Thread

Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less

161 points · 154 comments · burnt-resistor

mcmcmc · 1790027665 · focus · HN ↗
It truly boggles the mind how Trump managed to sell tariffs as anything other than a tax on American consumers
1. tygon · 1790028456 · focus · HN ↗
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  1. RGS1811 · 1790028525 · focus · HN ↗
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2. porkshoe · 1790028824 · focus · HN ↗
  He gets away with it because a lot of right-wing elites _love_ the idea of taxing consumption rather than income (or, heaven forbid, wealth).
  Additionally, Trump, Hassett, etc are still blaming Biden for inflation caused by the tariffs... and a lot of their base would rather believe that than admit that they got suckered by an obvious scam.
  1. technothrasher · 1790029083 · focus · HN ↗
    > Trump, Hassett, etc are still blaming Biden for inflation caused by the tariffs
    I'm starting to see this backfire with a lot of "personal responsibility" type old-school republicans to whom I talk. They're getting fed up with the administration just blanket blaming anything bad on Biden. Whether that will translate to actual political change, I do not know. But I found it interesting that I'm hearing the frustration more lately.
    jeremyjh · 1790031336 · focus · HN ↗
    Narrator: It did NOT translate to actual political change.
    TheOtherHobbes · 1790033478 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't need to translate to actual political change. It needs to translate to them staying at home instead of enthusiastically voting for more sadistic traitorous insanity.
    Which is looking quite likely.
    Although it does assume there are no peculiar and unexpected anomalies with the vote counting.
    LastTrain · 1790032531 · focus · HN ↗
    It will not because there are still immigrants and trans people to hate.
    [deleted] · 1790077841 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. loeg · 1790031985 · focus · HN ↗
    He doesn't actually "get away" with it. A lot of people, left and right, are unhappy about tariffs. But for now, he controls the executive, so it is what it is.
    LastTrain · 1790032458 · focus · HN ↗
    This is entirely in the “rights” control right now, any of them “unhappy” with it are outliers.
    fragmede · 1790033238 · focus · HN ↗
    We'll have to wait and see how many of those outliers end up voting, and how.
    Forgeties79 · 1790033417 · focus · HN ↗
    His core base (a solid 25-50% of the party) would rather die than vote for a democrat and all this DSA scare mongering is only entrenching them further/pulling the more moderate among them back into the fold.
    The blue wave will likely be a result of blue turnout and some small number of red sitting at home. And sadly the senate is still a toss up
    LastTrain · 1790039879 · focus · HN ↗
    As I like to say to my fellow blue friends who don’t seem to understand this “what would Joe Biden have to have done for you to vote for Trump”
    Forgeties79 · 1790050868 · focus · HN ↗
    A very fair question!
    loeg · 1790055830 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok but losing 50-75% of 2024 Trump voters would in fact cede control of more or less every democratically elected position.
    Forgeties79 · 1790077730 · focus · HN ↗
    25-50% have intensely strong feelings on the matter. I’m not saying 50-75% will vote blue or sit at home.
    loeg · 1790055766 · focus · HN ↗
    The right doesn't like, control the executive by democratic vote. Trump single-handedly does.
    mcmcmc · 1790033000 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is it was never an executive power to begin with. The unitary executive theory pushed by the Heritage Foundation is counter to everything the US was founded on. Decisions from the current SCOTUS are questionable given the conflicts of interest with certain spouses and the endless improper gifts.
    porkshoe · 1790035592 · focus · HN ↗
    It's silly to claim that a lot of people on the right are unhappy about tariffs.
    When Obama put a tariff on Chinese tires, right-wingers (correctly) argued that it was a bad idea that caused American consumers to pay almost a million dollars per "job saved" in the tire industry.
    Today the right is in control of the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and and far more news media and... basically just crickets.
    As for "he controls the executive". Bullshit. When a Democrat is in office, right-wingers remember that the President is not a king.
    Please don't "both sides" this extremely one-sided attack on the American worker.
  3. pstuart · 1790032348 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of his base believe his lie that the other countries are paying the tariffs.
    His followers are literally beyond reason and will accept anything he says. It's so very depressing.
  4. ch4s3 · 1790033015 · focus · HN ↗
    Populists of all stripes love tariffs and the illusory promise of autarky. We didn’t see Biden remove any of Trump 1’s tariffs and not a single Democrat in congress has committed to repealing the tariffs.
    porkshoe · 1790036311 · focus · HN ↗
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  5. matteoraso · 1790034889 · focus · HN ↗
    If that were true, the Republicans would implement a VAT. Trump is legitimately just a moron with a cult of personality.
3. toomuchtodo · 1790028894 · focus · HN ↗
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  1. hungryhobbit · 1790029177 · focus · HN ↗
    > Takes a 12th grade reading level to understand jury instructions.
    Source?
    toomuchtodo · 1790029250 · focus · HN ↗
    Keyword search: “reading level jury instructions”
    <a href="https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics" rel="nofollow">https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter... (“54% of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level”)
    Assessing the Readability of Capital Pattern Jury Instructions - <a href="https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1207&context=fcas_fp" rel="nofollow">https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1207&contex... (2013)
    "Plain English" Jury Instructions: Why They’re Still Needed And What The Appellate Community Can Do To Help - <a href="https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-journal/plain-english-jury-instructions-why-theyre-still-needed-and-what-the-appellate-community-can-do-to-help/" rel="nofollow">https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-journal/plain-eng... (2004)
    > The average reading level of American parents of young children is 7th or 8th grade.
    > About one in every four Americans (25 percent) is a high school dropout.
    > About half (45 percent) have gone to college for some period of time, but fewer than one in six (15 percent) have a college degree.
    > Nearly 50 percent of the Americans surveyed cannot read well enough to find a single piece of information in a short publication, nor can they make low-level inferences based on what they read.
  2. underlipton · 1790030361 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh, FFS. You're conflating capability with inclination. Trump supporters are not unintelligent; they have made a choice (conscious or not) to indulge their fears and hubris over making an informed decision. "They believe whatever they feel is truth and vote their vibes accordingly," is correct, but they act this way not because they're incapable of thinking critically, but because they allow a milieu of entitlement, fear, righteous indignation, and misplaced hope to drive them towards easy answers. "Why?" is complex, but it's still unacceptable, regardless.
    I have a problem with "Trump voters are idiots" because it lets them off the hook. They need to be held accountable, helped where their grievances are real, and pushed to reconcile their feelings with the facts.
    toomuchtodo · 1790030851 · focus · HN ↗
    > but they act this way not because they're incapable of thinking critically, but because they allow a milieu of entitlement, fear, righteous indignation, and misplaced hope to drive them towards easy answers
    My brother in Christ, re read the sentence you wrote. That is quite literally the inability to critically think.
    csoups14 · 1790031508 · focus · HN ↗
    An inability to think critically is not the same thing as a lack of critical thinking in a specific context. Would you agree that you think critically in some contexts and make emotion-driven decisions in others? I know I do, as much as I try to apply critical thinking universally.
    toomuchtodo · 1790031793 · focus · HN ↗
    No. I make almost every decision from a place of hyper rational logic and reason, partly from my professional experience in risk management, and partly because I take pharmaceuticals that have a side effect of quelling any emotional response. I cannot make an emotional decision because I don’t feel emotion driven. It’s delightful if I’m being honest.
    Certainly, I understand why the emotion drive humans do emotion driven things. I do not.
    pirates · 1790081274 · focus · HN ↗
    you might think you do this, that you have 100% control over your logic and feelings, but everyone knows that it isn’t true.
    dgellow · 1790031156 · focus · HN ↗
    You basically wrote „Trump supporters are not unintelligent; they‘ve made a choice to behave like a complete idiot“?
    [deleted] · 1790078245 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
4. jacobolus · 1790034226 · focus · HN ↗
  > managed to sell tariffs
  He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs, which are widely understood to have contributed to high prices and economic stagnation.
  What he did manage to do is bully the abjectly servile GOP leaders of Congress into not doing anything about the tariffs, even though setting trade policy is expressly assigned to Congress by Article I of the Constitution, and Trump has repeatedly exceeded any legal authority.
  1. EgregiousCube · 1790036566 · focus · HN ↗
    Nope, Congress has authorized the executive to impose tariffs multiple times for multiple different reasons. Tariff Act of '30, Trade Expansion Act of '62, Trade Act of '74, etc.
    PaulDavisThe1st · 1790039142 · focus · HN ↗
    SCOTUS ruled that his initial attempts at tariffs were illegal. He's used an entirely different part of the US code to try again (whether it stands is currently unclear; of course, the question of precisely who received the refunds for his previous illegal effort has received astoundingly little attention).
    Your comment begins "Nope, Congress has authorized ..." which just supports the point of the GP that it is Congress that controls the setting of tariffs, even if that may sometimes mean delegating it to the executive branch.
    jacobolus · 1790048927 · focus · HN ↗
    Past congressional actions were premised on an executive acting in good faith, upholding their oath of office, and following Congress's explicit intentions described in the laws you mention.
    A situation where a corrupt and incompetent president is explicitly trying to blow up the US economy using not-really-relevant laws as a pretext was not ever anticipated, and he will hopefully be strongly rebuked (e.g. impeached) by the next Congress.
  2. mvdtnz · 1790038542 · focus · HN ↗
    He campaigned and won on tariffs. A plurality of Americans favor them, evidently.
    PaulDavisThe1st · 1790039188 · focus · HN ↗
    We are a country of laws, and the SCOTUS ruled that his first attempt at tariffs was illegal. Whether or not a plurality or majority of Americans favor them is largely irrelevant.
    mvdtnz · 1790039646 · focus · HN ↗
    Whether it's illegal or not is irrelevant to the comment I was responding to, which incorrectly claimed "He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs".
    He campaigned and won with tarrifs as one of his main policy points. Voters favour them. Americans get tarrifs because Americans want tarrifs. Deal with it.
    PaulDavisThe1st · 1790080103 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not how a country governed by the rule of law is supposed to work.
    We have laws that limit what presidents (and Congress) can do. By extension that limits what voters can get by voting. Americans got/get tariffs because we currently have an administration that is willing to break the law.
    In addition, to focus on the point you claim that voters favored them. I've never seen any convincing evidence that this is true, and what evidence I have seen always seems predicated on the claim that the foreign suppliers pay tariffs, which is generally completely false. So, if they were in favor of what they understood, they did not in fact support tariffs in the real world. Further, I did see some polls suggesting that voters favored highly selected tariffs for specific products from specific origins. Again, that's not what the administration has sought to impose.
    Even so, I never saw polling that indicated even a plurality of voters were in favor of them one way or another.

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