From a Wednesday LinkedIn post by an entrepreneur named David Mauro, link at the end:
“I own a small plush toy business. We manufacture our products in China. ‘Liberation Day’ will be a fatal blow to lots of small businesses like ours… We make our products in China. We have a great company there we have been working with for 4 years to develop, product, refine and continuously improve. We have introduced 6 new products in that time period. But now, we are subject to a 34 percent tariff on imported goods to the US. Here’s how that works. We have a container coming over now. On $60,000 of product that we have already paid for, we will have to stroke a check to .gov for $20,000 just to get our products. Can you write a check to a stranger for 20,000 and be okay?”
“Probably not. Most small business are just getting by anyway. So, here’s what happens next. We have to raise prices. Maybe we got a loan to cover the duty. Maybe we took it out of our kids college funds. We had no choice. So we have to get that $ back. Prices go up. Demand goes down. Life sucks. Economics 101. But that’s just us. We have a lot of indy retailers that sell our products.”
“Retailers will face a bigger impact because they are buying at about half of list price. Duty tax will have a larger impact on them because there is just less margin to work with. So we get smoked, our customers get smoked our retailers get smoked. My point is the pain trickles down to everyone.”
“But, hey man, just make your product in the USA – screw those commies. First, the whole chi/com narrative that we have been spoon fed our entire lives is fake. But that’s another post for another time. Make it in the USA. Bruh… [Light editing there to Italicize MAGA voice telling him to suck it up].”
“As of today, 99.999 percent of the plush toys you see on shelves were manufactured in China. They have an entire industry built around it. Guess what? We don’t. It doesn’t exist. I tell people that if there was no China, there is no us. So what man. ‘Merica is back. No, because while you cheerlead this, you are being set up to take the fall. You. You think this is going to create a domestic manufacturing boom? I’ll prove it. Someone start a plush factory in the USA. Go. What? Nobody is investing? No venture capital? Bro, you’ll get rich! [Mauro picks up right where he left off in a second post because of LinkedIn’s char limit] Nope, you won’t. You know it. And by the time you make the factory, the population is squeezed to the hilt from all the other tariffs so they don’t have any money and labor cost alone makes the products cost too much to sell at a margin worth the investment.”
Well he keeps going and going. Didn’t link the posts yet to avoid spoiling the surprise as David Mauro’s LinkedIn profile bills him as “Founder, JesusDoll.com” and this is his banner pic:
And here’s the links from Part 1 and Part 2. In the interests of fairness Mauro does not sound like a Trump fan now, but that might’ve changed from a recent come-to-Jesus moment (pun intended) when he realized it was going to affect him as he writes “I feel like I remember this. Oh, remember how small business died and everything consolidated under mega-caps during Covid? Remember that global billionaires managed to increase their collective wealth by 27.5 percent during the four-month period, to $10.2 trillion? Do you remember who the winners were? I do.”
“They all backed Trump and were at his inauguration… So is this suicide by design wrapped in a MAGA flag to get the people behind it? Possibly. Is is well intentioned? Maybe. But, we just don’t know. But, regardless of the motive, the outcome will be the same. Wealth transfer from you them.”
“The best hope is this is some art of the deal negotiation tactic. But when China says we will fight a trade war or a real war to the end, we lose that one. Hopefully everyone goes to 0 and we all win.”