Tariffs and sky high audio prices.

I haven't read through this whole thread but from what I have read, there are some who believe that if you just buy American made you're not impacted. I'm in Australia and some American companies have increased their prices here because their parts come from China and that pushes up the cost. 

Someone else here wrote that the tariffs are paid for by the Chinese, not Americans. That's completely wrong. The customer pays. It's a tax on Americans. The idea is that Americans will prefer to buy American goods instead of Chinese if Chines products are more expensive but that doesn't work because so much doesn't even get manufactured in America anymore. China is the only supplier of so many goods, there's no getting away from buying Chinese made. 

When are people going to confront the fact that the POTUS does not know what he is doing??? He is like a wrecking ball in fully functional country. BTW yes pimbo you are correct! China is a very huge manufacturing country and that alone is going to drive up prices on American goods.

Get with it people: you’re following a pied piper of the worst kind.

No idea who you’re talking to--maybe yourself--but you type tens of thousands of words which ultimately reduce to "whoever I disagree with is obviously a Nazi and should not be allowed a voice."

A major appeal of an audio site is that we’re spared this kind of smug, intolerant cant. Well, at least we’re normally spared the political variety. You and a few others here need to go to political sites to share your bloviating.

Tarriffs are always a tax on your own people.  (Not a problem if you are a person who never pays their fair share)  You and I will pay more for products that are artificially price inflated.  Total rejection of capitalistic principles based on supply and demand and 'market freedom'.  And even the most American products are full of Asian parts.  And if you want a nice tube amplifier you will of course depend on Russian vacuum tubes.  

World trade was always an inevitability because of innovation. IT greatly increased the diffusion of knowledge which led to decreased costs for trade seeking firms. Add in lower labor costs in less developed nations and you have a perfect recipe for worker and capital displacement.

I recall the 1980's and 90's when the common mantra preached in the US was let the less developed nations do the manufacturing, we'll be the innovators, the idea nation. People employed in manufacturing would now be working in some new nebulous 'high tech' job yet to be created. My thoughts at the time were, this was going to be the greatest redistribution of wealth the world had ever known.


Elites are certainly good at reading history, they understand the appeal of exhortations of national exceptionalism. A promised great new future where we do all the thinking for the rest of the world was a grand delusion.

Still, even the elites were fooled into believing their own mantras. They were all too willing to enter into Faustian bargains, trading proprietary property rights for greater profits. They didn't steal our knowledge, we gave it to them. Chinese were playing by a new Capitalism playbook, we played along.

Consumers played their role as well. My, how we love lower cost consumer goods.

And so, this bargain seemed to work until rather recent times. Suddenly the middle classes of developed nations discovered they weren't as secure as they imagined themselves. A lifetime of work for what? And so, who to blame? Well, we'll blame the immigrants and those who cheated us in trade.


And so now they want to kill the golden goose of world trade and return to a protectionist and primitive trade policy. Bad times are inevitable in this world, a less competitive world won't make us richer.


We must understand free trade has greatly increased wealth in this world. The question as always is how that wealth has been redistributed. We will never get out of the quagmire until we find new ways to assign equity to resources. Think about the coming AI revolution, who will have ownership of this valuable resource?