Trump says Canada and Mexico to be hit with 25% tariffs on Saturday

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I am. Black market tacos taste fantastic if you ignore the numerous issues.

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I'm sad seeing all these "Enjoy the collapse, losers!" comments.

Most people on most Lemmy instances, especially here, probably made it VERY clear we didn't want this pathetic handbag-hobgoblin in charge. Yes, a lot of our countrymen voluntarily gave up their brains for his bullshit, but not all of us, by a long shot.

Policy stopped being directed by the will of the people a long time ago. We aren't levying tariffs. He is. We , human beings just like you, are trying to keep it together as a grotesque parody of the fall of the Roman Empire plays out around us.

Stop falling for that tribalist nonsense. Love has no borders, and hate is too busy drawing them. Support your brothers and sisters on this Earth, because when the evil wealthy masters of this world set their sights on your democracy, it could happen to your home just as easily, don't be fooled.

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I think the problem is that these tariffs are, for the most part, untargeted. They aren't a "tax" on "specific imports". They're a blanket tax on all imports from many countries.

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We're reaching the "find out" stage.

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Then you get to speedrun to a corporate theocracy with President Vance.

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The way you increase productivity is via exports, not artificially increasing the cost of goods. A sin tax is when you want to stop people from doing things so you make it more expensive. If you want to increase American cement production, you subsidize production.
Adding a tarrif to Canadian cement imports increases cost for imported cement, and encourages domestic producers to increase costs to match. If the competition just got 15% more expensive, there's no reason for me to not raise my prices 14%.
If the government comes in and says they'll pay me $15/ton of cement I produce, that encourages me to produce more cement and lower the price to sell it. Now I'm producing more, and I need to hire another machine operator and the economy grows because the lowered cost of cement makes people more willing to do things that need cement.

Tariffs are really only good for counteracting other countries subsidies. If Canada were paying manufacturers $20 a ton to produce cement, then applying a $20/ton tarrif makes the prices unbiased.

It's why our agricultural subsidies are viewed poorly by food scarce nations: we lower the overall market cost for food, and they can't afford to subsidize their own production, and returning equilibrium on imports would starve people, so they're trapped in a cycle of being dependent on imported subsidized food while living next to fallow farms.

Canada and Mexico aren't subsidizing their export industries, and a lot of what we're trading is in things we can't or don't want to handle. You can't increase American uranium production, off the top of my head.

We had a position of trade strength, which meant that we could afford to import more than we produced because our intangibles were worth more, and what we exported was worth more. Import steel and export tractors. Now we're saying we want to stop importing steel, making it harder to export tractors, so that we can bring back low paying dangerous jobs.

If you want to see productivity grow trumps way, go get a job as a farmhand picking spinach. Because his policy is basically that we need less engineers and more farm hands.

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You should have voted then lmao

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The Simpsons have not been wrong yet....

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I'm glad you started your dissertation with "the way you x is via y" because it immediately informed me that I was reading the work of a ln expert genius and as a smooth brain, when a genius writes, I read.

One question, wouldn't higher prices on imported cements sort of make local cements automatically cheaper, giving them an advantage without asking them to cut corners? In a free market you will often see a "race to the bottom" on goods, whereby manufactures and producers will cut costs so low that they lose money, so long as there is some other incentives that would lead to profit. Video game consoles are a common example. The console is sold at a loss with the expectation that they will make up the difference on the consumables, games and related services.

If local competitors can produce for lower cost than competitors it may drive more people, who generally just want to save money, to local businesses, creating demand, driving growth.

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I thought it was targetted but again in California its all items sold ate taxed and some at a higher rate.

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This massively violates the USMCA that he signed

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Even if they do, I expect that businesses won't drop their prices much. If the consumers have gotten used to it, it's free money for the business. Same with the supply chain issue pricing from COVID.

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You didn’t vote. So enjoy the collapse

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Video game consoles are sold at a loss on occasion because the marginal cost of game sales is extremely high. There's no associated product to pair with cement that would drive you to sell it at a loss.

My point was that yes, it will drive people to local businesses, because they will be cheaper. Local businesses have no reason to keep their prices the same if the competition just got more expensive however.

I'm glad you found my comment informative. I'd hate to think I was talking to someone who wanted to say their opinion and then got defensive if someone disagreed with them. It's a sign of someone with at least a wrinkle or two that they're open to discussing their thoughts.

For more insight from people even more knowledgeable than me:

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-tariffs
https://www.businessinsider.com/krugman-trump-tariffs-immigration-deportation-grocery-prices-wealth-taxes-policy-2025-1
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-end-of-north-america
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/

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Everyone so god damn snarky on Lemmy.

I don't "honestly think" that. I don't really have an opinion. I'm just explaining the article to you.

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He doesn't give a fuck about anything. It's so tiring that people assume that he is rational and he cares.

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It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't get fucked by proxy of America electing an old senile fascist.

I am Canadian and I will feel Trump's presidency for a while

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Nowhere in my post did I say I didn't vote.

Were you responding to someone else maybe, or you just clownin'?

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Nowhere in my post did I even hint that I didn't vote.

Your vivid imagination can be put to better use than inventing reasons to heap smugness on internet strangers.

(Not enjoying the collapse BTW thx. )

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Tariffs only makes thing more expensive for everyone.

Let's say you import steel at X$/ton and it cost Y$ locally where X < Y. You add a tariff T to make the imported steel on par with local steel.

Local steel still is as expensive and any production that uses imported steel now cost more.

Nothing went down in price, only up.

Now, there is a discussion to be had about buying local, but the immediate effect is that things will cost more even if manufacturers switch to local steel because they pay more for the same quantity no matter what.

This is a simplified version of the situation, but it explains the issue.

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Trump says Canada and Mexico to be hit with 25% tariffs on Saturday