How long should the tariffs last to be worth the investment? How much foreign materials you need to build your stuff? If the tariffs are short term it makes more sense to stop buying stuff instead of investing
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All very good questions that I don’t have answers to without looking at specific scenarios. I’m certainly not defending the US approach here, I think that applying them universally at such short notice is monumentally stupid.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of people that are very dismissive about tariffs in general, and I think that’s a bit short sighted. Yes, they are effectively a tax, but they’re *not* necessarily a tax on the consumer, though they will be when used abruptly, in the US way.
They are certainly a tool, we'll see how good one. It reduces economic activity (as people stop spending money while waiting for non-essential stuff to get cheap again)
Again, that's kind of focusing on the US disaster though. Ignore that, and hypothetically say, a country decides "ok, we need to encourage domestic steel production for national security reasons, so starting 2035, we'll stick a tariff of n%"
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