-Kanrabat- wrote:Well, Trump is a businessmen and he want a deal. So, people will have to negociate.
*koff*koff* protection racket / shakedown
Which incidentally only works if you're the only game in town and everyone else is dependent on you, which is... not the US' reality.
-Kanrabat- wrote:I don't see why can't we follow the logic that's already printed on North American Transformers boxes (It's written "Longueuil, Québec" in the copyrights section) and import all Transformers pre-made parts in Canada. Then we build the toys and put the finishing touch, pack them here, and they become Canadian goods.
This could work for the USA too I think.
More serious answer, also applies to the first point, is the US simply doesn't have the manufacturing capacity and can't just 'spin up' a few hundred new factories to make stuff domestically, even if they didn't have to import the raw materials (which they would - and no, importing parts and doing the final assembly onshore doesn't magically make them tariff-free domestic goods. Ask the auto industry). And the US cost of living is such that you could never make up the difference that way - physical goods are (relatively) cheap because manufacturing is outsourced to places with much lower costs and greater capacity, period. That's all the "trade deficit" is: the econ term for "buying stuff."
As to the effects on toy prices, it's going to royally suck for a while until/unless market pressures force a rollback and/or someone "negotiates" an exemption (I don't see toy collectors as a high economic priority...). For us outside the US, I'm not clear where the supply lines go - e.g. whether Hasbro UK buys its product directly from the Vietnamese factory (in which case, no tariff change) or via the US parent (so, hit coming and going). But given Hasbro's appropriately-named CEO's comments on disproportionately hiking collector lines, I assume we'll also get squeezed if at all possible.
(Not discounting the possibility that they simply cancel whole lines / franchises as non-viable, but that's a separate discussion.)
william-james88 wrote:Firstly, all US imports will have a 10% tax. This part is not inherently out of line when compared to how the rest of the world functions, it's similar to VAT (UK) or GST (Canada), where the government taxes imports so that citizens pay the government a similar tax to what they would pay if they bought the item locally. This is basically the duty fee American fans have probably seen or heard of from international collectors when they order from Amazon Japan (or Amazon US). So it brings the US up to speed with other nations in that regard.
This is wrong, btw. VAT and GST are roughly equivalent to US sales tax, not tariffs, as they apply to both imported AND domestic goods at the point of sale. Customs duties (roughly, tariffs) apply to imported goods at the point they cross the border, but not as a blanket rate for all goods from a certain country - they are set based on industrial sectors, used to protect already-existing domestic industry from a flood of cheap imports, and typically negotiated & agreed with the exporting nation via trade deals. What the Trump Admin is doing here is nearly unprecedented in both the breadth of the tariffs and the amount, not "bringing the US up to speed".
