Comment by f33d5173
8 days ago
It's so quaint to me that people actually believe his rhetoric. How long do you think people will put up with high prices before they turn on him?
8 days ago
It's so quaint to me that people actually believe his rhetoric. How long do you think people will put up with high prices before they turn on him?
If high prices are inevitable, what’s their endgame? Are they actually incompetent or are people too pessimistic about what they’re attempting to do?
Prior to yesterday's announcement, the claim regarding tarrifs was that the goal was to bring manufacturing back to american soil. This is unlikely to happen in any case, but it requires at minimum that consumers put up with high prices for a while (with "a while" being measured in years, if not decades). Actually, the "liberation day" tarrifs strongly agree with this goal: after speculation, the administration announced the formula for these new tarrifs, which has nothing to do with counter tarrifs or trade barriers as claimed, and instead comes from a ratio of the trade deficit in goods and the overall amount of trade. In other words, countries that export a lot of goods to the US (and the US doesn't have commensurate goods exports to) get high tarrifs. This makes sense if the goal is to incentivize manufacturing in the US, by making manufactured goods from outside more expensive.
There is another camp that thinks that trump doesn't really have a goal per se, and is rather doing all this as an exercise in showing off his strength and to draw attention to himself. This camp holds that eventually trump will get bored, or the public will turn on him, and he'll need to get rid of tarrifs to save face. We call these people "optimists".