Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs?

[ultrarunner]

The greatest thing is we live in a country where we can chose who to buy from.
If imported goods are cheaper than the US made products, then people buy imports and US producers suffer, shut down or shift work overseas.
If imported goods are more expensive than US products, then US producers will hire more people to meet demand helping citizens.
More jobs means competitive wages to attract and keep workers.

I recently bought 60 fire extinguishers…

The USA made extinguishers cost $1 more per extinguisher.

I bought USA made.

 

[t44e6]

Too bad we can't have free markets. And too bad we have a criminal government that inflates away the value of our fiat currency. We are ruled by a parasitic foreign cartel of bankers and corporations, no matter who is in office our circle of liberty shrinks and money and power keep flowing upwards.

 

[t44e6]

An illustration of the typical effect of tarrifs:

View attachment 1906271

(I'm not saying they don't have any use at all, but they're usually surprisingly not well thought out)

Virtually nothing government does is well thought out, and doesn't do what it is supposed to do. Unless punishing us is the goal.

 

[tjandrews]

The tariffs may add some fixed costs to tractors, but that cost will most likely be far less than the decrease resulting from the restoration of American energy independence.

We should be seeing the price of oil drop back below $ 40 per barrel by June, 2025 after the pipelines thru Canada are reopened and drilling is resumed on Federal lands. That will more than cut fuel costs in half, saving much on transportation.

At least two things wrong with that assumption:

1. That Canadian oil will probably be subject to the tariffs imposed on imports from Canada. Oh, and importing Canadian oil doesn't promote "American energy independence."

2. While you can lead an oil producer to federal lands, you can't make him drill. And if he's already drilled, you can't make him pump. Oil producers have little incentive to increase production and thus lower profits.

 

[vanatic2]

I didn't want to mention any names because I don't want to start a flame war.

This was intended as a non-partisan comment on tariffs in general (which we may or may not get, I am not sure they can be imposed by executive order).

If you really want to be bored out of your mind, look up the Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1930 which raised US import tariffs across the board to between 40 and 60 percent. The result of this was retaliatory tariffs, resulting in as much as a 30% loss in US exports. International trade dropped tremendously. Smoot-Hawley was one of the causes of the great depression, and the depression didn't end until mobilization at the start of WW2.

(If you don't learn from history, you are going to repeat it.)

Best Regards,
Mike/Florida

The markets today are much different than those of 1930. We were a manufacturing country back then whereas now we are simply a consuming country with much less base manufacturing. A vast majority of what U.S. consumers buy today comes from China. Just try to find something that doesn't! It's not easy.

If you look back at the past 20 - 30 years, as manufacturing became concentrated in a few countries (mainly Korea then China) due to favorable labor rates and those countries governments incentives to have companies set up shop there, we have been slowly funneled into our goods coming from those areas. I know this firsthand as I worked for the international division of Frigidaire for 23 years and personally witnessed this happen, especially in Korea in the late 1980's then Mexico in the late 1990's. In that time however, tariffs have come and gone with little to no negative direct consumer impact. This has been for several reasons, the main one in recent times being that China has absorbed tariffs without raising prices. This is due to the gross trade imbalance between China and the U.S. today. So much of their economy rides on our purchasing power that they can't afford to sour that relationship. Further, tariffs can cause companies to relocate their manufacturing back in the USA or other more favorable countries like Mexico or even Thailand.

In the short term, U.S. consumers may see some impact from this policy however in the long term several positive outcomes are probable. One is that prices will come down due to competition. Once you remove the unfair advantage China has held for 30 years on trade, other areas will step up and compete for our business. Second, the quality will improve. Have you noticed the slow decay of quality in the last 10 - 15 years? Nothing lasts. We buy Christmas lights and they go bad every year so we buy them again. More money for China. We buy microwave ovens that used to last 15-20 years but now if you get 5 you're lucky. But we buy them again and China gets more money. However Finally, and I think more importantly, we as a nation need to get our eggs out of one big basket and diversify where our goods are made. What happens when anyone becomes dependent upon one source for the vast majority of what they need to live and survive? That one source has power over you that can be used against you. If that costs us a little more but releases us from a potential stranglehold and returns jobs to America, then the cost is justified.

 

[tjandrews]

I'll agree with much of your post until you try and call Social Security an "entitlement". The Social Security fund could have been and would be self supporting until the so called excess was skimmed off and put in the general fund coffers.
I paid into SS from the time I was 14 and working for my father on the farm, right up till I turned 65.
If that had gone into a growth fund it would have more then covered what I'll ever draw out. The ones that have never paid into the system and draw on it as a disability it certainly is an entitlement to them.
Also as far as the Medicare system goes I've been paying into that for a long time also, also for the Part B I pay $174.70 per month out of my pocket (going up to $185 for 2025) then I also pay for a supplement every month $266 per month then also $31 a month for prescription insurance also going up in January.
So people that call SS and Medicare an entitlement are correct in that we are entitled to it because we paid for ours and others.
It should not be part of the budget, it was theft when it became part of the annual budget.

I too paid into Social Security for many years. Even though I'm 75, and collecting, I'm still paying into the system because I remain self-employed as a farmer. They recalculate my benefit every year, based on the new addition to my earnings record. Because there were a few very lean years in that history, my benefit has been known to increase because I still work.
But I take exception to your assertion that if I had put that money into a private investment, I'd be better off. The truth is that it seemed like every time I managed to collect some savings, something came along to drain it away again. Those lean years I mentioned. The barn needs a new roof, the car dies, or weather cuts production. Something. The forced savings imposed by the government are keeping me solvent, now that I have enough "experience" that I can't do some of what I once could.
And BTW, the money that was "stolen" from Social Security was actually "borrowed." It became part of the National Debt. I seem to remember reading somewhere that we owe the largest portion of the National Debt to ourselves.

 

[DieselBound]

"The chief cause of problems is solutions." -- Eric Sevareid

Don't worry, TPTB will be fine....

 

[KofAlberta]

"The chief cause of problems is…”.

I love this!!!


Here’s a decades old article I really enjoyed reading:

How the World Works - The Atlantic
By James Fallows
DECEMBER 1993 ISSUE

How the World Works

Americans persist in thinking that Adam Smith's rules for free trade are the only legitimate ones. But today's fastest-growing economies are using a very different set of rules. Once, we knew them—knew them so well that we played by them, and won. Now we seem to have forgotten

www.theatlantic.com

In his op eds, Warren Buffett has spoken about trade a few times.
Here’s one:

America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling The Nation Out From Under Us. Here's A Way To Fix The Problem--And We Need To Do It Now. - November 10, 2003

America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling The Nation Out From Under Us. Here's A Way To Fix The Problem--And We Need To Do It Now. - November 10, 2003

money.cnn.com

 

[tjandrews]

Years ago I paid less that $300 for a computer
I see a lot of the laptops are under $500 but
most of them must be at least 10 or more years
old as the speed is approx 2.5 mhz and dual core
rather slow Some of the new computers are 5 ghz
and 8 to 12 core

willy

I bought my first computer, an Atari 800, in 1985 at a garage sale for $25. It worked the way it was, but I soon tired of the tape drive that came with it and bought a floppy drive. Don't remember how much that cost. BTW, I still have it, and it still works, though I don't use it for anything but the occasional video game any more.
I bought a Windows 8 HP Pavilion a couple of years ago at another garage sale for $20. To be fair, the Pavilion's battery was no good, and had to be replaced. And I spent around $100 for a bigger SSD to replace the hard drive and for enough RAM to bring it to its max. Wiped out the horrible Windows 8 and replaced it with Mageia Linux. Works great. Does everything I ask of it.

 

[qualsite]

Tariffs... a favorite tool of tyrants throughout history, which is simply a tax on the citizens, paid for by the instant inflation, yet offering a degree of separation so that the sheeple never associate it with the tyrant, but always somebody else. And they never work as planned, except for the tax part, which always works. Again, when the government says that it's for the good of the people, the lie every tyranny uses for control, always know that it isn't, but only for the good of the government and the elites running it.