Tariffs, the Impact on the USA

Listen to the radio and TV, the average family will spend $1,400 on tariffs from China this year. Kind of hard to figure their math, if you buy “Made in USA.” These are real news sources spouting this crap. The announcer seems to be satisfied with continuing to buy from China; Trump is the problem. The whole purpose of a tariff is overlooked, to make you buy from some other source.

The real problem is that we buy everything from China and are dependent upon them for what we need. This needs to stop. We don’t need to pay China 500 billion a year to produce what we should be producing here. “Buy products made in the USA” is what President Trump is saying with the tariffs on China.

These news announcers that claim tariffs will be paid by us, don’t consider that fact that people price shop. Do the math, the Chinese put tariffs on our cars. They do it, to keep their consumers from buying them. We don’t sell many cars in China. Rewrite the headline on their side and it would read “Chinese paying $3000 extra on Chinese tariffs of American Goods.” Point of fact, they are not buying them, they are more expensive than cars made in China. The real question, when we have to kick in 500 billion in cash, because they didn’t buy enough from us, what the hell did they buy from us? The answer could be “nothing.”

The whole world has been sucking us dry by producing what ever we wanted. Congress made the legislation and tax laws that forced business overseas. If we can bring them back, we might just have a second chance to turn our economy around. In the past, when we taxed the hell out of manufacturers, they voted with their feet and moved to other countries.

The real problem is the mentality of the legislators in Congress. They think if they double the tax rate, they double taxes coming in. This concept failed miserably during the Great Depression; taxes collected, dropped off of a cliff.

The people in Congress have good intensions, but they have so little business acumen that the real solution are not the most obvious ones. A $15 dollar an hour minimum wage when the rest of the world gets $15 dollars a week, shows how brain-dead Congress has gotten. By god, a family can’t live on a 15 dollar an hour job in the US. Raising the minimum wage moves our jobs to people in other countries. Where you could have had an $8 dollar an hour job, now you have nothing.

So far, the tariffs have been attacked politically as a tax on the American consumer. And raising the minimum wage forces our jobs overseas. Business pass the cost of labor onto the price of the product for sale. It is the consumer that determines whose product they buy. The Tariffs level the playing field; it gives American businesses a better chance to compete with foreign imports.

What we need to realize, is that China, a communist country, does not support any investment in research, there is no incentive for doing so. As a people, they can profit by stealing what we create, and selling it back to us. A lot of the prescription pills in our system like Viagra are counterfeited in their county for sale in our country. The going joke is that they use drywall to make the pills.

We can avoid the tariff issue if we buy “Made in USA.” And that is probably too simple for the democrats running for reelection. Go figure.

China is laughing at us; Trump may set them straight. They are like a bad car mechanic that needs to make a car payment, and the US is the patsy.