Trumped-up Tariffs

With only one week left before we cast our ballots there is a lot to consider in this upcoming election, big things, small things, personal things. There is one thing that I had not really considered until catching a social media blurb a couple of weeks ago: tariffs.

I heard Trump speak about how he wanted to raise tariffs on imports to such an astronomical level that no one would consider trying to bring their products into the U.S. Like his physical southern border wall, this would essentially be a border wall around the whole country with big money fees buffering the growth of money at home. His reasoning is that it would force out imports that Trump says are displacing and replacing American products and production. I do not understand all the particulars of how tariffs work but I think I get the gist. It sounded a little radical, a little scary, but kind of like a good idea...at least to me.

I co-own a small business that focuses on three things: Coffee, Art, Ceramics. That's actually the tag line for our business Cōppa Cō. Before Cōppa Cō. I ran my home business, aaharrison ceramics, as a DBA from my basement. I made pottery on the wheel and cast clay in molds. I got some success and grew into a small production unit cranking out about thirty-thousand pieces in nine years until I finally had to shut it down when my family moved. But a few years later the pottery production was back and this time it was combined with a brick-and-mortar storefront that acted as a coffeeshop and small local art gallery. For many years I quietly wrung my hands in frustrated desperation as I worked around the clock trying to keep up production making work that I knew was competing directly with cheap imports in big-box-stores and buy/sell online merch. Here I was, the owner of a master's degree, father of four, full-time-work-from-home-stay-at-home-dad, still staying up until three AM so I could get more pieces finished after my kids went to bed, watching the bills pile up despite a viable and productive small business. How could this be? How could I be making and selling three thousand pieces a year and still be in the hole? I blamed the customer for going to the big retailers and I blamed the big retailers for selling cheap imports (junk as far as I was concerned). But I'm a pretty staunch free-market capitalist and I knew that if a business can get a product at very low cost and sell it at even a mediocre price, then it will have high profit margins, and who doesn't want high profit margins? So even though it brought me much angst, I understood it, and therefore I thought that I would just have to live with it and hopefully appeal to those discerning few percent who wanted a domestically produced, well-made, and unique product.

My current business is still productive. It typically operates in the black, although mostly just break even. It feels good to know that my family has a small business in a small rural town that brings joy to some of the locals and has a couple of employees. But there is no real profit and honestly, after fifteen years of owning and operating a couple of small business, I am ready to make some real cash-money. Yet, the dogging problem of cheap consumerism still holds us back. Even with a three-pronged business approach that hits multiple demographics both locally, regionally, and nationally, we are still at break even. I circle back to the dilemma of imports dominating the retail market and stuffing the shelves of every actual and digital storefront I peruse. Oh, sure there's Etsy, but I already wrote an article about them going mainstream and losing their handmade edge long ago. Without a huge pile of start-up capital to shovel into the furnace of advertising and R&D, I feel I will always be making products just to keep making products. Unless...

Imagine that all the things you bought were all made in the United States from materials sourced in the United States; like the good old days...1870. I bet we would not have as much stuff to choose from, but it would all be made here from materials we gathered and processed ourselves. That means Americans would be collecting and processing all the raw materials and selling it to American manufacturers who would be making all the products and selling those to American stores who would be selling those to the American public. Sounds pretty American right? But wait, can we still get the materials we do not have domestically and can we sell our stuff to other countries so we can increase our production and sales beyond just our domestic borders? Sure, as long as we have a trade agreement with another country. And this is where the tariff idea gets tricky. It is a little ironic to think of tariffs as even part of a free market, since it essentially controls the market through monetary force. That does not sound free. But it would make our domestic markets more free by decluttering the hoards of imports from our stores.

I would love for my products to be indirectly subsidized by the government by way of tariffs keeping similar imported cheaper products off the shelves of retail stores in the U.S. That way I can be assured that there will be a market for my work that will command a reasonable price and decent profit margin. But what if setting high tariffs makes other countries upset with us and they stop buying our stuff too or in turn impose astronomically high tariffs on us? Won't that be a problem and keep American goods piled up at home and kill our supply and demand? How would that affect my own three-pronged business with Coffee, Art, and Ceramics? Well, coffee is screwed right away because I am pretty sure America does not grow a single coffee bean in the contiguous forty-eight that anyone wants to roast and brew. Well, ok, California is giving it a try, but the United States cannot produce even a fraction of a percent of the amount of beans it would take to satisfy our constant coffee consumption. Art might do better, at least for a local artist gallery like ours. It would ensure that the handmade art made by local artists would not be confused with five-dollar AI generated color splashes made readily available in every home goods store. Ceramics is the one that would certainly benefit the most from exclusionary tariffs being levied on similar import goods. The tens of thousands of shelves that typically housed the hundreds of thousands of imported coffee mugs, dinnerware, dog bowls, candles, bird feeders, soap dishes, soup tureens, casserole dishes, and so much more would be vacated and now available to hold my ceramic products. Not only would they be vacated, but retailers would have to buy from me and other domestic producers like me to satisfy the needs of a voracious consumer base. So, coffee would take a huge hit, art would stay relatively the same, and ceramics would grow immensely. I think I would finally be in profit town.

But maybe coffee would not have to take a huge hit. What if the tariffs were structured in a way that allowed the materials we could not domestically produce to be imported at low cost, possibly as part of reciprocal agreements to boost exports of American materials to countries that do not have access to such things? What if the tariffs only imposed high fees on products and materials that we can and do make ourselves? That would help ensure that American products and materials at least had the first shot at being sold at home. One thing I have learned about consumers from fourteen years of being in retail and wholesale is that they all want to buy something...sometimes anything. They just want to be able to shop and they don't really care that much about quality. If it is in the store and on the shelf, then they will probably buy it, whether it is made domestically or imported. High tariffs on imports on goods that the United States can make ourselves will inevitably revitalize our private sector and strengthen our economy, so long as the tariffs are well thought out and specific to things we can do ourselves. We can bring back many industries that have systematically been dismantled and sent overseas the past five decades. We can bring back the production of raw materials that we no longer invest in domestically. I can still do Coffee, Art, and Ceramics.

If Donald Trump wins, and if Donald Trump does impose huge tariffs, then the retail landscape might begin to change. We might not see the endless variety of inexpensive objects all over our stores. We might once again see American brand names on things more than we see foreign brands. We might notice the quality of our everyday objects is a little better, a little more substantial, a lot more American. It would be a tightrope act to walk with many dangers, but big payouts for domestic producers, both workers and owners, if it works. It will also take time. It could easily take well over the four years a second Trump presidency would possess to recondition our businesses to produce primarily for home from homemade materials. It will certainly take longer to convince and recondition our buying populace to buy less stuff and live with quality over quantity. It seems the experiment could easily take ten years to stop the current trajectory, reverse direction, and successfully revert back to dominance in domestic production.

Is it possible that huge tariffs would revitalize our economy? Of course it's possible. Is it probable? I am less sure of that. I would love to see it happen in my lifetime. I still remember the pride of American made products from when I was a kid during the Regan years. I cannot remember when patriotism was as high-expect for a brief stint following 9/11. We were proud of what we made, what we earned and who we were. But with every subsequent election and new generation that ideal of Made in America fades and is replaced by a pluralized, globalized standard of everything, all the time, with an "I don't care where it comes from" attitude. I will tell you where my pottery comes from. The clay is mined and processed in the US, sold through a northeastern distributor to me in upstate New York where I make it by hand in my United States studio. The glazes and kilns are all made in the United States. Check the tags and labels on your stuff. If it is made in the USA, then that is money that goes right to your fellow American. It sounds like a dream...the American dream?

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