12-11-2016, 06:09 PM
(12-11-2016, 04:51 PM)Mikebert Wrote:(12-11-2016, 02:57 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(12-10-2016, 04:15 PM)Mikebert Wrote:Quote:He's talked about lots of things that were not promises. Tariffs were one of them.
He presented himself as opposed to free trade. That means tariffs. Otherwise it’s all talk. This country was built on tariffs. American became great on the strength of those tariffs. Since they were withdrawn America has become progressively weaker and weaker.
He had said the problem is not that the trade deals exist; it's that they are bad deals. He wants to renegotiate them, not get rid of them. Reducing China's tariffs on us to the level of our tariffs on China, for example, would substantially expand a huge market for US exports.
That's just a talking point. I interpret Trump's "bad deals" to mean "free trade with Mexico/China that has been bad for the US". What MAKEs those deals bad is they don't protect American jobs from unfair competition.
If the competition under those deals is unfair, then they aren't free trade deals - they're just trade deals. The solution is to fix the unfairness.
Quote:Quote:The country was virtually destroyed by tariffs in the Great Depression.
That is a line of horseshit that has been bandied about by the pro-trade folks (i.e. Republican Chamber of Commerce types and Democratic neoliberals) as justification for their trade policy. Trump believes it less than I do and I don't believe it all. Look I felt the way you do in the 1990's and only saw through the BS about 15 years ago. Trump was seeing things the way I do now thirty years ago. He never bought the horseshit in the first place.
Today isn't 30 years ago. 30 years ago, the free and not so free trade agreements didn't exist; Japan was the primary problem then, and Japan had huge tariffs and nontariff barriers to US goods and services.
Today, the world is dominated by regional trade agreements. The ones most problematic to the US are not the ones that we're part of, but the ones that we aren't part of - for example the EU, which is basically a protectionist agreement as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
If you think Smoot Hawley and the resultant retaliations helped the US economy, you're ignoring all of the empirical evidence about it.