There’s a thousand better ways to handle both tariffs and free trade. We fucked up the latter with NAFTA (and CAFTA), where the EU got it right. Bringing jobs home with tariffs isn’t something you just snap your fingers and do, shit takes a long time to re-align, it would’ve made a lot more sense to have it go through the legislature and say “hey, we’re starting out at a 10% tariff on this stuff we want to bring home, and we’re going to ratchet it up +2% every year until Congress doesn’t pass the law again.” Instead, we’ve got the most volatile president in history implementing tariffs by fiat: 10% 20% actually none actually 10% actually 125% for real this time. Yeah, in this situation, the best play is to just try and wait dumbass out, because there’s a non-zero chance he wakes up tomorrow and declares tariffs woke.
Instead of Orange Man doing Tariffs would it not have been better for him to talk about shopping locally and so forth. And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US?
Submitted 8 hours ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 44 minutes ago
payhn@sopuli.xyz 55 minutes ago
You can either convince people with a carrot to do what you want and hope they will comply or make them comply with a sharp expensive stick 🤷♂️ Orange man doesn’t seem to like carrots
db2@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
His goal is to enrich himself and hurt others while getting praised like a toddler that just shit on the toilet for the first time.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Well, he sure is shitting.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours ago
Why do you think Donald Trump has any clue about anything he is doing? Has he not repeatedly demonstrated the opposite?
shittydwarf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
He’s simply doing what Putin says, no thinking on his part
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
He only has concepts of a plan.
His words, not mine.
Thorry84@feddit.nl 3 hours ago
He will have the concepts of a plan in a couple of weeks. Literally any day now…
punkwalrus@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I often think he’s a second grader lying on his oral book report.
salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 7 hours ago
Look. He had the stupid tariff idea. He liked it because he likes the thought of getting his way by punishing people who defy him. That’s how he sees tariffs. It wasn’t a good idea. People told him that. So, being a stubborn narcissist, he wanted to do it more. Now here we are.
ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US?
that’s technically what tariffs do. topologically, it’s the same thing: using policy to give a price advantage to domestic producers.
talk about shopping locally and so forth.
talk gets one only so far. when those numbers start to chomp into the household budget, everyone forsakes the “made in…” label in favour of the price tag.
StaticFalconar@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
The orange man also could’ve given all the major CEOs a heads up since it takes years to build a factory.
Thavron@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
IMO this is the major flaw. Tariffs could work in practice, but you’d have to announce them way ahead of time to give local businesses time to fill in the gap. Otherwise you’ll get what happens now.
lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 1 hour ago
The first flaw is not discussing things with the people in charge of tariffs such as the secretary of treasury.
PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Trump doesn’t want you to buy local. He wants you to shop on Amazon and drive a Chinese-built Tesla.
lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 1 hour ago
Even his buddy’s Tesla’s had to double check with him to make sure they weren’t going to be tariffed, so I’m feeling that’s less on Drumpf’s part and more on Musk’s.
db2@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
*tesler
joyjoy@lemm.ee 3 hours ago
Are you referring to some kind of “opportunity economy”?
kmartburrito@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yeah, certainly if he were a normal President. But he’s a textbook narcissist who only gives a shit about himself and capitulating to the ultra elite. Throw some performance goals set up by his boss Vladimir Putin, and what do you get?
Absolute fucking chaos alongside fleecing the lower 99.99% for anything you can get and manufacturing a crash in the stock market so you and your elite friends can, you guessed it, profit from it tremendously.
A rational president, you bet. This dude is not that.
Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The goal is not to better the country or the economy. The goal is to make money, for his friends and connections to make money, and leave everything else destroyed while they laugh.
The tariffs not making sense is expected.
0ndead@infosec.pub 6 hours ago
You are more qualified to run the country than our current sitting dictator
Nemo@slrpnk.net 8 hours ago
He doesn’t do “better”.
eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
He’s not trying to act in the interest of the United States.
He works for Putin.
grue@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Tariffs have been the one major actual policy position rattling around in Trump’s empty skull since at least 1988. He fucking loves the idea of tariffs, for some reason.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Smart, specific targeted tariffs paired with grants/incentives to American companies to foster local production of critical goods (think CHIPS Act) can be a good thing, if they are done in such a way that it doesn’t send an entire industry/market into financial shock.
Like, if you want to onboard silicon wafer manufacturing (as a prime example); you would announce a small tariff to start off with, and a clear road-map of it increasing over time - allowing time for companies to build the necessary infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities onshore.
Once the industry has settled and matured, those tariffs could begin to be slowly pared back to ensure that free-market competition continues to keep prices in check.
But this would only work in an actual free-market economy, and not in the oligopoly-in-a-trenchcoat that currently exists in the states.
grue@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Sure, but that reasonable and nuanced idea has nothing to do with what Trump’s position on tariffs has always been. He’s just a dipshit that doesn’t understand the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics, or that the entire economy of of a country that controls its own currency (and especially one that controls the world’s reserve currency) doesn’t work the same way as an individual household or business.
Archangel1313@lemm.ee 7 hours ago
That would be “the carrot”. Trump prefers “the stick”.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
There’s a near-infinite number of better things trump could have done.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Of course. Republicans hate paying taxes. you can give back taxes to companies by giving them more money. You can even “reverse tariff” by subsidizing products that you want to be cheaper than the same imported products from China.
Tariffs are one of the worst ways to deal with this type of problem.
tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
Tariff = more money into Fed govt. -> funnel money from Fed govt into his and his friends pocket.
This is a faster way to get money out of the populace and into his accounts.
radix@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
It’s harder to do insider trading if you aren’t manipulating markets by posting contradictory statements every morning from your gold-plated toilet.
neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Yes, literally anything communicated or a plan would have been better. A fart in an enclosed room of crowded people would have been a better way to communicate than what this orange idiot did.
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
A salient question is why Democrats, like Pelosi, wanted reciprocal tariffs a couple decades ago and then changed their mind.
edgemaster72@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Better that they change their mind on bad policy than stubbornly stick to it
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 7 minutes ago
They should take that to heart two years ago.
The Democrats have stuck to failed policy so hard and it has cost the American people consistently.
untakenusername@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
shopping locally doesn’t shift supply chains as fully as tariffs can, like if you buy orange juice at the store, the plastic for the container could’ve been made from saudi Arabian oil, but tariffs allow that to be more from American. but yeah, what you described would be far better
HubertManne@piefed.social 7 hours ago
we don't collect enough taxes as is.
tempest@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
The reality is that there is no tax break large enough to make up the difference in costs for a lot of things. Even with tariffs China is still cheaper.
FelixCress@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Far too sensible.
ogmios@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
I mean, all I can say is that 5 years ago we were trying to get people to buy local because of China, and now Trump has managed to get all the people who didn’t listen back then to become really hardcore about buying local now, thanks to his tariffs.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
No, it’s made me hard core about just NOT buying at all.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 7 hours ago
He’s trying to raise revenue in a way he can control.
Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
He’s trying to raise revenue in a way he can
controllaunder.
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 8 hours ago
I don’t have a helpful answer to your question, but wouldn’t it be better to call him something that’s actually an insult about his character rather than his vanity, like “First Felon” or “First Rapist” or something? Not that he’s the first of any of those but “First” is a descriptor commonly reserved for the White House
oo1@lemmings.world 9 minutes ago
If you want to boost USA manufacturing industries I’d look at the sector that killed it first.
Bring in international capital controls, forex restrictions, limit consumer / mortgage credit maybe bring in some directed credit requirements. Badically the bank egulation that was chucked out in the 1970s. When us msnufacturing industry mysteriously started to decline. 70s recessions were not only caused by oil price shocks, and the sectoral shift was reinforced by bank liberalisation.
I’d think you’d want to force the USA finance industry to invest (at least some decent amount) in the future of USA produtive capacity, instead of letting them invest in China’s future and have an arms race to fuel a perpetual domestic property bubble.
Tarrifs might still be part of it - but if your domestic companies can’t borrow, they can’t grow or maintain/develop asset base.If they don’t have working capital facilities, they liquidate fast.
Tax breaks might work/help (as might tarrifs), but if taxes are all on profits, you still need to borrow against the future to make the investment in the present (i.e. make a loss and pay no tax anyway) to build the productive capacity. They’d be better for short payback or labour intensive industries than for capital intensive industry - without other stuff.
I guess if you mean income tax breaks for workers in certin types of jobs/companies, that is interesting. Either way you need quite a lot of monitoring to avoid corruption of just wierd distortions with unintended consequences. That’s what banks lending to businesses should do and be good at, monitoring their loans and their debtors.