Not arguing against the overall criticisms of Trump or Musk. Actually asking about there usually being a comment that goes something like “tariffs only help Trump’s billionaire friends.”
If I’m a billionaire, and I’d like to have more money, why do I want tariffs? How does tariffs help me get more money faster than no (new) tariffs?
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The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Not arguing against the overall criticisms of Trump or Musk. Actually asking about there usually being a comment that goes something like “tariffs only help Trump’s billionaire friends.”
If I’m a billionaire, and I’d like to have more money, why do I want tariffs? How does tariffs help me get more money faster than no (new) tariffs?
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Idk that they will help billionaires.
Raise the price of competitors, make domestic brands look better without investing, reduce competition, and if you know ahead of time you can bet on it.
They’re US producers who will be able to hike prices now they no longer have to be cost competitive with imports.
>How do tariffs help billionaires?
There is a serious possibility that they don’t; that tariffs don’t help billionaires, but if they did, it might be through The Shock Doctrine…
>In this strategy, political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. This economic “shock therapy” favors corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens when they are too distracted and overwhelmed to respond or resist effectively.
They don’t help them but they hurt billionaires less than poor people.
>If I’m a billionaire, and I’d like to have more money, why do I want tariffs? How does tariffs help me get more money faster than no (new) tariffs?
Billionares have access to liquid capital you don’t. On top of that, you end up spending a much larger % of your income on goods that are tariffed, VS billionares.
When the markets crash, the billionaires can buy up massive amounts of stock dirt cheap. That’s what happened in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Even if their net worth decreases, they’ll still have plenty of money to buy up cheap stocks and companies while everyone else is struggling and when the market recovers they’re then richer than they were before.
Unless they are successfully market timing, it doesn’t help them.
It hurts billionaires much less as they don’t care what anything costs. But you and I suffer when prices go up even a little. These tariffs are a ploy to raise money without saying they are taxes.
People with less liquid capital may very well have to sell their assets in order to afford necessities in ways that the wealthy do not. Businesses, homes, savings accounts, time and bodies via labor; if a rising tide lifts all boats a sinking one is sure to strand someone
Who the hell knows what people mean?
There is a theory that some assets will become underpriced by the market crash, and billionaires can sweep in and buy them cheap, but I think we can see that billionaires aren’t always smarter than the average person, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll do a good job of it.
I think that people are pushing for a “reason” why Trump did this. Someone behind the scenes who stands to benefit that we can blame.
The truth is that Trump is stupid and he doesn’t listen to people so he does stupid stuff. There’s no master plane. He’s just incompetent.
Tariffs help Trump. They increase his personal power and if countries or companies want to avoid tariffs they have to bribe Trump. This is all a scam.
They don’t really, not everything is meant to help them. Trump is just very very stupid
Actually they don’t.
The theory is that all the new businesses in America will create many jobs that were lost to imported goods over the past few decades. It bothers the rich because it will decrease the dividends they’re accustomed to getting from their stock investments.
> If I’m a billionaire, and I’d like to have more money, why do I want tariffs? How does tariffs help me get more money faster than no (new) tariffs?
It depends how much control you have over the tariffs.
If it’s random/arbitrary, it’s not very good for anyone.
But let’s say I own a whole bunch of American wineries. If I can convince the administration to put massive tariffs on foreign wine, then I can raise my prices too – and likely soak up more US market share.
And this is also true of any industry where I can make the math work to produce viable products in America.
I have plenty of investment capital – and the agility of being a local investor. If a certain product is heavily tariffed, I can try to rapidly move into that market and establish a new brand.
Of course, this is all a double-edged sword, because eliminating free trade means that tariffs may work against you in foreign markets – and you never know when the next administration might change policies and upend your market.
Billionaires own companies in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Tariffs stifle competition by artificially making foreign products expensive. This allows domestic producers to provide a lower quality product than they otherwise would have, without facing the penalty of losing customers.
There’s very little reason to ever have tariffs. They just make everything more expensive to do. Low value jobs shouldn’t be kept around for the sake of having jobs, that’s how you get put into China’s current situation with it’s unemployed youth, to where they can’t find jobs needing higher education because of over investment into industries that should’ve naturally declined or died off.
Trump failed to deal with the covid crisis and everybody got hurt. Except for billionaires who got rich off of it.
If the billionaires are part of Trump’s club then they can make money by insider trading.
They’re regressive. Because there’s an inverse relationship between how much money one has, and what % of that money is spent on consumption. So rich people will pay less taxes than everyone else.
Less competition means corporations (mostly owned by rich people) can charge more, resulting in more profit. Which won’t even be taxed, if we fully move over to a tariff system.
There are big reasons we moved over to an income tax system, they were so important they even passed an amendment to make it possible. We called the era before that the “robber baron” era.
So things get more expensive, most of us cut back. As things are more expensive most of us cut back. Companies don’t sell as much, stock prices go down. Remember that $40k Japanese car is now $50k, but the car company only gets $40k of it. So it costs more to buy their product, they don’t sell as many, but they don’t pocket the price increase, the government does. That is probably 90% of us.
For those who did better, roughly the top 10 or so percent: Let’s assume that you did OK, you are 60 and had a million dollars to retire on. If the market goes down 25%, you now have $750k. That is a big hit to someone who did pretty well.
If you have 2 billion dollars, worst case scenario you also lost 25%. You still have a million dollars 1500 times over. Having to pay another 20% for the stuff you buy is insignificant. But if you want to buy a company, or a large amount of stock, it is now 25% cheaper, as compared to the rest of us who are spending more on necessities that are more expensive.
The billionaires connected or able to read the writing? THEY’VE ALREADY SOLD EVERYTHING AND ARE SITTING ON CASH. Sweet, sweet distressed deals is how they benefit.
Meanwhile, businesses that are importers are surely going to the Trump regime to beg for a pass. And Trump can provide exclusions for individual companies on tariffs, in the name of national security or the welfare of US citizens. Totally at Trump’s discretion, depending on the amount of grift they’ve offered.
It’s all a shakedown.
Trump helps those that help him. So this doesn’t necessarily mean that all billionaires will benefit from this move, it just means that they have an opportunity to enrich themselves further, if they do the ass-kissing thing and get in Trump’s good graces.
After they grovel and shower him with compliments, then Trump will remove whatever barrier a particular billionaire is dealing with.
Its a way of wielding power that Democrats don’t ever consider for some reason. Maybe one of these days Queen AOC can act in a similar manner when dealing with these parasites.
Well let’s say there is an item you like from another country. You buy it and the money goes to that country.
Tarrifs make that item more expensive than an American made one so you buy american. The American made one might not be as good, or as cheap as the foreign one, but at least our billionaire makes the money instead of the foreign billionaire. Kind of seems like welfare for the wealthy to me.
They do not, generally speaking. Billionaires own a lot of stock, investments, and private companies which will be hit hard
Tariffs help ignorant, xenophobic Trump supporters, who believe foreigners have been ripping them off, and so they are entitled to freebies.
(foreigners have not been ripping them off and they are not entitled to freebies)
I think that line of thinking is overstated in this case.
As far as I can tell, Trump truly seems to think that tariffs are some magical thing.
In reality, tariffs generally act as a regressive tax, falling disproportionately on the lower and middle classes. It is shifting the tax burden to the less fortunate. In that sense, the wealthier benefit.
Billionaires can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on building domestic production. Then they can turn around and sell their products at SLIGHTLY less than the tariff-inflated prices that small businesses need to charge to cover their tariff-inflated costs. Consumers pay higher prices and those billionaires make the profits.
Anyone who couldn’t afford to drop hundreds of millions on a factory is fucked.
Jd Vance is an investor in a tech platform that sell off foreclosed farm land…
Billionaires are already rich. They want power and influence.
It’s not some 4d chess to crash the market and buy cheap. They’re ideologically insane and worship Trump at a crazy level.
People need to stop thinking about billionaires as though the only thing they care about money. Yes, they are money obsessed. But that have reached a point where the fluctuations in their worth are fairly meaningless. Anything money can buy, they can get.
What eludes many of them, however, is political power. The ability to reshape society itself. That is what makes them dangerous. I don’t think Elon is trying to get richer from Trump. I think he is trying to obtain political power. Same with the other Trumpist billionaires. And the GOP is the most easily bought and paid for party.
They short the stock market. Billionaires generally make their money in the stock market, but you can make money when the stock market goes down, if you bet that it would go down. Normal people can also short the stock market, but normal people don’t make tons of stock market investments, nor are they able to invest a huge amount of money in a short, like the billionaires can.
Fundamentally tariffs are a tax. Taxes can be progressive (generally taxing richer people) or regressive (taxing poorer people more).
Income tax is a progressive tax, since people who don’t make much money don’t pay the tax, while rich people pay a lot.
A tax on cheap stuff from china that you buy a dollar tree is a regressive tax. Every American, even if you a living on 10k a year will pay thousands of dollars more in taxes.
Now here is the kicker- Trump talks a lot about using tariffs to offset set the tax cuts for wealthy. He has talked about what if we can get rid of income tax.
Trump represents the billionaires, and plays an amazing game of obfuscation and race bating to take everyone eye off the ball. He wants poorer people to pay more and richer people to pay less.
They dont, thats just another reason why they’re bad
Whatever they would gain will be lost from the lost economic growth.
It depends on the billionaire. If you’re a billionaire with the auto brand that makes products with the highest amount of domestic sourced parts, you will benefit greatly from the reduced competition. You’ll raise your prices to just undercut your foreign competitors.
If you’re a billionaire that runs a private equity group that buys up, dismantles, and sells small businesses, tariffs will provide you a buffet of struggling prey.
If you’re not already over leveraged, you can leverage your assets now to buy stock at a discount.
If you rely heavily on international trade and only that, you’re just as boned as everyone else. But what billionaire fits that description?
>If I’m a billionaire, and I’d like to have more money, why do I want tariffs?
Pretty simple… increasing sales taxes (aka tariffs) for all Americans allows the reduction of income taxes for a few millionaires and billionaires.
They help the Republicans scrounge up enough money from the working class to pass billionaire tax cuts without being subject to a filibuster.
Only billionaire making out is Warren Buffet And his $300B in cold hard cash.
Broadly speaking, I think they don’t, which is why this particular development is being treated differently across the whole range of the press than other issues like, eg, deportations without due process.
Trump and his close friends can steal money from the rest of us by hoarding cash, forcing a market crash, and then buying afterwards. When they have absolute power and no checks anymore, corruption runs rampant. But more simply, they can also just accept bribes from foreign leaders in return for removing the tariffs. That’s just basic extortion.
>If I’m a billionaire, and I’d like to have more money, why do I want tariffs?
You don’t. Meanwhile, the rest of the billionaires who are actually smart enough to want more relative wealth don’t mind losing money to get there.
They help inefficient domestic businesses. If you’re a billionaire who owns an inefficient domestic business then you now have an advantage over your foreign competition. If the tariff is high enough then that foreign competition may even leave the market completely.
They don’t. Trump isn’t playing some sort of 4D chess here. He’s just genuinely stupid and holds a strong belief that tariffs are good