I have seen a lot of know-it-all democrat voters posting in the last few days about how Trump's economic strategy is bound to fail and those who voted for him for economic reasons are fools. Obviously I am extremely sceptical of these people, as economic literacy has never been a strong point of progressives (not to mention how they are all suddenly experts, like how they were for virus propagation, climate change, etc.).
Nonetheless, I myself am no economist. Can somebody with a better understanding explain the strategy to me, and also any potential ways in which it COULD backfire in the way progressives are suggesting?
I'm no economist, but the fact is there was no official federal income tax before 1913 or a corporate tax before 1909. It is obvious that tariffs can work instead of taxes but there must be domestic production of necessary products for this strategy to work.
The growing pain will be restarting/bringing back manufacturing that has been offshoring for many decades. This will take longer than Trumps 2nd term, so the torch must be passed on to the next 20 years of administrations to re-implement this kind of system.
In the short term, just the threat of the USA ramping up tariffs could be enough of a bargaining tool that our upside down trade agreements could drastically improve.
Never going to happen though. But your exactly right.
The only people that tariffs benefit are the government, and the people who are the suppliers of said products with tariffs, like when trump passed the tariffs for lumber and steel.
Trump has friends who own steel mills and lumber mills. So no shocker there, just making each other richer, its the true crony way.
How do owners benefit? Tariffs are just passed off to the consumers and intermediates anyway, do you think companies are taking any extra out of their own pockets, think of the poor ceo's guys. I dont think your average normie realizes how much steel and wood is in well, most everything.
I seen people in r/canada bitching about how many British Columbia sawmills have moved to the states to avoid the tariffs. I mean who you gonna blame, the greedy billionaire, or the canadian government to inept and corrupt to do the right thing.
My dad used to have deal with fucking mead the paper company before his family sold the property. If you werent careful those assholes would mark an extra 10 ft of land every few years or so.
I remember my dad constantly having to remove markers and put them back where they were supposed to be. Bunch of greedy assholes.