The cynical perspective is that it’s an attempt to consolidate wealth for the wealthy.

Basically, you drive the price up on everything and force the least able to bear the loss in revenue to give up and sell.

Elon Musk can afford to lose $11 billion, because he still has $200 billion left over and that is obviously more than anyone needs to keep afloat for a few bad years. The same goes for every billionaire and every multibillion dollar company.

When you import something from another country, it needs to go through things like customs, etc. You have to fill out all the paperwork about what it is and where it’s going (if you’re using/selling it in the US or just middlemanning it somewhere else).

Part of that paperwork includes tariffs, a tax on the good you are importing. So, the importer has to pay the government that money in order for the product to legally come in to the country. The importer pays that cost, so the local purchaser pays that cost, so the consumer pays that cost. And each one of those (and likely many other) steps probably will add on a little extra for the trouble.

The hope is that encourages local production; even if it costs more to produce locally, when you factor in the cost of the tariffs to import, it might make sense to invest the cost to avoid the tariffs.

The troubles are:

1. you can’t often make a fully operational supply chain domestically in 4 years
2. the US doesn’t have some of those raw resources, like minerals or regional food sources
3. good or bad, places like China can pay professional factory workers way less than minimum US wage, which, in case this is news to anyone, is already far below a livable wage

It’s really sad to see how well the right is brainwashing a new generation of adolescents.

It’s a classic tactic to illustrate how people with less can survive. Living and being alive aren’t synonymous. Living paycheck to paycheck is capitalist extortion: work or die. So claiming you’re 20% above someone literally being threatened isn’t the freedom you think it is.

A union doesn’t “magically” earn you more money. They are most effective at advocating for the lowest earners against the most egregiously overpaid upper management: the extortioners who take home hundreds if not thousands of times the wages of the people they extort.

If the money simply wasn’t available, so be it. Enduring a famine from bad weather is one thing, enduring a famine because the regency holds 98% of your crop in a vault is another.

I don’t know the exact meaning of you 10 week runway statement, but I bet it’s some alphamale bullshit about needing only 10 weeks to successfully launch your highly successful business. The majority of startup businesses fail, and do you know who is responsible for a lot of it? Big corpos throwing their dicks around. Dropping prices in your local area until you bleed dry, then surging the price again to absorb the loss. Opening a mega-store to eat up market share until you can’t pay rent, then closing down and moving out of city limits to avoid municipal taxes. Hell, just owning the company that owns the company that owns the company that owns the damn building you rent and driving to costs up to drive you out.

And lastly — and I am now realizing you may be a foreign nationalist with only a romanticized idea of America — no one is ordering credit cards online randomly. Like, its not even a thing you really can do. You might as well be accusing people of buying too many MacDonalds and Coca-Colas.