121–130 of 210 posts
What the U.S. is doing is just Brexit 2.0. If reason didn't work with Brexit, why would it work with this?
The best each one of us can do is to isolate ourselves from the disaster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, and I find this totally bizarre. The Trump administration's power is based in the Russian propaganda machine and xenophobia. Blanket tariffs (except towards Russia and Belarus, not mentioned in Ben Thompson's article of course) are in service of those two power bases.
US is still sanctioning Russia, meaning there's zero trade between US and Russia. It's illegal for US people and companies to buy from Russia. That's why there are no tariffs on Russia: there's no trade, there's nothing to tariff. I don't see how you concluded that US is currently "in service of Russia".
A simple way to see this is you have can a system of three countries, A, B, and C, where A only exports to B, B to C, and C to A. All have net neutral trade, but are in a deficit with someone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the real architect of the strategy is Ron Vara [0] [0] In case you didn't know Run Vara is a fake economist that Navarro made up in his books and memos to justify his own deeply flawed policies.
Tha fact that he just shuffled around the letters of his own name for the fake economist is simply amazing. Brave new world.
> using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid A simple way to see this is you have can a system of three countries, A, B, and C, where A only exports to B, B to C, and C to A. All have net neutral trade, but are in a deficit with someone.
Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is…
It reminds me a lot of Brexit. Politicians in the south of the country were warning that the financial sector (predominantly in London) would loose 100,000 jobs and people in the north were saying "oh, that sounds pretty good". A few years later when that didn't happen to that extent I remember an interview with someone from a fishing port which lost a lot of business that previously went to Europe. They were complai…
Unfortunately for them, they happened to be completely wrong about this (arguably not unpredictably: the UK MMO was more zealous than most European countries about enforcing catch restrictions) so they didn't lose the quota system but did lose an export market.
Surprised there isn't mention that a big part of the tariff strategy is to throw the equity markets into chaos in an effort to drive down the price of the 10-year bond. There was a panic last night because the 10 year bond price started going up as stocks were trading down, which is not supposed to happen. It would be truly disruptive if the whole game gets blown up by a lack of buyers for US debt.
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Worse than projecting one's values onto a rationalization of the new tariffs is to simply take the administration's rhetoric at face value. That other countries are "taking advantage of us" is just a talking point. We have to look at how the tariffs fit historical conservative programs. Republicans have long wished to replace our progressive income taxation with a flat tax system, but that's simply not achievable, ev…
Tariffs are also revenue. It just moves the revenue from income taxes, which can affect the rich if they have incompetent accountants, to consumption taxes, which affect predominantly the poors and middle class. Tariffs are a tax levied on American consumers, not on foreign governments. Using them to decrease income taxes on the rich is something only an out-of-touch millionaire could dream up. Qu'ils mangent de la b…
Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse than projecting one's values onto a rationalization of the new tariffs is to simply take the administration's rhetoric at face value. That other countries are "taking advantage of us" is just a talking point. We have to look at how the tariffs fit historical conservative programs. Republicans have long wished to replace our progressive income taxation with a flat tax system, but that's simply not achievable, ev…
I don't take their explanation at face value. I think you very well could be right in your analysis here. It is more interesting to me that actual targeting is based on trade imbalance. They could easily have used the same rhetoric and targeted the tariffs based on something else. I think the way they are targeted is sufficient to rule out a lot of explanations I have seen proposed like I mentioned above. What you ar…
It's arguments about tariffs as a revenue source replacing other taxes which are ancillary ones thrown out to appeal to other vaguely Republican instincts. Obviously if the US actually wanted to use them as a revenue source they wouldn't set them at punitively high rates likely to simply eliminate trade, frame it as a battle to reduce import dependency or dangle the carrot of trade deals to anyone willing to bend the knee. Not to mention his rapid reverse ferret reframing it as focusing on China