Screenshot of the chart by the Peterson Institute, from a news TV broadcast on MSNBC.
Let’s be real, companies are committing trade fraud and just shipping their goods to a different country that doesn’t have tariffs then reshipping to the US. I listened to it on Planet Money. The sad part is, the US government isn’t investigating or enforcing the tariffs. It’s useless.
How would you really fix that though, if China builds manufacturing plants in Mexico, and then car dealers purchase their cars from there, placing higher tariffs on Mexico doesn’t fix the issue, it just jacks up the cost of groceries, assuming the tariffs apply to all products and not just per company.
Is the idea to track the majority owners of every company and then tariff trade by company rather than where they are manufactured? What is the difference at the end of the day between a company moving manufacturing to Mexico to make the cars to avoid paying tariffs and a company making manufacturering plants for computers/phones in say China/India to get cheaper labor, and then sell the units back in the U.S.
We need a thorough revision of what the goals are and force the practices on all U.S. companies as well to make it ever workable long term.
All I know is that free trade is not fair trade. The solutions to this are referred to as “communism,” so it won’t be taken seriously or when it is taken seriously they’ll send in police/CIA/hitmen to fuck shit up to put an end to it.
this is how you know undecided voters who are deciding between “morals or pocketbook”, literally the words one of them used, are full of shit or just attention seeking
Or just really gullible.
Propaganda is an effective tool for shaping public opinion. It has far less to do with the gullibility of the individual and far more to do with the sheer volume and homogeneity of the message being espoused in the community.
If everyone on TV is chanting the same message, everyone in your town is raised with the same educational orthodoxy, and every social medium promotes the same message, you’re going to be under enormous social pressure to accept the catechism as delivered.
This is braindead levels of math. Yes, establishing tariffs across the board will fuck up average earners. Its painfully obvious this will only fuck over workers. Its fucken asinine anyone is even arguing for this.
It’s just a back-door technique for wealth transfer. Raise tariffs on imports, under the guise of being friendly to domestic business. Then lower income taxes on those same businesses, so the state can continue to defund public services and deregulate industry. Go to war on migrants, minorities, and other disadvantaged laborers in order to guarantee a domestic stock of second-class citizens. And use all that to depress wages and consolidate capital stocks in the country.
When you run out of domestic natural resources, you send your press-ganged youth military abroad to stake claims on neighboring soil, press gang more working people into the prison industrial complex, and loot the industrial machinery to be transferred to your friends on the inside.
It’s imperialism at home. Otherwise known as… fascism.
Trump is such a clown that when he speaks the internet is left talking about how he sounds like an angry idiot toddler. But he ends up getting a pass on his asinine policies because we are too busy talking about the insane stuff like “eating dogs” and him choosing to be Putin’s bitch.
Let’s not forget that his vision for “the economy” is also BS. His policy ideas are all bankrupt. The health care plan is not coming in 2 weeks. His administration inflicted on America’s budget the most insane deficit and debt of any single presidential term: https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump
His ideas on tariffs are insane and debunked by serious economists. The whole thing is bananas. His plan for tariffs would hurt American workers. And in typical GOP fashion, the pain hits harder on the working class.
For anyone that wants to read a real economics analysis, here is a detailed study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics,
Why Trump’s Tariff Proposals Would Harm Working Americans
