Tariffs are not a new concept and have been used historically to build economies. Top China analysts in the Obama administration credited its economic rise to protective tariffs and high barriers to entry for any foreign companies to sell in country.
I’m probably a bit older than most lemmy users and remember when tariffs were a major talking point for democrats as a positive thing to protect American jobs. Hell, growing up in the Midwest, all my dad and his buddies that worked union jobs had to vote democrat because of their aggressive tariff policy to protect their jobs.
So what if trump is right about tariffs and it reinvigorates the American economy? Will people find another reason to credit the success to? Will it be the end of blue collar voting for the democrats?
Edit: Markets are rebounding hard, I bought low, glad Lemmy is full of pseudo intellectual economic morons. How is Lemmy going to cope now?
I suspect he is right. These tariffs will torpedo the economy just as intended.
The question is inconsequential.
The empirical and historical information we have demonstrates that this is a patently stupid policy.
Wait, you were a child of the Great Depression? 'cause the US has been promoting free trade with low tariff rates since the end of WWII
I don’t believe this question is being asked in good faith
The big difference between the US and China is that China is often close to the bottom of the supply chain.
America doesn’t have the infrastructure already in place to supply the raw materials and basic essentials to manufacturers.
Until this is the case (and I’m phrasing it optimistically but the reality is it never can be the case), all manufacturers have to pay extra just to have access to the things they need to produce their goods.
This cost is passed on to the consumer.
Like another commenter pointed out, there just isn’t a domestic supplier of many products. Crucial rare earth metals and various other minerals just aren’t available. Heck, to my knowledge, there isn’t even a domestic manufacturer of light bulbs anymore.
Without putting anything in place before implementing these tariffs, he’s guaranteed that prices will go up on almost everything.
“A broken clock is right twice a day.”
He is not.
A tariff is a tax that increases the price of imported goods.
Tariffs are used to push people toward domestic alternatives to imported goods.
However, today, there are no domestic alternatives to most important goods.
So, all it’s doing is increasing the burden on the average person.
Companies are not going to invest in domestic production. They are going to spend that money lobbying to have tarriffs removed. Because guess what? Once tariffs go away, consumer prices are not going to go back to what they used to be. Instead, megacorps are going to pocket the difference as profit.
companies are not going to invest in domestic production
$1.1 trillion already committed to building in US. Not sure what you are talking about
Source?
Since the odds are so slim of tariffs at this scale further boosting an economy that was already pretty vigorous - I think the more important question is, who are you going to scapegoat when tariffs don’t work as advertised? Immigration? George Soros? Biden? Deep State? Panama and Greenland? Her emails? Will you swallow the doublethink when Murdoch and Bezos’s fake news tell you a recession is really sort of a boom, and vodka rations are up 8%?
I believe the tarrifs are good. Though for other reasons than Trump. The current (previous) situation is super unstable and unsustainable. It basically require a global US monopoly of violence (which was the case for about 30 years). Trade imbalance implies war (as stated by Keynes).
However, the arguments of the Trump administration are completely false and uneducated.
We’ve all been drenched in neoliberal propaganda for about 50 years (disguised as science), so it’s not weird people are unable to think outside of the box on this matter.
Also, super valid question. Don’t get the down votes.
How did you make it through life with such a blatent lack of critical thinking skills? Your comment history is full of these dumbass takes. I mean my God man. You sound like a fucking cartoon character. Neoliberal propoganda disguised as science? What the actual fuck does that even mean? Take off your tin foil hat and take a walk man. Clear your head. Jesus christ. What has happened to our world where no one believes in science? It’s fucking science man. Not everything is a political conspiracy. Not everything revolves around a political agenda. Some things just exist, like science. Reading comments like this make me want to jump off a bridge. It’s hard for me to accept that there are actually people that fucking gullible and stupid. I mean do you just listen to the people screaming the loudest? Do you have no concept of logic or reasonability?
Nothing you said can even be considered a coherent thought. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Take them meds bro.
Do you even believe in meds? Or is that part of the “neoliberal science conspiracy” too?
I believe in meds and I believe in science. Especially the science of complex systems. I don’t believe in political philosophy branded as science. The reproducability metric of social sciences and political economy is so bad that the complete field should move into humanities and philosophy (which isn’t bad, but it isn’t science). Aspiring sciences.
I mean it isn’t a secret that huge amounts of resources has been poured into neoliberal think tanks since the 70s. It’s an ideology which justifies the rich getting richer. Such stuff always get at lot of funding. It’s inherent.
I don’t think I’m the one who’s in lack of critical thinking here Mr 420.
How in depth would you like to understand the level to which across the board tariffs from the united states are going to fuck not just the united states economy but the global economy? Education at this level is not free.
Tariffs don’t “work” or “not work” it’s not a binary outcome. Just as measuring “the economy” is pretty much impossible, so is attributing economic outcomes to one single feature of the regulatory environment, They interact with the rest of the economic environment and some variety or work, production, trade, investment and distribution will occur. Over time all aspects of the system will change, adapt and react. Most changes have winners and losers and they can be counted or balanced off differently.
It it were paired with bank regulation and asset ownership regulation and a coherent industrial strategy, maybe also forex controls, maybe some counter cyclical macroeconomic policy (extremely unpopular these days) the outcomes would likely be quite different from a low regulation free for “all”. “All” is probably “a few with relatively unconstrained access to enough capital or credit to hoover up assets of the losers”.
But then a smaller subset of those things might also change the outcomes on their own. Either way it would be a matter of time and adaptation of a complex system.
It also depends what you think the objective is before you understand “success” or “failure”, the goals might well be social as much as economic. If the objective is trash the small scale asset ownig middle classes and enrich the elites economically then it might be working already.
Ignoring whether he is or not, as that is a DEEP dive into world economics, the response would have some variance, because nothing is monolithic, but I expect the prominent responses would be for supporters to cheer and gloat, for the independents to cheer and hope, with timing deciding the midterms, and for the opposition to drop it and focus on all the other problems with Trump.
I feel like that’s going to be the response. When stocks were dropping “THIS IS BECAUSE OF TRUMPS TARIFFS!!!” And now that they are going back up they will say “Well…. There are a lot of factors that go into global economics and it’s not a monolith”
Saying ‘the response’ is kind of pretending it’s a monolith. There will be a lot of carefully considered discussion, regardless of what the result is, because that’s what adult humans do. Then there will be the great lumps of BS that are projected by party mouthpieces and parroted by the party followers. I’m less interested in the social media chatter as a response and more interested in the response from the other countries.
China’s choice to place export restrictions on things like Yttrium and other rare earth metals, when they control ~3/4ths of the world’s supply, could put companies around the world out of business or under Chinese soft power. Some of America’s biggest blue chip companies are reliant on those materials. China is not going to make it easy if even possible to get those elements for US companies. Companies in Europe and Asia could also be targetted with it as an implementation of Chinese soft power.
Another issue to consider is the recovery itself. The market always craps its pants when Trump speaks because the thing the market loves is predictability and Trump is unpredictable. It’s hard to say how comfortable the investor class will be with taking risks on new investments when one announcement from the oval office can drop share prices to a new 52 week low.
Facing all this, it’s hard to care much about the chatter from party loyalists.
That would certainly be quite surprising. The expression of Trump being right is flexible enough to be interpreted in various ways.
The only plausible way would be if he achieves some largely meaningless concessions and the media spins it as a win. But if the American electorate gets the idea that the US can get free stuff by throwing a fit, then any agreement is not worth the paper it is written on.
Well, I guess that’s the answer. If Trump achieves anything positive with this, then the reaction with be self-destructive.
Do you have any particular scenario in mind that ends with Trump being vindicated?
Yeah you definately sound a lot older than most lemmy users, what are you doing lurking here creep. Don’t you have a bingo game to attend or something
And the last time they have been used by the US in 1930, they ruined the economy.
