Wouldn't restoring the prior taxes to those with highest incomes, and adding a proper capital gains tax, address this directly? As I've started to accumulate small amounts of wealth I've realized, my capital gains are taxed lower than my income; when I sell my house, I get up to 500k of gains tax free. If I backdoor a Roth IRA, I get tax free gains there too. etc. Add additional taxes to investment properties, in the form of property taxes could be one approach as well - I personally know of one investor that owns at least 20 (SFH) properties for example. So I'd propose starting there, as it targets both the wealth gap as well as hits those who can most afford it directly.
> Tariffs accomplish both of those, raising money at the same time as raising cost of goods and weakening the dollar.
If tariffs significantly reduce demand, or worse cause a recession, they will have the opposite effect. It would take time to sort out the full impact. But AFAIK, the tax cuts are proposed to be pushed through immediately, without firm corresponding spending reductions nor time to sort out the impact of the tariffs; similarly the tariffs are being implemented in what seems like a haphazard way, with everyone unsure of what they would / will be, how much, etc.
In general, I think if the plan were modest tax increases, esp. around capital gains policy and targeting SFH as investments, (very) modest tariffs, and well executed spending cuts, nobody would be in uproar. I will be pleasantly surprised if the current plan ends well, but it certainly feels as though only those steeped deeply in ideology are supportive of them at the present moment, and I think that is probably telling.
It's not like money isn't being made in the US today.
>Manufacturing output in the United States is at an all-time high as of 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
So you bring the factories back to the US, but 95% of the created jobs are for robots.
Problem solved...?
My point is some industries just die. And its okay. The solution is not to go backwards, but tax the winners of the change to subsidize and retrain the people who lost.
But in America, the extreme winners have convinced the rest of us that we shouldn't tax them, and Trump is now asking us to instead tax everyone more
> My point is some industries just die. And its okay.
You've got your example dead wrong. American farming didn't "just die," it got insanely more productive.
And a lot of the industries people want back didn't "just die," they just got moved so the "extreme winners" could profit off them even more. And then those same winners and their defenders always go "herp derp, industries gone, nothing we can do! Don't fight it, think: gone forreeevvveer."
> and Trump is now asking us to instead tax everyone more
Trump is now demanding to instead tax US residents more indirectly
Any working class person against higher and broader capital gains taxes is not thinking very deeply, in my opinion.
Where we fall dreadfully short compared to other countries is corporate tax revenue. In 2021, corporate income tax revenue in the U.S. was 1.6% of GDP, compared to the OECD average of 3.2%
Also when talking about tariffs reducing demand and inflating prices, I think it’s important to note that’s partly true. It doesn’t raise prices of domestic goods and actually increases demand for domestic goods.
That is the most harebrained argument I've ever heard. If politicians are "bad at taxing rich people", maybe the solution could be electing people that actually share the average citizens perspective and attempt to do this more effectively (like Sanders or Tim Walz), instead of billionaire nepo babies that spend half their career on a golf course?
I mean if I was a billionaire, making policy for billionairs, got paid by other billionairs and had working class people still elect me, I most certainly would not try to tax rich people harder, either...
> I think it’s important to note that’s partly true. It doesn’t raise prices of domestic goods and actually increases demand for domestic goods.
Increased demand for domestic goods means increased price for those. And actually increasing domestic supply affects other sectors, too, driving up costs all over the board (=> see baumol effect)-- there is no large unemployed workforce to throw at manufacturing without driving up costs in the places that worked in, before.
As a counter example, Thomas Piketty argues at length that taxation and wealth redistribution remain an effective way to bolster a societies resilience and lessen wealth inequality - which is still a very real issue in the world, and arguably one that the US shows can have very real negative consequences for letting it go unaddressed.
As for demand and inflating prices, yeah, domestic products may be more attractive, but the economy is huge, and much of it does not have a domestic allegory. The other issue here is the tax is on all imports, not only manufactured goods, which means raw materials - which often have to be sourced elsewhere - make manufacturing more expensive even domestically
> and much of it does not have a domestic allegory
Well some would argue that's the problem. Maybe now we will? Idk.
While nothing does, the actual discussion around it isn't allowing any room for non-tariff tax increases regardless.
Neither tariffs nor cost cutting, unless it targets major programs such as Social Security or Medicaid, will have an effect on the national debt or the deficit.
It’s all marketing.
The social safety net in this country is already terrible, making it more terrible by cutting the programs won't be better for anyone except a slice of the wealthy
Tangentially:
It’s wild how inconsistent the public and political reactions are to different ways of getting revenue. Take this common pattern:
When DOGE identifies billions of dollars in waste, fraud, or unnecessary spending, the reaction is often: "That’s only 0.01% of the federal budget. It’s nothing!"
But when someone proposes a tax on billionaires that would over time raise a similar amount suddenly the reaction flips: "We’ll solve inequality! Fund healthcare!"
This contradiction is everywhere. How can $20 billion in government savings be "nothing," while $20 billion in new tax revenue is "transformational"? It's the same money.
Did DOGE actually identify significant levels of any of this or is it simply labeled that for the expedited purpose of shrinking the federal government's effectiveness by any means possible?
They've been far less than transparent with the data that supports their findings and have been called out numerous times for misrepresentation[0][1][2][3] and lack of transparency which took a lawsuit to at least partially recitify[4]
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5313853/doge-savings-re...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/19/here-are...
[3]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-days-musk-trump-t...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/judge-orders...
Surely there's plenty of waste in federal spending but I suspect the vast majority is not going to be blatant and easy to identify
> NPR's analysis found that, of its verifiable work completed so far, DOGE has cut just $2 billion in spending — less than three hundredths of a percent of last fiscal year's federal spending.
> "Think of Congress and its budget as the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card, and DOGE is the $2 off gas card he used along the way," Riedl said. "It's great that he saved $2 on gas, but I think his wife may be more concerned about the $250,000 car."
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...
Regardless, "taxing the rich" is not one mediocre policy, but several interdependent policies. It's not just picking the 5 richest people in the world and taking their money. The transformation doesn't come from redistributing $20 billion (wherever that figure is from) but encouraging executives to reinvest into their company instead of trying to suck as much cash out as possible.
Bobby Kotick making $155 million a year while Activison lays off hundreds of employees is insane. What on God's earth could you possibly need more than $20 million a year for? That is not right no matter you slice it. That money needs to be aggressively taxed so it is instead used to keep people employed at a much lower tax rate, not in the hopes that the government can use it for spending.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67eebae2-df3c-800b-aba9-6e36c04810...
I liked Sowell's book, "Wealth, Poverty and Politics". Can you recommend one of Piketty's books?
> raw materials - which often have to be sourced elsewhere
Is that necessarily true? The US has abundant natural resources. Tesla could be mining lithium a few hundred miles away from their factory instead of importing it...
I'd say start with Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. Its a great read, if a bit thick (its a very large tome indeed and very information dense)
>Is that necessarily true? The US has abundant natural resources. Tesla could be mining lithium a few hundred miles away from their factory instead of importing it...
Its about access, cost, amount, etc. One company getting lithium is a rounding error. The entire market for lithium is bigger than Tesla and even electric cars. Then there is the entire question of how fast you can get the lithium online. Its not like most (if any) of the businesses reliant on lithium - which again, more than just auto makers certainly - take in raw lithium and produce something with it. It is typically pre-processed depending on its use. So that needs to come online too. Also, is there enough of the US workforce that can get this material online quickly? We're talking years before something comes online in sufficient quantity to be meaningful, let alone replace other sources.
Then you have to ask how much of the given resource do we even have? Whats the quality? Not all lithium deposits are the same, after all.
And many more questions I am not likely thinking about, and this is only in regard to lithium. Think about the raw materials for everything in our lives - gold, silver, uranium, iron etc. and you'll find in more cases than not its simply unfeasible to start mining & processing it in the US, you will have to import it.
Your idea of what this takes is, frankly, a bit too simplistic to be realistic or useful until it answers all of these kinds of questions.
>Mr Piketty’s second criticism touches on Mr Hollande’s tax policy. For years the French economist has argued for a more progressive tax system, which would merge both income tax, currently paid by only half of French households, and the “contribution sociale généralisée”, a non-progressive social charge paid by all. This too was one of Mr Hollande’s campaign promises. Yet the president has shelved any plans to overhaul the tax structure, preferring instead simply to increase taxes on the middle-classes and the rich.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2015/01/02/pikettys-snub
First off, capital flight is not a good argument against high wealth taxes, it's an argument for more controls to prevent people from doing this, so they are forced to reinvest in business.
The wealth tax was in for a meager 2 years, and the richest in the country started calling it "anti-business" even though they were transparently refusing to reinvest that money in their company. Anti-business is shorthand for "We can't hire the 1 high-earner executive we want to play golf with instead of the 100 lower level employees that would actually help the economy."
Instead, they kept THEIR salaries and ate that tax cost, and told their employees they would suffer during these times. It was a coordinated effort to discredit something that was meant to create more jobs. Much like when Saudi Arabia artificially restricted oil until after the 2020 election. And the administration had no controls on this.
So yes, high taxes on the rich by themselves are worthless, but that doesn't mean those policies coupled with tighter controls aren't essential for wealth inequality.
Of course, conservative news is going to talk about this in the context of debt, and claim because the amount raised did not match the debt (moronic) that it was clearly a bad idea to tax the rich, when the real takeaway is there needs to be more controls and a bigger spotlight on how these scumbags jerk the system around. At the end of the day, they are trying to keep their yachts and their massive, unnecessary mortgages, and will fight tooth and nail to do so, and anyone falling for news stories about "oh it didn't work in 2 years, my boss said I was going to take a salary cut" is helping that agenda and nothing else.
Have you ever tried to purchase electronics in Brazil? I don't know if that increased demand for domestic goods is necessarily a good thing...
Interestingly, Lua came out of Brazil for these reasons...
US homes tend not to be built with Japanese techniques.
As usual, libertarianism is used as a justification for corporate fascism, mercantilism, taxes on the poor… basically the Republican agenda. Funny how that works.
How are those things related? Are poor people bribing politicians to increase taxes?
(He actually was interviewed yesterday and he was very much not a fan of the tariffs.)
The primary benefit of the approach is that the pre-tarrif economy is strong, health care, high prices, and very high SFH prices are the primary ways people are hurting. Modest taxes as noted above address 2/3 without upending the economy in the process.
Prices wont come down, but unlike the tarrif plan they also wont go up so... seems like a better option at least to my relatively uninformed brain.
Though I am partial to using new revenue to increase competition (new startups) in weakly competitive markets. That's the most effective way of increasing supply, and choice, and letting a market function.
1950: 25% tax revenue came from personal income. 25% from social security. 25% from businesses. 25% from excise taxes.
Today: 50% tax revenue from personal income. 35% from social security. 7% from business. 7% from excise taxes.
This problem is never understood.
Turns out that governing based on the whims of the executive has downsides.
Years? Lol, how much would you bet they are all exactly the same in a month? A week?
> Hell, even the current [president] could [eliminate these tariffs].
The point is that the goal of building onshore production isn't as likely to be reached with these tariffs due in part to the uncertainty surrounding the method of enacting the tariffs.
What about all of the domestic producers of finished goods who can now can not afford their materials and supplies? What about the domestic supplier of that finished goods producer who has their orders cut because the finished goods producer needs to cut production? What about the domestic consumer who'd like to buy those finished goods, but they can't afford it because prices over all have increased? What about the barber shop by the finished goods plant that has to shut down because the finished goods plant cut their workforce by 50%?
100+ years of studying tariffs have shown that they are effective when very narrowly targeted. Otherwise they almost never achieve their stated goal of actually increasing domestic production.
Should we tax goods from Mississippi to NY to save jobs in NYC? After all, wages in NYC are way higher than in MS. Trade with MS pulls down wages with NYC.
A new steel mill won't magically appear in the middle of the US within a month.
And yet, I'm sure Trump will show up at one to take credit for its existence within the next month or so.
So if people were trying to make the world a better place congratulations they succeeded. JD Vance uses a bit different framing(!).
Anyway, back to your question, IMHO the problem in thinking here is that it implies that there must be "They" and "Us". You can't just get prosperous as a humanity, it needs to be a subgroup like "Americans" or "Germans" that do amazing things and they are very unsatisfied that Chinese and Indians got advanced and no longer do the shitty jobs. When they say globalism has failed us, they mean we thought that Vietnamese will keep making our shoes but now they are making cars too.
Essentially the core of the problem(or ideal) is nationalism and borders associated with it, preventing of people move around and pursue happiness.
A group of people like the generations of Americans who pioneered many technologies and sciences built a world, then other group of people(mostly their offsprings or people who caught up thanks to proximity to the ground zero) operated within that world and made some choices and transformed the world into something else. Now, they are unhappy with the current state and propose teaming up around something like religion/attitudes around genders etc. If you subscribe to the idea that people should team around these things and if you think that you won't be suffering that much and you don't care that some people might suffer a lot, then yes the current actions actually makes sense.
This idea of humanity transcending our genetic (due to geographic proximity) tribal groups is a uniquely European one. Pretending we can abandon all tribalism and integrate the entire world into a European model is either immensely incompetent or intentionally malicious (I tend to think the latter). The current billionaire class profits immensely from all the diversity (both generic and ideological) in the west. It’s much easier to parasitically rule a divided people than a unified one. Nationalism is a defense against these parasites.
> needs to be a subgroup like "Americans" or "Germans" that do amazing things and they are very unsatisfied that Chinese and Indians got advanced
The issue isn’t other countries improving. The issue is the average America should not have a degraded quality of life (barring major natural disasters etc) so that our billionaires can be richer. A nationalist elite class would correctly say “no, we keep those jobs here because it benefits my countryman even if I’m going to make less money”. We do not have this and the wealth gap continues to increase.
> If you're subscribe the idea that people should team around these things and if you think that you won't be suffering that much and you don't care that some people might suffer a lot
Do you think parents should prioritize their children? Not saying this snidely - there’s no black and white lines here, but I think universalism can only be accomplished by taking care of our own and growing our tent, as opposed to diminishing our own to lift up others (who in many cases do not share our universalist sentiments).
Just because an idea originated in Europe doesn't make it a bad one out of hand.
I did not realize Star Trek is uniquely European, that explains all the accents they have. It's a good thing Gene Roddenberry was European otherwise all this nonsense would make us Americans less isolationist.
> The current billionaire class profits immensely from all the diversity (both generic and ideological) in the west. It's much easier to parasitically rule a divided people than a unified one. Nationalism is a defense against these parasites.
For as much evidence as you present I'll assert that nationalism in fact profits the billionaire class much more than anyone else, thinking of most marketing campaigns, most nationalist leaders are all backed by the billionaires to win over the hearts of the working class. It's almost like you say yourself, "It’s much easier to parasitically rule a divided people than a unified one" and nationalism is just as much about dividing a nation's people from others than about real unity.
Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, and Simón Bolivar would like a word.
If companies couldn't compete before, they're now further disincentivized to compete, leaving the rest of us worse off and uncompetitive with the rest of the world.
Tariffs are just bad policy.
First, from the outside looking in, it appears these tariffs were implemented in an adhoc basis which disrupt supply chains potentially bankrupting companies and result in more layoffs in the short term.
Second, there should be a carve-out on tariff policy to respond to national security interests. e.g., if and when the US wants Ukraine to rebuild its fledgling export economy, the US should set the tariff on Ukraine's products to zero as it is in the US' interests that Ukraine is financially strong. Similarly, the US should use tariffs to protect industries it deems strategic such as manufacturing advanced computer chips.
In other words, instead of using a purely political process to set tariff policy, I would argue tariffs should be managed by an impartial semi-independent agency such as the Federal Reserve. The governors of such a tariff agency should be tasked with the goals of advancing long term US interests, economically, employment-wise, and national security interests.
The U.S. tax system is less progressive than those in many other industrialized nations. European countries like Denmark and France have higher top marginal tax rates (above 50%), while the U.S. top federal rate is significantly lower. Additionally, U.S. taxes and transfers do less to reduce income inequality compared to peer countries.
Raising rates on soley the rich will make the tax system even more progressive but will probably not make public service much more generous. Raising the tax rates on everyone would probably make the tax system less progressive but might actually fund a large increase in public spending.
What matters is outcomes, and the U.S. system—compared to other developed nations—does far less to redistribute wealth or fund robust public services. Other countries raise more revenue overall (often through broader-based taxes like VAT), and they spend it more equitably. So yes, technically progressive—but practically insufficient.
It's arguable, but it's safe to say that it's one of the most progressive among development countries, but that's in large part a function of the comparative inequality and low tax rates to start.
> If you want more public services the tax rate would need to increase at all levels but dramatically so at the middle to low end.
Yeah, but the net effect can be an improvement in terms of inequality. See e.g. https://www.cbpp.org/research/what-do-oecd-data-really-show-...
"As a result, the latest OECD data show that while the United States has the tenth-highest level of income inequality of the 31 OECD countries examined before considering taxes and transfers, it has the fourth-highest level of inequality after considering them."
"As the OECD report notes, if two countries have identical tax schedules that include graduated marginal rates, the tax system will have a more progressive impact in the country with higher pre-tax inequality, because a larger share of that country’s income will be taxed at the top rates."
"Because of their comparatively small size and below-average progressivity, U.S. cash transfers do less to reduce inequality in household cash incomes than those in any other OECD country except Korea"
That said this approach doesn't make a lot of sense. There are many ways to do this without antagonizing all of your allies which only helps out your enemies and ostracizes the U.S.
Loss of confidence in the greenback is deeply problematic for US power.
Good faith negotiations with our allies and trading partners that creates a balance of trade and reduces wealth inequality in the west. I'm not opposed to the actual ideas being floated, but the people doing are are completely unserious and it's being implemented in a stupid nonsense way.
We can look at a 50+ year history of every major U.S. trade partner increasing their protectionist policies, largely targeting the U.S., while the U.S. allowed trade deficits to balloon out of control. I don't see evidence that this "good faith" approach you speak of has any viability at all. The global economy can't say with a straight face that it has been a fair trade partner with the United States. For the past 50+ years the U.S. market has been open for business for all global producers, but the same has been far from true for pretty much every major U.S. trade partner. You can't even operate a company in China without 50% Chinese ownership, for example. The global stance on trade has all but made this an inevitable outcome.
A more charitable explanation is that the U.S. has been all in on globalization and free trade since the 1970s and the rest of the world took a protectionist stance in response. I'm sure the rest of the world had their reasons. But the U.S. does now, too. Globalization and free trade that only substantially flows in one direction simply is not sustainable.
Oh yes the hell we did. I was running an ecommerce store when this happened, it's been a disaster for US entrepreneurs who have any model other than dropship from China - https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_037....
> A more charitable explanation is that the U.S. has been all in on globalization and free trade since the 1970s and the rest of the world took a protectionist stance in response. I'm sure the rest of the world had their reasons. But the U.S. does now, too. Globalization and free trade that only substantially flows in one direction simply is not sustainable.
We negotiated those free trade agreements. Stop acting like we were being taken advantage of. Now, if you want to argue that American labor has been hosed, then I agree with that too, but China didn't do that - Nike did. None of these idiotic tariffs are going to help the American worker either - what remains of accessible opportunity for the masses has already become more like sharecropping with huge corporations owning the plantation, and it's only going to get worse under these policies.
We could instead pay for re-education and training for these folks to find jobs that do align better with the global economy and bolster social safety nets to help with job loss.
Tariffs are no guarantee the jobs will come back either or even if some of the manufacturing does come back to the US, that it will employ people who need it most or in the same number. Manufacturing automation is quite sophisticated nowadays. Even if the manufacturing comes back to the US - which I don't think is going to happen en masse if at all - the employment prospects that you're suggesting in this line of reasoning won't come back with them, is what the evidence suggests.
>There really are structural challenges to onshoring production due to strength of the dollar due to its reserve currency status; our society as such is biased heavily toward importing goods rather than exporting goods. This is a real challenge that needs to be addressed as well.
Why? Why is onshoring production of non critical goods a benefit to the US as a whole over the long term? Why do we want to protect manufacturing interests at the expense of other interests? These questions haven't been addressed. Not to mention the pain tariffs are going to cause isn't being addressed either, we're simply told to 'grin and bear it', and for what are we doing that exactly? Whats the actual nuts and bolts plan here?
Everywhere I look at the argument for tariffs I come up short on legitimate answers to these questions
>Our national debt is not sustainable either. Either we pay it down some, or we inflate it away; these are the two ways it goes away, ignoring the option of a world-shattering default on the debt. Tariffs accomplish both of those, raising money at the same time as raising cost of goods and weakening the dollar.
There's other ways to handle the national debt than put broad tariffs on all our trading partners - including allies who have actually been very generous about their trade terms and investments in the US, like Japan, the UK (really much of western Europe), Canada etc.
If we really want to strength the dollar, we could raise wealth taxes (like capital gains or instituting a land value tax for example) and moderate spending. Why are tariffs superior to this? Tariffs only hurt the poor and middle classes anyway, who can't simply fly out of the country for large purchases to avoid them.
Just because there aren't many ideas in bucket #2 doesn't mean you should do #1.
For a trivial example, consider steel and aluminum tariffs (Larry Summers gave this example on Bloomberg yesterday):
There are 60x more jobs in industries that rely on steel/aluminum inputs than there are in the US steel/aluminium producers. 60x!
Steel/aluminum tariffs increase the cost of inputs to the companies that employ those 60x more people; their businesses suffer; those jobs are more at risk.
Meanwhile, it will take a decade for steel/aluminum production to be fully done within the US, and even then it will be a higher cost (i.e. the reason the US imports a big share of aluminium from Canada is that Canada uses cheap hydro energy to produce it - something that the US can't do).
Through that decade, every single item that uses imported steel/aluminum as an input will be more expensive for average Americans.
So you risk 60x the jobs, for a slow and ultimately non-competitive local industry rebuild, and meanwhile average Americans pay higher costs.
Now multiply that across every category of good in the economy?
#1 is bad. I don't have a great idea for #2, but #1 is bad.
Wrecking shit when you don't care much about who suffers is much easier
- Bernie, 2008: https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1907883583228051964
- Nancy Pelosi, 1996: https://x.com/ThomasSowell/status/1907875133638705646
- Roger Moore's films
It true that there are democrats who are more skeptical on free trade and I would disagree with some of their views although adding workers rights and minimum wages into trade agreements are things which might have some merit but none of them would try something as ridiculous and economically suicidal as this. They're literally putting tarrifs on an island with a bunch of Penguins.
That's because he's lazy and doesn't really care to learn about policy or listen to the vast majority of economists including conservative economists tell him he's blowing up the economy and he doesn't care much about the damage he causes. He might remotely care about the stock market going down or losing political power and being tried for some of his many crimes but he doesn't really care much if his supporters (much less the half of the country that voted for someone sane) suffer, starve or die from a preventable disease.
That misses the point on so many levels. First of all consider that this is a domestic problem too. What about all the businesses abandoning California for Texas because wages are so much lower to achieve an equivalent cost of living?
Cheaper goods produced elsewhere is not necessarily a security concern for the economy. Silicon produced only in Taiwan is a security concern for the US, for example, but rubber production isn't even though the US cannot produce natural rubber.
Finally, and most importantly, price depreciation of goods due to global options frees up American businesses and employees to seek more lucrative ventures as the market demands that would other not exist due to opportunity costs.
Chinese manufacturing workers live on a $25k/y income ($15k without adjusting for purchasing parity!). Do you beliefe that raising prices on goods by 30%ish is enough to make those jobs attractive to US citizens?
What sectors would you suggest primarily sourcing domestic manufacturing workers from, and would you agree that just doing that is going to lead to further cost increase for the average consumer?
In my view, the current tariff approach is a rather naive attempt at improving national self-sufficiency at the cost of the average citizen, and the administrations explicit statements and goals make this pretty clear-- shifting government income from taxes to tariffs is a very obvious losing move for the vast majority of people that spend most of their income.
US economy right now is heavily biased towards providing services and high-tech goods because that is the most valuable use of its citizens according to market dynamics. Managing the economy in a "I know better than the market way" certainly did not work out for the soviets...
Sometimes I feel that people construct elaborate theories of how Trumps policies will end up beneficial for the average citizen, despite clear, explicit descriptions of how that is not the goal and historical precedent of acting directly against working-class interests (i.e. raising estate tax exemptions above literal 1%er-thresholds).
> US economy right now is heavily biased towards providing services and high-tech goods because that is the most valuable use of its citizens according to market dynamics
So basically geared for upper class / banking industry? US has some of the highest wealth inequality of the developed world.
But by far the most important aspect is military. Manufacturing capability is extremely important for military. US may be the most advanced, but a $10m rocket will not beat 10,000 $1000 drones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/business/worldbusiness/05... https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-... https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/dhs-crac...
Do you think that better wages and working conditions in underdeveloped countries are a goal (or even just side-effect) of Trumps policies? How is that achieved?
> Manufacturing capability is extremely important for military. US may be the most advanced, but a $10m rocket will not beat 10,000 $1000 drones.
I don't see a coordinated effort to expand the domestic arms industry that is pushing for those tariffs.
If your narrative is that tariffs are driven by military strategy, then you have to show how those military-industrial concerns drove political decisionmaking- because all I see right now is the president preferring tariffs over taxes for ideological reasons...
No. It will make labour in US competitive where you have labour laws. Consumers will pay the fair market price for products rather than relying on abusing labour in poor countries.
> I don't see a coordinated effort to expand the domestic arms industry that is pushing for those tariffs.
It's not about creating military industry. It's about creating a manufacturing industry which can be converted into war effort if needed. It's also about self reliance. It's also about creating meaningful jobs that actually create something (as opposed to the wall street where you have upper class just extracting wealth from the working man).
Lots of people talk about how the US should be more like Europe. People say the average European has a better quality of life, etc. Well, Europe has tariffs…
Targeted tariffs to protect and strengthen specific industries are fine - especially if done slowly and while supporting those industries internally to make sure that they aren't disrupted, and that they can actually capitalize on the space provided by a tariff.
---
This policy is not fucking that. It's just a backdoor tax on everyone, with zero planning and support internally to bring those industries back.
Simple terms for your simple comment:
A morbidly obese guy slowly exercising is great.
A morbidly obese guy getting dropped into a marathon with no prep is a recipe for a heart attack.
There's of course the opportunity to get those in line, but that requires negotiations.
I believe the EU has 10% tariffs on all US autos and we didnt have tariff theirs. That seems relevant in a way that this weighted average doesn't account for, right?
You can go tit for tat down the line, but all in all the numbers I gave you are the sum of everything.
Heavy tariffs won’t bring an equilibrium. It will only make imported goods expensive and allow the existing domestic producers to become laze and uncompetitive, all in all zeroing their export value.
Europe has higher taxes. But, somehow, despite the inefficiencies of governments, this produces a happier populace who work less and vacation more.
Thomas Sowell who is 94 has some wisdom to share: https://x.com/HooverInst/status/1907630250135273527?ref_src=...
The terrible state of US production is a myth. The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world. The #1 spot is occupied by a country with over 4x our population. Manufacturing employment is down because our manufacturing productivity is really high. Yeah, we don't assemble smartphones or make plastic trinkets. We make cars and jetliners and computer chips.
If you want to address the national debt and inequality, the solution is to correct the power imbalance between employers and employees by strengthening labor regulations and unions, and to raise taxes, especially on high incomes, and especially on the super wealthy. Taxing people like Elon Musk down to a more manageable 10 or 11 figures of net worth won't do a lot for the nation's finances directly, but it will do a lot to curb their power and get the government to be more responsive to our interests instead of theirs.
(And no, tariffs are not a good way to do this, since they're regressive.)
I'm hesitant credit President Trump with this too soon though, after all, his motto is "drill drill drill", but It's going to be interesting to see what happens.
I don't have specific numbers for America on hand, but I'd be very surprised if Trump's administration broke even, let alone cause an overall reduction.
I don't know how you expect these to cover for all the manufacturing you imply might come back to the U.S. with these tariffs, and that's assuming the space and the production means (factories, etc.) are here already. They aren't, and not for a couple years.
Combined to the fact that the U.S. is clearly sending a signal that coming there is dangerous now, especially for any other category than white males, and I don't see how you can even imagine that this situation is going to be working out.
Trump wants to eliminate all federal taxes. That's NOT going to reduce the deficit. The current republican spending bill includes a 4.5T tax cut to the wealthy and businesses, while cutting only 2T in spending from entitlements WE PAY INTO SEPARATE FROM TAXES. I am entitled to the money that me and my employer pay into Social Security, it's an investment, not a tax.
Let's stop taking from working people who are quickly falling further and further into poverty and start taking from the people who literally own everything!
Tariffs won't make them any better at their jobs. So the American customer can expect higher prices and lower quality of products and services.
The solution is clear, let the tax cuts expire, and increase the taxes on corporations. Make special tax incentives on real investment and innovation.
Make a special tax for the four individuals behind Trump at the inauguration, who own more health than 60% of the US population.
Stop allowing billionaires and corporations cheat the tax code to have lower effective rates than the majority of US citizens.
I am sure the 14 billionaires on Trump cabinet will be working on this right away... \s
"Warren Buffett Wants Higher Taxes For The Ultra-Rich, Including Himself — Says 'My Friends And I Have Been Coddled Long Enough" - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-wants-higher-t...
"Reagan's Radio Address on Free and Fair Trade on April 25, 1987" - https://youtu.be/5t5QK03KXPc?t=119
You don’t get world-class infrastructure, universal healthcare, and top-tier education without paying for it. High taxes are the price of a civilized society. Get over it!
Life isn’t meant to be a Squid Game.
Those countries have a population that is a fraction of the US. I’m sure they make more effective use of their taxes too. In the US, taxes continue to rise and health care and education costs rise even more. There are many things that are broken. Painting all billionaires as the problem and thinking that confiscating their wealth via taxes will solve the issues… is a popular rallying cry but is not an actual solution
Strongly encourage you to learn about their favorite money making concepts of passive income and compound interest. And other various "financial engineering" techniques corporations are engaging in.
These guys make more money taking a dump than 1000 US workers doing hard labor. I'm sure they are like 1000x more genius that most people but I doubt you could make an argument where a system that rewards this sort of behavior, while contributing absolutely 0 net value to society can also coexist in harmony with the rest of us.
When the most efficient methods of accruing wealth are literally predicated on profiting from doing nothing, they are not the signs of a healthy society.
However it isn’t a problem limited to capitalism or the US. And “billionaires” have been around for quite a long time - I find it strange that some are placed on a pedestal for some reason
Yes current crops of billionaires aren’t particularly different, but the methods they have access to are increasingly detached from any real world value. And due to the overall wealth of the US and money in the world in general, their ability to create capital out of nothing is on the very extreme end of the spectrum.
They are driven by tunnel vision and are distorting the very concept of money and the purpose it has to serve in society
I am tired of people spitting BS just to defend Trump's inane policies and everyone else having to rederive modern economic trade theory in comments in order to counter it.
Physicists used to get a bunch of derision for thinking their high skills in analytical thinking in physics easily carried over to other fields, and now we have CS majors thinking the same.
Regardless I will do some of the countering:
> what about the former domestic producers who could not compete, and do not have the skills or capital to find a new job which pays as well?
We had a candidates that offered job re-training programs. Those candidates weren't selected and those jobs went away even as we tried to put up protectionist domestic policy.
> our society as such is biased heavily toward importing goods rather than exporting goods.
This is fine. Comparative advantages and all. We just need to produce the goods necessary for national security. It worked out well so far. Do we actually want to have other countries do the high value services and us doing the low value manufacturing???? Why are you justifying engaging in a trade war with Cambodia and Vietnam?
> Tariffs accomplish both of those, raising money at the same time as raising cost of goods and weakening the dollar.
This is not backed by any data. Every single economic thinkthank worth a damn, including conservative ones, have detailed how it will raise the national debt.
I am tired of people saying ridiculous arguments just so they can stave off cognitive dissonance.
Tearing down our soft power and throwig out every trade deal we have carefully crafted since WWII is absolutely ridiculous.
Here's other things he's done:
- Threatened Canada
- Threatened Greenland/Denmark
- Supported Russia (it's obvious)
- Told NATO allies export F-35s will be nerfed just in case we come into conflict
Americans are already very insular, I don't think you all realise just how much you've pissed off Europe and Canada (I live in both places throughout the year, family in both)...
American multinationals have benefited greatly from trade with other countries... Look around the world: iPhones and Apple products everywhere, Windows computers, Google dominates search, the USA is a top travel destination, American weapons are used by most allies, etc...
Right now in Canada and European countries we're talking about completely cutting out all US trade and travel. Like all of it. It won't be policy but the US has completely destroyed all goodwill and cultural influence it has across the "West".
Because of immense hatred of Russia, China is now the "lesser evil" and pretty much all developed countries will band together. And not only will countries move on from US hegemony, they'll accept any pain that comes with it because Russia is threatening Europe and the USA is threatening their neighbours. Without the geopolitical aspect, the US might have won this trade war. But no one is going to bow to the US to then get sold out and conquered by Russia...
JD Vance had an interview somewhere (I think in the NYTimes?) where he claimed that national prosperity is downstream of military might which is downstream of industrial base. It made me stop and think, because that does line up with what I was taught about how the Allies won WW2, and the US beat the Soviets in the Cold War: we outproduced them. I'm not sure if this is "fighting the last war", though, since I imagine a lot of warfare going forward is going to be technological and with things like drones, etc.
It's just so easy to deal with our economic abstraction, of dollars flying around, and computer work, and services and so on, that I sometimes do wonder about your point here about the actual physical, production of goods, and how important that is. Can you have a long term, stable, healthy, successful country that doesn't (and can't) produce anything physical?
We clearly can still make some stuff. I have a great squat rack and barbell set from Rogue Fitness, which makes stuff here in the USA (captured in this beautiful advertisement video[0]), and it's awesome. But I also have a made-in-the-USA wood pellet smoker which is garbage, and which I kind of wish I had just bought from China.
All to say, yeah, I think there's the potential for there to be something along the lines of what you're saying. That said, the implementation is maybe not great. Even taking the Tesla Texas Gigafactory, which was built in warp speed (construction to first cars in about 1.5 years), that's only leaving 2 years before a potential next administration could roll back the tariffs if they wanted.
Because it is stupid. It's important to point out that this is stupid and not only doesn't help with problems that come with the benefits of globalization but makes it worse. How will a deep recession fox anything? Including debt(which is high but manageable under a sane government)
This is a dubious claim to begin with. If you believe that 'trade deficits are bad,' can you explain why? Post Covid, the US economy has emerged in significantly better shape than nearly every other country in the world, so I'm failing to see how these deficits are meaningful.
> Globalization has played a big role in creating the massive income inequality in our country
What is your source for this belief, especially when comparing globalization with other factors that cause inequality? From my understanding, the biggest recent contributors to a higher cost of living in the US are housing, health, and education. Health and education purely services-oriented, and housing is one-third a labor cost.
> our society as such is biased heavily toward importing goods rather than exporting goods
I think that's great. America exports services. We innovate to create new technology, are a leader in designing the things and systems that people want (think of our tech industry), and we delegate the work of manufacturing to others. That seems fine to me, and a function of having (relatively) open, free trade.
At a high level, the problem is that free trade makes the pie bigger, but causes distribution/inequality problems. So generally speaking, the best measures are going to be those that improve inequality while minimizing the impact to the size of the pie. Raise taxes on the wealthy, increase spending on social programs to the non-wealthy, fund investments in programs that benefit everyone equally. (Public transit, libraries, healthcare, education, etc.)
Tariffs shrink the pie, and I'd heavily bet against those hurt by globalization being those who are able to grab a bigger slice under the current administration.
For instance, globalization and offshoring of production has made goods cheaper for consumers, but what about the former domestic producers who could not compete, and do not have the skills or capital to find a new job which pays as well? Increased foreign competition pulls down domestic wages; telling people that they should shut up and be okay with that because they can get cheaper goods isn’t palatable to a lot of people facing the negatives of globalization. Globalization has played a big role in creating the massive income inequality in our country; it seems like we should fix that.
There really are structural challenges to onshoring production due to strength of the dollar due to its reserve currency status; our society as such is biased heavily toward importing goods rather than exporting goods. This is a real challenge that needs to be addressed as well.
Our national debt is not sustainable either. Either we pay it down some, or we inflate it away; these are the two ways it goes away, ignoring the option of a world-shattering default on the debt. Tariffs accomplish both of those, raising money at the same time as raising cost of goods and weakening the dollar.
So, to anyone who disagrees with these measures, but agrees that these are issues we ought to solve, what would you propose?