I actually don’t consider this an issue of being dumb. It IS an issue with being under-educated (often deliberately in R states) and fed a ton of propaganda

They’re symptoms, not the problem. Even if they were vanished from existing by will of a djinni or something, another would just take their place.

I don’t think he’ll live more than 4 years anyway. Hopefully the movement collapses when he does

If you’re a republican at this point you’re one of two classes:

1. Elite, business owner, capitalist. Out for yourself and with enough money and resources and support to do what you want and evade hardships with ease while blaming people below you for their own problems. These are the people who know that if the system changes, they will lose their benefits and comforts and have every motivation in the world to keep pushing right-wing ideology even if they don’t actually believe in it on some level. They have the luxury of not actually caring.

2. One of the people below the elite who work two or more jobs or can’t get ahead no matter what they do because the system is designed to keep the poor where they are and keep filtering the wealth upwards. These are the people without the time or education to learn why their lives are trash, and manage to watch 30 minutes of FOX or OAN news clips on facebook every Sunday night before bed so they truly, honestly believe that immigration and trans people are the source of all their problems and genuinely don’t understand why the good guys aren’t doing something about all the bad guys, because this is the extent of their mental strength.

the end consumer always foots the bill.

Or the consumer can’t/won’t take on the extra burden of cost, and the business loses enough sales to go under.

Not necessarily: the company can choose to absorb part or all the tariff, since the demand would drop at the higher price anyway, and they might make more overall profit at a lower margin per item. But generally yes, most of the cost will be passed on to the consumer and prices will increase on average.

Example:

It’s why they’re called “pass-through costs.”

The only difference would be that money we spent would be going to the companies instead of the government. Tarrifs are a government putting taxes on their people to strangle industries in other countries. In both scenarios we pay the same, but the flow of money is different

The real Russian plot we’ve all missed completely has far, far less to do with paying Trump to sell them documents. That’s the 2-dimensional public face of a cold-war that never ended and has been devastatingly effective against the USA.

The real Russian attack that we may never fully comprehend is exactly what they’ve done in other countries that they’ve subsequently annexed, which is making the general population stop caring about what’s true or not. It’s frighteningly easy to poison the well of public knowledge. You simply pour funding into efforts to boost BOTH SIDES of every social issue. When social debates and your nation’s interests are ramped up and the rhetoric gets more and more extreme on both sides of an issue, when every story on both sides becomes suspect, people simply tune out or stop caring about what’s true or not, and this is exactly where we are. Most people are more willing to just throw their arms up and go find a distraction than try to sift through what’s real or not.

It was even easier to pull off in the USA than anywhere else because we have a built-in policy of fierce independence and individuality. We don’t have communities around us, we don’t have social circles that will make us want to step up our game, we don’t have groups of people we care about telling us we’re wrong, we don’t have help from anywhere but inside our own heads. And if you’ve never been taught how your own thoughts can be wrong, if you’ve been fed the “special birthday boy” narrative for so long that you think highly of yourself, truth will seem toxic and poison because it will tell you things about yourself that will hurt. We don’t seek out pain as a species, we use pain a signal to avoid a thing.

You can google “KGB tactics for destabilizing nations” and spend weeks reading about what’s being done to us right now. But most people who read my message here will immediately feel that sneaking doubt or words of caution because “how do we even know what’s real anymore.”

They willing pay the extra funbucks tariff monies for the privilege and honor of shipping it to America (at cost) on a chance some red-hatted half-wit will waste it.

WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT

Yeah this is grade school level reasoning telling you that it obviously doesn’t work that way.

A country’s aluminum exports for example aren’t extra aluminum they want to get rid of because it’s junking up their basements and America is 1800-got-junk taking it off their hands at cost. It’s a fucking series of material production companies in a different country. They too are based on capitalism and they too require profits in order to function.

What kills me is that we shouldn’t be researching a thing that was taught in school.

Actual footage of us GenX kids learning about The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.

I don’t understand why this even needs to be researched. I’m no economist and I don’t know much about tariffs, but: costs more to get product to me for any reason = product costs me more. When has that ever not been the case? What am I missing?

What, visit a website, read it, then comprehend it? What, like a book?! May as well ask them to make a phone call.

The problem lies where they “find” their “research” when they see the answer they want to see on social media rather than an actual study or any factual references.

The real hard part is it’s a partial truth.

The sellers do pay the tariffs, they just don’t talk about what that does to the prices.

The other problem is it cuts both ways, and a number of the idiots will say as long as you’re hurting them too, fine.

And then we have retaliatory tariffs, which also cut both ways.

IMHO, our biggest issue is we’ve been using cheap Chinese products and labor as a crutch instead of increasing wages. They’ve been able to cut down wages because Amazon, Temu and Shein have been providing products WAY WAY under marketable US made prices.

Relevant xkcd