There is no point. Despite being effective illegal immigrants, ducks regularly self-deport each year. This keeps them one step ahead of any enforcement action. The problem is that the northern border wall just isnt tall enough.
I know one US business that used to make niche electronic product. Most components they used were from China. Got hit by the tariffs that wiped all the operating profit. Guy also had to sell his home and is now couchsurfing. Business is unlikely going to recover.
Of course he considered making chips and other components in the US, but he was few billions short to start the fab.
Good thing that the US cancelled collection of unemployment stats just as all these sorts of negative business effects were happening. If a job is lost in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Reminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.
From the other side of the Atlantic this sounds like straight Thatcherism, in which Chicago-school monetarism was an ideological anti-union weapon, and the Thatcher cabinet was not coy about it. However I think the US went that way first even if Reaganomics came later.
I think a lot of that in the US got spun up with Nixon, Reagan brought a lot of it to the mainstream though. Both of them hated unions with a passion that is for sure.
Unions are the best of all the bad solutions we’ve come up with so far for labor to compete with capital. The worst of course is collectivism through government, though that’s being tried again…
The best solution is antitrust enforcement and removal of anti-competitive laws/rules lobbied for by incumbents. When companies have to compete with each other for labor and customers, wages go up and prices go down. Whey they consolidate they can charge monopoly rents.
Unions often even make this worse because they'll latch on to a monopolistic employer and then lobby with them to retain the monopoly at the expense of all the workers who are their customers rather than their employees.
Sure there are a number of Democratic Socialists and other progressives winning elections and driving changes but everything I’ve seen policy-wise has been directly targeted areas where unchecked capitalism has clearly failed their constituents. Even in those cases, there’s no dramatic shift towards government ownership.
They use interest rates to protect against inflationary (and deflationary) spirals, which are known to be devastating. The effect on the unemployment rate is a known, and predictable, side effect. But formal unemployment is small compared to labour force dropout anyway, and the latter is not necessarily so sensitive to economic conditions anyway. Besides which, the unemployment rate can't really keep going down forever.
Had it not been for COVID you'd be at more than 16 years without a(n NBER-determined) recession, long enough to suggest a fundamental shift vs. how things worked in the several decades before that.
Have you ever read about people burning piles of German currency because it was better than using it to buy firewood with? Not to say we would get there, but allowing inflation to run is not kinder.
Inflation like that doesn’t just happen. It can only be the outcome of explicit government policy. Like in post WW1 Germany they wanted to wipe the value of all domestic government debt they accumulated during the war.
Those are more recent examples, but I think Germany is still a more visceral example for a lot of Western nations because Germany was a high tech, educated industrial nation that was hit with such massive problems from government policy. It's closer to home. Other countries are (wrongfully) easier to dismiss as being just too different from our wealthy and enlightened selves.
I am imagining Mexican cartels smuggling hardware into the US...
(But seriously I do not know how good US Customs is but in my country every day millions of packages from Asia arrive and they are checking not even a percent).
Counterfeits don't happen when you buy parts from reputable distributors (digikey, mouser, Newark, TTI, arrow, etc) that are not "marketplace" items. These parts often come right from the manufacturer or from a domestic distributor for the manufacturer. You get counterfeits when you buy from brokers.
Often with older electronics designs, the parts the engineers originally picked are no longer made. It's not the end of the world, there are solutions. Sometimes the vendor changes the part number due to a process change or the part design is sold to another company and goes under a new number. You can also sometimes find drop in compatible parts (common for the 7400/5400 series chips), these may be in a different package so you might have to design an interposer or deadbug it. The worst option is finding old stock using a broker. There are legit brokers that will source old stock and "refurbish" them for you (called re-lifeing). But there are also shady brokers that will buy counterfeits (or get tricked into buying them) that may or may not actually work. Sometimes the counterfeits are relabeled parts that are compatible but the new label gets a higher price because they aren't being made any more. Sometimes the counterfeit is actually a totally different design that is shoehorned into its desired purpose (like a new microcontroller masquerading as an old processor or ASIC). Other times it's just some random junk pulled from e-waste that's been relabelled. Other times you'll get a counterfeit that comes from a stolen design. Even when the counterfeit functions, it may not perform to the same spec as the original part (very important for military spec parts) or will have other characteristics that make it incompatible with the rest of the design (like drawing too much or too little current). When it comes to engineering in ISO9001, traceability is a huge thing and brokers just can't provide that.
At my job, we have an "absolutely no brokers" rule. They simply cannot guarantee that what they provide is genuine. If a legitimate distributor doesn't have stock of a discontinued part, they'll never have stock of it. Brokers will tell you what you want to hear while they go out and try to make it happen. I'm not saying all brokers are shady but if you are considering buying from a broker, you should be instead considering how you can replace that part.
a purported niche/low-volume electronics, but the profit is somehow dependent on BOM price? a tariff bump on a small BOM doesn’t take you from profitable to homeless.
if that happened, the business already had seriously bad margins, bad cash flow, over-leverage, or maybe he was just doing it out of love getting paid maybe back for his time or not.
tariffs might’ve hurt, but they don’t collapse a healthy niche hardware company where buyers are presumably also into the niche.
seems weird i dont get it. can you explain further?
gamers nexus did a great (and very long) video on the impact of tariffs on US computer businesses. Some of the manufacturers went into quite a bit of detail breaking down their costs and how tariffs would render some products so unprofitable that they would cease to serve the US market. Not sure if it necessarily applies to a niche/low volume business, but the impacts on a larger business were eye opening:
For example, the company can raise its prices. How well that works depends on whether there is competition for the company's product. If the competition is also hit by the tariffs, then they're on an even playing field. If the competition is using native parts, then the competitor gets the business.
There's concern that if all our chips come from one country, they could cut the supply off and make demands. That's called an "embargo".
It's also done to protect local industries, hence the term "protectionism". For example, Canada's large tariffs on American milk are there to protect the local Canadian milk producers.
AFAIK, Trump's tariffs are meant to serve the following purposes:
1. so critical supplies, like chips, will be produced domestically
2. to raise money for the treasury
3. to convince countries that have high tariffs to lower them in exchange for the US to reciprocate in lowering ours
4. to incentivize foreign manufacturers to invest in factories in the US
5. to use them as a negotiating tool for other terms favorable to US interests
These are not crazy things. We'll see how things play out.
They’re not crazy goals, but the way these tariffs are being implemented does not further most of them.
3 and 5 are undermined by the fact that even nations with positive trade surpluses with the US, and countries like Japan with Trump first term negotiated trade treaties (which for Japan included major concessions already) are being hit with these tariffs.
1 and 4 are a problem because many of the inputs into building out US manufacturing capacity come from abroad and are hit by tariffs. Secondly many of the manufacturing inputs into making products in these factories would come from abroad and be tariffed, unless those supplies are bootstrapped domestically first but there is no policy to ensure this. Thirdly as soon as the tariffs go away, these factories would become uneconomical, so they are a gamble on that not happening in the lifetime of the factories.
Finally, who’s going to build and operate this huge new manufacturing sector? Infrastructure construction relies heavily on immigrant labour that’s being driven out, so does actual manufacturing, and there are no hordes of unemployed Americans lining up for manufacturing jobs. It’s addressing a problem that largely doesn’t exist, to build out less efficient more expensive ways to make stuff, in a way that can’t work anyway.
Manufacturing investment surged in the last few years with the introduction of the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction acts. It’s going to be hard to disentangle the continuing effects of that from the effects of the Tariffs, but it’s hard to see how the Tariffs can have a positive effect.
What leads you to believe that the implementation of tariffs under this administration was done for the purposes that you have enumerated?
It seems that you're operating under the normally reasonable assumption that these policies were implemented after careful consideration with specific goals in mind. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the people involved in this are doing what they're doing for well-thought out reasons or ones that are meant to benefit America.
Agreed. Tariffs should be used like a scalpel, precise and targeting very specific things to encourage development or even the playing field. The tariffs that have been implemented so far are more like a sledge hammer, used to extort and intimidate.
> If the competition is also hit by the tariffs, then they're on an even playing field.
That assumes the customers are price insensitive. If you're making vintage parts for hobbyists and archivists, maybe they're not; maybe they don't get a raise just because the price went up and your thing is the thing they cut out of the budget when it all won't fit anymore.
Do you run a business with good margin, good cash flow, optimally leveraged and for profit? If yes, please tell us more about how tariffs have helped you.
Are your materials and supplies also locally made? The same for each of those suppliers. Very few things are entirely made in the US. How about your equipment? Are the motors, tools, electronics, etc also made in the US? Even companies making stuff in the US are being hit. Very few companies have their entire supply change within the US.
Importantly, the other countries are paying for the tariffs! What happened here is probably just an error, a mistake on UPS' part. There's no way US citizens should be the one paying tariffs, no one understands tariffs better than the US.
When there is enough demand for vintage parts, it'll motivate someone to create a time machine to manufacture them in larger volume in the past and bring them to the present. Win win.
Quite funny to see the US import the utterly disastrous "Import Substitution" model that destroyed India's fledgling industrial base that was left-over after the British left.
I understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated.
First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)
So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.
Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.
Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)
So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)
Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)
You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.
> First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
> Motor vehicles, bodies and trailers, and parts: actual light vehicles produced down 11%, real gross output of vehicles up 39%, real value-added up 125%. Inputs as a percent of gross output rose from 74% to 77%.
> Steel mills & manufacturing from purchased steel: in raw tonnage, steel shipped is down 18%, real gross output is up 5%, real value-added is up 125%. Inputs as a percentage of gross output rose from 73% to 74%.
> If the quality adjustment is 32%, the value-added increase becomes 652%!
> Another “quirk” of real value-added is that inflation adjustments and quality adjustments get applied retroactively, which creates wild inflections from small changes. In simplified terms, let’s say that, in 1997, car sales were $100 billion, and were still $100 billion twenty years later in 2017, with no changes due to inflation or input costs. Input costs in both years were $75 billion, meaning $25 billion in value-added in both years. The only thing that changed, let’s say, was that the “quality” of cars got 10% higher thanks to software innovations like Apple CarPlay and design improvements like crumple zones for safety—neither of which add to recurring production input costs. So, let’s say, our economists would adjust the 2017 figure to be $110 billion in “real” terms and show a small 10% increase, right?
>
> Instead, the way it works is that a recent “base year” is taken, in this case 2017, and the base year is never adjusted. So rather than adjusting from $100 billion to $110 billion, the “real” output of 1997 is retroactively adjusted to be lower, in this case $91 billion, to get the same 10% increase. But then, our value-added in 1997 has fallen to $16 billion, and the increase in “real value-added manufacturing” has jumped from 10% to around 50%! We have created a 50% increase in car manufacturing not by actually producing 50% more cars or “objectively” making cars 50% better, but just by playing around with statistics and definitions.
> However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
That's fine and indeed about the only way it even can be done in a country with higher wages. The question is, why can't we do more of that? Basic simple components like capacitors should be possible to automate, so what's preventing it? Why don't we have policies tuned towards causing more domestic automation?
The number of jobs won't be what it was when it was done by hand, but that's never coming back either way, and some is better than none. Meanwhile you reduce dependency on adversarial countries.
> the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset.
There is another alternative: Lower the cost of domestic goods, i.e. lower taxes or provide credits to domestic manufacturers. For example, allow capital investments in domestic manufacturing to be deducted immediately rather than over time.
This is actually one of the longstanding major problems with the US tax code right now. It creates a preference for international supply chains because that allows profits to be shifted into countries with lower tax rates and penalizes purely domestic supply chains.
Subsidies are a definite tool, and subsidies are existent in many industries. Lots of farm products for example are subsidized.
Of course they encounter their own political hurdles. Think Solar, Electric Cars, CHIPS act etc. But they become political footballs, even to the detriment of local interests. (Witness Florida reps voting to repeal CHIPS even though Florida got a lot of CHIPS money.)
So yes, companies want consistency in the supply chain, and current US politics doesn't offer that.
... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent] can afford to swim against the current in many product categories, but most people cannot afford to swim against the current in most product categories.
Dang it no! That isn’t remotely how deflationary works.
There’s always things being supplied for at lower prices. That is what product or service improvements do.
Your car is vastly safer than a Ford Model T. Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.
Firms reduce the cost of production and get to sell more to larger numbers of consumers. Total revenue = $ value * N customers.
You expand further on your position in the second part of your para, but that is fundamentally about how wages have not gone up over time. Which has nothing to do with inflation. It has MUCH more to do with the labor markets, and the pay people are getting for their labor.
> Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.
You're talking about something different than what I was - improvements that make a product better without the price going up (because the cost is small enough to become the new baseline, either by market stickiness or regulation). Those don't affect CPI, and therefore make life better at the same price. So I agree with where you're coming from there.
My point is about the manufacturing/product innovations that make prices go down (regardless of whether quality gets better or worse). Take for example offshoring, which was sold as maybe your local factory will have to lay off some people but we will have less expensive items at the store so we will all win on average. But it's a trick because the Fed creates a feedback loop that makes it so prices cannot go down on average.
Wages haven't risen as fast as consumer price inflation because that new money is injected into the financial industry (the fake "fiscal responsibility" of the Republican party). And when too much newly created money finally leads to too much demand for labor and wages start rising, the Fed then tamps down on the monetary creation.
Clearly monetary policy is a big subject, and yes the Fed has specific targets etc in mind.
But I was talking more about a mindset. And of course speaking generally- lots of people (everywhere) have budget constraints.
Having traveled in the US and Europe I'd suggest that in the US "volume" is rewarded as "good". For the same amount of money, "more" is preferred to "good". In contrast in Europe it's less "look how big the plate is" and more about "better quality."
So, to rather over-simply things, I'd describe US food as "bland, loaded with sugar, lots of it", whereas Europe is more "smaller quantities, less processing, more farmer's market".
Not just food. But across the board. Cheap = good.
And yes, I'm talking generally big-picture here - it's a culture thing - there are lots of counter examples if you look hard.
that's so beyond obviously a sarcastic remark. In that regard I'd consider a vast majority of the humans totally capable of detecting dead pan sarcasm both in spoken and written speech.
We need manufacturing in the US. The service economy can't survive long term; you have to make things. Tariffs are not fun, but they are an important part of making that happen.
But, tariffs on used cameras or vintage electronics does not help bring manufacturing back. Let's just bring back the de minimis exemption for things like this. More industry targeted tariffs, fewer blanket tariffs.
No sure why you are being down-voted. Your argument is coherent and correct.
Targeted tariffs on specific goods leads to the development of local production of that good. Lots and lots of countries have these in place.
Blanket tariffs are, of course, useless. The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee, so tarifing Brazil serves no purpose other than taxing coffee consumption.
A surgeon uses a scalpel, not an axe. Used well, tariffs are a very powerful tool. Used badly they create more harm, and don't achieve the goal of promoting local production.
Tariffs which are here today, but gone tomorrow, don't created the stable environment which long-term investment in local production requires.
Scale of the country matters. If Argentina (or any other small to medium size country) require extra work, businesses can just walk away - size of market does not justify extra efforts. Bet is that US market size is big enough that no global business can afford to walk away. At 20% of global GDP, US markets is also big enough to make scaled production feasible.
While tariffs on coffee do not incentivize coffee growing in US they do two things that are very beneficial for US economy
1) People replace coffee with hot cider, infusion tea or some other local substitute good.
2) Tariff on coffee as set up by Trump incentivize coffee producing countries to buy US goods whether it’s oil or cars to make trade balance more equal.
The only question is the scale of above but tariff on coffee is unquestionably help US producers.
Yes, tarifs can change behavior. I'm not sure that's the goal here, and I'm not convinced there's a local alternative to coffee (at the scale Americans drink coffee.)
>> Tariff on coffee as set up by Trump incentivize coffee producing countries to buy US goods whether it’s oil or cars to make trade balance more equal.
Countries don't buy goods, people do. Apparently insulting Canada didn't make them decide to consume more made-in-America goods. I'm not sure that random acts of insulting leads yo the effects you are proposing.
Hawaii would even have mountaineous and that island climate that's good for growing coffee. But labor costs probably mean they couldn't compete even if they tried
Overall there is a lot of manufacturing in the US. What the US doesn't have are manufacturing jobs because labor is more expensive than automation.
Maybe you meant the US should make sure to have some certain types of manufacturing like chips. In that case, targeted programs are a better approach than any sort of tariffs. See the CHIPS act for example.
You're not very good at it though. You're too aristocratic in your thinking - let the coolies make the stuff, we'll consume it.
The reason services are such a big part of your economy is because you can sit in an air conditioned office, send some emails, push some numbers around on a spreadsheet, and call it work.
Or targeted investment in relevant industries, similar to what the previous administration was doing before voters were suckered by the New York con man whose entire campaign was bemoaning everything about our country while apparently having some pretty spicy long-term kompromat hanging over him.
And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.
Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.
And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.
America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.
>America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.
The downside is the insane consumption associated with that. Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution, far more per capita than any other people in the history of the world, much of which is tied to how easy/cheap it is to order shit we don't need. So, good if ya wanna buy cheap pollution, pretty bad if ya care about the next generation.
You may want to take another look at that list. Proudly declaring you’re only the 16th worst per-capita (already very high!) when ahead of you are tiny places like Pulau, New Caledonia, Gibraltar and Curacao is really quite funny.
> For example, we where ranked 16th in terms of CO2 per capita in 2023
For home soil central north american CO2 production, sure.
Things change if such rankings were to account for the CO2 production as a result of satisifying US consumption habits .. the "benefit" of having off shored industry to China is the final goods come to the USofA while the emissions and waste of industry occur elsewhere.
I think the answer is China (CO2 emissions). But the longer answer is that they are mainly making stuff for the US and the EU.
> While China emits over one-third of global CO2, it is also the world’s factory, producing more than one-third of global manufactured goods (IEA, 2024a; Norton, 2024) . Research indicates that China remains the world’s largest generator of embodied trade carbon emissions. The gap between emissions embodied in China’s exports and those in its imports widened from 0.7 GtCO2 in 1990 to 1.8 GtCO2 in 2019 (CGTN, 2024) . According to the Global Carbon Budget, China’s 2021 consumption-based CO2 emissions are about 10% (or 1.2 GtCO2) lower than the territorial emissions (Friedlingstein et al., 2025).
If you are poor, you should be terrified, because what those policies mean is that the rich are pulling the ladder up behind themselves now that they’re rich beyond their wildest dreams.
I had this happen with FedEx. They released the package and delivered it without me paying. I submitted a dispute, which they say could take up to 6 months to process. I hate having this hang over my head, as I don’t want anything going to collections, but figured if I paid it I would have a harder time getting my money back.
Mine was for a watch I got serviced. My own watch that I shipped out being returned to me… not a new import. If I end up having to pay what FedEx is saying I owe, it would have been cheaper for me to buy a new watch than to get it serviced, which is very upsetting. The whole process has been a horrible experience from the very start and I regret the entire thing. I should have just risked getting it serviced locally… or not done it at all.
There's something called a "carnet" for that case.[1] When something is leaving the country temporarily but coming back, there's a way to register that.
This comes up a lot if you're doing trade shows or performances.
As an European, I'm kinda pissed we don't retaliate the duties.
I'd rather take a financial hit than act so weak and passive.
I swear between chat control, selling out EU's privacy to US tech companies (you can check how many times Palantir & others met commission members, it's public), the insanity of the ICE ban and this tariffs passivity I'm very unhappy.
Also, it's too convenient to only focus on material goods when the biggest US exports are gazillions in financial and IT services.
Leaving aside the other (valid) items in your list, reciprocal tarifs really aren't helpful.
Firstly, they're unnecessary. Just do what Canadians are doing. Stop buying US goods. Stop going to the US on holiday. Shop keepers get the hint real quick.
Secondly, they just make goods more expensive for you. They gave no impact on American producers.
So it may feel like the EU is doing nothing. But really, there's nothing they need to do. Tarifs are a tax levied by the US govt on US citizens. Sure demand might drop a bit in the short term, but that just drives producers to find other markets. Which in the long run is a good thing.
I feel the exact opposite (regarding reciprocal tariffs).
If your neighbor makes demands and threatens to shoot themselves in the foot if you don't accept, responding by shooting yourself in the face does not seem like a good tactic.
US tariff policy gifts European manufacturers with a competitive advantage.
A small example from a hobby of mine: electronic music, synthesis, audio gadgets, etc. The last decade or two has seen an explosion of innovation in this space driven by small boutique outfits on both sides of the Atlantic. This has only been made possible because of access to Chinese expertise in manufacturing.
The effect of US tariffs is to hurt everyone - but hurt US based companies more. If based in the EU, you pay 0% duty on your low-value-add Chinese inputs and sell finished products to customers - duty free to 450m inhabitants of the EU and with 15% tariff to the US. The same operation based in the US - pays 100% or more on inputs - making it uncompetitive in both markets (for any reasonable range of margin). This is just one small niche/corner of the economy where US-based companies are seeing profits being squeezed.
The other reason to avoid emulating US policy regarding tariffs, is the impact of the flip-flopping and uncertainty on industrial and manufacturing investment. How can anyone intelligently make a long-term (decades) investment decision to build a manufacturing facility in the US when at any moment, your input costs could increase 100%? Or the tariffs you were relying on to allow you to compete with foreign operations could suddenly be lowered as part of a "deal". Or they could go up and down within the space of months or even weeks? Or that in 3 years, the policy will be complete reversed?
Introducing uncertainty and volatility into trade policy might seem like a winning move if you view the world in game theoretic terms - that the global economy is a zero-sum game. I feel that the current US executive sees the world this way - if any other country is doing well, then it must be at the expense of the USA and vice-versa. And this basic misunderstanding of trade and economics is driving these self-harming policies.
As a fellow European, given we have no influence over US policy, I suggest standing back as the US re-learns the painful lesson of history regarding trying to stimulate your economy by making industrial and manufacturing inputs more expensive and adding volatility and uncertainty to the business environment. It sucks for everyone globally because the world isn't zero-sum, the USA suffering doesn't benefit others, so the best policy for Europe is to just refuse to play the game and sit it out.
The world's been through many past periods of tariffs. Generally the countries that do a lot end up hurting themselves - see say Argentina, near wealthiest in the world around 1890, now way down the list. Neighbours like Brazil that thought we'll tariff too have been meh. Countries like Singapore that went the other way and had zero tariffs got rich - from not much per capita to overtaking the US in that case.
I just got an invoice from ups to pay a $16 brokerage fee to jpmorgan for collecting a $0.60 tariff on a sticker included in a box with a custom keyboard shipped from Taiwan. Seems like wall street is making out better than the US on this arrangement
Yeah, I noped-out when I saw eBay's writeup on tariffs owed by the buyer (not paid by the seller):
"Shipping carriers or US Customs usually charge $5–$30 in processing fees. Add the item price, import fees, and processing fees to estimate your final cost."
Not something I'm doing for a $5 item... I'll sit back and wait until the Supreme Court finds the tariffs are illegal, and the Fed has to pay every cent back to the businesses, suddenly sending the US spiraling into the biggest budget deficit in history.
Tariffs do not always 100% immediately get passed on to buyer.
If there's a $100 product you'd like to purchase and there's a 100% tariff, it won't be $200.
That product was made abroad, let's for $20. So the tariff should be $20, not $100.
The US-based owner will go to the supplier, say they're getting squeezed by tariffs and first they'll try to see what they can do to recategorize the tariff, or negotiate with their supplier to absorb some of the expense. Let's say that got it down to $15. The owner still doesn't want to increase costs by 15%, so they'll hold off for a while and absorb, and then eventually maybe increase 5-10 and absorb further; perhaps eventually going the full stretch - maybe not.
Squeezing the supplier may work in the short term, especially for goods already ordered, and produced, which can't be sold elsewhere.
But in the short-medium term it creates uncertainty for the supplier. (The on / off / on nature of these tariffs doesn't help.) For some goods this means suppliers will develop new markets, or will adjust prices up for American purchasers.
For example, say I have an orange farm. Say I have been selling to the US for ages. Simple, reliable sale, no need to look for other customers.
This year there's turmoil. We take a hit because US buyers need a discount (or might cancel the order.) OK, I'll take the hit. But I'll also put out feelers for other markets for next years crop. Maybe Saudia Arabia is looking. Maybe Europe is looking. Next year, do I develop those relationships, or do I reserve my crop for my US buyer?
Tariffs are not necessarily the problem. They are an important long-term tool used to support local production. Uncertainty though is a huge problem- it's easier to sell elsewhere.
> tariffs are surely paid by the buyer, not the seller.
The US has declared import tariffs are to be paid by the importer/shipper, not collected from the end purchaser after... The opposite of the rest of the world.
If you look through eBay, at items coming from China, you'll see most are noted as:
Import fees: Includes import fees
This item includes applicable import fees—you won’t pay anything extra after checkout."
So they are being paid by the seller/importer/etc.
It seems to be a rare exception that you'll see the seller is not paying the tariffs:
Import fees: Import fees due prior to delivery
Due to US customs policies, the buyer of this item will need to pay import fees to the shipping carrier prior to delivery.
I expect nearly all foreign sellers have increased their prices to cover the tariffs. However, there are items selling for less than eBay says an individual will be charged in fees, so it's not just a you-pay-or-I-pay thing. Either eBay is exaggerating, or sellers are finding a way to get a better deal.
It's a minefield for eBay buyers who likely won't notice the footnote means their $5 purchase will cost them $20+ in fees. They now have something else to lookout for that doesn't show up in the table of search results. Something only in a small note on the item's product page. Something that might mean significant extra cost if you aren't careful when shopping.
I actually expect quite a lot of smaller foreign sellers have just stopped bothering trying to sell to the US, because the price plus the hassle isn't worth it. Large companies of course still will, with some price increase.
At least this guy got the option to know what was happening. A few years ago I randomly got a letter from the IRS (or some other 3-letter agency - I can't recall which) demanding I pay thousands of dollars because I imported "industrial equipment". I found this odd as I'm just a normal consumer who buys crap of Amazon and whatnot - I'm not importing tens of thousands of dollars worth of industrial equipment.
I verified everything and it wasn't a scam; the government was legitimately about to take me to court or start garnishing my wages or something like that. They said that UPS or FedEx had told them I imported the equipment but never paid import duties.
I got ahold of the case worker for my case and told them it must be some error. After a week or two of back and forth, we finally figured out that it was for a laptop that a user in Canada had shipped back to me when they left the company, and it had been mis-categorized and valued on the import documents. Since we had purchased the laptop in the US in the first place and shipped it to the user, the case was dismissed and I didn't have to pay anything, but it's always a mini heart attack when you get a letter from Uncle Sam saying you owe thousands.
I've had a UPS business account for over 35 years. In the past year or so they've become just terrible. Any call you make to them will have a hold time of at least half an hour. Many of my calls have gone over an hour. Usually you'll get transferred at least once. Also, earlier this year they outsourced their billing services to a third party, requiring additional consent on their website, and billing calls are now answered by an overseas call center.
I had to call them several times a few months back. What triggered everything was a fraudulent shipment made using my UPS account. I thought that I got that straightened out after two calls lasting about 2.5 hours total.
I got another bill the next month for the same fraudulent shipment where even though my shipping costs had been refunded, UPS was charging me a "missing PLD fee" because the criminals who shipped using my account number did not create the shipment using my online account. So after another 1.5 hours or so, that got resolved too. (They don't seem to offer an option to prevent shipments from being initiated from anywhere other than the online account.)
While waiting on hold (both times), their pre-recorded on-hold content would urge me to user their webiste to resolve my issue, which I had already tried, and discovered that it was impossible.
I had to call them one more time the following month because they began charging me $20 per month for no apparent reason. Without first notifying me, they decided that all direct bill accounts would now be charged this monthly fee. I was able to update my account with a credit card on file to get them to stop doing this.
I would switch to FedEx, but their customer service is even worse. I closed my FedEx account 20 years ago, but I continued to receive spam from them for over 15 years with no way to opt out (because of the existing customer relationship that no longer existed).
UPS is still probably the best domestically for ground shipping, FedEx is the best domestically for express parcels, and DHL is the best for inbound or outbound international without question.
Also a vintage PC enthusiast. I have completely stopped buying parts from overseas due to this issue. $60 for an old GPU + $Shipping + $ADMIN_FEE? No thanks.
This was before current administration. FedEx charged me $60 AFTER delivery of $30 hat gifted to me from my US peers (yep, no warning, I got an email that I owe them $60 a few days after parcel was delivered). I originally thought it's a scam, but it was not. I diaputed this stating I should be informed BEFORE, not after delivery. After 6 months of back and forth I found that it's actually EU tarrifs.
I had this happen to me on an order from Sweden. The order was about $450 + $50 shipping. I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%. So I was expecting ~$70. A few days before it is supposed to arrive UPS sends me a $242 bill for “tariffs, customs, and brokerage fees”. That basically made it 50% more expensive, but it was either pay it or loose the item. A month later they sent me an invoice that claimed the item cost $850. No idea how that happened. I am too scared to order anything from the EU anymore.
Its funny how little US citizens know about this, meanwhile in the rest of the world we have been paying import duties our entire lives. When an item is posted abroad forms have to be filled detailing the sender, the nature of the goods and the value. Some sellers willl bend the law for you and decalre the value of the goods to be lower than what you actually paid if you ask nicely. The main danger being that if the parcel is lost the sender will lose out on any insurance claim.
The other option is to prepay tarrifs during the purchase of an item. Fedex and DHL usually offer this service which includes epedited customs clearance.
> Its funny how little US citizens know about this
Is it really? It sounds like you're implying it's some kind of woeful ignorance, but I say it's perfectly reasonable:
1. Each US state is already in a open-borders zero-tariff framework with all other states, which covers a very large portion of what people purchase.
2. Until recently, most individual consumers didn't need to think about tariffs on international goods, since most purchases were <$800 and covered by the de minimis rule. (Which AFAICT was in place for ~80 years.)
Sure, but it wasn't $800 for 80 years: the $800 change happened in 2016... the threshold was $200 from 2016-1994, starting at $1 (and tapering up) in 1938.
So it looks like there are 4 distinct spans in the past [0] where a nominal value kept getting decayed by inflation. To put them here with inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars in parens:
* 1938 to 1977: $1 ($22 -> $5.43)
* 1978 to 1992: $5 ($25 -> $11.50)
* 1993 to 2014: $200 ($446 -> $272)
* 2015 to 2025: $800 ($1087 -> $800)
* 2026 to ????: $0 ($0 -> $0)
The point I'd like to make from this is that Americans under 50 weren't adults-with-money in time to ever encounter those older more-restrictive spans. If you're under 28, the highest-exemption is the only situation they've ever known until now.
It's funny cuz it's another sign of american privilege which the rest of the world finds hilariously ignorant.
i'm an american and find it really funny how americans can't seem to navigate a system the rest of the world does regularly. This is a great example of how stupid americans can be without realizing it, lol.
The rest of the world laughs at us while we act like we're superior. it's funny as hell dude.
I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%.
I got tempted by one of the Brymen/EEVBlog multimeters. There's still stuff on US gov sites (and tariff calcs) suggesting we've a free trade agreement with Australia. The reality is that a 40% tariff is likely to be applied, and the worst case is that someone decides that the copper tariff also applies and in lieu of a declaration of the amount of copper the US gov just assume the whole thing is solid copper. The sad part is that puts a brand new, made in RoC multimeter (BM2275) in spitting distance of a used, working 33401A but not an assembled-in-the-usa-with-global-components Fluke.
Lesson learned: don't trust tariff calcs and assume the worst case. Even if you order something when tariffs have been dropped you're still at risks for broad sweeping tariffs to come into effect by the time your item arrives at a US port.
Moving forward: big companies are far better able to deal with this tin pot dictator chaos, let them handle importation if you can. DigiKey (ugh), Mouser, and Newark all show the tariff as a line item. I'm quite sure at least one of them is fudging COO and all three have some remaining US inventory of some items so there's still some entirely legal tariff avoidance.
Likewise AliExpress choice involves shipping to what I suspect is AliExpress' bonded warehouse and they handle the applicable tariffs. I've recently decided to learn how to solder and there's still plenty of 99 cent crap available from AE if you're willing to (ab)use the new customer discount.
Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum, which required me to fill out a UPS-specific form attesting to the steel and aluminum content
I ordered a specialty lock and some keys valued at about $400, and paid an extra $400 in duties because of this. It's insane.
Plot twist: I'm in Canada and was ordering a made-in-USA product from a US vendor. The duties were due to matching countertartiffs at the time. Sorry, but that's the last lock I buy from the US (and maybe the last thing with metal in it if I can help it) until this mess is resolved.
Our business got charged a 200% tariff on a UPS import from Japan, completely incorrect. The dispute is taking much longer than OP’s.
Either UPS doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they willfully charge higher fees, or maybe they’re just understaffed from the massive layoffs they did to try to save their stock price.
edit: as a biz you (we) should use a legit import broker instead of UPS. But individuals like OP are stuck with no option.
In Germany, you can pre-register with DHL Express¹ with a bank account and optionally an EORI (Economic operators registration and identification) number, and then they immediately ding your bank account instead of providing their "disbursement service" where they 'benevolently' loan the customs fee to you for a 'minor' fee. I've not found similar options elsewhere, though I would assume they exist but might be corporate-only.
¹ annoyingly enough this doesn't even work with DHL, which is a separate thing from DHL Express in Germany.
This is how it works here in the US as well. If you are using FedEx or UPS for cross-border express shipments, you need to open an account with them and have a credit card on file (or whatever). Then they will deliver first and bill you later, instead of the other way around without an account. This really does make a difference!
I guess we can’t know precisely how this happened without seeing UPS’s original Form 7501.
The amended one sounds strange. Why did they claim that the duty for the actual HTS code is $0, and attribute the entirety of the tariff to the special EU-origin code?
In the country where I live, these kinds of fees are generally referred to "import taxes", because it's the buyer who's having to pay extra money which is going to the tax authority, not the seller.
While they can have an effect of encouraging domestic production, mostly they're a way to extract more money from the population.
That's just not true. It's 60% and 20% for items below US$50.
You could theoretically get charged over 100% the price of the product if you buy something really cheap and shipping is more expensive than the product because shipping is taxed too.
I’ve had a similar thing happen to me recently. 500$ tariff on $130 of stuff. The tariff should have been like $20. UPS has been completely non responsive and still won’t show me the customs forms. Total scam.
They probably have this type of cash in some short term investment vechicle to earn extra cash, so they have to hold on to it for an average of n days. Writing a cheque and mailing it basically gives them quite a few more extra days of interest payments.
Ah this is just another step towards Turkification[0] of USA. This situation is just how it is in Erdogan's Turkey but you still have way to go if you are able to get your package out of the customs in less than a few weeks and no hustle.
When the trade deals and tariff conditions get sufficiently complex(it gets more complex every day as the president accommodates specific companies and personal favors), the bureaucracy also increases so at some point it becomes too much of a nuisance to bother with individual imports.
It’s still a little hard to believe and terrifying how similar this particular title and the comments below are to what I would’ve read in Turkish forums circa 2010s.
yeah this is just a way for republicans to curry favors/influence from businesses they prefer.
they make everything as hard as possible, then create loopholes for their buddies.
this is what they've been claiming has been happening under democrats(projection), but in reality it's teh system they long for. Now that they're in power they can make it happen.
Lol the mental gymnastics of republicans to say "Tariffs aren't taxes on citizens, they're taxes on foreign countries"
and now trump is easing tariffs on foods because they're too expensive. he's also thinking of shipping out STIMULUS CHECKS because people are struggling to buy tariffed goods.
it's mind boggling what they must be thinking to justify this stuff.
Not a clickbait, because it was quite difficult to get it reduced, so it is good to know how to do it.
Moreover, the money have not been returned yet, that could take a long time and for many people losing access to such an amount would be very inconvenient, even if they knew that the money would be returned, eventually.
I live in Germany and UPS is asking for 116€ customs / fees for a personal gift package someone sent me worth $47 (40€ which is below the new 45€ de minimis line). Nearly everything in the blog post happened to me just this past week except I didn't have 116€ at home in cash(!) so they will be delivering on Monday (when I will have cash and then try to get it all back from UPS).
The whole thing is unbelievably infuriating and insane and I will warn anyone in the States to never again use UPS for shipping abroad.
Sounds like something that could be weaponized. Order a bunch of 'gifts' to be shipped to a target via UPS/FedEx or whichever vendor helpfully pays the tarrifs for you. Then your victim has to fight collections or pay up.
I also imported a roughly $400 item from Romania. Was expecting a 30% tariff at most. Nope. $756. Sender says there is nothing they can do. UPS says that's the money I owe. They will send to collections if you go long enough without paying it. Reddit had no answers, and many are struggling with the same situation.
If (when) SCOTUS determines that Trump's tariffs were illegally collected and importers are refunded, will end consumers who paid tariffs also be refunded?
They are already making noise that it would be too hard to issue refunds, ie 'can't unscramble an egg'. So even when tariffs get ruled against, refunds may take years to get. People buying tariff refund claims are still only paying ~.25 on the dollar.
Because I've ran into the same issue. I don't think this is actually the tariff. I'm almost 100% positive this is the shipping companies (UPS, and FedEx, but UPS seems to be the biggest culprit) are slamming receivers with massive bills because they are miscategorizing many items coming from Europe.
I would be surprised if the money was being held in escrow and could be refunded. Actually the Trump admin is using this as an argument to the SC as to why making the tariffs unconstitutional is a bad idea.
I had to pay a tariff charge of about $20 on an order of about $100 that I had placed about a year or so prior to this whole tariff bullshit. The idea that the president can decide to tariff whatever the fuck he wants is something that needs to go, since it's essentially levying taxes without representation. If somehow the current admin can't refund the money they stole from people then every single person involved should be thrown in jail and their property confiscated until that money is recovered.
I bought a semi-custom instrument from Germany back in the spring of 2024, about $1800 (a Sandberg electric bass). But there was a year-long back log. The timing was perfect -- they told me it was ready to ship just when the tariffs went into effect, which cost me an extra $250 or so.
Imagine how non Americans feel about Trump. He is fucking with the worlds economy nearly as much as he is messing up the US economy, yet we get even less representation.
Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
Make 8 bits great again!
The tariffs encourage domestic American hobbies like watching TV and eating potatoes.
You'll have to remove the potatoes as well as those can come from Canada.
Specifically thin sliced potatoes fried in industrial lubricants.
With chemical compounds spread on them for flavor. In a package made of PFAS.
Animal fats are just as well used (or were used, before oil) for lubrication. Most notably probably whale blubber
WHOA! I prefer my po-tay-toes sliced and fried in duck fat.
Since ducks are migratory shouldn’t duck products be tariffed?
I have a bigger issue: a bunch of undocumented CANADIAN geese in MY BACKYARD! I want ICE to send them BACK to Snow Mexico!
Canadians get annoyed when you call them that. I like to increase the annoyance by calling them Canadia Gooses.
My understanding is that the correct plural for a Canadian goose IS Canadian gooses.
Candida Geese delenda est
This delightfully reads like an old `fortune` message.
There is no point. Despite being effective illegal immigrants, ducks regularly self-deport each year. This keeps them one step ahead of any enforcement action. The problem is that the northern border wall just isnt tall enough.
Think you want an Amstrad CPC? Try burger instead.
This explains why John Titor needed to come back for those IBM parts
The best time to manufacture vintage computer parts is 28 years ago, but the second-best time is today! :p
> The best time to manufacture vintage computer parts is 28 years ago, but the second-best time is today! :p
What was so special about 1997?
I know one US business that used to make niche electronic product. Most components they used were from China. Got hit by the tariffs that wiped all the operating profit. Guy also had to sell his home and is now couchsurfing. Business is unlikely going to recover.
Of course he considered making chips and other components in the US, but he was few billions short to start the fab.
Good thing that the US cancelled collection of unemployment stats just as all these sorts of negative business effects were happening. If a job is lost in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I stopped buying vintage cameras from Japan on eBay.
Well, there's always the next administration…
I'm sure JD Vance administration will be more vintage-camera-friendly.
Only the kind that are small enough to hide in public toilets.
Nah, I'm sure he's more focused on vintage furniture.
Likes the creak of some old wood
With the amount of time he spends with Trump and Peter Thiel..probably
Reminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.
From the other side of the Atlantic this sounds like straight Thatcherism, in which Chicago-school monetarism was an ideological anti-union weapon, and the Thatcher cabinet was not coy about it. However I think the US went that way first even if Reaganomics came later.
I think a lot of that in the US got spun up with Nixon, Reagan brought a lot of it to the mainstream though. Both of them hated unions with a passion that is for sure.
Unions are the best of all the bad solutions we’ve come up with so far for labor to compete with capital. The worst of course is collectivism through government, though that’s being tried again…
The best solution is antitrust enforcement and removal of anti-competitive laws/rules lobbied for by incumbents. When companies have to compete with each other for labor and customers, wages go up and prices go down. Whey they consolidate they can charge monopoly rents.
Unions often even make this worse because they'll latch on to a monopolistic employer and then lobby with them to retain the monopoly at the expense of all the workers who are their customers rather than their employees.
Where is collectivism being tried again?
Sure there are a number of Democratic Socialists and other progressives winning elections and driving changes but everything I’ve seen policy-wise has been directly targeted areas where unchecked capitalism has clearly failed their constituents. Even in those cases, there’s no dramatic shift towards government ownership.
Why would Capital want competition?
Sociopaths. It breaks me to see the Fed use interest rates to cause unemployment as the lever against inflation. It all seems so cruel.
They use interest rates to protect against inflationary (and deflationary) spirals, which are known to be devastating. The effect on the unemployment rate is a known, and predictable, side effect. But formal unemployment is small compared to labour force dropout anyway, and the latter is not necessarily so sensitive to economic conditions anyway. Besides which, the unemployment rate can't really keep going down forever.
Zoom out; recent levels are actually quite impressive in the USA. Yes, they've climbed since 2023, but they're only just reaching the pre-GFC minimum (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...).
Zoom out further: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
Had it not been for COVID you'd be at more than 16 years without a(n NBER-determined) recession, long enough to suggest a fundamental shift vs. how things worked in the several decades before that.
Unemployement is a necessary part of the economy, what is cruel is making unemployment unlivable.
Have you ever read about people burning piles of German currency because it was better than using it to buy firewood with? Not to say we would get there, but allowing inflation to run is not kinder.
Inflation like that doesn’t just happen. It can only be the outcome of explicit government policy. Like in post WW1 Germany they wanted to wipe the value of all domestic government debt they accumulated during the war.
Have you ever tried to start a fire with a bunch of paper? It doesn't work great, and what a mess.
Done it plenty of times.
Works great until you run out of paper.
I think these days folks typically use Zimbabwe or Argentina as examples.
Those are more recent examples, but I think Germany is still a more visceral example for a lot of Western nations because Germany was a high tech, educated industrial nation that was hit with such massive problems from government policy. It's closer to home. Other countries are (wrongfully) easier to dismiss as being just too different from our wealthy and enlightened selves.
I am imagining Mexican cartels smuggling hardware into the US...
(But seriously I do not know how good US Customs is but in my country every day millions of packages from Asia arrive and they are checking not even a percent).
This kind of happens. There are all sorts of cases of counterfit ICs. Some even making it into military hardware
Counterfeits don't happen when you buy parts from reputable distributors (digikey, mouser, Newark, TTI, arrow, etc) that are not "marketplace" items. These parts often come right from the manufacturer or from a domestic distributor for the manufacturer. You get counterfeits when you buy from brokers.
Often with older electronics designs, the parts the engineers originally picked are no longer made. It's not the end of the world, there are solutions. Sometimes the vendor changes the part number due to a process change or the part design is sold to another company and goes under a new number. You can also sometimes find drop in compatible parts (common for the 7400/5400 series chips), these may be in a different package so you might have to design an interposer or deadbug it. The worst option is finding old stock using a broker. There are legit brokers that will source old stock and "refurbish" them for you (called re-lifeing). But there are also shady brokers that will buy counterfeits (or get tricked into buying them) that may or may not actually work. Sometimes the counterfeits are relabeled parts that are compatible but the new label gets a higher price because they aren't being made any more. Sometimes the counterfeit is actually a totally different design that is shoehorned into its desired purpose (like a new microcontroller masquerading as an old processor or ASIC). Other times it's just some random junk pulled from e-waste that's been relabelled. Other times you'll get a counterfeit that comes from a stolen design. Even when the counterfeit functions, it may not perform to the same spec as the original part (very important for military spec parts) or will have other characteristics that make it incompatible with the rest of the design (like drawing too much or too little current). When it comes to engineering in ISO9001, traceability is a huge thing and brokers just can't provide that.
At my job, we have an "absolutely no brokers" rule. They simply cannot guarantee that what they provide is genuine. If a legitimate distributor doesn't have stock of a discontinued part, they'll never have stock of it. Brokers will tell you what you want to hear while they go out and try to make it happen. I'm not saying all brokers are shady but if you are considering buying from a broker, you should be instead considering how you can replace that part.
Don’t buy your ICs from aliexpress.
Well they're less perishable than avocados.
a purported niche/low-volume electronics, but the profit is somehow dependent on BOM price? a tariff bump on a small BOM doesn’t take you from profitable to homeless.
if that happened, the business already had seriously bad margins, bad cash flow, over-leverage, or maybe he was just doing it out of love getting paid maybe back for his time or not.
tariffs might’ve hurt, but they don’t collapse a healthy niche hardware company where buyers are presumably also into the niche.
seems weird i dont get it. can you explain further?
gamers nexus did a great (and very long) video on the impact of tariffs on US computer businesses. Some of the manufacturers went into quite a bit of detail breaking down their costs and how tariffs would render some products so unprofitable that they would cease to serve the US market. Not sure if it necessarily applies to a niche/low volume business, but the impacts on a larger business were eye opening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W_mSOS1Qts
tariffs have chopped and changed so much since this video that the specific tariff amounts mentioned are likely not accurate.
Hardware companies often operate on a relatively thin margin, especially as compared to say, software companies.
Let's say a companies margin was 40%. The cost of their constituent parts doubles due to tariffs, they are no longer making money as a result.
I hope this helps explain it for you.
It's more complicated than that.
For example, the company can raise its prices. How well that works depends on whether there is competition for the company's product. If the competition is also hit by the tariffs, then they're on an even playing field. If the competition is using native parts, then the competitor gets the business.
This is one of the great misconceptions.
There are often no "native" alternatives.
Even the machines that make the chips are nearly all made in one country and then shipped around the world.
The amazing, modern nature of our modern world is built on the collective effort and knowledge of humankind globally.
Globally.
There's concern that if all our chips come from one country, they could cut the supply off and make demands. That's called an "embargo".
It's also done to protect local industries, hence the term "protectionism". For example, Canada's large tariffs on American milk are there to protect the local Canadian milk producers.
AFAIK, Trump's tariffs are meant to serve the following purposes:
1. so critical supplies, like chips, will be produced domestically
2. to raise money for the treasury
3. to convince countries that have high tariffs to lower them in exchange for the US to reciprocate in lowering ours
4. to incentivize foreign manufacturers to invest in factories in the US
5. to use them as a negotiating tool for other terms favorable to US interests
These are not crazy things. We'll see how things play out.
They’re not crazy goals, but the way these tariffs are being implemented does not further most of them.
3 and 5 are undermined by the fact that even nations with positive trade surpluses with the US, and countries like Japan with Trump first term negotiated trade treaties (which for Japan included major concessions already) are being hit with these tariffs.
1 and 4 are a problem because many of the inputs into building out US manufacturing capacity come from abroad and are hit by tariffs. Secondly many of the manufacturing inputs into making products in these factories would come from abroad and be tariffed, unless those supplies are bootstrapped domestically first but there is no policy to ensure this. Thirdly as soon as the tariffs go away, these factories would become uneconomical, so they are a gamble on that not happening in the lifetime of the factories.
Finally, who’s going to build and operate this huge new manufacturing sector? Infrastructure construction relies heavily on immigrant labour that’s being driven out, so does actual manufacturing, and there are no hordes of unemployed Americans lining up for manufacturing jobs. It’s addressing a problem that largely doesn’t exist, to build out less efficient more expensive ways to make stuff, in a way that can’t work anyway.
Manufacturing investment surged in the last few years with the introduction of the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction acts. It’s going to be hard to disentangle the continuing effects of that from the effects of the Tariffs, but it’s hard to see how the Tariffs can have a positive effect.
What leads you to believe that the implementation of tariffs under this administration was done for the purposes that you have enumerated?
It seems that you're operating under the normally reasonable assumption that these policies were implemented after careful consideration with specific goals in mind. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the people involved in this are doing what they're doing for well-thought out reasons or ones that are meant to benefit America.
Agreed. Tariffs should be used like a scalpel, precise and targeting very specific things to encourage development or even the playing field. The tariffs that have been implemented so far are more like a sledge hammer, used to extort and intimidate.
> If the competition is also hit by the tariffs, then they're on an even playing field.
That assumes the customers are price insensitive. If you're making vintage parts for hobbyists and archivists, maybe they're not; maybe they don't get a raise just because the price went up and your thing is the thing they cut out of the budget when it all won't fit anymore.
Do you run a business with good margin, good cash flow, optimally leveraged and for profit? If yes, please tell us more about how tariffs have helped you.
If you've been making the products locally, the tariffs on foreign products help you.
Are your materials and supplies also locally made? The same for each of those suppliers. Very few things are entirely made in the US. How about your equipment? Are the motors, tools, electronics, etc also made in the US? Even companies making stuff in the US are being hit. Very few companies have their entire supply change within the US.
Depends on your supply chain's exposure to foreign markets
Importantly, the other countries are paying for the tariffs! What happened here is probably just an error, a mistake on UPS' part. There's no way US citizens should be the one paying tariffs, no one understands tariffs better than the US.
If the seller from the country doesn't pay the tariff then it gets passed to the consumer. Someone has to pay the tarrif to import a tariffed good.
It’s a joke about the administration’s line that the tariffs would be paid by other countries, not by American consumers.
Freedom2 was joking
We need to get industry to step up production of the AST 6 pack plus, or Plus hardcard.
maybe even s-100 bus cards.
When there is enough demand for vintage parts, it'll motivate someone to create a time machine to manufacture them in larger volume in the past and bring them to the present. Win win.
Quite funny to see the US import the utterly disastrous "Import Substitution" model that destroyed India's fledgling industrial base that was left-over after the British left.
Since it came from India shouldn't they be paying a tariff on that model
Too bad all the competent politicians were dead set against preventing the "free market" from hollowing out American manufacturing.
I understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated.
First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)
So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.
Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.
Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)
So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)
Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)
You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.
> First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
No, supposed quality adjustments hide lower production volumes: https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/10/03/how-gdp-hides-indust...
> Motor vehicles, bodies and trailers, and parts: actual light vehicles produced down 11%, real gross output of vehicles up 39%, real value-added up 125%. Inputs as a percent of gross output rose from 74% to 77%.
> Steel mills & manufacturing from purchased steel: in raw tonnage, steel shipped is down 18%, real gross output is up 5%, real value-added is up 125%. Inputs as a percentage of gross output rose from 73% to 74%.
> If the quality adjustment is 32%, the value-added increase becomes 652%!
> Another “quirk” of real value-added is that inflation adjustments and quality adjustments get applied retroactively, which creates wild inflections from small changes. In simplified terms, let’s say that, in 1997, car sales were $100 billion, and were still $100 billion twenty years later in 2017, with no changes due to inflation or input costs. Input costs in both years were $75 billion, meaning $25 billion in value-added in both years. The only thing that changed, let’s say, was that the “quality” of cars got 10% higher thanks to software innovations like Apple CarPlay and design improvements like crumple zones for safety—neither of which add to recurring production input costs. So, let’s say, our economists would adjust the 2017 figure to be $110 billion in “real” terms and show a small 10% increase, right?
>
> Instead, the way it works is that a recent “base year” is taken, in this case 2017, and the base year is never adjusted. So rather than adjusting from $100 billion to $110 billion, the “real” output of 1997 is retroactively adjusted to be lower, in this case $91 billion, to get the same 10% increase. But then, our value-added in 1997 has fallen to $16 billion, and the increase in “real value-added manufacturing” has jumped from 10% to around 50%! We have created a 50% increase in car manufacturing not by actually producing 50% more cars or “objectively” making cars 50% better, but just by playing around with statistics and definitions.
> However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
That's fine and indeed about the only way it even can be done in a country with higher wages. The question is, why can't we do more of that? Basic simple components like capacitors should be possible to automate, so what's preventing it? Why don't we have policies tuned towards causing more domestic automation?
The number of jobs won't be what it was when it was done by hand, but that's never coming back either way, and some is better than none. Meanwhile you reduce dependency on adversarial countries.
> the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset.
There is another alternative: Lower the cost of domestic goods, i.e. lower taxes or provide credits to domestic manufacturers. For example, allow capital investments in domestic manufacturing to be deducted immediately rather than over time.
This is actually one of the longstanding major problems with the US tax code right now. It creates a preference for international supply chains because that allows profits to be shifted into countries with lower tax rates and penalizes purely domestic supply chains.
Subsidies are a definite tool, and subsidies are existent in many industries. Lots of farm products for example are subsidized.
Of course they encounter their own political hurdles. Think Solar, Electric Cars, CHIPS act etc. But they become political footballs, even to the detriment of local interests. (Witness Florida reps voting to repeal CHIPS even though Florida got a lot of CHIPS money.)
So yes, companies want consistency in the supply chain, and current US politics doesn't offer that.
... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent] can afford to swim against the current in many product categories, but most people cannot afford to swim against the current in most product categories.
Dang it no! That isn’t remotely how deflationary works.
There’s always things being supplied for at lower prices. That is what product or service improvements do.
Your car is vastly safer than a Ford Model T. Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.
Firms reduce the cost of production and get to sell more to larger numbers of consumers. Total revenue = $ value * N customers.
You expand further on your position in the second part of your para, but that is fundamentally about how wages have not gone up over time. Which has nothing to do with inflation. It has MUCH more to do with the labor markets, and the pay people are getting for their labor.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflation.asp
> If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.
In 1924 a Ford Model T cost $260. Adjusted for inflation to 2025 this is <$5000. The average new car price in 2025 is ~$50,000.
> Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.
You're talking about something different than what I was - improvements that make a product better without the price going up (because the cost is small enough to become the new baseline, either by market stickiness or regulation). Those don't affect CPI, and therefore make life better at the same price. So I agree with where you're coming from there.
My point is about the manufacturing/product innovations that make prices go down (regardless of whether quality gets better or worse). Take for example offshoring, which was sold as maybe your local factory will have to lay off some people but we will have less expensive items at the store so we will all win on average. But it's a trick because the Fed creates a feedback loop that makes it so prices cannot go down on average.
Wages haven't risen as fast as consumer price inflation because that new money is injected into the financial industry (the fake "fiscal responsibility" of the Republican party). And when too much newly created money finally leads to too much demand for labor and wages start rising, the Fed then tamps down on the monetary creation.
Clearly monetary policy is a big subject, and yes the Fed has specific targets etc in mind.
But I was talking more about a mindset. And of course speaking generally- lots of people (everywhere) have budget constraints.
Having traveled in the US and Europe I'd suggest that in the US "volume" is rewarded as "good". For the same amount of money, "more" is preferred to "good". In contrast in Europe it's less "look how big the plate is" and more about "better quality."
So, to rather over-simply things, I'd describe US food as "bland, loaded with sugar, lots of it", whereas Europe is more "smaller quantities, less processing, more farmer's market".
Not just food. But across the board. Cheap = good.
And yes, I'm talking generally big-picture here - it's a culture thing - there are lots of counter examples if you look hard.
True, but does not help in this case with vintage parts.
Please engage sarcasm-awareness mode.
Neither humans nor LLMs are currently equipped with separate sarcasm-awareness modes so telling someone to engage theirs can only be…ohh
that's so beyond obviously a sarcastic remark. In that regard I'd consider a vast majority of the humans totally capable of detecting dead pan sarcasm both in spoken and written speech.
Isn’t there a well known internet adage that speaks to this?
Do you remember what it is?
Cunningham's law
What? No it's not, it's ...
Hang on a sec... you sly devil, you!
Not falling for that one. Hmmmpphhh.
Cunningham himself even claims it was a misquote, and that he never suggested such a thing.
“Shouting incorrect directions in Ironforge” predates Cunningham by several years in any case.
Noted.
I believe the OP was attempting humour.
Yes. Pitfall of not reading the entire comment before responding.
We need manufacturing in the US. The service economy can't survive long term; you have to make things. Tariffs are not fun, but they are an important part of making that happen.
But, tariffs on used cameras or vintage electronics does not help bring manufacturing back. Let's just bring back the de minimis exemption for things like this. More industry targeted tariffs, fewer blanket tariffs.
No sure why you are being down-voted. Your argument is coherent and correct.
Targeted tariffs on specific goods leads to the development of local production of that good. Lots and lots of countries have these in place.
Blanket tariffs are, of course, useless. The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee, so tarifing Brazil serves no purpose other than taxing coffee consumption.
A surgeon uses a scalpel, not an axe. Used well, tariffs are a very powerful tool. Used badly they create more harm, and don't achieve the goal of promoting local production.
Tariffs which are here today, but gone tomorrow, don't created the stable environment which long-term investment in local production requires.
By themselves even targeted tariffs don't work. Argentina did not become a mobile phone manufacturing hub.
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/milei-is-scrapping...
Scale of the country matters. If Argentina (or any other small to medium size country) require extra work, businesses can just walk away - size of market does not justify extra efforts. Bet is that US market size is big enough that no global business can afford to walk away. At 20% of global GDP, US markets is also big enough to make scaled production feasible.
While tariffs on coffee do not incentivize coffee growing in US they do two things that are very beneficial for US economy
1) People replace coffee with hot cider, infusion tea or some other local substitute good.
2) Tariff on coffee as set up by Trump incentivize coffee producing countries to buy US goods whether it’s oil or cars to make trade balance more equal.
The only question is the scale of above but tariff on coffee is unquestionably help US producers.
Yes, tarifs can change behavior. I'm not sure that's the goal here, and I'm not convinced there's a local alternative to coffee (at the scale Americans drink coffee.)
>> Tariff on coffee as set up by Trump incentivize coffee producing countries to buy US goods whether it’s oil or cars to make trade balance more equal.
Countries don't buy goods, people do. Apparently insulting Canada didn't make them decide to consume more made-in-America goods. I'm not sure that random acts of insulting leads yo the effects you are proposing.
> The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee
Well, Hawaii does, but your point is good, thank you.
I knew that would come up :). Yes, Hawaii produces about 1% of the coffee consumed in the US. I'm guessing a chunk of that is consumed in Hawaii...
But I'm glad you got the point. :).
Hawaii would even have mountaineous and that island climate that's good for growing coffee. But labor costs probably mean they couldn't compete even if they tried
> We need manufacturing in the US.
Overall there is a lot of manufacturing in the US. What the US doesn't have are manufacturing jobs because labor is more expensive than automation.
Maybe you meant the US should make sure to have some certain types of manufacturing like chips. In that case, targeted programs are a better approach than any sort of tariffs. See the CHIPS act for example.
You're not very good at it though. You're too aristocratic in your thinking - let the coolies make the stuff, we'll consume it.
The reason services are such a big part of your economy is because you can sit in an air conditioned office, send some emails, push some numbers around on a spreadsheet, and call it work.
Or targeted investment in relevant industries, similar to what the previous administration was doing before voters were suckered by the New York con man whose entire campaign was bemoaning everything about our country while apparently having some pretty spicy long-term kompromat hanging over him.
And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.
Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.
And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.
America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.
>America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.
The downside is the insane consumption associated with that. Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution, far more per capita than any other people in the history of the world, much of which is tied to how easy/cheap it is to order shit we don't need. So, good if ya wanna buy cheap pollution, pretty bad if ya care about the next generation.
America isn’t #1 in pollution per capita, that’s largely a function of per capita income and America is a long way from #1 on that metric.
For example, we where ranked 16th in terms of CO2 per capita in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... We are just #3 by population and far richer per capita than the other 2.
You may want to take another look at that list. Proudly declaring you’re only the 16th worst per-capita (already very high!) when ahead of you are tiny places like Pulau, New Caledonia, Gibraltar and Curacao is really quite funny.
> For example, we where ranked 16th in terms of CO2 per capita in 2023
For home soil central north american CO2 production, sure.
Things change if such rankings were to account for the CO2 production as a result of satisifying US consumption habits .. the "benefit" of having off shored industry to China is the final goods come to the USofA while the emissions and waste of industry occur elsewhere.
> Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution
So does Canada.
> far more per capita than any other people in the history of the world
Not even remotely close to true. Aside from that it's down 20% from it's peak 40 (!) years ago.
> much of which is tied to how easy/cheap it is to order shit we don't need.
The data does not support this conclusion.
> pretty bad if ya care about the next generation.
Speaking of trends.. care to guess which country has doubled it's pollution in the last 10 years?
> > Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution
> So does Canada.
it's not as good of a comeback as you think it is...
> Speaking of trends.. care to guess which country has doubled it's pollution in the last 10 years?
I really don’t. I genuinely have no idea and I have zero interest in guessing. Just say it and stop wasting everyone’s time.
I think the answer is China (CO2 emissions). But the longer answer is that they are mainly making stuff for the US and the EU.
> While China emits over one-third of global CO2, it is also the world’s factory, producing more than one-third of global manufactured goods (IEA, 2024a; Norton, 2024) . Research indicates that China remains the world’s largest generator of embodied trade carbon emissions. The gap between emissions embodied in China’s exports and those in its imports widened from 0.7 GtCO2 in 1990 to 1.8 GtCO2 in 2019 (CGTN, 2024) . According to the Global Carbon Budget, China’s 2021 consumption-based CO2 emissions are about 10% (or 1.2 GtCO2) lower than the territorial emissions (Friedlingstein et al., 2025).
- https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/
Tariffs are great for a left wing, socialist, anti-globalist, green agenda.
are these bad things?
No. It's just ironic to see them coming from a capitalist demagogue desguised as a republican.
If you are poor, you should be terrified, because what those policies mean is that the rich are pulling the ladder up behind themselves now that they’re rich beyond their wildest dreams.
As an American, I always smirk when people in the US say that gas is expensive.
I had this happen with FedEx. They released the package and delivered it without me paying. I submitted a dispute, which they say could take up to 6 months to process. I hate having this hang over my head, as I don’t want anything going to collections, but figured if I paid it I would have a harder time getting my money back.
Mine was for a watch I got serviced. My own watch that I shipped out being returned to me… not a new import. If I end up having to pay what FedEx is saying I owe, it would have been cheaper for me to buy a new watch than to get it serviced, which is very upsetting. The whole process has been a horrible experience from the very start and I regret the entire thing. I should have just risked getting it serviced locally… or not done it at all.
There's something called a "carnet" for that case.[1] When something is leaving the country temporarily but coming back, there's a way to register that. This comes up a lot if you're doing trade shows or performances.
[1] https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...
> I should have just risked getting it serviced locally…
Sounds like tariffs working as intended?
Unfortunately the world is far too globalized for tariffs like these to ever be a good solution.
There isn't another niche guitar pedal hardware manufacturer that does the same thing as on in Belgium.
It more likely would have been the second option, “or not done it at all.”
As an European, I'm kinda pissed we don't retaliate the duties.
I'd rather take a financial hit than act so weak and passive.
I swear between chat control, selling out EU's privacy to US tech companies (you can check how many times Palantir & others met commission members, it's public), the insanity of the ICE ban and this tariffs passivity I'm very unhappy.
Also, it's too convenient to only focus on material goods when the biggest US exports are gazillions in financial and IT services.
Leaving aside the other (valid) items in your list, reciprocal tarifs really aren't helpful.
Firstly, they're unnecessary. Just do what Canadians are doing. Stop buying US goods. Stop going to the US on holiday. Shop keepers get the hint real quick.
Secondly, they just make goods more expensive for you. They gave no impact on American producers.
So it may feel like the EU is doing nothing. But really, there's nothing they need to do. Tarifs are a tax levied by the US govt on US citizens. Sure demand might drop a bit in the short term, but that just drives producers to find other markets. Which in the long run is a good thing.
> Leaving aside the other (valid) items in your list, reciprocal tarifs really aren't helpful.
You have completely missed my point: I don't care about them being helpful or not. It's not about the financial but political aspect.
I don’t think GP has missed the point at all. If the “political aspect” brings no concrete benefits for EU citizens, what’s the point?
> Stop buying US goods.
If only there was a way to make US goods more expensive to discourage their purchase :P
Sure, that's one way to approach it. But I feel like the Canadian approach is better.
You don't need to coerce fellow citizens, indeed the point is far more effective when it's not coerced.
And if not enough citizens care to make the point, then they're also not going to thank you for rising prices.
I feel the exact opposite (regarding reciprocal tariffs).
If your neighbor makes demands and threatens to shoot themselves in the foot if you don't accept, responding by shooting yourself in the face does not seem like a good tactic.
US tariff policy gifts European manufacturers with a competitive advantage.
A small example from a hobby of mine: electronic music, synthesis, audio gadgets, etc. The last decade or two has seen an explosion of innovation in this space driven by small boutique outfits on both sides of the Atlantic. This has only been made possible because of access to Chinese expertise in manufacturing.
The effect of US tariffs is to hurt everyone - but hurt US based companies more. If based in the EU, you pay 0% duty on your low-value-add Chinese inputs and sell finished products to customers - duty free to 450m inhabitants of the EU and with 15% tariff to the US. The same operation based in the US - pays 100% or more on inputs - making it uncompetitive in both markets (for any reasonable range of margin). This is just one small niche/corner of the economy where US-based companies are seeing profits being squeezed.
The other reason to avoid emulating US policy regarding tariffs, is the impact of the flip-flopping and uncertainty on industrial and manufacturing investment. How can anyone intelligently make a long-term (decades) investment decision to build a manufacturing facility in the US when at any moment, your input costs could increase 100%? Or the tariffs you were relying on to allow you to compete with foreign operations could suddenly be lowered as part of a "deal". Or they could go up and down within the space of months or even weeks? Or that in 3 years, the policy will be complete reversed?
Introducing uncertainty and volatility into trade policy might seem like a winning move if you view the world in game theoretic terms - that the global economy is a zero-sum game. I feel that the current US executive sees the world this way - if any other country is doing well, then it must be at the expense of the USA and vice-versa. And this basic misunderstanding of trade and economics is driving these self-harming policies.
As a fellow European, given we have no influence over US policy, I suggest standing back as the US re-learns the painful lesson of history regarding trying to stimulate your economy by making industrial and manufacturing inputs more expensive and adding volatility and uncertainty to the business environment. It sucks for everyone globally because the world isn't zero-sum, the USA suffering doesn't benefit others, so the best policy for Europe is to just refuse to play the game and sit it out.
The world's been through many past periods of tariffs. Generally the countries that do a lot end up hurting themselves - see say Argentina, near wealthiest in the world around 1890, now way down the list. Neighbours like Brazil that thought we'll tariff too have been meh. Countries like Singapore that went the other way and had zero tariffs got rich - from not much per capita to overtaking the US in that case.
> As an European, I'm kinda pissed we don't retaliate the duties.
"Someone is trying to shoot me so I'll shoot myself in the foot in retaliation"
Sometimes, doing nothing is the best move. Doing something self destructive to make yourself feel better makes no sense at all.
I just got an invoice from ups to pay a $16 brokerage fee to jpmorgan for collecting a $0.60 tariff on a sticker included in a box with a custom keyboard shipped from Taiwan. Seems like wall street is making out better than the US on this arrangement
Please blog about this!
Yeah, I noped-out when I saw eBay's writeup on tariffs owed by the buyer (not paid by the seller):
"Shipping carriers or US Customs usually charge $5–$30 in processing fees. Add the item price, import fees, and processing fees to estimate your final cost."
https://pages.ebay.com/tariffs/
Not something I'm doing for a $5 item... I'll sit back and wait until the Supreme Court finds the tariffs are illegal, and the Fed has to pay every cent back to the businesses, suddenly sending the US spiraling into the biggest budget deficit in history.
eBay has a checkbox for "Location: US Only" that I have never had to check before. I check it now.
Go, USA?
How would this ever work?
The vast bulk of tariffs are surely paid by the buyer, not the seller.
It's more nuanced than that.
Tariffs do not always 100% immediately get passed on to buyer.
If there's a $100 product you'd like to purchase and there's a 100% tariff, it won't be $200.
That product was made abroad, let's for $20. So the tariff should be $20, not $100.
The US-based owner will go to the supplier, say they're getting squeezed by tariffs and first they'll try to see what they can do to recategorize the tariff, or negotiate with their supplier to absorb some of the expense. Let's say that got it down to $15. The owner still doesn't want to increase costs by 15%, so they'll hold off for a while and absorb, and then eventually maybe increase 5-10 and absorb further; perhaps eventually going the full stretch - maybe not.
Squeezing the supplier may work in the short term, especially for goods already ordered, and produced, which can't be sold elsewhere.
But in the short-medium term it creates uncertainty for the supplier. (The on / off / on nature of these tariffs doesn't help.) For some goods this means suppliers will develop new markets, or will adjust prices up for American purchasers.
For example, say I have an orange farm. Say I have been selling to the US for ages. Simple, reliable sale, no need to look for other customers.
This year there's turmoil. We take a hit because US buyers need a discount (or might cancel the order.) OK, I'll take the hit. But I'll also put out feelers for other markets for next years crop. Maybe Saudia Arabia is looking. Maybe Europe is looking. Next year, do I develop those relationships, or do I reserve my crop for my US buyer?
Tariffs are not necessarily the problem. They are an important long-term tool used to support local production. Uncertainty though is a huge problem- it's easier to sell elsewhere.
> tariffs are surely paid by the buyer, not the seller.
The US has declared import tariffs are to be paid by the importer/shipper, not collected from the end purchaser after... The opposite of the rest of the world.
If you look through eBay, at items coming from China, you'll see most are noted as:
So they are being paid by the seller/importer/etc.It seems to be a rare exception that you'll see the seller is not paying the tariffs:
> It seems to be a rare exception that you'll see the seller is not paying the tariffs
The seller won’t take the hit if that results in a loss. Surely the price just went up to include the tariff?
I expect nearly all foreign sellers have increased their prices to cover the tariffs. However, there are items selling for less than eBay says an individual will be charged in fees, so it's not just a you-pay-or-I-pay thing. Either eBay is exaggerating, or sellers are finding a way to get a better deal.
It's a minefield for eBay buyers who likely won't notice the footnote means their $5 purchase will cost them $20+ in fees. They now have something else to lookout for that doesn't show up in the table of search results. Something only in a small note on the item's product page. Something that might mean significant extra cost if you aren't careful when shopping.
I actually expect quite a lot of smaller foreign sellers have just stopped bothering trying to sell to the US, because the price plus the hassle isn't worth it. Large companies of course still will, with some price increase.
Maybe, but when I order from Canada I don't see a lower price. So probably we're paying for your tariffs.
At least this guy got the option to know what was happening. A few years ago I randomly got a letter from the IRS (or some other 3-letter agency - I can't recall which) demanding I pay thousands of dollars because I imported "industrial equipment". I found this odd as I'm just a normal consumer who buys crap of Amazon and whatnot - I'm not importing tens of thousands of dollars worth of industrial equipment.
I verified everything and it wasn't a scam; the government was legitimately about to take me to court or start garnishing my wages or something like that. They said that UPS or FedEx had told them I imported the equipment but never paid import duties.
I got ahold of the case worker for my case and told them it must be some error. After a week or two of back and forth, we finally figured out that it was for a laptop that a user in Canada had shipped back to me when they left the company, and it had been mis-categorized and valued on the import documents. Since we had purchased the laptop in the US in the first place and shipped it to the user, the case was dismissed and I didn't have to pay anything, but it's always a mini heart attack when you get a letter from Uncle Sam saying you owe thousands.
UPS sucks today.
I've had a UPS business account for over 35 years. In the past year or so they've become just terrible. Any call you make to them will have a hold time of at least half an hour. Many of my calls have gone over an hour. Usually you'll get transferred at least once. Also, earlier this year they outsourced their billing services to a third party, requiring additional consent on their website, and billing calls are now answered by an overseas call center.
I had to call them several times a few months back. What triggered everything was a fraudulent shipment made using my UPS account. I thought that I got that straightened out after two calls lasting about 2.5 hours total.
I got another bill the next month for the same fraudulent shipment where even though my shipping costs had been refunded, UPS was charging me a "missing PLD fee" because the criminals who shipped using my account number did not create the shipment using my online account. So after another 1.5 hours or so, that got resolved too. (They don't seem to offer an option to prevent shipments from being initiated from anywhere other than the online account.)
While waiting on hold (both times), their pre-recorded on-hold content would urge me to user their webiste to resolve my issue, which I had already tried, and discovered that it was impossible.
I had to call them one more time the following month because they began charging me $20 per month for no apparent reason. Without first notifying me, they decided that all direct bill accounts would now be charged this monthly fee. I was able to update my account with a credit card on file to get them to stop doing this.
I would switch to FedEx, but their customer service is even worse. I closed my FedEx account 20 years ago, but I continued to receive spam from them for over 15 years with no way to opt out (because of the existing customer relationship that no longer existed).
> UPS business account
> What triggered everything was a fraudulent shipment made using my UPS account
If your business allows for it, set your account to "Deny Inbound Charges" at https://www.ups.com/vip/view
UPS is still probably the best domestically for ground shipping, FedEx is the best domestically for express parcels, and DHL is the best for inbound or outbound international without question.
Didn't UPS try to move away from union labor a few years ago after a strike? I wonder if this has anything to do with that.
Also a vintage PC enthusiast. I have completely stopped buying parts from overseas due to this issue. $60 for an old GPU + $Shipping + $ADMIN_FEE? No thanks.
This was before current administration. FedEx charged me $60 AFTER delivery of $30 hat gifted to me from my US peers (yep, no warning, I got an email that I owe them $60 a few days after parcel was delivered). I originally thought it's a scam, but it was not. I diaputed this stating I should be informed BEFORE, not after delivery. After 6 months of back and forth I found that it's actually EU tarrifs.
I had this happen to me on an order from Sweden. The order was about $450 + $50 shipping. I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%. So I was expecting ~$70. A few days before it is supposed to arrive UPS sends me a $242 bill for “tariffs, customs, and brokerage fees”. That basically made it 50% more expensive, but it was either pay it or loose the item. A month later they sent me an invoice that claimed the item cost $850. No idea how that happened. I am too scared to order anything from the EU anymore.
Its funny how little US citizens know about this, meanwhile in the rest of the world we have been paying import duties our entire lives. When an item is posted abroad forms have to be filled detailing the sender, the nature of the goods and the value. Some sellers willl bend the law for you and decalre the value of the goods to be lower than what you actually paid if you ask nicely. The main danger being that if the parcel is lost the sender will lose out on any insurance claim.
The other option is to prepay tarrifs during the purchase of an item. Fedex and DHL usually offer this service which includes epedited customs clearance.
> Its funny how little US citizens know about this
Is it really? It sounds like you're implying it's some kind of woeful ignorance, but I say it's perfectly reasonable:
1. Each US state is already in a open-borders zero-tariff framework with all other states, which covers a very large portion of what people purchase.
2. Until recently, most individual consumers didn't need to think about tariffs on international goods, since most purchases were <$800 and covered by the de minimis rule. (Which AFAICT was in place for ~80 years.)
> AFAICT was in place for ~80 years
Sure, but it wasn't $800 for 80 years: the $800 change happened in 2016... the threshold was $200 from 2016-1994, starting at $1 (and tapering up) in 1938.
So it looks like there are 4 distinct spans in the past [0] where a nominal value kept getting decayed by inflation. To put them here with inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars in parens:
* 1938 to 1977: $1 ($22 -> $5.43)
* 1978 to 1992: $5 ($25 -> $11.50)
* 1993 to 2014: $200 ($446 -> $272)
* 2015 to 2025: $800 ($1087 -> $800)
* 2026 to ????: $0 ($0 -> $0)
The point I'd like to make from this is that Americans under 50 weren't adults-with-money in time to ever encounter those older more-restrictive spans. If you're under 28, the highest-exemption is the only situation they've ever known until now.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/small-parcels-big-problem...
It's funny cuz it's another sign of american privilege which the rest of the world finds hilariously ignorant.
i'm an american and find it really funny how americans can't seem to navigate a system the rest of the world does regularly. This is a great example of how stupid americans can be without realizing it, lol.
The rest of the world laughs at us while we act like we're superior. it's funny as hell dude.
american pride/ego is hilariously stupid.
I would have just been happy if the declared value was what I paid, instead of almost double.
Lesson learned: don't trust tariff calcs and assume the worst case. Even if you order something when tariffs have been dropped you're still at risks for broad sweeping tariffs to come into effect by the time your item arrives at a US port.
Moving forward: big companies are far better able to deal with this tin pot dictator chaos, let them handle importation if you can. DigiKey (ugh), Mouser, and Newark all show the tariff as a line item. I'm quite sure at least one of them is fudging COO and all three have some remaining US inventory of some items so there's still some entirely legal tariff avoidance.
Likewise AliExpress choice involves shipping to what I suspect is AliExpress' bonded warehouse and they handle the applicable tariffs. I've recently decided to learn how to solder and there's still plenty of 99 cent crap available from AE if you're willing to (ab)use the new customer discount.
Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum, which required me to fill out a UPS-specific form attesting to the steel and aluminum content
I ordered a specialty lock and some keys valued at about $400, and paid an extra $400 in duties because of this. It's insane.
Plot twist: I'm in Canada and was ordering a made-in-USA product from a US vendor. The duties were due to matching countertartiffs at the time. Sorry, but that's the last lock I buy from the US (and maybe the last thing with metal in it if I can help it) until this mess is resolved.
Our business got charged a 200% tariff on a UPS import from Japan, completely incorrect. The dispute is taking much longer than OP’s. Either UPS doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they willfully charge higher fees, or maybe they’re just understaffed from the massive layoffs they did to try to save their stock price.
edit: as a biz you (we) should use a legit import broker instead of UPS. But individuals like OP are stuck with no option.
In Germany, you can pre-register with DHL Express¹ with a bank account and optionally an EORI (Economic operators registration and identification) number, and then they immediately ding your bank account instead of providing their "disbursement service" where they 'benevolently' loan the customs fee to you for a 'minor' fee. I've not found similar options elsewhere, though I would assume they exist but might be corporate-only.
¹ annoyingly enough this doesn't even work with DHL, which is a separate thing from DHL Express in Germany.
This is how it works here in the US as well. If you are using FedEx or UPS for cross-border express shipments, you need to open an account with them and have a credit card on file (or whatever). Then they will deliver first and bill you later, instead of the other way around without an account. This really does make a difference!
I guess we can’t know precisely how this happened without seeing UPS’s original Form 7501.
The amended one sounds strange. Why did they claim that the duty for the actual HTS code is $0, and attribute the entirety of the tariff to the special EU-origin code?
In the country where I live, these kinds of fees are generally referred to "import taxes", because it's the buyer who's having to pay extra money which is going to the tax authority, not the seller.
While they can have an effect of encouraging domestic production, mostly they're a way to extract more money from the population.
Hello fellow Brazilian! We cry in 200-300% on top of shipping costs.
That's just not true. It's 60% and 20% for items below US$50.
You could theoretically get charged over 100% the price of the product if you buy something really cheap and shipping is more expensive than the product because shipping is taxed too.
> Lutnick Family Angling To Make Astronomical Sums Off Court Nixing Tariffs
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lutnick-family-angling-...
I’ve had a similar thing happen to me recently. 500$ tariff on $130 of stuff. The tariff should have been like $20. UPS has been completely non responsive and still won’t show me the customs forms. Total scam.
Government insanity aside, the most insane part to me is that card networks allow partial refunds, but UPS wants to... mail a cheque?
They probably have this type of cash in some short term investment vechicle to earn extra cash, so they have to hold on to it for an average of n days. Writing a cheque and mailing it basically gives them quite a few more extra days of interest payments.
Maybe they want to play a similar game to mail-in rebates? Or it could just be an old process that has yet to be modernized
I got charged a $17 tariff on a doll my stepmum had knitted my daughter. Fun fun
Ah this is just another step towards Turkification[0] of USA. This situation is just how it is in Erdogan's Turkey but you still have way to go if you are able to get your package out of the customs in less than a few weeks and no hustle.
When the trade deals and tariff conditions get sufficiently complex(it gets more complex every day as the president accommodates specific companies and personal favors), the bureaucracy also increases so at some point it becomes too much of a nuisance to bother with individual imports.
[0] https://www.theglobalist.com/the-turkification-of-america-tr...
It’s still a little hard to believe and terrifying how similar this particular title and the comments below are to what I would’ve read in Turkish forums circa 2010s.
For Turkey it only got worse from there.
yeah this is just a way for republicans to curry favors/influence from businesses they prefer.
they make everything as hard as possible, then create loopholes for their buddies.
this is what they've been claiming has been happening under democrats(projection), but in reality it's teh system they long for. Now that they're in power they can make it happen.
Never fear! That $2000 check will be coming your way soon.
And all it cost was a mere $4,900 stealthily taken from your pocket—what a steal!
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-april-1...
Lol the mental gymnastics of republicans to say "Tariffs aren't taxes on citizens, they're taxes on foreign countries"
and now trump is easing tariffs on foods because they're too expensive. he's also thinking of shipping out STIMULUS CHECKS because people are struggling to buy tariffed goods.
it's mind boggling what they must be thinking to justify this stuff.
Somewhat clickbait. The $684 duty charge was in error, and they got it reduced to the correct amount (an order of magnitude lower)
Not a clickbait, because it was quite difficult to get it reduced, so it is good to know how to do it.
Moreover, the money have not been returned yet, that could take a long time and for many people losing access to such an amount would be very inconvenient, even if they knew that the money would be returned, eventually.
I live in Germany and UPS is asking for 116€ customs / fees for a personal gift package someone sent me worth $47 (40€ which is below the new 45€ de minimis line). Nearly everything in the blog post happened to me just this past week except I didn't have 116€ at home in cash(!) so they will be delivering on Monday (when I will have cash and then try to get it all back from UPS).
The whole thing is unbelievably infuriating and insane and I will warn anyone in the States to never again use UPS for shipping abroad.
Sounds like something that could be weaponized. Order a bunch of 'gifts' to be shipped to a target via UPS/FedEx or whichever vendor helpfully pays the tarrifs for you. Then your victim has to fight collections or pay up.
I also imported a roughly $400 item from Romania. Was expecting a 30% tariff at most. Nope. $756. Sender says there is nothing they can do. UPS says that's the money I owe. They will send to collections if you go long enough without paying it. Reddit had no answers, and many are struggling with the same situation.
And now you know why DHL suspended shipments to the US for a bit. I think express (non-postal) shipments are being processed these days?
I hate UPS with the passion of a thousand dying suns.
I've long since opted to pay more to use DHL whenever I can, but a lot of Chinese suppliers simply won't deal with anyone except UPS. Drives me nuts.
If (when) SCOTUS determines that Trump's tariffs were illegally collected and importers are refunded, will end consumers who paid tariffs also be refunded?
nobody has any idea and you best bet trump is going to hold onto that money until it goes to the supreme court.
They are already making noise that it would be too hard to issue refunds, ie 'can't unscramble an egg'. So even when tariffs get ruled against, refunds may take years to get. People buying tariff refund claims are still only paying ~.25 on the dollar.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-tariff-trades-sho...
UPS didn't charge it.
If SCOTUS finds the tariffs unconstitutional in Learning Resources v. Trump, they should order refunds.
According to the President, tariffs have already brought in $8 TRILLION dollars. [1]
Might be hard to issue refunds.
1. https://reason.com/2025/09/02/the-white-house-says-trumps-ta...
Because I've ran into the same issue. I don't think this is actually the tariff. I'm almost 100% positive this is the shipping companies (UPS, and FedEx, but UPS seems to be the biggest culprit) are slamming receivers with massive bills because they are miscategorizing many items coming from Europe.
I would be surprised if the money was being held in escrow and could be refunded. Actually the Trump admin is using this as an argument to the SC as to why making the tariffs unconstitutional is a bad idea.
Indeed. The moral of the story is that it’s ideal to do illegal acts which are difficult to undo, as it’ll give the judiciary greater pause.
This reminds me of the quote
If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
Kind of the same idea, sorta.
I had to pay a tariff charge of about $20 on an order of about $100 that I had placed about a year or so prior to this whole tariff bullshit. The idea that the president can decide to tariff whatever the fuck he wants is something that needs to go, since it's essentially levying taxes without representation. If somehow the current admin can't refund the money they stole from people then every single person involved should be thrown in jail and their property confiscated until that money is recovered.
I bought a semi-custom instrument from Germany back in the spring of 2024, about $1800 (a Sandberg electric bass). But there was a year-long back log. The timing was perfect -- they told me it was ready to ship just when the tariffs went into effect, which cost me an extra $250 or so.
Imagine how non Americans feel about Trump. He is fucking with the worlds economy nearly as much as he is messing up the US economy, yet we get even less representation.
Retroactive taxes are clearly bs.