Could soar? Like, it's preventable? How? Oh, vote for Harris/Walz to not see tariffs used again.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Oh, tariffs... i thought they were stating the obvious: christmas.
Let's hope this means the resulting oversaturation/-production will then make laptops half the price for us Europeans.
Consoles: Hives of vendor lock-in and proprietary nonsense
Smartphones: Hives of vendor lock-in, proprietary nonsense and a powerful tool for social engineers
Laptops: Strong tendency toward proprietary design, eh they're not that terrible, I guess...
All in all, making these things harder to obtain would be a net positive for society.
It could also mean that manufacturing of those might return to the US. Fuck Trump but US tech media have been insufferably partisan last couple of weeks.
It might, after years and years.
Thr problem with snap tariffs is it doesn't give the economy time to reorient. All of that overseas industrial capacity providing those imports has taken decades to ramp up, while US capabilities have atrophied badly. It will take many years for US manufacturing to fully catch up, and in the mean time the 50% or more price increase on tons of basic goods would become baked into the price of said goods and only drive additional crazy inflation.
And even if you ramp them up over time, there is not much business incentive to jump into the water immediately, and you have the same problem.
The article mentions consumer devices but this would also smack basically every single piece of commercial and industrial electronics hardware too and have a lot of knock on effects.
How so, at least with this article? It mentions a couple times things like:
what she hasn't done is disown the current tariffs on the imports of China, which have also been harmful.
if Harris wins and resumes Biden's supposedly more strategic approach to tariffs, tech companies already feeling heavily burdened expect they would be stuck with extra costs under her administration
Harris hasn't been clear about her plans for tariffs if elected
It's unclear how quickly prices would rise if Trump or Harris expanded tariffs.
It feels (at least to me) pretty balanced on this that they will rise if either one is elected, they just can't say how much under Harris because she hasn't given details about it, which they point out many times. Trump has declared his intention, so that's why his amount is shown.
Trump's threat of a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods is perhaps the clearest worst-case scenario for tech companies preparing to adapt as administrations shift.
Disowning current tariffs doesn't mean they'll go away, either, though.
Tariffs are easy to put in place, but hard to roll back. You can put then in place on a whim, basically, but then the target country will retaliate with their own. As a result, removing them requires diplomatic negotiation to make sure the removal is bilateral. That's not easy to do during times of icy relations like China and we currently have.
They could have titled this piece „Vote for Harris because Trump will make your toys more expensive”. Stating that they don’t know what Harris will do is not nuance.