A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
Related communities:
They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff.
This is probably what Trump thinks, too. I can easily believe he is that stupid.
I'm also wondering just what the fuck Trump and co. are going to do with all the money obtained from these tariffs. Just, like, spend it all on hookers and blow or what? Remember how you all believed this was the party of "low taxes?" Yeah, guess what a tariff is, fuckers.
This is probably what Trump thinks, too.
100%. If he isn't reading it from a script that someone else wrote, he knows nothing about the topics he's talking about.
He even boasts about "knowing more than anyone about XYZ", yet, it can't expand on the subject, can't answer questions about it, is vague, and reminds me of how really bad LLMs answer questions.
I found some additional articles on what he said about this, and he did indeed flat out say he expects the "other countries" to pay the tariffs. For instance, this.
A sweeping tariff policy will kill two birds with one stone, Trump says: It could find a new source of revenue for the U.S. government, which could offset losses from lowering or eliminating certain forms of income tax, while extracting money from rival governments.
That's not how tariffs have worked at any point in history.
Yup. He does a great job "selling" ideas that simply aren't grounded in reality.
Like that wall that Mexico was going to pay for. What an idiot. Did his base think the United States would just send Mexico a bill for work completed and expect them to pay it? You couldn't make this buffoonery up!
Is the owner of the company purchasing a year's worth in order to keep the price they charge down, or in order to raise prices in February when their customers expect it because of the new tariffs, and pocket the difference? While having avoided paying bonuses?
Obviously I don't know the business in question, but it's quite possible that the company has a bunch of longer running contracts that would become a loss if the inputs become much more expensive.
Of course, businesses will use the opportunity to charge more, but sudden price hikes are a very real problem.
This is almost certainly what's happening. The proposed tariffs will be very hard on American businesses and devastating for the consumer. It's quite literally a fairly severe tax on domestic companies and the American people. But, honestly, we could do with a less consumerism in this country. Unfortunately, it's likely to cause a tough economic downturn that will hurt poor people the most.
Large and small manufacturing companies have contracts for orders for months to years out with set prices, some of which might have wiggle room for costs but not to this extent. Plus manufacturing already tries to balance out costs across projects due to fluctuating prices for materials. If their materials double (or more) in price they will be screwed by the contracts and guaranteed to lose money on all of them.
Buying at the current prices means they will have to pay to have the materials stored in a warehouse, which will cut into their planned profits for those existing contracts. Hell, they might be buying at a higher cost than they normally would when fulfilling the contracts.
The company is getting screwed, not trying to fleece customers or their employees.
Without having more detail I can't speak with certainty, but, general principles of inventory management and cash flow discourage having a surplus of stock, as that ties up a significant amount of working capital in the costs of storing and handling it all - you risk not being able to pay your liabilities because you've sunk all your funds into inventory that hasn't yet sold and generated more revenue.
Companies often have longer term contracts with specific prices agreed that can't always be easily changed. Those contacts could quite easily become unprofitable if there are sudden increases to the direct costs of fulfilling them. So, rather than trying to fuck customers, this company is likely trying to stock-up at current market prices to ride-out the first year of tariffs, but in doing so, needs a large injection of working capital to cover the expenditure (hence cancelling bonuses), and also puts itself in a very vulnerable position where cash flow is concerned by tying up that capital in inventory - any further sudden and unexpected costs could lead to the business folding.
Unfortunately, this kind of ignorance comes from a weakening of our education system. It's not just on them that this has happened, and its only going to get worse if we don't try to stop it.
Hey, exactly! The fact that we are even allowing this nonsense is a true testimony to how extremely important education is! If you remain ignorant, you are more easily persuaded to believe anything because you aren't taught what "bullshit" is, and have no real ability to think for yourself.
Education is freedom from ignorance.
And that's why red states are slashing school budgets en masse and continue to have consistently terrible academic performance.
I don't know if this post is true or not. However, a lot of people don't know history, civics, & economics. (This is the result of the Reagan & Bushes dismantling of the education system.) I've told a lot of people to look up the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the impact it had on our and the global economy. Tariffs will start a trade war. That's what happened to our farmers the last time Trump was in office. He ended up having to bail out farmers which cost more than the tariff brought into the government. The Chinese simply bought their soy beans from other countries instead of paying for ours. There were a lot of farmers that lost their farms then.
I have been told many times to feel bad for those farmers, that they aren't idiots, etc.
I thought I ran of fucks for them but a few more just flew out like butterflies from a dusty chest.
I hope ever single one that put up those massive Trump signs loses their family farms to big corporations.
We need fewer corporate farms, which are dirty as fuck now let alone after they gut the USDA. I hope that they lose their family farm to two gay dudes from Vermont who got really into organic gardening and decided to cash in their b&b for corgis to start growing high quality produce right here in America's heartland.
I'm sure the corporate farmers were happy to buy up that land and cut the trump admin a nice check for the convenience.
To be honest, this kind of feels to me like the boss was just looking for an excuse to not have to pay workers.
I mean, he got it and it's actually a good one. Uncertain finances tend to cut into bonuses of all types.
The truly enraging thing about the voters who said they voted for trump due to economic concerns is HOW IN THE GODDAMNED FUCK do they think he's going to fix anything? To the extent that a president can change the cost of living, among the worst ideas is probably to fucking add fees to imports. This is his one idea and yet no one can explain to him the extremely simple negative effect that it would have on consumers.
This absolute fucking dope had one terrible idea for helping lower prices (which will certainly raise them) and the voters lapped it up without thinking. America is full of morons.
Studies generally show the economy does better under Democrats than Republicans, in measurements of CPI, GDP, job growth, and unemployment. Republicans however have a massive propaganda machine that has gaslit the country in believing the opposite. Frequently this is backed by short term plays that make things "feel" better but cause significant long term problems. Like a CEO firing the QA team, line goes up this quarter and by the time the consequences arrive they're gone and blame the next guy.
They're operating under a lot of propaganda, and no understanding of economics. They're ignorant of the fact that Trump inherited the economy that Obama fixed, which is why at the time under Trump things were better. They're ignorant of the fact that Trump fucked everything up with his handling of the pandemic, previous tarrifs, and in turn fucked the economy up on the way out. They're ignorant that Biden was trying to clean up Trump's mess, and instead assign blame to Biden.
And every after all that, there is still the added fact that the president doesn't directly control the economy, and has limited options. But that doesn't matter to them. They've been sold a simple solution to a complicated problem.
Trump's Tariffs are BIDENS FAULT! And they'll STILL be Biden's Fault EVERY TIME I vote for the man who LITERALLY campaigned on creating these Tariffs!
"you won't have to vote anymore" --the diaper, july 2024
Maybe it's because I took economics as far back as high school, but even just from reading high school history books I knew what a Tariff was. How the FUCK did they not know that?
I am also willing to bet that they will eventually blame the democrats for breaking the system, as they always do.
There’s a fair portion of people 21+ that have difficulty playing blackjack because they can’t add to 21. Last night I was asked by a grown man what 9+1+3 is.
You’d be surprised how incompetent some people are.
Hold MAGA voters accountable for their choices. Every. Single. Day.
Thanks Trump.
I'm about to print off about a million of those "I did that!!" stickers that the magats loved to stick on gas pumps. You better believe those things are going everywhere.
I mean the whole point is paying a tariff so American companies make the goods instead for less.
But if paying Chinese poverty wages and tariffs is still less than paying Americans to do it, then guess what they're going to do?
It's also dumb to just assume that foreign companies can just flip a switch and start building/assembling whatever they sell in America. You need facilities, you need to hire employees, you need to train employees. You can't just pick up your factory, drop it in Kansas, and just slot people into the building to work it right away.
Also, unless your plan is to exclusively export to the US, then it's less cost effective to open up new facilities in the US. You just raise prices and and have the consumers take the hit for the tariff. There's also the problem of logistics for raw materials for whatever products your manufacturing. Those also tend to cost more to acquire stateside.
The worst part is that policy is only a single bullet in the policy foot gun Trump has loaded. It gets even more expensive when the low cost labor is suddenly deported and/or put in camps. Which I realize isn't even the worst thing about the immigration policy, but just pointing out that it too has consequences to these same people.
Global trade drove the cost of supplies and goods down to the lowest available prices, so while setting tariffs may encourage local production because it makes overseas less attractive, the price of goods still goes up on both scenarios.
If moved locally, there will be more local labor required for production but it's not clear if that is a net benefit.
Hypothetically under globalism more developed countries shed their "dirty manufacturing labor jobs" and move more people upmarket. Of course this is matter of nonstop debate among economists because as we all know the whole population of a country can't move upmarket together and a lot of people were/are screwed because of lack of education and opportunity to develop themselves.
In an ideal implemention of this, more people would be moving to the arts, self expression, and technology, while fewer are involved in survival activities like shelter and food.
I think the unsolved problem now is that average people believe way too much of that wealth went to the top while the middle class is working harder than ever and getting less.
Guise, I'm struggling. Part of me says...let them all burn for their "fuck around and find out".
But I know that isn't completely right. I just, am, so, angry (and sad).
Will probably choose the let them burn route.
On the other hand, there’s nothing you can do anyway, so the only option is to let them burn.
I posted a meme last week before the election about a lot of my fellow Americans being depressingly ignorant and a bunch of people got pissed off about it.
I'm just saying...
Just read estimates his tariffs would cost the average household 7600 annually. I told my folks and they didn't understand why I thought it was funny. I told them they wanted this.
Wow, the turn around time on that was fast.
Life under Trump in 2024 will be orders of magnitude worse than life under him in 2016. It won't take long for Americans to begin to feel strong consequences of the election result.
I guess I forgot some people knew what to expect from a second Trump term and would plan accordingly. It would have been nice if this guy had sat these people down and had this talk before the election.
This tells me the information pipe to voters is broken, and hacked.
People live in their own social media realities. There has always been ignorance, but it's never been so widely personalized. And Trump and the GoP played it like a fiddle.
And just watch, the Dems are going to learn precisely nothing from this and campaign like it's the 1950s again, thinking policy was their problem.
And it's sooo typical of their hyper-inflated personal and national egos:
They didn't wonder for one minute why on earth foreign companies would pay up. For the honor or doing business with the greatest country on earth tm? Because they'd have no choice of other buyers, since no other countries has car / computer / whatever manufacturers who'd buy their products instead?
They. Are. So. Fucking. Insular.
Some companies have already said they're going to pass the extra cost onto consumers, so while the companies will pay more, they'll make a lot of that back from the consumers that can still afford the products.
Electronics will probably be the hardest hit, with prices of cell phones, laptops, and game consoles increasing quite a bit.
Good. Hope it hurts.
It will.
Unfortunately, it will also hurt those who wanted nothing to do with Trump's lies.
Everyone, except the rich, will suffer. Thanks for voting! /s
Most people on this planet are dumb as shit. More at 11
not exactly shocking, not the first time Trump has made tariffs. Last time they drove the cost of house construction up.
This is what happened in the UK with Brexit.
2025, Chinese year of the Leopard
It’s like Brexit, but in America.