Old 04-25-2025 | 09:05 AM
  #19  
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Turbosina
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From: Guppy Gear Slinger
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Originally Posted by ImSoSuss
You rushed to buy Chinese plastic crap from Walmart before the Tariffs? Panic much?
I guess you don't realize that more than half of the products imported into the USA aren't finished products. They are raw materials that US companies use to create finished products, and that supports millions and millions of US jobs. To believe that these tariffs won't have a dramatically negative effect on our economy is to be wilfully ignorant. Your characterization of imports as "cheap Chinese crap" makes it quite clear that you have little clue about how modern economics actually works.

Let's take coffee for example. One percent of the US coffee bean supply is grown domestically, because we don't have places where coffee can be grown outside of Hawaii. So we import 99 percent of our beans. Employees here in the good ol' USA then grind, roast and serve that coffee. Plus the truck drivers who deliver the beans to roasteries, coffee shops, and supermarkets. What happens when tariffs spike the price of coffee? Demand declines, and that directly affects the livelihoods of everyone involved in the economic chain that allows you to drink coffee in the first place.

From the aluminum that goes into Boeing aircraft, to industrial diamonds that are utterly essential to some heavy industries, to the rubber that goes into car tires -- all of these raw materials either aren't possible to produce domestically, or can only be produced at vastly higher costs. These materials are combined into finished products right here in the US, and millions upon millions of American people earn their living from assembling, designing, transporting, and selling these products. Tariffs simply make their lives more difficult, by making it harder for consumers and businesses to buy the products created. I guess people like you just choose to ignore this reality, because you think of imports as merely "Chinese crap."

And for the record, I've never once entered a Walmart.
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