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jm4 3 hours ago

Many retailers increase their prices by multiples of the tariff increase rather than a straight passthrough so that they can maintain their margins. It's probably why a lot of the biggest retailers with monopolies aren't complaining much about tariffs. They mostly keep the same margin and actually increase revenue. Meanwhile, it's been incredibly damaging to small businesses and consumers. Functionally, tariffs have been a massive wealth transfer.

dmtroyer an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Based on the graph, the increase in cost to the retailer was $0.49 and they marked up $1.10. I imagine this is pretty standard markup but multiplies the effect of the tariff and passes it to the consumer, not to mention the producer and importer.

dmtroyer an hour ago | parent [-]

also, I'm not sure retailers are necessarily to blame. some use pretty simple math in calculating the retail price based on cost and don't necessarily have visibility into the tariffs.

harmmonica 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can't repeat this enough and I'd like to make sure to connect the dots. The Big Beautiful Bill that was signed into law cut taxes. To keep the US Federal Government from going (even more) into debt, Trump introduced aggressive tariffs (it doesn't matter that he introduced the tariffs before the BBB became law because he/they knew the BBB would pass and that was baked into the tariff decision).

The BBB tax cuts benefit the wealthy much more than the average person. The tariffs are borne by both the wealthy and by the average person when they buy tariffed goods, but those tariffs are easily absorbed by the wealthy while acting as an additional tax on the average person by increasing prices. This is just about as direct a transfer of wealth from the average person to the wealthy as you could possibly put into place (barring an actual transfer where the average person is taxed and those dollars are literally transferred directly into a wealthy person's bank account).

In a way, it's a genius move. Convince a healthy chunk of the US population that you're on a populist crusade to bring jobs back to America while increasing the wealth of the wealthy and taking even more of the average person's income. Don't forget that the reason the jobs were exported in the first place was to decrease costs so that, you guessed it, wealthy people would get wealthier (but at least in that scenario the cost of a tv went way down, am I right???).

All that said, I don't mean to suggest that bringing jobs back isn't actually a goal. It's just not the primary goal. My take on the priorities of the current admin's tax policy, including the tariffs (which, broken record, are taxes) 1. decrease taxes on the wealthy 2. decrease income taxes on everyone else who pays taxes 3. get "everyone else who pays taxes" to fund the decreased taxes on the wealthy 4. bring jobs back. Somewhere in there is also "create a mechanism for opaque profiteering." I'm not quite sure where that falls on the list. Cynically it's probably number 2.

an hour ago | parent [-]
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