What if they gave a trade war and no one came?
That philosophical question from the 60s is rhetorical because they are most certainly coming to Trump’s trade war. China became the first country to strike back at the US for Trump’s “unilateral bullying practice” by imposing a 34 percent tariff on all American imports.
On the American side of the pond, layoffs have already begun as Stellantis NV, an automaker, announced 900 layoffs in the US due to production pauses at plants in Mexico and Canada. The US job cuts are at plants that build components for the foreign factories.
Prices haven’t started rising yet, although some retailers may decide to get a jump on the tariff charges. Inventories already on hand won’t be taxed at the higher rate, but replenishment will. Large price increases are expected for clothing, cars, and raw materials like metals and textiles.
Tariff implementation is staggered with the universal 10 percent tariff effective on April 5 and the steeper “reciprocal” tariffs kicking in on April 9. After that, there will be a hodgepodge of retaliation from both other countries and Donald Trump.
This is just the beginning.
What comes after that is the question. In very large part, that depends on Donald Trump.
One option for Trump is to look for a few concessions from other countries, declare victory, and remove the tariffs. This would allow Trump to look somewhat sane and magnanimous, even if also like a bully. It would allow the stock market to rebound at least partially and hopefully avert a global recession. If, as some people claim, Trump is using tariff threats as a negotiating tactic, events would follow this course.
I don’t think this will happen.
I think the most likely course is that Trump doubles down and ramps up his tariffs as other countries respond. If you wonder why, I’ll point at history, both recent and otherwise. There is ample evidence that Trump has been a “Tariff Man” for decades. He really believes in the tactic, and during his first term, the tariffs were there to stay (with some waffling). There’s no reason to believe this time is any different.
The fact that Trump tariffed Israel after it preemptively removed its tariffs on US imports is an indication that it is not a negotiating tactic. Even if it was, it would be a poor negotiating tactic against countries like China where bending to Trump’s will would entail an unacceptable loss of face.
And let’s face it, who would trust Trump to make an honest deal at this point anyway? The president is infamous for changing and ignoring the terms of agreements. I mean, he calls the USMCA a horrible deal today but said it was the “best agreement we’ve ever made” when he signed it only five years ago. Anyone who inks a deal with Trump must know that it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
The question then becomes what happens when the trade war rages for the 1,384 days until Trump leaves office. For starters, the economy will slow and prices will rise. As is often the case, the poor will be hardest hit because so much of what lower-income people buy comes from countries like China and Vietnam. The inventories of retailers like Dollar General, Walmart, Amazon, and Temu will be hard hit.
Inflation may also rise. Those who don’t remember the 70s may not have heard the term “stagflation,” but many economists are predicting that the combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth is a distinct possibility.
We have already seen plummeting stock markets and magically disappearing 401(k)s, and that trend is likely to continue with more rounds of retaliation. Shockingly, the Trump supporters I know who were very concerned about their retirement savings during the 2022 stock market declines after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine are mostly silent. At this point, they haven’t felt the pain, and most of them still have faith that Trump knows what he is doing.
How long will it take them to disabuse themselves of that notion? Who knows? Some never will. For others, at some point, it will kick in that they’ve been had, but after a full decade of being programmed by Fox News and right-wing media to believe that Trump is a messianic genius, it is going to be a long process.
How long may depend on how bad it gets and how quickly. The 2018 tariffs destroyed hundreds of thousands of the manufacturing jobs they were meant to create and bankrupted farms, but most Trump supporters still think that the Trump economy was a strong one. This is due in roughly equal parts to a rose-colored view of the past, disinformation by right-wing media, and the fact that if they weren’t directly affected by the economic effects of the tariffs, their information bubbles meant that they wouldn’t hear about them. Further, the pandemic overtook the economy as the major story of 2020 and helped Trump escape accountability for his ill-advised trade policies.
Of course, the 2025 tariffs are bigger than the 2018 tariffs, and Trump is introducing them earlier in his term. Whether the tariff policy is successful or not will be very evident by the midterms. By 2028, the Republican Party will be reeling unless course reversals are made. In a 50-50 country, it won’t take a large electoral shift to produce a blue wave, and I do expect a significant shift.
Nevertheless, the US has a strong economy that can withstand a lot of mismanagement. The future looks even worse for countries like Vietnam, where 30 percent of the country’s exports go to the US. It will be difficult for the country to replace US buyers, so the imposition of tariffs based on a lie that even Erick Erickson has called out could devastate the economy. Vietnam never had a 90 percent tariff on US imports, as Trump claimed. The actual figure varies by commodity, but the highest published rate for Most Favored Nation countries was 10 percent.
Recessions in other countries may not bear the political weight of a domestic downturn, but they can spark humanitarian crises or even wars. That’s particularly true since the trade war is being combined with Trump’s shutdown of foreign aid projects to create a double whammy. It seems that the Administration doesn’t want to give handouts to other countries, but it also doesn’t want them to better themselves by trade.
There is also a possibility that Trump may “wag the dog.” At some point, he may try to distract the nation from its economic problems with an invasion of Greenland or Panama. I don’t believe that Trump is intentionally crashing the economy to trigger unrest and use the Insurrection Act, but that chain of events could happen even without premeditation.
As I wrote last week, the trade war won’t affect all countries equally. China is well-positioned to fill the America-shaped vacuum left by Trump’s isolationism after it employed the savvy strategy of not declaring a trade war against the entire world. If Sun Tzu didn’t say something about it being a bad idea to declare war on the whole world at once, he should have. China would also like to take the American role as de facto leader of the world, a mantle that MAGA seems happy to surrender. Brazil, an exporter of soybeans, oil, and iron ore, also stands to gain ground with former buyers of US goods.
The trade war is not going to end well for the US or anyone else. How bad it gets depends on how long Donald Trump is willing to pursue a failed and destructive policy.
The best that we can hope for is that the economic devastation will inoculate American voters against economic populism, particularly the authoritarian MAGA strain. As I’ve said before, nothing will make the public sour on Trump like letting him get what he wants. His ideas are just bad.
In the meantime, our 401(k)s may be significantly lighter and we may be turning allies into enemies at an alarming rate, but boys can’t play on girls’ teams and Kamala had an annoying laugh. It’s all been worth it, right?
People need to understand how fascism works, philosophically. Fascism is, ultimately, a belief in natural hierarchies extended to the natural conclusion. This applies to everything. The part people tend to misunderstand is that they think this is _logical_. That you can make agreements to be subservient, and those agreements will be honored.
It is not. It is all lizard-brain nonsense. The lizard brain has a vague sense of where people belong, and a sense if if they ‘know their place’.
This is, for example, why it doesn’t require people to think they’re at the top. It has a vague sense of where it belongs, too. It has as much genuflecting towards people above them as it expects genuflecting from people below them. This is why you get people like Trump cowtowing to people like Putin. He thinks Putin is above him, and it’s entirely natural for him to give deference to him.
This also means, in their little lizard brain, that they see people who did not know their places but were forced into agreement with what they say not as ‘making a deal’, but that such people not only rightfully belong below them, but need to be forced there, forever.
Columbia caved to Trump instantly, and he decided to continue to destroy them. He will continue to humiliate them, forever. He thinks they challenged him, and they are forever his enemy.
Resistance, meanwhile, tends to actually scare them. Because if they have to back down, it make their lizard brain reprogram you into into an equal, because the other option is somehow their lesser beat them. So you must not actually be long there.
Practically speaking, you can remain safe from bullies, and fascists, and whatnot, by doing vaguely what they say, never challenging them, and never becoming their enemy, and hoping you never fall into a class of people they go after. Never look weak or like an easy target, but never strong enough to challenge them. Staying under the radar _does_ work, I will admit that.
But once you _do_ become their enemy, it doesn’t matter how much you cower and beg and plea and agree to do what he says, he will continue to hurt you.
Foreign countries appear to mostly be understanding that they fall into ‘a class of people the fascists go after’ as a general rule, and are not going to cave. They’re already his enemy, he already thinks they ‘don’t know their place’, and they fully understand this.Report
It would almost be funny if the Trump administration collapsed because he stood on one of the few principles he seems to have.Report
I think now is a good time to talk about Liz Truss. Now Truss was a fool who announced an inexplicably poor economic policy, which quickly panicked the markets. She was a terrible choice for leader, and choosing her was an indictment of the Conservative Party. But you’ll note that one she screwed up badly enough, they got rid of her, quickly. And while I wouldn’t call Rishi Sunak a good PM, he at least knew better than to crash the economy.
Which means that while The UK’s Conservatism are a dysfunctional mess, they are much less of a disaster than the Republican Party is right now.Report
Yes, all true. There’s a bit of a structural element in that Lettuce Head Liz Truss was, effectively, the Speaker of the House in American contexts and, thus, Trump would be a lot harder, functionally and procedurally, to ditch. The underlying point, though, that tanking the economy is going to reduce Trumps power is a good one though- it should and will.Report
Impeachment is harder than rolling a PM for sure, but if the Republicans were to reach out to the Democrats in the spirit of bipartisanship, I’m sure they could make it happen.
For that matter, the Republicans could work with the Democrats to build a veto-proof majority to strip Trump of his tariff powers and reverse the tariffs he’s already imposed. Somehow, I’m not optimistic.Report
Oh yes, no denying that the GOP is way deeper into the deranged mindless right wingism that the Tories ever got.Report
What Trusk is doing right now is basically the economic equivalent of the Ghost Dance.Report
Yeah, I mean they’re not bringing their Liz Trussalike to heel now as he does his level best to crash the global economy, but most of the Congressional Republicans who are committed to nonfeasance now also voted against holding him accountable in February of 2020 after he sent a mob to murder them
The story of Trump’s rise to power is also a story of every American institution failing to meet him with appropriate resistance, and the institution that failed first and most thoroughly is the Republican PartyReport
I’d say that’s a very accurate summation.Report
This. It’s basically like we are living in a real life version of the Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.Report
The Republican Party is very weak, the voters overrode it to pick Trump. The “appointed” candidate both cycles was someone else.
The unfortunate reality is the system allows for popular but unfit candidates to be voted in.
The good news is Trump crashing the economy will lower his popularity. This is also the bad news.Report
What do you expect will change as a result?Report
Philip: What do you expect will change as a result?
The political calculus at the moment is Trump was just elected and his base is solidly behind him, so any GOP member can expect to lose their next election if they oppose him.
Trump crashing the economy on a whim is also him losing the backing of his base (or just making the other 80% so angry that they’re willing to stand up to him) that GOP politicians will have to oppose him to get elected.
It might even get so bad that his cabinet needs to replace him with Vance leading the coup.
Big picture the root problem with Trump is he wins elections, so him being able to do what he wants is a feature of Democracy and not a bug.Report
We have Liz Tuss or worse as President without a good way to remove her from power. On attempt to remove or at least hinder Trump will require the Republicans to team up with the Democrats. Republicans aren’t going to do that.Report
This is true but it should also be noted that the Parliamentarian system provides a release valve for poor leaders. I don’t think it is fool proof if a plurality of voters want authoritarianism but release valves and being able to kick out the PM from within are important.Report
Making Musk’s sucky video game console in the hot sun
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I needed a job ’cause RFK cut federal funding for cancer research
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I left my adjunct position and it feels so bad
Guess my tenure is done
It’s the best teaching job I ever had
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
Writing federal grants with a ball point pen
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I lost my pension and I lost my retirement
I fought the Trump and the Trump won
I fought the Trump and the Trump wonReport
One thing that I’ve seen over and over again is some variant of this argument:
“It’s possible to have done the tariffs correctly but this isn’t how to do them! They should have done them like this…” and then they rattle off a handful of ways that the tariffs should have been done instead.
Trump’s biggest weapon is that he appears to be directionally correct to huge numbers of his critics, just inept at execution.
The market fundamentalists have been singing their same song as since the 90’s, of course. Tariffs are bad, they’re always bad, you’re costing yourself money, so on and so forth. Anyone who has argued with Libertarians over the last 30 years has these arguments memorized.
The whole “libertarian” thing is played out, though. Low-status. The new hotness is arguing “other industries than the one I’m in should not have tariffs… Trump should have *SOME* tariffs but he shouldn’t be doing them the way that he is doing them! He should do them like this…”Report
It’s all a question of what your goals are. We sold the American consumer market way short to China in the 90s. There’s a (IMO good) case to be made for a correction and tariffs may well be part of it. What there isn’t a good case for is cutting off our own supply chains in the Western hemisphere, risking our access to other developed economies with whom America is more than capable of competing fairly, or punishing a bunch of undeveloped African countries who sell us raw materials, plus some already marginalized colonies of photogenic flightless birds.Report
“There’s a (IMO good) case to be made for a correction and tariffs may well be part of it.”
It looks like a substantial portion of the American ex-Producer market feels like it was defected against and is now part of defecting back.
I have a handful of suggestions for putting things right again… but the first step is acknowledging that something bad happened and the something bad involved defecting against the American ex-Producers.
But doing that involves, among other things, agreeing with Trump.Report
Sure but none of that excuses Trump from doing an objectively crappy job at whatever it is he’s aiming for (assuming he’s aiming at anything at all). The Europeans apparently already offered a bilateral 0 industrial tariffs deal that he’s thumbed his nose at. Now we all know Europe is hardly the cause of the decline of the post industrial Midwest but it’s a small win that doesn’t threaten anyone, and probably helps some of our own exporters, yet he won’t take it because he’s an idiot. At what point does it become fair to judge him on his own performance?Report
Oh, I’m not trying to excuse Trump as much as I see him as God’s Punishment.
(Of course I agree that we should have bilateral 0 industrial tariffs with Europe.)Report
Then we defect against them harder next time
The way to deal with Nazis is to crush them thoroughly, until they recognize that Nazism is suicide, not to accommodate them because they feel they were stabbed in the back by Judeo-Bolshevism
We learned that lesson the hard way the first time, and it looks like we’ll have to learn that lesson the hard way the second time, tooReport
That strikes me as a lot more likely to normalize Naziism than to crush it.
But I’m one of those people who sees the American ex-Producers as not particularly Naziish and conflating what they are with what happened in the 30s and 40s is not going to work out in the favor of the people who keep nominating Clintons and Kamalas.Report
Given that the signature feature of Trumpism is wildly dishonest conspiracy theorizing, my baseline assumption is that any Trump supporting claiming they were defected against is that they are lying outright, using that imagined betrayal as a cover for the vicious, stupid bigotry that actually motivates themReport
Well, I suppose that denial that a large number of American producer types got the short end of the stick during the global outsourcing thing over the last few decades is a good play.
Worked well so far.
Maybe it will continue to work as well as it has so far.Report
Should we also cater to their insistence that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim and that measles vaccines are just as dangerous as the measles, or are we only supposed to attribute and credit invented motives to Trump supporters because those are the ones we need to make them seem sympathetic?Report
If you think that if someone believes a set of right things and a set of wrong things gives you an out against agreeing with them where they are right because of how offensive you find their wrongness, you’re effectively putting a tariff on truth.
And the person who is getting the short end of the stick in that is “everybody”.Report
It has nothing to do with agreeing with them, and everything to do with believing that malicious liars are not being truthful when they tell you what their grievances are, especially when they use those grievances to advance policies–like these–that make everything they claim to be upset about worse!Report
Well, this goes back to the whole NAFTA thing. Was NAFTA supposed to make their lives better?
They don’t seem to agree that their lives are better.
Maybe you could point out the GDP again. Point out how much better off you are.Report
Every Presidential Election Team Blue has had for the last 50+ years has been against na.zism. If that’s all you’ve got, then you’ve got nothing because there’s nothing you can say on that subject against Trump that you haven’t already said a dozen or so times.
I would love for Team Blue to discover and advocate for good government, rule of law, gov reform, and so on. I would love even more for Blue to run on economic growth.
These would be easy issues to steal from Trump.Report
If only there was a deliberative body outlined in the Constitution that could handle a considered response to foreign tariffs! One that was leery about ceding its authority even.Report
If only indeed.Report
The deliberative body always ™ delegates the actual negotiations to the Executive because the deliberative body can’t really negotiate coherently.
Now, the deliberative body should delegate tasks ad hoc and post hoc the delegated authority should be circumscribed until the next delegated task… but, yes, the point is directionally true.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10038Report
Agreed, but piling on the ‘failed execution’ aspect of any Trump project is that the path forward was never just tariffs.
There’s a ton of work to do internally with how we invest on infrastructure … ironically the IRA highlights what many of those reforms need to hit. And then there’s separating the objectives by region and geo-strategy. And then there’s building new(ish) trading blocs FIRST so that we can detach or provide incentives to new trade policies in other harder to crack areas. And then there’s a general requirement for determining what success looks like, and how sub-successes are prioritized… etc. etc. etc.
IMO the thing that you use to detach weak-Trumpers (or anti-Democrats) is ‘do you really trust Trump to have done his homework and do you trust him to make things better after he makes things worse for the other team?’
It won’t overcome negative partisanship entirely… but if you’re in politics for the iterations you have to take the things he’s directionally right on — and prove that you’re better than he is to change the ship of state.
In the end, Trump likes tariffs, and he has authority to use tariffs… so his policy is, tariffs. He never ever does the work that’s needed to be a successful statesman.Report
No disagreement from me on the big strategic picture.
But I still think it’s worth making a stink about the bonfire we’re throwing ourselves on with Trump in hopes that maybe he in all his fickleness pulls back some; maybe some credibility is salvaged for the day after he’s gone. Because as much as I agree with you on the desirability of a responsible altering of course Trump may do enough damage to make that impossible for a generation. There’s no ‘oops just kidding’ anymore, now that we’ve put him in charge twice.Report
It took approximately 3 seconds for people to start calling DeSantis worse than Trump during the 4 seconds that DeSantis was ahead of Trump during the 2023-2024 primary season.
I’m not quite sure that we’ve escaped the hyperreality of the moment.
But maybe a trade war will bring us back down to reality…Report
Heck, I remember in 2015 when Trump was just some weirdo that nobody was taking seriously, and people talking about how Ted Cruz looked like a drowned man’s cock and Rubio was a Tio Tom and so on.Report
Guys, this is bordering on autistic. The Democrats have made plenty of errors resulting in some real issues of credibility. But this idea that partisan mudslinging is the decisive consideration here strikes me as its own type of Twitter brain, where political junkies project their own obscure fixations into everything without even bothering to make a case for a connection.Report
I don’t think that “bordering on autistic” is an insult when you’re actually talking to people who are “bordering on autistic”.
It certainly not an argument for those people to change.Report
OK how about it’s just nonsensical? We finally put the “well this is what you get for not abandoning Obama and being so mean to Romneybot in 2012” and now we’re on to “Well this is what you get for not abandoning Clinton/Biden in 2016/2020 and being so mean to Rubio/Cruz/Desantis”?!Report
The question, as always, is “what are you willing to compromise on?”
And if the answer is that all of your beliefs are too precious to compromise on, then… here we are. With a group of people who also are unwilling to compromise.
Maybe you can throw together a list of reasons that it’s morally incumbent on two groups of people who disagree with each other to compromise and work together.Report
Jay, me lad, going for Desantis instead of Trump isn’t compromising- it’s capitulating. DeSantis was running as Trump in thigh high waders.
Compromising would be sticking with your candidate and pushing them to moderate on language and policy which, let us note, Both Biden and Harris did on immigration, identity issues and many other things. I think one can say they compromised too late (Biden) or too little (Harris) since they lost but one can’t pretend they didn’t compromise.Report
Oh, I wouldn’t suggest that DeSantis is a compromise candidate.
I would, however, suggest that he is not as bad as Trump.
I would not, for example, call DeSantis “God’s Punishment”.
As for what I might expect from others, I’s expect fewer to compare DeSantis to Hitler or compare DeSantis supporters to Nazis.
Or maybe that’s just where we are now. Anybody who disagrees with me is Ontologically Evil.
It might explain how we got Trump, now that I think about it.Report
This might, maybe, make sense if that kind of name calling were new or unusual or anything else but it is, of course, as old as the hills, older than you and I and entirely bipartisan. Though I, being left of center, would note that calling Obama an Islamic Marxist monster or Hillary all the things they called her was language that was coming from the actual GOP party actors whereas the Desantis=Hitler chatter was largely twitter twaddle and social media pap by my recollection.
And if that language is how we got Trump then is there some magical reason that the name calling of the right by the left absolves the right of responsibility for nominating Trump (and lets’ not even talk about how libertarians actors online have almost en toto sold their souls to Trump)? Or why the left gets no credit for NOT nominating a left-wing Trump despite endless name calling from the right? I mean how is this not just Murcs’ law all the way down to the bones? *bursts into flames for using an LGM term here*Report
Jaybird, DeSantis didn’t even make it to New Hampshire by the will of Republican primary voters. Are you really saying that this kind of rhetoric (which I also find mostly stupid) weighed into their decision? They voted for Trump because they preferred him, not because online blue tribe hysteria forced their hand.Report
I’d say that Biden was a *GREAT* compromise candidate!
The problem is that he didn’t govern as one. Whether you want to get into whether that was Biden’s doing or whether it happened without his knowledge, that’s fine.
But Biden was voted for enthusiastically and then… well, you remember 2024 as well as I do.
As for Harris, when asked what she would have done differently, she said nothing. She said it on The View! She said it during a softball interview to a non-wonky audience!
And that’s without getting into the stuff that they were able to run ads on without Harris even addressing forcing her most ardent defenders to say stuff like “but she didn’t *RUN* on that!”
And so you’re stuck with the Harris attacks being “here’s what she said on camera” which, as attacks go, are among the most vicious.
Why doesn’t the left get more credit for running Harris and having Liz Cheney up on stage with her?
Yeah, you’d think that they would.Report
Uh yes, Jay, I did say that the allegation is that Harris compromised too little. But she did compromise. She walked back from her 2020 positions, deemphasized or reversed herself on them and generally stood down. Not enough. Not visibly enough likely and certainly not with any finesse but she did do all that.
So… now we’ve switched from “Why don’t the Dems compromise??” to “Why don’t the Dems compromise enough??” And we still haven’t answered why only the Dems have agency.Report
I don’t remember her walking back from her 2020 positions. I *DO* remember her defenders arguing “she didn’t run on that!” instead of “she reversed herself!”
I don’t think that the language is how we got Trump as much as I think that the failure to compromise on stuff is how we got him.
I also think that there was quite a cultural backlash against the Mostly Peaceful Summer and covid-lockdowns continuing into 2022… and that’s without getting into the immigration debacle and the crime numbers (that ended up actually going up instead of down after all of the smoke cleared).
Biden was the compromise. And Harris said that she wouldn’t have changed anything.Report
YOur memory is faulty then. Harris reversed herself on Fracking (switching from wanting to ban it to supporting it); she reversed herself on decriminalizing border crossings (switching from supporting decriminalizing it to saying there should be consequences for illegal border crossings and the laws on the border must be enforced); she reversed on electric vehicle mandates (in 2020 she wanted to require 100% carbon neutral tech on vehicles by 2035, in 2024 she stated she didn’t support an electric vehicle mandate); she reversed herself on Medicare for All (in 2020 she supported it, in 2024 she only campaigned on strengthening existing medicare but ditched the M4A plank). Likewise she ran a convention that could have been lifted from the GOP in the 90’s full of Americanism and promised a lethal military.
So, you’re just misremembering it, sorry. As for the scum and chuds who started stuff when it got dark in 2020; the media who pantingly apologized for it and the government that oversaw the lockdowns (reminder: that was under Trump or, after 2020 a bunch of localities, none of whom reported to the Federal Dems); none of them were running in 2024. Harris did compromise, reverse herself etc… just not enough or not with enough finesse.
So we agree that Harris, Biden and the Dems did compromise- they just didn’t capitulate. So why is it only they are responsible for Trump? Could it be possible that the GOP and the right might, maybe, possibly, have any scintilla of responsibility for the candidate they nominated and elected?Report
Oh, yeah. Fracking. Yeah, you’d think that more people would give her credit on that.Report
You don’t think it’s worth mentioning that Trump is about to reward his working class supporters by pushing the prices of goods through the roof and destroying whatever retirement they have saved? Or driving us towards a recession where jobs and benefits will be harder for them to come by?
I don’t think too many of them were following whatever MSNBC or pre-Elon Twitter was saying about DeSantis.Report
Of course it’s worth mentioning.
But I also don’t know that their perceptions will shift to “I will vote for whomever promises cheaper imported electronics”.
I don’t know that it won’t… but I don’t know that it will.
As for a recession, I go back to my von Mises. We need to wring out the rot. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to *SUCK*. But we need to wring out the rot. Not wringing out the rot got us here. Kicking the can down the road will make the eventual wringing even worse.Report
That belies all political and electoral history. Biden presided over a soft landing but the voters still handed his party still got handed an L because inflation* and bad vibes from Covid occurred during his watch. Do you think those same voters are going to talk about “wringing out the rot” when Trump induces a recession, inflation and tanks their 401k’s? The politically engaged Trump voters -might- babble that cope. But with just them Trump and his party will go down in a landslide.
*And to some degree his spending levels too but mostly Covid.Report
I don’t think that those same voters will talk about wringing out the rot. If I thought that even one out of twenty of them knew who von Mises was, I’d feel better about things.
But there’s the “what those same voters think” and there’s the “what I think” and there isn’t a whole lot of overlap there.
There are a handful of goals that overlap, though. That’s probably incidental.Report
I think it goes without saying that the Democrats’ fortunes will greatly improve if they come up with an answer to that question. They’re in the wilderness for a reason.
However I don’t think the swing-ish voters have read von Mises. I think there was a very understandable thermostatic reaction due to inflation with immigration and some cultural issues as auxillaries but there was no resounding mandate for this. People are about to get double forked here, and the promise that it’s all going to be worth it because a bunch of factories are going to go up (where? when? for what? who knows) is a complete lie, if that’s even what people are relying on, which I’m not entirely sure it is.Report
Yes, that’s a real concern. In fact, it concerns me that the Liberal response has been a sort of libertarian embrace of market fundamentalism.
Credit to AOC and Bernie who are at least pulling out bad ideas from the previous century… but Dem critiques of Tariffs in the service of anti-Trumpism? Eeep.Report
Sure, I’d support a more intelligent approach to this from the Democrats, same as the last 8 years.
I think what’s frustrating me is our silence on the question of at what point more than a couple Republicans should start to break ranks. Given their stated desire to make America great again and all, and this plan’s er- inconsistency with that.Report
Yes, the Republican party is broken.
Strangely, there are just no incentives for your old OG Republican to do anything other than watch where this goes.
If *they* kill it, then they kill what would have been the biggest, most beautiful success ever. Career ending.
If Trump crashes and burns, whelp they just go back to their safe seats and hope to ride out the failure… some won’t make it, but some will. Still better than the sure thing of ending their careers.
The parties are frozen until something breaks.Report
It’s funny, a lot of centrist writers are wringing their hands because Dems aren’t issuing a libertarian embrace of market fundamentalism right now. Chait frets about it over at the Atlantic right now.Report
Heh, #Notalldemocrats … now I’m mildly interested in what Chris Deluzio is all about.
From the one paragraph I’m allowed to read:
“The video featured Representative Chris Deluzio, from western Pennsylvania, who calmly intoned, “A wrong-for-decades consensus on ‘free trade’ has been a race to the bottom” and “Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.””Report
There’s a webtool that bypasses their paywall. I’ll post a link sometime when I get home.
If I understand my party (and I think I do) the awkward problem for the Deluzio brand Dems is they are not very pro-free trade so the Trump nonsense is kind of a monkeys paw wish. They want to oppose Trump but they don’t want to/believe in embracing free trade market fundamentalism. I think theyr kind of dippy but I’m a neoliberal shill so I would.Report
https://archive.ph/JcWUCReport
Thanks for the link… and yes, the Neo-Liberal shills are shilling and to my point, I think they are pursuing intra-Dem fights with the new and likely effective anti-Trump packaging.
Which is to say that the Party realignment (and role reversals) continues apace:
“Not long ago, the political logic of rejecting free trade made a certain degree of sense for Democrats. But events have a way of changing political logic. A trade-skeptical message that worked perfectly well five or 10 years ago is going to sound awfully out of touch after Trump is done turning tariffs into a synonym for catastrophic ineptitude.”
The context for his ending the argument thus is spelled out earlier: we (Dems) can’t have a ‘subtle’ or ‘nuanced’ trade policy or talk about competence in deploying such a policy — we must abandon all things to oppose Trump and any future policy that might be tainted by Trump. And by the way, my favored policy is the way we should abandon those things.
Electorally, he might even be right — as we discuss above, Trump often poisons things he touches… it’s one of the reasons not to support Trump. So taking opposing positions definitionally isn’t a bad electoral strategy.
But, I honestly do think that abandoning ‘good’ or ‘subtle’ or ‘nuanced’ positions just because Trump bigfooted some of them isn’t in anyone’s long-term interests.
And finally, on a purely electoral note… adopting the opposite of some of your formerly held positions often works at cross purposes with a) your ability to talk to them, b) being perceived as sincere, c) how the new things work with the old things that are still important, and d) how realignment can cross pressure individual reps whose constituencies still adhere to the ‘old’ party alignment.
Anyhow, this is what I was saying in that there’s a lot of pressure to simply become market fundamentalists and abandon positions that were ‘reasonable’ 5-yrs ago because of optics.
Unfortunately the Trump effect is bad in so many different ways, it’s hard to settle on a single one to hate. But one thing I’d personally avoid is simply taking the opposite stance; sometimes it really is better to acknowledge the point and give the opponent a noose of how he’s doing it is worse than how you’d do it.
Not doing that is kinda how the R’s got Trump in the first place.Report
The Democrats are split between Free Trade is good and realizing that the former message of “those jobs are not coming back but we will retrain you to be home health aides” was a loser.
Some like Whitmer have parochial interestsReport
I think I get all that but the question of free trade is more nuanced in the Dem coalition than describing it as “adopting the opposite” covers. Clinton, after all, oversaw NAFTA and Obama was a relatively decent free trader too while W had significant apostacies on Trade and Trump, of course, never met a tariff he didn’t love.
The complexity of packaging that and selling it is why politics is difficult. The Dems have had a pretty nuanced and sensible approach to trade. Biden certainly wasn’t an enthusiastic free trader- he didn’t ink any free trade bills, but he primarily rolled back free trade in an area of industrial policy that was based on national security considerations rather than economic/moral arguments and was pretty easy to defend (unless you’re a doctrinaire free trader).
But, really, the Dems are early in a wilderness phase so all the factions trotting out their positions and aligned journalists, like Chait, flying the banners for their respective positions is part of the operational process of a healthy party. Marketing trade to voters is hard to fit into a sound bite but a clever enough politician can be both appealing and vague enough to sell just about any policy and, after Trumps idiocy, just about any nuanced trade position should be a political winner.
And this is all presuming that A) Trump doesn’t eventually realize that his Tariff nonsense is killing him, declares victory and rolls it all back or B) the GOP in congress realizes the tariff nonsense will kill THEM before it kills Trump and joins with the Dems to end all of it.Report
One of the things people forget about the 2018 trade thing was that China had a massive swine-flu outbreak at the time, and the trade war was less a “war” and more an expected downturn in demand. If it had been Clinton instead of Trump we wouldn’t have heard much about it.Report
1. Higher prices on everything;
2. Fewer products available. A company called Framework is not ending lower priced laptops to the U.S. anymore because of tariffs. Nintendo has stopped taking pre-orders on the Switch 2 to figure out the tariff regime.
3. Recession, Depression, Increased Unemployment, Bankrupted industriesReport
I mean that is trump in a nutshell. The four P’s that the right stands for: Pollution, Poverty, Plague and Plutocrats.Report
There is a 104% tariff on goods from China.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/trump-china-tariff/index.html
It is impossible to overstate how much of a big freaking disaster this is going to be for the American consumer. It just isn’t fancy Iphones that come from China. A lot of basic medicines and medical goods come from China and a lot of clothing. Things are going to get more expensive and crappier.Report
I always wonder why people think that doomposting about “supply shocks” and “everything’s gonna cost more” is necessarily going to bring readers to their side.
It’s entirely possible that someone will look at that and say “wait, why were these vital materials that we can’t run society without being made overseas? Don’t we remember 2020 where suddenly it was impossible to get masks because the Chinese government refused to ship them to us? Why do tariffs on Mexican imports mean that a car factory in Detroit has to shut down, shouldn’t that factory be making all its own parts anyway?”Report
The tariffs are extremely unpopular and only committed Trumpists and anti-Democrats think otherwise.Report
Most of the tariffs are unpopular. The ones for my industry have a lot of local support.
It’s those other ones that we don’t need.Report
It may be “entirely possible,” but it seems unlikely. And if they do actually wonder about it, they’re not likely to be receptive to anything that approximates an accurate explanation.Report
This would be an excellent line of thinking if the factories used to produce the stuff currently being tariffed still existed. Also, cheap labor exists in this world, and it ain’t in the United States.Report
Why doesn’t it exist in the United States? Was that a decision by the people who worked there to stop working there, or was it a decision by the people who owned the factories to close them and go somewhere cheaper?
“Keep manufacturing domestic” used to be a left-wing, pro-labor position!Report
https://bsky.app/profile/econberger.bsky.social/post/3lmd2yuzrok2p
Trump is stuck in a vision of the past that no one wantsReport
Make America 19th century again.Report
“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow CrashReport
I’d like to point out that music and movies have really fallen off in the last decade or so.
AI is surprisingly good at microcode and it hasn’t shown indications that it’s stopped getting better at it.
Pizza technology advancements have slowed (but not stopped). The small-batch artisanal stuff is surprisingly good while, at the same time, Costco’s $9.99 16″ Pepperoni pie’s only rival in value is the $1.50 hot dog.Report
What makes AI good at microcode is less that it’s good at microcode and more that processors are now so powerful that they don’t need good microcode to run sufficiently well for the purpose.Report
“As good as the median programmer” is still pretty darn good.Report
Thing is, once “sufficiently good” is nearly free, opportunities for “good but not top-tier” tend to dry up real fast.Report
Yeah. And then there will be only three things we do better than anyone else.
Music.
Movies.
High-speed pizza delivery.Report
and I’ll be honest, based on local results the “high-speed pizza delivery” ain’t lookin’ so great either.Report
Apple is going to move Iphone production from China to…India, as a way around the tariffs.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-production-china-tariffs-6cc37f40Report
China is massively unstable and should be expected to implode some day (see also: Russia).
Apple should have been in the process of moving for years.Report
India isn’t the exact model of political stability itself. My main point is that the tariffs are not going to revive American manufacturing.Report
They have been.Report
Thats actually good news.Report
https://bsky.app/profile/mattmfm.bsky.social/post/3lmcjz76xws2n
Apparently lots of small businesses are leaving product in China because they can’t afford the tariffs.
The real havoc to the stock market happens at midnight tonightReport
Israel’s currents tariff’s on American goods are somewhere in the range of 1% to 2%. Netanyahu promised tariffs of 0% on American imports if Trump would not impose tariffs on Israel. Trump said no and went on to impose the tariffs. Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump was to flatter him out of the tariffs and Trump would not budge. This is extremely bad because Netanyahu is probably the foreign leader most likely to get Trump to budge on tariffs.
https://archive.ph/lSVAj#selection-317.0-321.253Report
He’s a narcissist who has surrounded himself with “Yes” men.
“Not budging” and “being unreasonable” are part of the package, even before we get into dementia.Report
This narcissism and the cult around him menas that Americans are going to get experience what shopping in a late stage Communist country is like. Republicans in Congress are either totally in on the cult or can’t bring themselves to work with the Democrats to get rid of Trump.Report
There is sometimes a rational basis to be unreasonable and there is nothing wrong with going into some kind of negotiation demanding things you know you will not get or asking for more than is reasonable. But there are limits.
Trump doesn’t understand those limitsReport
Futures are going down, down, down.
https://www.cnbc.com/pre-markets/Report
Car imports down, down, and downL
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/business/trump-tariffs-cars-auto-industry.html?smid=nytcore-android-share&fbclid=IwY2xjawJiundleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHjqwDqqz04A5EVYa2hIbkNYplkF9xCqx_ZBxxKGIYRr0fhj6nkubK9vMLXut_aem_TgYFMfmLZZZh6TMLSvJSIAReport
Get read for the $2300 Iphone.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/will-trump-tariffs-make-apple-iphones-more-expensive-2025-04-03/Report
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/64a602513d6ece9108396128979659a3bff2ca983df97c0d7efdf8990233a5d6.jpgReport
Why are you doing this?Report
He saw a really funny and insightful meme and wanted to share it.
I was hoping it was the Trump as Voldemort image where Voldemort has bad hair and is yelling “MAKE HOGWARTS GREAT AGAIN!” but Trump as Kim Jong Orange is good too.
With memes that good, you don’t even need an argument.Report
https://bsky.app/profile/juddlegum.bsky.social/post/3lmf67bbovc2w
If only Senator Kennedy were in a position to do something about his very informed views on why tariffs are bad.
Oh wait, he is. He just lacks a spine.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/opinion/trump-tariffs-rationale-power.html
“The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams, hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.
This simple fact of the president’s psychology does more to explain his antipathy to international trade and enthusiasm for tariffs and other trade barriers than any theorizing about his intentions or overall vision. It certainly is not as if he has a considered view of the global economy. It is not even clear that Trump knows what a tariff is.”Report
More Market Fundamentalism vs. Well You Have To Understand:
Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan’s governor) gave a speech saying “look, I like tariffs too, but this is just nuts!” and Jared Polis (Colorado’s governor) responded by saying that nobody should like tariffs because tariffs are bad for everybody (and adds a note about how sanctions can be cool, though).
In related news, China has filed a complaint with the WTO.Report
He’s running!
Pretty interesting that he’s publicly calling-out Whitmer on Twitter.Report
That’s one hell of a strong signal to undecideds and weak Republicans. “Hey! This guy feels about markets the way that *I* do! He’s even willing to take on his own side!”Report
Prepping for the primary. With the kind of crap going on it’s never too early to start.Report
We could have worse candidates, but I’d prefer better ones. Still, I wish him well.Report
Abundance, baby!Report
There’s a somewhat heated debate amongst the various types of leftists going on right now on the various social media around the idea of tariffs. A lot of trade unionist types going back to the industrial revolution, and a lot of social democrats in the 20th century, have been in favor of targeted tariffs as a form of protectionism for workers (can’t lose jobs to manufacturing in Germany if we have tariffs on German-made goods here in 1840s England, now can we! sorta thing). A lot of internationalists are like, “Tariffs are a form of nationalism. All nationalism is bad. Therefore all tariffs are bad.” And the various types of Marxists (including the internationalists) point out that tariffs don’t end up helping workers, they just help capital (there are a bunch of Marx and Engels writings to this effect from the 1840s on). It’s been an interesting discussion, with good points on both sides (but still, tariffs are bad, and don’t help workers!).
Union leaders in the U.S. seem to heavily favor tariffs, particularly on cars, and a year or two ago, their members largely agreed, but recent polling suggest union rank and file are increasingly anti-tariff generally. I suspect that a Democratic mayor of Michigan has to say “Some tariffs are good” to keep on the auto unions good side.Report
Everybody knows that *MY* industry should be protected somewhat against malevolent actors who are abusing “so-called” free trade.
It’s those other tariffs that are bad. It’s in Adam Smith!Report
It seems to me that the most important part of the debate is about ‘the now’ and the future rather than the past. I had lunch earlier with a friend whose politics are a few ticks to my left and we talked a lot about the differences between doing something like this today versus, say, the 1990s. Thirty years ago there were still a lot more jobs on shore to protect. Now, to the extent you’re protecting anyone with them, it’s going to be a relatively small number of people juiced in on legacy arrangements. Which isn’t to say that decisively resolves the issue but it does IMO change what the question is. We aren’t really talking about a benefit to now existing people, not on any large scale. The question is whether the tariffs would operate to spur new investment in good jobs with strong labor protections. I’ve already stated my skepticism of that elsewhere but I’d certainly be curious if anyone has laid out why my view is wrong.Report
As someone who thinks that tariffs are pretty much always bad (“just because your opponent shoots himself in the foot doesn’t mean you should”), I do think that China has engaged in bad action over the last few decades when it comes to IP theft and whatnot.
Moving our manufacturing over there means that we’re giving them our blueprints and they can build an identical factory next door to the one we’re renting and make the same stuff to the same specs and sell it for just-above-cost and undercut the ever-living itshay out of American designs.
Which is bad.
And so we’re in a place where we can’t make it on US soil because we can’t afford to pay people what they’d require to do the work and the people who will do the work for pennies are willing to do the work for pennies because they’re stealing it. In the short term it looks great… and in the medium term, we’re out of business.
So tariffs, as retaliation for stuff like IP theft, makes sense to me. It’s a weird backwards protectionism in that it’s an attempt to protect IP rather than industry itself.
And it’s still a very blunt instrument that probably won’t work to disincent doing it again next time.
But it’s better than, say, war. Or a depression.Report
I think it’s all a question of what the goals are. There’s a strong national security case to be made around IP, or certain types of manufacturing. You don’t want the critical pieces of your best weapons technology being built or copied in the country you might end up needing to use those weapons against, or in close range of that country’s missiles. I think there’s also maybe a less straightforward but nevertheless compelling case that you do not want a country that you may be on a collision course with to enrich itself on easy access to your big rich consumer market. Tariffs may play some part in the strategy to deal with those things. The issue we face now is that the ship has already sailed on the latter, and maybe also on the former. The strongest criticism of what Trump is doing IMO is that tariffs on countries that sell us natural resources or make our shoes in horrid conditions aren’t relevant, and starting stuff with traditionally friendly advanced economies is counter productive.Report
I’m not a fan of the Biden administration by any means, but if you wanted to bring back manufacturing, the Biden administration’s chip and green initiatives seem to be the right way to do it. Those sectors also bring in enough jobs that there are whole non-profits being set up to help with workforce issues.Report
I was very positively disposed to those efforts.Report
Trump blinks except for ChinaReport
Here’s the Tweet from the White House.
Report
My 2 cents: he’s starting to get worried that this is weakening him so much that congress won’t be able to get their clowns in order to pass his tax cuts and safety net evisceration budget. So he’s pausing to try and get the big victories through congress first.Report
He has a number of folks he doesn’t respect explaining that tariffs are bad but he also has a number of folks he does respect explaining that tariffs are bad. Meanwhile, the only folks who are saying that tariffs are good are people he doesn’t respect.
It’s not a *DEDUCTIVE* argument but it *IS* an inductive one.
(And, let’s face it, if I wanted to argue for tariffs at all, easy mode would be “reciprocal tariffs against fellow first world nations”. The fact that a non-zero number of fellow first world nations reluctantly dropped their own tariffs would be an argument *FOR* reciprocal tariffs in practice even for someone who is a market fundamentalist in theory.)Report
On further reading it looked like the market turmoil got so bad that even Trump got nervous. Specifically the bond markets for Federal debt and the dollar started to get wobbly. Trump, evidently, isn’t worried about a recession but a full on financial crisis makes him nervous.Report
So I guess Trump did blink.
Say what you will about Voldemort, but he would have seen it through.Report
This is already pretty much how it was, though. First world countries occasionally use a tariff to protect an industry that actually exists (Unlike, say, our _coffee_ industry), and other countries then slap a tariff on something to protect something of theirs.
And no one tariffs entire countries, because that fundamentally makes no sense.
…what are you talking about?
First world countries tend to average about 2.5% tariffs with us, which is about what we charge them. China is 3%, Japan is 1.9%, the EU is 2.7%, Australia is 2.5%, Singapore is 0% somehow.
Which are close to ours tares. It’s hard to find details, but our average incoming tariff is (was?) 1.9%. But we, rather obviously, apply higher rates to things from wealthier countries. I’m not going to bother to track down and average the exact numbers, but we’re within 20% or so. If someone wants to argue tariffs should be slightly higher, hell, you can join my club.(1)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/trumps-tariff-rates-for-other-countries-larger-than-word-trade-data.html
I have no idea if you’d include India in ‘first world countries’, but there is one notable outlier, as India charges stuff from us at at 12%. I am not sure why.
Incredibly oddly, our top exports and imports from India _are mostly the same things_: Pearls and semi precious stones, electrical machinery and equipment, nuclear reactors, and mineral fuels and oils. Why we’ve decided to trade those things back and forth is unknown. Seriously, not making a joke here, I don’t understand that. The only difference is they also get ‘lenses, microscopes, medical instruments’ from us, and we also get ‘pharmaceutical products’ from them, which makes it sound like we’re supplying their pharmaceutical labs to make drugs for us! (Which at least makes sense, unlike trading nuclear reactors back and forth. WTH?)
1) My pro-tariff club says (Or said, this is nonsense now since Trump destroyed the world order) that we should tie tariffs to labor rights and workplace safety standards, and we should set up some sort of independent monitoring agency, maybe not even run by the US, but internationally, and say: The tariff are currently 4% on textiles from China (Or whatever they are), and next year they will be moving _up_ to 4.1% on that, _unless_ your company voluntarily complies and allows spot checks from these monitoring agency, at which point they will be 3.9%. And they will keep going up and down 0.1% points a year until they hit 5% and 3%, respectively.Report
I probably wouldn’t consider India a first world country but they’re getting there (and good for them). Street beggars have smartphones now and it wouldn’t surprise me if India is a first world country in the next couple of decades.
Eh, I’m not a fan of tariffs at all. If the other guy is shooting himself in the foot, why join him?
As for the whole labor rights/workforce safety standards thing, I get it and wouldn’t want to argue against it but those things are gameable in practice with Potemkin factories and the like and it’d end up being a pain in practice (though I get it in theory).Report
Tariffs shouldn’t be used to counter other tariffs, I agree. Where I think they should be used to is to counter unfair trade practices like a government deliberately subsidizing an industry to let it beat an American one, and then later raising prices after America’s industry collapses.
But that requires a lot of smart people, and also requires a lot of decisions about what ‘subsidizing’ is. Are other countries subsidizing workers because of socialized medicine, for example? That’s not there as a trade policy, but it could make things cheaper…OTOH, if both corporate and personal taxes are higher because of that, it’s _not_ doing that.
Etc, etc.
This is a place where smart people belong in figuring this out, and we should use our soft power to work on things, and…well, I’m pretending it’s three months ago, aren’t I? We pretty much just burned all that down.
You’d have to have a pretty competent organization that watched for all that. I will admit, I’m not 100% sure it’s possible, or could scale, but it’s not crazy to try.
And the entire concept of setting up _someone else_ to do it is that we would not have to deal with it. Some independent group that we just dump some money in and hopefully we don’t have to worry about. Maybe part of the WTO or something.Report
This is a place where smart people belong in figuring this out
I’ve met one or two smart people before. They were pretty cool. They didn’t have gummint jobs.
Maybe part of the WTO or something.
Yeah. You, like me, have met pretty smart people.
And here we are.Report
Governance by social media. Nothing the markets like more than a little certainty. Put 7/1 on your calendar to start dumping shares again.Report
Truly farcical.Report
I don’t plan to wait until 7/1 – now seems like a good opportunity to get out of the pool for a bit with minimal injury, while they figure out how toxic the contaminant is.Report
JFC, the Dow was up 3,000 today! If only we had advance warning of that knucklehead’s tariff meanderings. We’d be able to buy and sell Elon.Report
He Truth Socialed this morning that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
This was about four hours prior to the tariff announcement.Report
Kinda makes you wish you were a follower, don’t it?
Nuts, if you think about it.Report
A pretty good insight from a since-deleted tweet. (It wasn’t mine but since the guy deleted it immediately after posting it, I’m guessing he doesn’t want to be associated with its authorship.)
Report
Does anyone else find it infuriating how the media is reporting that the tariffs are paused?
No, the nonsensical calculations are gone, and everything is just at the 10% minimum now.
That is…about four times higher than it was before. So still pretty big.
But on top of that, the tariffs with China were the major harmful ones, and they are still there. Our three largest trading partners are Canada, Mexico, and China. Put together, that’s almost half of what we import. And those are the exact same places the Trump administration is putting large tariffs! Right now.
It’s really funny to mock how uninhabited islands are being tariffed, but that literally doesn’t impact us. Nor does us stupidly tariffing coffee…price will go up, demand will go down, people will live. Whatever. We taxed the EU, 10%, oh no, car prices might go up.
Canada, Mexico, and China are, uh, important. Both to actual consumers, and to companies that rely on them for sourcing for stuff they make.Report
A flashback from 2016:
Report
There’s no money in journalism. It only survives as a going concern by people working in it for prestige and bragging rights and by people owning it for prestige and bragging rights along with a trickle of revenue from the social media empires that leech off it and appropriated its original revenue streams.
The old model is dead, sustained in a kind of twitching coma state by those factors. No one has a fishing clue what the new model can be.Report
Open Source Yellow Journalism. Go on Twitter and explain “I am an Economy Scientist. This Economy is in great distress.”
Or “I am an Economy Scientist. This is the best Economy the world has ever seen. The red line going down is good, actually.”Report
Going back to an electronic equivalent of a person standing on a soapbox in the market square interspacing their “analysis” with declarations that are not a crank is a possibility, sure. People are hunting desperately for something better because it’s a pretty lousy possibility.Report
I just saw a very good point: “China can stay poor a lot longer than the US can stay poor.”Report