Comment by trhway
7 days ago
Which is one of the reasons the countries with high tariffs have had worse economy overall and specifically much worse than the US economy. The higher your tariffs the worse the protected industry and the whole economy.
7 days ago
Which is one of the reasons the countries with high tariffs have had worse economy overall and specifically much worse than the US economy. The higher your tariffs the worse the protected industry and the whole economy.
Yes - with free trade, the US is the wealthiest economy in the history of the world. Economic research says it works. What is the reasoning for throwing it away?
I hear the nonsense reasoning from the Trump crowd, but many know it's nonsense even as they say it. What is their real goal here?
I wish I knew. Nothing I hear from that crowd makes any actual sense except one thing: they have developed such a seething hatred for more than half of their fellow citizenry that they're willing to destroy the entire country, including themselves, just to hurt them.
But that also makes no real sense. So I don't know.
The bloviation on manufacturing is cargo-culting. It's a promise of a better time for an electorate that's being squeezed by ever increasing precarity. It's a rose-coloured version of 1950, when people with a high-school diploma could walk into a giant General Motors factory and get a job that paid enough to raise a family, own a house, and retire at 60 with a pension. Obviously, this was based on the US being a dominant manufacturing power.
(They neglect that what made it the dominant manufacturing power was a war that killed tens of millions and sidelined most other industrial nations, but perhaps that's plan B when this doesn't work)
As for using tarriffs to deliver the factories, they assume the US market is so vast and desirable, that it's worth building plants and full supply chains specifically for it. I'd expect that any firm that believed that had onshored their factories years ago due to plain economics, without a comical tarriff regime to spur it. (I'm thinking of how "foreign" automakers sprinkled plants all over the South making models that largely fit US preferences)
Conversely, I suspect you'll see a lot of firms say "we'll just skip the US entirely" -- the factory you built in Viet Nam or Germany can still sell cheaply to a hundred and fifty countries, and together that adds up to more than even the US can offer.
> they have developed such a seething hatred for more than half of their fellow citizenry that they're willing to destroy the entire country, including themselves, just to hurt them.
That is the people following (speaking very generally). The leaders are leading people in that direction for a reason.
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Power. The power to punish. The power to attempt to make people or countries do what you want. It is not economic. It only makes sense if you think like a mobster.
To tank the economy so billionaires can scoop up more/the remaining assets for pennies on the dollar as leveraged/in debt non billionaires have to sell their homes or lose them in foreclosure.
The problem is they don't think it's nonsense. They really believe this will pay down the deficit, bring jobs back to the US, make it great again.
They see it as closing loopholes - "rebadging made in China as made in Vietnam, Thailand, Japan? Nice try, Trump's smarter than that!"