I’m still yet to understand the benefit of tariffs.
Tariffs are to protect a local industry and noncompetitive culture and/or poorly mismanaged economy where comestibles and housing are disproportionately priced due to exploitation and gross mismanagement. It is also a military protection. The front line of the peace time battle front is the growth of an economy both in total and in tandem with industrial capacity. The Soviet Union was defeated when it was completely uncompetitive at economic growth. The move to a venture capital based economy grew the West far faster than the USSR could keep up.
If any country relies solely on the imported industrial capacity of another region, they are extremely vulnerable to hostilities from said region or other outside influences.
Another region may normalize labor abuses, or may have a far better managed form of housing and comestibles that makes the life of its populous far cheaper than your region. The west has never had substantial land reforms in over a century in most places. The population has redistributed and grown, while a lack of effective policies has allowed massive inflation of the price of goods and housing to the point of a completely noncompetitive labor force in places capable of addressing these fundamental issues effectively. Additionally, much of the West failed to design infrastructure with long term sustainability in mind. The vast majority of that infrastructure is now an untenable hemorrhaging patchwork of hacks and rot that is impossible to replace and impossible to service.
So these places must inflate the cost of outside products to account for their own deficiency, and try to use that money to bring themselves back to parity — in a perfect world, but most are unaware and so fail to hold their governments accountable with these funds, never righting the wrong.
But how do you protect a local industry by inflating prices. Let’s take GM for example. They’re saying it’s costing 150k to build each EV and those EVs aren’t as good in terms of quality as the Hyundai’s, Kia’s, Volkswagen’s or even Tesla’s. The only thing tariffs do for American consumers is force them to pay more money than they should. While for GM, they simply enable them to put out subpar products and have them compete with cheaper and better cars. It’s rewarding failure.
That is a whole different issue. GM is part of the toxic and corrupt US business sector. Their claims are trash politics. There are an order of magnitude less parts in an EV than ICE. The only reason these are expensive is because of no R&D into tooling for EV’s and the supply chain. Yeah it’s expensive to pay competent people to do everything for their decrepit useless quarterly imbecile mindset. China said they were investing heavily in EV tooling and supply chain back in 2014. The US did nothing at the time, then half ass gave GM 6 billion to invest in EV R&D. GM turned around and used the money to do a stock buy back, bonus the back patters and spend absolutely nothing on EV’s. Such is the American way. The Chinese are not "subsidizing anything. They are simply the only ones that have made any worthwhile effort to try and make a half honest EV.
There is no way to overcome the market corruption of such criminals, but those criminals are supply chain gate keepers that prevent most Americans from participating in the market. We are on the path to empoverishment in the USA and will be totally irrelevant on our present trajectory. Outsourcing as it was done was treason for venture capital and the effects of that are only just beginning.
I’m talking about places like Europe where people with half sense and ethics live. They might have a chance with tariffs helping them teach parity.
It’s funny you say that because Volkswagen has been openly protesting increased tariffs on Chinese EVs
BYD: 17,0% Geely: 19,3% SAIC: 36,3% Other cooperating companies: 21,3% All other non-cooperating companies: 36,3%;
it’s no surprise that tesla is less than half at 9% and i wonder what byd did to get a deal.
BYD is building new factories in the EU namely Hungary.
byd builds a factory and they get 4.3% points shaved off; meanwhile tesla builds a factory and gets almost 3x that amount shaved off.
