October 26, 2024

Import Tariffs are the equivalent of a federal sales tax on designated items. The lower classes are affected most by sales tax.

The old and outdated concept of tariffs was visible during the nineteenth century, where the attempt was to show favoritism for U.S. products. Even then, it was rightly opposed for reducing productivity and generating enemies. So now Trump wants to do what didn't work in the nineteenth century.

There are a few legitimate tariffs, where a specialty product needs to be protected for cultural reasons. But it is too easy to broaden the process to unnecessary purposes.

What economists don't mention is the total impossibility of disconnecting from globalized trade, as tariffs would do in a maximum and ridiculous way and which Trump is totally unaware of. Trump promotes the nineteenth century concept that U.S. producers can do what anyone else is doing and with no relationship to the rest of the world.

Even if U.S. producers could restart abandoned manufacturing processes, and they can't, they would only be selling to a few domestic consumers instead of global markets, at least after beating everyone else up for no good reason.

Trump has not the slightest concept of globalized production and markets. Here are several problems that are difficult to avoid under the best of conditions. One is supply chains. Complex products need numerous supply chains from around the world. Creating enemies destroys those supply chains.

Production now days evolves in an ecology that makes it work which includes access to supply chains in the most expedient manner. One broken link, and everything stops. Evolving in an ecosystem prevents transplanting into a different environment through artificial means.

There are now at least four billion workers integrated into production processes. The 3.9 or 4.3% unemployment rate replacing those workers isn't as much as a sick joke, not to mention the parking lots that U.S. producers require.

Then there are the qualifications required for producing modern, complex products. Skills evolve when used and disappear when not used. Someone said a few years ago that there are only about a dozen machinists in the U.S. There used to be about fifty thousand.

Then there is the run down education system in the U.S., where kids are not taught to read and a fake new math deprives them of skills. Foreign workers are needed for specialized purposed, because education is still being produced in other countries.

Trump's concept is analogous to getting rid of science and engineering, because all that is needed is blacksmiths to produce horseshoes.

Addendum

November 11, 2024

Trump is now saying that he will raise tariffs, until imports and exports balance. That claim is so absurd that it shows a thought process disorder that is characteristic of all corruption.

The thought process disorder is taking an infantile element of a complex subject and assuming it can be manipulated with no influence over the rest of the subject. All corrupters show that mentality in assuming they are going to destroy enemies and the rational, ordered existence they rely upon and still have the best of everything. Not knowing that everything is going to disintegrate in destroying part of it is a thought process disorder.

There are several things that would happen if tariffs were raised to reduce imports. First, the domestic economy would disintegrate, because it is shaped by the cheap products that are imported. If those imports didn't exist, the products would cost at least twice as much to produce domestically. Since many of the imports are feeder elements to other products, those products become nonfunctionally expensive and not produced.

Now days, import products cannot be produced domestically at any price, because there aren't enough workers, even if the factories could be produced, and they can't. Reducing the modern economy to some primitive state would totally destroy it.

Secondly, exports would rapidly reduce to zero under those conditions for two major reasons. One, the price would sky-rocket eliminating the U.S. from global trade. Two, no one is going to have anything to do with such a disruptive bunch, when they try to destroy global trade to take advantage of others.

Missing the fact that some nonsensical tactic would destroy complex processes is so absurd that it shows a thought process disorder.

Trump assumes he did wonders for the economy in creating tariffs on steel and aluminum during his first term. The first thing that happened was one of the steel companies went under, because steel producers have to import a lot of raw materials. They can't function competitively paying tariffs on their necessary imports.

Now another steel company, the most famous steel company in existence, U.S. Steel, is going under and trying to dump their problem onto the Japanese who don't know much about economic problems in the U.S.

And Trump hasn't figured out yet that he destroyed the steel industry with tariffs. Not the least reason is because know-nothing journalists pretend that everything is just business as usual with not the slightest indication that Trump's tariffs were any problem. Corrupters latch onto fake journalism for political justifications.