Huh? No, it's the opposite. You should really look up how tariffs work. They drive up prices for foreign products. Local products are unaffected, giving them a competitive advantage.
Comment on Trump says he plans to put a 100% tariff on computer chips, likely pushing up cost of electronics
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Wouldn’t this only affect goods manufactured in the USA? If a finished product containing chips from say, Europe, were to land on USA shores it would only have a 15% tariff right?
Why does trump hate American manufacturing?
artyom@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious. You do know that the vast majority of the chips in all the devices you use are not manufactured in the US? Doubling the prices of the chips imported to manufacture devices here will obviously jack up the prices of those devices
artyom@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Why wouldn't I be serious? If they're manufactured outside the US then they're obviously not manufactured in the US?
can@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I believe they’re referring to products made in the USA that contain chips.
As in importing chips would be 100% but importing a product that contains chips would be 15%?
SaltSong@startrek.website 3 weeks ago
What he means is, if I buy an iPhone built in China, this tariff won’t affect the price I pay.
But if I buy a phone built in America, with an imported processer, this tariff will make that phone more expensive.
artyom@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Not correct. Once again, tariffs only affect imported goods. If you buy an iPhone built in China (assuming you import to the US) you're going to pay a tariff on the device.
If you buy a phone built in America, with Chinese processors, you only pay tariff on the processor.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
He meant that this is a disincentive to manufacture a phone in the USA.
Phone built in china: 30% tariff on the total assembled unit (this week is 30% or it changed again?)
Phone built in USA: 30% tariff on all the components because they’re made in China, 100% tariff on the processor, AND spend 1000% more in assembling the device because finding, training and paying skilled workers is way more expensive
Maybe there might be an incentive to move production to a country different from China, but the situation changes too wildly. The risk of spend millions to move production to Vietnam to get a lower rate, then a week later Trump gets diarrhea from eating a bahn mi and imposes an immediate 50% tariff as revenge
SaltSong@startrek.website 3 weeks ago
Right, but this tariff, at least as I understand it, is on chips imported as chips, not on products that contain chips. An iPhone will, of course, be subject to some other damn fool tariff, but not this specific one.
Of course, my understanding of this specific tariff may be wrong.
candyman337@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
So you’re an AI right? Like no real person would believe this
artyom@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
WTF are you talking about? Did you not go to elementary school?
can@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I feel like there must be a miscommunication/misunderstanding here.
bigfondue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They increase demand for domestic goods and therefor raise the price of goods that were already more expensive than the imported goods.
DrFistington@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What about situations where there are no alternative us made products
artyom@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Then there are no US products to affect?
Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Are you a troll?
Or do you really not get it??
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
You’d guess wrong. Welcome to the wonderful world of tariffs and import/export controls!
I wouldn’t call it a trivial dodge because the act of building the tariffed good into another product takes time and resources at the origin side, then again at the destination side to undo the manufacturing steps. However, sometimes its worth it to a company. There are lots of examples of companies doing exactly this.
Ford Transit Connect cargo vans were made in Turkey. Ford wanted to import them to the USA. However, there was a tariff placed on vehicles for commercial use, so Ford installed cheap passengers seats in the back and imported them as passenger vehicles. As soon as the vehicles would arrive onshore in the USA, Ford would rip the cheap seats out, and sell them as commercial vehicles.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US. Those chips can run more than $1k, while those Anbernic devices tend to run a couple hundred, so the small overhead would absolutely be worth being taxed at 15% instead of 100%.
Surely regulators have learned from the Ford Transit thing…
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
I don’t, but these new tariffs don’t match what we’d had before.
The closest I can think of is one scheme to avoid aluminum import tariffs. A company cut bar stock into longer lengths and did the cheapest/fastest/worst job of spot welding them together into the shape of a finished good (a chair or table, can’t remember). The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US.
It would be cheaper, but not inexpensive. This would require setting up an entire manufacturing assembly line to create and assemble the carrier product, and a reciprocal dis-assembly line on the other side to reclaim the desired CPU part. Its doable, but quite a bit of additional expense when the straight non-bypass method is a robot removing a CPU from a tray and inserting it directly into the finished product. Would it be worth it? Potentially yes! That’s why I made my first post here on the topic.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The existing tariffs somehow exclude chips or phones/computers with chips in them. This would be a separate category, like metals.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
It’s a tax of 100% on chips being imported to the USA, having been manufactured elsewhere. The idea is that it should force companies to set up their own chip manufacturing in the USA. But that’s expensive and slow to do, and requires a lot of specialized engineering talent, so US-based electronics companies will somehow have to survive through years of paying twice as much for the chips they build into their products.
MyNamesTotallyRobert@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
Expecting companies to build their own chip foundries and manufacture their own chips to avoid tariffs is as unrealistic as expecting poor people to singlehandedly use nuclear fission to create atoms from nothing to materialize into existence all the food they can’t afford. Even if these American “use AI for everything” megacorp regimes that can’t even write a mouse driver that’s under 1gb actually put their big swingin’ dicks back into their pants long enough to actually figure out how they could be efficient enough use the more achievable 90nm and 65nm chips, even that is so unachievable they’d never find a way to mass produce them affordably. Russia supposedly managed to diy their own 350nm chips which is barely even mid 90s Pentium 1 era bullshit and even that’s probably fake propaganda that, best case, followed some half successful low volume experiments in a lab.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
He’s been trying to prevent the US from manufacturing their own chips, so that can’t be the real goal…
reuters.com/…/trump-wants-kill-527-billion-semico…
floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
From that article:
I think that, insofar as Trump has a coherent view, that’s it: he doesn’t want to give companies money to establish chip manufacturing in the USA, because he thinks it can be done instead by bullying them with tariffs so they are forced to fund it themselves if they want to stay in business.
I’m not saying that’s a wise view. There’s a good chance he just ends up creating more economic problems at home. And it’s in part driven by his desire to get revenge on Biden by doing the opposite of everything he did.