There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend.
Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are.
There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries have invented sunscreens that feel better on your skin than the old styles, but aren't yet approved in the US. Motorcycle helmets are another. You may have seen the MIPS system - the yellow slipliner that's become popular in bicycle helmets. Scientists have realized that rotational impact leads to concussions and similar brain damage, but prior helmets only protected against naive impacts. Europe now requires helmets to protect against rotational damage. The US requires that manufacturers self-assert that they meet a very old standard that ignores rotational impact. They do not recognize Europe's new standard.
Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now. Protectionists are going to see this as a win.
> Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are.
Stylevana, where I go for my Japanese/Korean sunscreen and skincare, is still shipping to the US as far as I can tell.
schmookeeg · 9m ago
Ignoring the massive political elephant that exists in all of this stuff -- isn't this a good trigger, as demand for the "updated standards" products will force these companies (or resellers of these products) to either validate their products for sale in the US or force the US to recognize these EU standards?
I suppose an immediate counterpoint is that the US Consumer seems unwilling to clamor for high-quality products. :/
93po · 24m ago
i appreciate you mentioning MIPS - i had no idea there was a new, better standard, and i'll definitely get one for my next helmet (motorcycle)
bsimpson · 20m ago
MIPS is actually pretty rare in motorcycles helmets. I know Bell makes a helmet with it, but the premium helmets tend to come up with their own solutions to the same problem.
ECE 22.06 is the standard to look for for rotational protection in 2025.
93po · 15m ago
thanks!
hypeatei · 15m ago
This comment was very informative, thanks. It's really disappointing to see a seemingly new wave of people cheering on isolationism/protectionism.
Maybe some have valid concerns for certain products that we don't make ourselves (e.g. semiconductors) but Trump and his cronies are not the solution to that at all.
4ndrewl · 1h ago
It's the price of uncertainty.
Business can plan for low tax or high tax regimes. Not so much when it's just "unknown".
I was wondering how this would affect the programmer that was sending people Japanese candy packages back in the day, but apparently they shut it down already due to postal restrictions and related increases in postal rates during Covid. Now I'm curious who survived that but is shutting down due to this.
tempodox · 32m ago
Main thing is uncle Donald gets his beloved chaos and unpredictability. God forbid anything could be predictable or knowable without his direct personal approval. After an appropriate tribute, of course.
pbreit · 8m ago
This was always a completely insane loophole that the item on Amazon was much more expensive than the exact same item on Temu.
franze · 1h ago
Austria, too. I know somebody working there in mid-management. They say the don't care about high or low taxes on the parcels they transport, but they need a straight forward way to execute, and there just is none.
Scoundreller · 57m ago
This is the issue for postal systems.
In every country in the world, you could send a package by post and the receiving country’s customs will assess duty/taxes/admin fees and charge the recipient as the default procedure.
As of later this week, the US will not do that procedure (or allegedly charge some absurd flat rate, like $50-$200 on even a $1 package).
Sending postal systems don’t want to deal with the aftermath of rejected/refused packages. And it’s unknown if US Customs and US Postal Service is even capable of charging that flat rate anyway.
thm · 1h ago
Unless they're declared as gift <$100 or sent via Express.
Scoundreller · 57m ago
Americans going to be receiving a lot of $99 gifts!
So does any other shipper (UPS? Fedex?) allow shipments from India?
Scoundreller · 54m ago
Yes, but you won’t like the pricing.
RantyDave · 52m ago
And New Zealand
Havoc · 3m ago
I don't get the $100 threshold they're setting? What's the logic behind accepting small packages when suddenly everything is above de minimis?
cheema33 · 1h ago
This needs to be repeated. Tariffs are a tax on ordinary citizens. Unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not progressive and therefore benefit the wealthy.
These are the sort of things the poor and middle class voted for. To make the rich, richer. And then turn around and complain that rich are getting richer and they are getting poorer.
dfxm12 · 1h ago
I'm sure Japan, and other countries doing similar things, don't like the tariffs either. Hopefully actions like this will change voter behavior, either at the polls or to embolden voters to do whatever it is they can to tell their elected officials to revert these changes. Maybe this is a drop in the bucket, but on the other hand, maybe Japan doesn't want to/can't make a bigger a splash.
In any case, it is rare that Americans face consequences for bad behavior of American foreign policy. Hopefully Americans get more engaged and introspective this time around.
rkuykendall-com · 59m ago
> Hopefully actions like this will change voter behavior
Everyone has been repeating this for months but inflation remains relatively normal so prices are not rising. Maybe it's a delayed effect that we won't see until later in the year, but at this point it is a theory and far from a fact, not something that needs to be repeated.
We have already observed that the opposite does not hold - in 2017 we slashed corporate income tax by 14% across the board, roughly the same as the tariffs but with far more surface area, and yet prices did not react and the benefits were not passed along to the consumer.
All we _know_ right now is that this is going to negatively impact economic growth by hitting corporations, the same way slashing corporate income tax positively impacted economic growth by benefitting corporations.
marcosdumay · 25m ago
Tariffs don't inherently cause inflation.
The noise about inflation is very likely propaganda trying to focus people on something that the government can control. (Yet, it looks like the US government is giving up on controlling it.)
Instead, tariffs have complex effects on the real economy. Universal tariffs do cause the concentration of wealth the GP was talking about (but it's way worse than the GP's claim) and deindustrialization. Inflation may or may not happen, it's not a given.
freen · 52m ago
Companies have reserves, local stock etc.
Fixed prices are a bet on TACO and hoping to avoid the orange rage: see what happens when you blame price increases on tariffs.
Lots and lots of bribes have been paid. This is yet another.
cuuupid · 45m ago
We will definitely see but it's still a theory at this point, and one that has not played out the other way in the past with a reduction on corporate tax _across the board_
> Fixed prices are a bet on TACO
Having been part of some of these conversations it's mostly a bet that democrats will win back control sometime in the next decade and do a full reversal. When that happens, you don't want to be caught out with less market share because you adjusted your prices to maintain your bottom line. Same logic as startups burning VC cash on offering free compute, 80% discounts on tokens, etc. to grab market share.
If you're in an elastic market, your priority is not to maximize profit, it's to make the market inelastic.
ethbr1 · 26m ago
It's not a theory -- every business that imports product from international sellers is staring at their current import prices and their remaining pre-tariff inventory numbers right now. (See the huge import volume burst pre-tariffs)
What they're trying to decide is (a) do they eat the cost of tariffs in margin or (b) do they raise prices?
That's a decision that doesn't need to be made until they burn through warehoused inventory, but for high-volume businesses (read: retail) it's measured in months at most.
Once that hits, either (a) or (b) will be chosen, and neither is great for equities markets / the economy.
Moreover, there's no "hiding this under the rug" once publicly traded companies begin to report quarterly financial results AFTER burning through their pre-tariff inventory. They can't not explain to their shareholders why they've taken a hit to profitability.
Best possible case is retail prices raise, once, by the amount of tariffs, and that's that.
But a 15%+ price hike is going to be an uncomfortable narrative for those in power who insist tariffs won't raise prices... so I'm not betting that conversation goes logically.*
* See the reaction part of Amazon got when they "accidentally" line-itemed tariff charges as evidence on how dangerous the administration sees transparency around tariff costs
bendbro · 47m ago
> These are the sort of things the poor and middle class voted for. To make the rich, richer.
Experts show saving 7.1337% at Walmart is worth losing your job to offshoring!
I haven't seen meaningful change for poor or workers with a decade of Democrat policy, so pardon me while I ignore that and vote for some tariffs.
colechristensen · 1h ago
I think it's quite the opposite. Tariffs are flat taxes on corporations AND can't be avoided with the tax shenanigans all big corporations use and many small ones can't. Implementation and motivation details aside I'm in favor of small tariffs for all but the most equal trade partners.
Corporate taxes have the problem of small business paying much more proportionally than large ones and a flat tax on businesses that rely on cheap foreign labor and goods is deserved.
Trump doesn't get to define all of my opinions by me needing to oppose exactly everything he's done.
The problem with the current political situation is the establishment in both parties w were too cowardly or useless to address real problems which are now actually being addressed by objectively stupid fascists.
And that is the lesson to everyone, get stuff done or get replaced by awful people doing awful things.
graeme · 1h ago
>Tariffs are flat taxes on corporations
The OP said tariffs are not progressive taxes. You are agreeing with them while believing you are disagreeing.
Further tariffs are not specific to corporations. Individuals pay them. Small business pay them. Large businesses pay them.
folsom · 1h ago
Then you would agree that all corporate taxes are not progressive and are eventually paid by all consumers thus all corporate taxes should be abolished.
mlyle · 1h ago
In the long run, tariffs basically all fall on the consumer because producer and distributor behavior is near infinitely elastic. Econ 101 predicts that the party who is less able to adjust behavior in reaction to the tax pays most of the tax.
In the short run, this isn't true: firms have goods they need to move.
zahlman · 1h ago
This model predicts much higher prices overall than actually observed, especially on the goods deemed most essential (like food). There are many reasons that companies cannot simply charge "what the market will bear".
mlyle · 10m ago
You’re mixing up two different questions. "What the market will bear" is a monopoly pricing story.
Food is messy because it's a commodity with a whole lot of substitution-- consumers have a high elasticity as a result.
We are talking about elasticity's prediction for the share producers and consumers each pay when there is a cost structure or tax change. Incidence theory is well validated and fits observed evidence remarkably well, including in 2019 studies of the effects of the 2018 trade war.
tsunamifury · 1h ago
We are in a world economy which actually needs demand more than supply. This is your missing analysis.
mlyle · 8m ago
"We need demand more than supply" is a macro diagnosis.
But tariff incidence is a micro question. Elasticity analysis doesn’t care whether the world has a demand shortfall or a supply glut. It asks: when a tax raises transaction costs, which side is less able to change behavior? In the long run, suppliers usually have more flexibility than consumers.
tsunamifury · 5m ago
I can't believe I'm going to look like I'm defending this but here it goes:
The market 'offering' the most demand to the global economy right now is America, by far and away, with a distant second of Europe and Middle East. America has chosen to use tariffs in an attempt to 'tax the demand offered' to the global economy in order to stop the localize debt accumulation of that demand, along with other justifications (rightly or wrongly) of stabilizing global trade and currency.
This is at least the THEORY on Tariffs. Its makes a bit more sense than the 'grrr 1950's trade imbalance' story media keeps spinning, but whatever I'm not going to defend it any more than that.
mlyle · 2m ago
I'm not talking about trade imbalance. I'm simply saying, tax incidence is predicted by elasticity, and in the long run suppliers have very high elasticity.
You can possibly improve trade imbalance with tariffs (though retaliation makes it hard). But it's hard to escape your consumers paying most or all of the costs of those tariffs.
rapind · 1h ago
> The problem with the current political situation is the establishment in both parties w were too cowardly or useless to address real problems which are now actually being addressed by objectively stupid fascists.
> And that is the lesson to everyone, get stuff done or get replaced by awful people doing awful things.
I don't think that the establishment who benefitted from the status quo actually cares nearly as much as they pretend to while the poor and eroding middle class bear the brunt of the suffering. I doubt rich reagonites and clintonites who made a killing off of deregulation and cheap overseas labour have many regrets.
Corporations don't pay taxes. They pass them on to their customers: us.
And applying tariffs to tools and raw materials when you're supposed to be trying to bring manufacturing back to your country is... well, let's just say any government stupid enough to do that isn't likely to improve things in any other respect.
hdgvhicv · 57m ago
Invisible hand forces prices down.
If tarrifs on imported goods are high then people choose non imported goods (which might be substitutes for goods which can’t be made in America) as there are no tarrifs.
They are dangerous though. If country A stops selling to US it sells cheaper to other countries. It also stops importing from the US (and chooses subsidies).
Overall everyone loses out - at least in theory, as everyone uses worse substitutes.
msgodel · 1h ago
They're not nearly as bad as income tax which would have to be raised if we didn't do tariffs.
At least tariffs tax consumption rather than production. Taxing production/income is horribly evil and in better times (such as when the country was founded) people who insisted on it would have been shot.
os2warpman · 54m ago
>and in better times (such as when the country was founded)
Better for who?
Better for me, definitely, I'm a white upper-middle-class military veteran professional landowning (mortgages don't count, buddy) male.
I would be guffawing on a porch in the town square, smoking a corncob pipe, pitched back in a rocking chair resting my feet up on a barrel, as the local militia marched off to shoot people for protesting taxation or their lack of voting rights.
Anyone who thinks the 1700s were "better" is a slice short of a whole pie.
marcosdumay · 16m ago
> I'm a white upper-middle-class military veteran professional landowning (mortgages don't count, buddy) male
If you don't own a stable company, you may still be too poor to benefit from those ones.
bendbro · 40m ago
And you'd be two nuts short of masculinity if you support anything that benefits others over yourself, your family, and your own community.
woadwarrior01 · 52m ago
> At least tariffs tax consumption rather than production. Taxing production/income is horribly evil and in better times (such as when the country was founded) people who insisted on it would have been shot.
Not true. Producing almost anything in the material world requires raw materials. If any of them are imported, they suffer from tariffs.
IMO, if a consumption tax is what you're looking for, then value added tax (VAT) is a more suitable solution and not tariffs.
airstrike · 1h ago
> would have to be raised if we didn't do tariffs
This isn't true.
hippo22 · 1h ago
Do you think that cigarette taxes should be repealed then?
bryzaguy · 1h ago
If I were to pick a place to tax, the addictive, harmful substances seem like a good option. But that’s easy for me to say because I don’t smoke. I do like sugar though. Imagine the impact on our health if there were a sugar tax.
stouset · 1h ago
There is in some places. California has a hefty sugary-beverage tax, for example. I'm intuitively "for" things like this, but I'm curious if it's been long enough that we've been able to collect data showing any effects.
This is not whataboutism. The argument described in GGP would apply the same way to GP's case. Cigarette taxes are a sales/consumption tax (specifically one aimed at discouraging consumption, but cigarettes are addictive) and they are necessarily, inherently regressive, for the simple reason that people with orders of magnitude more income and wealth cannot feasibly spend proportionately more on cigarettes.
Spooky23 · 1h ago
That’s not Whataboutism. Cigarette taxes are excise taxes, very similar to tariffs, and often implemented to encourage behavior by raising commodity cost.
In the case of cigarettes and alcohol they are partially “sin taxes” to discourage negative behavior.
In the case of the Trump emergency tariffs, they are seeking to pivot the entire economy.
So there’s a nuance and multiple ways to look at it. If you’re GM, the ability to make better margins on shitty cars is a net positive. If you’re in the technology or medical field, well, you’re fucked.
gosub100 · 1h ago
It's so crazy to hear the far left speak out against tax. It's literally both sides are the same. You elect people who impose taxes and fees on poor people who are squeezed to the point of not being able to feed themselves, but vociferously protest tariffs that might make a video game system or other luxury item cost closer to it's true cost. You are literally helping shareholders under the guise of the party that represents "the people".
paxys · 1h ago
Not all tax is the same. The left prefers progressive taxation (if you make more income you pay more tax), the right prefers regressive (if you buy or use goods or services you pay tax on them). Sales taxes and tariffs are in the latter category.
georgeplusplus · 1h ago
It’s disingenuous to consider one’s total income when weighing the fairness of a tax like sales tax. The thought that a sales tax is somehow benefiting one group over the other is ridiculous far left extreme thinking.
You pay for a service and that service has a rate. To think that the only good kind of taxation are those that are progressive is the dumbest thing I ever heard.
oblique · 41m ago
The taxes will have to come from somewhere. Tariffs are a regressive tax because money spent on goods will increase sublinearly with income. The % of total income spent on tariffs passed onto the consumer is therefore higher the lower your income is. It's not "ridiculous far left extreme thinking", it's basic math.
marssaxman · 1h ago
What "far left" is it that you think you are hearing here?
bryzaguy · 1h ago
One impact I’ve seen is small businesses who can no longer afford the tools/supplies they need, which aren’t manufactured in the states, so they are forced to increase their prices on good they sell or go out of business.
ActorNightly · 57m ago
There hasn't been a far left leader elected in US, even on a state level.
Secondly,the point of a tariff in a normal political climate is to bring manufacturing back home. This won't happen in the current administration.
And don't confuse liberals with far left.
zahlman · 1h ago
This fails to understand both the "far left" attitude towards taxes (many forms of taxation are accepted and even eagerly pursued; frankly, very few people actually have politics that treat "tax" as a single coherent idea) and the opposition to Trump (roughly, half the country, just as with every other president in a two-party system).
helloooooooo · 1h ago
I don’t think anyone here has yet come to the realization that ending rampant consumerism is the whole damn point of the tariffs.
shafyy · 1h ago
No, that's surely not the point of tariffs. Maybe a silver lining, but for sure not the intention.
bagels · 1h ago
According to who? That's not the most common justification provided for them, the more common refrain a bag full of lies about what a tariff is and what a trade deficit is.
ActorNightly · 1h ago
I love how you can just take what Trump does, assign some positive intent to it without any evidence of him mentioning it, and pass it off as some clever political move.
Just FYI, if you want people even begin to take you seriously, you have a long bridge to cross in demonstrating in that you don't support a child molester being in the white house.
hdgvhicv · 51m ago
You can support some of trumps policies while thinking the insurrectionist peadophile should be behind bars
You can also support tarrifs in principal but not support the way they have been implemented (club not calpol, used as a political weapon or to extract mafia style favours)
Latty · 43m ago
The post being replied to says "the tarrifs", clearly referring to the current set of tarrifs implemented by this admin, not the concept of tarrifs in general, otherwise they'd have just said "tarrifs".
ActorNightly · 40m ago
Yes, but that is not what is happening here.
stouset · 55m ago
It's absolutely insane.
I know we don't want HN to devolve into political bickering, but this is a deeply important meta-observation about what's happening in our country right now. Trump's stochastically random decisions are so inscrutable, but his following is so cult-like, that his followers are forced to flail around to try and find any plausible justification for these actions.
You'd think that at some point the sheer effort of this would trigger some sort of introspection, but it never seems to come. Someone, somewhere, latches onto an explanation that's catchy enough, vague enough, and impossible to disprove enough, that the tribe can take the explanation at face value and latch onto it, no matter how thin.
This will be studied for a long, long time.
ActorNightly · 38m ago
I hate that this is somehow is still viewed as political, when the topic has moved far past that to the point where you are arguing with conservatives that can't comprehend actual reality.
Like this is philosophical more than political.
add-sub-mul-div · 1h ago
My brain just leaked out of my ear.
dudefeliciano · 57m ago
This is a ridiculous attempt at sanewashing. When has Trump or anyone in the GOP EVER stated that they want to end consumerism?
Yeah gilding the Oval Office really drives the message home.
“Trump calmly reminds nation that desire is the truth of all suffering” - Onion
khuey · 1h ago
The "point" of the tariffs is that Trump likes tariffs. There's nothing more to it than that.
eagsalazar2 · 1h ago
Lol, are you serious? Can you elaborate on your thinking here? Are you suggesting Trump imposed tariffs out of some altruistic goal of reducing waste or the social impacts of consumerism?? That can't be right. What is the motivation in your mind?
arghwhat · 1h ago
Tariffs like this is a market regulation that the people pays for.
It doesn't "benefit the wealthy" because it's not progressive, it benefits the wealthy that have investments in the tariffed industry by distorting the market to their advantage instead of having to be competitive on a level playing field.
The rest of the wealthy are equally annoyed by the tariffs as everyone else, possibly more so as they see their investments tank.
Retric · 1h ago
It benefits the wealthy by applying to a smaller percentage of their spending. You can easily avoid all tariffs on a 100 million dollar yacht built outside the US, and you don’t pay it for a personal chef etc.
Scoundreller · 56m ago
Best part is, I don’t even have to pay it on the work of the personal chef I import!
dale_huevo · 1h ago
>it benefits the wealthy that have investments in the tariffed industry
If only they invested in venture-backed mass surveillance apps instead
Gud · 1h ago
There is no "level playing field" when you are competing with literal sweatshops though.
Frankly tariffs get a bad rep because of from who and how they are implemented but can absolutely serve a purpose.
Retric · 1h ago
Automation consistently outcompetes sweatshops.
What’s missing from these discussions is the idea of competitive advantage. It is inherently more efficient to grow crops in climates where they thrive, tacking a tariff to protect domestic production means intentionally lowering the standard of living of everyone both domestically and abroad to favor some tiny group doing something wasteful.
ethbr1 · 11m ago
There are a few situations where tariffs are beneficial:
1. To preserve strategically important domestic industries (historically: food production and mechanization industry)
2. To shield domestic industries while they're growing to take on already efficient and scaled global competitors
Benefiting labor or saving jobs is probably the stupidest use of tariffs, if one of the above isn't also in play, because it'd be more efficient just to offshore it to low COL countries and instead refocus internal labor.
The slippery slope, of course, is that industries will claim to be included in one of the above, but instead sink their tariff-protected excess profitability into shareholder/self-enrichment instead of business investment.
It'd make more sense to require domestic industries in tariff-protected sectors to invest {near tariff} percentages of their revenue in R&D and/or capital expenses (or be heavily taxed).
Otherwise the government is simply artificially inflating their profitability, at the cost of any consumers of the product.
Retric · 1m ago
Food production isn’t some homogeneous entity, it might make sense to subsidize some level of staples but direct subsidies are more transparent and can be more easily limited.
Similarly, military procurement can subsidize relevant industries without impacting the wider economy. In other words you can maintain some domestic steel production etc without impacting the cost of goods.
cuuupid · 52m ago
Automation is not replacing sweatshops, they've just made the sweatshop workers more productive (economically) while requiring them to be less productive (in activity).
So all that's happened is an exponential increase in the output volume of sweatshops :/
Retric · 7m ago
There’s many industries that have moved beyond sweatshops due to automation.
Pepsi can’t get glass bottles from 3rd world sweatshops at anything competitive with a highly automated factory. In the vast majority of industries it’s just a question of levels of automation and climate control inherently makes automation easier by reducing variability in temperature and humidity.
bendbro · 45m ago
I don't want to compete with pollution, child labor, slaves, extreme hours, and poverty-tier living conditions
Workaccount2 · 21m ago
Bernie removed the section on his website about tariffs being necessary for a healthy economy...
Tariffs are a populist thing, and people seem to think it's just a Trump thing.
CalRobert · 1h ago
You can still send letters- this is a big deal but it’s not -quite- as bad as I first thought since my ballot is mailed in from abroad…
jleyank · 1h ago
Remember, he’s ending mail-in ballots…
westernmostcoy · 1h ago
That's not within his power to do.
jleyank · 1h ago
He wasn’t allowed to end the r&d system in the us, but nobody stopped him. He wasn’t allowed to create export tariffs, go nuts with import tariffs, rip up senate passed treaties, …. As others have said, somebody has to stop the process and to date it’s not been stopped.
apricot · 3m ago
> That's not within his power to do.
What rock have you been living under for the past eight months?
_aavaa_ · 1h ago
Neither was starting “military actions” in the past. Laws need to be enforced to have any power.
wasabi991011 · 1h ago
Neither is ending birthright citizenship, dismantling USAID, closing the department of education, firing the heads of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board (independent federal agencies) without cause, impounding funds appropriated by Congress, etc.
Nevertheless, Trump has started process for all of those, and has been successful at many due to the slowness of the courts.
jleyank · 1h ago
Also, the ultimate court seems to favour his actions. Hell of a backup plan.
throw0101a · 1h ago
> That's not within his power to do.
Trump has the power to do anything that people (especially Congress) does not push back against.
> 1. Do not obey in advance.
> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
>Trump has the power to do anything that people (especially Congress) does not push back against.
Elections are run at the state level, so it's not like Trump can direct state agencies to stop counting mail-in ballots. That said, the fact that elections are run at the state level, and the fact that only a handful of swing states matter means it only takes a few pliant election officials to change the outcome of the election. eg. if Georgia's governor caved in 2020.
throw0101a · 53m ago
> Elections are run at the state level, so it's not like Trump can direct state agencies to stop counting mail-in ballots.
Trump asked Texas to redistrict that they were all for it.
gruez · 41m ago
That's mentioned in the second part of my comment:
>it only takes a few pliant election officials to change the outcome of the election. eg. if Georgia's governor caved in 2020.
dangus · 1h ago
Not really true. In this case he doesn’t have the power to do it because the federal government doesn’t operate elections. He has no lever to pull.
At most he can convince some friendly state legislatures to ban mail-in voting, but even that may not be an automatic process (e.g., maybe some states have requirements to change the constitutional or put the item up on a ballot measure).
Every Trump policy to this point has involved some kind of lever that the executive branch has had power over: tariffs, national guard deployments, and even in the case of ICE enforcement, Trump had to go to Congress to appropriate additional funding to make that viable long-term.
As an aside, I’m not personally too worried about the mail in voting as a hot button issue. I don’t think Republicans will touch it significantly because they need turnout, too, and they need it from key demographics that use absentee ballots like older voters and military members.
Some research seems to show that mail-in voting doesn’t really benefit a specific party.
It's his standard procedure over and over again; works great for him.
Talk it up. If it keeps him in the headlines, great.
Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. If he gets sued, fine, there's a decade of suits piled up in the queue, no problem. If there's an injunction, maybe ignore it and try anyway (queue full). If he's truly blocked, it's the commie judges and he'll make that better soon. OTOH if he gets away with that, more outrage and more PR for him, success.
Early stage fascism thrives on outrage fatigue to slim opposition. Do three more outrages today. Repeat tomorrow.
jcotton42 · 1h ago
Trump has tried to do plenty of things that aren't within his power, like ending birthright citizenship by executive order.
add-sub-mul-div · 1h ago
Has he "ended" it? Does he have the discipline, intelligence, and patience to do the work to end things legislatively or just make executive orders that will be tied up in courts for years and rescinded as soon he's out of office?
ActorNightly · 52m ago
He has codified massive funding to ICE in the BBB, which he has direct control over.
So he can order people to be detained and deported, knowing that the legal system can't handle the appeals of that many people.
Furthermore, the only way he will leave office is if his disease gets bad enough to where he can't function. And then the assumption is that the crazies he has hired aren't going to basically take over the government completely. If he is able to function in 2026 and 2028, US won't have real elections.
lawlessone · 1h ago
>and rescinded as soon he's out of office
If
No comments yet
ModernMech · 1h ago
It is if you live in a state controlled by a GOP governor and legislature. Trump also doesn't have the power to gerrymander Texas, yet he commanded it, and then it happened. Which means he actually does have the power.
actionfromafar · 1h ago
Neither was tariffs
dangus · 1h ago
Untrue, Congress gave that power over to the executive branch.
tines · 36m ago
By what legislation?
paulsutter · 1h ago
AFAIK the proposal is to go back to absentee ballots, rather than the blanket free for all today
amanaplanacanal · 1h ago
My state does all elections completely by mail, which means all paper ballots. It seems to work perfectly.
paganel · 1h ago
Which is good, as that is easier to fraud/tamper with. If you can’t be arsed to move your pistruie to a voting section come Election Day then you shouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway.
prasadjoglekar · 1h ago
Thank you. And to further clarify, Japan Post provides a way to ship packages with the appropriate customs declarations.
scoopr · 1h ago
While technically true, f.ex. Finland has stopped all mail shipments[0]. I guess the airlines were not set up to dealing with the hassle of making sure all the shipments are “allowed”. Or maybe just lazy, dunno really.
Title is not accurate. They're allowing personal shipments under $100, and the rest can be shipped via their UGX service.
It sounds like JP doesn't want to deal with the customs paperwork at scale (edit: also the deposits).
Kye · 1h ago
I couldn't find a way to fit all that in the title, so I got 99% there and clarified in the first post. The title still has more resolution toward the full detail than the original title.
timr · 1h ago
Yeah, it's literally the same as the title on the page so I get it, but unfortunately it's a hot-button political issue and people are eager to misinterpret.
I'd suggest something like: "Japan Post stops accepting US shipments over $100."
Kye · 1h ago
I did that with a slight change: "Japan Post to temporarily stop shipments to US over $100"
To emphasize that it's not in effect yet and that it's to, not from.
edit: Someone went and reverted it to something less clear than everything else
mmaunder · 1h ago
Sounds like the Japanese commercial carriers are going to get a bump in business since they're not interrupted.
cinntaile · 1h ago
Japan Post is a commercial carrier, the biggest one.
It's only temporary, due to the uncertainty. What a waste of resources this whole thing has been.
rozab · 1h ago
The font rendering on this site is crazy, I guess traditional Japanese fonts like MS PGothic always render bitmaps at smaller sizes. It's fine when zoomed in (or on HiDPI displays i guess). Is it just assumed that Japanese users have better fonts installed?
casperb · 59m ago
Same in the Netherlands. PostNL halted all box shipments to the US last Friday. Only allowing envelopes to go through.
They planned to support the new regulations before, but pulled the plug last Friday.
Mr_Eri_Atlov · 1h ago
Every morning I wake up and check to see if it's happened yet.
ysofunny · 1h ago
there is a literal energetic meaning to borders and frontiers and barriers IN GENERAL
from mitochondrial gradients pushing ions through a hole to make a protein complex spin so to chain double phosphate groups in ADP molecules into triple ATP molecules thereby storing energy.
all the way up to an international entities controlling flows of goods and people across borders with the goal of maximizing corporate and government profits (storing/collecting energy)
i.e. utilizing the energetic gradient caused by citizens and people and families trying to meet each other across the border including sending each other goods, flavors, candies, etcs
How can you be an American and not be embarrassed by this? Is stopping the "woke mind virus" really that important to you?
dcchambers · 1h ago
Semi-related: I make orders from Amazon Japan a couple times a year - shipping to the US isn't cheap but it's nice that Amazon has always handled import taxes/customs/everything else involved in international shipping. Other than taking longer, it's basically the same experience as ordering from Amazon domestically.
It's a shame that the ending of the De Minimis Exemption and other tariff-related stuff from the current administration is going to basically kill off Amazon Japan deliveries to the US.
From my understanding, once De Minimis ends, the delivery guy may ask you to pay import duties when he drops the goods off at your house. This is impractical for so many different reasons - what if I'm not home? How do I verify the import taxes? If I miss the carrier and don't pay, what happens to my order?
timr · 1h ago
I don't know what Amazon specifically will do (didn't know they allowed international shipments to begin with!), but the customs process via any normal carrier is that you get a bill when your items arrive at the port of entry.
You pay the bill, the item is released, and you get it a few days later. FedEx, for example, does the whole thing online.
ArchOversight · 1h ago
FedEx in my case paid the bill to customs, shipped me my item, and then secondary sent me a bill to pay for the customs fees after I had already received the item.
They don't want shipments stuck in port because storage there is expensive.
timr · 1h ago
Yeah, they'll do that up to a certain amount. Obviously, they're taking a risk that way.
SequoiaHope · 1h ago
Didn’t it already end for China? They just add the tax on top of the shipment price and pre-pay it.
crazygringo · 1h ago
If it's through Amazon they would probably just add the import taxes to your order.
Otherwise, you'll get a notice from USPS/UPS/FedEx in advance to pay the import tax online (or at post office), and then they'll deliver it.
metalman · 1h ago
here in Canada, ordering from the states was already a royal pain, as the dutys were applied more or less arbitrarily at the border, but getting some camera part or other little doohicky from china, is cheap and reliable, if wierd and of completely unknown delivery date.
I cant imagine ordering from the states now, selling to maybe, but it would be a pay up front no returns, buy some insurance and pray kinda offer.
shortrounddev2 · 1h ago
We should have something like the federal reserve, but for trade policy. A board of governors nominated and confirmed by the senate in 8 year rotations. Politicians cannot be trusted to craft economic policy. I am dubious that they should be crafting fiscal policy either since theyve shown they cant be trusted with that either
jacobolus · 1h ago
This is power explicitly reserved for Congress, which is being extra-constitutionally seized by the President (on the pretext of "national security") with no public support. The problem here is electing a lawless president and putting the Congress in charge of a GOP which is full of unprincipled cowards from top to bottom, not the institutional framework.
shortrounddev2 · 1h ago
If the answer to a lawless president is a cowardly and corrupt congress, then god help us. Economic policy simply cannot be trusted to politicians whose only incentive is re-election and serving campaign donors
jacobolus · 1h ago
That's true for every aspect of US government and society; having policy set by an elected legislature answerable to the people is how democracy works. If you want things to function better, start electing people who behave honorably and act in good faith and start demanding accountability from your representatives when they don't.
(Also, don't get your hopes up about the Federal Reserve in the current climate. Just like the Supreme Court or the FBI or the EPA or the NIH, the Federal Reserve is only as good as the people in charge, and Trump is doing what he can to seize control and abuse its powers for personal gain.)
philwelch · 59m ago
The Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which is still current statutory law, empowers the president to set tariffs. There’s an argument that Congress didn’t have the power to pass that law, but they did.
Scoundreller · 42m ago
In theory, most countries are signatories to the Universal Postal Union and World Customs Organization (branches of the UN) to keep the post/customs system humming along.
I tried to read up on their “rules” on this topic and it’s a bunch of wishy-washy hot air other than some standardization of customs declaration forms, and I guess HS codes.
Otherwise the only way you get everyone to agree on something: by getting them to agree on nothing during their junket meetings.
the_gastropod · 1h ago
It wouldn’t matter. The Supreme Court has allowed this administration to do whatever they want within the executive branch with the very narrow exception of messing with the Federal Reserve. And tariffs are squarely under congressional authority, but the party currently controlling congress has decided to cede that power to the president.
concinds · 1h ago
Trump's tariffs are already illegal and unconstitutional (though the right-wing Supreme Court won't care). Tariffs are within the purview of Congress. He's been doing all of this through "emergency" declarations.
philwelch · 1h ago
Why not just have a dictator?
shortrounddev2 · 1h ago
That is the current system, yes. A president with dubious claims to legitimacy is allowed by a dysfunctional and outdated legislature which abdicated its responsibilities generations ago to yank the chain of the economy at will like a suburban mom walking a Shih Tzu. There are absolutely no checks and balances on the US presidential system other than the now long-dead system of political norms. It's obviously not working well because the absolute fucking moron in charge (or, more realistically, the conservative ghouls which are parading his corpse around, Weekend-at-Bernie's style) is driving our economy straight at a brick wall
favflam · 1h ago
The current system was up for debate in the last election.
Feels over reals got us this result where Republicans specifically in Congress refuse to step in to stop the President from violating the emoluments clause, tax authority, and impoundment.
At least the last administration knew they had to pass Congressional legislation to spend money and that impoundment was absolutely illegal. And there is clear evidence Democrats will cull the herd of politicians who stray off.
philwelch · 1h ago
> or, more realistically, the conservative ghouls which are parading his corpse around, Weekend-at-Bernie's style
I don’t know what reality you’re from but that is not even close to true in this reality. Maybe you’re thinking of the last guy.
favflam · 1h ago
This situation feels dumb. I feel like I am watching idiots cheer on someone doing parkor and that person getting his teeth smashed on a wall. Like, what is the point?
ShakataGaNai · 1h ago
It is. The original claim was that De minimis exceptions were being used to ship drugs into the USA from (insert hand wavy racist statements here about anything South of Texas). Then it was "because unfair". Then they terminated de minimis for all countries.
I don't think anyone is cheering. At least most of the people cheering are starting to realize it's actually their face planting into the cement.
OutOfHere · 1h ago
He is in effect going to kill people in this way by coming in the way of their medical shipments to the US.
ncr100 · 1h ago
He's killed people, according to studies which I don't have on hand to share, but are real, with his leadership,
hundreds of thousands through the usaid closure, and
hundreds of thousands through his misleadership around covid misinformation during the pandemic
He cares about how death looks, he doesn't seem to care about the sadness that it brings to lose a human life or the value of human life in any of its dimensions other than looks. He talked about looks, when he saw photographs of dead children I think it was for Gaza, or Ukraine, but he just talked about looks. He did not talk about how sad it was for the parents or for the loss of life from Earth's human civilization.
fabioborellini · 59m ago
I bet the worst part of him getting shot, for himself, would have been ruining the final photos with an open casket
ajmurmann · 1h ago
The implementation is also needlessly fumbled. All these shippers are suspending their service temporarily because this is all so rushed. Normally there would be larger lead times for changes like this and shippers and importers could adjust their processes and businesses with less friction.
And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actually take effect or be rolled back soon. So much cost that could have been avoided!
_verandaguy · 1h ago
Unfortunately, Americans chose to elect an administration which is either unwilling to learn why a federal bureaucracy has to move slowly sometimes, or who is actively leveraging that precedent to undo it.
x0x0 · 1h ago
It's like letting the idiots on here claiming you can build twitter in a weekend run our country.
Anyone who spend 30 seconds thinking would understand that spinning up the logistics to collect hundreds of millions if not billions of payments would take some real doing. Instead, we're gifted mr "it's obvious and easy".
shadowgovt · 1h ago
This is one of the larger effects of Trump's rule-by-EO approach that I think people are coming to realize:
The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive.
Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.
ajmurmann · 25m ago
You could rule by EO and just have them take effect further out, no?
mullingitover · 1h ago
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
- H. L. Mencken
nine_k · 55m ago
No learning, and if fact, no stable control, is possible without negative feedback.
Voters are bound to a make serious mistake time to time, and make conclusions from the outcome. This negative feedback is vital, as long as it's not fatal. (That latter seems to be needing serious attention lately.)
uncircle · 1h ago
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
- Winston Churchill [disputed]
coryrc · 1h ago
What's your alternative?
I'm serious.
(Mine is multi-member ranked voting (NOT IRV)).
uncircle · 1h ago
Can’t get into details in a forum comment, but I’ll say that whatever we have in most of the Western world ain’t very democratic. It is a spectrum, that currently skews very hard towards plutarchy.
The positive thing about having a king is that there was only one head to cut when things got out of hand.
I’m no monarchist, but it’s about time to have a serious discussion about political philosophy instead of hiding behind the “Western representative democracy is the best we can do” cliché.
nine_k · 51m ago
> only one head to cut when things got out of hand.
History has been showing time and again that it's an illusion. Bad governance structures and corruption get entrenched, and gladly plead allegiance to a new king.
zahlman · 1h ago
"Democracy" is the form of government; you are speaking of voting systems, which are an implementation detail, and not in the same natural category. "Alternatives to democracy" are things like despotism, monarchy, communism, fascism etc.
nine_k · 43m ago
Aristocratic republics have been doing quite well for some time: Florence, Venice, Genoa in the Mediterranean, much of the Hanseatic league and places like Novgorod, and later the Dutch Republic, in the north.
shadowgovt · 1h ago
One alternative that has been tried (and is, arguably, still being tried) is Constitutional Republic.
The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect.
Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on.
It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase.
It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).
ghssds · 1h ago
> Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment.
Actually the thirteenth amendment explicitely allows slavery to exist in a case a whole bunch of people (maybe even yourself) think is super useful.
shadowgovt · 36m ago
I was handwaving around the exception for criminals, but I concede your point: it's an oversimplification to say slavery is strictly illegal.
(One can also make some interesting arguments around the notion of the draft).
philwelch · 1h ago
De minimis allows people to evade tariffs by simply drop shipping each individual product all the way from China or wherever, so long as the retail price is below the threshold. I’m skeptical of tariffs in general but if you’re going to have them, it makes sense to close the loopholes.
someotherperson · 1h ago
So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist.
timr · 1h ago
> So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist.
Same argument. If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US. It's the same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center.
Setting aside judgment of the tariff policy and the chaotic implementation, it does make sense to make them blanket actions. Much of the byzantine nature of our existing supply chains is due to gaming of international tariff policy.
someotherperson · 58m ago
> If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US
No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is.
> same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center
Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
timr · 47m ago
> No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight.
I didn't say "overnight". But if you don't think it would happen, you haven't been paying attention: it has been happening for decades. It's not a crazy thing to consider when establishing a tariff policy.
> Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
Flinging names ("lazy", "superficial") is not an argument. You've obviously decided that these actions are stupid -- maybe they are! [1] -- and nobody is going to convince you otherwise, but I just gave you a plausible reason that you'd choose to do it this way.
[1] I don't personally like these policies, but I'm willing to admit when something I don't like as a whole makes sense in part.
philwelch · 1h ago
China isn’t the only country that drop ships.
Ekaros · 1h ago
But at least ensure you can then get paid... Which seems to be hang here. Failure to tell how to pay those tariffs...
OutOfHere · 1h ago
De minimis is used a lot more by individuals than by corporations. People shouldn't have to pay tariffs on necessary medicines or any other items for personal non-commercial use.
Tariffs aren't even justified, as they're anti-free-market, anti-capitalistic, and the government provides no extra services. It's equivalent to an illegal federal sales tax. If anything, the government has been cutting major services.
actionfromafar · 1h ago
Yeah dodge the steel tariffs in small envelopes!
ModernMech · 1h ago
If you're honestly asking what's the point, the literal answer is the entire federal government has realigned itself to support Trump's ego. That's literally its entire purpose now, without exaggeration. If something is bad for Trump's ego, it will not happen no matter how good it is for the country. Conversely, if Trump wants something to happen, it's going to no matter how bad it is for the rest of us. Or at least that's how they see it.
Tariffs are happening because it's an idea he came up with 40 years ago when he was in his prime and it stuck to him.
And no one is doing anything to stop the tariffs, despite everyone knowing better, because the people in power can't tell him "no", because that would hurt his ego. You see what he does to people who hurt his ego? They get mocked on social media, deported to a foreign gulag, they and/or their spouse gets fired, their company gets investigated or loses grants, or their house gets raided by the FBI.
So everyone has to go along with it no matter how dumb it is.
monero-xmr · 1h ago
I don’t see why we should allow 0% imports but be shut out of exports. Yes yes according to some chart this is actually a good thing but I find it unfair.
For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good.
The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah.
I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal. Using tariffs where imbalances exist, especially when countries arbitrarily lock your goods out of their markets, is a tool for fixing this.
One reason the US is so fucked up for the lower and middle classes is our global reserve currency and how it provides increasing pressure on the dollar and slowly deindustrializes our society. This has been pushing us towards ever more radical politics
favflam · 1h ago
My middle school 7th grade civics class told me that this conversation happens in Congress in Congressional hearings.
I get to hear my Rep ask questions. There is a Congressional research office that acts as a kind of neutral arbiter of truth allowing for evidenced based instructions. Then, after weeks or months, a consensus builds and Congress passes a law and tells the President what to do (hence Congress=Article ONE -> two).
Now, I get to watch a single person dictating tax rates and dumb twitter threads doing a horrific job replacing what I described above.
I could debate you on the merits of your comment, but my real point is that before you wreck the lives of millions of people, you should make sure most people are onboard with all the consequences (1st order and 2nd order effects).
monero-xmr · 1h ago
Trump is able to this this because the other branches of government are not stopping him, because his party has control and he is a very strong executive.
A prior historical US example would be FDR, who my teachers growing up simply adored, who strong armed many aggressive executive policies through and radically reshaped America for a century.
actionfromafar · 1h ago
Another reason is the weird fetish for pumping the spoils of the strong dollar into medical middlemen and tax cuts for billionaires.
monero-xmr · 1h ago
I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs.
How we redirect money to the medical system is so completely insane it must be the #1 place politicians get their graft from. It’s just so insane
fzeroracer · 1h ago
> I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs.
Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.
monero-xmr · 1h ago
My preferred way would also to be to eliminate expenditures, but failing that, redirecting taxes in a way that grows the US internal economy as much as possible, and incentives the re-industrialization simultaneously, is an interesting experiment.
selectodude · 1m ago
Everybody wants to reindustrialize yet I don’t see a lot of people signing up to work in a factory. Why don’t you go be the change you seek?
GuinansEyebrows · 1h ago
Eliminating US government expenditures would obliterate the entire economy overnight.
monero-xmr · 1h ago
I would not literally eliminate expenditures but as we cut the total taxation we similarly reduce spending 1 for 1
modeless · 1h ago
> "we will continue to accept letters, postcards, printed matter, EMS (documents), and postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) containing gifts between individuals with a value of less than US$100."
So no, "mail" is not suspended. More accurate headline please.
favflam · 1h ago
Ecommerce of millions of people are facing a huge disruption.
Think of Brexit. Commerce still happens between the UK and Europe, but there is a massive show-stopping level of friction now because people need to do Customs. That is a lot of paperwork. Millions of people are not used to this and many small businesses will get wiped out.
Ekaros · 1h ago
And this is worse than Brexit. As in that case both sides had very clear rules and processes already in place. It was significant new overhead and there might not have been border capacity. But at least how everything could be done was clear.
sugarpimpdorsey · 1h ago
Silicon Valley is in a mad panic, left wondering if bulk shipments of Tenga Eggs will be affected.
lupusreal · 1h ago
Insane that we have tariffs with Japan of all countries, America's most important strategic ally by far.
bapak · 1h ago
Mr. D just does not know that.
Kye · 1h ago
edit: someone changed it to a cropped form of the page title that's even less informative. I tried.
I had to redo the headline a bit to fit and accurately represent the overall picture.
Some key details copied from the post:
>> "Therefore, starting August 27 (Wed.), in line with other national postal operators, we will temporarily suspend the acceptance of postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) to the United States that contain the following items:"
>> "Individual gifts with a content value exceeding 100 US dollars
>> "Goods intended for sale for consumption"*
>> "In addition, we will continue to accept letters, postcards, printed matter, EMS (documents), and postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) containing gifts between individuals with a value of less than US$100."
>> "As an alternative to the above suspension of acceptance, our international courier service, UGX (U-Global Express), can handle shipments in compliance with U.S. customs regulations: UGX (U-Global Express)" [1]
Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are.
There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries have invented sunscreens that feel better on your skin than the old styles, but aren't yet approved in the US. Motorcycle helmets are another. You may have seen the MIPS system - the yellow slipliner that's become popular in bicycle helmets. Scientists have realized that rotational impact leads to concussions and similar brain damage, but prior helmets only protected against naive impacts. Europe now requires helmets to protect against rotational damage. The US requires that manufacturers self-assert that they meet a very old standard that ignores rotational impact. They do not recognize Europe's new standard.
Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now. Protectionists are going to see this as a win.
More background on helmet standards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BUyp3HX8cY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76yu124i3Bo
Stylevana, where I go for my Japanese/Korean sunscreen and skincare, is still shipping to the US as far as I can tell.
I suppose an immediate counterpoint is that the US Consumer seems unwilling to clamor for high-quality products. :/
ECE 22.06 is the standard to look for for rotational protection in 2025.
Maybe some have valid concerns for certain products that we don't make ourselves (e.g. semiconductors) but Trump and his cronies are not the solution to that at all.
Business can plan for low tax or high tax regimes. Not so much when it's just "unknown".
Similar across Europe https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/25/postal-serv...
In every country in the world, you could send a package by post and the receiving country’s customs will assess duty/taxes/admin fees and charge the recipient as the default procedure.
As of later this week, the US will not do that procedure (or allegedly charge some absurd flat rate, like $50-$200 on even a $1 package).
Sending postal systems don’t want to deal with the aftermath of rejected/refused packages. And it’s unknown if US Customs and US Postal Service is even capable of charging that flat rate anyway.
https://www.business-standard.com/immigration/india-post-sus...
"Temporary restrictions on postal goods shipping to the U.S. for private and business customers"
https://group.dhl.com/en/media-relations/press-releases/2025...
These are the sort of things the poor and middle class voted for. To make the rich, richer. And then turn around and complain that rich are getting richer and they are getting poorer.
In any case, it is rare that Americans face consequences for bad behavior of American foreign policy. Hopefully Americans get more engaged and introspective this time around.
It won't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_tr...
We have already observed that the opposite does not hold - in 2017 we slashed corporate income tax by 14% across the board, roughly the same as the tariffs but with far more surface area, and yet prices did not react and the benefits were not passed along to the consumer.
All we _know_ right now is that this is going to negatively impact economic growth by hitting corporations, the same way slashing corporate income tax positively impacted economic growth by benefitting corporations.
The noise about inflation is very likely propaganda trying to focus people on something that the government can control. (Yet, it looks like the US government is giving up on controlling it.)
Instead, tariffs have complex effects on the real economy. Universal tariffs do cause the concentration of wealth the GP was talking about (but it's way worse than the GP's claim) and deindustrialization. Inflation may or may not happen, it's not a given.
Fixed prices are a bet on TACO and hoping to avoid the orange rage: see what happens when you blame price increases on tariffs.
Lots and lots of bribes have been paid. This is yet another.
> Fixed prices are a bet on TACO
Having been part of some of these conversations it's mostly a bet that democrats will win back control sometime in the next decade and do a full reversal. When that happens, you don't want to be caught out with less market share because you adjusted your prices to maintain your bottom line. Same logic as startups burning VC cash on offering free compute, 80% discounts on tokens, etc. to grab market share.
If you're in an elastic market, your priority is not to maximize profit, it's to make the market inelastic.
What they're trying to decide is (a) do they eat the cost of tariffs in margin or (b) do they raise prices?
That's a decision that doesn't need to be made until they burn through warehoused inventory, but for high-volume businesses (read: retail) it's measured in months at most.
Once that hits, either (a) or (b) will be chosen, and neither is great for equities markets / the economy.
Moreover, there's no "hiding this under the rug" once publicly traded companies begin to report quarterly financial results AFTER burning through their pre-tariff inventory. They can't not explain to their shareholders why they've taken a hit to profitability.
Best possible case is retail prices raise, once, by the amount of tariffs, and that's that.
But a 15%+ price hike is going to be an uncomfortable narrative for those in power who insist tariffs won't raise prices... so I'm not betting that conversation goes logically.*
* See the reaction part of Amazon got when they "accidentally" line-itemed tariff charges as evidence on how dangerous the administration sees transparency around tariff costs
Experts show saving 7.1337% at Walmart is worth losing your job to offshoring!
I haven't seen meaningful change for poor or workers with a decade of Democrat policy, so pardon me while I ignore that and vote for some tariffs.
Corporate taxes have the problem of small business paying much more proportionally than large ones and a flat tax on businesses that rely on cheap foreign labor and goods is deserved.
Trump doesn't get to define all of my opinions by me needing to oppose exactly everything he's done.
The problem with the current political situation is the establishment in both parties w were too cowardly or useless to address real problems which are now actually being addressed by objectively stupid fascists.
And that is the lesson to everyone, get stuff done or get replaced by awful people doing awful things.
The OP said tariffs are not progressive taxes. You are agreeing with them while believing you are disagreeing.
Further tariffs are not specific to corporations. Individuals pay them. Small business pay them. Large businesses pay them.
In the short run, this isn't true: firms have goods they need to move.
Food is messy because it's a commodity with a whole lot of substitution-- consumers have a high elasticity as a result.
We are talking about elasticity's prediction for the share producers and consumers each pay when there is a cost structure or tax change. Incidence theory is well validated and fits observed evidence remarkably well, including in 2019 studies of the effects of the 2018 trade war.
But tariff incidence is a micro question. Elasticity analysis doesn’t care whether the world has a demand shortfall or a supply glut. It asks: when a tax raises transaction costs, which side is less able to change behavior? In the long run, suppliers usually have more flexibility than consumers.
The market 'offering' the most demand to the global economy right now is America, by far and away, with a distant second of Europe and Middle East. America has chosen to use tariffs in an attempt to 'tax the demand offered' to the global economy in order to stop the localize debt accumulation of that demand, along with other justifications (rightly or wrongly) of stabilizing global trade and currency.
This is at least the THEORY on Tariffs. Its makes a bit more sense than the 'grrr 1950's trade imbalance' story media keeps spinning, but whatever I'm not going to defend it any more than that.
You can possibly improve trade imbalance with tariffs (though retaliation makes it hard). But it's hard to escape your consumers paying most or all of the costs of those tariffs.
> And that is the lesson to everyone, get stuff done or get replaced by awful people doing awful things.
I don't think that the establishment who benefitted from the status quo actually cares nearly as much as they pretend to while the poor and eroding middle class bear the brunt of the suffering. I doubt rich reagonites and clintonites who made a killing off of deregulation and cheap overseas labour have many regrets.
And applying tariffs to tools and raw materials when you're supposed to be trying to bring manufacturing back to your country is... well, let's just say any government stupid enough to do that isn't likely to improve things in any other respect.
If tarrifs on imported goods are high then people choose non imported goods (which might be substitutes for goods which can’t be made in America) as there are no tarrifs.
They are dangerous though. If country A stops selling to US it sells cheaper to other countries. It also stops importing from the US (and chooses subsidies).
Overall everyone loses out - at least in theory, as everyone uses worse substitutes.
At least tariffs tax consumption rather than production. Taxing production/income is horribly evil and in better times (such as when the country was founded) people who insisted on it would have been shot.
Better for who?
Better for me, definitely, I'm a white upper-middle-class military veteran professional landowning (mortgages don't count, buddy) male.
I would be guffawing on a porch in the town square, smoking a corncob pipe, pitched back in a rocking chair resting my feet up on a barrel, as the local militia marched off to shoot people for protesting taxation or their lack of voting rights.
Anyone who thinks the 1700s were "better" is a slice short of a whole pie.
If you don't own a stable company, you may still be too poor to benefit from those ones.
Not true. Producing almost anything in the material world requires raw materials. If any of them are imported, they suffer from tariffs.
IMO, if a consumption tax is what you're looking for, then value added tax (VAT) is a more suitable solution and not tariffs.
This isn't true.
In the case of cigarettes and alcohol they are partially “sin taxes” to discourage negative behavior.
In the case of the Trump emergency tariffs, they are seeking to pivot the entire economy.
So there’s a nuance and multiple ways to look at it. If you’re GM, the ability to make better margins on shitty cars is a net positive. If you’re in the technology or medical field, well, you’re fucked.
You pay for a service and that service has a rate. To think that the only good kind of taxation are those that are progressive is the dumbest thing I ever heard.
Secondly,the point of a tariff in a normal political climate is to bring manufacturing back home. This won't happen in the current administration.
And don't confuse liberals with far left.
Just FYI, if you want people even begin to take you seriously, you have a long bridge to cross in demonstrating in that you don't support a child molester being in the white house.
You can also support tarrifs in principal but not support the way they have been implemented (club not calpol, used as a political weapon or to extract mafia style favours)
I know we don't want HN to devolve into political bickering, but this is a deeply important meta-observation about what's happening in our country right now. Trump's stochastically random decisions are so inscrutable, but his following is so cult-like, that his followers are forced to flail around to try and find any plausible justification for these actions.
You'd think that at some point the sheer effort of this would trigger some sort of introspection, but it never seems to come. Someone, somewhere, latches onto an explanation that's catchy enough, vague enough, and impossible to disprove enough, that the tribe can take the explanation at face value and latch onto it, no matter how thin.
This will be studied for a long, long time.
Like this is philosophical more than political.
“Trump calmly reminds nation that desire is the truth of all suffering” - Onion
It doesn't "benefit the wealthy" because it's not progressive, it benefits the wealthy that have investments in the tariffed industry by distorting the market to their advantage instead of having to be competitive on a level playing field.
The rest of the wealthy are equally annoyed by the tariffs as everyone else, possibly more so as they see their investments tank.
If only they invested in venture-backed mass surveillance apps instead
Frankly tariffs get a bad rep because of from who and how they are implemented but can absolutely serve a purpose.
What’s missing from these discussions is the idea of competitive advantage. It is inherently more efficient to grow crops in climates where they thrive, tacking a tariff to protect domestic production means intentionally lowering the standard of living of everyone both domestically and abroad to favor some tiny group doing something wasteful.
1. To preserve strategically important domestic industries (historically: food production and mechanization industry)
2. To shield domestic industries while they're growing to take on already efficient and scaled global competitors
Benefiting labor or saving jobs is probably the stupidest use of tariffs, if one of the above isn't also in play, because it'd be more efficient just to offshore it to low COL countries and instead refocus internal labor.
The slippery slope, of course, is that industries will claim to be included in one of the above, but instead sink their tariff-protected excess profitability into shareholder/self-enrichment instead of business investment.
It'd make more sense to require domestic industries in tariff-protected sectors to invest {near tariff} percentages of their revenue in R&D and/or capital expenses (or be heavily taxed).
Otherwise the government is simply artificially inflating their profitability, at the cost of any consumers of the product.
Similarly, military procurement can subsidize relevant industries without impacting the wider economy. In other words you can maintain some domestic steel production etc without impacting the cost of goods.
So all that's happened is an exponential increase in the output volume of sweatshops :/
Pepsi can’t get glass bottles from 3rd world sweatshops at anything competitive with a highly automated factory. In the vast majority of industries it’s just a question of levels of automation and climate control inherently makes automation easier by reducing variability in temperature and humidity.
Tariffs are a populist thing, and people seem to think it's just a Trump thing.
What rock have you been living under for the past eight months?
Nevertheless, Trump has started process for all of those, and has been successful at many due to the slowness of the courts.
Trump has the power to do anything that people (especially Congress) does not push back against.
> 1. Do not obey in advance.
> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
* https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Tyranny
Elections are run at the state level, so it's not like Trump can direct state agencies to stop counting mail-in ballots. That said, the fact that elections are run at the state level, and the fact that only a handful of swing states matter means it only takes a few pliant election officials to change the outcome of the election. eg. if Georgia's governor caved in 2020.
Trump asked Texas to redistrict that they were all for it.
>it only takes a few pliant election officials to change the outcome of the election. eg. if Georgia's governor caved in 2020.
At most he can convince some friendly state legislatures to ban mail-in voting, but even that may not be an automatic process (e.g., maybe some states have requirements to change the constitutional or put the item up on a ballot measure).
Every Trump policy to this point has involved some kind of lever that the executive branch has had power over: tariffs, national guard deployments, and even in the case of ICE enforcement, Trump had to go to Congress to appropriate additional funding to make that viable long-term.
As an aside, I’m not personally too worried about the mail in voting as a hot button issue. I don’t think Republicans will touch it significantly because they need turnout, too, and they need it from key demographics that use absentee ballots like older voters and military members.
Some research seems to show that mail-in voting doesn’t really benefit a specific party.
https://www.dw.com/en/us-election-mail-in-voting-biden-trump...
Talk it up. If it keeps him in the headlines, great.
Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. If he gets sued, fine, there's a decade of suits piled up in the queue, no problem. If there's an injunction, maybe ignore it and try anyway (queue full). If he's truly blocked, it's the commie judges and he'll make that better soon. OTOH if he gets away with that, more outrage and more PR for him, success.
Early stage fascism thrives on outrage fatigue to slim opposition. Do three more outrages today. Repeat tomorrow.
So he can order people to be detained and deported, knowing that the legal system can't handle the appeals of that many people.
Furthermore, the only way he will leave office is if his disease gets bad enough to where he can't function. And then the assumption is that the crazies he has hired aren't going to basically take over the government completely. If he is able to function in 2026 and 2028, US won't have real elections.
If
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[0] https://www.posti.fi/en/latest-news-at-posti/%20/news/trump-...
It sounds like JP doesn't want to deal with the customs paperwork at scale (edit: also the deposits).
I'd suggest something like: "Japan Post stops accepting US shipments over $100."
To emphasize that it's not in effect yet and that it's to, not from.
edit: Someone went and reverted it to something less clear than everything else
It's only temporary, due to the uncertainty. What a waste of resources this whole thing has been.
They planned to support the new regulations before, but pulled the plug last Friday.
from mitochondrial gradients pushing ions through a hole to make a protein complex spin so to chain double phosphate groups in ADP molecules into triple ATP molecules thereby storing energy.
all the way up to an international entities controlling flows of goods and people across borders with the goal of maximizing corporate and government profits (storing/collecting energy)
i.e. utilizing the energetic gradient caused by citizens and people and families trying to meet each other across the border including sending each other goods, flavors, candies, etcs
It's a shame that the ending of the De Minimis Exemption and other tariff-related stuff from the current administration is going to basically kill off Amazon Japan deliveries to the US.
From my understanding, once De Minimis ends, the delivery guy may ask you to pay import duties when he drops the goods off at your house. This is impractical for so many different reasons - what if I'm not home? How do I verify the import taxes? If I miss the carrier and don't pay, what happens to my order?
You pay the bill, the item is released, and you get it a few days later. FedEx, for example, does the whole thing online.
They don't want shipments stuck in port because storage there is expensive.
Otherwise, you'll get a notice from USPS/UPS/FedEx in advance to pay the import tax online (or at post office), and then they'll deliver it.
(Also, don't get your hopes up about the Federal Reserve in the current climate. Just like the Supreme Court or the FBI or the EPA or the NIH, the Federal Reserve is only as good as the people in charge, and Trump is doing what he can to seize control and abuse its powers for personal gain.)
I tried to read up on their “rules” on this topic and it’s a bunch of wishy-washy hot air other than some standardization of customs declaration forms, and I guess HS codes.
Otherwise the only way you get everyone to agree on something: by getting them to agree on nothing during their junket meetings.
Feels over reals got us this result where Republicans specifically in Congress refuse to step in to stop the President from violating the emoluments clause, tax authority, and impoundment.
At least the last administration knew they had to pass Congressional legislation to spend money and that impoundment was absolutely illegal. And there is clear evidence Democrats will cull the herd of politicians who stray off.
I don’t know what reality you’re from but that is not even close to true in this reality. Maybe you’re thinking of the last guy.
I don't think anyone is cheering. At least most of the people cheering are starting to realize it's actually their face planting into the cement.
hundreds of thousands through the usaid closure, and
hundreds of thousands through his misleadership around covid misinformation during the pandemic
He cares about how death looks, he doesn't seem to care about the sadness that it brings to lose a human life or the value of human life in any of its dimensions other than looks. He talked about looks, when he saw photographs of dead children I think it was for Gaza, or Ukraine, but he just talked about looks. He did not talk about how sad it was for the parents or for the loss of life from Earth's human civilization.
And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actually take effect or be rolled back soon. So much cost that could have been avoided!
Anyone who spend 30 seconds thinking would understand that spinning up the logistics to collect hundreds of millions if not billions of payments would take some real doing. Instead, we're gifted mr "it's obvious and easy".
The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive.
Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.
- H. L. Mencken
Voters are bound to a make serious mistake time to time, and make conclusions from the outcome. This negative feedback is vital, as long as it's not fatal. (That latter seems to be needing serious attention lately.)
- Winston Churchill [disputed]
I'm serious.
(Mine is multi-member ranked voting (NOT IRV)).
The positive thing about having a king is that there was only one head to cut when things got out of hand.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887634
I’m no monarchist, but it’s about time to have a serious discussion about political philosophy instead of hiding behind the “Western representative democracy is the best we can do” cliché.
History has been showing time and again that it's an illusion. Bad governance structures and corruption get entrenched, and gladly plead allegiance to a new king.
The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect.
Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on.
It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase.
It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).
Actually the thirteenth amendment explicitely allows slavery to exist in a case a whole bunch of people (maybe even yourself) think is super useful.
(One can also make some interesting arguments around the notion of the draft).
Same argument. If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US. It's the same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center.
Setting aside judgment of the tariff policy and the chaotic implementation, it does make sense to make them blanket actions. Much of the byzantine nature of our existing supply chains is due to gaming of international tariff policy.
No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is.
> same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center
Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
I didn't say "overnight". But if you don't think it would happen, you haven't been paying attention: it has been happening for decades. It's not a crazy thing to consider when establishing a tariff policy.
> Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
Flinging names ("lazy", "superficial") is not an argument. You've obviously decided that these actions are stupid -- maybe they are! [1] -- and nobody is going to convince you otherwise, but I just gave you a plausible reason that you'd choose to do it this way.
[1] I don't personally like these policies, but I'm willing to admit when something I don't like as a whole makes sense in part.
Tariffs aren't even justified, as they're anti-free-market, anti-capitalistic, and the government provides no extra services. It's equivalent to an illegal federal sales tax. If anything, the government has been cutting major services.
Tariffs are happening because it's an idea he came up with 40 years ago when he was in his prime and it stuck to him.
And no one is doing anything to stop the tariffs, despite everyone knowing better, because the people in power can't tell him "no", because that would hurt his ego. You see what he does to people who hurt his ego? They get mocked on social media, deported to a foreign gulag, they and/or their spouse gets fired, their company gets investigated or loses grants, or their house gets raided by the FBI.
So everyone has to go along with it no matter how dumb it is.
For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good.
The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah.
I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal. Using tariffs where imbalances exist, especially when countries arbitrarily lock your goods out of their markets, is a tool for fixing this.
One reason the US is so fucked up for the lower and middle classes is our global reserve currency and how it provides increasing pressure on the dollar and slowly deindustrializes our society. This has been pushing us towards ever more radical politics
I get to hear my Rep ask questions. There is a Congressional research office that acts as a kind of neutral arbiter of truth allowing for evidenced based instructions. Then, after weeks or months, a consensus builds and Congress passes a law and tells the President what to do (hence Congress=Article ONE -> two).
Now, I get to watch a single person dictating tax rates and dumb twitter threads doing a horrific job replacing what I described above.
I could debate you on the merits of your comment, but my real point is that before you wreck the lives of millions of people, you should make sure most people are onboard with all the consequences (1st order and 2nd order effects).
A prior historical US example would be FDR, who my teachers growing up simply adored, who strong armed many aggressive executive policies through and radically reshaped America for a century.
How we redirect money to the medical system is so completely insane it must be the #1 place politicians get their graft from. It’s just so insane
Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.
So no, "mail" is not suspended. More accurate headline please.
Think of Brexit. Commerce still happens between the UK and Europe, but there is a massive show-stopping level of friction now because people need to do Customs. That is a lot of paperwork. Millions of people are not used to this and many small businesses will get wiped out.
I had to redo the headline a bit to fit and accurately represent the overall picture.
Some key details copied from the post:
>> "Therefore, starting August 27 (Wed.), in line with other national postal operators, we will temporarily suspend the acceptance of postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) to the United States that contain the following items:"
>> "Individual gifts with a content value exceeding 100 US dollars
>> "Goods intended for sale for consumption"*
>> "In addition, we will continue to accept letters, postcards, printed matter, EMS (documents), and postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) containing gifts between individuals with a value of less than US$100."
>> "As an alternative to the above suspension of acceptance, our international courier service, UGX (U-Global Express), can handle shipments in compliance with U.S. customs regulations: UGX (U-Global Express)" [1]
[1] https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/UGX/index_en.html