X/itter Reacts To The Tariffs
It's like tab clearing, but for those with no attention spa... squirrel!
Since Steven is the king of tab clearing, I’m going to try something different and bring you best/worst of X/itter’s hot takes on the Tariffs. This may become an ongoing series–though I make no promises.
I already used this X/eet in a separate post, but I think it’s worth repeating–tl;dr there really does not appear to be a plan:
Well, other than the President announcing the tariffs and immediately claiming “Mission Accomplished” (the Iraq war parallels continue):
Though some folks see the problem with using this medical metaphor:
Also, I’m not sure the effects we are seeing today are suggesting the patient is doing particularly well… it sure seems like there have already been some negative effects. Steven’s noted what’s happened with the Markets. But what about the value of the dollar?
Granted, I’m not an investment banker, but it seems like it will be hard to pay down our foreign debt if the dollar is losing value. Though one country’s loss is another country’s gain:
But even if the value of the dollar is depressed, we still have that extra revenue we can use to pay down the debt, just like we did during the first Trump administration:
Oh…
Well…
To be even-handed, here is one of the President’s supporters talking about what he thinks the goals for the tariffs should be:
This hot take leaves out a lot of external factors. Also, I’m not sure “strong wages” is an accurate statement (at least for the average manufacturing job):
Finally, I’m glad that some folks are thinking about how economists are doing during this particular period:
(Especially, those of us who have been coping with the last three years… I mean months).
@JKB I look forward to your pedantic correction on this one–when you are writing it perhaps you can also address Thomas Sowell’s position on tariffs. I mean just yesterday you were imploring us to listen to Dr Sowell on another topic.
In all seriousness, I will leave you with a vital x/eet. The reality is that the only reason these tariffs have happened is a lack of political will to rein in the Imperial Presidency:
The good news is that a handful of Republicans in the Senate have taken the first step towards that. This may be a moment where change is possible. I hope that Democrats and moderate Republicans can come together to get more of this through both chambers.
Ok commenters, that’s my current overview–what did I miss?
My partner and family got here yesterday. We’re all stuck in a one bedroom Travelodge room till Tuesday.
I showed her that Dinar one and she just laughed and said “I’m glad I get paid in Pounds now!”
Xitter??
You do know most serious non-conservative analysis is either on Bluesky only or on Bluesky as well?
Trying desperately to see an upside, this is so absurd, and so obviously harmful, maybe today is the day everyone recognizes Mad King George.
What no one has seen is what the end game is? What’s the plan? What does intentionally f’ing up the economy get us? Where do we go from here?
Job numbers are out tomorrow. Should be interesting.
I look forward to [not] finding out two things:
One, exactly what Reddit posts was the AI trained on that recommended this formula / community-college problem set solution?
Two, who approved this “learning” as being complete/valid/acceptable? I get that “all” of the AI’s from Silicon Valley give the same solution — that means the AI’s are all terrible, it doesn’t mean the solution is somehow plausible.
“Using AI” doesn’t absolve a human who chooses of their own free will to implement the AI suggestion. In this case AI vomited forth a hallucination.. and the world now has to deal with this wildness.
It’s also fun to watch Silicon Valley burn several billion dollars.. nobody sane will trust an “AI decision” moving forward.
The formula for deciding the tariff rate is made as it is so that a typical MAGA can hear it and think that it constitutes something “reciprocal”. It is approximately (dollars of stuff we buy from them)/(dollars of stuff they buy from us), and then normalized to fluctuate around 10 percent.
The takeaway being that the more they sell to us, the bigger the tariff, and the more we buy from them, the smaller the tariff.
The important part is not that it was written by an AI as claimed. It was designed this way to be understood by the average person on the internet, who is … ummm, not a Ph.D. holding economist, let’s just say.
And these AIs are all trained on the internet, and so they tend to reflect the way the average person on the internet talks about things.
For most of my life, tariffs were a thing that Republicans railed against and opposed at every turn. I thought they maybe had a point, but free trade was never a big deal for me then, nor is it now.
I can’t tell you how many stories I heard from Republicans about this protected industry or that one and how unfair it was, and how much it distorted prices, and how bad this all was for growth.
Let them speak now.
@Gavin: Anyone who says, “But we just need to feed the AI more [unlicensed] information!” should be legally required to punch himself in the face.
This was a great compendium of Twitter reactions. Thanks, Matt.
A major point I think people keep missing is that Trump did not calculate his tariffs based upon the tariffs of other countries. He based it upon trade deficits and specifically trade in goods, excluding services. That suggests that those countries just eliminating the small tariffs they have wont be adequate, they need to eliminate their surpluses, specifically in goods. Which ignores that it’s not really the US trading with other countries. Its individual US citizens buying stuff made elsewhere because it’s cheaper or better.
Steve
@Jay L Gischer: I wouldn’t be looking for any help on the GOP side. A commenter here used to be a regular GOP conservative and is now a MAGAnaut. In the past he claimed that companies needed to move overseas because costs were cheaper and they needed to maintain profits. That then turned into companies only moved overseas because Clinton forced them to do that with his policies. That ignored that corporations have agency, they still wanted profits and most of that moving occurred under Bush.
So now he/they are migrating to the idea that the foreigners are cheating and taking advantage of us, ignoring that it’s largely because they can make stuff cheaper. Just assume that almost every Republican is now firmly in the cult (of personality) and they will happily shift their arguments to support anything Trump does.
Steve
If you do a month by month analysis of prices, done helpfully by a guy at CATO, you see that companies did increase prices early, anticipating inflation so they did add to inflation. However, it was largely due to supply and demand mismatches. In this case it would be solely due to Trump policy.
BTW, the 2 week thing was what journalists wrote, it wasn’t really what the medical profession wanted.
Steve