I was in a room full of my engineering managers. These are all highly educated, highly intelligent men who are quite capable of doing math. They are also, to a man, big Trump supporters.

They swung onto the topics of the Tariffs and one of them said “I think it’s great that we are finally making China pay for destroying American industry.” Keep in mind that we all worked at an American manufacturing facility.

I pointed out to them that the Tariffs didn’t cost China a single dime.

They all started to argue with me and I just said: “Look, in my previous job (about 6 months prior) one of my responsibilities was to report to Senior management, monthly, on how much we had paid to the US state department in tariffs”.

The last full year I was in that role (2019) we paid over $10,000,000 in tariffs on our imported goods. We ended up passing most of that on to our customers as we didn’t really have the option.

They all suddenly realized that I knew what I was talking about and they didn’t. But, there was much grumbling, so I said to them: “Look, even if China paid 100% of the Tariffs, what is stopping them from just charging us more for the product then? Like they could literally just add the tariffs into their invoice to us.

IT always seemed bizarre to me that none of them realized how Tariffs actually worked.

And that is why MAGA thinks tariffs are a good idea. They think that they are a tax on other countries that have somehow “cheated” us and that those countries can’t just charge more to offset that cost.

Basically, they have 0 idea what tariffs are or how they work, so they think they are a great idea and that someone else will pay them.