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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
I'm sure posters here could provide a reasonable steelman for Trump's position if asked, but forget about providing arguments for a second: are there any Trump supporters here who genuinely believe this is a good set of policies, or even a not-disastrous set of policies?
I can't imagine this will be the final thing to break support for Maga types, but I would give strong odds that this goes down as a major black mark on Trump's eventual record, and a potential torpedo for any future Maga candidates
There are plenty of benefits.
Makes domestic manufacturing more competitive. The US economy can't be based on finance and a tech. Wall street and silicon valley simply don't employee anywhere near enough workers to satisfy a country with 340 million people. Having a few people make vast fortunes in the medical industry and insurance while a hundred million people sell services won't be sustainable. The US has rising income inequality and the fracture between wall street and average Joe has become way too large. If pollution happened in the same area as the consumers live we would have a far greener world.
Outsourcing increased the distance between owners and workers. American oligarchs have no connection to their workers in Vietnam. If they lived in the same city the connection would be a lot stronger. Boeing workers working at the same complex as the bosses in Seattle will be treated better than workers in Mexico.
Sovereignty: Being dependent on long international supply chains is a major risk. The world risks a bronze age style collapse if global supply chains break down. Imagine a war in Taiwan, a serious pandemic, a tactical nuclear war or a meteor shutting down a few key factories. It could upend our entire civilization. We could quickly find out that farms are dependent on some supply chain for some component we never have heard of but keeps us all fed and this factory has been knocked out. The number of suppliers that supply key components to medical care, the electrical grid, oil and similar is shockingly small. Many companies are dependent on numerous supply chains and if one of them broke down it could cause cascading effects. It may be more efficient to have 1-4 global suppliers of key components than to have dozens. However, it is far more anti fragile.
This might be more credible if Trump were not also planning to reinstate his wildly lop-sided tax cuts. Inequality is mostly downstream of fiscal policy, not trade policy - the period of major growth in inequality came in the 80s, then it stagnated in the 90s and 2000s which doesn't really match up with free trade/decline of manufacturing timelines, what it very obviously matches up with is 12 years of Republican control of the Presidency up to 1993. Inequality at the moment is roughly where it was in the early-mid 1990s.
This makes no sense as rationale for the tariffs when one looks at where and how they have been applied. I think chips have even been exempted from Taiwan's tariff rates!
As @The_Nybbler said, this makes no sense at all. How could insulating domestic manufacturers from foreign competition make them more efficient and dynamic? The very reverse process is part of what destroyed British industry. Higher tariffs barriers in the post-war period meant that, because they were not exposed to global competitive forces, British companies never kept up with the technologies and efficiencies developing all over the world, and so when firms like British Leyland arrived in the 70s and 80s they were still producing cars at the speed and quality of decades prior and were inevitably destroyed. For a developing country this logic is more reasonable because pure Geschenkron-style copying is enough for domestic industry to grow fast from a very low base, but in the position of a first-world nation this stops working because you're at the forefront of technologies and efficiencies. Hence why Chinese tariffs have come down every year for decades, because they're slowly wearing out the possibilities of copying manufacturing techniques from the rest of the world and the competitive advantage offered by low wages.
At the end of the day you have to believe Trump when he speaks. He is simply an idiot who thinks that the US should not run a trade deficit with literally any country in the world and doesn't understand anything about anything. This is not a piece of masterful grand strategy to reduce inequality and strengthen the resilience of American supply chains, Trump is just thick.
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