There's a lot of attempting to connect tariffs to high prices. Of course no item has an actual tariff price on it. The only real complaints with merit are for luxury items that have little costs on this end, wine costing hundreds costs hundreds more. Realistically, in my normy life, almost all my costs are for services here.
Car and house insurance, real estate taxes, tuition for the kids, if I had a mortgage, car payments or credit card debt, I'd be paying interest, I do pay full tuition for two kids. Someone should do a study as to how much we actually spend on imported goods.
We did buy a fridge this year, old one was 20 years old, powers that be wanted a new one. It's not something you buy every year. I also bought an ipad for the youngest, she does homework on it, phone is for social media. All our phones are 3 years old and we won't be getting new ones for a while. Iphones don't wear out much.
I think the whole tariff thing is overblown. If the fridge and iphones cost twice as much it wouldn't compare to our fixed costs of insurance, taxes, tuition, etc. Costs spread out over years are small amounts per month.
I agree that tariffs can be pro-labor in a marginal way. Hence, I have been suspicious of free trade since the late 1990's. Immigration may depress wages for those in at the bottom, but this too is a marginal effect. This weak sauce is all Republicans can offer. Democrats should offer this too.
The principal cause of declining income share going to the bottom 90% with a corresponding rise in the fraction going to the top tenth (70% of this gain goes to the top 1%) is a change in business culture from stakeholder capitalism, in which workers, customers and shareholders contribute to the success of the enterprise and share in the proceeds, to shareholder capitalism in which the shareholders and management receive the bulk of the gains.
The cause of this is a change in policy (legalized stock buybacks and lower top income tax rates) that allowed the extensive use of executive compensation in the form of stock rather than money and perks. Stock compensation incents management to focus on shareholder value above all else and this discourages investment in lower margin capital and labor-intensive business in favor of high margin tech or finance with the profits increasingly diverted to shareholders rather than invested.
At the end of the day the USA has to begin some sort of national policy on trade that assures a domestic capacity to produce at least a small percent of everything. Never again should we be caught out with no ability to make covid masks, or rare earth magnets.
To do this we might well have to subsidize some industries to keep them operating, probably best done via tariffs. Soybean sales are unimportant. Low income wages are more important than anyone realizes, and as Oren says, without tariffs, wages push ever more manufacturing offshore.
We can't exist as a country selling each other equities. We have to make stuff.
Richard Hanania: "While protectionists focus on jobs their policies save, they ignore the much larger harms inflicted on the rest of society. Steel tariffs imposed by the Bush administration in 2002–2003 were found to have cost 168,000 jobs in industries that have steel as inputs, more than the total number of jobs in the entire steel industry. The first Trump administration’s washing machine tariffs created 1,800 jobs, at the cost to consumers of $820,000 for each job."
I understand that you have bought into the free trade argument but ask who is paying to secure all those foreign supply chains feeding those foreign factories. The French got run out of North Africa and aren't going back in.
One reason that will step back and watch it burn is that no other European countries were willing to help fight the terrorists. The second is that its political suicide to cut pensions and health to defend foreign supply chains.
The same will happen writ large as we run out of money and have to choose between cutting Medicare or defending foreign supply chains against pirates and terrorists.
So you're okay with America running itself into bankruptcy and watching the world spiral into chaos as long as we do it at a slightly slower rate. Don't get me wrong, Trump is only half right. We need to re-write trade policy to reward honest and responsible allies. What we're currently doing is rewarding corrupt and irresponsible actors.
But we can't get to where we need to go from where we are. The political right is shifting because much of what we're doing is failing. The biggest problem, as usual, is all the vested interests that are making a buck on the current policies. It was always going to take an unorthodox leader to get us out of the rut we had gotten ourselves into.
Trump is annoying but much like Lincoln, FDR, or Reagan, the bigger issue is moving the entrenched powers to remove their self imposed blinders.
Your TDS is showing. Biden piled on massive debts. We will see of we go into Venezuela. What we were doing about stopping the drug smuggling was costing us a fortune and failing. Similar to many other issues. The mainstream politicians seem incable of changing anything.
So would you rather we just keep walking into bankruptcy or try something different.
Small minded is the fantasy that we had a better option to vote for. The queen of word salad along with most of the rest of the current Democrats lack any vision other then clinging to power. I keep hoping for a split between the diversity-crats and what's left of the more serious democrats.
Meanwhile we are still having to run out the un-reformed Neo-cons on the right. Disconnecting trade from mutual defense, rule of law and shared values may have been a good idea but then so was socialism. Reality has proved "free" trade to be a massive tragedy of the commons.
I know one thing that is underreported. How angry union members are with the Democratic party on the sheer opposition to the reciprocal tariffs.
There's a lot of attempting to connect tariffs to high prices. Of course no item has an actual tariff price on it. The only real complaints with merit are for luxury items that have little costs on this end, wine costing hundreds costs hundreds more. Realistically, in my normy life, almost all my costs are for services here.
Car and house insurance, real estate taxes, tuition for the kids, if I had a mortgage, car payments or credit card debt, I'd be paying interest, I do pay full tuition for two kids. Someone should do a study as to how much we actually spend on imported goods.
We did buy a fridge this year, old one was 20 years old, powers that be wanted a new one. It's not something you buy every year. I also bought an ipad for the youngest, she does homework on it, phone is for social media. All our phones are 3 years old and we won't be getting new ones for a while. Iphones don't wear out much.
I think the whole tariff thing is overblown. If the fridge and iphones cost twice as much it wouldn't compare to our fixed costs of insurance, taxes, tuition, etc. Costs spread out over years are small amounts per month.
I agree that tariffs can be pro-labor in a marginal way. Hence, I have been suspicious of free trade since the late 1990's. Immigration may depress wages for those in at the bottom, but this too is a marginal effect. This weak sauce is all Republicans can offer. Democrats should offer this too.
The principal cause of declining income share going to the bottom 90% with a corresponding rise in the fraction going to the top tenth (70% of this gain goes to the top 1%) is a change in business culture from stakeholder capitalism, in which workers, customers and shareholders contribute to the success of the enterprise and share in the proceeds, to shareholder capitalism in which the shareholders and management receive the bulk of the gains.
The cause of this is a change in policy (legalized stock buybacks and lower top income tax rates) that allowed the extensive use of executive compensation in the form of stock rather than money and perks. Stock compensation incents management to focus on shareholder value above all else and this discourages investment in lower margin capital and labor-intensive business in favor of high margin tech or finance with the profits increasingly diverted to shareholders rather than invested.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical
At the end of the day the USA has to begin some sort of national policy on trade that assures a domestic capacity to produce at least a small percent of everything. Never again should we be caught out with no ability to make covid masks, or rare earth magnets.
To do this we might well have to subsidize some industries to keep them operating, probably best done via tariffs. Soybean sales are unimportant. Low income wages are more important than anyone realizes, and as Oren says, without tariffs, wages push ever more manufacturing offshore.
We can't exist as a country selling each other equities. We have to make stuff.
Richard Hanania: "While protectionists focus on jobs their policies save, they ignore the much larger harms inflicted on the rest of society. Steel tariffs imposed by the Bush administration in 2002–2003 were found to have cost 168,000 jobs in industries that have steel as inputs, more than the total number of jobs in the entire steel industry. The first Trump administration’s washing machine tariffs created 1,800 jobs, at the cost to consumers of $820,000 for each job."
I understand that you have bought into the free trade argument but ask who is paying to secure all those foreign supply chains feeding those foreign factories. The French got run out of North Africa and aren't going back in.
One reason that will step back and watch it burn is that no other European countries were willing to help fight the terrorists. The second is that its political suicide to cut pensions and health to defend foreign supply chains.
The same will happen writ large as we run out of money and have to choose between cutting Medicare or defending foreign supply chains against pirates and terrorists.
We’re running out of money faster under Trump than we were under Biden.
So you're okay with America running itself into bankruptcy and watching the world spiral into chaos as long as we do it at a slightly slower rate. Don't get me wrong, Trump is only half right. We need to re-write trade policy to reward honest and responsible allies. What we're currently doing is rewarding corrupt and irresponsible actors.
But we can't get to where we need to go from where we are. The political right is shifting because much of what we're doing is failing. The biggest problem, as usual, is all the vested interests that are making a buck on the current policies. It was always going to take an unorthodox leader to get us out of the rut we had gotten ourselves into.
Trump is annoying but much like Lincoln, FDR, or Reagan, the bigger issue is moving the entrenched powers to remove their self imposed blinders.
Your TDS is showing. Biden piled on massive debts. We will see of we go into Venezuela. What we were doing about stopping the drug smuggling was costing us a fortune and failing. Similar to many other issues. The mainstream politicians seem incable of changing anything.
So would you rather we just keep walking into bankruptcy or try something different.
Small minded is the fantasy that we had a better option to vote for. The queen of word salad along with most of the rest of the current Democrats lack any vision other then clinging to power. I keep hoping for a split between the diversity-crats and what's left of the more serious democrats.
Meanwhile we are still having to run out the un-reformed Neo-cons on the right. Disconnecting trade from mutual defense, rule of law and shared values may have been a good idea but then so was socialism. Reality has proved "free" trade to be a massive tragedy of the commons.
Much like socialism.