Laptop, smartphone, and game console prices could soar after the election
Laptop, smartphone, and game console prices could soar after the election
Most Americans may not realize popular tech hasn’t been hit by China tariffs—yet.
Could soar? Like, it's preventable? How? Oh, vote for Harris/Walz to not see tariffs used again.
Did you read the article? Biden made many of Trump's tarrifs permanent and Harris, while critical of Trump's tarrifs, hasn't put forth her own plan or disowned the Biden strategy.
Edit: Fucksake, Lemmy. It says this in the article. I said nothing positive or negative about either candidate or their positions on tarrifs. 😆
Tariffs can be good when applied in limited, researched and balanced ways. Trump's "plan" is to just apply a 60% blanket tariff, which is what's really really bad.
In addition to the education you got below, Trump wants to apply a 20% tarrif across the board.
Not even remotely the same as keeping existing ones.
Don't "both sides" this issue.
You can't just undo tariffs by cancelling them.
So you tariff steel from china (or whatever), and they will tariff some of your exports (or other). Bad for everyone probably. But now it's done.
Removing the tariffs will only make things worse if china (in this example) isn't OK with rolling back what they did.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Plus, presidents regularly create carve-out exceptions to tariffs, anyway. This is likely overblown fearmongering.
It could also mean that manufacturing of those might return to the US. Fuck Trump but US tech media have been insufferably partisan last couple of weeks.
It might, after years and years.
Thr problem with snap tariffs is it doesn't give the economy time to reorient. All of that overseas industrial capacity providing those imports has taken decades to ramp up, while US capabilities have atrophied badly. It will take many years for US manufacturing to fully catch up, and in the mean time the 50% or more price increase on tons of basic goods would become baked into the price of said goods and only drive additional crazy inflation.
And even if you ramp them up over time, there is not much business incentive to jump into the water immediately, and you have the same problem.
The article mentions consumer devices but this would also smack basically every single piece of commercial and industrial electronics hardware too and have a lot of knock on effects.
I don’t think anybody expects change to happen overnight and taking what Trump is saying at face value is a futile effort. Every world power is looking into self sufficiency to avoid another supply shock inflation like during the pandemic, especially with high risk of more regional wars with global impact. Dems want green transformation and chips to drive this but I’m not sure if that’s enough because it doesn’t eliminate dependency in other industries.
My main issue with this reporting is that it’s nauseatingly one sided. US is polarising very quickly at the moment and this only accelerates the process. Far right is gaining momentum because liberal media refuse to acknowledge why people vote for them. Trump will obviously screw blue collar people too but from their point of view at least he’s speaking to them.
How so, at least with this article? It mentions a couple times things like:
what she hasn't done is disown the current tariffs on the imports of China, which have also been harmful.
if Harris wins and resumes Biden's supposedly more strategic approach to tariffs, tech companies already feeling heavily burdened expect they would be stuck with extra costs under her administration
Harris hasn't been clear about her plans for tariffs if elected
It's unclear how quickly prices would rise if Trump or Harris expanded tariffs.
It feels (at least to me) pretty balanced on this that they will rise if either one is elected, they just can't say how much under Harris because she hasn't given details about it, which they point out many times. Trump has declared his intention, so that's why his amount is shown.
Trump's threat of a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods is perhaps the clearest worst-case scenario for tech companies preparing to adapt as administrations shift.
They could have titled this piece „Vote for Harris because Trump will make your toys more expensive”. Stating that they don’t know what Harris will do is not nuance.
Disowning current tariffs doesn't mean they'll go away, either, though.
Tariffs are easy to put in place, but hard to roll back. You can put then in place on a whim, basically, but then the target country will retaliate with their own. As a result, removing them requires diplomatic negotiation to make sure the removal is bilateral. That's not easy to do during times of icy relations like China and we currently have.
Let's hope this means the resulting oversaturation/-production will then make laptops half the price for us Europeans.