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
The problem is if you hit everyone with a stick sometimes they just leave and you are left just playing with your carrot by yourself
I’m business the last one standing is the winner. That could be his goal
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.
In truth, he missed the bowl but still wants that praise, anyway.
Well, he sure is shitting.
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.
He doesn’t do “better”.
It’s harder to do insider trading if you aren’t manipulating markets by posting contradictory statements every morning from your gold-plated toilet.
That would be “the carrot”. Trump prefers “the stick”.
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.
No, it’s made me hard core about just NOT buying at all.
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.
He’s trying to raise revenue in a way he can control.
He’s trying to raise revenue in a way he can
controllaunder.
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.
A salient question is why Democrats, like Pelosi, wanted reciprocal tariffs a couple decades ago and then changed their mind.
Better that they change their mind on bad policy than stubbornly stick to it
You are more qualified to run the country than our current sitting dictator
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.
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.
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.
Oh, absolutely!
My morning caffeine clearly hadn’t kicked in because I stupidly forgot to circle back round to that point. 🤦🏻♂️
Ultimately, my biggest worry is that Trump’s absolute piss-poor understanding and implementation of tariffs has very likely ‘poisoned the well’ to the point that they could probably never be successfully implemented in our lifetime by an actual competent Government - assuming the US ever gets another chance to elect one ever again.
Ultimately, my biggest worry is that Trump’s absolute piss-poor understanding and implementation of tariffs has very likely ‘poisoned the well’ to the point that they could probably never be successfully implemented in our lifetime by an actual competent Government
Well, it’s not as if they had much chance of happening anyway, given the neoliberal status quo for decades before that, so… 🤷
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.
The orange man also could’ve given all the major CEOs a heads up since it takes years to build a factory.
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.
The first flaw is not discussing things with the people in charge of tariffs such as the secretary of treasury.
