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Message: <blockquote data-quote="R_Chance" data-source="post: 7780003" data-attributes="member: 55149">The statement that started this ball rolling centered around a non economic reason for the tariffs. Their use as a means of coercing a "better deal" out of China. This is not economics. Economically tariffs are rarely effective at doing more than raising prices on your own consumers. The basic idea being that local producers will be able to compete with foreign products due to the increased price of foreign goods. This impacts the foreign producer (the Law of Demand says it all, the higher the price the lower the demand, who will sell fewer) and it allows a domestic producer to compete at the new higher price. And consumers carry the weight by paying more. The effect of increasing domestic sales is rarely worth the increased cost consumers pay. The standard argument for tariffs is that it protects / produces jobs and industry. People are always in favor of "saving" someone's job. They rarely understand the increased costs that all consumers pay for this, or that the loss of purchasing power they suffer is greater than the economic value of the limited amount of jobs / industrial capacity "saved".Ultimately tariffs are a barrier to international trade that effectively makes those on the business end (that would be us, the consumers) poorer. If you think there is any economic function for them... I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might want to buy. The one legitimate, imho, economic function for tariffs is maintaining an industry which is strategic / necessary. I doubt the RPG market is one of them. Other possible uses are matters of domestic politics or international relations.Having said this, I just hope my students remember this for their Macroeconomics final exam next week... a ha! Teachable moment coming up <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />*edit* You could natter on about this for ages, but I think most economists would agree with the basics outlined above. Politicians, of course, are another animal entirely and often find reasons to evade the facts, or disagree with the opinions of economists. As with all things, ymmv. My graduate degree is in history btw, I teach AP Government (Political Science), AP Macroeconomics and college history classes (B-17A and B-17B U.S. history surveys) at the moment. I am, in essence, an informed layman, not an economist. Hence this note / edit.</blockquote>

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