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Tariffs are generally considered to be bad because they discourage trade without a worthwhile benefit. Trade is generally considered to be good because of something called comparative advantage. The TLDR of comparative advantage is that some countries, for whatever reason, are better at making a specific good than others.

This means that, with cooperation, a country could get the same good for cheaper by trading instead of trying to produce domestically. But if that same country starts placing tariffs, the trades become more expensive and less worthwhile; needlessly diminishing the benefit of trade. Sure, the government does collect some revenue from the tariff, but it could have raised that revenue using a less economically harmful type of tax instead.

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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '24

This was recognised going back to Aristotle who saw trade as a wholly natural process at every level - since no human or nation is born complete - which could be perverted by governments and retail traders who could profit off of disrupting it without themselves producing any genuine value

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u/Ok_Chard2094 Aug 20 '24

It is wrong to say retail traders don't produce any value. They offer a convenient place for consumers to trade multiple goods in small quantities at once.
That is a valuable service.
(What that service is worth, and what share of the pie they deserve to keep, now that is a different discussion.)

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u/theOne_2021 Aug 22 '24

Dont you know that labor alone produces value?? /s

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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '24

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u/NotACockroach Aug 18 '24

That's not at all contradictory with economics. Economics can't really tell you what you should do. It can sometimes tell you what the likely outcome is if you do something.
So economics might tell you that tariffs will hurt both nation's prosperity. However a nation may choose to pay that cost in exchange for some other non-economic benefit.
However it's very common that people sell the idea of tariffs to offer some kind of economic benefit to the nation. This is highly unlikely to work.

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u/fgd12350 Aug 18 '24

In economics the term ceteris paribus is thrown around a lot when explaining things like this. But most of the time ceteris paribus doesnt hold. If trading with country X means that that country will steal your tech and slowly degrade the comparative advantage of the rest of your economy. Then that tariffs or trade bans may end up being a net economic benefit in the long run.

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u/MachineTeaching Aug 18 '24

Only if that's actually effective.

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u/TessHKM Aug 18 '24

"May" is an extremely load-bearing word there

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u/WhosJoe1289 Aug 18 '24 edited Aug 18 '24

I can see comparative advantage being a global good in a world where everyone is friends. But how do we reckon that in today’s world where some nations are more or less friendly…

The “friendliness” of a nation isn’t necessarily relevant because trade is mutually beneficial. Even if I think a country “X” is a big fat stinky meanie poopy head, it might still might make sense to produce or buy from them because I’m also better off for it. In fact, anytime you see a small label that says something to the effect of “Made in *insert bad country here*” you’re seeing this in action.
———

and with national security in mind?

We factor for things like national security by thinking in terms of opportunity cost. Basically, instead of assessing the value of a good by merely it’s production and transportation cost, we also assign a dollar value to whatever we miss out on by doing “A” instead of “B”.
To contextualize this, let’s imagine that the US could save about $500,000 per F35 that it let China fully assemble. But let’s also say that the value of keeping the blueprints of the F35 away from a potential adversary is about $1.5 Million. Because moving manufacturing to China means we lose the opportunity of keeping those blueprints confidential, we should subtract the opportunity cost from the amount saved to see how much we really saved. Doing so yields a ‘savings’ of -$1,000,000 in other words it’s a million dollars more expensive to move manufacturing after considering the security risk.
Now I’d be surprised if these specific numbers are at all accurate, I kinda just pulled them out of my rear, but hopefully you can see the general idea I was trying to demonstrate; that we can estimate the dollar value of risk and include that in our decision making.

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u/soyoudohaveaplan Aug 18 '24

The flip side of comparative advantage is that trade will amplify and cement whatever minor differences between countries there were before they traded.
Perhaps a country could potentially gain a comparative advantage in chip manufacturing, but it might take a 10 years to build up those skills , and during that period the country's chip industry might not be internationally competitive.
In a pure free trade environment this potential might never be realized. The country ends up in an equilibrium that is locally optimal (in a mathematical sense, not a geographic one). But there might be potentially superior equilibria that the country is now prevented from reaching.
A temporary tariff, which causes temporary pain, might be justified to help overcome a "saddle point" and lead the country to a more adequate equilibrium.

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u/MachineTeaching Aug 18 '24

Which is true, but you don't know if you will end up with a comparative advantage. Most of the time you're just sinking a ton of resources into industries that never succeed. It's exceedingly difficult to "pick winners".

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u/Laplaces-_Demon Aug 18 '24

But why do the effects of tariffs differ from a basic sales tax?

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u/goodDayM Aug 18 '24

There are several differences, but I can describe one: retaliation.
When one country imposes tariffs, say 10% tariff on imported steel, it tends to trigger a reaction by affected countries, ones that export steel. Those other countries might respond by imposing a tariff of, say, 15% on something the original country exports. Sometimes that can lead to further escalations.
The end result is higher cost of goods for people in all those countries, and also lower demand for affected goods which impacts jobs. See Trade Wars.

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u/skimdit Aug 18 '24

What about countries that have a VAT?

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u/TessHKM Aug 18 '24

Sales tax affects all goods equally, regardless of origin, so while it might have a distortionary effect on consumption as a whole to some extent, it's not as severe as directly inflating the value of one specific industry at the expense of another

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u/Pitiful-Recover-3747 Oct 14 '24

Sales taxes are also not universal. Some states have sales tax, some don’t. Some states have personal income tax, some don’t. Some states have sky high property taxes, some don’t. Each state legislature has enacted their own revenue scheme that aligns with their voters, tax base, and fiscal priorities.
Tarrifs would affect any item targeted by them. Let’s say you target Chinese lithium batteries. Everything gets a 50% tariff. Well obviously that’s going to raise the price on Chinese made batteries, but it will also significantly raise the price on domestic and other sourced lithium batteries because suddenly there is much higher demand for a limited amount of products.
Lithium batteries are a fun example because China produces 80% of the worlds supply. They invested for decades in industrial capacity and supply chain design that they canconsistently deliver the lowest costs and highest volume. The folly in the tariff arguments being proposed by some politicians is assuming that one country imposing tarrifs will change that fact. The rest of the world will still buy those Chinese Li batteries. Obviously hurts Chinese sales to the US, but the rest of the world still buys. So there will not be some giant rush to build excess capacity in the US becuase you’re investing in a limited market. Meanwhile everyone in the US that needs a battery for their phone, drill, vacuum, laptop, boat or whatever gets to pay more for that battery than anyone else in the world.

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u/geoffm_aus Oct 27 '24

You'd only put a tariff on lithium batteries if you saw them as a strategic asset and your country's prosperity depends on having a reliable home grown supply of them. A tariff must go hand in hand with industry stepping up and building the infrastructure to produce batteries and raw materials at home. Otherwise a tariff is pointless.
If you don't see them as strategic, and you believe that as with any new tech the price is still volatile and falling as tech changes, so still many years to play out to see how important in-house production is, you might as well import them cheap from china and take advantage of the subsidies the Chinese government has made to make them. If a battery cost $100 to make, and the Chinese government has put in $20, so it cost you $80, why not to take that. No way you could make them for less than $100 anyway.
Medium size economies like Australia with little interest in manufacturing will not see batteries as strategic and go the later. Bigger economies like the US which seem to want to do basic commodity manufacturing despite being a 1st world service economy might differ, but why is he the million dollar question.

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u/Zestyclose_Idea7701 Nov 29 '24

People tend to forget that these days limiting a globally accessible company from one country’s market just drives them to other ones usually. Example? China, NK, Russia. They all expanded trade with each other over the last few years, and have been mitigating international sanctions by doing so.

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u/StepEfficient864 Aug 18 '24

How would you address the problem of “dumping”?

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u/SnooRadishes7189 Nov 07 '24

Instead of tariffs you can put limits on the amount of a product that a country can import. This is what happened to the Japanese car makers in the 1980ies. It is more targeted.

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u/Ok-Dog-8918 Feb 12 '25

How does this not also inflate prices and prop up bad businesses according to the 100% free trade comparative advantage?
You are limiting outside supply and creating domestic demand even if domestically we aren't the best for said product, right?

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u/BadSanna Nov 09 '24 edited Nov 09 '24

In addition, free trade creates international dependencies which promote peace, while tarrifs create tension between nations that can lead to war.
For example, if I export food to you and you import oil to me, then neither one of us can easily go to war with each other because your people, and soldiers, will starve and I need your energy to even wage war.
This helps keep leaders egos in check and makes them more open to negotiation.
Let's say in the same example, I decide to impose a 20% tarrif on your oil imports because I have some small oil production of my own, and they are struggling to compete with your output. This increases the price of oil from you which forces you to lower your prices to stay competitive with my product, which makes it more profitable for you to trade with other countries, which reduces the supply of oil in my country, which allows my producers to raise prices fuether. Yes, the small, very narrow sector that produces that particular good benefits, in this case oil, but everyone else in the country suffers because now prices have gone up. Supply is more scarce and demand is higher.
And it doesn't end there. In retaliation from you imposing tarrifs on me, I in turn impose tarrifs on your food imports. Now the profit of your food producers is reduced, which in turn hurts the general populous because they aren't earning as much.
Now your people are angry, my people are angry, and so the leaders are forced to do something to appease them. So they raise tarrifs more, or work with other countries to impose twrrifs as well, so that you are forced to go back to trading with me.
Eventually, I'm so mad that I cut off trade with your country completely. Now my country has to adapt to find ways to feed itself without your trade.
This now makes war a viable option. I can invade your country and take over the food production myself.
This is basically what happened with Russia.
Europe and the US have been imposing trade sanctions against them for so long that they were forced to grow independent enough that they could afford to piss everyone else off and invade Ukraine.
What's more, since Europe is heavily reliant on the oil they export, they could use the threat of cutting them off to keep Europe from coming to the aid of Ukraine.
The US doesn't have as much interdependence with Russia, so we could afford to ignore any minor leverage Russia might have with us to keep us from aiding Ukraine.
Now, we've had free trade with China for many years, and we also owe them so much money that they cannot afford to have our interest payments stop for any reason and since we have outsourced all of our factories to them, we cannot afford to have them cut off trade. This fact has kept us from war multiple times, and also protects Taiwan from China because they have to negotiate with both countries since we have interdependencies.
In short, global trade is not just good for the economy, it's one of our most powerful security assets and is why we have largely had world peace for the last 70 years.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

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u/RobThorpe Aug 19 '24

Really, do you have evidence for this higher GDP and employment?

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u/Zestyclose_Idea7701 Nov 29 '24

History has been calling you every day for the last fifty years. Gave up, left a message: “YA WRONG” Over and over and over and over and over again. Lol For real though. Every country on this earth is proving that statement wrong again, because any company that had the money to expand globally makes even more money by staying global. Tariffs don’t compensate for cheap, outsourced labor. You need to understand that before you can have an adult conversation about this with other people. Tariffs never were the answer, and they never will be because they require a company to take a loss. Which they have never done btw.

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u/Zestyclose_Idea7701 Nov 30 '24

I’m gonna feel terrible for the previous, contentious comment later, but it urks me that even with limitless knowledge at our fingertips, people still won’t spare thirty seconds to find out that tariffs are just a means for countries to cut gains from other countries. They haven’t served a single good purpose for the world since before heavy automation,and pre 4th industrial. Normal people always suffer and countries like China, Russia, and N. Korea, always find ways to trade.
Normal people always suffer first.

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u/the_lamou Sep 22 '24

Out of curiosity, does that opinion change when tariffs are implemented as a defensive measure against anti-competitive practices like dumping when they are deployed by nations specifically to eliminate domestic competitors in their trade partners? As an example, Chinese steel or EVs, which are heavily heavily subsidized by China's government both directly — most Chinese EV makers are not financially viable and are kept afloat through various government programs; and indirectly — as in the case of China's currency manipulation to favor exports.
Additionally, has the opinion on tariffs shifted in light of recent research on NAFTA and other free trade agreements that have found that aggregate economic measures have hidden much more prolific and longer-lasting damage to the losers in a free trade exchange? With increasing evidence that the benefits of free trade tend to accrue very unevenly inside an economy, has there been any movement from growth-orientation (growth is always good and should always be prioritized because eventually it helps everyone) to equity-orientation (growth doesn't always distribute evenly and large populations at the losing end may be permanently hurt even if aggregate metrics show overall improvement)?

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u/Strider755 Oct 23 '24

I get how comparative advantage works, but that model doesn’t take negative externalities into account. These include increased emissions from all that additional shipping, unrest from displaced workers, loss of institutional knowledge, and diminished capacity for military production in the event a war breaks out.

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u/spreadlove5683 Nov 11 '24

What if you're trying to compete with the country you're placing tarrifs on and are willing to accept some disadvantage if it lets you get ahead of the other country?

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u/spikelees Nov 11 '24

Adam Smith argued specific reasoning for tariffs. to protect domestic industries (particularly those vital to national security), to incentivize foreign countries to change their practices, and to raise revenue - stole this from Google because I’m lazy
We have a situation globally where this applies. US trade deficit is $1T. This means we are consuming $1T more than what other countries are purchasing from us. Despite what you hear about prices etc. this is not good for our country long term. China is the main driver of this. Between undercutting US products and cheap cost of labor China has been able to become the single most dominant global exporter. They have almost 0 competition.
The purpose of the tariff is to create competition. Increase US exports to countries we have a negative trade surplus with. And force a change in behavior towards China. The effectiveness will be TBD but please try and see both sides of the argument instead of the generic “oh but the consumer will suffer” … the consumer is already suffering along with the entire country as a result of the current situation

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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '24

But isn't supporting the domestic industry good ? I mean through domestic industry the native people will get jobs. Things may get costly because USA being a first world country cost of labour etc is high. But at the same time you you keep manufacturing in USA. You don't depend on countries like china pakistan bangladesh etc or europe.

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u/024knoxs Jan 08 '25

Yes, yes we all understand comparative advantage. Your response doesn't take into consideration that all things need to be equal to properly evaluate comparative advantages. Ex. A country can make a good cheaper because it externalizes costs to others. Example circumventing labor, environmental, and safety concerns.

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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '24

But I see some countries applying tariffs on certain industries and where able to protect them enough to be competitive on the world stage or at least good for domestic consumption. And seems to also provide a stronger middle class. Does targeting protectionism seen as a positive thing in economics if the idea is to get a stronger middle class that can do different things instead of the one thing a country can do well?

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u/WhosJoe1289 Aug 18 '24

Here’s this sub’s FAQ on protectionism it will give you a much more detailed and accurate overview on protectionism than I ever could. To sum it up as I understand it, there’s no use in trying to use tariffs to ‘protect our industries’ because it doesn’t work. What might cost our industries millions might only cost another country half of that, and that’s okay! Cheaper production means cheaper prices too, so everyone is better off for it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

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u/TessHKM Aug 19 '24

Even if you don't work in a globally competitive industry, you still benefit in a few ways:

Most obviously, you get access to higher-quality, cheaper versions of whatever thing that industry produces and which depend on its outputs.

If you have a functioning taxation system & welfare state, you benefit from other people getting rich in the form of investments in your local infrastructure and income redistribution.

Cost "disease". As an economy's productivity rises as a whole, wages rise even for sectors that see lower/no growth in productivity, simply because those employers are forced to offer better incentives to counter the increased opportunities for higher-paying jobs.

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u/TessHKM Aug 19 '24

Selection bias, more or less. For every successful protectionist economy bootstrapping itself up the value chain, there's an example like Brazil just permanently crippling its own consumer electronics market for no benefit. The thing about betting which industry/business is going to be profitable in the future is that, by the very nature of markets, most of those bets fail. When private entities make those bets, if they get it wrong, they just waste their own investors' money. If a government gets it wrong, it can have far more serious repercussions, like leaving in place unsuccessful tariffs which can affect entire industries for decades.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

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u/TessHKM Aug 19 '24

Indeed! So one might question why they haven't at some point in the last 40 years. One might go so far wonder if a tariff regime which has been noted as 'discouraging investment in R&D for consumer electronics and IT' has anything to do with that.

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u/Visible-Impact1259 Nov 10 '24

That’s why Trump wants traits. He wants to give the rich a tax break again or eliminate taxes for the rich and that money needs to be recovered from somewhere. We basically get everything from abroad whether it’s PC parts or steel. So the money from the tariffs will make up for the tax breaks. But he tells his idiot supporters that it’s to encourage job growth in the U.S.

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u/Infamous_SpiPi Nov 11 '24

You are forgetting the benefits of tariffs, like everyone else lately:

while they increase the cost of goods, they also brings jobs back to the local country, even if those jobs are making a more expensive version.

increased tax revenue on the local products, jobs, company

prevent a foreign company using child/slave/low pay labour to undercut your countries companies, drive them out of business/acquire them, then have an international monopoly on the market (international monopolies cannot be regulated, except for… tariffs)!

All in all, tariffs can be a good or bad thing. It depends what exactly you are applying them to on a case by case basis.

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u/Hill0981 Nov 15 '24

It can also cost jobs as businesses that rely on imports lose profitability and have to close down or layoff workers. Also when profits drop wages also drop (and good luck getting them back where they were if/when those companies return to their previous levels of profitabilty as companies are always quicker to drop wages than raise them).

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u/The-Jilldo Nov 19 '24

Exactly, but that's the point - it's a trade off to bring back production to your home country in exchange for damaging importation business'. It's much of a muchness for most things and with the US being the powerhouse of economy it's probably the right political move against the Chinese economy which is a primarily manufacture and export economy. China is nothing without those nations producing and buying from it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '24

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u/WhosJoe1289 Aug 18 '24

I’m not sure that I understand your reasoning. When you say “that would clearly apply looking inwards of a nation not merely outwards” is the “that” you’re referring to comparative advantage? If so, no disagreement here, I don’t see why comparative advantage would stop at the national level, I’m sure it does extend to states, counties, cities, and the like. But states, counties, and cities don’t generally levy tariffs against one another, so I’m not sure why this distinction is relevant to make.
I also don’t see how we go from that into “an argument for no taxes.” The point I was making only makes sense in the context of tariffs, not all taxes.

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u/No_March_5371 Aug 18 '24

All taxes and regulations impact behavior. This is well known and accepted. When taxing, the idea is to do so either by minimally distorting behavior, or by distorting behavior in a desirable fashion (tobacco taxes, for instance). Tariffs are highly distortionary taxes that substantially impact behavior, but the benefit is not positive. Making imports selectively more expensive leads to many fewer imports, which reduces overall welfare and diminishes comparative advantage gains from trade.

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u/Better_Meat9831 Aug 18 '24

Also: Terrifs just raise prices for everyday people. It will still be imported, but the consumer will pay that tax, not the producer.

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u/UpbeatFix7299 Aug 18 '24 edited Aug 18 '24

This is the succinct answer. Say a country wants to protect its steel or aluminum industries by charging tariffs on imports. Its citizens will bear the cost in terms of higher prices for cars, canned food/drinks, and countless other products and everything else that now have to rely on these artificially expensive imports. But politicians can demagogue it and say "I'm just charging it to the foreigners so you don't have to pay." It's a scam by charlatans who don't understand, or choose not to understand, the benefits of international trade that has lifted billions of people out of poverty. My dad's 1982 TI computer that had a hard drive so small that all the programs were on cartridges cost almost $2k in today's money. Go back just 40 years and people spent a much higher % of their income on things like clothing and electronics goods.the reason infinitely better goods are so fucking cheap now has a lot to do with free trade and utilizing comparative advantages

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u/Prior_Author_818 Nov 23 '24

Why does the country that imposes the tariff have to pay it?? That doesn’t make sense. One would think the country sending their goods to us would pay the tariff just so they can get their product into the country and let the American conSumer make the decision as to which product they buy.

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u/As-R0me-Burns Nov 27 '24

Because the countries don’t just send their goods to us. A company here in the united states has to go a buy it from them.
When they buy the product or raw material from China for instance no matter how you look at it the consumer pays.
I do plastic pellets for the molding industry.
For example if I get a quote for a skid(2204#) of raw pellets delivered to the port of LA from Shanghai then the company I’m buying the material from will charge me a price per pound that includes already the cost of the material, shipping, and any and all customs/duties/tariffs.
So in this scenario they just passed on the cost to me which I then pass on to the consumer in the United States. The consumer can’t get the material for production domestically because any excess feedstock is sold to overseas companies and when companies go on Force Majuer (manufacturing shutdown) the material becomes scarce and thus must be imported at a higher cost.
If I were to buy the material from Shanghai and pick it up in Shanghai to bring to the port of LA then I am required to pay all shipping,customs,duties,tariffs etc
No matter how you look at it the consumer in the tariff imposing country is the loser.
The idea behind tariffs is that it’s going to drive companies to produce more domestic made goods. The issue with that is companies don’t care about consumers.
Companies will always just increase the cost of their goods to offset the increase that affects their profit margin. They know that some president will reduce them and the cycle continues.
Same concept with trickle down economics. It’s just jargon that sounds good to people who don’t understand how things truly work in the world.

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u/Zestyclose_Idea7701 Nov 29 '24

No offense, but you sound like you were less educated in your own neck of the woods in terms of basic economics. I learned this stuff in a home economics class in upstate NY when I was twelve years old.
If the process of exporting and importing is referred to as supply and demand, why would the company whose supply is in demand pay a fee for supplying it? And the sad part? Most of our country thinks like this because a lack of basic economic understanding, which I completely fault businessmen and politicians for ruining through lobbying.
Armed with this new knowledge, I hope you educate the other people in your family, because we all deserve better. Also, for what it’s worth, I sucked at written english when I first moved out because that was the pitfall of my own area’s education system. 2011, couldn’t write coherently. Now I can because I educated myself better than my school district. Never stop learning and you will, if nothing else, always grow wiser and more humble. 👍🤜🤛

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u/ILikeCutePuppies Aug 18 '24

It could also be produced more locally with a terrif. In fact, that is often the reason given for terrifs. However, new local production will be less efficient (at least in the short term) and use resources that likely would have been better used elsewhere, all without reducing price.

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u/Better_Meat9831 Aug 18 '24

If you want to boost local production, give local subsidies and increase wages. Imports will still happen, even if you charged an 800% tariff.

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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '24

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u/MachineTeaching Aug 18 '24

Not really, this is just politics. Same as Trump. The economic damage is second to pursuing political goals.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '24

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24

Certain people in favor of tariffs claim that keeping production domestic outweighs the negative effect of lost comparative advantage.
What is the right way to think about whether that is true or false?

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u/No_March_5371 Oct 02 '24

There are potentially reasons for this such as national security, but not for things like just prices. Trump's washing machine tariffs saved washing machine manufacturer jobs, but they increased the cost of washing machines so much that consumers had to pay over $800k more in costs for every job saved. That's a pretty lousy trade.
Most of the people in favor of tariffs are political cranks.

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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '24

Tarrifs are bad because they cause a deadweight loss.

A deadweight loss is basically a net negative for society.

Why do tarriffs cause this?

Well because Tarrifs artificially increase the price of a good. This neccessarily reduces the consumer surplus. However a higher price means a higher producer surplus, and you now have the revenue fron the tarrif. So the question becomes, is the gain in government revenue and producer surplus outweighed by the loss in consumer surplus?

The answer is no. And this is easy to demonstrate graphically:

https://images.app.goo.gl/BUKuBkRN6TfzQfmj6

Consumer surplus is the area between demand and P_tarriff

Producer surplus is the area between supply and P_tarriff

The government Tax revenue is the area between the imported goods times the difference between world price and tarriff price.

Notice how this leaves two areas of deadweight loss, the area between the quantity supplied domestically at the world price and the quantity supplied at the tarriff price as well as the the quantity demanded at both prices

This deadweight loss benefits no one.

You would be right to point out that the world price hurts producers. But the obvious answer is to redistribute some of that consumer surplus to the producers to compensate them. A deadweight loss leaves you with less surplus to actually do this with, and so it is a net negative, even arguably to the producers.

Lmk if you have any more questions! Happy to help!

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u/iron_and_carbon Aug 18 '24

They are bad because https://www.reviewecon.com/trade-tariffs.

Them being worse than others is more an empirical question where because of how the economy works post Industrial Revolution trade creates a huge amount of the total value and its supply is highly elastic so the deadweight loss calculation from the above graph tends to be larger than the dead weight loss from other forms of tax to raise the same amount of revenue

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u/provocative_bear Aug 18 '24

Imposing tariffs pretty much always results in retaliatory tariffs, so they present a cost. Other posters have pointed out that free trade is the most efficient system economically.

That being said, there are geopolitical reasons to impose tariffs. It can protect crucial local industry, including that needed for national defense, and it can protect the institution of labor/environmental/human rights standards in a home country vs a foreign nation without such standards.

So, tariffs aren’t a good engine for direct economic prosperity, but they can serve other purposes.

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u/Adorable-Anxiety6912 Nov 22 '24

Let’s talk quilting fabric. Pre-Covid solid quality fabric was $5-6 a yard. After Covid it’s now $9-10 a yard. Tariffs may end quilting for me and my retirement plan. $14-18 a yard is not going to work. There’s talk now of quilters buying THE machine, needles, threads and fabric now… STOCK UP! Thankfully batting is made in the US and it only $300 for a roll that is 90” x 30 yards.

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u/RobThorpe Nov 22 '24

This type of stocking up is happening. Large firms are announcing plans to buy before tariffs raise prices to their shareholders. Yours is not an isolated anecdote.

You are about to leave Redlib

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