Dr. Phosphorous
Platinum Member
- Sep 3, 2024
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Trump backed down against China because a lot of MAGA supporters started complaining about the tariffs....and got nothing in return from China.
Trump blinked...because even his most loyal supporters are telling the mentally ill imbecile that his tariffs are fucking insane.
As the excerpt from the article below mentions, the average U.S. tariff rate has risen from 2.5% to 18% under Trump...even after easing the tariffs against China last weekend.
This is the highest tariff rate since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s, which made the Great Depression even worse.
From the Washington Post --
Throughout April, President Donald Trump’s sky-high tariffs on imports from China had rippled through the U.S. and global economies. But the president was reluctant to move too quickly to lower the penalties on Beijing, believing that the United States needed to stomach some short-term economic pain to achieve a major rebalancing in trade and that China had more to lose in the standoff.
By the end of the month, though, a growing number of blue-collar workers whom Trump saw as part of his political base — including longshoremen and truckers — began warning that tariffs and a near-total cessation of trade with China were hurting them. Behind the scenes, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other aides told Trump that his own voters were in danger if the tariffs did not come down, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. That gave them a path to initiating negotiations with the Chinese, which culminated this past weekend in Geneva with a partial deal to reduce tariffs between the world’s two biggest economies. One White House official cautioned, however, that multiple factors contributed to the trade talks in Switzerland.
Trump has substantially changed tariffs on goods from China, Canada and Mexico at least a half-dozen times each. He has reversed himself at least three times on auto tariffs, on steel and aluminum, and on agriculture and energy. Other sectors are left waiting to see how their production lines might be upended. Trump has announced, but not implemented, tariffs on semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and a range of other critical imports.
Previously, the most rapid period of change for U.S. trade policy was from 1806 to 1812, as early American presidents contended with shifting alliances with Britain and France, according to Douglas Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College who specializes in economic history. But, Irwin said, “that was changing every year. This is changing every day. The sheer amount of activity is unprecedented, overwhelming.”
Even after easing economic hostilities with China, Trump has raised the average U.S. tariff rate from 2.5 percent to 18 percent — the highest level since the Smoot-Hawley tariff rate of the 1930s that most economists think exacerbated the Great Depression, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. Trump has long maintained that these higher tariffs will provide an incentive for companies to bring operations onshore and will help pay for the GOP tax bill.
But some critics say these policies are unlikely to achieve that result. A high tariff rate could in theory provide an incentive for manufacturers to move production to the U.S., but the administration’s constant reversals of policy gives businesses little confidence that they won’t be undercut later. That undermines the goal of encouraging companies to invest heavily in new U.S. facilities.
“It’s been completely insane,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, said of Trump’s tariff policies. “When I step back from the euphoria over easing tariffs with China, what I see is the tariff rate is five times as high as when Trump took office. And we seem to have gotten nothing out of it at all.”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, pointed out that the only formal pact so far is more of an outline for a future agreement than a traditional trade deal. It’s hard to imagine that Britain needed to be threatened with major tariffs for its leaders to agree to relatively minor concessions, Holtz-Eakin said.
“All we’ve done is impose tariffs and then un-impose them — we haven’t accomplished anything, honestly,” Holtz-Eakin said. “We’re going to sell some more Boeings to the U.K. That’s the only thing. Did we really need the tariffs on the world to get that done?”
Trump blinked...because even his most loyal supporters are telling the mentally ill imbecile that his tariffs are fucking insane.
As the excerpt from the article below mentions, the average U.S. tariff rate has risen from 2.5% to 18% under Trump...even after easing the tariffs against China last weekend.
This is the highest tariff rate since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s, which made the Great Depression even worse.
From the Washington Post --
Throughout April, President Donald Trump’s sky-high tariffs on imports from China had rippled through the U.S. and global economies. But the president was reluctant to move too quickly to lower the penalties on Beijing, believing that the United States needed to stomach some short-term economic pain to achieve a major rebalancing in trade and that China had more to lose in the standoff.
By the end of the month, though, a growing number of blue-collar workers whom Trump saw as part of his political base — including longshoremen and truckers — began warning that tariffs and a near-total cessation of trade with China were hurting them. Behind the scenes, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other aides told Trump that his own voters were in danger if the tariffs did not come down, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. That gave them a path to initiating negotiations with the Chinese, which culminated this past weekend in Geneva with a partial deal to reduce tariffs between the world’s two biggest economies. One White House official cautioned, however, that multiple factors contributed to the trade talks in Switzerland.
Trump has substantially changed tariffs on goods from China, Canada and Mexico at least a half-dozen times each. He has reversed himself at least three times on auto tariffs, on steel and aluminum, and on agriculture and energy. Other sectors are left waiting to see how their production lines might be upended. Trump has announced, but not implemented, tariffs on semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and a range of other critical imports.
Previously, the most rapid period of change for U.S. trade policy was from 1806 to 1812, as early American presidents contended with shifting alliances with Britain and France, according to Douglas Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College who specializes in economic history. But, Irwin said, “that was changing every year. This is changing every day. The sheer amount of activity is unprecedented, overwhelming.”
Even after easing economic hostilities with China, Trump has raised the average U.S. tariff rate from 2.5 percent to 18 percent — the highest level since the Smoot-Hawley tariff rate of the 1930s that most economists think exacerbated the Great Depression, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. Trump has long maintained that these higher tariffs will provide an incentive for companies to bring operations onshore and will help pay for the GOP tax bill.
But some critics say these policies are unlikely to achieve that result. A high tariff rate could in theory provide an incentive for manufacturers to move production to the U.S., but the administration’s constant reversals of policy gives businesses little confidence that they won’t be undercut later. That undermines the goal of encouraging companies to invest heavily in new U.S. facilities.
“It’s been completely insane,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, said of Trump’s tariff policies. “When I step back from the euphoria over easing tariffs with China, what I see is the tariff rate is five times as high as when Trump took office. And we seem to have gotten nothing out of it at all.”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, pointed out that the only formal pact so far is more of an outline for a future agreement than a traditional trade deal. It’s hard to imagine that Britain needed to be threatened with major tariffs for its leaders to agree to relatively minor concessions, Holtz-Eakin said.
“All we’ve done is impose tariffs and then un-impose them — we haven’t accomplished anything, honestly,” Holtz-Eakin said. “We’re going to sell some more Boeings to the U.K. That’s the only thing. Did we really need the tariffs on the world to get that done?”
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