dtrain79 said:

China isn't "booming." It's economy has actually disappointed for the past 6-8 years, as that moron Xi cracked down on the free market. And in fact, the more it embraced the free market, the more it boomed ... to the tun that the average Chinaman makes about 20% of what the average American does.

Btw, the Hoover Institute ran a person who didn't sell his soul out to Trump like VDH to explain the terrible nature of tariffs. That man is named Thomas Sowell. A few of you have heard of him.

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Precisely why China will be forced to negotiate.

Love Sowell. Very smart man. Love VDH too. Sowell does recognize the negotiating tactic. I know you hate Trump and due to your emotion, your normally very solid brain tends to overheat. Negotiations aren't immediate, but your favorite leader of Argentina loves Trump. Look for Argentina to thrive. Bet on any country that seeks fair and free trade with the US.

The problem is you say you want free trade but asking countries nicely to remove their trade barriers doesn't work. If the Dems were trying to get them reduced, it didn't happen. Trump gave the world 70 days and already we are seeing results from Israel, Argentina, Vietnam, etc.

Time will tell.

tjfleck6 said:

It's good to see you did a little bit of self-reflection.

Trump is here to save America from the 'leaders' you chose, Jeff.

I do feel great. Thank you for asking. Sleeping heart rate below 40.

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Edited my post and changed the words. You are really clever!

Fully expecting the markets to recover over the next couple of weeks as investors figure out who the winners and losers are going to be.

It’s been fascinating listening to commentators on the left and the right who are bought and paid for by corporate America.

JeffT818 said:

My vote helped to burn the country down. Congratulations! How does it feel to have voted for a moron?

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It's good to see you did a little bit of self-reflection.

Trump is here to save America from the 'leaders' you chose, Jeff.

I do feel great. Thank you for asking. Sleeping heart rate below 40.

rillaman said:

Producing more here, we have laws that protect again low wages and child labor. Other countries don’t have the same protections.

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Oh boy, what a thinker. That is why we have exported manufacturing to those countries.

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stoneaxe27 said:

So you are thinking that this Trump tariff fiasco is aimed at helping slave/child labor in poor countries? LOL. Please explain.

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Producing more here, we have laws that protect again low wages and child labor. Other countries don’t have the same protections.

I don’t think that’s the aim, but it could be one of the results.

Yes, I know Dems are against stopping people from exploiting cheap/illegal labor. We saw that when you guys supported flying in South American prison gangs under the idea they would work our farms. Thanks for confirming.

rillaman said:

Yes, we know. You would support destroying small towns that can’t support a higher mimimim wage. And that you support buying goods from child/slave labor as long as that labor comes from overseas.

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I am actually for a minimum wage of around $13/hr. $20 is much too high. However, if the two are a package deal I would take the bad with the good.

FYI, the Republican party has never been the party of improved worker conditions either in the US or overseas. Do you think Trump cares one bit about working conditions overseas?

rillaman said:

So the Dem message is that we need to increase the minimum wage for American citizens. But also, we need to make it easy for America to use slave (and child) labor overseas so we can have affordable Nike’s.

What a party.

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So you are thinking that this Trump tariff fiasco is aimed at helping slave/child labor in poor countries? LOL. Please explain.

JeffT818 said:

I will take the party of a higher minimum wage and free trade over the party of high tariffs and low US minimum wages everyday of the week.

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Yes, we know. You would support destroying small towns that can’t support a higher mimimim wage. And that you support buying goods from child/slave labor as long as that labor comes from overseas.

AzIllini said:

I don't think everyone outside the admin believes the tariffs are the biggest blunder in presidential history. Here is an opinion piece trying to analyze the situation. The underlying premise is that the US has fiddled for too long, and looking forward, our economic situation is sick and needs a major reset.

So there is the do nothing crowd, there is Trump and room in-between. Trump is not just negotiating with trading partners but also with the US public. There is going to be some pain, but instead of going slow so Federal judges can block the negotiations and Democrats can undercut them, he has jumped in with both feet.

As the attached article ends, "Will it work?" Only time will tell but we all should be rooting for America in this one.

Here's what Trump is really up to with high-stakes tariff gambit

Policy analyst Tanvi Ratna breaks down what President Trump is really up to with his tariffs, and it is more ambitious that you may think.

www.foxnews.com

ps. Trump had a 4 year on the job training period and is no rookie in negotiations. The left wing media already is digging up economists and others to trash the US' position, but I kinda lean toward Trump being more savvy in the real geopolitical world. Again, time will tell.

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Here is an idea instead of all of the MAGA excuse making for this disaster. If your intention is to negotiate, you sit down and actually negotiate, talk. You don't crash the world economy, more importantly you don't crash the US economy that was the world's premier economy when he took office. That only weakens the U.S.'s bargaining position. All Trump knows about negotiation is negotiating his way out of multiple bankruptcies. He hasn't been allowed to build since I believe the 1990's due to bankruptcies, he was limited to licensing agreement that allowed others to use his name. Now he has discovered the grift of elected office.

Increased corporate defaults. I am sure that will work out well.

rillaman said:

So the Dem message is that we need to increase the minimum wage for American citizens. But also, we need to make it easy for America to use slave (and child) labor overseas so we can have affordable Nike’s.

What a party.

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I will take the party of a higher minimum wage and free trade over the party of high tariffs and low US minimum wages everyday of the week.

Looks like a blue wave on a bad Senate map for the Rs. Will the swing state Ds cancel their retirements?

So the Dem message is that we need to increase the minimum wage for American citizens. But also, we need to make it easy for America to use slave (and child) labor overseas so we can have affordable Nike’s.

What a party.

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AzIllini said:

I don't think everyone outside the admin believes the tariffs are the biggest blunder in presidential history. Here is an opinion piece trying to analyze the situation. The underlying premise is that the US has fiddled for too long, and looking forward, our economic situation is sick and needs a major reset.

So there is the do nothing crowd, there is Trump and room in-between. Trump is not just negotiating with trading partners but also with the US public. There is going to be some pain, but instead of going slow so Federal judges can block the negotiations and Democrats can undercut them, he has jumped in with both feet.

As the attached article ends, "Will it work?" Only time will tell but we all should be rooting for America in this one.

Here's what Trump is really up to with high-stakes tariff gambit

Policy analyst Tanvi Ratna breaks down what President Trump is really up to with his tariffs, and it is more ambitious that you may think.

www.foxnews.com

ps. Trump had a 4 year on the job training period and is no rookie in negotiations. The left wing media already is digging up economists and others to trash the US' position, but I kinda lean toward Trump being more savvy in the real geopolitical world. Again, time will tell.

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Outside of the debt/deficit, there's nothing "sick" about our economic situation. It's actually an extraordinarily uninformed view. Please, I'm begging you, start looking at relative growth rates of the USA versus the other important members of the West (the rich economies) and Asia Pacific (Japan/Korea) in the past 20-25 years. We've blown most of them away.

Americans are lied to all the time, by the left and now by the right. There's a reason America exports so many ... tourists right now. We are rich as hell by any standard; the average person here can do things with their money that few in the world can. And both political teams have spent varying degrees of time telling the country how much things suck.

This used to be just a left problem, now it is a left and right problem.

djpc said:

I'm curious as to what people think are the better alternatives. I'm of a mind that the status quo in unsustainable. I think a consumption-driven trade deficit somewhere in the range of $800B to $1T plus is unsustainable, and regressive. I think the strategic vulnerabilities that we got a brief exposure to during covid are way to serious to ignore. After a few generations now, attempts to bring China into the "family of nations" have not transformed them into a noble and upstanding partner and free society. I don't like tariffs either. We seem to have a lot of expertise on what not to do here. But realistically, what are the alternatives that will make for meaningful long-term changes?

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One thing we need to discuss. The trade deficit is measured ONLY in goods, while the US is a service-based economy and absolutely "exports" more services than it "imports." I'm sure that doesn't make up the entire trade deficit, but it would be helpful to consider before we declare a problem.

Second, are we sure that the trade deficit is a problem? Despite the claims of many, American incomes and wealth have grown considerably in the last 50 years. While the top end has gained more than the bottom over this time, in recent years wage gains at the lower end have outpaced those at the higher end (my amateur eye suggests that the real reason wages declined at the low end - a phenomenon that was real from about 1980 to 1995 but has reversed since - is that addition of millions of women to the workforce). The poorest 20% of Americans consume more in goods/services than the average person in many "rich" countries (crazy but actually true). It doesn't seem like transitioning to a service-based importer has hurt the country in a meaningful way. It may have hurt some zip codes, but America is a huge nation with varying and sometimes competing interests.

Third, I bring this up a lot, but when you look at the richest nations in the world, there are four types: (1) petro-states with small populations; (2) Switzerland; (3) the United States; and (4) trade-based city states like Luxembourg and Singapore. (1) isn't replicable and (2)/(3) are historically dynamic economies, and (4) are pure importers premised on a free trade regime. Exactly none of these countries is premised on manufacturing, and almost all are service-based regimes who embrace trade.

Fourth, not sure if this is the question being made, but there is a discussion about what products "need" to be made in the USA for defense, national security, and even scarcity purposes. I'm not sure of the answer, seems like shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, and some tech products should be items the US considers how to make more of. But there's other items that it may not, from an overall perspective, hurt to lose.

8

djpc said:

But what do we do instead to address the issues that have been mounting over the last 2-3 generations? That would be an interesting conversation. It tedious to me watching the anti Trump faction and the pro Trump faction trying to dunk on each other all day long 7 days a week. Maybe I'm following the wrong thread.

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Prior to Trump getting elected, this board spent 4 years crapping on Biden. If there was a great deal of interesting conversation during that period, then I must have missed it. So I don't think you are going to find it now. If all the MAGA posters think the plan is great then what discussion can you have?

JeffT818 said:

Here is what you don’t do:
Make up phony tariff rates to justify your actions.
Slap tariffs on the entire globe in no rational way.

Trump's actions have been recognized by everyone outside of the administration as one of the biggest blunders in presidential history. Yet you think there are no other opyions. Either Trump's plan or no plan.

Many options were discussed within Trump's administration before Trump decided on this plan. There were many better options. Vance for one was pushing for a more limited program as a start.

Click to expand...

I don't think everyone outside the admin believes the tariffs are the biggest blunder in presidential history. Here is an opinion piece trying to analyze the situation. The underlying premise is that the US has fiddled for too long, and looking forward, our economic situation is sick and needs a major reset.

So there is the do nothing crowd, there is Trump and room in-between. Trump is not just negotiating with trading partners but also with the US public. There is going to be some pain, but instead of going slow so Federal judges can block the negotiations and Democrats can undercut them, he has jumped in with both feet.

As the attached article ends, "Will it work?" Only time will tell but we all should be rooting for America in this one.


ps. Trump had a 4 year on the job training period and is no rookie in negotiations. The left wing media already is digging up economists and others to trash the US' position, but I kinda lean toward Trump being more savvy in the real geopolitical world. Again, time will tell.

JeffT818 said:

Here is what you don’t do:
Make up phony tariff rates to justify your actions.
Slap tariffs on the entire globe in no rational way.

Trump's actions have been recognized by everyone outside of the administration as one of the biggest blunders in presidential history. Yet you think there are no other options. Either Trump's plan or no plan.

Many options were discussed within Trump's administration before Trump decided on this plan. There were many better options. Vance for one was pushing for a more limited program as a start.

Click to expand...

But what do we do instead to address the issues that have been mounting over the last 2-3 generations? That would be an interesting conversation. It tedious to me watching the anti Trump faction and the pro Trump faction trying to dunk on each other all day long 7 days a week. Maybe I'm following the wrong thread.