If you are an American, how are you preparing for the upcoming tariffs and possible trade war?
What impact do you think it will have on you?
Are there critical items to purchase now that will be too expensive to afford next year?
Are you changing your savings or investments?
If you are an American, how are you preparing for the upcoming tariffs and possible trade war?
I'm not. I would love to, but there's not really much I can do as far as I can see.
What impact do you think it will have on you?
Are there critical items to purchase now that will be too expensive to afford next year?
Probably a lot of things. Contrary to what a lot of MAGA morons would like to claim, tariffs very rarely ever benefit the country establishing the tariff. Very few things are actually wholly made in America nowadays. With such a global economy, even things that are marketed as "made in America" are typically not made 100% in America. And even if they are, the parts are often sourced from around the world since, with modern shipping, that's actually cheaper typically than sourcing it in-country. (Not to mention that some parts can't be sourced in-country simply because no one exists to provide that service anymore.)
Are you changing your savings or investments?
Bold of you to assume that I have any extra money to put into either of those. I put in the same amount of money every week as I have the last while: whatever I can, which isn't much. I don't get paid shit for my job, yet prices keep going up. Sadly, it's not like I have much money to adjust. :(
Tariffs amount to a higher inflation rate / a regressive tax, as they will not subsidize local industry to any significant level. You will not see wage increases or more jobs from it. Probably the opposite.
This will be a quantitative change, it will look like 2022-2024 but with a higher effective inflation rate, translating into a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
More people will experience what it's like to earn 10-20% less money and have fewer job prospects. One would hope that this teaches humility and solidarity, but in a country that only knows how to punch left, that will be an uphill battle that must nevertheless be fought.
As long as the rich get richer, the system is working as intended. Voting will not change anything other than how fast the wheels fall off this bitch.but we still have to, so we crash later rather than sooner.
I bought two 16TB hard drives that I intend to fill with the content I generally pull down as I need it. Game roms, books, videos, a backup of Wikipedia(real). I'm already about 80% of the way there with preserving what I want to preserve. The other 16TB drive will be a copy. I can keep it in or around my toolbox at work just in case anything happens at the house, fire or flood, whatever.
I don't seriously consider content being harder to acquire in the Trump presidency considering that's mostly the Middle East, India and Romania if SoulSeek is anything to go by, but it gives me peace of mind.
As for spending.... what spending?
I'm poor, but I already only spend on utility and literally nothing else. It's helpful, really. I don't buy crap and always have money for what I need, but I know I'm the minority, here. I'm always willing to suffer if it means I have headroom, to my family's constant worry.
I cook constantly. I bake about two loaves of bread a week. My house generates baked goods on a constant basis for everyone around it, and I sell here and there. Flour is cheap, making variety is easy and everyone loves it.
You wanna survive this shit?
Run as close to the grain as possible. Don't buy their shit. Don't buy anything they're associated with and if they try to control something, starve yourself of it. Fuck em. Don't let the bastards win.
I grabbed a four-bay RAID and some drives for the same reason. I highly recommend you also get a UPS if you can so that random power outages (which are more likely) don't crash your drives.
I already have a setup at the house. This 16TB is basically the master cold storage for everything(~12GB of content and personal files) and gives me peace of mind. I can restore the server apps in twenty minutes with its local backups, but... the Jellyfin content, my books, roms, etc, need some parity.
A few months later I might get another and make another copy. I usually buy refurb drives and test them out a bit before running them. I have pretty good luck with them. Most of the time, I'm writing the entire drive on first use so if there's a problem, I'm gonna find it.
Moved forward large purchases that cannot be delayed 5 years.
I am not changing my investments. My predictions on market impacts tend to be wrong. The stock market and the economy are not the same thing (market can be up during recession).
I am working to get healthier and update vaccinations. I don't know what is coming but being able to run, climb, and lift are versatile.
My husband finally bit the bullet and upgraded his computer. I’m planning to upgrade my phone before the year is out, because mine is 6 years old and probably not getting security updates for another 4 years.
Not that these things didn’t need to happen, but having it forced on us last minute has sucked.
Considering using it as an excuse to upgrade my PC to an actual high-end rig to avoid tariffs on PC parts. Never had a PC that was actually "high-end" but this could be an excuse to build one. Aside from that, not much at the moment. There's too much shit that'll be affected by tariffs and aside from my PC, I can't really see myself buying anything new that'll truly last me four years. As such, there's not much of a way for me to dodge tariffs.
That's a good plan if only I had the money spare to do the same rn haha
Can't do much but pay bills. If things get harder then they already are it will slow down or reverse my plan to drop 1 or 2 of my part time jobs.
I think it's going to hurt me as a retail worker. Any retail worker knows, that your pay is usually based on how well your store is doing. And your store's profit is tied to the purse of the corporation that in turn, pays you. Now if Trump is dead set serious on wiping Immigrants out of the workforce and not willing to raise the wage and combat inflation (we know he won't). That just means the corporations will start cutting jobs than doing what's right.
And if hundreds of retail jobs are cut, so there will be store closures. Store closures happen, you're out of work because people will not want to pay the high prices of inflation once everything is in full swing.
So, I don't know how I'm preparing for this. It's going to upset a lot of my plans going into next year if my store is affected. I work at Wal-Mart and basically their stance is they're going to raise prices so we can expect to see jobs cut and store closures because of underperforming profits of said stores. Simply because a so-called "businessman" doesn't know how the fuck tariffs work.
As a shopper. I guess it's back to relying on Dollar Tree again...
there is nothing I could possibly do that would alter how much it affects me unless I suddenly got a lot wealthier
Business won't let him do most of that. It was just loud fake superficial concepts of plans . His real task is staying in power. I think our biggest concern now is loss of immigrants.
ETA- i was initially pretty concerned and wanted to really cut back spending and increase savings. We will likely do some of that, but we're still planning little holiday trips and doing work on the house.
Wouldn't you want to do exactly the opposite in the face of really bad inflation?
Spend any extra money on imported goods that are consumable, especially chinese. As that money will quickly be worth less.
I may buy more dried fruit and bulk t-shirts.
I'm going to be working on only buying domestic goods going forward. Yes, it will increase the cost of goods overall, but that's a given when we're going from an unreasonably cheap standard to one built for supporting our own people. I've already been careful to mostly focus on domestic produce and goods, all that the tariff package will do is encourage me to continue on that journey.
Oranges grown in Argentina and flown in (with all the damage that planes do) should not be cheaper than those grown in Florida. Mexican chiles should cost more than the ones from New Mexico and Arizona. Coffee from Ethiopia or other places around the world ought to cost more than from Hawaii or elsewhere in the USA. That's just the plants - never mind the meat, the fish, the dairy, or the hard goods.
I don't want to buy cheap shirts made in Malaysia or the Philippines. I want to buy good quality clothing from American companies from American retailers on store shelves. I want that to be the standard everyone lives to. Whether we like it or not, tariffs are the only way to change the aggregate behavior. I don't want half of my stuff to be plastic crap made in China under their torturous labor laws. I want to be surrounded by quality goods made here in the USA by American workers. I entirely support the tariffs and their higher-order effects, even the increased costs. In fact, I think the projected values are too low, because it might still be cheaper to import. We need to enforce tariffs that make it cheaper to produce and build here in the USA, with Americans working to the benefit of Americans.
Getting into the 'plastic crap' also, I don't want America to 'recycle' plastic by shipping it abroad and going with the policy that says that if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. I want us to actually work to recycle our plastics, to reuse every scrap we can, because it should be cheaper to recycle and reuse domestic product than it is to import new or to export that which should be recycled.
So sure, I expect to see higher costs. I expect that my dollar will be stretched thinner for a time. But if the government stays the course to enforce high tariffs, and then uses the payments from irresponsible companies who import rather than employ Americans to pay off the national debt, we'll all be better off.
PS - I want export tariffs too, so that it's more valuable to sell domestic goods to Americans than to market them abroad.
I see where you are coming from, but I think there are better ways to handle those issues than blanket tariffs. For example, you can get clothes from Bangladesh for cheaper than Norway because Bangladesh pays workers much less, (probably) has much lower environmental regulations, and the focus is on price over quality.
Adding a tariff to goods from Bangladesh would not improve the goods, it would just squeeze the business to cut even more corners to remain competitive, and likely put a lot of poor people out of work. Additionally a tariff on goods from a country is likely to be retaliated.
If the end goal is reducing production of garbage products at great impact to the environment and the workers, laws can focus specifically on those factors. We already place antidumping and counterveiling duties on goods that we deem are priced with unfair business practices, why not do more of the same for unfair labor practices, or environmental practices?
If someone can pay Ethiopian farmers a fair wage to produce landrace coffee (where it grows natively), and the environmental costs of shipping it to the US are accounted for, I don't think it should be arbitrarily upcharged relative to monocrop coffee grown in a narrow band of expensive former rainforest in Hawaii.
Thank you for a respectful and thoughtful reply. I understand your perspective, though we disagree. I just don't think we're in a condition as a country where we can really go for the nuanced approach. The country needs to take broad decisive action to bring back American labor and services.
As long as the focus is on price, we need to make the price of importing higher than the cost of domestic production. This isn't about whether the quality of Norwegian goods or Bangladeshi goods is higher. It doesn't even matter if American goods are of lower quality than those Bangladeshi ones. It's about whether it was made in America by American labor, and thus supports an American labor chain. That's really where my focus is at this point. The environmental concerns are secondary, but important - simply that it takes fuel and money to bring those goods to our shores.
There are unemployed Americans, while goods and services are being imported from abroad. That shouldn't be considered an acceptable outcome. I don't particularly care about workers from foreign nations, sad to say. In abstract, yes, I would like for everyone on Earth to have a good job and a good life, but our government (and our people) need to focus on the needs of Americans first.
As far as the difference between natural Ethiopian coffee and monoculture Hawaiian coffee, right now I care whether or not the Ethiopian coffee plantations employ American workers on American soil, paying taxes to us and supporting the businesses within their community. The rest is really just a matter of degree at the moment - optimally we'll sharply reduce imports for both the social and environmental benefits. We shouldn't be worrying about whether our companies can pay Ethiopians a fair wage right now - that's the problem of the Ethiopian government and local Ethiopian companies. We need to worry about the fact that there are Americans not working and not receiving a fair wage. We need to clean up our own house first and shorten our reach, before we can reach back out into the world.
Circling back around to the retaliation, that's fine by me too. I almost want to see retaliation, actually; it saves us from putting up export tariffs. It's not a 'trade war', it's the desired outcome, to limit trade outside of the United States. I want it to be expensive for us to export goods, services, and labor. Companies here in the US should focus their production on serving the needs of our own people first.
Given the massive debt we're running right now, the way I see to do that for the time being is to economically punish behavior we don't want to receive money, rather than spend money and incentivize what we do want. That gets more money into the government that doesn't directly come from individual income, property, or sales taxes; the debt can be paid down by irresponsible companies who aren't willing to adjust to the America first paradigm.
Getting my financial situation shifted to risk adverse and saving as much as I can.
Finally getting a generator. I live in a rural area. Not having a generator was a huge hole in my setup. We also got a wood stove earlier this year for backup heat. I had longer term plans for solar but now it looks like that may be impossible since China makes all the equipment, and it's already difficult to balance the utility with the expense.
Somebody should make a website that tracks prices on goods and other items from the day Trump becomes president and throughout his term.
He said he would lower prices. His politics says the opposite. Let's see.
That’s the Consumer Price Index.
There’s also the related Producer Price Index which unfortunately does not include tariffs but will be interesting to watch.
If you think government metrics during trumps presidency will be accurate, i have a bridge to sell you.
Most .gov websites are essentially useless the moment trump takes the throne.
Don't forget the Big Mac index, apropos the incoming administration.