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.
But also note that the federal budget was much (x 1000) smaller than what passes as the budget now.
may it be so again.