▪️It’s been an amazing week for the tariff defenders. They started off by backing the “reciprocal tariffs” which turned out not to be reciprocal at all but based on a nonsensical trade deficit formula, causing substantial tariffs to be put on many countries who had zero or extremely small tariffs on the US.
▪️Then, when the markets tanked we were told not to be “panicans.” The stock market wasn’t actually the economy, this time it’s Main St. over Wall St. The same people who wanted Covid lockdowns hate tariffs so screw them. It was time to finally stop the world from ripping us off, and tariffs were essential to bring back industry to the gutted US economy (even though US workers currently have the highest real wages in history).
▪️Then, Trump decided he didn’t like the markets tanking, backtracked and simply suspended most of the tariffs. Except for China, which he dramatically increased. This was the plan all along! It was 4D chess to play hardball with China.
▪️Then, late on a Friday, they exempted computer chips and essential electronics from the tariffs, the most important products we buy from China, and what all the tariff defenders said we desperately needed to reshore.
▪️At every step, the defenders had the rug pulled out from under them by none other than Trump himself. It’s been incredible to witness.
This kind of (non)thinking is so ridiculous. Equating Covidians with anti-tariff ignores a whole subset (Thomas Sowell, Rand Paul, Peter Schiff, Alex Berenson, etc.) who were against both. It also ignores that the Trump Administration was pro-lockdown!
This page was adamantly against lockdowns and mandates during Covid. What was so frustrating back then was that it was obvious the mandates and lockdowns would not stop the spread. So it was not a dilemma of shutting down the economy vs. stopping the spread, it was a decision between no lockdowns and everyone gets Covid, or shutting down the economy and everyone still gets Covid.
With tariffs, the trade off is equally dumb. They won’t hurt Wall Street but help Main Street, they’ll make things more expensive for the avg worker and potentially cost them their jobs. It’s lose lose. Like with Covid it’s maddening that people can’t just decide not to torpedo the economy, they have this idiotic inertia they just can’t stop. We’ll ...
The reactions by some on the right to the tariffs are embarrassing in their mindlessness. Pure sophistry and non sequiturs that avoid actually putting forth a coherent economic argument. Probably because you can’t defend what actually happened. Trump unleashed “retaliatory tariffs” not even based on tariff rates but based on some formula regarding trade deficits which is nonsensical. Thus, the highest tariffs are against countries like Cambodia, Bangladesh and Lesotho, who apparently are the ones “ripping us off.”
There is no coherent strategy or economic view here. One day it’s “tariffs are necessary to rebuild the US economy” then they’re just 4d chess negotiating tactics, then when the markets plummet over the chaos that’s actually fine because (a la Bernie Sanders) the stock market isn’t the economy and who cares about people’s stock portfolios?! The only lodestar is trust in Trump no matter what. It will be interesting to see how long these rationalizations ...
▪️This incredible leap of logic is only possible if you ignore all context. The median income is only relevant if you have a job! In the Great Depression, unemployment reached nearly 25%, so a good portion of the country had no job to buy a house with. Kind of an important detail.
▪️Because of this, home prices plummeted. One estimate has home prices falling 67% from 1929-32, and hovering there for most of the GD. So if you were lucky enough to have a good job, housing was affordable, but obviously this wasn’t ideal. Housing was “affordable” because…so many couldn’t afford them.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41283#:~:text=Abstract,most%20of%20the%20Great%20Depression.
▪️In 1932, 273K people lost their homes. The next year, 1,000 homes were being foreclosed on every day. By 1934, nearly half of all mortgages were delinquent. But hey, median pay to home cost was great!
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