

If the teriffs burden exceeds the profit margin, which in most cases related to recent US discussion it does, if companies don’t raise prices they’ll be selling at a loss. No amount of corporate belt tightening can save you, even if there was an appetite for that, which there isn’t anyways.
Yes. By the time those come down to a per-unit cost, they’re something for sure, but nowhere near as large of a factor of cost of materials.
Again, if we were talking a 5% cost increase in raw material input, then the ratio between additional unit cost of materials and unit cost executive salary would at least be closer. But we’re talking terriffs that are STARTING at 25% and god knows who’ll say the wrong thing to cause them to jump to 50 or 100.
As exorbitant as they are, you are probably underestimating the volume of production and so overestimating the per-unit cost of those salaries.
Ford, for example estimated a 25/10 teriff on steel/aluminum would add 1.6 billion to input costs in 2017. Now we’re looking at 25/25 so, I dunno, 2 billion per year (2025 dollars)
You could cut all executive pay at Ford to 0$ and you’ll still be in the red by like 1.8 billion.