It is incorrect that Trump wants to lower the average income. He of course wants to lower the average wages of workers, but he wants to raise the average income of the upper classes. That is what extending the 2018 tax cuts and refusing to raise the Soc. Sec. tax are all about.
It’s an incredibly complex problem, which us why Trump is exactly the wrong person to be doing this. He can’t handle “complex”, he never could.
US consumption won’t disappear overnight. It will decrease over time. The initial tariffs will decrease demand, so other countries will either reduce production, seek new markets, or a bit of both. As they find new markets, they’ll gradually reduce exports to the US, because they will be a pain in the ass, as well as generally less profitable. As its economy slows down, the US will end up in a downward spiral, as job losses also reduce demand, making all of the above a bit worse every month.
Getting out of that spiral will be impossible for a US government that has pissed off everyone who once before would have come to their aid.
To me, this question is answered by Trump’s disturbed psyche. From birth, he’s felt taken advantage of, that ‘someone’ has taken his food, his toys, his mommy’s love away from him, and he’s driven to get revenge on ‘someone’ (dudn’t matter who) and to snatch his goodies back and make things right for the world. It never matters to him whether he’s making any sense at all–he knows he’s been stolen from, and he’s white-hot angry about it. That’s all you need to know.
This is a topic I never foresaw myself typing this in a response to with “and of course Perun has a video on it” but this being the brave new world we have; Perun has a video on it.
Enjoy the economy while we have one, boys and girls.
Yeah. If he put tariffs on any one country, or a few, it would be almost certain to affect them more, the US being the economic behemoth that it is. Putting them on 180 countries at once is just madness.
Manufacturing was outsourced because foreign workers were cheaper, not because American workers didn’t want to do factory jobs. Presumably, these former manufacturing workers are hoping to get something like their old jobs back, not adopt the pay and conditions common in third world countries.
Another reason for tariffs is if you have made some product expensive as a side effect of goals you consider more important. Eg, if you pass strict animal welfare laws to prevent factory farming, it defeats the purpose to allow cheaper meat to be imported from countries that don’t care about animal welfare. Similarly, if you impose strict pollution standards on manufacturing to reduce climate change, you do not want such manufacturing to simply move to other countries with lower standards, since then there is no benefit to the environment.
Good points!
Lutnick is a particularly oleaginous idiot. 
Haven’t you heard??
Wait. Make that … 
At what salary? Why not connect the dots and see what happens when all manufacturing jobs come back to the US. Do you really think wages will universally rise in accord with labor costs?
Or do you think wages and prices will magically drop?
Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back to the US. It would take years (or, in the case of semiconductors, decades) just to get facilities built and running and nobody is going to invest that capital knowing that in a few years Trump will be gone and whoever succeeds him will rescind the tariffs, if they’re even still in place by then. Even if you could wave a magic wand and have thousands of factories open for business tomorrow, the cost of labor is exponentially higher here and most of your raw components would have to be imported anyway because they simply can’t be produced in this country.
Overall I agree w your post. But this part I snipped is nonsense:
The American government did not enact animal welfare laws to reduce the total level of animal cruelty in the US food supply, much less the world food supply. They wanted to placate the whining soccer moms with no clue about the realities of planetary food supply or economics.
IOW … Just move it out of sight of said Soccer Moms. Which outsourcing it to e.g. Viet Nam does admirably.
Same thing with the pollution standards. It’s pure NIMBY: move the ucky part elsewhere and who cares how many indigent darker brown people suffer. Global warming does not matter, period.
Now you’re in sync w the American zeitgeist.
The United States is not the only government that enacts strong protection laws. For instance, the aforementioned GMO foods that the EU limit, or US beef that isn’t as strict in mad cow prevention.
He wants to raise his income; he doesn’t care about the rest of the upper class. They aren’t Trump and are therefore of no value. Trump would cheerfully have them all killed for a handful of change; in his eyes that’s pure profit, things of no value in exchange for money.
The rest of the upper class was too stupid to realize that and so supported him under the mistaken idea that Trump cared about the upper class, rather than regarding them as expendable as everyone else but himself. So they didn’t expect his to bring everything crashing down, which will hurt them along with everyone else.
Granted the US is a laggard in all that goodness. We are the largest third World tinpot dictator know-nothing country on Earth.
My point was to push back at @DemonTree who IMO mistakenly believed the US had effective laws motived by something resembling altruism. A foolish notion which I wished to disabuse her of promptly.
As a small business that is getting royally screwed by these tariffs (especially the newly-announced 100% Chinese one), I thought I would point out that the outcome is likely to be a backfire of stupendous proportions.
Instead of China suddenly buying US products at vastly inflated prices, what is likely to happen is they will use their huge population and government-controlled planning to simply replace the products they buy from the US with home-grown ones. In the meantime, while they ramp up new industries, they will buy their planes from France, their drugs from Switzerland or India, and their technology from Germany.
Trump is going to be resoponsible for start of the decline of the US as an economic superpower.
I doubt that they’ll replace everything with home grown versions, the same reasons that trade is desirable still exist outside the US. It’s the US that’s artificially creating a situation where trading with it is undesirable. And I expect the results will be very effective at discouraging imitators.
China and the rest of the world just have to restrict their trade to nations not controlled by self destructive lunatics. Which is most places, really.
America is screwed, however.
I looks like you are using the future tense here.
English is not my first (or second) language, but surely you wanted to use the perfect past tense.
This is an interesting discussion indeed: what is going to happen to the world economy (outside of the US) if the tariffs remain in place? Demand from the US would go down a lot, but is it possible that for instance Canada and the EU would also shift from buying US goods to buying production from countries who sell a lot to the US, thereby at least reducing the effect to those countries (and the economy at large)?
I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to the 1930’s depression, but if I understand it correctly, at that time every country imposed tariffs. Now it is only tariffs on US trade. So while the world economy takes a big hit, it might not have to turn to full-blown depression.
It’s not just possible, it’s already happening. In Canada, we’re royally pissed off at the US, and a lot of consumers are actively avoiding US products as much as we can. We’re actively seeking out Canadian alternatives, or other countries. Our stores have started prominently displaying countries of origin. They always did that, but now they’re being extra-highlighted. Air travel to the US is reported to be down about 70% this month.
It will take a long time for us to decouple ourselves from the US, and we’ll never get to 100% non-US trade, but we’re going to diversify, and we won’t come back to the US any time soon.
Either description presumes that lawmakers all have the exact same motivations. I’m sure a lot of cynical lawmakers went along in those grounds. But the bill writers and sponsors probably agreed with the ideals of the legislation.
“Citizens demand we take action so we took action,” may be a cynical legislator’s view, but those citizens were altruistic with their demand for action.