Ok. The bottom line is, either it “won’t do all that much”-- meaning it won’t affect prices, it won’t affect the economy, it’ll be basically useless–or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The “disastrously expensive for ordinary people” is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it’s the mechanism by which the plan operates.
There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll wreck the country that was snipped out.
That’s true if all other things were equal, but they’re not. The US is the largest economy in the world, based on GDP, so it has a lot more weight to swing around than others. So theoretically, the US should have more leverage than smaller countries.
That said, I don’t think the US has enough leverage to get away with this. Retaliatory tariffs will come and the net result is that trade in all regions will suffer. When you tax something, you get less of it…
The US might be able to get some leverage if we had an economist in power w/ strong diplomacy skills, but we have Trump.
They may not understand it, but they’ve fucked around long enough to get to the find out part of the equation. I just wish those of us that understand this and voted against this shit wouldn’t be affected by it
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll *wreck* the country that was snipped out.
This is just such an absolutely perfect summary. I wish we could American politicians to speak this clearly to explain why this is such a bad idea.
It wouldn’t matter. The public doesn’t listen directly to politicians, it gets filtered through the media first, and the media picks and chooses which parts they actually report. The people who would actually hear this already know. The people who would need to hear it never will because Fox won’t show it to them.
Ok. The bottom line is, either it “won’t do all that much”-- meaning it won’t affect prices, it won’t affect the economy, it’ll be basically useless–or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The “disastrously expensive for ordinary people” is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it’s the mechanism by which the plan operates.
There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll wreck the country that was snipped out.
That’s true if all other things were equal, but they’re not. The US is the largest economy in the world, based on GDP, so it has a lot more weight to swing around than others. So theoretically, the US should have more leverage than smaller countries.
That said, I don’t think the US has enough leverage to get away with this. Retaliatory tariffs will come and the net result is that trade in all regions will suffer. When you tax something, you get less of it…
The US might be able to get some leverage if we had an economist in power w/ strong diplomacy skills, but we have Trump.
Conservatives will NEVER understand this.
They may not understand it, but they’ve fucked around long enough to get to the find out part of the equation. I just wish those of us that understand this and voted against this shit wouldn’t be affected by it
This is just such an absolutely perfect summary. I wish we could American politicians to speak this clearly to explain why this is such a bad idea.
It wouldn’t matter. The public doesn’t listen directly to politicians, it gets filtered through the media first, and the media picks and chooses which parts they actually report. The people who would actually hear this already know. The people who would need to hear it never will because Fox won’t show it to them.
That would require American politicians to have a spine. Those are in short supply.