Ask someone in a third world country to do some basic addition and they can do it pretty easily. Ask the average American, and they can’t. We’ve become dependent on calculators. AI may be like this for a much broader range of thinking and we risk turning ourselves into morons.
The China shock was actually quite minor compared to the size of the US population. Most lost jobs are due to automation, not China. Tariffs don’t solve this. Dumb tariffs, like Trump’s tariffs, make it worse.
Trump tariffed India for buying Russian oil, and now Trump is buying Russian diesel, which is a form of refined oil. He has turned the United States into a hypocritical country with no principles, who no one should trust because no words, no deal, means anything. The country has always had to look out for itself, but the repeated backing out of deals, including ones made by Trump, the repeated economic and military aggression, and the naked unprincipled hypocrisy has turned the United States into an asshole country.
1/3 two 2/3s of the big inflation we had was caused by supply side issues, meaning Covid-caused problems with producing goods, services, and energy, rather than too much government spending. The other 1 or 2 thirds…was government spending–the Covid relief bills.
Some people talked about tariffs like they would single handedly crush the economy. That’s unfortunate because models showed that tariffs are bad for the economy in ways that hurt people, but aren’t usually significant enough to single-handedly crush the economy. This makes it easier for people to incorrectly deny the harms of tariffs in general, and the harms of the current and recent tariffs.
Some economists think tariffs never make sense. Others, think that with strategy, thinking carefully about where to apply them, to which countries, on which items, what the different impacts will be, and informing and working with your allies…then tariffs could be a net good despite the costs. That’s not what we got from Trump.
With Trump, we got hectic tariffs that require a daily chart to manage them all. It doesn’t make sense to build a factory based on a short-term tariff that could change at any moment due to a variety of reasons.
Putting tariffs on every country cuts your leverage over any particular one country.
If the goal is to get specific industries back in the US, then you want highly targeted tariffs.
Liberation day tariffs were based on a simple formula and they were absurd on their face. The administration just didn’t do their homework when coming up with tariffs.
Trump ignored free trade agreements that the US had made with countries.
Trump enacts tariffs for a variety of personal reasons that don’t make sense, like tariffing Canada for fentanyl, even though US fentanyl mostly comes through Mexico. If I’m another country watching erratic tariffs, I don’t really know what to do to avoid tariffs, and I’m going to start planning with other countries how to counter this erratic country called the Untied States of America.
Trump’s bombastic behavior of threats, tariffs, and war are making the world more skeptical of the United States. China is taking advantage of that and arguing that they are the more reliable power.
America’s biggest trade problem is China. Trump started a trade war with China, fought it foolishly, and lost. He escalated tariffs on all goods from China to a level the US couldn’t handle, and that combined with the US need for Chinese rare earths, forced Trump to back down. Tariffs were put on countries who are not rivals and who cooperation with has little to no downsides. Tariffs were put on all sorts of goods, making it difficult for American businesses to operate because they couldn’t afford the inputs to their businesses. China’s strategic cheating on trade affects the whole world. The US could have worked with the world and strategically fought a trade war with China. Instead, the president doesn’t appear to have a basic understanding of economics and world relations, so just blindly tariffed most countries and most goods in such a way that hurt the United States and its people.
China is screwing Europe economically. The US could have worked with Europe to counter China’s cheating, instead, Trump declared economic war on everyone at once, and bowed to China because China was too strong for Trump to take on alone.
Trump’s tariffs haven’t much limited goods coming from China to the US because China just ships them through third-party countries. The administration talked about cracking down on this, but haven’t really done it.