Jacob Ward's Warning | Trump's Tariffs Will NOT Work
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How much will Trump's tariffs raise household costs and who pays?
The tariffs we're seeing from the Trump administration are going to have a very deadly effect on America's ability to do more or less anything when it comes to business and innovation, at least for a little while. Let me explain why. So as you know, President Trump has imposed tariffs more or less across the board on some of our longest standing trading partners, countries like Vietnam and India that were trying to replace China as our geopolitical tensions with that country increased. China, of course, has been crushed right here. I mean, they've been hit really hard with tariffs that amount to over 124%. And all of that, just so we're clear, comes down as a tax on you and me. The companies that import those goods have to pay these tariffs in order to get them off the docks.
And they, of course, to make good on their losses, have to pass that cost on to us. The estimate is that this is going to cost American families anywhere between 1.3% and 1.9% of their income over the coming year. That's something like a $3,000 extra expense per American family on average. That's what we're talking about. And this comes, of course, at a time when the latest estimate shows that about 37% of American families can't put together an extra $400 in an emergency. So it's a tough time to be asking people to pay as much more for imported goods as they're about to, especially considering how much of our lives depend on imported goods.
What tariffs has the administration imposed on China, Vietnam and India?
Now, here's the thing. If you are an administration that wants to somehow revive American manufacturing, then your first step here, of course, is to just absolutely impose these in a blanket way But you have to do two things. First of all, you have to be absolute about it. And second of all, you have to make a plan for helping companies to create the manufacturing base that they need. So here are the problems that these companies have bumped into in both those places. The first is that when it comes to a blanket installation of tariffs across these companies, that's not what's happening. Already, Tim Cook and Apple have secured an exemption from for their iPhone manufacturing, not to mention laptops and other kinds of things.
And that means suddenly that everybody's lining up to try and get an exception. Once one kid gets to go to the bathroom, everybody wants to go to the bathroom, right? And so you suddenly have company after company from sector after sector showing up and trying to get the White House to give them an exemption. The New York Times is reporting that on Monday, a whole bunch of retailers showed up, including Walmart, Target, others, to basically try to get the same kind of exemptions that they saw Apple get. And that is a huge distraction from the need of companies to basically think about the future. If you're the CEO of a company right now and you're trying to make plans about what to do with your money,
Well, you're not just going to spend your time building an American factory or maybe investing even in a Mexican factory in spite of the tariffs. You're going to spend your time trying to get exemptions for... your company when it comes to tariffs. And then the second thing there, right, is this question of whether you could actually then turn and become an American manufacturer. If you were one of these companies, could you do that? Well, company after company are telling the White House, we can't actually build the machines we would need to become a manufacturer of our own products. unless we can import a certain number of them without tariffs. You need the parts and so forth that we bring from abroad in order to even build the kinds of machines that you would need to make the computers and cars and the rest of it that President Trump seems to want Americans to make for themselves.
There's no plan here, as far as I can tell. It seems to simply be a blanket tariff which, you know, looks good on a bumper sticker.
How do importers and retailers pass tariff costs onto consumers?
I hit the world with tariffs, but it doesn't actually create the effect, the incentive to build stuff here in the U.S., at least not in the short term, that President Trump seems to intend.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How much will Trump's tariffs raise household costs and who pays?
0:00–1:25
2
What tariffs has the administration imposed on China, Vietnam and India?
1:25–3:46
3
How do importers and retailers pass tariff costs onto consumers?
3:46–9:14
4
Why aren't blanket tariffs creating immediate U.S. manufacturing jobs?
9:14–11:16
Speakers
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