Rob Copeland, NYT:
Many of Trump’s wealthiest backers are losing a fortune in the market today. Stephen Schwarzman is down more than $3 billion on shares of Blackstone, the asset manager that he runs, while Elon Musk’s Tesla shares have shed more than $6 billion.
One of the common refrains I see about all this is that after some short term pain, the country will be better off in the long run.
And then I remember Keynes’ retort - in the long run, we’re all dead.
It still boggles my mind we’re economically battling some combination of 19th century mercantilism mixed with a healthy dose of trickle down and some fascism for flavor. It’s like we’re right back in the 1920s again, only most of us actually see the cliff this time.
Also, there’s zero reason to actually think that, anyway. After some short term pain, there’ll be long term pain. And a nation likely permanently much worse off.
WTF are you talking about? All the rubes DO believe that. Who do you think is repeating it all the time? It’s half a dozen guys at work alone.
It’s how they justify it to themselves and their friends and neighbors. Though I have noticed they’ve quieted down considerably over the last week.
Once the Trump administration is done, the United States will be weaker both economically and militarily.
And they are both wrong, and have no actual justification for their beliefs. The Right operates under the principle of “if we want to believe something it’s true” however, so they’ll march right off the metaphorical cliff and take the rest of us with them.
Typical exclusion of Beelzebub by the two-party system 
He’s the incumbent.
I thought it was Asmodeus. Or is he the Vice-Satan?
Just as an aside, I thought Tom Hulce really nailed his essence in that film.
Yes. You might get long-term gains from lower tariffs at the cost of some short term pain. You won’t get it from higher tariffs. Also, it’s easier to raise tariffs than lower tariffs because you trading wide burden for concentrated special interest gain. That said: wow. Tariffs have been set higher than the Smoot-Hawley ones during the Great Depression. And the US has an economy three times reliant on foreign trade. Chart from Nobel Laurette Paul Krugman:
America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.
Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down. Here’s what just happened to the average U.S. tariff rate:
Accurate. The only real proponent of this plan is Peter Navarro (see wiki bio upthread), an economist who has penned no peer reviewed articles on this subject.
^ That right there - FDR created the system - is reason enough for the fanatics to burn it all down, even if they’re in the burning house.
How incredibly fucking stupid.
Yeah, and in the long term the price of eggs would have come down, but the MAGA crowd just couldn’t wait.
We’ll known things are bad when they start blaming the tariffs on Biden.
How long do you give it? A month?
Wouldn’t be surprised to learn it happened yesterday.
And here is what Navarro says on his role as an economic advisor.
This is the president’s vision. My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters," Navarro said.
So basically, he sees is job as reversing engineering some sort of policy that indulges Trump’s whims.
Maybe. But it’s hard to tell if he’s more cart than horse. Even before 2016, Navarro was mainly known to the general public as a talking head economist on cable news - which may have been the big draw, i.e. ‘saw him on TV’ - who espoused many of these current shenanigans. He may well have been chosen because he pre-drank the Kool-Aid and didn’t need outside encouragement.
And he has long been one who was notorious among economists as somebody who almost never got any economic prediction right. But he’s almost normal compared to the rest of the current clown show, so he doesn’t get much attention.
“…but, I told you so”.