I also bought my new LC on Wednesday! Feeling pretty blessed as I wasn’t planning on it and had a deposit down for a mudbath TRD PRO. Decided to drive it to get a feel for the new hybrid engine. Drove it. Loved it. Bought it! Got home that night and saw the news about the tariffs. This is my first LC. I’ve always wanted one and ended up having 6 4 runners in my lifetime.
This whole thing is so woefully inaccurate it's hilarious.
You also have to look at VAT (i.e., valued added taxes or anything functionally similar) applied by other countries (not just their tariff rates) to understand the full tariff & trade picture.This list of effective tariffs by country is an interesting read:
List of countries by tariff rate - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
With Venezuela being a possible exception, none of these tariffs are anywhere in the neighborhood of magnitude this administration is using, plus they are levied universally across all importers and not being weaponized against certain countries. Also notably, the US tariff rates on that chart are in the cluster of normal, which means that absent tariff tantrums from the current administration we are operating in the globally normal area.
What I’m saying here is that this narrative that other countries are taking advantage of us is not borne in the data.
Two other points:
1- not sure I agree with your point on nationalized production removing risk compared to globalized trade. In a free trade environment where no country is trying to overtax another, each country provides goods and services it is best capable of providing to the benefit of the larger whole. Same idea is why you and I don’t grow our own onions - someone else can do it better and cheaper than I can so I buy them at the store, but on a global scale. The inflation we saw during the pandemic was global and created by a global supply chain shock. There’s no supportable point that it would have been better if we’d been growing our own avocados. It would probably have been worse, certainly sector by sector. Especially when you factor in that we cannot grow enough avocados (for example) to satisfy our own demand.
To assert that we should pull all manufacturing back to the USA dogmatically and not because we do it well is an idea not being advanced presently because it makes economic sense, but because advancing that concept is good for the political fortunes of a certain group of people.
2- Using tariffs as a negotiating threat as you suggest might not work. That negotiation strategy implicitly assumes that we are the only available trading partner for whatever commodity in question, and that we have high leverage to dictate terms. In some situations there are other notable global suppliers who will not threaten to tariff - and Russia and China are among them in many cases. If we prove to be too difficult to work with, our trading partners will simply abandon our business relationship and move their account to someone else. Which not only hurts our producers but strengthens the economies of those we view as our trading rivals.
Long story short - this trading tirade is, in my opinion and the opinion of virtually every other economist not employed by a news outlet or political party, not a good idea.
I won't speak to everything here, but I will address what I think may have been some of the point the poster you are responding to was making when he mentioned "useless degrees."
Please show me one concrete example of a kid getting a sociology degree so they can work as an assistant manager at a GAP. I'll bet you can't find one. Based on that comment I bet you don't even know what jobs can be fulfilled by having a sociology degree. Hopefully you'll do some research and figure it out though, but I would also bet you won't.
I love the mentality of "fall in line, don't question anything, do what we tell you, if not you're a "shit bag student, shitty parent, or a shitbird administrator". Obviously coming from the perspective of someone who doesn't know why sociology degrees are needed...shocker.
As far as "legitimately marketable and useful (aka difficult and demanding)", that's as equally uninformed and clueless as not knowing why sociology degrees are needed. I'd love to hear your take on the list of degrees that you approve of and then do an analysis of all of the things that you can say goodbye to because of what's excluded. Hilariously uninformed.
As for your thoughts on Biden...no real shocker there based on your limited educational knowledge.
Another woefully ignorant response. Are there really that many people without knowledge of basic education and careers?
You could be right, it could be another on again/off again/on again/off again scenario. I think if the manufacturing comes back then prices will increase - maybe not as much as with the tariffs, but you can't bring manufacturing back to the USA and have the same prices with the difference in labor cost.
Did the last administration promise inflation at the rate it soared at? AgainA course on reading comprehension would go a long way for you I think. My first Bachelors degree (I have two) was a liberal arts one, major in Communications with a minor in, guess what, Sociology. No where in any of my post did I say those degrees had no value, were worthless, or added nothing to society. All are worthy fields of study in their own right. However, they don't, nor should they, have the same ECONOMIC value in the free/open jobs market. The problem has been that many self entitled people have come to the idea that they SHOULD have equal financial value, that all should be paid the same. There is a culture of entitlement that has moved away from hard work and merit based pay.
First term was a success? Let's look at the facts. Because facts, not personal feelings, are important.Virtually every negative you site about first term was due to, and after covid. I'm talking BEFORE covid. The first 3 years. Record low unemployment. Inflation BELOW 2%. Mortgage rates at near record to record lows. People died because of covid and you blame trump? Lol. Well you should hate Biden because even more people died from covid while he was in office than did under Trump.Maybe you should have gone beyond a 4-year degree. If you want to talk about degrees, I'll tell you about the post-doc classes I've taken, but it really doesn't make any difference because nowhere in my post did I state that you do not see the value of those degrees. In fact, you even highlighted part of my response in bold text and pointed it out for me. Read it again, especially the part where it says if you don't see. That does not state you don't see, it states if you don't see. Reading comprehension...right?
Your analogy makes no sense. If Trump weren't president, would you have not gotten married, bought 2 new cars, had both of your children, and bought your first home? Of course you would have. I would point to an earlier post where I've pointed out that along with the higher prices everyone is seeing today that corporate profits have also steadily increased over the same time period.
The section of your response highlighted in bold is an opinion, and I disagree with that opinion. People today are working multiple jobs to make ends meet - and you think they don't know the value of hard work? Does working multiple jobs sound like entitlement? What I hear most people clamoring for, and rightly so, is a fair, livable wage. See the comment above on corporate profit. If you can't connect those dots perhaps you need to research it more.
This is not a great success. At all. By any definition.
- 2.7 million jobs lost
- 57% of the jobs lost to COVID returned, but the net loss was 2.7 million
- Net loss of 178,000 manufacturing jobs, taking into account pre/post COVID
- The number of people without health insurance rose by 3 million
- Federal debt rose from $14.4 to $21.6 trillion - a 50% increase
- Home prices rose by 27.5 percent (you may have a great interest rate, but have you seen the price of housing now?)
- Economic growth rate dropped by 2.2%
- Corporate profits rose by 17.4%
- Trade deficit increased by 36.3% (that horrible trade agreement he referred to...that was him)
- 401,000 people died from COVID (the number of clueless comments on this subject that he made are public record)
- Murder and aggravated assault rates increased
- Unemployment rate rose to 6.4%
- Took office at 4.7% unemployment
- He did take it down to 3.5%
- COVID hit and took it to 14.8%
- Left office at 6.4%, an increase of 1.7%
Just addressing this specific statement:
) at a cost of what, $8-10 million/day?
