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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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I might be wrong here, but tariffs can be very effective tools, but as a slow burn. The way they're being wielded here is asinine.
If you want to affect behavior, tariffs are a long game. They're passed by Congress so they aren't tied to the whims of one man. If you don't want US chicken or EU trucks, make a law and let decades of implementation change behavior.
If you just want them to hurt, you do them the way we are now. The unpredictability hurts businesses and individuals, inside and outside the US. It makes prices and markets volatile and sows distrust. It hurts the vast majority of people, but benefits people who have the stability and assets to buy low and sell high. Each tariff implementation and retraction is just a mini market manipulation giving people with advance knowledge of what is affected to profit.
They're a tool for correcting price alterations on the seller side. If China is subsidizing the manufacturing of Fidgets, a matching tarrif on the import of Fidgets protects domestic manufacturing from artificially cheap competition by preventing consumers from seeing those low prices.
The subsidies don't even need to be hostile. The US subsidizes food to lower domestic costs, ensure a stockpile, and keep farmers happy. The side effect of driving down world grain prices is incidental.
Additionally, they strike me as the stick that pairs best with a carrot to spur domestic production of whatever you've put tarrifs on, along the lines of the CHIPS act.
This administration doesn't believe in carrots, only sticks.
The sticks loose a lot of their scaryness when they're not consistently wielded. See the on again off again tarrifs on Canada/Mexico and their constantly changing scope. The lack of consistency and predictability makes it very hard for businesses to make decisions.