Summary
Best Buy warned that Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports from China, Mexico, and Canada could raise prices on consumer electronics, as 60% of Best Buy’s inventory comes from China.
Trump plans to impose a baseline 10% tariff on all imports and a 60% tariff on Chinese goods to boost domestic manufacturing.
Retailers like Best Buy and industry groups like the Consumer Technology Association are preparing for supply chain disruptions by importing goods early or sourcing alternatives to avoid higher consumer prices.
Which part of that cycle was supposed to fix the cost of living problems again? Last I checked, those tariffs aren’t going towards universal basic income or social services.
Don’t forget to throw mass Federal layoffs into the mix.
The part where the monopolies buy up even more of the economy and we all get issued life subscription plans because they can cover everything from our housing to our groceries to our jobs. Don’t worry, your WaLife Plan^tm is tailored to be affordable for your Cashier position.
I can’t be arsed to actually make the meme, so here’s a transcript:
[Drake meme]
Top-left panel: Drake looking away in disgust.
Top-right panel: Cyberpunk 2077
Bottom-left panel: Drake looking pleased.
Bottom-right panel: America 2025
Everything he’s planning is going to have negative effects on the economy…
Deport every? No one to work the jobs most refuse to do… Means food, housing, and other shortages which makes prices go up.
Tariffs? Make everything cost more and force companies to charge consumers.
Reduce education standards? Keep everyone dumb so they vote for us!!!
This one kind of makes me a bit sad about the two prevailing sentiments:
Heartless separation of families and forcing immigrants back into dangerous situations, frankly in the name of pursuing an ethnic purity/superiority.
Maintain an illegal labor class of folks constantly under threat of deportation so they have fewer rights and higher fear to exercise the rights they do have, so they can be cheap and abused labor.
The “grant these people legal standing” seems to never be a persistent stance. Closest we got was DACA, and even that was pretty limited. No one dares threaten giving the cheap labor any leverage.
Tariffs can also backfire like with China and their retaliatory tariffs . Some US companies rely on exports for a large part of their business.
It happened the last time Trump tried it. China slapped a tariff on an ag product, soy (iirc), China stopped buying, the government bailed out the farmers. Everyone lost except China.
I agree with everything except this. If companies can’t find workers, it will force them to review the pay and benefit to attract people. If it still doesn’t work, the government will certainly allow immigrants to enter legally for those jobs.
Right now companies are employing immigrants with shitty pay and without any benefits. It is slavery.
In France many illegal immigrants are working in delivery jobs. People are not against doing those jobs but the conditions are shitty. So illegal immigrants are doing those because they don’t have a choice and maybe it is way better than in their original country. But that is exploitation and slavery.
You do realize we’re talking about the fascists here, yes?
In such a case, they’d be receptive to something like DACA, which was very surgically set to grant legal status to the “obviously useful” immigrants.
But no, the same administration that demands mass deportation will let industries burn to the ground before they ramp up legal immigration.
But you are right that the other side of the argument “but we need labor without protections to make stuff cheap!” doesn’t sound particularly good.
Oh you clearly haven’t met American conservatives. They’ve already done this a few times. It blows up in their face every time and now they want to do it nationally.
It’s happened before in the construction industry very recently like the last time trump was president… I just can’t find anything on it… So I can’t really back this up…
But they couldn’t replace those workers last time it wasn’t even about paying people it was finding people who knew how to do those jobs because they were gone…
Remember people were told to go to college not to learn a trade… For the last 40 years at least… I lived through it and it fucked me over but that’s not the point…
They told Americans not to learn these jobs…
Well, that and these policies shift every few years. So if you try to embrace the ‘new normal’ it stops being normal in short order anyway.
But in any event, it is a problem that the ostensibly “liberal” side ends of favoring making a labor class exempted from whatever rights and privileges have been granted to the legal labor class. It’s also a problem that the deportation is cruel to the immigrants. Unfortunately, we don’t have any policy in sight that is compassionate and empowering for those that do come to the country.
Could be even worse than that. If consumers stop spending in anticipation of the tariffs, starting the cycle even sooner