In a Toy Association survey of 410 toy manufacturers with annual sales of less than $100 million, more than 60 percent said they had canceled orders, and around 50 percent said they would go out of business within weeks or months if the tariffs remained.
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She had placed a large order of scooters to arrive for the summer. But the importer rerouted the shipment to Canada because it did not want to pay the tariff.
Tariffs are just a policy tool we can use. Every major economic power uses them to some extent, including the European Union.
Trump’s tariffs I think are bad because he is “going after everyone” versus Biden’s approach which was to build a coalition of friendly nations and revamp supply chains to reduce dependency on China who is adamant about being a foe to the United States, European Union, and others. Tariffs are not a bad tool to leverage here against China, but the way this administration is going about it seems like a less prudent approach.
To the OP’s point - I completely agree. If Americans can’t go a day without a flood of cheap, disposable junk (yes this is different than your iPhone or other advanced electronics), our civilization is going to face serious challenges on the global stage and further reductions in quality of life and access to resources.
What so many seem to forget is that there actually isn’t enough to go around. And we have to enact policies and utilize military force to protect our nation(s). Ideally we can do this in a peaceful way that brings everyone up as much as possible but this is only going to occur so long as the great nations of the world see eye to eye on that. We can and should enlarge the pie. But it requires everyone agreeing to doing so. That consensus is failing.
Many seem to think “China will just sell their stuff to the EU and the EU will get cheaper prices!” But that just places the EU in the same intolerable position the United States is finding itself. You must manufacture goods and provide services. You must have industries capable of creating products at all levels. Allowing too much of that manufacturing power to reside in one country, and one that does not like your liberal values, is beyond foolish.
The fact that Americans can’t go a day without TikTok or cheap Temu junk, or stomach paying more for your iPhone and keeping it a little longer should be viewed as seriously and deathly concerning. And going without such things or paying more for them isn’t even in the conversation of national sacrifice or “hard times”.
To add, it seems to me that “we don’t have the ability to build that here” when it comes to something like an iPhone is a serious problem. We have hollowed out our manufacturing capacity.
The idea that China only makes "cheap, disposable junk" and this faux-tough guy "we gotta man up and suffer through" pose is a big part of the problem.
At this point I wonder if it's some sort of engagement farming thing. Surely someone who posts the same stupid stuff every time and gets yelled at it has a reason for doing it? Right?
Despite the ongoing problem of LLMs passing as human (and before that, https://xkcd.com/1019/ etc.), it is entirely possible they're 100% sincere.
First, remember that a lot of people voted for Trump despite all thay he said in the election and all that he did last time around. What he says must resonate with a lot of people, or that would not have happened.
Second, anecdotally, there's someone I used to know back in the UK who was absolutely convinced that Brexit would be a success, to the extent that at one point me simply saying "no" to some claim he made resulted in him shouting "that proves we should do it!" (or similar, it's hard to quote exactly from memory, especially 9 years later). Cambridge graduate, did the maths olympiad in their youth, still acted that way.
And third, it's very easy to get anchored on something that was once true, and not update as the world moves on. When I was a kid, "made in China" or "made in Taiwan" was not a sign of quality, but "made in Japan" was; but one of the films of my youth was Back To The Future, and one if the few things you can allow even fiction to inform you of are cultural beliefs, like 1955 Doc Brown being written to expect "made in Japan" to justify component failure.
Well yes, as I mentioned in my post China does make more than cheap junk. And our inability to make those advanced electronics is a specific problem I called out.
With respect to the “man up” piece of it - well if you can’t go without TikTok and Temu junk you have a big problem.
Both items: inability to manufacture advanced electronics, and inability to not go without cheap junk are separate but related problems.
While I think the Trump admin is weak and will capitulate on tariffs, and that’s aside from the asinine way in which we are treating our allies with respect to the same, him and others are very much right to point out the underlying concern. Tariffs can help to address those concerns, but they are just one tool amongst many.
>Well yes, as I mentioned in my post China does make more than cheap junk.
And yet you don't see the contradiction in characterizing people's fears as being unable to "go without TikTok and Temu junk" rather than being rightfully afraid of the recession and mass economic hardship this will trigger costing many people their jobs and savings. This is going to severely damage our economy for absolutely no reason with no plan whatsoever. People are entirely correct to be worried.
>While I think the Trump admin is weak
Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong" it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.
> And yet you don't see the contradiction in characterizing people's fears as being unable to "go without TikTok and Temu junk" rather than being rightfully afraid of the recession and mass economic hardship this will trigger costing many people their jobs and savings. This is going to severely damage our economy for absolutely no reason with no plan whatsoever. People are entirely correct to be worried.
Sure people can be worried. In fact, it's America's great national pastime. But I don't think I made the claim that the Trump administration is going about the decoupling with China in the best possible way, only that the goal is one that's worthwhile precisely because the pain you are describing.
No longer importing plastic junk, again this is separate from manufacturing advanced electronics which are also an important concern, and the effects of which are so devastating that we will trigger as you put it a recession, mass economic hardship, and will cost many people their jobs and savings, seems to place our country in an intolerable situation and a reliance on such imports, which if you read the news from the Right People, China seems to experience no economic hardship from such a decoupling meaning we are simply at the mercy of their benevolence. That's a scary thought, and it seems to me we're just going to experience this pain either way, we may as well do it on our terms, generally speaking.
With respect to TikTok you can just delete it. There's no pain experienced there. I'm close-minded on that specific issue. Social media in general is bad anyway, TikTok is just currently the worst and one we can most easily ban today.
The inability to manufacture advanced electronics at scale in the United States is a self-evident problem. I personally don't care about the arguments suggesting why such things can't be built here, because those just further illustrate the problem.
> Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong"
Well I don't really care much about this tough guy stuff you are talking about, but as an aside it is rather important politically, especially when we're dealing with a despotic regime in China that must save face, both culturally and by virtue of dictatorship. I mostly just care about policy and the results of the policy.
When I say Trump is weak, I don't mean he is weak in the sense of being a macho guy - frankly there's nothing less I care about in the world aside from TikTok videos - what I mean is he doesn't have the stomach to go through with the plan because of the potential economic repercussions in the short and medium term. In fact, his inability to be stalwart on this issue is precisely the greatest problem now in our foreign policy agenda (or what remains of it) because now all we've done is screwed a bunch of things up and pissed off the allies we need to actually achieve the goal. The worst of all worlds, so to speak.
> it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.
The endeavor has merits and likely those are well worth pursuing. I wouldn't disagree that the way in which we are going about things is not the best way, and I think I mentioned that before. I preferred the Biden administration's approach in general, though I don't think they acted with enough urgency.
Cost increases from onshoring are more than wage increases from onshoring.
There is no problem with trade deficits. Countries accumulating USD means they have to lend it back at cheaper and cheaper rates.
The real problem is the federal deficit. In 2024 the USA had to borrow $2 trillion to keep the lights on, while foreign countries only had $1 trillion from net trade deficit to lend.
By analogy, the problem isn't that the USA is buying discount goods, it's that it's funding its lifestyle with a credit card. Paying more for the goods and still using a credit card doesn't solve this problem. It makes it worse
If the goal is to plug the budget issue, you want imports to continue so that you can extract more tax from the citizens.
Even then, quality of life is less impacted if you just raise general taxes like a VAT or sales tax. That way consumers still get the best bang for their buck.
This is disingenuous even by your usual standards. “cheap Chinese crap for Christmas” was just one example of things that tariffs will make it harder to get, by no means the only one.
It’s not the 90s anymore. Lots of Chinese goods are neither cheap nor crap, nor producible elsewhere.
I’m specifically responding to a post that links an article about christmas toy shortages. I know China makes some incredible technology. But it also makes a lot of cheap crap nobody needs. Can we at least agree on banning that?
No (why? what's the actual problem with having cheap crap nobody needs?). But I'd at least agree with something like a carbon tax to target the environmental externalities of the type of commerce you're talking about.
Retailers Fear Toy Shortages at Christmas as Tariffs Freeze Supply Chain: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/business/trump-tariffs-ch...
In a Toy Association survey of 410 toy manufacturers with annual sales of less than $100 million, more than 60 percent said they had canceled orders, and around 50 percent said they would go out of business within weeks or months if the tariffs remained. … She had placed a large order of scooters to arrive for the summer. But the importer rerouted the shipment to Canada because it did not want to pay the tariff.