So your concern appears to be that the current system doesn’t allow a U.S. retail middle man to take their cut?
I didn’t realize there was so much sympathy for non value providing middle men in the U.S.
I do actually agree with the de-minimus issue and that the system needed to be redone, but not because I think more Americans should be spending their lives being middle men leeching money off the American user, but because the de-minimus exemption was distorting the markets leading to highly inefficient individual packages instead of bulk packages being shipped.
But the problem isn’t the elimination of de-minimus. If that had been eliminated a year ago, a $1000 import from AliExpress would see a $100-$200 additional cost which while not ideal would have been reasonable.
The problem is the raising of tariffs to extremely high levels that mean that the $1000 goods now carry a $1100-$1500 duty on top.
You're misrepresenting my point.
This isn’t about protecting "middlemen" for the sake of it, it's about applying consistent rules across different channels of commerce. If a domestic retailer has to pay duties to bring in inventory from abroad, but a foreign seller can ship the same item directly to a U.S. consumer with no duty via de minimis, that's a structural arbitrage opportunity, and yes, that does distort the market.
Whether the intermediary adds value or not is a fair debate, but the real issue is the system favoring one pathway over another based on a technicality, not merit. If you want to argue for a globalized market with no tariffs or friction, I’m sympathetic to that. But that’s not what we have, and pretending that eliminating de minimis while raising punitive tariffs are the same problem is a conflation.
I’m with you on criticizing high tariffs — retaliatory or otherwise, especially when they become a blunt weapon. But de minimis wasn't a free-market policy, it was an exploit. Fixing it doesn’t mean embracing protectionism, it means closing a loophole that had gotten too large to ignore.