I am curious how all of these economic decisions play out. Are these even well thought out economic strategies? I acknowledge that I am living through this experiment, and feel less in control about my destiny compared to a few years ago.
1. make players in the room happy - tax cuts and deregulation
2. make his voters happy - tariffs and immigration control
3. enjoy the power - memecoin and cola button
and there are indeed some 'well thought out' economic strategies behind tarrifs
> "In theory, tariffs would be a shrinking ice cube. That you would tariff a country and then as the production comes back to the U.S. the income tax - the corporate revenues and the paid income tax - goes up and the tariff income would go down."
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/treasury-secretary-bessen...
it is the strategy, as long as the US is building a laptop production industry in domestic
but that's not what's happening here
these are retaliatory tariffs used to get other concessions out of countries -- look at Canada and Mexico
besides, as you pointed out, what domestic laptop manufacturing industry is there to protect?
Even if Trump were employing tariffs as intended, I'm not sure how many industries the US have that could benefit? Maybe lumber, computer chips (force TSMC to open factories here), car batteries (?)
Have any of Trump/Musk's actions in the past month seemed particularly well thought-out? It's sharp-elbowed bullying by people who will never see any consequences for their actions.