One of the ways that Trump reminds me of Bush Jr. is that you never want him to do anything you agree with, because he’ll fuck it up and discredit it. Trump’s tariffs are the platonic essence of fucking up a good idea.
Let’s run thru this:
Companies and individuals need predictability. Everyone has pointed this out, but it’s still true. You can’t lay on new production if you don’t know if the tariffs are here to stay or not.
It takes time to increase production so tariffs should come in like a lamb. Personally I’d have most tariffs increase by 1% every month or two, depending on how long a specific type of production takes to increase, until it reached my target. Companies can’t just spawn in new production, this isn’t a video game.
If you can’t produce it you shouldn’t tariff it unless you have hard currency issues. Mostly self-explanatory: tariffs are used to make domestic production economically viable. If you can never produce it tariffs don’t make sense unless you don’t have enough hard currency to import things you really need, usually capital machinery. This last part doesn’t apply to the US.
If domestic production has a better use, tariffs may be a bad idea. Right now the US is ramping up energy production to it can concentrate on AI. Putting tariffs on Canadian energy is thus stupid, since the US can’t build enough energy fast enough. Related: aluminum production is massively energy intensive. Tariffing Canadian aluminum means you need to use American energy for refining. Is that the best use of American energy right now? (I mean, a case could be made that AI is overhyped bullshit, but Trump isn’t saying that.)
Maybe you want to export goods to another country, and they’ll tariff you if you tariff them. Tariffs often need to be negotiated between countries. If everyone just tariffs everything, that’s the end of international trade. Generally the idea is “you specialize in X, we’ll specialize in Y and we’ll trade.” Comparative advantage is overstated and only works when there are no significant free capital flows, but it’s also true that no one can produce everything they need: not even China right now, or the US in 1950. So “tariffs on everything” is moronic.
Tariffs without industrial policy rarely work. If no one can afford to build up industry, or if the regulatory environment makes it hard, all the tariffs do is increase prices. Biden actually had pretty decent industrial support programs going and Trump is dismantling them. He should, instead, have left them in place while putting strategic tariffs in place to further support them.
Needless to say Trump is bad on all these issues, because he’s a tard.
NR
Trump and his cronies aren’t using tariffs to build up domestic industry. Trump and his cronies want tariffs as a backdoor method of implementing a national sales tax. Replacing the progressive income tax with a national sales tax has been a long-term goal of right-wingers, because sales taxes fall much more heavily on the poor and the middle class than they do on the rich.
But a national sales tax would have to pass Congress, while Trump can just throw out as many tariffs as he wants. It’s a win for him and his rich buddies and a loss for everyone else.
Mark Level
Yes, of course.
Your last one is key, of course. Since the US would never do “industrial policy”, on the off chance that it could raise the Peasant’s wages, which the Masters will not allow, “We can’t have nice things!”
This was a Hillary staffer line in 2016 about her campaign. Actually, it was what she told the peasants as well, “America is already great”, thus it came back to bite her. See the book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” by 2 actually talented DC journalists.
Since I respect you, I will have to take your word that “Biden actually had pretty decent industrial support programs going “, though I doubt the drooling old man designed them. If we are talking about Presidents who were ‘Tards, just in this century alone (no need to go back to Millard Filmore), or demented, counting backward we have Trump, Biden, Shrub the Lesser, Reagan, Harding as well. (He did Fillmore, more of what Trump bragged about grabbing, however, was reportedly poisoned by his jealous wife.) And let’s not forget that the once intelligent (if viciously reactionary and racist) Woodrow Wilson served the last part of his term with his Lady Macbeth wife making decisions, as Joe did alongside Jake the Human Scarecrow and Blinky.
Mencken’s old line applies: “”As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”
(Verified per Snopes. It’s interesting that he got the narcissistic piece in there so long ago.)
Ian Welsh
Mark:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/unpacking-the-boom-in-us-construction-of-manufacturing-facilities
Biden was shit in most ways, but he did occasionally appoint good peole and let them run. Lina Khan, for example.
Charlie
You’re the third left wing person I’ve seen use retarded as an insult this week.
Ian Welsh
When the shoe fits.
Dr. Beer N. Hockey
Yes!
mago
So some white dude went hunting in Africa and a flock of birds flew over and shat on his head.
Enraged he raised his rifle to shoot them, but his guide said, don’t do it. Those are foo birds, and to kill one brings bad luck.
Superstitious nigger thought the whitie who shot one down, then immediately fell dead.
The moral being, if the foo shits, wear it.
Apologies. Can’t help myself.
Poul
The biggest problem is a long term consistent policy whether it’s Republican’s or Democrat’s in the White House. It will take decades to change things just as it took decades to end up in the present situation.
Will we see such bi-partisan policies?
Also tariffs on money may be more effective.
https://archive.vn/UW6Do
“But the uncertainty could get worse. For amid all the tariff shocks, there is another question hovering: could Trump’s assault on free trade lead to attacks on free capital flows too? Might tariffs on goods be a prelude to tariffs on money? “
Soredemos
@Charlie
Language policing is just another piece of culture war bullshit, and I think that type of nonsense should really just burn itself out already. It doesn’t matter, we should be fighting actual battles of substance.
Colloquially, retard as insult has never stopped being used by real people in the real world. The most you’d get occasionally is someone tut -tutting you and weakly going ‘no, stop, that’s mean’.
‘Differently-abled’, ‘neurodivergent’, ‘unhoused’. Man, that last one especially; no actual homeless person calls themselves that.
Personally, I’m even in favor of bringing back the harsh but meaningful diagnoses like feeble-minded and moron as well.
Hat tip to the French for continuing to call economists autistic.
Oakchair
You’re the third left wing person I’ve seen use retarded as an insult this week.
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Genocides are being committed left and right.
We’ve been in non stop war for 25 years.
The chronic illness rate has surpassed 50%
Homelessness is rising and rising.
And you’re concerned about the use of the word retard…. Exhibit A of how unserious our dystopian society is.
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Language policing is just another piece of culture war bullshit,
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Yep, it’s just another shallow pointless distraction from things of actual substance.
It’s a prime example of virtue signaling in that it accomplishes nothing beneficial but makes people feel like they are doing something.
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Personally, I’m even in favor of bringing back the harsh but meaningful diagnoses like feeble-minded and moron as well.
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What language policers completely fail to grasp is that the term used isn’t what makes it harsh. It’s the intent. It’s the lack of material conditions and social connection.
M
Ian, do you think Trump is acting alone not together or on behalf of somebody?
I believe he is a symptom of an intra-elite war about something. I have a hard time to believe that he can go alone against the old oligarchs and related organized crime-syndicates as well as MIC that have told all presidents what can be done or not. He is not changing as much as radicalizing, is my impression.
What is he accomplishing for real? The DOGE project will inflict 19th century Manchester-level of pain on non-capital owners. To whom is the wealth tranferred? Is it about wealth or about crushing people so that they will own nothing and be unhappy or about something else? Is he a useful idiot like Scholtz destroying Germany?
DMC
Its the “Doners”. He’s working for the people who pay him, just like everyone else in DC. When Miriam Adelson can toss $100 millon at him, who do you suppose he’s working for? Look at the huge list of corporate donors, many of whom are experiencing buyers remorse because they didn’t anticipate the degree that Musk would actually run things and generally create chaos. They overlooked his Nazi grandfather and how he got out of South Africa one step ahead Mandela.