is a low price (oops no you'll be paying more than what we said once tax is applied)". Same with car ads: "Taxes, tags, and fees extra".

The description of Amazon's "plan" may be misleading.

What was Hanania right about?

Is that what Amazon does with all of its government-imposed costs? Do the give you an OSHA tax number? An income tax number? Seems like a perfect example of a special pleading.

Trump should lean in on this. Require Amazon to list the tariff price, also require it to list the country it was made in, the wage payed to the factory worker, the safety regulations in that country, and their weekly work hours.

Let's inform the American consumer

How many government-imposed costs have a 1:1 mapping to a given sale? If sales tax wasn't calculated after discounts, online stores might show sales taxes on individual items, rather than the total order price. (It's not as though online stores don't want customers to be annoyed by sales tax - "brick-and-mortar" stores effectively subsidized online shopping, before states started taxing the latter.)

Why not? Almost every seller in North America separates out the sales tax. Gas stations around here routinely display at the pump the added costs of state and federal taxes. Like those taxes, tariffs are a lot more closely related to the value and amount of the goods being sold than other business taxes, so it's probably very easy to calculate what the added cost per item is.

You're getting lost in the details (which are mostly lies from both sides), when this is a case of simple conflict theory. Amazon thinks, correctly, that if they label the products with the tariff this will make people angry at Trump. Trump realizes this and opposes it.

But is making people angry at Trump a reason for Amazon to do something or a reason for Amazon to not do something? According to Reuters, the proposal was to show tariff costs for a program I hadn't previously heard of, "Haul," which I gather is $2.99/month access to extra-cheap crap. Tariff costs are more salient to those customers, so it makes sense to consider showing them to that self-selected group, while implementing it for the broader Amazon inventory and third-party marketplace would be more trouble than it's worth.

I think part of the reason for the idea is to put pressure on Trump to back off on the tariffs.

In that case, why would they only do it for the cheap crap?

This is good instinct for politics but awful instinct for statesmanship. No amount of conquering enemies will overcome the fact that these tarrifs are self-destructive.

If you go this hard on conflict theory you end up surrounded by sycophants in an epistemic black hole. This isn't just "one unfortunate thing Trump is doing wrong" it's the primary issue with authoritarianism as a means of running the state. As soon as the guy on top of the hierarchy has a dumb idea (and everyone has dumb ideas) there's no way to stop it.

The more he punishes people for lightly pushing back on his one big dumb idea, the further into the black hole everyone goes.

I agree that the tariffs are bad, but that makes no real difference in whether or not it's good or bad for Trump for Amazon to point them out. If in 2021, stores started listing their prices with a line item for "recent inflation", it would be pretty clear that was an attack on Biden, even though inflation really is bad.

It depends on Amazon's exact implementation, but I just assumed it was a way for them to list a lower sticker price than what customers actually pay and expect the customer to just go through with the purchase anyway.

Similarly, back in 2021 due to increasing labor costs, a whole bunch of restaurants did start adding a fixed percentage "service fee" on the final bill that went into their general revenue (not a replacement for tipping). Was that anti-Biden?

I don't think so, and it wasn't perceived as such, the main difference being that Biden wasn't intentionally positioning himself as an advocate of higher costs in the same way Trump has positioned himself as an advocate of tariffs.

the fact that these tariffs are self-destructive.

This is an opinion, not a fact. The United States government received most of its revenue from tariffs until the Civil War, and they still played an important role until the corporate and income taxes were imposed in the early 20th century. The US existed for 125 years with this ‘dumb’ idea without self-destructing. As always the question should be: who benefits? Some people certainly will, and some certainly won’t.

This is an opinion, not a fact. The United States government received most of its revenue from tariffs until the Civil War,

When they didn't have a federal welfare state for the old, or a blue-water navy. The main reason why Trump beats the GOPe at the ballot box is that voters worry that the GOPe is going to aggressively cut the welfare state for the old. Maintaining Social Security and Medicare in something resembling their current form is fundamental to the political viability of Trumpism, and isn't compatible with funding the government with tariffs.

The U.S. didn’t have a welfare state in 1860 but it definitely had a blue water navy- while the union army found itself initially incapable of conquering the south the navy was more than able to blockade it, the USN had carried out overseas operations such as the Barbary coast war and opening Japan to trade, etc.

I’d also point out that welfare for the old is funded separately from the general fund- payroll taxes are technically not the same thing as income tax.

I'm quibbling now given that you are right on the Barbary war and opening of Japan, but the Union blockade of the Confederacy was not a blue-water operation and it isn't clear if the Civil War era ironclads were blue-water capable.

The blockade wasn’t blue water, no, but it shew considerable naval strength and competence and in conjunction with previously established blue water capabilities(eg Barbary war, anti slavery operations off of west Africa, opening Japan) can be taken as demonstrating that the USA was already a naval power to be taken seriously.

The US government was small enough to be funded by tariffs and alcohol back in the day. I'd like it if it was that small again.

The US imports about 4 trillion in goods and the government budget is about 7 trillion. It's mathematically impossible to fund the budget with tariffs.

Protectionism and revenue raising are also at cross purposes for tariffs. For protectionism you want the tariffs high enough that the goods do not flow into the country. For revenue you still want the goods flowing because otherwise the tariff doesn't get paid and doesn't raise money

I think the point is that either one Trump would consider a win. I don't know why people think they have to pin a specific intent to the tariffs. Trump is looking for any win, not a specific one. Trump believes tariffs not destructive the way most economists seem to believe they are; that genuine belief opens up a lot of options for him than for someone for whom it would be an obvious bluff. Companies stop shipping to the US and industry reshores? That's a win. Companies still ship to the US? That's new revenue for the government. Countries negociate a new trade deal to dodge tariffs that's more advantageous to the US than the status quo? That's a win too.

This is a relevant point not only for Trump, individually, but the Trump coalition backing him on tariffs. A critical-mass policy coalition doesn't need everyone to want the same thing from an action, only enough people to believe their priority concern is addressed enough to be worth the cost.

The [reshoring industry is worth a high price] people and the [we need to break supply chain dependence on China even if it costs a high price] are not necessarily the same people, even if they are both willing to endure [high price]. They want different things, and would likely not be as willing to accept [high price] were they not getting something they feel was worth the price.

This is a reason why people who go 'if they wanted X, why didn't they do Y?' have been confused. There is no single desire of [X]. There is [X1], [X2], [X3], and so on, and the policy coalition is- as most policy coalitions do- cluster against various interests of [X[#]].

It is however frustrating when you are speaking to a particular individual and you say "X1 makes no sense in this context" and they say "well I just want X2 so its fine". And then you say "well X2 makes no sense either". Then they leave the chat and someone else enters to say "well i don't care too much about X2, I just want X1".

No one has an obligation to make their ideas easier to attack, but don't be surprised when we point out the internal inconsistencies.

I can understand why pundits or political players would engage in this sort of sophistry, but to see it on a niche anonymous online forum is utterly bizarre.

A retvrn to the state of affairs where the USA was not global hedgemon would not benefit the average US citizen, much less the average Trump voter. It doesn't even benefit Trump himself. Who would benefit is China. That is self-destructive.

A retvrn to the state of affairs where the USA was not global hedgemon would not benefit the average US citizen, much less the average Trump voter.

I disagree.

I think the US being a world spanning empire is one of the worst things that happened to the American people, and in particular to the sort of American people that votes for DJT.

But I sense that you and I have vastly different notions of the good. Salus populi suprema lex esto.

It doesn't even benefit Trump himself. Who would benefit is China. That is self-destructive.

Only in a compositional fallacy sense of the term.

Self-destruction is part of the broader category of things considered [bad]. It is not synonymous with the entire category of [bad]. Things can be both [bad], and not self-destructive.

The rest of the dispute comes to the nature of the [bad], which in turn depends on whose standards of 'benefit' apply. This leans into the typical 'they are acting against their own interests' critique that regularly dismisses differences in preferences by supposing one's own preferences are the agreed upon standard.

Clearly there are people who think it will benefit them. People who feel strongly that things should be manufactured in America. People who think they're in a position to make things in America and would get satisfaction from that even if they had a salary cut. People who find being global hegemon ideologically distasteful or believe it has unwanted secondary effects.

I think that 'I understand why politicians are lying about this, but why are you?' is not a good starting point for understanding this perspective.

It can also be a way to try to avoid accusations that Amazon itself is raising prices and using tariffs as an excuse. When people get mad at the CEO's poor decisions, it's tech support that has to hear people complain.

I don't think Amazon is angry at Trump. I think Amazon is angry at tariffs for the exact same reason that consumers are angry at tariffs. They aren't using this as some proxy conflict to get back at MAGA. They want to cut costs and lower prices.

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