Here.
Fine with me!
Actually, I think it is a hollow argument. Remember those Nike and other fancy sneakers you used to buy for $70-80? Well some dirtball who was head of Nike was manufacturing those shoes in Indonesia for $7 a shoe. Furthermore, he paid his workers so little that many Nike workers in that land were suffering from malnutrition because they didn’t even have enough food to eat. Import them for $7, sell them for $70. Quite a profit margin for the head of Nike.
I always wondered about how outrageous that was until I went to buy shoes recently. The same sneakers that I had always paid $75 for were now available for $30. I assume they still cost $7 to make in wherever. It’s just that Joe Shoe Company is now making $23 profit instead of $67 profit. I think that’s basically what’s going to happen when we put tariffs on this stuff. They are probably already totally ripping us on most of this stuff anyway, so I figure with the tariffs, they will just make $300% profit instead of $1,000% profit. Oh no, they’ll have to raise prices! Bull.
Anyway I would be perfectly happy to pay higher prices for some stuff, which I doubt are even economically justified. Price competition seems so vicious in retail nowadays that I gather that if tariffs make Joe Ripoff Capitalist feel he has to raise his prices probably for no good reason, I assume that there will be all sorts of cut-rate guys out there just waiting to undercut him. I doubt if it is economically justified in most cases.
And if it means I buy less from China, that’s fine with me. Every single item I have ever bought made in China has been a complete piece of garbage. That includes two floor lamps that each cost me $100. They both lasted a couple of years before they broke. Back in the 1970’s, you bought a lamp and it lasted forever. There was no such thing as “the lamp broke and we had to buy a new one.” It never happened. I do not believe we ever replaced one lamp in my parental home. And I believe my mother still has a lamp that she got from her mother, no doubt purchased sometime between 1920 and 1935. Here it is 80-90 years later, and the damned thing still works. I doubt if it has broken one time. This junk coming out of China must be built with planned obsolescence in mind. I am sure of it.