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Oh, no, I don't think this is fully possible under the current state of affairs. You might could substitute some income, but the welfare state is too vast to fully replace. But there's a difference between "replacing income taxes" and "generating revenue." I (contra Trump, I guess) am very skeptical the former is possible without some major changes but the latter seems like a no-brainer. Like I said, I agree you can't maximize the benefits of all three. I just don't think it's right to suggest that e.g. a protective tariff will generate zero revenue.
I've heard people Smarter In Economics Than Me suggest a Trump economic boom over the rest of his term (this was after the tariffs came down), but their theory was that it would come about due to deregulation. They weren't exactly fans of how the tariffs were handled.
Maybe this is what the administration is doing, but do you not buy into the concern about outsourcing our industrial base to China at all? (I don't think that situation is quite as dire as is often suggested, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the problem, does it?)
Sure. As I said,
Although, with that being said, I do suspect the US probably could delete-from-existence some European nations. The question of whether or not the US has leverage and whether or not it should use that leverage (or how it should use that leverage) are different in my mind.
Did you read them? Some of the most interesting discussion revolved around the question of if the US should commit valuable military resources to reopen a trade route that largely does not influence US trade. Pretty interesting to see that the administration at least seems to be thinking about this (or at least some members, specifically Vance, seem to be).
There are a number of good moves his administration made in their first term, I think. Whether or not that counts as "4D chess" is up to you, I guess. But the idea that the government acts based on secret information isn't, I don't think, proposing a novel theory of government action. "Secret Sauce Stuff" motivates government action all the time, from standing up Space Force to killing Qasem Soleimani to locking China out of the US power grid. One analogous example might be US actions against Huawei (which were undertaken under the Biden and Trump administrations). The US has targeted Huawei directly on the basis that they are a security concern, and certainly there are public reasons to think this, but I am sure FVEYS has Secret Sauce reasons as well.
Now, I'm not sure that's what's going on here. I don't think that Trump or his administration is above making mistakes. But look, when Trump says "I'll put massive tariffs on China if they go to war with Taiwan" and then less than a year later does this, amid some (perhaps overstated) warnings from the DoD that China is targeting 2027 as a kick-off date for military action against Taiwan and at least one unsubstantiated rumor that their timeline is even shorter, it does make me suspicious, yes. I think we should all be open to the possibility that the solution might be Just That Obvious even if we don't think that's the most likely alternative.
It won't generate literally zero revenue in an accounting sense, though it might damage overall tax revenue, on account of depressing economic activity while not raising much money. Tariffs are highly distortionary.
I'm really not that worried about it. The demise of US manufacturing has been tremendously exaggerated, and the panic about it has less to do with pure manufacturing capability than with
a) anxiety over the rise of China and the loss of US manufacturing supremacy. Autarkic economic policy will make this worse, not better. The proper remedy for this would be heavy investments in industrial automation (the US is embarrassingly under-roboticized considering it's the world's most advanced economy) and closer trade ties with allied countries (e.g. Mexico). The problem here is that there's very little appetite for this sort of thing - US labor politics is adamantly anti-automation, domestic producers are more interested in squeezing rents out of a captive market, and industrial policy is largely treated as a jobs program. Even so, there is a limit to what the US can do about this. China has 4x as many people, a state with far fewer fetters on its power, and a policy commitment to industrial overcapacity.
b) the social consequences of industrial consolidation, which also have less to do with China alone (seeing as they predate Chinese industrialization) and more to do with broader shifts in global economic circumstances (e.g. Japan eating into the US' international market share in the 80s) and technological improvements that made manufacturing less labor intensive and encouraged physical consolidation. This was very bad for a lot of rural industry and the communities that depended on them, but creating zombie industries to prop them up is absolutely the wrong move.
The US has the second largest industrial base in the world, by quite a margin. We don't produce a lot of cheap consumer goods, but I don't see a reason to care that we're buying t-shirts from Vietnam instead of Mississippi.
I did. I was not impressed, especially since they're not exactly delivering on defeating the Houthis (and probably will fail for the same reason the Biden admin failed, which is that it's really hard to bomb a determined adversary into submission).
More importantly, the crude transactionalism doesn't speak highly of the current admin's thought processes. Which shouldn't surprise us, since this is a bunch of amateurs trying to do foreign policy.
I guess you're going to have to clarify what you mean by "secret sauce", because I think this is grading Trump on an outrageous curve. Most of this stuff either doesn't matter or would've happened under any semi-competent president, and without the myriad own-goals that Trump inflicts upon the country foreign policy-wise in the meantime. Trump has a pattern of doing very impulsive things, occasionally punctuated by something reasonable (usually because someone else talked him into it or because the machinery of the USG more or less made the decision for him). I don't see much reason to extend him charity on this, especially when it's been a personal fixation of his for a long time. Trump just thinks tariffs are neat, and he doesn't know enough about trade or economics to understand why this is a bad idea.
Sure.
Yes, I agree with this. I'm not sure this is enough for reshoring, though, based on conversations I've had with others.
Right, I care a lot less about cheap consumer goods than I do limited autarky by which I mean "do we have our energy, food and basic staples, and military supply chain secured against hostile actors." Obviously this doesn't preclude trade – I think there are a number of foreign suppliers (like a number of our European allies, or Mexico) that it would be safe to rely on.
We don't have this, and we should.
You can be impressed or not, but my point was that the administration was using a "whole cloth" approach to thinking about what they were doing militarily or economically. (Or at least Vance is. Perhaps his thinking does not carry over.)
Personally I think this approach is a baby step towards a grand strategy that the United States needs to actually have and follow daggumit so I hope that the administration continues to refine it.
Fundamentally, just nonpublic knowledge.
Less grading on a curve, and more withholding judgment.
One of the things that I have found is that my charity or lack thereof can't change policy. However, I sometimes can learn things when I try to figure out why things I don't understand are happening, instead of chalking it up to incompetence. I hope I've made it very clear that I don't rule incompetence out, but assuming that isn't really very interesting or educational.
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