Comment by roxolotl
7 days ago
Aside from everything else one thing what strikes me as particularly insane is how it’s not even defensible as a protective measure. My favorite everyday olive oil comes from Tunisia. They now have a 38% tariff on them. There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
The orange man wanted tariffs, the orange man is going to get tariffs. Now we have to hope the American people aren’t so dumb as to still be convinced only he can solve their issues. I don’t hold out hope for that.
If Jan 6th didn't dissuade people, I don't think anything will.
Additionally, his base will not blame him, they will swallow whichever of the many narratives the propagandists are currently cooking up that suites their fancy.
I disagree with this. Jan 6th didn’t affect 99% of peoples lives directly. It was clearly bad, but few people saw impacts in their own lives.
Higher prices and a possible recession will affect every person in the country and even globally.
His MAGA base might not blame him, but that’s only like 30-40% of the electorate. The other 60-70% won’t be happy if their lives are negatively impacted.
That's the thing, there is an almost impenetrable media wall that no amount of "this is bad" news articles can get through
IMO the only thing that can get through is actual personal consequences for the voter themself
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> It was clearly bad, but few people saw impacts in their own lives.
It did though, they just didn't know how to measure it, and it wasn't felt immediately. It was like the flash of light that dazzles before the pressure wave of the nuclear bomb blasts everything (which in the analogy is this moment, now).
What happened on Jan 6, and in the leadup and response to it, was the erosion of democratic norms. Before Nov 2020 they were stronger, and after Jan 6 they were significantly weakened. Our institutions are essentially built on trust, and Trump in his campaign to overturn the 2020 election spent every waking moment for months attacking those foundations. He purposefully eroded people's trust in Democracy for no reason, because there ultimately the fraud he alleged in that election was not found.
That impacts everyone. They just don't feel it in the supermarket; they just have no "democracy meter" that they can use to gauge how healthy their representation is in government. But the reason he's able to do what he's doing now is he because he laid the foundation in 2020.
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Don't expect much. Modi's overnight demonetization of Rs. 1,000 bills back in 2016, caused a lot of inconvenience to almost all the Indians for 3/4 months at-least. Demonetization and flawed implementation of GST caused many small scale companies to shut doors.
With media in their pockets they can get away with anything.
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One thing worth noting is that congress isn't pleased about the executive branch high jacking the powers of appropriations from them (i.e. imposing a tax on the people in the form of a tariff).
I see no evidence of your claim. A total of 4 senators of the President’s party voted symbolically on a non-binding resolution against his Canada tariffs. The Speaker of the House, who also belongs to the President’s party, won’t even bring it up for a vote. There has been no motion from the legislative branch to undo the President’s direct subversion of the power of the purse by effectively eliminating the staff required to disburse Congressionally-approved funds.
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The root cause is the IEEPA (1977) which was vaguely worded to supposedly shrink executive authority under TWEA (1917) which allowed essentially unlimited executive authority "emergencies" to be declared for an unspecified amount of time. IEEPA was used to block TikTok, which still may get blocked, and used to set these arbitrary tariffs. IEEPA needs to be fully abolished. (And we also need to bring back the Tillman Act (1907) and get an amendment to overturn CU.)
I'm sure they are working on a very strongly worded letter about this right this very moment.
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Are they going to actually do anything about it? If not, their displeasure isn't worth a fart in the wind.
Jan 6 was far from many people's lives. It was a philisophical debate at most. When they get to the stores to buy groceries and they are 30-50% higher and their next TV, laptop the same way, they will realize that voting for an Oompa Loompa was a bad idea, and will want him out.
Spoke to a friend who is a big Trump supporter just yesterday - his view is that we shouldn't react to short term impact, these policies and tariffs should be viewed and judged in the long term. These tariffs will remake american manufacturing. I dont know if thats the current faux news talking point.
Yep, that's the talking point. Howard Lutnick has been out there saying this.
For better or worse, though, voters don't judge politicians based on the impact their policies have in 10-20 years. They're going to judge these tariffs in 18 months when they vote in the midterms and again in 2028, long before a widespread shift in manufacturing can occur.
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> Jan 6th
Folks who try to make "the insurrection!" a thing don't really have a good read on the pulse of the average American. This is a failed branding attempt for what amounted to an unscheduled tour around the Capitol.
The same people pushing "Jan 6th" can normally take home the gold medal in mental gymnastics when discussing the events ending with numerous American cities being on fire just 6 months prior. Multi-city infernos were "mostly peaceful" protests, but when a Republican is shot by Capitol security, it's an "insurrection."
"If propaganda doesn't dissuade people I don't think anything will."
You accidentally answered your own question.
The thing is that Jan 6th was done by part of the "people", so it's now America versus America.
Everything done is done by "by part of the "people""
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“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
Is that because we can't grow olives here, or because we don't have federal subsidies propping up a domestic olive industry that can compete with corn and soy?
I ready don't know the details well enough there, but it feels like this could just be selection bias at play.
You can grow olives in the US and there are some farms in CA. The quantities produced are orders of magnitude off though and given the time it takes to grow olive orchards we cannot replace our imports of olives in a reasonable time period.
There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.
Hawaii is the only U.S. state where you can grow coffee and their coffee costs a fortune. You need tropical weather and high altitude. Florida won't cut it. Besides, we already have fruit rotting in the fields in Florida because there's no one to pick it.
Want to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars or batteries? Ok, fine. But tariffs on all imports? It's the most brain dead policy in my lifetime. I can't think of any products that are produced 100% domestically without any foreign inputs. These tariffs will drive up the price of just about everything.
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There are olive farms as far north as Oregon. I visited one a few years ago and bought some olive oil; it was very good.
Surely the null hypothesis isn't "The USA would have a domestic industry for every crop known to man if not for external factors"
Oh that's 100% what Potus thinks.
There's no other rationale for this other than thinking this.
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Or (more likely) they would not have access to many crops at all.
Personally I don't mind not having strawberries in the middle of winter, but for some they care about that.
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Let's ignore whether we'll actually get there, that's a very deep question and entirely theoretical for now.
If we could snap our fingers and domestically produce most or all of our own products, would you not prefer that?
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The exact growing conditions for olive production aren’t common in the US, so most of the production comes from California - west of Sacramento and south along the San Joaquin river. There are a lot of barriers in bringing specialty crops to market related to know-how and contracting sale of product, so even in other areas where growth may be possible it may be infeasible.
https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/fruits/olives
https://croplandcros.scinet.usda.gov/
I mean if you could make olive oil cheaper in America wouldn't someone have done that by now?
The US never lacked for smart entrepreneurs looking for a business opportunity. See wine.
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An olive tree reaches the peak of its productivity after 15 years and can live for several centuries.
An adult tree can be so expensive that there are cases of theft. It takes a heavy truck and a tree puller to steal an olive tree.
Hard for me to believe that even with a surplus of domestic production that comparative advantage of importing still wouldn't be better.
Almost all the olive oil in my local Costco comes from California
US does produce olive oil, particularly in states like California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Oregon, and Hawaii. So you do have a few options:
That said, refusing to support local production out of principle isn’t really a solution.
Difficult to move the production of olive oil.
I don't know how much you know about olive oil, but it comes from olives, which grow on olive trees. Olive trees are famously long-lived and, together with the very specific types of land that they grow on, they represent extremely persistent and valuable investments for the people who produce olive oil.
This is not true. Next time you grab an olive oil bottle read the fine print: unless it’s very expensive it will be a blend of oils from 4-8 countries, ie production doesn’t have to be in the same country where olives grow on olive trees, as you eloquently put.
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There are a few olive trees in my neighborhood. I should plant some too. It would be fun to watch them grow.
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You forgot about
5. Switch to another source of fat, like lard or butter.
Even if there isn't a local industry that produces something, tariffs increase the competitiveness of domestic substitute goods.
US consumption of olive oil is more than 10x domestic production of olive oil. It is not possible to spin up olive orchards in even a medium timespan as the trees take many years to grow. It’s not about wanting to support domestic producers, it legitimately is not possible.
That's why I believe that long-term tariffs will result in a net positive effect. Domestic production will keep growing. Things that cannot be produced locally will somehow get resolved on their own through a self-organizing chaos, so to speak.
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You are right about olive oil. So why did he do it? The trade imbalance with Tunisia. Why is there are trade imbalance with Tunisia? US consumers have money to buy products from Tunisia, Tunisian consumers don't have the ability to afford products from the US. Why can't Tunisian's afford US products? This is the central question for every country in the trade war and it has myriad factors, but two of the biggest are: A higher cost US dollar, suppression of wages in countries like Tunisia (and Germany, and China, etc).
> Tunisian consumers don't have the ability to afford products from the US.
They do use products from the US, just not physical ones. It's weird to read such takes on HN of all sites.
There is this group-think on HN today that services are intentionally left out as part of the US trade balance. That confusion likely comes from tax and corporate structures. Ie all those profits are locked into sub-corps, so Apple-Cayman Islands or Google-Ireland (corporate tax havens) which is why they don't show up on the balance sheet as "trade" into the US (typically those sub-corps buy financial assets with those profits). Read the first chapters of Trade Wars are Class Wars for more depth.
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It's not a weird take if you reasonably assumed that OP meant: "they don't have the ability to afford the same value of products from the US." Which makes total sense because their income per capita is only a fraction of that of the US.
Tunisian here. Tunisians on social media are baffled/amused because olive oil is basically the only product imported by the US.
And apparently the US bought 33% of it
>Onagri data show that Spain is the leading destination for Tunisian olive oil, with 47.4 percent flowing to Spanish ports, followed closely by Italy at 42.2 percent and the United States in third at 33.8 percent.
https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/africa-middle-east/as...
Tunisia is so productive it exports 123.4% of olive oil.
Or perhaps I don't understand what they're trying to say in that sentence
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This is interesting to me, because Spain and Italy are also exporters of olive oil. And there have been famous discoveries of fraud in the EVOO market as it has boomed. I wonder what percentage of Spanish and Italian EVOO exports are actually blended with (or wholly!) Tunisian imports?
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Those numbers don't add up.
What is Tunisia buying from the United States?
http://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports/tunisia
and imports:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/tunisia
Work with your government to drop the tariffs on the US. Problem solved.
From what I've understood from that chart, the "percentage" is just a difference between imports/exports with the USA. It's not actual tariffs in place by Tunisia ON USA goods. Am I right/wrong ?
Or is Tunisia tariffing the hell out of US Olive Oil in order to protect their local production base
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Or just wait for Tunisia to gradually replace tariffed goods with EU and Chinese equivalents. Problem also solved?
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Are you trolling?
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So, we can and do grow olives here in California, but it is a very small industry compared Spain, Italy, etc.
However, one thing we absolutely cannot grow here in any sort of money-making way, is coffee. So 32% tariffs on imports of coffee from Indonesia.... when we do not even export coffee.
California produces very high quality olive oil. I buy it at Costco. The Kirkland brand likely comes from outside the country.
California produced 1.94 million gallons of olive oil in 2023. That same year the US used ~98.5 million gallons of olive oil. There just isn't enough space to produce that much olive oil in CA much less produce it profitably or in ways that wouldn't devastate the environment. And all that is ignoring that it takes around 10 years for an olive tree to get to consistent production.
Oh, I agree. I was just pointing out we have some, and it's going to get a lot more expensive now.
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Maybe we can make British olive oil by getting Tunisian olive oil and putting it in a British bottle? Then it's only 10%.
The whole thing is kind of nuts.
We get a lot of titanium from China. That's because the largest natural Ti deposits are in Eurasia. That is due to geology, not politics, and now US companies who need it (read: high performance transport, medical products) will pay substantially more for it.
The US has a trade surplus with the UK, and the UK got a 10% tariff :-) Who's ripping off who?
>> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
I'm not sure this is true. I buy olive oil specifically from California. It's niche but could be larger if they weren't competing with lower overseas labor costs.
Not 50 times larger which is what it would need to be to supply the current domestic consumption. California only produced 1.94 million gallons of olive oil in 2023, that same year the US used ~98.5 million gallons of olive oil.
Even if we could snap our fingers and create the orchards out of thin air there's not enough land and water to grow 50x our current production. Then where's the worker population coming from? They're also trying to drive overall immigration to essentially zero.
Don't olive trees take decades to reach maturity?
It takes time to ramp up olive oil production, so it’s way more cost effective to just import olive oil from countries with established crop.
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Olive oil, coffee, chocolate, vanilla, tea, lots of fruits, sugar. These will all be massively stressed.
According to Trump Tunisia has to buy olive oil from you for the same amount of money that you spent on Tunisias olive oil. Otherwise one side has a trade deficit and that's unfair!
I would happily pay 38% extra for high quality Tunisian olive oil, it is already super undervalued because it's reputation is lower than it should be.
It's gotten so bad that Tunisian olives are shipped to Italy, pressed into oil, and labelled as Italian Olive oil.
Except none of that 38% extra in price is going to the farmers. It's a tax not extra profit for the producer. Crazy how many people still do not know how tariffs work.
You may want to re-read GP's comment because they did not indicate whether they cared if the 38% went to the government or the farmer. Reading their comment as written, they simply said they would happily pay the tariff to continue enjoying Tunisian olive oil. It's "crazy" of you to imply they don't understand how a tariff works when you're the one mis-reading what they wrote.
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What did I write that gave you the impression that I don't know this?
If anything those Tunisian folks would have to reduce the price to compete. The tariffs go straight to the US coffers at the customs, nothing to do with the farmers.
https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/tariffs-101-what-ar...
His approval numbers will decrease 20-30% over the next few months. Only the most cultish cultists will stick with him when inflation spikes to 15%.
I think you started to form a persuasive argument, but you discredit yourself by saying "orange man".
Yep, that’s the problem. If only people treated the man who mocks disabled reporters with respect then he would have lost.
It's not about a respect, it's about not sounding childish. I swear discussions about American politics are the most infantile and tribal things on the internet, and that says a lot.
If someone can't even express their opinion without restoring to ad-hominems I assume they can't be readoned with.
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There are small olive oil producers in the US. Do they see this as a good thing?
Why wouldn't they? They can immediately raise prices by however many percent the tariff is. Probably a bit less because higher price causes lower demand. So let's say raise by half of the tariff.
Maybe it will partially offset the increased cost of everything they need to buy and sell olives.
Now when I think of it it might be a wash.
They still probably use equipment, packaging and other materials that come from overseas. Or they work with suppliers impacted by tariffs. Their costs are going up. Everyone's costs are going up, although some more than others.
I've put together a directory of olive oil producers from California:) https://www.californiaoliveoil.info/
> what strikes me as particularly insane is how it’s not even defensible as a protective measure
You must not have read many of the comments here. Way too many people are trying to defend this just because they don't want to have to admit that they were wrong on Trump being better for the economy.
Why do you think it's a good idea to buy olive oil from Tunisia instead of from California? Are you aware of how much CO2 is released to ship a trivial commodity across the atlantic ocean?
Just a guess as he said his favorite olive oil so could it be one tastes better? I imagine like many other things taste can be effected by the region it is grown in. As for your other point in a perfect world we would all care about global climate change but many are not going to eat something they don’t like to do their part. But really cargo ships are small fish in such a big problem. Ban private jets or cruise ships would be way more beneficial.
Help me understand your viewpoint here - is the assumption that an entire ship is dedicated to shipping trivial commodities and the cargo isn't co-mingled with anything else? At the same time, what isn't counted as a "trivial commodity", and should ships _only_ be used for those items?
It just seems like the only things we should be importing from across the globe are things that absolutely cannot be produced domestically. For example, I've heard that coffee beans only grow in certain climates, so that would be a commodity that makes sense to import.
Pretty much everything else, including this supposed Tunisian olive oil, just sound like luxury goods to me, and should be priced accordingly.
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> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
You should be using America corn oil. /s
Well, no you see vegetable oils are actually bad and we should cook everything in beef fat or butter.
Surely that's not stupidly expensive, right?
Producing tallow is cheaper than producing olive oil in most of the USA.
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No offense, but the benefits may outweigh problems like getting your favorite Tunisian olive oil.
The orange man is saying: "Looks like you are sending a lot of $$$ to those olive oil farmers in Tunisia. With my tariffs you now have two choices at your disposal: either you keep buying their Olive oil but then you are going to have to give me $$$ as well to pay for our national debt. You are going to buy less of it; and help your country in the process. Alternatively, you can decide that maybe you don't need olive oil all that much. We have this amazing product called 'corn oil' which is produced locally and is now comparatively less expensive, buy that instead and support your local farmer. Choice is yours".
Maybe you don't like either of these choices; but at the same time; saying "I believe that having cheap access to product produced halfway across the globe is a god given right to American people; how dare you imposing me to make such a choice" is part of the reason why we need 13 earth to sustain the modern US lifestyle.
I am really not a Trump supporter at all. But at the same time the gradual reduction of tariffs has been a key factor of increasing global trade; which in turn is a key component of the increase of CO2 emissions. Finding a way to dampen a bit the international component and making sure that locally sourced products and services are not affected seems not that bad.
The whole "decide that maybe you don't need olive oil that much" thing is what's going to crush the economy in the US. The problem is that demand does not shift to alternative supplies elastically. It takes years and sometimes decades to build an alternate supply chain for some industries. So what you're saying is that an entire generation of children in the US are going to have to grow up materially worse off than their parents and grandparents. And that's assuming that a bunch of businesses magically start overnight to fill the enormous gaps caused by a lack of access to international supply chains. If you look at other countries such as in South America or for example Italy where there are huge protective tariffs, the industries you expected to magically appear didn't. Instead people just have less and work less.
So your dichotomy applies, but it's not some magical ratchet out of globalization unless there's a corresponding push on the federal or state level to build competitive domestic industries to replace the international supply chains we've been cut off from.
> but then you are going to have to give me $$$ as well to pay for our national debt
You realize this money will not be used to pay down the national debt, but rather fund commensurate tax cuts for the very rich?
Their plan for the budget deficit is instead to slash expenditures (see DOGE and what they’re up to).
> I am really not a Trump supporter at all. But at the same time the gradual reduction of tariffs has been a key factor of increasing global trade; which in turn is a key component of the increase of CO2 emissions. Finding a way to dampen a bit the international component and making sure that locally sourced products and services are not affected seems not that bad.
I'm not sure about that part.
International shipping in particular isn't a huge part of the energy cost of the goods that get shipped, so making the same things locally doesn't save much. This is from 2016 so things will have changed since then, but back then it was 1.6% of emissions from shipping, vs. 11.9% from road transport: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
What trade does increase directly is the global economy, and that in turn means more money is available to be spent on energy; historically the energy has been carbon intensive, but everyone is now producing as much green energy as they have factories to work with, and are making factories for those green energy systems as fast as they have bureaucracy to cope with.
I am from Western Europe and the story that "the majority of the meat we eat is imported from Argentina at great environmental costs while we have farmers unable to make ends meet; this is what's wrong with globalization" is a key story that gets repeated constantly by environmental activists and NGOs. Similarly, there's a big push by the same green parties to "stop consuming pineapple in November, buy locally sources seasonal veggies instead".
I almost never see anyone disagreeing with that, and anyone that does is immediately qualified as "climate change denier". To me it looks like tariffs similar to those introduced by Trump would constitute a step in the right direction (make stuff more expensive = less consumption + if you buy it anyway you have disposable income so you give more to the state) . It feels weird to me that now it suddenly doesn't seem to be so much of an issue anymore; if it's only 1.6% why is it such a key argument.
Similarly; almost everyone agrees that "it's not normal that we depend so much on foreign countries for things that are essential for our future". That idea really came up during the COVID crisis and never left. The EU is launching "big plans" to address this issue (as usual; with barely any impact at all). Again; the reason why we have FFP2 masks made in china is purely because it's cheaper. Make them more expensive; and local options can pop up, naturally. It will take decades; but the ideal moment to begin working on your goals was yesterday. The next best opportunity is today.
There are many many things wrong with the way Trump computes the tariffs rates; the way they are announced, handled etc. But at its core: "less trade, less global & more local" is a key pillar of virtually every Green Parties over here; it's so weird to me to see Trump (!!!) actually do something that looks like it aligns with those goals.
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Sounds like a good argument for a carbon tax!
IMHO the idea is that they are ready to accept the suffering of Tunisian oil lovers for the greater good, which is the empowerment of certain type of people like them.
It's basically Europe but hundred or more years ago.
> My favorite everyday olive oil comes from Tunisia. They now have a 38% tariff on them.
"Silver lining:" there's a good chance that oil was either rancid or doesn't pass basic quality tests for the "extra-virgin" part:
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/imported-olive-oil-quality-unre...
The COOC web site lists California olive oils that they've certified. Last time I checked California Gold Olive Oil was certified, and they even sell it in half and full gallons. That's just one I've tried and liked-- there are a bunch of others listed on the COOC web site. (Edit: there are probably certification trade associations for other countries/regions, COOC is just the one I'm familiar with.)