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Roosevelt had them repealed in 1934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?
Who’s going to profit? That’s the great thing about tariffs: no one profits! Once you account for retaliatory tariffs, tariffs are mostly just a particularly stupid an inefficient sales tax. It’s not like the Trump administration will even be using tariffs to support consumer protection inspections of the goods being imported, so these tariffs can be expected to have no positive effects whatsoever.
How is a 25% tariff on trade going to stop thousands of people pouring through Mexico and Canada bringing drugs and crime?
I think that people who support higher tariffs and understand them at all realize that they will increase prices, but think that they will also help bring back more decently paid manufacturing jobs to the USA, which will more than outweigh the effect of rising prices. I suspect that it won’t work out that way.
One thing I will find “interesting” in a train wreck kind of way is who Trump and the Republicans will blame for the failure of their policies over the next couple of years given that they control all branches of the federal government. Probably the “deep state”. I also wonder if the federal government will have anybody with actual expertise in their fields left working for them after a couple of years – these people being the widely reviled “deep state”.
thanks, i was unaware of this
https://www2.lehigh.edu/news/politically-connected-corporations-received-more-exemptions-from-us-tariffs-on-chinese-imports
acroyear: Basically, corporations could apply for exceptions to the tariffs, and they were granted…depending on what candidates and PACs your corporation donated to
@10 Maybe if you put it in pictures so TFG can follow along?
Although I think every character in that class scene grew up to be a Republican. It would explain a lot, actually.
What made those “good factory jobs” good was the fact that they were unionized jobs.
I’m tired of hearing about how how undocumented workers and immigrants are “doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do”. Unless we are specifically talking about giving blow jobs to DJT, there are NO jobs that Americans won’t do… if they come with a middle class income and benefits.
Exhibit A: NYC sanitation worker.
There is generally a 2 year waiting list (give or take) for ANY job in NYC Dept. of Sanitation because those people are paid handsomely to pick up garbage. The job comes with excellent benefits–health, pension, matching contribution retirement plan and overtime pay, including holiday OT pay, which is why those jobs are desirable.
@15 I was wondering the same thing.
… stupid post button… grrr
Re: jobs Americans won’t do
For all the people who are about to squawk about farm workers & harvesters, I’d like to point out that if you paid teenagers $20/hr to pick strawberries, there wouldn’t be any undocumented workers picking them.
Paying employees more money to pick crops would not increase food prices significantly, since most of the cost is in advertising/marketing, shipping and mostly, cold storage. Employee wages are barely a blip on the radar. I think it was Fast Food Nation that pointed out that by paying meat processing plant workers $15/hr minimum, the price of $4.99 ground beef would go up…by a penny. That was approximately 20-25 years ago, but the point is that labor costs are not significant costs, shipping and storage are.
It’s amazing how many people are only just now starting to pay attention to what Trump’s tariffs would actually do to the economy. Did I say amazing? I meant depressing. Democrats spectacularly dropped the ball when it came to attacking Trump on his actual record.
An example of a middle class job that Americans used to do… when it was still a middle class job.
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/a-thousand-pines/
Notice that a lot of the attraction of the job for American workers is that you could work like crazy for a few months of the year, have enough money to live on for the rest of the year & then have the rest of the year to do other things? A boon if you are trying to launch your own business or have your own passion projects.
The other thing to keep in mind is that tariffs on steel (just as one example of tariffs gone badly wrong) enabled American steel manufacturers to avoid investing in modernizing their factories. So the end result was expensive, uncompetitive steel mills that couldn’t compete on the world market. Now the US has no real steel manufacturing and no resilience in the event that we suddenly need to ramp up iron and steel manufacturing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/08/us-weapons-manufacturing-ukraine/
Right now, China appears to be manufacturing the bulk of the steel market, and their steel is of questionable value–a lot of things built with cheap Chinese steel fail abruptly and far earlier than the anticipated age of obsolescence.
https://www.bdo.com/insights/advisory/the-steel-industry-and-its-place-in-the-american-economy
https://cdmg.com/building-faqs/why-using-cheap-steel-is-unsafe#:~:text=It%20is%20not%20a%20matter,to%20get%20the%20job%20done.
https://californiaglobe.com/fr/troubled-bridge-over-water/
From the last article
@20 well, you might want to check out the California Globe link…
When I advocated elsewhere on this site for voting for the least bad, I meant it. I did NOT suggest in any way, shape or form, that she was a good candidate, just the least damaging one.
One way to look like a genius, if you are not in fact a genius, is to stand next to a toxic imbecile and look like a genius by comparison.
So… America gets the leadership and infrastructure that it voted for. Congrats. Yippee.
I am really tired of reading and listening to arguments about Herr shits in pants plans or policies as if he is all about some kind of 3D chess. What we are seeing but often not recognizing is he is incompetent and has always been so. His hate filled self absorbed ego is only interested to personal gain but is incapable of honestly succeeding only cheating. The only “product” he has had any success with is his name everything else is and was shit which his “leadership” he ran into the ground if it had any chance at all.
We are watching close up just how he has driven all his schemes into the ground unfortunately we will have to ride it all the way down together. I can only hope that it is quick so we can start the job of what will clearly be a rebuilding akin to a post natural disaster where all the emergency services will have to be reduced to useless shells .
happy days!!
As a Canadian, I’m suddenly remembering a time many years ago where people on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border (somewhere over in the Quebec area) were complaining that police on the other side of the border weren’t taking the smuggling problem seriously. Thing is, they were talking about two different smuggling problems: the U.S. was complaining about cannabis being smuggled across from Canada (before it was legal in either country) while Canada was complaining about people smuggling U.S. cigarettes across to avoid import duties and taxes.
Yeah, Trump’s being his usual ‘it’s loud and it sounds good to me, who cares if it coincides with reality’ self. That said, Canada apparently is a significant ‘middle-man’ in the fentanyl production and distribution network: there’s apparently enough domestic production that we’re a net exporter. But if there were any ‘easy way to solve this long-simmering problem’, believe me, it would have been done already, because Canadians are dying as well. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with immigration, and everything to do with the fact that gangs can make money doing it (and a lot of those gangs are locals anyway), and a lot of the precursors for it (mostly supplied by China) aren’t illegal by themselves and have too many other uses to just outright ban.
Its no good telling Trump whats wrong with tariffs.
He knows that saying it gives his supporters a glassy eyed buzz.
Convince them, not Trump.
Trump believes raising tariffs is teriffic and banning abortion is prolific.
[;) though ‘tariffic’ would have been even better]
“Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to EASILY solve this long simmering problem” of drugs and immigration across the US border (emphasis mine). If it is so easy, what hasn’t the USA done it? Why didn’t Trump do it when he had the chance? Heck, the USA shouldn’t expect their neighbours to solve Amercan problems (though good neighbors would probably help if asked).
Basic economics (or pseudoscience, as some think of it):
BTW, there are three potential ways to cover the cost of tariffs:
— importers raise the price of sale
— importers wear the cost and decrease their profit
— exporters wear the cost to keep selling volume
One of those is hardly, hardly, hardly ever the case.
That’s the one Trump is selling to his rump.
(They’ll pay for it just as Mexico paid for the Wall)
@ 13 Raging Bee
ANOTHER unstoppable caravan if illegal alien invaders?! When was the first one supposed to get here?
1620.
@31: No, no, no, the NONWHITE unstoppable caravan! The one we’re supposed to be afraid of, remember? The ones who are poisoning OUR PBFs?
The fact that he says “…to charge Mexico and Canada…” means that no, he doesn’t understand what tariffs do. Or maybe he just believes that his supporters don’t understand them and will be cheering him on.
@10 Jaws Yeah, the single stupidest thing about trying to use tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US, other than him also claiming that the Chips Act needs to be ended, because it was somehow bad, despite doing this very thing for the first time in a generation, is that, while its illegal to use one in the US (probably due to Chinese spyware, but also do to the literal price), you could go to China and, in theory, buy a new phone, which is a generation better than what you local cell company in the US offers, for like $20 US, more or less. Lets assume for a moment that this isn’t China subsidizing the cost for its citizens (which is possible), it still means that, in theory, the actual cost of your $600 ‘out of pocket’ phone in the US is more like $30, even if you are talking about Verizon buying the parts, then having someone glue them together in the US. So.. you put a tariff on this of 25% and it does what? Raised the cost to the company selling you a $600 phone, which is already 20 times more than what it costs to make the thing, by $5-6 dollars? The only thing I can see this doing is giving the cell company grounds to charge you $700. I sure as hell won’t encourage anyone to spend literally billions of dollars to create a new mines, to find rare earth metals for the phones, which we don’t have in the US, billions to create new manufacturing plants to mass produce more plastics for the cases, billions again more for chip making (especially after Trump yanks the rug out from under the existing effort to do this, already in progress), and what ever the F else we don’t already have to accomplish it.
Basically, why the F would any US companies spend billions to restart US manufacturing when you could put a 100% tariff on things and it still, in 90% of cases, only cost them somewhere between 1/10th and 1/100th, or less, just to pay China anyway, and pass the cost on to us? Its insane.
Kahegi @34 – with a phone you picked a special case because this is patented product, where a large part of the value is software (so copyrighted). So China is doing the manufacturing under licence. If you are looking a South Korean washing machines for instance, the added value from the brand owner is not mostly in the US. (In fact, it is an interesting example because the washing machine itself may in fact be mostly manufactured in China – so exactly how that value subject to higher tariffs becomes complicated.)
The real action is not in the tariffs, it’s in the tariff exemptions. I forget exactly where I read it, but it seems that the last time around, yes, he introduced a bunch of tariffs, but, hidden away in the fine print were a bunch of loopholes and exemptions which just happened to favour companies and individuals with favourable relationships with Trump. The carving out of these exemptions then becomes another channel for horse-trading, patronage, and the doling out of favours.
I don’t think this is where I originally read about it, but it’s good enough: Escaping Trump’s tariffs has required navigating a ‘broken’ system vulnerable to corruption, businesses and academics say
Who is going to profit? Well, according to the lead author on the study mentioned in that article: “The lobbyists and the lawyers are going to benefit the most”.
All this proves that tRUMP (in his infinite ignorance) wants to extinguish the enlightenment of reason, honesty and caring to hasten The New Dark Ages.
Whoever is pulling the strings is going to get rich and we will pay. Trump is an idiot wrapped in a moron wrapped in an imbecile. Like Sargent Schultz, he knows nothing, NUH-ZING! He has the brain of a 2-year old: he can say words, but he doesn’t know what they mean. (My granddaughter can sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, but she doesn’t know what is a twinkle, little or star. Same with Trump.)
Both Mexico and Canada have said F U to the tariff threat which could tank our economy in less than a year. Of course, the MAGA Morons will find a way to blame Obama.
We are embarking on the age of the Four Horsemen of the Oligarchy.
@Doc Bill:
At the moment Canada isn’t so much saying ‘F U’ as ‘What the F do you actually want?’ Which nobody can answer, because Trump himself is simply using rhetoric that sounds good to him with no real understanding, and nobody, even those who work with him, can define what ‘success’ would mean in terms of stopping drug flow (as if we weren’t already trying).
From the CBC: What’s Trump’s price for averting tariffs? He didn’t tell Trudeau
@Doc Bill
I wouildn’t say Canada has said F U to the threat, it seems to me most politicians are scrambling to try and figure out what they need to do to get Trump to pull back from the threats (as pointed out by jenorafeuer). The reality for Canada is that we have to play along, which is what Trump wants, because the alternative is a massive hit to our economy.
Trump doesn’t have a real plan, he’s just using it as a blunt hammer to try and get us to do what he wants. It makes no difference if it makes a difference in the number of migrants or the amount of fentanyl. He will get to look tough, tell his followers “Look, I made Canada get into line”, declare victory and walk away.
In the long run it will be bad for the US. If our own government has even half a brain they are already working on ways to ship our exports to other countries. The US will get higher prices, lower productivity and a weaker economy. Canada and Mexico will get hurt more (at least at first) but it will be losers all around. Of course none of that matters to Trump because he will have declared victory and moved on to something else anyway.
Sort of misses the point(neither for nor against tariffs). Why did the EU and China retaliate with tariffs if tariffs were only going to hurt their own people?
Deepak, me to an AI:
geopolitical question, a succinct response please: Why did the EU and China retaliate with tariffs when the USA imposed them?
The EU and China retaliated with tariffs in response to the USA's tariffs to protect their own economies and signal their disapproval of the US trade policies. It's a common practice in international trade disputes to counteract perceived unfair measures.Includes a hyperlink to the source.
(Age of the internet, or was that intended rhetorically?)
[also, cf. Dunc @36. Selling indulgences]
@John Morales @42
So China’s tariffs protects its economy but US/Trump’s tariffs don’t ?
So China wishes to signal disapproval of US trade policies by imposing tariffs which per the original post will make life worse for its own citizens ?
you should probably ask an AI. They are really authoritative in such matters!
<
blockquote>So China’s tariffs protects its economy but US/Trump’s tariffs don’t ?
<
blockquote>
Gotta love how your retort is all about how it’s an AI and therefore wrong.
Do you know to what the argumentum ad hominem refers?
(It was a fucking stupid question. See my video above)
Still, for the yuks:
“Let’s focus on the basis for the tariffs:
European Union (EU)
Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: The EU imposed retaliatory tariffs in response to the U.S. Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum, which were justified by the U.S. on national security grounds. The EU argued that these tariffs were not legitimate and retaliated to protect its own industries1.
Aircraft Dispute: The EU’s tariffs were also based on a long-standing dispute at the World Trade Organization (WTO) over subsidies to Boeing and Airbus. The WTO ruled that both the U.S. and EU had provided illegal subsidies to their respective aircraft manufacturers, leading to the EU imposing tariffs on U.S. goods2.
China
Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: China’s retaliatory tariffs were a direct response to the U.S. Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum. China argued that these tariffs were not justified under WTO rules and imposed tariffs on U.S. goods to counteract the impact on its own industries1.
Section 301 Tariffs: China’s tariffs were also a response to the U.S. Section 301 tariffs, which targeted Chinese goods over issues related to technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation. China viewed these tariffs as an unfair trade practice and retaliated to protect its economic interests2.”
(1www.csis.org 2www.trade.gov)
In Answer to DS – the reason for a retaliation is that it is a standard human response to aggressive behaviour from others to retaliate. Sure, it will hurt domestic consumers, but is a response to hurt already imposed on domestic producers. And so long are there are alternative sources for the goods subject to tariffs (which abide by internationally negotiated agreements), it will just hurt US suppliers and benefit alternative sources. The US (running trade deficits as it does) is actually in a poor leveraging position in this regard. The imposed broad tariffs will almost certainly hurt domestic consumers more than it helps domestic producers.
The real issue here is arbitrary departure from international rules that everybody else has agreed to abide by. The US is becoming under Trump a rogue nation. Essentially the US is planning to become a criminal nation, just has Trump has spent his life engaging in criminal behaviour, which the law in the US has been to too corrupt to punish.
It is self defense.
The US putting tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, China, and the EU is a form of aggression.
These tariffs are designed to help the USA and hurt those other countries.
This is sometimes referred to as a “trade war”. It is economic warfare.
Without defending themselves, the victim nations would lose their own manufacturing jobs and have their foreign currency reserves disappear as their imports rise while their exports shrink.
Nations have to have more or less balanced trade in the long run or they end up like Argentina, broke and going nowhere.
The other point that you missed is that tariffs also known as trade wars, are a lose-lose game. No one wins. The USA hurts the others while hurting itself.
This is why people think Trump and the GOP are dumb.
Trade wars are part of our ancient history.
The other point to remember about tariffs is that we’ve tried them before.
They don’t work and often make things worse. A whole lot worse.
This thread already discussed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs which Hoover enacted in 1930 right as the Great Depression started.
For the three people still left, this is what mainstream economists say about trade wars.
In the short term, they might have some positive effects.
In the long term, they usually end up as failures due to higher costs, lower consumption, and protection of inefficient local industries that have no incentive to increase productivity.
“Economists generally agree that in the long term, trade wars hurt the economy, slow GDP, and overall make a country less competitive in the international market. ”
Trump is fixing something that isn’t broken while ignoring the real problems that we have.
US unemployment isn’t high. It is in fact, about as low as it has ever been and it can’t get much lower.
“The unemployment rate in the US is 4.10%, which is lower than the long term average of 5.69%.”
@ raven
With the GOPQ cruelty is the point. Hurting people is the point. Punching down is the point. Godfather Trump and his Mafia parasites don’t care because they are immune to any consequences. They’ll grift the amber waves of grain to the last morsel all the while blaming Barack HUSSEIN Obama. MAGA will gleefully burn the house down while still inside.
May we live in interesting times.
An actually even simpler answer to DS:
Because placing tariffs on goods that you actually CAN produce inside your own country, and don’t need to buy from the US, has less of an impact on the country in question than one that is a pure service economy, which produces almost nothing themselves. Sure, Mexico and Canada would both be impacted by placing retaliatory tariffs, but Canada is likely able to get most of what the US ships to them from another source, or make it themselves, and most of the stuff coming out of Mexico tends to be food crops, both grown there, and shipped through there. Exactly what impact, in terms of “necessary goods”, will Mexico face if they stop shipping “food” to the US. Money, sure, but they can always just make those things available to other countries in larger amounts, and it might actually “help” those other countries, due to demand going down, but in terms of real hardship, outside of not being able to afford to buy the latest Marvel DVD, or some other US export? Not really seeing how a tariff from them hurts them on anything like the scale, in terms of basic needs, the way it utterly wrecks the US, to impose them, basically on stuff we literally can’t grow in large enough amounts.
Canada may be more effected by this. I have no idea how much food they ship “from” the US, but honestly, I would almost laugh off the impact of Trump tariffs too them, going the other direction. It would effect what? The billion dollar maple syrup industry and paper manufacturing, which would vastly increase the cost of toilet paper in the US (the literally #1 import from them, from one source I heard some time back)? For them the threat is more just, “Stop screwing around, if you tank your own economy its going to ‘inconvenience’ us!”, not so much, “Don’t do it, it will ruin us too!” Or, maybe I am totally clueless and they ship some hugely critical thing to us, which if we are not buying it will do more than save some trees, or suddenly allow Canadians to buy more maple syrup than some rumors suggest they are currently limited to per year…
@Kagehi and others:
The biggest issue of a Canada-U.S. trade war is probably going to be with automobiles.
Automobile manufacturing has been pretty heavily integrated between the two countries starting back with the Auto Pact in 1965, which was the result of a series of tariffs and trade wars prior to that. U.S. Manufacturers love it because rather than needing to have production lines for everything on both sides of the border to avoid import duties, they can have focused production lines in each country and ship the cars back and forth based on demand with it mostly evening out. The fact that the main manufacturing centre was traditionally Detroit which is already right on the border, making collaboration easier, was a major contributor to this.
The original Auto Pact expired but had already been subsumed into the later Free Trade Agreements like NAFTA. If Trump plans on breaking the current version of the USCMA/CUSMA agreement (which he signed himself) then auto manufacturers are going to be some of the biggest losers because, as I said, production is pretty much integrated between the countries due to almost sixty years of active collaboration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_Automotive_Products_Agreement
@Kagehi 52
The single largest export from Canada to the US is crude oil (there are few refineries left in Canada, as it was easier to move crude to existing US refineries than build more here). This alone will be a heavy hit on Canada’s economy as it will be difficult (at least initially) to replace pipelines to the US with tankers to the rest of the world. It will also cause a sharp increase in oil prices in the US.
The auto sector is the next major item, as already explained by jenorafeuer,
There are many other significant exports, primarily raw materials for construction and manufacturing. One more specific is lumber for construction – this has been a sore point for years, but the US has always been careful in the past. Look forward to lumber prices jumping, along with the costs for housing etc.
Don’t worry, Trump will blame Canada.
@John Morales
Sure – you do not though. Also ad hominem may be a logical fallacy, but it isnt necessarily untrue and it IS a practical life skill due to limited resources(e.g. no need to look at anything coming from the discovery institute , no need to look at climate studies funded by oil and gas companies)
I didnt say your AI was wrong. I said IF one of the purpose of a tariff is to protect the economy , then the original post by P Z Myers(and others who keep saying tariffs are lose-lose) should discuss it, rather than a one sided portrayal or the AI is wrong and tariffs dont protect the economy. Which is it ?
Ditto for the retaliation. IF US consumers are the group that will suffer the most and there are no other effects of tariffs why would retaliation take the form of China will impose tariffs on US goods ? Surely better to say – Aha your people will suffer the most, please go ahead and double the tariffs!. So ofcourse there are other effects which are skimmed over in posts like this one.
@Jim Brady
Well sure – Im only complaining about the one side posts that talk about consumers only. It misses why people favor tariffs even when they know that their prices may increase.
@raven
Not in favor or against tariffs. But this characterization that anyone who imposes tariffs is going to lose isnt complete. Is the US really in a good position with all manufacturing in other countries (see Intel!)? Has it won, therefore? How would you suggest to fix it ?
Which is the same old – yes your bills are double and your wages have stagnated and your lviing standards have gone down – but the economy is doing great , and employment is at an all time low, and the GDP is increasing – The thing the economist is measuring is not what most people care about!
@kagehi
Ok – Canada and Mexico arent impacted much – except that their leaders seem to think it will impact them , no ? Otherwise they should be saying go ahead , knock yourselves out.
And of course for the 4 years that Biden still had the tariffs imposed on China , no one seemed to care much.
“Sure – you do not though. Also ad hominem may be a logical fallacy, but it isnt necessarily untrue”
No. But yours was indeed untrue. Bullshit, really.
“I didnt say your AI was wrong.”
Neither did I say that you said that my AI was wrong.
It’s a session on a freebie chatbot, that’s what my AI is.
No instance permanence.
Nonetheless, I can leverage even that in ways you apparently fail to comprehend.
—
Anyway. Relax. No biggie.
[quietude; bored]
Read that again..
Why? Because US consumers are the group that will suffer the most and there are no other effects of tariffs.
(Implicit in the question, that is)
BTW: “But this characterization that anyone who imposes tariffs is going to lose isnt complete.”
me @30:
BTW, there are three potential ways to cover the cost of tariffs:
— importers raise the price of sale
— importers wear the cost and decrease their profit
— exporters wear the cost to keep selling volume