Trump was asked specifically if he would consider "exempting" some larger U.S. companies that have been hit especially hard by the new tariffs, and the president said he would consider it.#
"I'll take a look at it as time goes by. We're going to take a look at it," Trump responded. "There are some that have been hard — there are some that, by the nature of the company, get hit a little bit harder, and we'll take a look at that."
When asked how he would determine#which companies#might receive such an exemption, Trump responded, "Instinctively."
While this Fox news story talks about exemptions (and the quotes are weird...trump just making **** up) it doesnt really connect the dots for the reader (i didnt expect them to)
What he is doing is asking companies for bribes basically. Mob boss style.
'Its a shame what these tariffs have done to your company but I can make them go away for you if you give me something'
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How exactly does Trump think he's going to "make deals" with all these countries? Trade deals are complex agreements and they're going to negotiate like 80 of them within 90 days?
If they even try some countries are going to take them to the cleaners because they'll have a group of 22 year old interns hammering out the details.
How exactly does Trump think he's going to "make deals" with all these countries? Trade deals are complex agreements and they're going to negotiate like 80 of them within 90 days?
If they even try some countries are going to take them to the cleaners because they'll have a group of 22 year old interns hammering out the details.
The fact that they were questioning his chief trade agreement negotiator in Congress while trump announced the pause and that dude did not know the pause was going to happen (or happening) doesnt seem good for new agreements.
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While the White House estimates that only 38 per cent of imports from Canada claimed a USMCA exemption last year, experts say the proportion of compliant cargo could easily breach the halfway mark, since companies enjoying effectively free trade had little incentive to certify their wares until now.
“A lot of potentially CUSMA-compliant goods that are manufactured in Canada don’t certify as CUSMA because they didn’t need to,” said Jesse Goldman, chair of the international trade group at Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt LLP, pointing to U.S. “most-favoured nation” (MFN) tariff rates that were next to nil.
“Why go to the trouble of providing all this information, keeping the records and documents, potentially subjecting ourselves to a verification audit from U.S. customs authorities when we can just sell the good on an MFN basis, which also has a zero rate of duty?”
CBC mentioned this morning that Canada is now the only member of the G7 with retaliatory tariffs in place on the U.S. No doubt that when Trump sits down on the toilet this morning, his swiss cheese brain will realize this fact and he’ll likely blow a gasket and threaten 100 bajillion % tariffs on Canada. So the question is, do we continue to stay the course with our current countermeasures, or do we back off like every other country has done?
Canada is in a very different place than other G7 countries, we are the major export market for the US consumer goods, but we do still largely have options for many things outside of their market, including over seas imports, internal trade and austerity. We can get Volkswagen, or re-orientate our steel shipments more internally, but also many of the goods we buy from the US we can go without out, we don't need boutique vitamins or hot sauce that we heard about in a podcast ad. We are really the only market outside of domestic the US has for that stuff. For other countries the US is either the only option for a good and the tariff wont change sourcing, just make things more expensive, or they are already the expensive backup option.
Don't get me wrong, I think this blanket tariff idea is idiotic as with most MAGA concepts and the implementation laughable at best.
but I lowkey think there could be some long term advantages for manufacturing if the tariffs stick
The price gap between mass produced foreign goods (I'm moreso referring to electronics/appliances and that sort of thing) and locally manufactured goods has become so vast that the latter doesn't benefit from economy of scale anymore.
So when people choose between x @ $1000 and y @ $200, where x has a 15y warranty and y has a 1y warranty, people, myself included, will choose y. y will last about 2 years or 3 and then we buy y again. And again. The modern phenomenon of disposability.
Back before time, if your vacuum or blender broke, you went to an electronics store and got it repaired. That's the sort of job that has died out, because usually it means getting a whole new motherboard which has already been depreciated due to rapid development cycles for foreign manufactured electronics.
A locally manufactured electronic, in order to compete, would need to be designed eithong term quality and repairability in mind, but hypothetically this does help the consumer in the long term.
Is this an isolated scenario? Yes, tariffs in general are stupid. But not only could this help smaller niche operations compete with mass produced trash, but US tariffs on asian products would hypothetically benefit Canada too as our economy of scale for manufacturing could grow to something more employable.
It's not exactly a pro free market take, but it is a halfassed answer to a genuine issue of the past ~25 years. I would expect it to fail due to corruption and poor implementation, much like the USSR, but hypothetically, allowing electronics & appliances manufactured on this continent to compete with asian content would in fact be a nice idealistic outcome.
okay devil's advocacy over.
If I were trying to solve that problem with legislation, I would require manufacturers to support products for longer periods, and outlaw proprietary parts that have made corporations rich. And of course put in a billionaire tax - you pay 10% of your net worth over $1,000,000,000 in tax annually.
Because foreign countries are not the true problem, it is capitalist greed.
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Last edited by GranteedEV; 04-10-2025 at 09:08 PM.
Don't get me wrong, I think this blanket tariff idea is idiotic as with most MAGA concepts and the implementation laughable at best.
but I lowkey think there could be some long term advantages for manufacturing if the tariffs stick
The price gap between mass produced foreign goods (I'm moreso referring to electronics/appliances and that sort of thing) and locally manufactured goods has become so vast that the latter doesn't benefit from economy of scale anymore.
So when people choose between x @ $1000 and y @ $200, where x has a 15y warranty and y has a 1y warranty, people, myself included, will choose y. y will last about 2 years or 3 and then we buy y again. And again. The modern phenomenon of disposability.
Back before time, if your vacuum or blender broke, you went to an electronics store and got it repaired. That's the sort of job that has died out, because usually it means getting a whole new motherboard which has already been depreciated due to rapid development cycles for foreign manufactured electronics.
A locally manufactured electronic, in order to compete, would need to be designed eithong term quality and repairability in mind, but hypothetically this does help the consumer in the long term.
Is this an isolated scenario? Yes, tariffs in general are stupid. But not only could this help smaller niche operations compete with mass produced trash, but US tariffs on asian products would hypothetically benefit Canada too as our economy of scale for manufacturing could grow to something more employable.
It's not exactly a pro free market take, but it is a halfassed answer to a genuine issue of the past ~25 years. I would expect it to fail due to corruption and poor implementation, much like the USSR, but hypothetically, allowing electronics & appliances manufactured on this continent to compete with asian content would in fact be a nice idealistic outcome.
okay devil's advocacy over.
If I were trying to solve that problem with legislation, I would require manufacturers to support products for longer periods, and outlaw proprietary parts that have made corporations rich. And of course put in a billionaire tax - you pay 10% of your net worth over $1,000,000,000 in tax annually.
Because foreign countries are not the true problem, it is capitalist greed.
China essentially state subsidizes every single industry it deems important. This is very hard to compete against. Perversely, this lowers the value of the yuan since money printer go brrrr, which makes their goods even cheaper. They can still do this because so many of their people are still poorer than dirt, so they have a LOT of cheap labour to cycle through. Also the increasingly authoritarian CCP has basically forced people to either accept #### work or exit the workforce altogether (although I'm sure they'll start pointing guns at those people too).
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It looks like Ontario went ahead with their electricity surcharge for exports to the U.S., that they had previously suspended. They reported to make $260k in one day and estimate that they will average between $300k and $400k. Over a year, that would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100b.
I wonder if Trump ups the steel and aluminium tariffs to 50% like he said he would if Ontario added the surcharge.
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It looks like Ontario went ahead with their electricity surcharge for exports to the U.S., that they had previously suspended. They reported to make $260k in one day and estimate that they will average between $300k and $400k. Over a year, that would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100b.
I wonder if Trump ups the steel and aluminium tariffs to 50% like he said he would if Ontario added the surcharge.
I think that should be $100 million.
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O.K. there has been a lot of talk on whether or not MacTavish has actually done a good job for us, most fans on this board are very basic in their analysis and I feel would change their opinion entirely if the team was successful.
