Ok was reading a post somewhere else and came across someone saying how trump likes tariffs too much, which is not the first time i have heard tariffs frowned upon. I have always been of the opposite opinion and I guess would also 'like tariffs too much' so please enlighten me as to why they are bad.
My view:
I like to visualize the flow of wealth and whether wealth is flowing in to or out of an area. When I researched Fredrick the Great, he had become 'the great' thru making Prussia wealthy, and he had done this by freeing up and empowering local producers while limiting... thru tariffs... goods externally produced. This makes total sense to me. Prussian producers then pull wealth in while foreign producers no longer pull wealth out.
Another parallel is when developing countries have farmers that cannot produce goods cheaply enough to compete with the oversubsidized foreign goods flooding their market and, because their government does not tariff up the prices of the foreign goods, the locals get thrown in to poverty. These two things have always, to me, implied the role of tariffs is to prevent wealth from being drained out of an area and, as a byproduct, divert business and thus success inward instead. Because this helps local prosperity, I, I guess similarly to Trump (?), have historically viewed tariffs as generally a 'good' tool.
So please, explain where I'm wrong, if I am, and why tariffs would be bad. thank you
Good answers here, but another issue with generalized tarrifs is that if the business already exists in America the increased price of the foreign good gives the American business the means to raise their price to be closer to the now more expensive foreign good.
If China sells a shirt for $10 and now it's $20, but US company sold their shirt at $14 they can now safely raise the price of their shirts to $18 and still be the "cheaper" option.
funneling money straight to the shareholder, as is intended
Exactly. EV tariffs give US EV manufacturers more room to raise prices. The same is true for subsidies.
That sounds good for US companies, but then other countries raise their tariffs on US goods to compensate, so consumers both inside and outside the US end up paying more.