I’ll credit Trump for one thing - he successfully broke me of my Scotch habit with his stupid tariffs
Now let’s scale that up to, well, everything?
The US tax rate is very similar to other nations, the only difference is what we spend our tax money on. Most rational nations spend their tax money on their citizens. The US spends it on other poor countries citizens, but not in the way you are thinking. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bury Palestinians under rubble. Hundreds of billions to cover Yemen people alive while they sleep. Meanwhile, school teachers in America have classes over 30 students and have to buy their own school supplies.
This is such a gloriously uninformed opinion. The benefits to the US from being a global superpower are staggering, investing a million dollars in shutting down the Houthi attacks on merchant ships or whatever returns hundreds of millions of investment back to the US by way of trade (also, they are “spending” that money on the wages of nationals, it’s not leaving the country). The Israeli Hamas is a proxy war with Iran, it’s unethical and utterly immoral, but to argue that it’s costing the US money is flawed.
There are real areas us spending is bad, the fact that the US spends over 17% of gdp on healthcare when other countries like Australia spend less than 11% does mean that Americans are spending too much money on healthcare (and literally getting shit for it), but it still doesn’t mean that they are destroying 6% of GDP.
We spend more on the military than the next ten countries combined. TWO of which are actively engaged in open conflict with each other.
I’m not sure that you understand my point. Spending money on military is an economic gain for the USA, for every cent spent they gain dollars in returns. It’s a “good” investment (from an amoral financial perspective, as said above, the ethics are appalling). Another country who spends less but also has a return to their economy less than they spend (like North Korea) is a bad use of taxpayer money. The amount of spend/return isn’t relevant, the ratio is what matters.
Well, worked everytime someone did this in the past … not!
And he will do it.
He has to figure out this thing with a boat, a shark, and a battery…
But once he works that one out, China will be paying our taxes.
Horrible idea from a horrible orange blob.
MAKE INFLATION GREAT AGAIN
I think he might be trying to destroy America
Jesus Christ, we learned that fixing the economy via tariffs was bad in 1930. Like holy shit, tariffs are nearly universally agree by every field of economics to be shitty for citizens, businesses, and then the country. It makes no one inside want to buy anything but the simple basics, even with the basics now costing much much more.
I am not a “free trade” person, but this is not how you “Make America Great Again”. Even Ronald Reagan and Dubya didn’t do tariffs as a replacement for other things.
Yes, but Trump has a “relationship with MIT” and a “very good brain” so what would those economists know?
The relationship is knowing MIT and not even knowing what it stands for…
Do you know the real reason why he said he had a relationship with MIT? Because his uncle, John Trump, was a professor there.
I have a cousin who was prominent physicist at a prestigious university. Meanwhile, I dropped out of college. I wouldn’t even dream of suggesting I had any sort of understanding of physics because of my cousin. In fact, he has something named after him and he once tried to explain it to me and I couldn’t understand what the hell he was talking about.
I still stand by my words lmao
Trump is so stupid that he has no idea how stupid he sounds.
He probably thinks it refers to Mitt Romney.
Take a look at the JOLTS data
516k job openings in April, 385k separations and 382k hires. That’s a deficit of about 100k jobs that aren’t being filled in manufacturing alone. The problem isn’t a lack of manufacturing jobs, in fact it’s the opposite. We have over a hundred thousand manufacturing jobs we can’t fill, and this matches what I hear through the grapevine at my work which does contract industrial cleaning. People don’t want those jobs, and people take advantage of the opportunities available to them to get out of those jobs. Trump would destroy the countries economy if he actually managed to implement this plan
There’s a quote from Arthur Harris that I think shows a pretty fundamental insight into the mind of a fascist.
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and no one was going to bomb them.”
Someone like Trump just does not think, “And then what will they do when we triple our tariffs on their goods.” It’s an innate narcissism, the belief that everyone else exists to do things to and not to have agency of their own.
This isn’t even getting into the reality that this is just another regressive tax scheme designed to shift even more of the tax burden onto the working class.
That’s not how anything works. The country exporting to the USA don’t field the tariffs expense. The importers do.
He would just be removing taxes for people himself to a massive deficit and decreased trade.
I hate Trump, and maybe that’s what he’s thinking.
But I’m not sure replacing taxes with tariffs won’t help; replacing sales taxes with teriffs will mean that domestic products are effectively being subsidized by people buying imported products. This increases demand for domestic products, hopefully stimulation domestic production.
I think the tell isn’t that he is using teriffs, it’s that he wants to cut income taxes at the expense of people buying foreign products.
The USA mainly sells Financial Services and Machinery. Making our own rubber ducks and flatpack furniture would be analogous to a lawyer painting his house when he could have made enough money to pay somebody else to paint it 5x over.
Unfortunately, much of our raw materials are imports so by disincentivizing other countries to trade with us we are killing our own manufacturing capabilities. That is exactly what happened when Trump era steel tariffs killed a large sector of American manufacturing. And he explicitly excluded Russian Steel where his good friend Aaron Abromovich was offering to supply steel for his stupid wall, until congress twisted his arm into signing the additional tariffs against Russia, just another example of how his actions are purely selfish.
At the end of the day, trade is both good and conditional. Other nations might see these actions as hostile and reduce the number of goods they’re willing to sell, as they can’t be the ones left holding the bag if trade suddenly stops one day and they’ve overproduced specialty goods with no use so reducing production is the clear choice, and there is less incentive to offer other less profitable goods as per trade agreements and less incentive to even make new trade agreements in the first place.
You cannot force American CEOs to want to produce goods in the states anymore than you can convince Chinese people to live in the districts where excess homes were built: governments do not have enough control to dictate the markets via anything but positive reinforcement.
It feels like this (common) argument it’s trying to have is cake and eat it too, so maybe you can help me understand.
As you, and everyone, say: the financial burden of the teriffs are paid by the importer and passed to the consumer, rather than being paid by the exporting country or exporter - so what is the disincentive for those countries to continue trade with us? They’ll see a decrease in demand, but is that really a disincentive? I don’t understand how both of these things can be true and have the same cause, at the same time.
The problem is outsourcing, and teriffs are an attempt to make outsourcing less appealing. I understand your analogy, but that’s the problem: we’re encountering Goodhart’s Law. We’re optimizing for GDP, and you’re right that’s teriffs will result in lower optimization, but in chasing GDP numbers we’ve failed to consider where the money is getting allocated. The lawyer could save money by hiring foreigners, but hiring locals helps people in their community. (Not saying foreign workers are bad, just trying to reuse your analogy). I don’t think we should get too preoccupied with economic efficiency, as long as we can ensure the waste stays domestic.
I’m not confident teriffs are actually a good idea, and even if they were I don’t trust Trump to implement them. What I’m trying to do is push back and get clarification about why people are acting like teriffs are inherently bad.
I’m not trying to have the cake and eat it, I’m trying to convince people like you not to shit on the cake just because you think you might be able to eat around it.
What?
Why am I getting down votes?
How am I shitting on anything? What am I even shitting on? \All I’m doing is asking “why do we shit on teriffs and treat them as inherently bad?”
Im trying to have a discussion in good faith, and rather than having any of my questions explained or answered I’m just down voted and vaguely demeaned.I’m being very clear I do not support whatever shit trump is doing, I’m trying to understand why people just hate tariffs.
I don’t understand how, if the importer bares all tariff costs, what would disincentivize a foreign nation from exporting to us since they bear no increased costs. Why would this not just appear as a decrease in demand, from their perspective?I literally explained it to you in simple terms and you still argued against the facts.
Tariffs
Shit on
USA Commerce and Industry
They cannot ever be a replacement for taxation. Their uses are purely as a defence from foreign fuckery in the markets.
You didn’t provide facts, you provided arguments and assertions.
Then I refuted one of your arguments showing how it is seemingly contradicted one of your assertions and asked for elaboration.I don’t understand where your hostility is coming from. I’m not even saying you’re wrong, I’m pointing out arguments that don’t appear (to me) to lead to your conclusion.
I absolutely don’t refute that Trump’s idea is a bad one. My question is more general than that.
Trump floats more shit than a sewage treatment plant.
This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.
I’m sure he’ll come up with something dumber tomorrow.
How much can a banana cost Michael, $1000?
Someone explain to me how this would benefit the rich. The rich don’t pay income tax.
If the rich didn’t pay taxes than tax cuts for the rich would not be their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd top priorities.
Tax cuts for the rich are capital gains tax cuts and corporate tax cuts.
Income tax cuts don’t impact them, broadly.
Income tax cuts don’t impact them, broadly.
Then they should not be objecting at all if we raise the top income tax rate back to 91% like it was in the 1950’s when we had a great economy.
The truly rich would be fine. They don’t pay income tax, they live off of capital gains.
That’s just punishing people at the top of the working class. Doctors, lawyers, etc.
Look at this graph, when you know, then you know. Fuck all this distraction from the actual problem, orange man is a distraction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States
He’s not a distraction if he gets re-elected.
That’s probably why he won’t win again. It would be amazing to have a convicted felon as president, he’d go from being a distraction to being the thing that causes serious unrest.
I said he wouldn’t win in 2016. I was wrong.
Okay so I’ll say he will win in 2024 so then I’ll be wrong as well. It would be crazy if he won as a convicted felon, after being impeached twice, after losing in 2020 by a landslide.
I agree with the Squid. We should all be worried. He came ridiculously close last time. Remember the electoral college is not helping. It was basically thousands of votes in 2020 that saved us.
Trump got the 2nd most votes of any presidential candidate in history in 2020. It wasn’t a landslide.
He did not lose in 2020 by a landslide. That’s just not true.
Biden won the election with 306 electoral votes and 51.3% of the national popular vote, compared to Trump’s 232 electoral votes and 46.9% of the popular vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_elections
So suggesting he has no chance of winning when he came that close four years ago and he’s likely not lost a huge number of fans is a little premature.
I guess “landslide” is pretty subjective. The difference was 74 electoral votes, 7,059,526 voters. He only won
Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,686 votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan
I don’t like this system so I’m done speculating.
It was only like 43000 votes across several swing states. Not by much at all.
Convicted Felon and Sex Offender Treason Trump did however lose the popular vote in a landslide and the electoral vote in a landslide.
Numbers are even worse when you consider swing states. AZ, GA, and PA swung Biden’s away by a net 40,000 votes. Razor thin margins, for any Dem candidate.
People fixate on the popular vote, but California going Blue by an extra million votes doesn’t change anything
That doesn’t sound amazing at all, that sounds totally horrible
Yea, amazing wasn’t the right word choice. Probably should have used “absurd”, “ridiculous” or “bizarre” instead.
Amazing - causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing
Nah you were all good imo lmao people just attribute amazing to positivity
Makes sense that profits went up, since this graph is not inflation adjusted
Now look at this in the context of increasing domestic production, so we’d be importing less even before increasing tariffs. Revenue will hit rock bottom in record time.
