Trump wants to make US companies even less competitive, apparently.
Can he really be that clueless about the manufacturing business?
It’s simple. Once he has them back to making things in America The Great, he builds a wall to keep them in.
And makes New Mexico pay for it.
Just Apple, apparently, which kinda violates the Bill of Attainder clause.
Trump isn’t that stupid. The Republican base is.
So this is too far for you yet you think Trump might start a Muslim holocaust? Or am I misremembering?
It’s a lot easier to rile up the masses into burning mosques and killing Muslims than it is to force a corporation to relocate manufacturing to the US.
Donald trump doesn’t actually intend to do any damn thing that he says he intends to do.
All you need is a tariff high enough to make imported Apple products prohibitively expensive.
Sure its not a great idea but its not an impossible idea.
I don’t think trump could count as stupid, how can you classify a object without a brain stupid?
Maybe he means it when he says it. But you are correct that he doesn’t have any coherent principles that will be implemented if he is elected (which God forbid).
Things appear under his combover, and he says them out loud and looks around to see if it attracts attention. The press repeats it, he repeats it. It doesn’t have to make sense, and he doesn’t feel the need to explain it. If it gets attention, that’s all he wants.
No one is surprised if Trump is an economic idiot, given his idiocy in pretty much every other area of politics. At least when Bernie Sanders opposes free tradeagreements, he is doing so from a consolidated set of principles. Granted, he is just as dumb as Trump on economic issues, but at least Sanders is a sincere dumbass rather than an insincere dumbass like Trump.
Hillary’s opposition to the TPP is slightly different - she is trying to have it both ways, as part of her primary campaign where she moves to the left, and then run back to the center if nominated and pretend she never said it or didn’t mean it. It’s like what she did with NAFTA.
IOW Hillary is lying for effect, Sanders is a principled idiot, and Trump is an attention whore. Business as usual.
Regards,
Shodan
“Apple and other US companies”, according to the article.
Not just Republicans think that trade tariffs and protectionism is a good thing (and not all Republicans do, since economic conservatives certainly wouldn’t think it’s a good idea). Many lefties and Dems also think this. It’s a populist position that resonates with folks who don’t understand why it’s such a bad idea…even seemingly intelligent folks think that protectionist measures and tariffs are good ideas that we should do. Now, whether Trump is simply playing on that pool of populist sentiment or is actually as stupid as he seems is a question I can’t answer. My thought is that he IS that stupid, since though he’s a businessman he’s mainly in real estate and doesn’t seem to have a background in economics and/or international trade. In the end, I’m not sure it really matters if he’s a troll, playing a complete and obnoxious dumb ass or if he is basically an obnoxious dumb ass for real, since either way he’s bad juju, IMHO. I doubt YMMV on that one if not anything else I’ve said here or in the past. 
He graduated in 1968 with a B.S. in economics from the Whorton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
He has numerous businesses that operate internationally in areas including Real Estate, entertainment, retail.
These are just the facts, interpret them as you will.
The article is misleading in that the headline says “force”, but the “force” is higher taxes. That’s a slightly different animal. But he, of all people, being a businessman should know that high tariffs are a bad idea. They would also probably violate treaties we have with other countries.
I don’t take anything he says seriously, and I doubt he does either.
No doubt. Still, I think there’s a fairly big difference between scepticism of TPP and NAFTA and the blanket 35% tax on imported manufactured goods that Trump is proposing. Repealing NAFTA and not passing TPP would return things to more or less what they were in the 80’s, when average tariffs were still well below 5%. There’d be less trade, but not wildly less.
Even at its more protectionist period, when the entire federal gov’t was funded by tariffs, I don’t think they ever went as high as 35%. The result would be a defacto end of all cross-trade of US manufactured goods*.
*(and while its probably a fools errand to expect consistency from Trump’s policy proposals, FWIW, the shock to Mexico’s economy would almost certainly lead to a wave of US bound immigrants that no wall would be able to stop).
This is clearly Trump ramping up his trolling. If he gets nominated every tech CEO would be donating large gobs of money to Hillary. And since he can only make rules for US companies, within months Apple would no longer be a US company.
Is Robin Williams really dead? Is it possible that he is disguising himself as Trump and doing ever more absurd bits?
Irrational fear based on a vague idea. The real stupidity here is anyone taking a vague statement from someone running that seriously.
More an Andy Kaufman bit.
An import tariff would affect anyone importing goods into the US. It wouldn’t matter if Apple moved their headquarters to Zanzibar or wherever. As long as they were manufacturing phones in China to sell in the States.
A 35% import tariff doesn’t seem that vague. And despite the common belief, Presidents generally follow through on their campaign promises.
Of course, Trump is considerably more nonsensical then most Presidential candidates. And he won’t be President. But much of the reason that he won’t be Prez is that his policy ideas are stupid, so it hardly seems like a waste to point out that they’re stupid.
Maybe. I’d imagine the shock to the United States economy of such protectionist policies would make it far less attractive.