Aliexpress is already displaying tariff-inclusive prices.
A curious dynamic: A seller importing a container of cargo to Amazon (or other US warehouse) has to pay the tariffs up front while trusting that dear leader won't lower the tariff amount before they can sell them. A seller that ships directly from China has a committed purchase with cash in hand by the time the specific tariff needs to be paid. I can see this leading to drastically less selection from US warehouses of long tail items that would otherwise sit around.
Speculation: I wouldn't be surprised if Aliexpress (/Choice) charges sellers a fixed fee based on the current tariff rates, but still covers whatever the tariff ends up being when the item arrives at the port, to make it really straightforward for sellers. The kind of eat-it investment you get in a society working to build up institutions rather than tear them down.
For many goods a 145% tariff is a ban for all intents and purposes and no different to a 100% tariff or a 200% tariff. This is just more evidence (as if we needed it) that the administration has no idea what they're doing.
Certain goods are extremely high mark up. For example, clothing is typically 100-200% markup. So if you buy a $5 t-shirt and sell it for $15, the tariffed price is now ~$12. You may find retailers will sell that at $20, absorbing some of the cost on a temporary basis.
Also, many such retailers have already sought to diversify their supply chains (eg buying clothing from Vietnam and other places).
I'll be sad, but amused, when Trump and Co declare that each state should build factories to fill their needs for basic products ... similar to proposals made during the economic collapse days in Venezuela.
His most die-hard supporters will hang on to the bitter end - and they're the least capable of doing so. I've gone from mocking them => feeling sorry for them => fear them - these people are definitely not harmless.
It's surprising that we would actually vote for this of our own free will.
That's gotta be something historians will puzzle over for the next two hundred years. It's mind blowing that we did that.
Stepping a level lower even, how, on Earth, could our system possibly have produced Harris, Vance and Trump as the options? Then you step a level lower than that, and even the challengers were like, DeSantis and Haley?
It was corruption and ineptitude the entire way down. How could that have happened?
The two party system, forced on us by plurality voting, is the reason people feel they don't have a choice.
Pick one of two very different sides. If a third candidate tries to enter the race, they harm themselves and the person they are similar to, and they help the opposition.
Any form of ranked voting will rid us of this restriction and allow more candidates to run for an office, and allow citizens to vote their true preference.
Yesterday, HR 3040 was introduced by a GOP member from Arizona, which intends to ban ranked choice voting from federal elections. The GOP has already banned it in the state of Florida.
A radical party is terrified of a system that enables more electoral competition and throttles radicalism.
Right. The last serious third-party presidential candidate was Ross Perot in 1992. In terms of political platform and voter appeal he was slightly more similar to the incumbent Republican candidate George H. W. Bush, which probably enabled the Democrat candidate Bill Clinton to win (although it's impossible to know what would have happened if Perot didn't run).
Some political analysts claim that Perot entered the race not really intending to win but rather as retribution against Bush. In 1979 the Iranian regime imprisoned two of Perot's EDS employees. Perot asked Bush, who was then Director of the CIA, to get them out. Bush refused to act and Perot held a grudge against him ever since.
"In 1979 the Iranian regime imprisoned two of Perot's EDS employees. Perot asked Bush, who was then Director of the CIA, to get them out"
Most interesting part of that story is that once the government failed to help he organized and trained his own operation and successfully extracted his employees.
> Stepping a level lower even, how, on Earth, could our system possibly have produced Harris, Vance and Trump as the options? Then you step a level lower than that, and even the challengers were like, DeSantis and Haley?
I guess you forgot about the corpse of Biden. Harris belongs in that "challengers" category except she had less support than DeSantis and Haley (from both Democrats and Republicans!). Harris has never received a vote in a presidential primary.
The Democratic party enabled Trump to win by not forcing a clearly incapable Biden out of the race earlier, allowing them to run an actual primary and then choosing a terrible candidate because they backed themselves into a corner with identity politics. Remember, the Democratic party was totally fine with Biden until he was forced in front of the American people and they got as good of a look at him as the party had.
That's how our system produces these horrible candidates. Each party acts in their own self-interest because they have a stranglehold over the electoral process.
It started in 2008. The Democratic party tried to rig it for Clinton.
I'm sure she's a wonderful person in real life, but she's one of the most unpopular people to ever run for office.
Obama actually is likeable, easily winning the primary and both elections.
The Dems, because deep down they'd rather have the GOP over real progressives. Decided to rig it for Hillary again in 2016. Sanders had an actual base, but the DNC didn't want him to win.
Biden was a rigged candidate too, but the pandemic swayed things in his direction.
With Harris, the Dems decide to skip the rigged primary, the little people (the actual voters) don't need to have a say. Here's your moderate Republican from the mid 90s.
At least the Republicans didn't rig every primary they've had since 2008. They don't play the super delegate dance.
Well... Time to try and establish residency elsewhere.
> The Dems, because deep down they'd rather have the GOP over real progressives. Decided to rig it for Hillary again in 2016. Sanders had an actual base, but the DNC didn't want him to win.
Sanders was a candidate in the Democratic primary (which is already a significant accommodation, with Sanders not even being a member of the Democratic party), and was strongly rejected by Democratic voters -- twice.
The constant whining from Sanders fans about the DNC is simply annoying, and is basically the same conspiratorial thinking that MAGA adherents display when they complain about the "deep state".
Oh ffs, Harris in charge would've been just fine. If we're talking about economy/stock market only, even Vance as president would've been fine as well, although he'd destroy American democracy way more efficiently than Trump.
It's funny you say that, because we talked about literally that. No joke.
No, he does not and would not want to work in a shoe factory, but he remembers when he was 16 and his first job was actually in a local shoe factory. He said it was a terrible job, but taught him how to keep a job. And he appreciated being able to buy shoes that were made by people he knew. . . . "I want that opportunity for my grandson."
It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to exist in quantity.
The US already makes highly advanced goods like cars using robotic manufacturing.
Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?
The question really is if such entrepreneur made such a shoe factory that still employed union labor at fairly high rates of pay, why wouldn't they just install that factory in a place where labor costs less?
If the goal is union jobs at fairly high rates of pay, we can make high-productivity jobs like CVS employee (~$1.2mm revenue per employee IIRC) into good high-paying union jobs by incentivizing CVS employees to unionize.
Even the type of high-value manufacturing present in the US tends to be less productive with labor than Costco (~$30k net profit per employee) or Delta (~$56k net per employee) or ADP (~$84k net). Since our labor pool is decreasing, it is even more critical for Americans to work in high-productivity jobs rather than moving the other direction.
Clothing is hard because it needs to have stretch. Iron is easy to automate because it doesn't stretch (well it does but not by enough to worry about). Thus we have been automating steel for a long time, and clothing still has a lot of manual sewing done on it. To the extent we have automated sewing it is often has a significant quality reduction.
Hopefully somebody can solve the problem. There is a lot of work on it, and progress is being made. Don't ask me how close they are, I don't work in that space.
and one of the ways to do that effectively is with intense automation and integrated supply chains regardless of geo-political borders. Neither of these is attractive to this circus
Why would an entrepreneur even think about building a factory when building materials might potentially skyrocket? Anyone who is considering something like this is just going to wait until Trump isn't in office so things can stabilize. If you said, right now, I'm gonna build a factory, it probably wouldn't start producing anything until 2028 at best.
What? Of all the non-high-tech things you can manufacture, shoes actually seem pretty complicated. You have a mix of different materials, if you want to go more traditional you need a higher level of employee skill, you need a big variety of styles and sizes to be competitive, and if people have one bad experience with your product they'll probably never buy from you again. Also the margins and competition are brutal.
How is that any different than hourly wage slave jobs now? It's better than being homeless or spending imaginary bucks printed against a debt that will never be paid off
We can build a factory in a month, including permitting, acquiring the land, planning the building and constucting it, as well as procuring or building the machinery and setting it up in the factory, programming it and hiring and training the workforce during high employment? That's very impressive!
tbh, as far as I'm concerned the hollowing out of the USG is why we can't do things fast. How many times has your boss had the entire team submit a proposal on how long it would take each member of the team to complete a JIRA ticket and then use that bidding as to who to assign the ticket? Like if you could build bridges and stuff in-house then you really speed things up.
Given that something like a factory is probably going to require eminent domain to get a large contiguous tract (or built in the middle of nowhere so no counter-lawsuit) it seems fine for the government to build the shell of a building and then sell it off to be customized.
11 months is truly impressive but of course a far cry from a single month. A bridge also needs no machinery and workers permanently dedicated to it. IMO it's absolutely crucial for the US to cut down red tape and silly regulations to allow all construction to get done much more rapidly. I also wonder how this translates to building many projects like it at the same time. I understand construction capacity and backlogs are a huge bottleneck and we are in the process of deporting large numbers of people who could work on it while never having been good at growing a strong workforce in trades that require certification like electricians because we won't give out H1Bs for those.
I have a metal lathe in my shop, if I thought it was worth it I could turn it into a factory in 10 minutes - including the time to change my clothes. I could a factory to build simple toolboxes in about a month - not much space or equipment needed. Building a car assembly line - one month if you will accept a production rate of 1 every year. Want to turn out a new car every minute and it will take a lot longer.
In order to save its industry from the Nazis, the USSR moved over 1,500 large factories eastward in under six months in 1941. So the US in 2025 could certainly build at least a few factories in under a month. It would be a complete waste of government resources and certainly should be spent on something more worthwhile (like eradicating homelessness), but it's not impossible.
It’s not possible without seizing the means of production. An electrical switchboard that can power a factory has a minimum 24 week lead time, probably more like 52 weeks.
In my local construction market everyone is already working. There’s no slack manpower, particularly in the skilled trades (mech, elec, plumbing)
The above also ignores the fact that nobody wants to lend capital for such projects, so the government will need to finance it.
If you have ever been involved in new factory construction for anything that's more than light manual assembly, this statement would be very amusing to you.
I think it will be both. Raising prices for some goods because of tariffs (and adding some percent for good measure and profit) while also discontinuing others. It may go like the car market where cheaper options are slowly being phased out and the focus goes to higher priced vehicles.
Prices never really came down after the COVID shortages, I really don't expect this round of shortage to be any different. Companies have a convenient excuse to jack up prices with the comforting lie that they'll go back down when shortages are over.
For stuff that people need and will buy at heavily inflated prices, sure. But there are a lot of non-essential items that people probably won't buy if the price increases significantly. And for those items, I suspect a lot of stores will just let the shelves stay empty instead of spending a lot of money for inventory they can't sell.
Candy bars for example. They want to charge $3 for a single candy bar now, but no one wants to pay that much so they're selling them 2 for $5.
But retailers have studied that this trick isn't going to last because not everyone wants to buy candy bars in bulk, and they won't spend more than $3 for a single candy bar, which means if it goes any higher they won't by any candy bars at all.
The customer will only bear so much, though, so at some point the businesses that keep buying stock and raising prices will be left with stock that cannot be priced any higher, leaving it to be unloaded at a loss. That can be a far worse situation than not having any stock at all. Either way, it is an uncomfortable gamble.
