Inadvisability of MAGA-Initiated International Trade Warfare Tariffs
Ultimately, Tariffs on Products of Exporter-Suppliers Sold to Importer-Retailers Are a Pass-on Sales Tax on and Raise the Prices on Those Products Sold by Importer-Retailers and Purchased by Domestic Consumers
Some of the top and obvious marketplace ramifications of the economic mechanics of the imposition of tariffs on imports from China and other [major] export-import competitor nations:
PRC China and the other major nation-state export-import competitors targeted, and their business products punished, with US tariffs on their exports to, imports by US re-sellers into, the US will balance and cancel out the effect of the US tariffs with corresponding, or correspondingly higher, rates-of-charge counter, retaliatory tariffs of their own on US exports to their nations, compared to zero or lower tariff rates-of-charge on imports from respectively zero-tariff and lower-tariff imposing nations. Prices of imports, including components, parts and raw materials, in addition to semifinished and finished products, for all affected lines of products, will increase, and probably comparatively rapidly or abruptly sharply spike for and between the tariff dueling nations. Particularly the smaller producer, and/or lesser international and optionally domestic, market-share and import-beneficiary retailer and consumer, export nation would most lose, though both might lose lopsidedly overall, international consumer market share, reduced domestic consumer purchases, along with net-effect purchasing power with regard to their household and business enterprise incomes, and reduced retailer sales and profitability and consequential, in the aggregate, reduced import-export business sector earnings as well as earnings, or returns, to their investors, as in the import-export sector of the US economy. If importer-retailers absorb the tariffs in whole or large part, they will reduce their profit margins and profitability or do worse to themselves. This economic scenario in the USA would result in widespread business failures and staid acutely diminished sales, revenue and profit declines in the import-export sector of the economy, including for major street, mall and online retailers, and in the respective full unemployment for some and substantial reductions in employment for others of their workforces of import businesses. Housing, automobile, grocer, banking, lending and credit, church tithing, charitable donations and political contributions, among other sectors of the US economy, would be economically hurt by income losses by the import-tariffs' related and driven downturn (in financially weakened going concerns, insolvencies and mass unemployment and reduced employment of business significantly tied to and dependent on imports, especially normally price-cheap imports) in the US economy.
However, when imports constitute the dumping of products at or below the cost of their production, whose effect is or credibly potentially is to harm systemically the viability of an industry or producer-market segment of the receiver nation, then reasonably such imports should be banned if they are not essential to or required for the production needs of domestic producers and the supply of the same kinds of products by domestic suppliers is insufficient. If they are so needed, then tariffs should be levied on them to make their retail prices match the average, above-average or top price of the concerned products found across major or all world markets. Otherwise, when imports, by exporters, with bona-fide prices episodically or in an overall continuum flood the domestic market, import quotas can be set on them and punitive tariffs can be levied on them, per type of product and supplier, with offender suppliers subject to being suspended for a term from exporting directly or indirectly through proxies, on a case-by-case basis rather than doing the same against the export products in large measure or wholly of a foreign nation or its producers in order to protect the solvency, viability and marketplace competitiveness of domestic producers, while averting inter-nation mutually economically damaging trade wars. By law, anti-monopoly or -quasi-monopoly and anti-collusion regulated domestic and international competition between and among similar businesses constrains runaway price rises and inflation to the benefit of consumers and, ideally, bolsters a maximum of market-share participants and stakeholders within and across the different industries and types of business as well as supports the extensive spread or distribution of wealth, and its non-concentration in a relatively few, among the citizenry.
The practical and ethical economics rules and conventions applicable to and operative in the trade relationships between and among advanced technocratic and industrially developed nations do not apply as much with second and apply minimally with third tiered techno-industrially developed, or moderately and weakly developed, nations, as they put the natural resources and largely tenuous employment and subsistence financial means of the populations of the two latter economic and trade tiered nations at high susceptibility to peril and grave economic depredation by first and second tiered such nations. In trade relations of any and all import and export trading nations, of all tiers, in quarterly, semi-annually and annual net revenue and profit results, or proportionally for these based on the sizes of the economies of competitor nations, there will be a hierarchy of best to least achieved performer nations, in which first tiered nations overwhelmingly will tend to be the best materially and in knowledge and skills equipped and productive nations in making and supplying products and in being durably the best performers and most resilient, with fluxes in performance ranking among them in performance reporting cycles, to recovering from slumped or poor performance and remaining competitive within first tiered competitor nations, whereas third tiered nations would not be significantly capable of buying up resources and companies as well as buying off the top and important but lesser governance officials of first or second tiered nations, unlike vice versa for first and less so for second tiered nations of third tiered nations, whose nations, respectively, would be able or better able to also largely economically colonize and devastatingly prey upon or parasitize, even by outright violence, national-forever-debt-slave foreign loans, pretender-righteousness color coups and figurehead, political puppet leaderships, on third tier nations. This latter situation is the case, especially against some Central and South American nations and the nations of black Africa, what is left of Africa as black Africa, inching toward going the way of Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, etc., though by colonizers and re-settlers who are alien people to Africa from a variety of outside-of-Africa ancestral lands. Rankings in inter-nation and international trade achiever-performance positions among first-tier trade nations will inevitably shuffle and change over the financial performance reporting cycles and across the years -- in democratic trade relationships between these, there can be no monopoly nation or permanent or lasting solo same dominant nation.
We must be proactively mindful of both Murphy's law and the Peter principle, or woe betide us like with the Covid-19 pandemic and its havoc on the US economy and economies of the other major nations of the world of humanity: Economic policy of the first Donald Trump administration - Wikipedia , Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years — ProPublica , Trump’s Trade Wars with China and Europe Have Made Bad Agriculture Policies Worse (foreignpolicy.com) , Trump Tariffs & Biden Tariffs: Economic Impact of the Trade War (taxfoundation.org) , Did Trump’s tariffs benefit American workers and national security? (brookings.edu) , How Trump’s Tariffs Really Affected the U.S. Job Market | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace .
The adverse economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic muddled the distinction between them and the mounting and concurrent adverse effects on the US economy of the first Trump Presidency's wide-ranging tariffs on imports. Strongly indicated within the writings of the aforementioned citations is that former POTUS Trump was more interested in and focused on the circa $79,000,000,000.00 that his tariffs generated than the short-term circa well more than $400,000,000,000.00 in business and job income losses in the US economy, apart from their longer-term losses, that resulted from his concurrent Covid-19 initially mismanaged pandemic and policy of large tariffs on imports, especially those exported from China, and loss of the export of US agricultural products by the agricultural sector of the US economy to China.
Considering that past behavior, unless redemptively or corruptively modified in the interim for better or worse, is the best predictor of future behavior, here is a click-on news commentary of warning on the US economy by a reputable and credible financial market expert of what may credibly come to pass for the US economy under the new, second Trump Presidency, of whom the first Trump Presidency left the dream economy it inherited from the Democratic Party Obama Presidency totally wrecked, for which the MAGA portion and a significant politically mixed other portion of the voting electorate forgetfully, ignorantly and facetiously blamed its/his successor Democratic Party Biden Presidency for it, whereas the Biden Presidency restored in full the US economy and, along with the Federal Reserve Bank, its inflation rate down to virtually the default minimal inflationary interest rate of 2%, and, moreover, made the US economy the currently leading economy in the world — though it did not restore prices to those of the pre-inflationary period preceding the soaring price inflationary period, which historically has never happened, brought about by the first Trump Presidency and whereof then President Trump, before he took office as US president in his first term, had a history of various of his businesses having been in bankruptcy 6 times and himself of having been successfully sued for legally liable financial misconduct against others, Anthony Scaramucci Predicts a Market Crash Under Trump — Here’s How To Prepare If He’s Right (yahoo.com) .
Tariffs do not take place in a one-way action environment and relationship with other nations and the nations of the world, as in one of negative output and impact on others by oneself without a return, or response, and impact action, or counteraction, on oneself from and by negatively affected others by oneself, the initiator-instigator of the negativity or negative exchange and transaction relationship. We must remember that indeed tariffs ultimately are a sales tax, passed by the exporter-suppliers onto the retailers and consumers of the imports, which hikes the costs and prices of the imported, if all not all, by side effect, products and services for sale.