You can’t talk about increasing costs being a concern without talking about immigration or any of the other radical policies being advanced by Democrats, all of which work in conjunction with each other.
Especially when your source of information is a bunch of self-proclaimed experts with a well-established track record of failed predictions just like the one they are making about tariffs.
Believe them if you want. They count on it for continued employment.
It is. Tariffs are bad policy, for the public.
I would like to post the following, written by Thomas DiLorenzo:
There are already articles on the internet quoting investment “experts” saying that Trump will cut taxes and that tax cuts will be “inflationary.” That implies that tax increases should be deflationary. Let’s try to figure out how that works. This is classic Keynesian demand-side thinking, so the argument is that taking say, a billion dollars out of the bank accounts of taxpayers and giving it to government bureaucrats to spend instead will cause deflation even though the amount of total spending is exactly the same. What is different is WHO is doing the spending, in this case government bureaucrats instead of citizens who earned the money in the first place. Standard Keynesian superstition holds that “aggregate demand” must increase if the price level is to increase (or be higher than it otherwise would have been), but in this case it is not higher but the same.
I’m beginning to doubt these claims that keeping more of your own hard-earned money harms all of society by causing price inflation and that handing over more of your hard-earned money to politicians and bureaucrats always benefits “society.”
Tariffs will usually increase prices, especially tariffs on China, where the vast majority of our consumer goods are produced. This is a surface level view though, and a 1:1 take doesn’t tell the full story.
The primary drawbacks to tariffs are increased prices, trade reduction and potential retaliation.
Prices vs realized economic gain will be and always have been a ratio to manage. We do this through a few different measurements like GDP for example.
So reduction in trade may sound bad, especially with spin theory from a global economy focused economist in the mix, but if it’s increasing production at home, is it bad? What ultimately serves the populace better? More jobs and higher salaries or cheap products? Two sides of the economic strength coin, where the rubber meets the road. If protectionist policy leads to lower unemployment and market driven salary increases by say 10% but increases the price of consumer goods by 5%, there is still a net 5% gain for consumers, and more of them given employment expansion.
The problem comes when prices exceed returns. Unfortunately we experienced Covid, unprecedented raw material and supply chain shortages due to shutdowns and didn’t get to see Trump policy at play in a fair way to measure it.
Confounding things even more, leverage comes in to play. While China may produce a large amount of our goods, we are China’s market. They can only squeeze so hard until we, via market forces, look elsewhere. Homegrown to recycle back to the above conversation, and India is ripe for cheap labor where necessary.
Plus, in many cases, our companies are manufacturing in China. Essentially giving them their manufacturing chops. We truly own the whole circle, they are essentially a hired manufacturing agent. And managing leverage is Trumps forte.
Economics is a sound, mathematical science but it’s still largely based on theory, and not everything is surface level black and white. There are lots of layers to peel.
There is a lot of misinformation floating around too. I can’t find the quote to respond now that this thread has snowballed but someone mentioned GM shuttering factories in 2019 due to Trump tariffs. This simply isn’t true. GM has been struggling since they were bailed out, has been slow to change with market demands and closed factories producing outdated vehicles vs retrofitting for modern manufacturing. And many of them were international already anyways: GM to Close 5 Plants, Reduce Workforce
You can’t take media at face value.
This is not what I am trying to discuss. I am trying to discuss the tariffs and the economic implications of them.
Let me ask you this as I think we may be in agreement. If you could discard the proposed increased import tariff policy and keep the remainder of the economic related policies of the Republican party, you would prefer that package of policies, or would you prefer that the increased import tariff policy remain in the array of Republican policies related to the economy?
Running an economy is not simply an exercise in economic principles; it is also a political exercise. Elected officials create budgets, not economists. Every economic decision considers possible voter fallout. Congress controls the purse, not Trump, not Musk.
Tariffs are a single component of the economic result. You can extract it and examine it inside and out, but it is an aspect of the system. It is a single “x” in Y = f(x). Each x affects Y. Some x’s affect how another or other x’s affect Y.
System thinking is required to understand how any one “x” alters the impact of any of the other x’s to approximate how each “x” will affect the Y.
Understanding how an “x” performs in the lab is much simpler than understanding how that “x” performs in the system.
It sounds like you bros need a Measurement Systems Analysis.
The federal reserve has a greater influence on the economy than Congress. They are the ones who fix high inflation. What’s needed is a Federal Open Market Committee that understands the problem and is willing to fix it.
Musk has mentioned streamlining and making things more efficient. He also added there would be hardship for Americans in the meantime. That has nothing to do with the federal reserve. It’s about spending. Tell people who have been complaining about inflation and the costs of groceries and gas, in spite of reports about how well the economy was doing under Biden, to now suffer austerity measures. Good luck when elections come again.
They served a dual purpose.
Initially they worked as you described.
Secondary effect was when Trump absolutely pantsed Harris in the debate by telling her of their pressence and utility in “her” administration. 
.
It was just a blip on the radar for most people, but to me that was a truly precious moment.
I understand that. I’ll ask you what I asked @twojarslave
I am not arguing that the Dems have a better overall economic policy platform. It would be relevant to look at the whole system in that case, as perhaps the tariffs increase inflation, but other policies decrease inflation. What I am arguing is that the Republican economic platform would be better without the proposed policy of increasing import tariffs.
I am also not saying it’s impossible that economically the tariffs could turn out to be a good policy. There just isn’t much evidence to support that position at this time. Correct me if I am wrong, but even within a system the addition of import tariffs has basically always resulted in inflation. Perhaps this upcoming economic system is different and will handle it differently, but I think the time to believe that is when it is proven.
Since tariffs are just another tax on consumers, that’s correct.
I got extremely good at tuning the boiler controls on 8 different boilers. Knowing only a single parameter and how it operates is extremely ineffective to tune a boiler.
To your question: I don’t pretend to know the system. It is a moot point to discuss how we believe it affects the economy (especially me.)
Example: If I taught you all the specifics of attemperation as it pertains to boiler control; and you knew all that can be known about it in a laboratory setting. Then a boiler operator calls and said the final steam temperature is swinging. I am not about to send you to fix the boiler temperature swing.
And another HUGE variable is lag time. The time between cause and effect.
Has it?
I look at them as a buffer to the comparative advantage that low wage/slave labor countries utilize to dump goods and tank our industries.
I know a lot of people that if all things are equal, would rather spend their money in the US on US made goods.
Ideally this will be the result. Ideally
No, it has nothing to do with spending. It has to do with the Federal Reserve. To lower inflation, you contract the economy by taking money out of it. That is the Federal Reserve’s job. When you contract the economy, inflation falls and unemployment rises in the short term, because of the Phillips Rule. Eventually, unemployment falls back to its natural rate, and inflation is permanently lower.
Look up the Volcker Shock. Doing this is political suicide, and when Paul Volcker did it it cost Jimmy Carter reelection. However, it was necessary. Trump doesn’t have to worry about that because he won’t be up for reelection in 2028.
But when it comes to spending, the fact is that government can and should be made smaller. The government is a bloated bureaucracy and needs to be streamlined. Reducing its size wouldn’t cause hardship anyway, but contracting the economy would.
Elon Musk knows what he’s talking about. Only those who have studied economics would understand it, and that’s why you need a good economist to run the Federal Reserve. It’s the only way to fix high inflation.
I will make a bold prediction that will take a while to be proven right or wrong, but I think Trump’s 2nd term will secure his place as one of America’s greatest leaders. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but eventually.
He is surrounding himself with a lot of very smart people who’ve demonstrated high levels of character and are not ideologues. He has a vision and the political backing to begin policy implementation and/or cancellation. Whatever we’re in for, it isn’t more of the same.
People forget how loathed Abraham Lincoln was. If you go back and read what Democrats said about him at the time, you’d be hard pressed to distinguish it from modern Democrat rhetoric about Trump.
I believe modern Democrats go to even greater dishonest mental gymnastics to smear Trump than they ever did to Lincoln. Some of what they said about Lincoln was even true, just like with Trump.
History has never been kind to Democrats, once enough time transpires. FDR will always get a pass, even though he had a ton of bad policy before and during the war.
Coincidentally, gas is down 12 cents a gallon here since Tuesday.
Good luck with that. You can’t just cut off some teats, you’ll need to kill the cow.
We giving credit to trump or Biden for that ?