- Joined
- Jun 18, 2018
- Messages
- 79,745
- Reaction score
- 84,258
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Progressive
"I think the Trump folks are asking the right question. But they’ve come up with just about the worst answer. It’s a classic case of fighting the last war. They’re looking over their shoulder, wishing we hadn’t made the mistakes we made 20 years ago. But what they are doing now is just compounding the errors.
The jobs that we lost to China 20 years ago: We’re not getting those back. China doesn’t even want those jobs anymore. They are losing them to Vietnam, and they aren’t upset about it. They don’t want to be making commodity furniture and tube socks. They want to make semiconductors and electric vehicles and airplanes and robots and drones. They want those frontier sectors.
...we're not just putting tariffs on tennis sneakers. We’re putting tariffs on steel, on rare earths, on machine parts, which means we’re raising the cost of the inputs for all the things we make. That makes those frontier sectors way less competitive. If we want to keep these industries flourishing, we need them to be able to export to the rest of the world. And who the hell is going to buy our cars or planes if we’ve suddenly made them more expensive?"
Link
Unfortunately, as seductive as it is, you can't relive the past. This pro-tariff economist is afraid Trump is going to teach us that lesson the hard way.
The jobs that we lost to China 20 years ago: We’re not getting those back. China doesn’t even want those jobs anymore. They are losing them to Vietnam, and they aren’t upset about it. They don’t want to be making commodity furniture and tube socks. They want to make semiconductors and electric vehicles and airplanes and robots and drones. They want those frontier sectors.
...we're not just putting tariffs on tennis sneakers. We’re putting tariffs on steel, on rare earths, on machine parts, which means we’re raising the cost of the inputs for all the things we make. That makes those frontier sectors way less competitive. If we want to keep these industries flourishing, we need them to be able to export to the rest of the world. And who the hell is going to buy our cars or planes if we’ve suddenly made them more expensive?"
Link
Unfortunately, as seductive as it is, you can't relive the past. This pro-tariff economist is afraid Trump is going to teach us that lesson the hard way.
