this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Tariffs on something from China doesn't get paid by China. It gets paid by the US consumer.
And I don't mean that like "China pays the tariff so the end result is a higher price for the consumer"...I mean, literally, China doesn't pay it. China sees no difference in the cost of importing things to us. Nothing changes for them.
It is literally paid, first, by the company that imports the goods.
It is then paid again by the consumer in the higher price that they charge, and it it then paid again by the Chinese exporter in terms of reduced volume of exports.
Is there an exemption, say, if a Chinese person were immigrating to the US and they already owned an EV for several years and wanted to bring it with them? Or is there a massive import duty on things like that?
In some cases if you don’t tariff it, the US consumer ends up paying for it in the long run. Artificially underpriced products are meant to drive domestic industries and other competitors out of business. You then end up with a monopoly that charges exorbitant prices at a later date and everyone domestically is out of a good paying job.
That already happens domestically with large players. See Amazon and basically every small business out there. And we don't even get a bunch of jobs for it, because Amazon has mastered the use of robotics to minimize job production.