All About Tariffs
 

Please feel free to post any opinions on Tariffs, any thoughts or questions. I have a question to kick the thread off.

#1 The Economists say that Tariff's are bad for the country imposing the Tariff. It's "committing economic suicide" etc.

#2 Other countries always impose retaliatory tariffs when we tariff something of theirs.

If it actually is true that tariffs are bad for the country imposing them why does every country we impose a tariff on retaliate by placing a Tariff on our goods instead of just laughing at us for harming ourselves?

Are the economists wrong? Are all countries dumb? Why is it that no country takes the economists advice when it comes to Tariffs?

Re: All About Tariffs
 

I thought the purpose was to try to make trade a level playing field.

Just my uninformed opinion.

Re: All About Tariffs
 

What do you mean by a level playing field?

Re: All About Tariffs
 

The "economists" are doing their job of brainwashing Americans into accepting destructive anti-American economic policies enacted by communist subversives who have put the USA on the chopping block.

Murica. It's what's for dinner.

Re: All About Tariffs
 

I think there are multiple factors in play. First, imposing retaliatory tariffs is only detrimental to the economies in question. Second, if a nation has a trade deficit with another nation, a tariff can bring some level playing ground in effort to encourage more trade and cooperation to relieve the tariff.

But that's only what I've read and I'm not even sure if that's true. I'm by far no expert on it.

Re: All About Tariffs
 

Tariffs function like sales tax. You want to sell your stuff within our border, you get taxed, same as people within the border who want to sell their stuff. It helps to keep the in-house buyers and sellers competitive with foreign buyers and sellers.

This is related to the cheap goods from Asia syndrome the USA swallowed hook, line, and sinker. When companies realized they could make their products with functional slave labor and resell them back into the USA with little overhead and low tariff, they did so, creating SEZ's in Mexico and overseas, while local manufacturing suffered.

Reorganizing our tariff situation will help our in-house economy in the long run, even though there is going to be some serious pains temporarily, to right the ship that went astray decades ago.

Re: All About Tariffs
 

Interesting.

Everyone knows that I'm not a Trump supporter and that I'm pretty critical of the Trump Administration. But this is one of several things that he's done that might prove positive. We'll have to see.

Re: All About Tariffs
 

It is a tough situation because of the tit for tat actions going back and forth. However the truth is that for decades the USA has come out of trade deals with the deals favoring the other parties.

Particularly in the case of China the enjoy "free trade" and import cheap goods into the USA while placing high tariffs on many US products exported to China. Not a level playing field at all.

The danger in protective tariffs is you can end up protecting uncompetitive industries. For example the USA and Great Britain lost their ship building industries because of how uncompetitive they became on the world market due in part to unions.

Re: All About Tariffs
 

So I would like to explore a hypothetical scenario. Suppose there were only 2 countries and both had tariffs so high that they never traded anything. What would happen if the country A agreed to remove the tariff a single good, one that Country B could efficiently produce?

I'll give my thoughts later

Re: All About Tariffs
 

Is country B, Wakanda? :hmmm