“Some $1.6 trillion in annual imports are subject to the tariffs, while at least $1.7 trillion are excluded, either because they are duty-free or subject to another tariff, according to a POLITICO analysis based on last year’s import data.
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In an interview with POLITICO on Monday, Trump said he was open to adding even more exemptions to tariffs. He downplayed the existing carve-outs as “very small” and “not a big deal,” and said he plans to pair them with tariff increases elsewhere.
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In addition to the exemptions from Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, more than $300 billion of imports are also exempted as part of trade deals the administration has negotiated in recent months, including with the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan and more recently, Malaysia, Cambodia and Brazil. The deal with Brazil removed a range of products from a cumulative tariff of 50 percent, making two-thirds of imports from the country free from emergency tariffs.”
An unstrategic mishmash of tariffs is not good for the economy.
“The unemployment rate rose to 4.6 percent in November, its highest level in more than four years, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The economy gained 64,000 jobs that month after losing 105,000 in October, mostly the result of federal government workers taking buyouts.”
“The fee will affect workers in fields far beyond tech. Health care providers, religious groups, and educators are among those suing the Trump administration over the fee, “saying it would harm hospitals, churches, schools and industries that rely on the visa,” reports the Associated Press. The fee could exacerbate teacher and physician shortages, especially in rural areas that struggle to attract American workers. “About a third of H-1B workers are nurses, teachers, physicians, scholars, priests and pastors, according to the lawsuit,” according to the Associated Press.
Though the Trump administration argues that its visa fee will address the “large-scale replacement of American workers,” it might not lead to companies hiring American workers instead of foreign workers after all. “Firms respond to restrictions on H-1B immigration by increasing foreign affiliate employment,” found a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. “For every visa rejection,” the average multinational corporation hires 0.4 employees overseas, while the most globalized firms “hire 0.9 employees abroad for every visa rejection.” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond economist Nicolas Morales observed that “tighter immigration rules don’t just limit U.S. hiring, but they can also accelerate relocating jobs to other countries.”
Other countries are trying to attract foreign talent that might be deterred by U.S. visa policies, Roll Call reported in October. Germany’s ambassador to India and Bhutan compared the country’s immigration policy to a German car: “It’s reliable, it’s modern and it is predictable….We do not change our rules fundamentally overnight.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued that “not as many people are going to get visas to the United States,” which represents “an opportunity for Canada.”
The H-1B program is imperfect. Many supporters of high-skilled immigration suggest fundamentally changing the visa or scrapping it altogether, arguing that it limits foreign workers’ mobility and long-term prospects and doesn’t prioritize the highest-skilled workers for the U.S. economy. But a $100,000 fee won’t fix those issues.”
“Texas farmers have long pushed for Mexico to send more water to meet the obligations of the 81-year-old treaty that says Mexico is obligated to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the U.S. every five years. Trump also threatened sanctions and tariffs against Mexico in April, complaining then that the country had delivered less than 30 percent of the requirement over a five-year window that ended in October.
Mexico argues that climate change-driven drought has hindered its ability to send the requisite water, but officials promised to send 420,000 acre-feet to the U.S. by October.”
China is using its stranglehold on rare earth minerals to wage economic warfare against the world. If a company wants such materials from somewhere else, they will be more expensive, and those companies’ products will no longer be competitive.
When countries like China focus on heavily investing, initially it works well because they invest in productive things and this grows their economy. However, later, they run out of that many productive things to invest in, in which case they are robbing their citizens of consumption and outcompeting other countries’ manufacturing, but not gaining much actual new productive benefits. This leads to debt.
Bilateral tariffs like Trump is doing don’t work. The U.S. has a huge deficit because it consumes more than it exports. A global tariff could work by making goods more expensive and incentivizing people to consume, now relatively cheaper, domestic products. Bilateral tariffs just mean Americans will import cheap goods from country C and D instead of the heavily tariffed countries A and B.
Getting foreigners to invest in the U.S. hurts the U.S.. The U.S. has plenty of capital to invest and doesn’t need more. Additional investment means driving up the dollar, making U.S. goods less competitive internationally, and hurting U.S. exports.
China has debt to support investment. The U.S. has debt to support consumption. The system is out of whack and needs adjustment.
Calling a political opponent a communist is silly. Not even the Soviet Union or China called themselves communist. They called themselves socialist. Communism is when the productive surplus is controlled by the workers themselves. The government owning a business and deciding what to do with a surplus is just a government elite controlling the surplus instead of an owner or manager elite. Communism would be not a government elite or capitalist elite controlling the surplus, but the workers controlling the surplus. The socialist governments were supposed to be a transition phase to true communism. The closest things to this might be cooperatives where the workers also own the business, although those are done within a larger capitalist system.
“The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report last month showed there were 6,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in October, despite nonfarm payrolls increasing by 119,000. The slip in factory roles have brought the tally of lost manufacturing jobs since Trump’s April tariff push to 59,000, according to the data.
Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told Fortune the shrinking manufacturing sector is, in part, a result of tariffs disproportionately hitting intermediate goods, which are products used in the process of creating a finished good. This can hike up production costs, forcing companies to slash headcount. Pantheon Macroeconomics analysts Samuel Tombs and Oliver Allen similarly said in September that shrinking wage growth was a result of tariff-hit companies trying to maintain margins amid rising input costs.”