If tariffs do in fact result in more good manufacturing jobs coming back here, I am in favor. As a practical matter though, the electorate does not focus on the long term, so if there is short term pain he will either have to retreat on the idea, or risk dealing with a Democratic House and possibly Senate for the last half of his term. That could happen anyway, but certainly will if the economy isn't strong. As for me, I am taking a wait and see approach on the tariffs, neither an advocate or a critic, yet.
Manufacturing accounts for approximately 13 million employees in the United States. It is increasingly automated and with the introduction of robots will become more so. While domestic manufacturing will become more productive and produce more goods it is unlikely to employ more Americans.
Indeed, the nostalgic semi-faux memories of 50-60s era is merely nostalgic dreaming.
There is a path to great US mfg in scale up on high-value-added automated industrial production where one is servicing Whole World market - that of course needs free trade plus it needs excellent export infrastructure (i.e. infrastructure investment) plus it needs increased skills investment that is not snobbishly focused on the Progressives obsession with 4 year liberal arts college degrees, but rather on high-tech technical skills - the old metal bangers jobs upgraded to robot line oversight, with a mix of pipefitter grease with IT base worker understanding...
Now that Trump is destroying scale (and highly incentivizing my EU and my Canadian friends to do joint deals in off-set) that is pretty much buggered in the short term.
Of course energy abundance and stability via both gas and massive Renewables investment with electrification expansion (as elec driven industrial processes are fundamentally more energy efficient and energy efficiency is efficiency which is of course the ultimate goal to get profit, more efficiency is more competitive.
1950s nostalgia manufacturing jobs are not returning to USA.
There really is not any question - except to innumerate dreamers - one merely has to look to the great economic successes of .... Argentina, Brazil or LatAm tariff based import-substittution programs over a whole bloody century- the Yuge successes of tariffs... not.
Trump's economics are nothing more than the decripitic corpse of Smoot Halsey dragged out of its grave, with some added late 19th century innumeracy added in.
High value add trade with integration, and heavy automation, and stopping the 1990s error of focusing on only college education and overly on non-asset-based IT (programs, services) - enormous competitive errors.
Trump (and Musk's) problem is that they clearly don't know what they're doing--an ironic parallel to many of Biden's worst decisions. It's a persistent intellectual laziness when it comes to issues they aren't familiar with. Trump clearly doesn't understand how protectionism is supposed to work, Musk obviously doesn't know about the legal frameworks for dealing with changes in government expenditure, nor does he seem to care about reducing it in anything but a reckless fashion--it's all just shooting from the hip, and in the cases where the law is being skirted, hoping that the courts don't catch up.
Not all their ideas are bad, and the Democrats could benefit from borrowing a page from them--having a DOGE is a great idea, and smart forms of protectionism that account for the complexity of modern globalized trade networks could do some good, and indeed did do some good under Biden. The border should be kept under control. (and you don't need to go all gestapo to do it) But, populist "don't believe the elites!!!" aside, you should try to listen to people who know what they're talking about. A hard thing to do, I suppose, for the extremely rich, who are insulated from the effects of policy failures--but not impossible, given some diligence. (see: Warren Buffet, Ray Dalio)
Clearly, the calculation is short term pain vs long term gain. Will it work? Who knows but it did in 1981. In the meantime, the Democrats need some sort of positive policy regime rather than counting on dissatisfaction with Republicans to do its thing. That leads to what Ruy was warning against which constant policy flips and by narrow margins.
Edit Here is some advice from the Guardian:
In fact, the revival of populism, left and right, can be understood as a revolt against the world Third Way helped midwife. After all, they embraced an economic model – defined by free trade, deindustrialization, mass global migration and stagnant wages – that was responsible for the left’s breakup with the working class in the first place.
It is notable that that quote is repudiating precisely the policies you cited as 'working' in 1981.
Those policies consisted of Reaganomics 'Supply Side' measures designed to destroy the bargaining power of unions. That included the implementation of free trade policy and the sending of industry abroad, reducing union control of the industrial supply chain; increased migration to create a large supply of non-unionized labor that could stop unions from using strikes to bargain for higher wages; and, in the long run, a reallocation of business investment from industry to finance, stagnating wage growth, and a resultant increase in the net level of borrowing amongst wage-earners--which made union members' finances too tenuous to enable strikes, and ultimately created the debt bubble that exploded in 2008.
You are not helping your argument by making Trump's current policy choices analogous to the policy regime that destroyed the working class.
We're just more than two months into Trump's presidency for God's sake. His reciprocal tariff strategy has not even clicked in yet and the doom-and-gloomers are already announcing funeral arrangements. Maybe even Democrats can find some of that patience and posturing that helped them, if not the nation, endure four years of Joe Biden's -- or whoever was running the White House during his cognitive free fall -- steer the economy into ruin.
Trump's bold and untested economic resuscitation efforts will most assuredly be met with a firestorm of denunciations if they fail. What would be surprising is if any Democrat, and notably the party's emergent far Left flank, gives him any credit should they prove wildly successful.
My thoughts exactly. I don't know if tariffs will have the desired effect, but I'm taking a wait and see approach. Probably high risk / high reward. If it doesn't work, the party will and should suffer a political price. If it does work, it can usher in a new prosperity.
"What would be surprising is if any Democrat, and notably the party's emergent far Left flank, gives him any credit should they prove wildly successful."
That's just par for the course now, until we get out of this hyperpolarized mess.
300% more jobs were created in Obama's second term than in Trump's first term (before COVID) and anyone in the GOP who dared to mention it was immediately labeled a 'RINO'--most of all by the lesser-performing Trump.
That is not exactly, the entire story. Obama entered the WH during a profound economic downturn. Jobs disappeared. Then 3/4ths of a trillion tax dollars were dropped on the economy. Jobs came back as the economy improved, during his 2nd term. Obama didn't magically create them.
Ditto for Biden's jobs miracle. They were overwhelmingly, jobs that disappeared during Covid, and then returned, when the US was no longer locked down. Or worse yet, they were just additional federal employees.
The WSJ calculates, 85% of the jobs created in Biden's final year were actually new federal employees, or financed by taxpayers. Handing out US tax dollars to NGOs, who hire more people to underwrite and implement 3rd world sex change operations, meals for terrorists or the study of of the love lives of rats, on cocaine, creates jobs. It is just debatable if the administration creating such employment, improves the lives of Americans.
Notice I didn't say Obama *created* them, I said they *were* created. If you want to truly be brutally realistic here, it must be acknowledged the great bipartisan lie of presidential politics is that the president has the capacity to 'create' jobs, when in reality the rate of job creation is mostly a consequence of secular economic forces. The president can affect these forces to a mild degree--mostly in a negative way--but he has no control over them and the constant taking credit or blame for the waxing and waning of job growth by presidents is a purely political contrivance.
So, no, Obama didn't magically create the jobs that brought the U-6 down six points in his second term--but neither did Trump magically create the jobs that pushed it down two points further in the pre-COVID era of his first term. Obama and Trump merely took credit for the same thing--the natural recovery from the 2008 debt deflation. The recovery was largely caused by a resumption in private sector borrowing after a period of massive deleveraging, and neither of them had much to do with it. The current spasms in the capital markets are actually quite unique in that it is a rare instance of federal policy implemented by the president actively inciting market volatility. (Not just my conclusion--that is Powell and the Fed's publicy-stated conclusion as well) Usually when a recovery is underway, the president isn't keen on sabotaging it--Trump's poor understanding of how to implement protectionist measures has managed the feat, though.
We'll very likely be reading and hearing more about The Great One's complicity in the Biden crime family's corruption and failures so "hyperpolarizing" from either side cannot be the answer. Let's have some aggressive, fearless truth-telling.
"The economy" means different things to different people. Diesel is down, concrete is way pricey, our Vanguard account has taken a beating.
People felt positive just after we all started getting vaccines. Lots of covid money to the lower quintiles, private business had been given thousands in bogus loans turned to grants. Biden followed up with billions to corporate America with the IRA and Chips Act but he flooded the country with cheap labor and wages went down here.
I'm ok with tariffs, need to manufacture here. DOGE hasn't really saved much money, deportations are big headlines but very few people. Employers have started screaming because the border is tighter. Construction seems depressed due to rates.
When I start to see Help Wanted signs I'll figure we are headed for better times. Stock Market will probably sink a bit further, rich people who do most of the discretionary consumption are already pulling back.
The worst case scenario, may well be accurate, or most negative effects on 11% of the US economy derived from exports, might be offset with lower oil and gas prices. Coupled with entry into new markets that will open, if tariffs are taken to zero, on both sides. It is easy to imagine, at some point, Trump hopping on Air Force One, to sell US products, where they are not, yet sold. Trump hawking US grain and cars in new parts of the world, would not be surprising. We will have to wait and see, if the tariffs work, or cause more harm than good.
Besides, there is more at stake, than just the economics. The WSJ just reported on the billions invested by China to build a rash of new factories, in Mexico, near the Mexican border. They were constructed to circumvent Trump's tariffs, introduced in his last administration.
Regardless of how anyone might personally loathe Trump, most people would agree, China with billions invested in hundreds of factories, sitting on our border, in a poor, narco state with 130 million people, is a really, really bad idea. If Trump can force closures, that is a win, even if it is an expensive one.
Hell with the polls. Jesus, if we have not proven by now that they are all corrupt and manipulated by the Regime establishment, then we are just duped idiots.
Sure there are squealing little piggies of greed upset that their previously artificial stock values are correcting from the Democrat debt spending binge. And sure the layoff of all those wasteful unproductive government workers and the corrupt NGO workforce is causing more squealing. But all of this was voted for by the forgotten men and women of the American working class that demanded a deserving correction to the system to help them recover what had been taken from them by the same people squealing today.
Working class people are going to be the ones that take it in the neck for this reckless tariff boondoggle, though. The PMC will be hurt too, sure, but not nearly as much. The big squealing will be from blue-collar workers who are sent to stagflationary slaughter because Trump can't be bothered to take a smarter, non-blunt-force-trauma approach to his protectionist initiatives.
Working class people were already taking it in the neck for the reckless policies of the Biden Democrats. Your post is idiotic given the actual situation on the ground, and the fact that these Trump tariffs are an effort to improve it. Like most making the low economic IQ point you are making, there is nothing given as an alternative to the decades long decline of economic circumstances for the bottom 80%. Inflation was just transitory for them, right? Those industrial and manufacturing jobs sent to China and Mexico were just too bad, so sad, right? If only those people would get a degree and a fake laptop job like you, they would be golden? You do know that the fake laptop jobs are the ones going bye bye now... outsourced and AI ed.
If he wanted to improve things, his solutions would at least smack of due diligence--of an attempt to understand the nuances of the problems he's dealing with, and craft intelligent solutions. Then one could say well, maybe the solutions didn't work, but they weren't undertaken recklessly. Instead he's proposing totally nonsensical solutions that clearly indicate he hasn't taken the time to understand the problems he's trying to solve at all. That's not an attempt to help working class people--that's just lazy ego-stroking. It's everywhere: he's barely cognizant of the fact that tariffs are a tax we levy on ourselves, and their implementation demonstrates no comprehension of their effects on American supply chains. The manner in which he calculated the tariff rates prove he hasn't bothered to learn how trade surpluses/deficits work. He keeps referencing the protectionism of the 19th century as a model but shows no indication he's taken the time to grasp the most important factors that made it work. (Otherwise, at the very least, he'd talk a bit more about the key role of the gold standard) If this were an authentic attempt to help working people, the guy would have set his ego aside and done his homework. That he couldn't makes him little better than the bad actors that sold out American industry.
The problem with you and so many others is that you don't do the work to read, listen, see and hear the explanations that are available. You suck on your Democrat-biased media feeds and pretend you know everything.
Construction on infrastructure projects offers the prospect of creating more well-paying jobs. Infrastructure week was a joke in the first Trump administration. The Biden administration passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill, but was slow in rolling out projects and creating a coherent message related to infrastructure. The heater-skelter focus on tariffs will not create jobs. They might cause a recession if they result in a trade war or disinvestment in the U.S. economy.
In most mature democracies, political parties will map out in considerable detail the purpose of an initiative like reciprocal tariffs. Various sectors of the public will then debate the pros and cons of the proposed policy. Under Trump we still don't the outlines of the tariff policy one hour before they are going to be announced. Trump is counting on cultish adulation to carry him through this rocky period.
Well of course it will - Bidenomics at least had in its headline level ideas actual proper economic thinking. It was misexecuted on a number of fronts and loaded down with goofy Woke sandbags as well as to use Klein's term, Everything Bagel Progressive agenda (no trade offs address every probem in the world via everything - so loaded down they ended up not achieving much besides inflation.
But was at least coherent on major concepts.
Trump is simply retreading already failed games - as if one can't see the econometric history of LatAm century long failures of import-barrier and substittuion
(or look to the failure of US auto mfg behind the protectionism of the 60s and 70s, locking US auto mfg into dead-endism appealing and fitting only USA and missing the opportunity to develop global competitiveness, including tech and models that were not only pure USA)
(of course Democrats dumb tribalist reaction in inflation denialism and absurd semi-numerate misreadiing of macro figures Bourgousie-Splaining to the poor MAGA dupes (sarcasm there) that their sentiments on inflation were just due to being Fox dupes... well I think we are about to see Tribalist Blindess is not merely the sin and fault of the Progressives, the Trumpy-MAGA are about to commit the exact same error. Lesson - never think own side is free of the fault you see in the Other side.)
Both Trump and Biden embraced the notion that neoliberalism was dead and that some sort of industrial policy that promoted domestic manufacturing was needed. Jake Sullivan tried to lay out a road map for the nation's economic future. Scott Bessent is the closest thing to a deep thinker in the Trump Administration. He says tariffs will be a ceiling and not a floor which suggests there will be many bumps in the road.
If tariffs do in fact result in more good manufacturing jobs coming back here, I am in favor. As a practical matter though, the electorate does not focus on the long term, so if there is short term pain he will either have to retreat on the idea, or risk dealing with a Democratic House and possibly Senate for the last half of his term. That could happen anyway, but certainly will if the economy isn't strong. As for me, I am taking a wait and see approach on the tariffs, neither an advocate or a critic, yet.
Manufacturing accounts for approximately 13 million employees in the United States. It is increasingly automated and with the introduction of robots will become more so. While domestic manufacturing will become more productive and produce more goods it is unlikely to employ more Americans.
Indeed, the nostalgic semi-faux memories of 50-60s era is merely nostalgic dreaming.
There is a path to great US mfg in scale up on high-value-added automated industrial production where one is servicing Whole World market - that of course needs free trade plus it needs excellent export infrastructure (i.e. infrastructure investment) plus it needs increased skills investment that is not snobbishly focused on the Progressives obsession with 4 year liberal arts college degrees, but rather on high-tech technical skills - the old metal bangers jobs upgraded to robot line oversight, with a mix of pipefitter grease with IT base worker understanding...
Now that Trump is destroying scale (and highly incentivizing my EU and my Canadian friends to do joint deals in off-set) that is pretty much buggered in the short term.
Of course energy abundance and stability via both gas and massive Renewables investment with electrification expansion (as elec driven industrial processes are fundamentally more energy efficient and energy efficiency is efficiency which is of course the ultimate goal to get profit, more efficiency is more competitive.
1950s nostalgia manufacturing jobs are not returning to USA.
There really is not any question - except to innumerate dreamers - one merely has to look to the great economic successes of .... Argentina, Brazil or LatAm tariff based import-substittution programs over a whole bloody century- the Yuge successes of tariffs... not.
Trump's economics are nothing more than the decripitic corpse of Smoot Halsey dragged out of its grave, with some added late 19th century innumeracy added in.
High value add trade with integration, and heavy automation, and stopping the 1990s error of focusing on only college education and overly on non-asset-based IT (programs, services) - enormous competitive errors.
Trump (and Musk's) problem is that they clearly don't know what they're doing--an ironic parallel to many of Biden's worst decisions. It's a persistent intellectual laziness when it comes to issues they aren't familiar with. Trump clearly doesn't understand how protectionism is supposed to work, Musk obviously doesn't know about the legal frameworks for dealing with changes in government expenditure, nor does he seem to care about reducing it in anything but a reckless fashion--it's all just shooting from the hip, and in the cases where the law is being skirted, hoping that the courts don't catch up.
Not all their ideas are bad, and the Democrats could benefit from borrowing a page from them--having a DOGE is a great idea, and smart forms of protectionism that account for the complexity of modern globalized trade networks could do some good, and indeed did do some good under Biden. The border should be kept under control. (and you don't need to go all gestapo to do it) But, populist "don't believe the elites!!!" aside, you should try to listen to people who know what they're talking about. A hard thing to do, I suppose, for the extremely rich, who are insulated from the effects of policy failures--but not impossible, given some diligence. (see: Warren Buffet, Ray Dalio)
Clearly, the calculation is short term pain vs long term gain. Will it work? Who knows but it did in 1981. In the meantime, the Democrats need some sort of positive policy regime rather than counting on dissatisfaction with Republicans to do its thing. That leads to what Ruy was warning against which constant policy flips and by narrow margins.
Edit Here is some advice from the Guardian:
In fact, the revival of populism, left and right, can be understood as a revolt against the world Third Way helped midwife. After all, they embraced an economic model – defined by free trade, deindustrialization, mass global migration and stagnant wages – that was responsible for the left’s breakup with the working class in the first place.
It is notable that that quote is repudiating precisely the policies you cited as 'working' in 1981.
Those policies consisted of Reaganomics 'Supply Side' measures designed to destroy the bargaining power of unions. That included the implementation of free trade policy and the sending of industry abroad, reducing union control of the industrial supply chain; increased migration to create a large supply of non-unionized labor that could stop unions from using strikes to bargain for higher wages; and, in the long run, a reallocation of business investment from industry to finance, stagnating wage growth, and a resultant increase in the net level of borrowing amongst wage-earners--which made union members' finances too tenuous to enable strikes, and ultimately created the debt bubble that exploded in 2008.
You are not helping your argument by making Trump's current policy choices analogous to the policy regime that destroyed the working class.
We're just more than two months into Trump's presidency for God's sake. His reciprocal tariff strategy has not even clicked in yet and the doom-and-gloomers are already announcing funeral arrangements. Maybe even Democrats can find some of that patience and posturing that helped them, if not the nation, endure four years of Joe Biden's -- or whoever was running the White House during his cognitive free fall -- steer the economy into ruin.
Trump's bold and untested economic resuscitation efforts will most assuredly be met with a firestorm of denunciations if they fail. What would be surprising is if any Democrat, and notably the party's emergent far Left flank, gives him any credit should they prove wildly successful.
My thoughts exactly. I don't know if tariffs will have the desired effect, but I'm taking a wait and see approach. Probably high risk / high reward. If it doesn't work, the party will and should suffer a political price. If it does work, it can usher in a new prosperity.
"What would be surprising is if any Democrat, and notably the party's emergent far Left flank, gives him any credit should they prove wildly successful."
That's just par for the course now, until we get out of this hyperpolarized mess.
300% more jobs were created in Obama's second term than in Trump's first term (before COVID) and anyone in the GOP who dared to mention it was immediately labeled a 'RINO'--most of all by the lesser-performing Trump.
That is not exactly, the entire story. Obama entered the WH during a profound economic downturn. Jobs disappeared. Then 3/4ths of a trillion tax dollars were dropped on the economy. Jobs came back as the economy improved, during his 2nd term. Obama didn't magically create them.
Ditto for Biden's jobs miracle. They were overwhelmingly, jobs that disappeared during Covid, and then returned, when the US was no longer locked down. Or worse yet, they were just additional federal employees.
The WSJ calculates, 85% of the jobs created in Biden's final year were actually new federal employees, or financed by taxpayers. Handing out US tax dollars to NGOs, who hire more people to underwrite and implement 3rd world sex change operations, meals for terrorists or the study of of the love lives of rats, on cocaine, creates jobs. It is just debatable if the administration creating such employment, improves the lives of Americans.
Notice I didn't say Obama *created* them, I said they *were* created. If you want to truly be brutally realistic here, it must be acknowledged the great bipartisan lie of presidential politics is that the president has the capacity to 'create' jobs, when in reality the rate of job creation is mostly a consequence of secular economic forces. The president can affect these forces to a mild degree--mostly in a negative way--but he has no control over them and the constant taking credit or blame for the waxing and waning of job growth by presidents is a purely political contrivance.
So, no, Obama didn't magically create the jobs that brought the U-6 down six points in his second term--but neither did Trump magically create the jobs that pushed it down two points further in the pre-COVID era of his first term. Obama and Trump merely took credit for the same thing--the natural recovery from the 2008 debt deflation. The recovery was largely caused by a resumption in private sector borrowing after a period of massive deleveraging, and neither of them had much to do with it. The current spasms in the capital markets are actually quite unique in that it is a rare instance of federal policy implemented by the president actively inciting market volatility. (Not just my conclusion--that is Powell and the Fed's publicy-stated conclusion as well) Usually when a recovery is underway, the president isn't keen on sabotaging it--Trump's poor understanding of how to implement protectionist measures has managed the feat, though.
We'll very likely be reading and hearing more about The Great One's complicity in the Biden crime family's corruption and failures so "hyperpolarizing" from either side cannot be the answer. Let's have some aggressive, fearless truth-telling.
Way to signal you have no idea how hyperpolarization works.
"The economy" means different things to different people. Diesel is down, concrete is way pricey, our Vanguard account has taken a beating.
People felt positive just after we all started getting vaccines. Lots of covid money to the lower quintiles, private business had been given thousands in bogus loans turned to grants. Biden followed up with billions to corporate America with the IRA and Chips Act but he flooded the country with cheap labor and wages went down here.
I'm ok with tariffs, need to manufacture here. DOGE hasn't really saved much money, deportations are big headlines but very few people. Employers have started screaming because the border is tighter. Construction seems depressed due to rates.
When I start to see Help Wanted signs I'll figure we are headed for better times. Stock Market will probably sink a bit further, rich people who do most of the discretionary consumption are already pulling back.
The worst case scenario, may well be accurate, or most negative effects on 11% of the US economy derived from exports, might be offset with lower oil and gas prices. Coupled with entry into new markets that will open, if tariffs are taken to zero, on both sides. It is easy to imagine, at some point, Trump hopping on Air Force One, to sell US products, where they are not, yet sold. Trump hawking US grain and cars in new parts of the world, would not be surprising. We will have to wait and see, if the tariffs work, or cause more harm than good.
Besides, there is more at stake, than just the economics. The WSJ just reported on the billions invested by China to build a rash of new factories, in Mexico, near the Mexican border. They were constructed to circumvent Trump's tariffs, introduced in his last administration.
Regardless of how anyone might personally loathe Trump, most people would agree, China with billions invested in hundreds of factories, sitting on our border, in a poor, narco state with 130 million people, is a really, really bad idea. If Trump can force closures, that is a win, even if it is an expensive one.
Defenders of Boris Johnson were saying almost the same thing in defending Brexit.
Hell with the polls. Jesus, if we have not proven by now that they are all corrupt and manipulated by the Regime establishment, then we are just duped idiots.
Sure there are squealing little piggies of greed upset that their previously artificial stock values are correcting from the Democrat debt spending binge. And sure the layoff of all those wasteful unproductive government workers and the corrupt NGO workforce is causing more squealing. But all of this was voted for by the forgotten men and women of the American working class that demanded a deserving correction to the system to help them recover what had been taken from them by the same people squealing today.
Working class people are going to be the ones that take it in the neck for this reckless tariff boondoggle, though. The PMC will be hurt too, sure, but not nearly as much. The big squealing will be from blue-collar workers who are sent to stagflationary slaughter because Trump can't be bothered to take a smarter, non-blunt-force-trauma approach to his protectionist initiatives.
Working class people were already taking it in the neck for the reckless policies of the Biden Democrats. Your post is idiotic given the actual situation on the ground, and the fact that these Trump tariffs are an effort to improve it. Like most making the low economic IQ point you are making, there is nothing given as an alternative to the decades long decline of economic circumstances for the bottom 80%. Inflation was just transitory for them, right? Those industrial and manufacturing jobs sent to China and Mexico were just too bad, so sad, right? If only those people would get a degree and a fake laptop job like you, they would be golden? You do know that the fake laptop jobs are the ones going bye bye now... outsourced and AI ed.
If he wanted to improve things, his solutions would at least smack of due diligence--of an attempt to understand the nuances of the problems he's dealing with, and craft intelligent solutions. Then one could say well, maybe the solutions didn't work, but they weren't undertaken recklessly. Instead he's proposing totally nonsensical solutions that clearly indicate he hasn't taken the time to understand the problems he's trying to solve at all. That's not an attempt to help working class people--that's just lazy ego-stroking. It's everywhere: he's barely cognizant of the fact that tariffs are a tax we levy on ourselves, and their implementation demonstrates no comprehension of their effects on American supply chains. The manner in which he calculated the tariff rates prove he hasn't bothered to learn how trade surpluses/deficits work. He keeps referencing the protectionism of the 19th century as a model but shows no indication he's taken the time to grasp the most important factors that made it work. (Otherwise, at the very least, he'd talk a bit more about the key role of the gold standard) If this were an authentic attempt to help working people, the guy would have set his ego aside and done his homework. That he couldn't makes him little better than the bad actors that sold out American industry.
The problem with you and so many others is that you don't do the work to read, listen, see and hear the explanations that are available. You suck on your Democrat-biased media feeds and pretend you know everything.
Educate yourself. https://youtu.be/p0IUh8kNSqY?si=IAlyQhinSODkCgdZ
Construction on infrastructure projects offers the prospect of creating more well-paying jobs. Infrastructure week was a joke in the first Trump administration. The Biden administration passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill, but was slow in rolling out projects and creating a coherent message related to infrastructure. The heater-skelter focus on tariffs will not create jobs. They might cause a recession if they result in a trade war or disinvestment in the U.S. economy.
Whatever happened to predictability? Most of the rest of the world has already decided the United States is an unreliable partner.
As I've expressed before, I basically have decided to back every single play until Jan 20, 2026. Will re-evaluate at that time.
In most mature democracies, political parties will map out in considerable detail the purpose of an initiative like reciprocal tariffs. Various sectors of the public will then debate the pros and cons of the proposed policy. Under Trump we still don't the outlines of the tariff policy one hour before they are going to be announced. Trump is counting on cultish adulation to carry him through this rocky period.
Well of course it will - Bidenomics at least had in its headline level ideas actual proper economic thinking. It was misexecuted on a number of fronts and loaded down with goofy Woke sandbags as well as to use Klein's term, Everything Bagel Progressive agenda (no trade offs address every probem in the world via everything - so loaded down they ended up not achieving much besides inflation.
But was at least coherent on major concepts.
Trump is simply retreading already failed games - as if one can't see the econometric history of LatAm century long failures of import-barrier and substittuion
(or look to the failure of US auto mfg behind the protectionism of the 60s and 70s, locking US auto mfg into dead-endism appealing and fitting only USA and missing the opportunity to develop global competitiveness, including tech and models that were not only pure USA)
(of course Democrats dumb tribalist reaction in inflation denialism and absurd semi-numerate misreadiing of macro figures Bourgousie-Splaining to the poor MAGA dupes (sarcasm there) that their sentiments on inflation were just due to being Fox dupes... well I think we are about to see Tribalist Blindess is not merely the sin and fault of the Progressives, the Trumpy-MAGA are about to commit the exact same error. Lesson - never think own side is free of the fault you see in the Other side.)
Both Trump and Biden embraced the notion that neoliberalism was dead and that some sort of industrial policy that promoted domestic manufacturing was needed. Jake Sullivan tried to lay out a road map for the nation's economic future. Scott Bessent is the closest thing to a deep thinker in the Trump Administration. He says tariffs will be a ceiling and not a floor which suggests there will be many bumps in the road.
None of this matters until election season comes around.