What did the McKinley Tariff do?
The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 increased the taxes on most imported goods while eliminating taxes on luxury items. The intent was to protect American industries from foreign competition. The outcome was that domestic businesses raised the prices of American products to unaffordable rates.
source https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-mckinley-tariff-of-1890.html
If you google anything related to Tariffs, the fake news and fake academia studies are working hard to slander McKinley and Trump.
Ppl around me are assuming tariffs will increase the price of imports/goods that we cannot afford anymore.
Sounds like bullshit to me, many countries that ripped us off on trade deals, just aren’t gonna get their free lunches anymore. Trump said many countries are hugely reliant on us for many things, like military assistance. Taking that away alone will make them desperate to make better trade deals.
However I’m not too educated on the matter. Could we have a discussion and dig into how tariffs will help is? I wanna educate normies
So yeah what do you guys think?
Just to get it out of the way, I think we need to acknowledge the fact that tarrifs are going to raise prices for a large percentage of consumer goods, if not the majority of them. And that we, the buyers, will be footing that price increases. Companies aren't going to be losing money out of the goodness of their hearts over this.
Basically the idea of tarrifs seems to be to force manufacturing to the US by making it more expensive to import goods than it is to produce them here. There is just no way around the fact that we, the consumer are going to be the ones most impacted by this.
It's not just a case of US based companies moving their manufacturing back to the US, though. There are just so many goods that are mostly only available from foreign companies with few, if any, US companies manufacturing them. The biggest example of this would be electronics. Which, unfortunately, is also one of the biggest categories of things we consistently buy.
And some of the main reasons why companies moved their manufacturing out of the country in the first place hasn't changed, either. And two of those reasons are A) corporate profits, which should be self explanatory and B) the Walmart mentality of the average US shopper. They want the largest amount of goods for the lowest amount of money. They are not at all interested in paying for quality, and they're not interested in paying more for an item just to keep manufacturing in the US. And they're certainly not interested in ensuring that a US based citizen is making a living wage while producing those goods versuses literal slave labor being used by so many foreign countries.
Quite frankly, I think that if President Trump keeps to his promises concerning tarrifs it means that we've pretty much seen the end of cheap consumer goods. And I don't think that's a bad thing, necessarily. We have become such a wasteful society where it's cheaper to throw a broken item away and buy a new one than it is to repair it. This goes for everything from toasters to cars. Certainly the environmentalists should be rejoicing over these tarrifs because they'll most likely usher in a new era of "reduce, reuse, recycle", because it will once again become common for things to become more expensive to replace than it is to repair.
I know that most people here think that after the initial transitioning phase of getting the manufacturing industry back up and running in the US (which who knows how long it will take to do so) that we will once again have inexpensive goods. I think that this will only happen with some drastic changes to our culture concerning corporate profits. Because like I said before, companies aren't going to be sacrificing their profits out of goodwill towards man. If you go back to look at when the US still had a healthy manufacturing industry, take a look at what the average income ratio was between a company's lowest paid employee and the company's president and other high ranking employees. The average in the 1950s and 60s was something like the bigwigs making 7x the salary of the common worker. Today, the average is around 200× more.
There is simply no way that we can move manufacturing back to the US, have US citizens in those manufacturing jobs making a living wage, and companies keep making these types of profits. Not without us, the consumers, paying a hell of a lot more for goods than we currently are.
And for those that think the solution is to pay US citizens as little as possible to work those manufacturing jobs, I'll point out that this is why we have such a problem with companies hiring foreigners to come over to work these types of jobs. So that just opens up an entirely new can of worms there concerning foreign workers and illegal immigrants.
Any way we look at it, none of this is going to be easy, or fast. I think it's extremely important that people realize and accept this up front rather than having unrealistic expectations and then becoming angry and disillusioned when reality doesn't match their fantasy.
The main thing I'm concerned with is the impression people seem to have that all of this is going to happen quick enough that prices are going to fall significantly while President Trump is still in office. I just don't see that happening within the next four years. Especially in areas where the US doesn't have a strong history of producing certain goods, such as electronics and we'll have to build those companies up from the bottom.
Tariffs don't having to be broad and all encompassing. If Chyna is currently the only source of whatever object we need, that object likely will not be included in a tariff.
But isn't that one of the main points of tarrifs? To use them to increase US manufacturing instead of importing from other countries?
I'm not trying to be rude here. I'm legitimately trying to understand this better.
Are you getting this from some source, or is it just your personal feeling?
I ask this because as I mentioned in a different post here, people seem to be all over the map as to tarrifs.
It goes from tarrifs being high enough that it encourages companies to completely reorganize their companies and start manufacturing in the US to them basically being non-existent.
The biggest problem is that there really isn't anything concrete out there concerning what Trump is planning. It would help so much if there was something that just showed what he has planned.
Otherwise it just seems to be people projecting whatever they want to see happen. And even then, it's often just a poorly thought out wishlist that contradicts itself constantly.
No offense taken at all. Also, I am no expert here either. In his first term tariffs covered some things from a country and not others. I can not source that right now. The interwebs are so full of clutter about Trump tariffs right now, I just don't have the ambition to wade through all of that to find what I would need.
As for the rest, I think it is a very delicate balance to reach positive outcomes. What that balance is idk.
The big thing here is Trump uses it as a bargaining process to get what he wants.
I too have many questions.
I've been going back over what Trump has said about tariffs with China, and he has been saying that he's going to impose at least a 60% tariff across the board on goods imported from China.