Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Hannibal]

Slapping 50% tariffs on foreign-made jeans or foreign-grown bananas is moronic.

It's not moronic if you prioritize saving the jobs in the domestic jeans or bananas businesses over having cheap jeans or bananas.

But you do need to impose tariffs on every industry if you want to be fair, so the guys making cars or Oreos don't end up worse off. The people who lose the most are people working in jobs that don't compete with foreign imports. Which is lots of us. I don't love the concept, but I can see where the motivation comes from.

[Mike]

Or the fact that he's been a highly effective and successful governor of the county's 3rd most populous state.

[Tom W]

His only problem is that he is Ron DeSantis.

Which isn't much of a problem when you see what the other options are.

[Da Geezer]

Anyhoo Trump has proposed

* Raising taxes by 10% on ALL imports. Raise taxes on Chinese imports specifically, which is a lot of what we buy, by closer to 60%
* Will do nothing serious to reduce spending on entitlements. Spew word salad gibberish to pretend he's simply going to close the deficit through "better management"
* More tax cuts for businesses! More tax cuts for the wealthy!
* Pressure the Fed to get interest rates to zero as fast as possible. Install a sycophantic goon at the Fed once Powell's term ends in 2026.

If you spent the past 3 years bitching about inflation and Biden's policies being directly responsible for it, you may want to check out Trump's platform and ask yourself if it sounds deflationary to you.

*Tariffs are not raising taxes. There are countervailing benefits to American workers from tariffs. But as Hanni says, ultimately tariffs raise prices. Taxes, on the other hand, always stifle economic output because wealth is transferred from productive businesses to the government (which is a decidedly unproductive entity).
* Better management would include doing something about the disability system. It would also include paying benefits only to US citizens. The best thing that could happen to this country would be for there to be a "voting card" in which citizenship is proven either by a birth certificate or proper naturalization documentation. If Trump is thinking about sending millions of illegals back, he will need a way to determine just who is legal.
* Tax cuts always and forever pay for themselves because letting people keep their own money leads to productive use of that money rather than allowing government to destroy production with regulations and the hiring of ever more bureaucrats. I might add that there is no way out of the National debt trap we are in other than economic growth
* The Fed does not "set" interest rates. The market does that. And when you see all this 3.7% "core" inflation talk, keep in mind this does not include food and energy.

[Mike]

The question then becomes: is it more moronic than ushering in 8 million migrants that don't have much way to support themselves and placing that burden on federal, state, and local governments?