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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33456 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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This will be a dry post: I'm laying out my thoughts over the tariff discussions of the last few days as succinctly as I can.

Dangers to tariffs:

  • Tariffs that are higher than other countries can incentivize domestic companies to move abroad to gain access to cheaper inputs. It has similar negative incentives to a high corporate income tax (the latter of which was reduced in 45's term to be more in line with the rest of the world).
  • Danger of a trade war loss. If you don't have market power (attractive consumer base or exports) then a trade war is likely to end in a loss. Costs will be passed to citizens. The US is rather unique in having outsized market power.
  • Protectionism can lead to complacency in the citizenry. Lack of competition breeds inefficiency and lethargy. The workforce and economy needs to be sufficiently diverse to maintain competition.
  • Less efficient global distribution of resources.
  • Tariffs are distortionary in a way that (flat) income tax and universal sales tax are not.
  • Less foreign investment (assuming trade deficit shrinks). A trade deficit means US dollars go abroad: those dollars have to come back somehow, usually in the form of investment. Losing this foreign injection of capital is a double edged sword: a benefit is that it will make investments cheaper for domestic savers (cheaper stocks, cheaper housing). This will benefit younger generations who are buying the cheaper stocks and housing at the expense of retirees.

Economic/Political Benefits to tariffs:

  • If you are in a position of strength, it can distort the global economy in your favor. Companies may wish to domicile in your country (especially if you have low corporate income tax rates) in order to access your consumers and/or workforce.
  • Supply chains will become more intra-national, improving national security.
  • If you are in a position of strength, it is a useful foreign policy tool.
  • If everyone else is doing tariffs except you, then the economy is already distorted; and implementing reciprocal tariffs may "un-distort" the global economy.
  • If you want to raise revenue and you don't fear a trade war, tariffs may have less of an impact on GDP as other methods of taxation (eg, income tax).

Ideological benefits to tariffs:

  • Less interconnected global economy leads to less systemic risk (anti-fragile). The revealed fragility of supply chains during Covid shocked me, and made me realize we have traded efficiency for instability. I wrestle with this on a more local level here: https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/texas-roadhouse.
  • Destruction of the Bretton-Woods post-war hegemony.
  • Reciprocal tariffs punishes other nations for constantly hitting "defect" in an iterative "trade" game. It could force the world towards a better equilibrium.
  • Tariffs are explicitly allowed in the Constitution, income tax had to have an amendment.

Other thoughts:

If you are going to do protectionism, tariffs are better than subsidies.

Tariffs will change the relative cost of goods, but being a tax they should be net deflationary rather than inflationary.

Sanctions are like extreme "reverse" tariffs; if Russia and Iran are any example energy-rich countries seem to weather sanctions well.

feels a little weird to have my very first post here after a decade or whatever of reading scott, subreddit, and then here be a sort of swipy rant, but here goes:

the main "danger" to this whole affair is that trump has managed to unite the left, right and center in every single country that isn't the US in being all-out "fuck those assholes, we're doing it live".
in theory, the rational response to US tariffs would be to enact no tariffs at all and to ask trump to pretty please be so nice as to remove his tariffs too.
in practice, this would be political suicide everywhere.

the only play is to throw up a huge middle finger to the US to widespread public applause and to double down.
whether or not that hurts the country that does it more than the US is completely irrelevant. any politician that doesn't go down the 'tard road won't be a politician for long.

any supposed analysis that doesn't take this pretty obvious reality into account is worthless.

the obvious play would be to short US equities, and then implement retaliatory tariffs. the windfall from the short would help offset the economic loss from the tariffs . imagine had Chinese officials shorted S&P 500 futures through intermediaries b4 announcing its retaliatory tariffs.

As soon as Trump announced, their retaliation was already basically locked in. Their announce didn't move the needle because it was highly improbable they were gonna just do nothing.

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