The first quarter of 2025 is going to be rough.
Does he even understand what tariffs do? Like, who ends up paying for them? He wants to impose a 25% tax on our two most important agricultural partners, and also on our trade partner, China. In the middle of winter, fruit and vegetable prices will be launched skyward. I also expect that the big grocery chains will see this as an opportunity for even greater price gouging. Didn’t he campaign on complaining that grocery bills were too damn high?
He also tried this before in 2018, slapping more tariffs on goods from China. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
I think my Christmas present to my wife and myself will be all about stocking the pantry in December, and maybe we’ll have to expand the backyard garden in the spring.
Do we have to remind him of Smoot-Hawley? I hate having to dust off my high school civics knowledge.
What’s the current tariff on fentanyl?
25 to life, i think…
LOL.
You think Trump would remember it for more than a day? Or care?
That was my thought when I first heard the tariff idea during his first term.
Hoover tried that in 1930.
The Smoot-Hawley tariffs didn’t cause the Great Depression but they made it worse.
They didn’t work!!!
Roosevelt had them repealed in 1934
PS: This is not at all complicated.
Can’t Trump or anyone in the GOP power structure use Wikipedia?
You could remind Trumplethinskin about Smoot-Hawley, but it wouldn’t help anything. He never knew what it meant, and isn’t going to learn now.
He may be using them as threats to make them curb emigration etc. Or maybe not. Any rise in prices will no doubt be successfully attributed to DEI, wokeism, etc residuals from former administration. Trump’s genius lies in his ability to convince a large swathe of the populace that anything he says is true.
The blindingly obvious answer is an absolute “NO”. After it has been explained to him on numerous occasions that the consumers pay the price, he still harbors the idiotic notion that the countries that have tariffs imposed on them are paying. He believes that he is all-knowing and everyone else is stupid when the opposite is true. It is maddening that this country was dumb enough to elect him again.
Seen a few comments by European journalists about what Trump wants to achieve with this tariffs, how it isn’t about economic goals but used as a diplomatic strategy…
For fuck’s sake, how do these morons still believe anything from Trump is in any way planned or the result of anything resembling thought?
Tariffs are one of his brainfarts he can’t let go because it brings him attention. If these tariffs are about anything they are about his ego and his hateful urge to harm “the others”.
This sums it up.
Trump isn’t playing any sort of tactical or strategic game.
He is flailing around randomly without any thought whatsoever.
This is what is in Trump’s brain at any given time……Nothing, zero, null..
“I think Smoot and Hawley would make excellent swear words”
https://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=292
@3: Sorry, but that’s more than 140 characters. He won’t (and perhaps can’t?) read it.
The real purpose is to move those good factory jobs back to America. Where a generation of undereducated (but well-trained on decade-out-of-date equipment) factory workers can continue as slave labor from dawn to dusk, unable to unionize, unable to get appropriate medical care for on-the-job injuries because increasing employers’ workers’ compensation “contributions” would be a tax hike (and we can’t have that). Or, maybe, digging foundations for more branded luxury resorts and casinos that will file for bankruptcy (independent of their owners being “really rich”) as soon as they demand their unpaid overtime.
One also wonders if anyone has looked at the origin tags at Macy’s on ugly ties in The Donald J. Trump Collection lately…
The global trade situation is a complex problem. Like all complex problems it has a simple easy to understand incorrect solution. For a populist like Trump these incorrect but simple solutions are part of their appeal. Trump can get up there are talk about big tariffs in a few simple sentences that anybody can understand.
How much Trump actually believes in it? I have no idea. It may be something of his own conceptions because he has always sold himself on bringing jobs back to the US. It could be something fed to him by advisors who are authoritarian nationalists. It could be something he said for campaigning and now he is saying he will go through because he thinks it will help his popularity.
Status Kuo posted yesterday a reminder of a NYTimes article that the tariffs got turned into a PAC grift.
One of those scandals that was so predictable, nobody else picked up on it. It was just ‘Trump being Trump’ and nobody cared, it seems. It would have buried any other administration.
Basically, corporations could apply for exceptions to the tariffs, and they were granted…depending on what candidates and PACs your corporation donated to. Donated to Trump or Republican PACs/Candidates? You were more likely to get the exception. Donated to Democrats, you were more likely to not get it.
This is a HUGE corruption scandal…or would be if anybody cared.
But this is Trump: nobody cares. He’s just corrupt and that’s that, it seems.
https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/corporate-america-isnt-so-sure
ANOTHER unstoppable caravan if illegal alien invaders?! When was the first one supposed to get here?