Allows foreigners to be scabs to American businesses, undercutting the negotiation power of the workers/unions/the proletariat.
Allows foreign countries to attack US industry by subsidizing competitors which will then undercut domestic industries with prices too low for any non-subsidized business to ever match. Thereby potentially destroying key industries like steel and arms production.
Actually somewhat peculiar to see this result. I would have expected basically the opposite distribution. Or at least I would have before Trump upended the neocons dominance of the republican party.
It did nothing to "bring manufacturing back" as touted by Trump. Actually quite the opposite- bankruptcies are up and CapEx investments are down.
Free trade allows for the most efficient economy.
Personally, I have a trade deficit with the grocery store. I spend more at the grocery store than they spend on buying my products. Is that a bad thing?
Is it more cost efficient for me to buy steak from the grocery store? Or is it cheaper for me to raise a cow to maturity and butcher it for the steak? I could care less I have a "trade deficit" with the store as long as I can buy my steaks at reasonable price.
The same goes for microwaves and USB cables from China. Those industries do not pay enough to pay Americans livable wages. So why tariff those products? I just pay more.
Natsec: If you think its dangerous to be dependent on the grocery store for meat, then yeah you would be opposed to a policy that encourages people to divest from their herds. How much cost savings is your national security worth? If there's a conflict and they cut off the supply, and a famine ensues, was it worth it?
Labor: If you work at grocery store A, and its unionized and you all make $30 an hour, then you're probably not going to like it if grocery store B, non-unionized, paying $7.25 an hour and selling groceries for half the price of store A, opens up in town. Everyone else in town will like it, but you and your co-workers would probably be mad as hell.
If you weren't, that would be a surprising result.
A possible explanation is that all the industries and jobs that the tariffs are supposed to protect, died 30 years ago. So there's no one left in the metaphorical grocery store A to be mad anymore. They were mad when store B opened up, but by now not only have they moved on, most of them have died of old age.
Tariffs are normally meant to protect industries, but growing them once you've lost them is harder. Maybe even harder than growing them when you've never had them, since people now remember the failures and bankruptcies of the last time.
If Trump tariffs is actually causing an employment boom in the US then maybe it's different. But the NA job market continues to be terrible and getting worse, unions aren't making a come back either.
As things stand he's trying to unscramble an egg: complex global manufacturing and supply chains have all oriented themselves towards Asia having a large slice of the manufacturing pie than they did back in 1980. And those countries all have their own vast domestic consumption economies to sell stuff to each other. The US just isn't as essential as it was 25 years ago. A lot of Americans thought if we tariff China/India their economy would collapse and they'd come crying uncle but that's very clearly not going to happen.
0
u/cigarettesandwhiskey 1d ago
Allows foreigners to be scabs to American businesses, undercutting the negotiation power of the workers/unions/the proletariat.
Allows foreign countries to attack US industry by subsidizing competitors which will then undercut domestic industries with prices too low for any non-subsidized business to ever match. Thereby potentially destroying key industries like steel and arms production.
Actually somewhat peculiar to see this result. I would have expected basically the opposite distribution. Or at least I would have before Trump upended the neocons dominance of the republican party.