The best revenge is living well. You put a 60% Tarrif on us, then we will simply quit doing business with you. And there are a lot of collateral benefits to doing business with us.
I like that too. I heard Trump say a day ago that we need to negotiate like we hold all the cards, and we do. He has some crazy ideas, but I like that one.
We have import tariffs now, too. The Ford Ranger was the best selling pickup truck in the US for many years. Haven't seen a new one in awhile? Ford moved production to Mexico and it then became subject to a 25% tariff on imported pickup trucks. So we were left with Toyota and Nissan pickups. Toyota and Nissan, (foreign manufacturers) undoubtedly made a lot more money on both volume and margin because consumers no longer got the option of purchasing their favorite truck and those were the only two left. I'm against having all consumers in America get screwed so that a million or two people can get manufacturing jobs. I cannot figure out why jobs in car manufacturing, smart phone assembly, etc, etc, is worth any more than what they get paid at mcdonalds for turning on a french fry machine. They are both unskilled labor. I'll just add what Art Laffer said about trade. If the US has a cure for heart disease and another country has a cure for cancer, and then the other country puts huge tariff on our cure for heart disease so it doesn't come in, are we supposed to say "hey, if you're not going to buy our cure for heart disease, then we're not going to buy your cure for cancer"? People buy foreign products if it makes their life better. Putting a tariff on foreign products is just an income transfer from the consumer to a few million manufacturing jobs that are overpaid.
that was my position for years... until I spoke with people who tried to sell things overseas. they took our jobs because they protected their economies while out politicians were advertising free trade. What happened was the cronies took our tech our IP and our jobs overseas... and then imported their people to the US and gave them handouts so our companies like walmart could facilitate more sales transactions for them. This extraction was also accomplished by destroying the value of our assets and income through inflation and taxation and pretending our standard of living was declining because our govt was overspending. What is really happening was the the extraction has hidden by inflation and low interest rates. Want to see pain... think of 7% interest rates. This will happen when the extraction is close to completion. We will be screwed as the bankers will say the U.S. can't default on its obligations so just turn over the trillions in assets the U.S. govt owns to the bankers and their clients who own the bonds. How many Bonds does the FED own now. They may even say they will invert (take) the assets american people have in their banks... and in exchange for leaving some of our money with us they we insist the U.S. join a world currency. This was not free trade. It was a rigged extraction. Left or right - I think we all need to wake the fuck up. The bankers are not accumulating these assets because they are nice people and we are playing bean bag here. There is no rule that says America can't be collapsed. There is no rule that says those in control have to respect our rights if they have the power. We need to cease being dupes of the cronies who control and own our politicians and our money supply. Does anyone here think the current crop of Politicians would not cave to banker demands during a manufactured crisis. We could be all screaming in unison don't give our land with mineral rights away... and Ryan and McConnell and Reid and Pelosi and Obama and Rubio and McCain and Clinton would be saying ... we have to do it or the govt will shut down and we will run out of money. Then in a secret vote all the democrats and half the republicans would vote our rights away and adopt a world currency. Just look at how Obamacare Obamatrade are working. We don't even know what is in Obamatrade and what was surrendered and Rubio... forget it... it just amazes me that people don't see this. These bastards and bastardettes vote without even reading the bills and our proud of it.
What? You're saying that a machinist, robotic technicians, and the like are the same skill level a some guy making fries? That's absurd.
No, i'm not. Those are a tiny minority of the jobs that are lost. Computer operated machinery operators are not unskilled and they make decent money and as far as i know, there are always jobs available for them as long as the economy is growing. They are always in demand. I'm talking about the vast majority of line jobs at a car plant that do nothing but slap one piece of metal onto another piece of metal. They can learn to do it in about a day or two. And those jobs are worth nothing more than min wage no matter how long people have become conditioned to believe they should make a good living and full retirement plan off of them. They priced themselves out of the mkt and they want the gov't to write a law to force consumers to come to them. I did that stuff at an Allis Chalmers union plant during a summer in college. There was nothing to it. If car companies have gone full robotic and those metal bending jobs are no longer part of the picture, then that would mean that there are only a small percentage of jobs left to do that are highly skilled. So either we're forcing consumers to get screwed so that a very small number of robot technicians can have a job, or if we're talking about thousands and thousands of jobs, like they typically mention, then most of them are just line jobs that are unskilled labor. They can't have it both ways. I'm a consumer. I am not a manufacturing worker. I'm not going to just stand by and keep my mouth shut while the gov't tries to redistribute money out of my pocket into someone elses.
I'm not sure that our budget deficits have anything to do with foreign trade. The gov't runs huge deficits and if china's central bank wasn't buying those bonds, they'd be in someone's portfolio. And the gov't would still be telling us they have to make good on them no matter who owns them. The answer is to not run huge deficits, not to turn off foreign trade. I'm for free trade without any treaties being used. I don't feel the gov't has any business making me pay more so it can be redistributed to someone else. These managed trade deals that we have now seem to me to be exactly what anti free traders are asking for. They make sure mkts are open for drugs and software and movies and everything that we have a competitive advantage in. If the definition of fair trade is that they have to buy just as much from us as we buy from them, i don't think that's good economics at all. Because it would just mean that if a foreign country didn't buy much, then consumers in the US would get rooked into buying something that was not their preference in order to balance the transaction with the other country. It's really like i said in the other post. I'm not just going to stand by and say nothing when money is taken out of my pocket and put in someone elses by the gov't. Of course, like in all of macroeconomics, there are many moving parts to consider and it is near impossible to know all of them or how they're being affected by other ones. It's all mostly opinion on my and everyone elses part.
you noted its a dynamic process. because by having a stronger economy our dollar would be worth more and you might be getting those goods relatively cheaper with a stronger dollar. for instance the stuff in walmart and our stores was a hell of lot less expensive a decade or two ago. Its very hard to say how much inflation has been caused by the fact our economy is weaker than it should have been vs how much has been caused by the FED "expanding" our money supply.
jem, we had a fresh continent of resources and were a huge exporter of low value added goods in those days (slavery helped, too). This made us deep pocketed customers for the world's manufacturers. We could afford to erect protective tariffs on our own nascent manufacturers' inputs. The situation is reversed today. The Cap'n mentioned CAT. So consider Waukesha, from whom my company also buys engines. They moved their plant to Canada because the US (well done, republicans) would not match Canada's Import/Export bank subsidies. Waukesha's exports are cheaper now because Canada's export subsidy has offset their tariffs. (Though to be honest Canada dropped almost all tariffs under Stephen Harper--to make Canada more competitive.)
FHL makes a powerful case. He's right, but I wonder if that's the end of the story. Is economic efficiency the only thing we care about? Where are we as a country when we turn into the UK, a hollowed-out country of people on welfare with a few super rich bankers and everyone else working as waiters and bartenders? Foreign countries force us to sell our heart disease remedy at cost or they will invalidate the patents. We have to buy their cancer medicine at exhorbitant prices. We end up financing pharma R&D for the entire world on the backs of the US consumer and taxpayers. US companies that want to sell into china typically have to set up a plant there and transfer their trade secrets to chinese partners. Of course, a lot of the proprietary data and know how, the stuff the academicians assure us will replace metal bending, is just stolen or counterfeited anyway. We have the largest consumer market and can dictate terms to other countries. Instead we have foolishly embraced the WTO and other global trade regimes, where foreign bureaucrats dictate terms to us. That is exactly what Trump is talking about.