Summary

Trump announced that 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will take effect on February 1, though a decision on including oil remains pending.

He justified the move by citing undocumented migration, fentanyl trafficking, and trade deficits.

Trump also hinted at new tariffs on China.

Canada and Mexico plan retaliatory measures while seeking to address U.S. concerns.

If oil imports are taxed, it could raise costs for businesses and consumers, potentially contradicting Trump’s pledge to reduce living expenses.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      49 minutes ago

      He doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s so tiring that people assume that he is rational and he cares.

  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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    45 minutes ago

    I’m sad seeing all these “Enjoy the collapse, losers!” comments.

    Most people on most Lemmy instances, especially here, probably made it VERY clear we didn’t want this pathetic handbag-hobgoblin in charge. Yes, a lot of our countrymen voluntarily gave up their brains for his bullshit, but not all of us, by a long shot.

    Policy stopped being directed by the will of the people a long time ago. We aren’t levying tariffs. He is. We , human beings just like you, are trying to keep it together as a grotesque parody of the fall of the Roman Empire plays out around us.

    Stop falling for that tribalist nonsense. Love has no borders, and hate is too busy drawing them. Support your brothers and sisters on this Earth, because when the evil wealthy masters of this world set their sights on your democracy, it could happen to your home just as easily, don’t be fooled.

    Edit: I’ve gone over my comment multiple times…where the heck did I even insinuate I didn’t vote? We only get one, and like many others, I said a prayer and ticked the box for Kamala’s half-hearted efforts to stopgap and buy us more time to fix this thing. For all the friggin’ good it did.

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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        41 minutes ago

        Nowhere in my post did I even hint that I didn’t vote.

        Your vivid imagination can be put to better use than inventing reasons to heap smugness on internet strangers.

        (Not enjoying the collapse BTW thx. 👍👍)

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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        44 minutes ago

        Nowhere in my post did I say I didn’t vote.

        Were you responding to someone else maybe, or you just clownin’?

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      47 minutes ago

      It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t get fucked by proxy of America electing an old senile fascist.

      I am Canadian and I will feel Trump’s presidency for a while

  • bradd@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    I do ultimately think tariffs will be good for the US. I feel bad for other countries but I guess, but I think the US needs to be more productive.

    California, seen as a relatively “progressive” state, has a sales tax on everything, and pretty extreme sin taxes. A tariff is like a sales tax, and a sin tax on specific imports.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      The way you increase productivity is via exports, not artificially increasing the cost of goods. A sin tax is when you want to stop people from doing things so you make it more expensive. If you want to increase American cement production, you subsidize production.
      Adding a tarrif to Canadian cement imports increases cost for imported cement, and encourages domestic producers to increase costs to match. If the competition just got 15% more expensive, there’s no reason for me to not raise my prices 14%.
      If the government comes in and says they’ll pay me $15/ton of cement I produce, that encourages me to produce more cement and lower the price to sell it. Now I’m producing more, and I need to hire another machine operator and the economy grows because the lowered cost of cement makes people more willing to do things that need cement.

      Tariffs are really only good for counteracting other countries subsidies. If Canada were paying manufacturers $20 a ton to produce cement, then applying a $20/ton tarrif makes the prices unbiased.

      It’s why our agricultural subsidies are viewed poorly by food scarce nations: we lower the overall market cost for food, and they can’t afford to subsidize their own production, and returning equilibrium on imports would starve people, so they’re trapped in a cycle of being dependent on imported subsidized food while living next to fallow farms.

      Canada and Mexico aren’t subsidizing their export industries, and a lot of what we’re trading is in things we can’t or don’t want to handle. You can’t increase American uranium production, off the top of my head.

      We had a position of trade strength, which meant that we could afford to import more than we produced because our intangibles were worth more, and what we exported was worth more. Import steel and export tractors. Now we’re saying we want to stop importing steel, making it harder to export tractors, so that we can bring back low paying dangerous jobs.

      If you want to see productivity grow trumps way, go get a job as a farmhand picking spinach. Because his policy is basically that we need less engineers and more farm hands.

      • bradd@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        I’m glad you started your dissertation with “the way you x is via y” because it immediately informed me that I was reading the work of an expert genius and as a smooth brain, when a genius writes, I read.

        One question, wouldn’t higher prices on imported cements sort of make local cements automatically cheaper, giving them an advantage without asking them to cut corners? In a free market you will often see a “race to the bottom” on goods, whereby manufactures and producers will cut costs so low that they lose money, so long as there is some other incentives that would lead to profit. Video game consoles are a common example. The console is sold at a loss with the expectation that they will make up the difference on the consumables, games and related services.

        If local competitors can produce for lower cost than competitors it may drive more people, who generally just want to save money, to local businesses, creating demand, driving growth.

    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      I think the problem is that these tariffs are, for the most part, untargeted. They aren’t a “tax” on “specific imports”. They’re a blanket tax on all imports from many countries.

      • bradd@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        I thought it was targetted but again in California its all items sold ate taxed and some at a higher rate.

  • stevedice@sh.itjust.works
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    21 hours ago

    Someone make this into that Gru meme:

    1. Slap a 25% tarrif on goods coming from your 3 biggest economic allies
    2. Economy will strengthen due to American consumers preferring American made alternatives
    3. There are no American made alternatives
    4. There are no American made alternatives
  • x00z@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    Just like the war on drugs, you’ll be able to buy black market tacos in alleys.

  • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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    20 hours ago

    I’m morbidly fascinated to see how all of this shakes out.

    Everyone on the left is saying it’s a terrible idea with very predictable and deleterious consequences.

    Trump seems to think it’s as great as it sounds at face value - tax things that sound bad and get money.

    Either way it will be a feature of economics text books for centuries to come.

    Obviously I want to see Trump fail spectacularly, but it fucking sucks that would harm those of us who can least afford it.

    If you went shopping last week and half value of your purchases originated in Canada or Mexico, then will the same purchases next week cost 12.5% more ? That’s pretty staggering inflation

    • kava@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      i come from a tariff heavy country. you want a sneak peak? inflation. shit is gonna get more expensive. that’s it

    • ceiphas@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Obviously I want to see Trump fail spectacularly, but it fucking sucks that would harm those of us who can least afford it.

      I thought that was the plan…

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I love how old the orange asshole looks in the photos. Hopefully things just work out in our favor soon. It could be a permanent sleep or maybe a nice golf ball to the forehead or choked on a pretzel. I think we should probably place some …legal… Bets on how it all goes down? It shouldn’t that that long. I remember when my Grandma looked like that and we buried her a few months later.

    • RangerJosey@lemmy.ml
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      20 hours ago

      Man look at Kissinger and the Bush Family.

      If you’ve got a high enough body count you just live forever.

    • prof_wafflez@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s not like this buffoon being gone will stop the rest of the out-of-their-minds and now fascist Republicans or Muskrat from continuing the work.

      • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Yep, Vance is in a way more dangerous than Trump. Trump might throw wrenches in the fascists’ plans by either blurting them out proudly thinking it was his idea or by being too afraid of being unpopular (which he is obviously obsessed with) and taking back some of the changes due to public pressure. Vance on the other hand will be just a hand puppet for Putin and/or Musk.

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Those were the days. We all wished for that pretzel to have been a little bigger, a little dryer. But somehow it didn’t work out. But, it could happen again! Lightning can strike twice in the same spot. Or lightning can strike in two or more spots separately non-dependently.

    • Bosht@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      Man have you seen him speak? I don’t know what concoction of drugs he is on or if he’s just showing his age but he’s definitely not the rager he was 5 years ago. Seems tired and much less coherant. Makes me optimistic he might be in mental decline more than I theorized previously. But if we go by the ‘asshole’ rule he’ll outlive most of the Senate just out of stubbornness and hatred. We definitely need a quick solution.

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      The thing is, I think that might be out of the frying pan and into the fryer at this point.

      Vance is cooler under pressure in interviews and generally more coherent sounding. I think he does a far better job of saying ridiculous unreasonable things with a convincing tone of voice and demeanor than does Trump.

      If Trump has one too many cheeseburgers tomorrow, then we’ve got young, clean-cut, smooth talking first-term President Vance to worry about, and I bet he won’t be threatened by the attention Musk gets as long he he gets his cut. (Hell, I’m not even sure having to take over for Trump in that circumstance would count as his first term.)

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        You’re right. I’m just wishful thinking.

        Maybe just hemorrhoids. That would be lovely! … ESPN:And the president just got up again in another awkward gesture of disrespect! He seems in pain after all the points Bernie made…Trump:oh shit! Here comes the pain again! Fine fine! I’ll sign if we can all leave quickly!

    • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      WAY more. We import a lot of food from Mexico as is, and the immigration and ethnic clensing the Trump goverment is engaging in is already forcing farmers to watch their crops rot on the ground with no one to harvest them. So we’re following in the great tradition of Stalin and Pol Pot, we have a dumb fucking asshole with a hard on for ‘‘strong man tactics’’ demanding we change how we get food in many extreme ways immediately, you know, instead of gradual change, so we’ll all get to see what an artifical famine looks like! Do you think Trump will let other nations send us emergency rations so we won’t die? Or will he confiscate them at a dock or border and have them dumped into the ocean so he doesn’t look weak? North Korea knows.

      • rocket_dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        We also export a hell of a lot of soybeans, so when retaliatory tariffs kick in I guess our new ultra-masculine conservative government is going to have us all eating lots and lots of soy.

    • mycelium underground@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I can’t believe some people think that putting tariffs on a country means the country will just give the government 25% of everything and the merchants of that country are not just going to raise the prices to match the new expenses(or maybe even a little bit more since they have a good excuse to change prices).

      I guess I can stand to eat a bit less, we can call it the economic collapse of the US diet! Just think of all the profits from the diet books! To bad they are going to cost 30% more now that my Mexican publisher is paying a tarrif to bring the books into the US. That’s OK, spending more money on the book just means that you won’t be able to afford as much food, making the diet work even better!

      • tekato@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I can’t believe some people think that putting tariffs on a country means the country will just give the government 25% of everything and the merchants of that country are not just going to raise the prices to match the new expenses(or maybe even a little bit more since they have a good excuse to change prices)

        I’m not sure anyone believes that. The point of tariffs is that merchants will have to increase prices to keep the same profit, causing people to purchase less of the product and look for cheaper alternatives (those without tariffs).

        • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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          10 hours ago

          Many Americans thought the foreign country paid the tariffs, so forgive me if I disagree that my country is capable of that level of thought.

        • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Unfortunately, a lot of people are saying they think the county of origin pays the tariff and not the importer.

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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          20 hours ago

          Yeah targeted tariffs only products where there’s a domestically produced alternative might do that. Putting tariffs on everything means people will just have to pay more for some things. Canada and Mexico will do the former, while the US is doing the later (much dumber) approach.

          Anyway… this Canadian has just remembered a few more US based services to cancel. Not because of any price changes have happened yet but because apparently Americans have to learn the value of trade the hard way. Trade goes both ways, and that’s not going to happen as much now.

  • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    A friend of mine works for an electric semi truck company. The vast majority of their parts are manufactured in Canada and Mexico; they’re just assembled in the US. His mom voted for Trump and really wants him to move back to Ohio so he can have space and be close to family. He wanted to go back, too, and had a transfer and promotion within the company set up before the election. Now there’s a company-wide freeze and his transfer is gone. The company’s internal financial projections are not good.

    His mom refuses to recognize that she just voted for her son to stay in Seattle indefinitely, even though he wants to move back. She keeps thinking that any day now, the economy will be so booming that his company will be doing great. He can’t talk to her about it anymore.

  • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    As an American, I’m loving this… Really. Its high time we feel the pain we’ve inflicted on other countries. Our “comeuppance” if you will.

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Unfortunately, it’s just going to become another massive wealth transfer when those that have the means buy ups heaps of cheap stock after the resulting market downturn.

        • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          When the people can’t even afford the lumber to make the guillotines, what do we do then?

          • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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            22 hours ago

            We take the lumber…

            There is strength in numbers, and in solidarity! They cannot kill us all, because they need us more than we need them!

            • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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              21 hours ago

              If empty platitudes could strike down the bourgeois, you’d be the greatest hero our world has ever known.