You seem to be operating under the misplaced assumption that Trump’s goal with the tariffs was to actually bring manufacturing back to the US or improve the US economy in any way. It’s understandable if you haven’t paid very close attention to Trump over the past 9 years. But whenever thinking about him or his policies, you have to keep one thing top of mind: Trump is a habitual liar who only cares about his own personal wealth and power.
He’s not trying to bring manufacturing back to the US or improve the US economy. He’s doing market manipulation to increase his wealth and that of those who helped get him into power. He doesn’t give a shit about you or me or any of the rest of us. He couldn’t care less if the US crumbled into dust tomorrow, so long as he’s still on top.
Yes but you, like everyone I seem to talk to these days, is under the false impression that Trump isn’t a complete idiot who literally thinks tariffs are the solution to all problems. It’s more comforting to think there’s some massive conspiracy by Russia or that it’s a ploy to make money off the stock market, but I truly believe that Trump actually thinks tariffs will magically fix the economy and his reactions to the backlash are legitimate shock that so many people and the markets don’t agree. Yes Russia does stand to gain from this, but they don’t need to pull the strings when the guy in charge is innovating economic policy so stupid that a smart person would have trouble even imagining it.
Trump decisions make more sense when you realize he is actually stupid as fuck and there’s no hidden chess moves or anyone pulling the strings from the shadows. There is nobody at the wheel who is actually competent even if they’re evil. This is all just the whims of a complete moron who is probably also going a bit senile as well.
You must be new here.
His goal is to enrich himself and hurt others while getting praised like a toddler that just shit on the toilet for the first time.
In truth, he missed the bowl but still wants that praise, anyway.
Well, he sure is shitting.
The goal wasn’t tho further the economy. The goal was to further racism and hate.
Why do you think Donald Trump has any clue about anything he is doing? Has he not repeatedly demonstrated the opposite?
He’s simply doing what Putin says, no thinking on his part
He only has concepts of a plan.
His words, not mine.
He will have the concepts of a plan in a couple of weeks. Literally any day now…
I often think he’s a second grader lying on his oral book report.
or this presumption he gives a shit about the peasants.
Look. He had the stupid tariff idea. He liked it because he likes the thought of getting his way by punishing people who defy him. That’s how he sees tariffs. It wasn’t a good idea. People told him that. So, being a stubborn narcissist, he wanted to do it more. Now here we are.
Yeah, certainly if he were a normal President. But he’s a textbook narcissist who only gives a shit about himself and capitulating to the ultra elite. Throw some performance goals set up by his boss Vladimir Putin, and what do you get?
Absolute fucking chaos alongside fleecing the lower 99.99% for anything you can get and manufacturing a crash in the stock market so you and your elite friends can, you guessed it, profit from it tremendously.
A rational president, you bet. This dude is not that.
Trump doesn’t want you to buy local. He wants you to shop on Amazon and drive a Chinese-built Tesla.
*tesler
“I love to slur!”
Even his buddy’s Tesla’s had to double check with him to make sure they weren’t going to be tariffed, so I’m feeling that’s less on Drumpf’s part and more on Musk’s.
The orange man also could’ve given all the major CEOs a heads up since it takes years to build a factory.
IMO this is the major flaw. Tariffs could work in practice, but you’d have to announce them way ahead of time to give local businesses time to fill in the gap. Otherwise you’ll get what happens now.
The first flaw is not discussing things with the people in charge of tariffs such as the secretary of treasury.
The goal is not to better the country or the economy. The goal is to make money, for his friends and connections to make money, and leave everything else destroyed while they laugh.
The tariffs not making sense is expected.
And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US?
that’s technically what tariffs do. topologically, it’s the same thing: using policy to give a price advantage to domestic producers.
talk about shopping locally and so forth.
talk gets one only so far. when those numbers start to chomp into the household budget, everyone forsakes the “made in…” label in favour of the price tag.
There’s a thousand better ways to handle both tariffs and free trade. We fucked up the latter with NAFTA (and CAFTA), where the EU got it right. Bringing jobs home with tariffs isn’t something you just snap your fingers and do, shit takes a long time to re-align, it would’ve made a lot more sense to have it go through the legislature and say “hey, we’re starting out at a 10% tariff on this stuff we want to bring home, and we’re going to ratchet it up +2% every year until Congress doesn’t pass the law again.” Instead, we’ve got the most volatile president in history implementing tariffs by fiat:
10% 20% actually none actually 10% actually 125% for real this time. Yeah, in this situation, the best play is to just try and wait dumbass out, because there’s a non-zero chance he wakes up tomorrow and declares tariffs woke.He’s not trying to act in the interest of the United States.
He works for Putin.
Yeah that would be reasonable policy that doesn’t ruin our global trade relations
Weeelllllll…
We’re violating trade agreements with our tariffs. But giving tax breaks to companies that re-shore industry would also likely violate trade agreements, because it would create ‘unfair competition’. Kinda like the way that China has given subsidies to certain industries–such as solar panel producers–has created unfair competition, since they have far lower costs than other solar panel producers. As such, tax breaks and incentives would probably also hurt our trade relations, because we would essentially be taking jobs out of other countries. …But that would probably hurt out relations with other countries far, far less than what we’re doing now.
Honestly, there’s not a great way to bring manufacturing jobs back in a way that doesn’t harm our relationships with other countries, or our national interests in some way. By purchasing shit from companies with lower labor costs/standards of living/higher levels of labor abuse/etc., we’ve undercut our ability to produce the same goods at a competitive price while also keeping our own standards. Even if we went back to pay ratios between workers and executives that existed 50 years ago (I think that lowest to highest ratio in large companies was about 150:1 in the late 60s), that wouldn’t be enough to keep our living standards, avoid labor abuses, and still be competitive with shit we get from China.
This is compounded by the fact that we do have some of this manufacturing in the US, because it’s more-or-less required by the Barry Amendment (USC 10 §2533(a)). But the costs are astronomical. Take a backpack made by Mystery Ranch. Their Black Jack 80–identical to the USSOCOM SPEAR Patrol bag they make, just with another name–is $1200. The version that’s made in Vietnam and is not Barry-compliant, was about $400. The materials and craftsmanship were substantially identical, but the fabrics were sourced from outside the US, and the manufacturing was done outside the US. There’s no reasonable way that the US gov’t can subsidize those kinds of costs.
He doesn’t do “better”.
