Tariffs are not a new concept and have been used historically to build economies. Top China analysts in the Obama administration credited its economic rise to protective tariffs and high barriers to entry for any foreign companies to sell in country.
I’m probably a bit older than most lemmy users and remember when tariffs were a major talking point for democrats as a positive thing to protect American jobs. Hell, growing up in the Midwest, all my dad and his buddies that worked union jobs had to vote democrat because of their aggressive tariff policy to protect their jobs.
So what if trump is right about tariffs and it reinvigorates the American economy? Will people find another reason to credit the success to? Will it be the end of blue collar voting for the democrats?
Edit: Markets are rebounding hard, I bought low, glad Lemmy is full of pseudo intellectual economic morons. How is Lemmy going to cope now?
He won’t be right about tariffs because he (and you, I suppose) has a gross misunderstanding about how tariffs should be implemented. Tariffs are typically used to strengthen a local product. Say that we wanted to support Napa wine. We might introduce a tarrif on importing wines from our largest competitors. This would increase the cost of the foreign product in relation to the domestic product and encourage consumers to buy locally. So, why won’t this work if we just tarrif everyone for everything? Well, we don’t make everything so they’re isn’t a local option to buy instead. Not just for you, but for the companies that make the things you consume. Oh, then let’s just build up the industries to make everything. Even disregarding that we don’t have the ability to produce everything due to, well, climate and resources, that would cost many millions of dollars and years of investment before seeing a profit. Which is a nice idea if businesses had any faith that the tariffs are permanent, which they don’t not only because the current administration (likely lol) won’t be in power forever, but also because the current administration has said that they are willing to negotiate. So why bother making the investment when you can import again soon? And lastly, if we try to strong-arm everyone at the same time, they’ll just band together without us. They don’t need to trade with us if they have an alternative in a more profitable trade partner, and we’ve just incentivized the entire world to look for a better option than us. We did that. All at once. The idiocy is frankly astounding.