Ahh yes, the esteemed Mark Zandi. A man celebrated for his clear vision of the present and what it will lead to in the future.
I just don’t understand why people are ready to believe anything bad about Trump, even from really confident people who keep being proven wrong.
Opinion | Trump Can Take Heart: Mark Zandi Says Harris Will Win
Magic 8 balls and crystals
Them brainlets just can’t help themselves… insufferably stupid
A tariff is a tax.
Higher taxes Raise prices.
But there are multiple factors, and even multiple taxes, that influence prices. It’s not just tariffs in a vacuum.
The first time around Pres Trump cut the corporate tax rate, limited costly Obama Care regulations and his energy policy lowered energy costs. All of this put downward pressure on prices.
So the tariff policy most likely raised prices, but not as much as other policies lowered prices.
They also help to even the playing field with countries that unfairly subsidize certain industries.
Because demand for lots of goods tanked with Covid.
I think this is plausible this time around. I don’t think he will place a 10-20% tariff across the board, and 60% on China. I think he will use it for trade deals, and sell it as getting a better deal because of the threat of tariffs.
I try to be open minded. I think the tariff idea is terrible, not because of Trump, but because it is a terrible idea. It is not worth debating if a large tariff program will cause inflation, it is obvious, with a few caveats. There are situations where it doesn’t cause inflation, but those situations are worse (the tariffs cause an economic recession).
When manufacturers end up getting a higher supply cost, do you think they are just going to eat that cost? Will China sell us goods at a loss to keep their prices consistent?
I’m confident that there will be economic impacts to a tariff, but I don’t share your confidence that Mark Zandi will end up being proven correct this time.
Read that article I linked about your so-called expert who is, in fact, a partisan hack. It has a laundry list of failed predictions on his part.
Partisan hacks, in case you are unaware, are often highly celebrated and even issued awards for their partisan hackery. A monkey throwing darts at a wall would probably have more correct predictions than Mark Zandi at this point.
But hey, I’m looking forward to four more years of arrogant hacks having to make sense of how reality refuses to comport to their view of the world. It will keep things interesting and their continued employment in this line of work should give the nation’s job numbers a small boost.
Have the experts been wrong about, literally, anything in recent memory?
Seems like they’re batting 1,000 through COVID, Ukraine, etc.
Define expert because it seems as if the working definition here is: someone I agree with.
We can just discuss the actual policy.
You work in manufacturing if I remember correctly (I do too). Did you have cost increases on supplies a couple of years ago? We did. My company had to raise prices to compensate for our costs to manufacture going up. We assemble here, but lots of our parts (especially electronics) are sourced from China. I highly doubt our suppliers are going to eat the cost, so with a 60% tariff, they are going to pass most of that cost to us, and we are going to pass that cost on with price increases. This all lines up logically, right? I think we should be able to agree on all of this.
So when the price increases are passed on at each transaction, what happens to the prices that the end user has to pay if he wants the product? They go up. That is inflation.
When Chinese goods go up in price, what happens to the price of competitive domestic goods? I’ll say that if I am making a product, I am trying to maximize my profits (which is what a majority of businesses do). If Chinese goods are cheap, I can’t just make my prices high, because I will have difficulty selling my product, so I’ll price them so that they will sell and still make a profit (a balance), if I can’t do that, I’ll exit the market because I can’t compete with China. If I am able to compete with China and all of a sudden their products become 60% more expensive, and my goal is to maximize profits, what will I do next? You can be damn sure that I’ll be raising my prices. For the consumer, price increases, and that is inflation.
I’m not disputing that a tariff has economic impacts or impacts to manufacturing costs. I’ve had many very large purchase orders with my name on it where I had to calculate and add tariff costs. That cost, like every other cost, gets rolled up into the sale price and passed along to the customer.
That isn’t the same as inflating the currency by issuing money from the sky to reward people for not producing and then insisting on continuing that policy for as long as politically possible.
I always ask “compared to what” when considering a public policy. I can live with some tariffs, which are not a radical and transformational public policy. If they are a disaster, it is simple enough to get rid of them.
If I contrast that to radical Democrat policies and the consequences for getting those wrong, the worst case scenario of the tariff pales in comparison.
How do you undo tens of millions of humans cynically invited into the country as lawbreakers, enrolled in benefits with children in the public schools and more kids on the way?
How do you undo the kid who was guided into cross sex hormones and decides she doesn’t like having a deep voice and that new mustache?
Tariffs? What about…?
In 2022, the major cause of inflation was government spending
I can agree, but the end result is inflation just the same. The extent to which you do either activity will impact the severity of the inflation.
I’d also like to point out that issuing currency and sending out stimulus checks was continued by the Biden administration, but started with the Trump administration. I agreed with the general concept for both parties, but the extent of which it was done is debatable. It did help people get by during Covid and the after economic effects of Covid. I think economically both admins actually did fairly well on that front if we compare to most other countries.
I think this is a bit out of scope for our discussion.
I don’t think it is fair to try to compare a large section of one side’s platform to the a large section of the other’s platform, when we are just discussing the merits of a single policy. It is defending a bad policy by comparing numerous policies which you find favorable from the admin putting forth the bad policy and comparing it to the numerous policies from the other side which you find dis-favorable. That is fine for a general discussion of the candidates and platforms, but out of bounds for a discussion on a single policy.
Obviously, the people pushing masks, vaccines, and war.
Policies are not implemented in a vacuum. Why would it make any sense to examine it like that?
Even if I believe someone who has been proven wrong time and time again, like the “expert” you just cited, the worst case scenario is costs go up a bit and some people will call that the same thing as the government printing and spending money that doesn’t exist.
The great thing is that we all get to find out together if the partisan hacks who have been wrong over and over again for the last 10 years are going to get this one right.
I don’t think when discussing the merits of a tariff policy that policy related to transgender hormone therapy on children or immigration is applicable.
You cherry picked one “expert” out of many. The fact of the matter is that from an economic standpoint, it is hard to defend the notion that tariffs will not raise prices on American consumers.
Is this a tariff policy only thread?
It isn’t.
The content of the total thread is irrelevant to a specific discussion within the thread.