Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman declares, “The Trump Tariffs Just Got Even Worse.”
I wanted to put up a quick response to yesterday’s sudden move to exempt electronics. What you need to know is that it does not represent a move toward sanity. On the contrary, the Trump tariffs just got even worse.
Why? Three reasons.
For electronics, at least, we’re now putting much higher tariffs on intermediate goods used in manufacturing than on final goods. This actually discourages manufacturing in the United States. Joey Politano puts it well:
Uncertainty created by ever-changing tariff plans is arguably a bigger problem than the tariffs themselves. So look at the timeline so far. First we had the sudden imposition of average tariffs bigger than Smoot-Hawley. Then, a week later, Trump ditched that plan and replaced it with a plan that imposed average tariffs roughly the same size, but with the tariffs on individual countries either much higher or much lower than in the first plan. Then tariffs were taken off some but not all products just three days later. At this rate we’ll soon see tariffs changing every day, then maybe every three hours.
The stench of corruption around these policies keeps getting stronger. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence for massive insider trading around last week’s tariff announcement; the big beneficiaries from the latest move are companies that made big donations to Trump. Investing in plant and equipment looks like a bad idea given the uncertainty, but investing in bribes for the ruling family clearly yields excellent returns.
So just like that we’re turning into a nation where policies are ill-considered and constantly changing, and business success depends not on what you know but on who you know and whether you pay them off.
That sounds bad, but I’m sure the Trump team knows what they’re doing.
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.
With senile dementia/cognitive impairment that imbecile now is no longer intelligent enough to grade as a moron.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it just irritates me when people call him a moron, he just isn’t that smart.
ETA: Therefore, good luck trying to reason with him in any sort of intelligent way. The best you can do is work on his impulses and prejudices. Or maybe use short words and simple language, like explaining stuff to a little kid.
Recent approval polls show Trump sliding: He’s 13 percentage points underwater in a recent YouGov survey, 12 points underwater in a recent Quinnipiac poll and 5 points in the tank in the notoriously pro-Trump Rasmussen poll.
One explanation may be that Trump is uniquely bad at being president…
Not helping the general panic is the fact that Trump continues to utter quotes like this on live television: “I said we’re gonna try to get groceries down. Right? An old-fashioned term but a beautiful term. Eggs.”
In a recent Cabinet meeting, he babbled something about companies building their own power plants with artificial intelligence: “We’re letting people build their own power plants. A lot of them being built with the AI and beyond the AI. Chips. We’re letting them build their own power. Never been done before.”
Quotes like that could explain why 51% of the people in the YouGov survey who APPROVE of the job Trump is doing said they “can understand why someone would disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job.”
That number is astounding. More than half of Trump’s usual die-hard supporters are like, “Yeah, I like him, but I definitely get why you might not.”
…In the same poll, of the majority who disapprove of Trump, 78% said, “There’s almost nothing President Trump could do to win my approval.”
They must’ve heard him in the Oval Office the other day saying of the Great Lakes: “I assume the lakes are all interconnected.”
Or maybe they listened to him on April 2 when he proudly touted his rekindling of the word “groceries,” saying: “An old-fashioned term that we use – groceries. I used it on the campaign. It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Groceries. It says a bag with different things in it.”
…In the same poll, of the majority who disapprove of Trump, 78% said, “There’s almost nothing President (sic) Trump (sic) could do to win my approval.”
I can think of three things he could do that I would approve:
1) resign
2) drop dead
3) confess everything he’s done since 2015 to date has been to benefit himself, and he doesn’t give the world’s smallest fuck about everyone else, especially not the suckers who voted him in.
It is impossible to deny the obvious fact that Trump is either a moron, a crook, or both.
And ~45% of Americans think that’s just great.
@Michael Reynolds:
Moron and crook, I would say.
All they know is they don’t need to know anything.
Dr Joyner has made me laugh many times with his understated humor, but this particular one got a good snort.
Analogous to the muddled personality that now dictates our chaotic policy.
@Michael Reynolds:
I blame this on the advent of Jerry Springer and the Pet Rock phenomenon.
@Michael Reynolds:
He might have been a moron a couple of years ago.
With senile dementia/cognitive impairment that imbecile now is no longer intelligent enough to grade as a moron.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it just irritates me when people call him a moron, he just isn’t that smart.
ETA: Therefore, good luck trying to reason with him in any sort of intelligent way. The best you can do is work on his impulses and prejudices. Or maybe use short words and simple language, like explaining stuff to a little kid.
@charontwo:
To wit, Trump babbles his way through doing a bad job and the polling proves we know it | Opinion (USA Today)
Because what is he talking about?
@Michael Reynolds:
Birds of a feather, flock together.
@DK:
I can think of three things he could do that I would approve:
1) resign
2) drop dead
3) confess everything he’s done since 2015 to date has been to benefit himself, and he doesn’t give the world’s smallest fuck about everyone else, especially not the suckers who voted him in.
@Michael Reynolds:
And evil. Trump is either a moron, a crook, evil, or all three.
@charontwo:
I have to agree. This, for example, is beyond moronic: “Among the cuts was the entirety of the World Trade Center Health Program, including its administrator, …”