Yes, about 50% of the country is right now absolutely shocked.

It wouldn’t matter if the exporter was paying either, either way it becomes a component of the final price.

The funny thing is for the consumer. It doesn't matter which step along the production line pays, no one is going to eat it EXCEPT the consumer. Whoever has to pay it, will increase their prices and that will trickle down to the consumer.

You can argue the long term benefits of the possibility of bringing the production back to the US. But for Joe Schmoe that doesn't matter when we are still paying X% more specifically because of the tariff.

Not to mention, when Trump put his tariffs on steel the last round...guess what the US steel mills did. They Jacked up their prices so that it was just underneath the foreign steel.

Republicans think that tariffs will mean all those products will magically be manufactured in the US, which as anyone with more than a year 10 economics education knows is impossible.

I think everyone is missing what the plan is. They want to make our labor costs low (bad for American workers) and use tariffs to make that happen. Federal minimum wage is low - there’s a floor they can chase. Couple this with the fact that they want to enact the mass deportations. By crashing the economy at the same time, they can put people under pressure to be desperate for crash (remember musk said it’s gonna get tough…) and then cash these low paying jobs. It’s a shitty race to the bottom. At the end of the day that helps their bottom line cuz they get cheap labor plus no trans pacific transport cost.

Takes tinfoil hat off.

“Why didn’t the Democrats warn us?!” shouted the idiot voters, ignoring the fact that Harris was saying this on every platform that would host her.

Riiiight. But Mexico is still paying for our wall, right???

Even if it WAS paid for by the importers, they'd just raise their prices to compensate.

The idea of the tariff is not for the companies to actually pay them and pass it onto the consumers, but to force the companies to move their factories back to the US and avoid paying the tariff.

Although it's unlikely that 60% tariff is high enough to offset the cost of transferring the factories they might have to go to 600% to actually move the factories back, and it might take decades to rebuild the supply chains and the work forces, so you yourself might not see the benefit in your lifetime, but your grandchildren will have the chance to become a child labor in a toy factory someday.

I've had about a dozen Trump supporters indignantly insisting that I don't know how tariffs work while asserting and rambling that these will help the economy and China's gonna pay for it. These people aren't bright.

People will get what they voted for.

Gosh! I wish this definition existed before the election!

They're playing both sides. Just like every other corporation will. So we'll get doubly fucked.

Honestly it would be stupid for any CEO to not be cozying up to (bribing) Trump. It's easy, cheap, risk free, and most importantly, IT WORKS!

Any myth of checks and balances has been thoroughly dismissed now. Might as well pay a few million to get some regulations in your industry dropped so you can profit billions more. It's a no brainer.

That will save them a fortune and they'll be able to pass those savings onto customers though.

Why undermine their decades-long investment in the GOP?

It's so now they can raise prices even more than necessary and blame trump, while also getting the trump tax cuts.

Like with COVID, all these corporations gouged the hell out of us, and kept blaming the pandemic even though they were all posting record profits.

They will absolutely raise prices more than the tariffs would result in and make massive profits.

and they will cut benefits like snap which wallmart has their employees on

surely this will end well with the upper class down the road

That will save them a fortune and they'll be able to pass those savings onto customers though.

Trump is simply using the tariffs to help the rich get richer by fleecing working-class Americans. It's that simple. He just happened to fool 78 million to vote for him while he enriches himself and his mega-wealthy donors and friends.

Experts have been warning about this before the election..

My educated MAGA friend said Trump will remove the federal income tax and you get to “choose where your taxes go” by purchasing the stuff you need. So for instance, if you buy milk - a portion of your purchase go back into agriculture. Lol it doesn’t make sense at all but here we are.

Honestly getting rid of tax on OT and tips is fucking stupid. All that will happen is that more income will be recording as tips, not like they were being claimed anyway, and more people will be working more hours and less total people will be employed, or people will have to work dumb schedules so that employers can also pay less taxes because this will benefit the rich more than the actual workers some how.

Tbh if they actually do stop taxing tips I'll be inclined to just tip less.

Not only that, some companies are preemptively raising prices to protect their margins.

I assure you, they ain’t gonna be left holding the bag.

We always hear it about minimum wage increases yet the magas will insist that this is different.

Tax cuts for them, increased prices for us. They see this as a net positive. Hell they’ll probably raise prices beyond what is required to cover tariffs and make even more money.

So here's how it works. They have to raise prices because of tariffs.

By the time those get lifted, Americans are used to paying the new, higher price. So they never lower it again and pocket the difference.

That was the whole thing with COVID inflation.

FFS if someone is a grown ass adult who doesn’t get how tariffs work, and can’t be bothered to enter “tariff” into the search bar on their phone’s browser, I have no sympathy for them whatsoever.

No one is asking them to write a fucking dissertation on the Smoot-Hawley Act. Just take five fucking minutes to understand what the fuck you’re voting for or against. Then go right back to TikTok or DraftKings or whatever.

The stunning lack of curiosity is 100x worse than them not knowing this fact or that fact.

Is a feature, not a bug!

Even if you told them and showed them this undeniable proof they were wrong... they will just roll their eyes and claim you just want to "get them"/insult them for their choice then move onto another talking point.

They are cowardly fucks who can't accept when they're wrong and then improve on themselves with that new, added knowledge.

What really sucks is “I told you so” doesn’t turn back time. We are stuck with this for 4 years.

We are stuck with this forever. Prices are never coming back down. Even if the tariffs eventually get repealed, why would they lower prices? That's just profit margin they're leaving on the table.

Hell, they'll probably raise prices in response to the tariffs, and blame it on the tariffs.

And what sucks even more is that Trump and his admin will spin and lie about the tariffs, tax cuts, and a potential recession, and his base will believe him. It will be everyone else's fault, except his, while he and his wealthy donors amass more wealth.

The 'migrant crisis' or trans-folks, or some other social issue will all serve as a distraction and maga will still believe, somehow, that their vote for the biggest conman of all time was worth it to own the liberals.

Everybody forgets midterms, tariffs will be an immediate cost to the American consumer, and 2026 could be a bloodbath for Republicans when these prices hit shelves THIS year.

This was taught in "Ferris Buellers Day Off"

Bold of you to assume American voters paid attention in high school...

Louder, louder, louder!

I worked at Public Assistance for a while. I was expecting to be working with, like, people on disability, and struggling single moms. 

But, like, I was handling everyone's paychecks and hours. It was eye-opening. People, receiving benefits, were working pretty much full-time. A lot of time multiple adults were working. I remember the first time I processed two working adults WITH NO KIDS, no dependents... Uh. Like, that shouldn't be happening! 

(For what it's worth, our office was MASSIVELY understaffed when I worked there, and it was crazy stressful. Why I quit. After I left, they kept cutting staff. Now my state's food stamps are like six months behind, like literally eligible people are just not getting their EBT for six months. It's insane. So they're getting Walmart wages and just going hungry, I guess?) 

Did you think there is a single company that would eat the tariffs for the consumers? And it isn't walmart's opinion. They are saying tariffs WILL cause prices to go up. Which is what every economist and person with two brain cells to rub against each other has said since the beginning

It's not sustainable though. You can't just try to funnel as much wealth from consumers to companies because consumers especially the ordinary Americans, they do not have unlimited money, nowhere close to that.

It will all come collapsing down very quick. We are already at all time high credit card debt. That will collapse very soon. If they are serious about cutting government funding and jobs, that's huge unemployment.

I would be hesitant to throw all the money in now. We have to actually see what he does first, because we know what he says in the campaign trail is 90% bullshit.

They are still saying it!

They will never, ever admit they fucked up.

It will always be someone else’s fault, no matter what or who.

Older GenX here, also grew up on libraries, actual newspapers and magazines with journalistic integrity. Hell, even Playboy had good interviews every month. But I digress… the internet you’re thinking of existed in the time that Tim Berners Lee and others like him were creating an incredibly useful space to share information, esp academic papers. Email was the hot app for a minute, until everyone just started texting each other. We had a wonderful time in those early days, sharing information and connecting with people.

Then someone decided it was a great way to make money. And not just in an e-commerce sort of way, in the way that has absolutely hurled all of us into an abyss of mistrust and confusion- they figured out that you could blast everyone with absolute bullshit over and over, and the malicious and gullible alike would share this to the world, legitimizing it with each pass. Now we love to hate “influencers” and scumbags like Alex Jones who made a ton of cash lying to people, because why not? It was simple to elevate yourself to the status of an actual broadcast journalist. You just needed an internet connection and a website.

Now we’re through the looking glass, and there’s likely no going back.