China’s counting on it. They have no intention of blinking, and other trading partners like EU and Canada are secretly delighted the Chinese are as stubborn as they are.
A crash is bad, very bad. It will hurt people. But if things go spectacularly off the rails NOW, Trump may have to give up. Or be removed from office (fat chance of that, as apparently everyone in DC is a sheep.) If things just slide into depression over months, that may be worse.
Not to mention, this is going to bring chaos into the supply chain immediately, with huge bottlenecks everywhere that freight enters the country…….because someone is going to have to pay up big before the goods can leave port and be delivered.
Might be a profitable time for anybody offering bonded warehouses.
They also, periodically have excellent fire sales.
(because when they sell the unclaimed bonded goods, all customs want to recover is the unpaid duty, usually a fraction of the value of the shipment)
This is going to be all sorts of hell for businesses everywhere, and small business owners everywhere need to check their contracts.
My business didn’t deal with a lot of imported products when I was working, but I imported enough stuff to know what a business disaster this is going to be. My contracts (which I’m pretty sure no one ever read) had a blanket exclusion for taxes and tariffs……still if I had to tell a customer they had to pay 50% more because tariffs…..that’s not a phone call I’d want to make. This is going to reverberate.
Now, is dumb as these tariffs are, they could’ve been executed normally…..if businesses had 60 or 90 days notice they could mitigate a lot of the damage, maybe renegotiate contracts or source different products or scale back projects in order to pull the budget in line with increased costs.
But to dramatically increase the cost of everything coming in over the border this abruptly leaves no room for strategies, and lots of companies, especially smaller ones are going to be stuck between a rock and hard place. They’ll be forced to come up with money they don’t have so they can pay a tribute to the new king in order to get the goods their company needs to stay in business. It’s coercive.
People are going to learn how complex the web of worldwide production is, because even stuff that is produced in the US is reliant on materials and parts from other parts of the world. We’re throwing a thousand monkey wrenches into the world supply lines that’s going to make COVID toilet paper shortages look quaint. So many things are going to suddenly be unavailable as suppliers scramble to replace their sources, or realize they can’t and just swallow the tariffs, causing massive downstream price increases. We haven’t seen anything like what’s going to happen in our lifetimes. Sure, maybe the the 1980s and 2008 financial Crisis or the COVID crisis will have some similarities here but they’ll be dwarfed as this basically combined them all and then some. This is a great depression level event, we’re talking about a significant fraction of the wealth of the US erased almost instantly. It’s going to be catastrophic.
Quite frankly I’m surprised the productive rich people in this country haven’t exerted their influence to get rid of Trump yet. At times he’s been a useful tool to them, but not this.
How? Impeachment? It couldn’t be done when the Dems had majorities in the Reps and the Senate. What makes you think it will happen in a Republican-controlled Congress?
25th Amendment? Trump chose the VP and secretaries for one thing: personal loyalty to him. No way they will try to oust him. And even then, they would need 2/3 of each house to support them.
That’s it. That’s the only avenues to remove him.
The US is not a parliamentary democracy where a leader who is driving the country off an economic cliff can be quickly removed (see, Truss, lettuce, etc)
No. There is another.
What, the ghost of Carrie Fisher?
Technically, you don’t have to remove him to stop the tariffs.
Tariff setting is a power of Congress, which has delegated the power to set tariffs in emergencies to the President. In the legislation where the power was delegated, Congress retains the right to pass a resolution through both houses that would stop the declaration of the emergency.
Now, it may be impossible to get the small handful of Republicans needed to sign on to those resolutions (although one such resolution, directed against the Canada tariffs, has already passed through the Senate) but removal isn’t the only way to stop the tariffs from going through. Those Republicans are probably more worried about the prospect of opposing Trump (and likely drawing well-funded and endorsed primary opposition) than they are about the backlash from tariffs.
Frankly, they may be right that they are in a no-win situation, and would end up doing better by sticking with Trump than by turning on him. Which is pretty sad, but here we are.
As of Sunday, seven GOP Senators had already signed onto supporting such a bill.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5236142-congress-tariff-bill-trump/
The senators actually have it easier - many of them either will be retiring or won’t be up for election before Trump has shuffled his way out of the White House.
Representatives, on the other hand, have to deal with an election next November. Most of them aren’t exactly profiles in courage anyway, and have to account for the fact that they’ll need to keep on the good side of their president or be hurled into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. So they’re going to hang around, deflect as best as they can and hope that something comes up between now and then - and even if they lose their seat, perhaps they can hang on to some wingnut welfare for themselves and their families.
I believe twenty defections are needed for a veto override.
There was one veto override in Trump 45. Trump had vetoed a Defense Authorization Act that included renaming the confederate-named military bases. In Trump 47, of course, renaming can be done by presidential decree.
As noted in another post, getting a veto-proof majority in the House is probably harder than the Senate. But politicians do watch polls and there does get to be a point where this could work.
If congressional Republicans by some miracle get serious, even more important than taking back tariff rate setting is changing the War Powers Resolution so the President cannot order the conquest of Panama, Mexico, Canada or Greenland.
Jesus we’re really doing this.
Is there a political cartoon out there depicting Frankenstein (maybe McConnell) watching his no longer controllable monster (obviously Trump) wreaking havoc on the village (the world economy)?
According to Google, I’m not the first to think of this.
According to deeply held Argentinian myths, in the USA when a president doesn’t do what the rich oligarchs want and/or is leading the country to ruin he’s promptly assassinated by a “lone lunatic”.
This leads to frequent complains that our current (and most previous) president is not being killed because we are a backwards country incapable of the civilized methods of advanced democracies…
Well, and I’m sure the average rep has significant stock holdings, and are also watching their wealth evaporate.
Let’s say I’m a Kentucky rep with $10 million in the bank. Is re-election more valuable than a $3.5 million hit?
Simple short answer.
Yes.
In 1863, Ulysses S. Grant was commanding the Army of the Tennessee and his objective was taking Vicksburg, MS, which could give the Union command of the entire Mississippi River. Vicksburg was a naturally impregnable fortress and he spent a few months trying to figure out what the hell to do about it.
He ended up, in defiance of all military convention, bypassing it and launching an invasion of Mississippi itself. His army stampeded towards Jackson, fighting all the way, burned it, and only then, wildly away from his supply lines, did he turn and attack Vicksburg from the other side.
What the Confederates did about this was… well, nothing. They were stunned into a complete absence of decisive action. No one could firmly decide what to do about this entirely unexpected and unfamiliar military action, and so they failed to do anything at all. Jackson burned, and Vicksburg sat unsupported. Military units in Mississippi were not brought together, as a result of which they were all crushed in detail - Grant didn’t lose a single battle in the entire campaign. Vicksburg, hopelessly cut off from the rest of the country, was starved out a few weeks later. The Mississippi was now the property of the Union and two entire Confederate states were removed from the war. It was the worst military catastrophe in North American history and the confederates basically sat there and took it. It was, in modern terms, organizational shock. Things happened so quickly and the defeats came so rapidly that the decision makers were basically stunned into an inability to respond, instead just individually trying to figuratively duck and cover.
Well, I suspect that’s what’s happening. It’s shock. The business leaders and mandarins in government are all ducking and covering. No one knows what to do, and no one is willing to stick their heads above the parapet and have the courage to be the one to suggest the 25th amendment or a coup. They are retreating into normalcy bias and cowardice.
And I foolishly thought it was for lack of a second amendment!
The Dow index has bounced up half a percent. Trumpists will begin crowing he’s a genius.