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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.
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.
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.
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