Donald J. Trump is... TARIFF MAN: Righting wrongs and funding walls

[zikzak]

@Brainspore

Common people can benefit from international trade too. I happen to LIKE avocados.

Yeah, thank god for United Fruit Company, champion of the common people and their right to avocado toast. There’s a reason avocados are grown in Mexico, and it’s not just climate. It’s because American demand for cheap commodities requires conditions which would be considered intolerable in the US. So I don’t disagree that you can benefit, but consider at whose expense.

@Dire

So domestic retailers just absorb the import tariffs?

Sure, sometimes. Or sometimes they find a different remote source to keep costs down. Or sometimes they make longer-term investments in local production in order to stabilize price. Or yes, sometimes they raise the price for the consumer. But generally speaking, importers will be forced to do their second-favorite thing (where their favorite thing is importing super cheap goods from workers with negligible labor, wage, health or environmental protections). Much of the time this is actually a positive change, even in the case where it does mean your cell phone costs 5% more.

@DukeTrout

Suppliers and Purchasers usually end up meeting somewhere in the middle, depending on the power dynamic.

Depending on the power dynamic indeed.

@DukeTrout

I’d like to see some evidence behind the statement that “NAFTA destroyed Mexico’s economy.”

In Oaxaca, some towns have become depopulated, or are now made up of only communities of the very old and very young, where most working-age people have left to work in the north. Economic crises provoked by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other economic reforms are now uprooting and displacing these Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas, where people still speak languages (such as Mixteco, Zapoteco and Triqui) that were old when Columbus arrived from Spain. “There are no jobs, and NAFTA forced the price of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore,” Dominguez says. “We come to the U.S. to work because we can’t get a price for our product at home. There’s no alternative.”

@Shuck

current tariffs on components (but not finished goods), [are] causing US manufacturers to move their jobs overseas

Granted, that sounds like a bad policy to me. But I highly doubt that it’s tariffs on components which are mainly responsible for the relocation of manufacturing jobs. Even if we had no tariffs on components, lack of worker and environmental protections make manufacturing abroad far more exploitable and therefore profitable. You know what would make it less profitable, though? Tariffs on importing those goods. I don’t love government intervention as a solution, but I’m just saying.

@Shuck

And this is the objection to all of Trump’s plans - they’re the completely wrong solutions, badly implemented, and everything he says about them is a lie.

I think this is a good take. We can criticize Trump while also criticizing the Kochs of the world who hate Trump for their own reasons.