Comment by Hikikomori
20 hours ago
You can use tariffs as a stick but you should also use a carrot. Hard to argue that trump didn't do tariffs in the dumbest way possible.
20 hours ago
You can use tariffs as a stick but you should also use a carrot. Hard to argue that trump didn't do tariffs in the dumbest way possible.
> Hard to argue that trump didn't do tariffs in the dumbest way possible.
That is certainly one of my frustrations with Trump. He has this tendency to take things which aren't necessarily bad ideas, and pursue them in such stupid ways that he is poisoning public opinion of those concepts for a long time to come.
Take tariffs. I really want the US to have manufacturing again, in fact it seems to me that it is genuinely an issue of national security that we don't have the ability to manufacture things. So I'm ok with tariffs in the abstract, as part of a larger plan to build up industry in the US.
But of course that isn't what we got - we got something which is causing a lot of heartburn for (probably) no benefit to our manufacturing industry. So not only is Trump not effectively advancing the ends I would like, in the future when a politician suggests tariffs people will pattern match it to "that thing Trump did which really sucked" and reject the proposal out of hand even if the details are different. And it's like this for so many things Trump sets his mind to. It's really frustrating.