You’re not giving capitalism enough credit. Corporations and businesses are not altruistic. If they can get away with slowly raising prices to increase profit margins, they will.
That’s a hell of a lot easier to actually achieve when you don’t have foreign produce acting as competition and consequently sanity-checking domestic prices. Foreign suppliers implicitly set a ceiling for how much a product can cost since the market would shift to using them if they became the cheaper option.
To make matters worse, tariffs are a very nice excuse for retailers to raise prices across the board using the excuse that “it costs us more to get it, so it has to cost you more to buy it.” If we’re lucky, they’ll raise foreign goods by the exact amount they’re paying more for them and only choose to raise domestic good prices (for profit) by only some fraction of that amount.
Most food in the US is domestically produced, so no. The US is a huge exporter of food outside of specialty goods and tropical things.
You’re not giving capitalism enough credit. Corporations and businesses are not altruistic. If they can get away with slowly raising prices to increase profit margins, they will.
That’s a hell of a lot easier to actually achieve when you don’t have foreign produce acting as competition and consequently sanity-checking domestic prices. Foreign suppliers implicitly set a ceiling for how much a product can cost since the market would shift to using them if they became the cheaper option.
To make matters worse, tariffs are a very nice excuse for retailers to raise prices across the board using the excuse that “it costs us more to get it, so it has to cost you more to buy it.” If we’re lucky, they’ll raise foreign goods by the exact amount they’re paying more for them and only choose to raise domestic good prices (for profit) by only some fraction of that amount.