Ok, let me take another shot

Posted on: March 4, 2025 at 08:47:42 CT

both can be true at the same time because it depends on your perspective. If you're a company like, say, Stanley Black & Decker, you build almost all of your products overseas and import them back in. Tariffs increase your cost, your consumers costs and make competitor products a more attractive alternative. So, it depends on whose ox is being gored.

At the same time, it may help the economy overall. Consider the thread above, where Honda is going to move an assembly plant from Mexico back to the US. They've determined that the costs of the tariff exceed the increased labor costs of assembling here. Purely domestic producers get a boost, more jobs potentially at home and tax revenues.

The reality is, though, with some products, domestic production will never be able to compete with cheap foreign labor costs. The margins are so small that tariffs hurt them, increase costs to the consumers, and won't lead to domestic production/job creation. It's just a beatdown for those producers and consumers.

As far as a tariff free environment, it will lead to job loss because labor costs are cheaper in Mexico. We've already seen that in the past. Production will follow lower costs.