The Trump Tariffs Just Got Even Worse
paulkrugman.substack.com
paulkrugman.substack.com
> Import Chinese battery: 145% tariff
> Import Chinese battery inside Chinese laptop: 20% tariff
> Import Chinese battery inside Vietnamese laptop: 0% tariff
If their goal was to encourage manufacturing in the US, it's not looking good.
A better educated citizenry would never have fallen for the con that huge new tariffs are anything but a huge new tax increase on themselves.
A better educated citizenry would realize that no country has ever taxed it way to prosperity and "greatness".
The natural enemy of democracy is ignorance --- and Trump is the proof.
There is no sin except stupidity. - Oscar Wilde
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S. Thompson
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. - Dietrich Bonhöffer
Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him? - Obi Wan Kenobi
These guys are untrustworthy liars. I assume there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of carve outs for the tariffs, based on bribing the POTUS or approved affiliates. - Me, 10 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561464
There will be reprisals lasting a generation. These stupid fucks will insist calling them stupid is unfair. I expect some of them will become violent. We've seen it before. The long live the Confederacy, and Lost Cause Myth assholes are really no different. They come out of the woodwork when we coddle stupidity, the constant bigotry of low expectations.
China will just re-route / change the labels to Vietname or another country. It's already been happening for years.
How does this help? China can still create all the parts, and as long as the final assembly happens in a different country (which notably can be virtually anywhere except the US) the tariffs can be bypassed. Huh?
How long did our "liberation" from sanity last? About a week. This is how long it took our former friends and trading partners to school Trump in the fact that trade isn't always "bad".
So why exactly did "Tariff Man's" big day turn into a big fail? Two reasons:
1) The real world is a complicated and interconnected place.
Simple minded solutions may sell to simple minded folk watching Fox Noise but this doesn't mean these simple ideas are credible and will actually work in the real world.
2) The USA's biggest export is debt. We sell a lot of debt to our former friends and trading partners. And if they suddenly stop buying, we are sunk.
In other words, isolation is a prescription for economic disaster. The next simple but equally bad idea --- a debt default.
This is all Economics 101 stuff --- and Trump is failing the test.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/why-the-bond-market-is-a...
It was about asserting he could ruin everyone’s day if people didn’t suck up to him/pay him off.
And it worked.
If you realize he’s a terrorist pretending to be a reasonable person, rather than a reasonable person pretending to be a terrorist - things will make a lot more sense.
And all it cost him was whatever small credibility he had to prosecute a world wide trade war. As if someone who bankrupted multiple casinos has any economic cred.
Our former friends and trading partners just asserted how they can ruin Trump's day if he acts unreasonably. And confronted with the obvious, Trump folded like his former casino in Atlantic City.
https://6abc.com/trump-plaza-implosion-video-watch-live-stre...
Bottom Line: The largest bidders in auctions of US Treasury bonds are the same countries targeted with tariffs on "Liberation Day". And this "economic genius" totally failed to grasp the significance of this until after the fact. Duhhh!
Who is the stupid one in this situation?
Yeah, Mussolini thought this way too. He hung corrected.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-corpses-of...
What hurts us also affects "Tariff Man". If it were otherwise, he would not have folded so quickly.
https://reason.com/2024/12/11/trump-the-self-described-tarif...
He’s well aware of the potential future problem of course (IMO) which is why he has been purging the FBI/DOJ/Military of anyone who is going to refuse to suck up to him too.
That's an optimistic view; there's really very little reason to think that he's learned that lesson.
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