this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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The reality is that practically everything consumed in the US is made in China or sources components from China. What the tariffs mean in practice is that input costs are going to go up across the board making everything more expensive. Given that huge numbers of people are already living on subsistence wages, they don't have much room to absorb a sudden cost of living increase.
https://edconway.substack.com/p/globalisation-is-a-far-far-bigger
Wow, that is a startling shift over a relatively short period.
I saw another post earlier this week where Walmart's policy was being discussed on Twitter. People were absolutely insistent that Walmart's price increases wouldn't affect the things they buy because they (cough) only buy American made products. These folks actually think all of their food is locally grown, or that all of their gasoline is produced in the US. (Yes, a large portion is, but never all of it.)
And of course there's still the continuing discussions about how tariffs will somehow force more products to get made in the US. Yeah that's not happening either, companies are just moving manufacturing to other countries that will be less affected by the tariffs. I haven't seen a single corporation yet publicly announce that "hey you know what, we'll just give up our profit margins and pay a ton of money for entitled Americans to pick their noses instead of building your cheap 500-inch TV." But gee, you know who would have built those products cheaply and locally? All those immigrants y'all are so desperate to kick out of the country. Why it's almost as if MAGA can't find enough ways to screw themselves.
The supply chains are so complex at this point that most people have absolutely no clue how and where anything is produced. Nor do they understand how hard it is to actually create supply chains from the ground up. The US has been trying to decouple for China for close to a decade now with basically nothing to show for it. Trump and his crew clearly don't understand this, and think that if they just play tough with China then they'll get what they want. The US is headed for some really bad times in the near future.
It's also worth mentioning that US trade is only a small portion of the overall Chinese economy. So, even if Trump cut China off entirely, the impact there isn't going to be dramatic. It'll hurt, but not nearly as much as it'll hurt the US https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/EXPIMP
I suspect what we'll see if Trump continues his belligerent ways is that China just says screw it, cuts us off completely, and leaves the whole nation hanging. There will be the crowd who are fine with it because they somehow imagine China is hurting even worse, but eventually the reports will filter in from other countries about how China is doing just peachy, taking away even that imagined victory from MAGA.
When the war starts, we will see what economic disintegration means.
The west is absolutely not prepared for a war with a peer adversary even if there was any logic to it. Unfortunately, I suspect that our glorious rulers would rather burn the planet down than accept that their hegemony is now over.