US court blocks Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs
A U.S. federal court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs from going into effect, ruling that the president overstepped his authority by imposing across-the-board duties on imports from nations that sell more to the United States than they buy.
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Not thrilled about this. The tariffs were about the only damn thing I agreed with Trump about. Not exactly the way he was going about them but nonetheless they could have done a lot of good over the long term. Some damage on the short term, but that pain is overdue frankly.
You agree with a strategy that's never worked? And has caused extreme economic recession on both of the previous attempts?
Huh.
More than two times. The US has used wide scale tariffs many times in the past, particularly in the 19th century and into the early 20th. They directly caused or were a significant contributing factor to a recession and FIVE depressions. The last one was the Great Depression.
Ah, looks like I get to be one of today's lucky 10,000...
It can work if targeted and coupled with industrial policy. Eg. The CHIPS act coupled with a tariff on Chinese chips, stuff like that. Everyone agrees that Trump's way of doing it was counterproductive.
Well, exactly. But that's not at all what he did. ¯(ツ)/¯
For some of us the recession is a feature not a bug.
"For some of us the suffering of millions and the early deaths of tens of thousands is a feature not a bug"
Yeah medicine is bitter. People can suffer now, or they can suffer later but the path we’re on will lead to suffering all the same. I prefer to suffer now frankly.
Edit: Let me get into this a little bit more, do you think the current economy is unfair to everyone except the elites? Your guttural reaction to this tells me that you might be, as most people on Lemmy. Well here’s the thing, changing the way things work, a revolution if you’d like to call it that but I don’t because it conjures images of a big uprising and I don’t think that’s necessarily how it’s gonna happen, will result in an upending of the system in such a way that it will be inevitable that people suffer. Change in human systems is followed or preceded by suffering. The possibility of suffering should not stop us from doing what will be best for future generations. I don’t understand where this mentality of avoiding suffering at all costs came from, but all it leads to is complacency and a continuation and proliferation of the current system. The worst thing is that the people that profess it the most tend to call themselves “leftists” which boggles my mind.
Long-winded accelerationism
I guess you could call it that.
What is the upside of the tariff position?
It's easy to make the mistake of overestimating Trump's strategy when trying to understand his behavior.
Since getting elected he just doesn't give a fuck. He's got a decade to live at best and he get's to ride it out in luxury with the entire world as his play thing.
He got elected by saying he would implement tariffs, gut government services, and be mean to poor people. He's been doing exactly those things.
The tariff announcements just stoke angst. Imagine a narcissist being able to fire off a "truth" and the whole world descending in to chaos for a week. That's it. Like a child poking an ants nest.
We stop exploiting cheap labor in other countries that maintain said labor cheap by giving no protections to their workers. It stops the abhorrent consumerist culture that permeates society, and its ecological implications. And like there are of course, national security concerns that have been exposed with COVID-19.
And tariffs are perfectly legal when they go through the proper channels. So, the administration just needs to go through the proper channels and work with the legislative branch to pass such tariffs. And they shouldn't be predicated on a bullshit national emergency
bullshit national emergency
You mean the President's feelings being hurt because no one cares about him and they're starting to tell him that to his face instead of being polite? And starting to actively ignore everything he says and purposely doing the exact opposite of what he wants?
Yes I’m sure this would have been the one time the neolib/cons at congress would have acted against their own interests.
Beside the point. You want tariffs? Follow the law, it's that simple
To govern within the boundaries of the law, one often needs to build coalitions. Those are guardrails established by democracy
Oh I agree. I just also happen to know that the people who should be imposing this tariffs are the ones with the biggest incentives not to do so, so they won’t do it. Look at all the disgusting things they let him get away with and the one thing that would upended the economic order in ways that would not benefit the elites got stopped.
I had some hope that this would be the one thing to slip by. Instead they will let him send people to foreign gulags without due process. But nope, don’t touch the billionaires supply chains! That’s no bueno.
Cool, so implement them legally, through Congress. Where they have input from actual economic experts that at least have a minimum understanding of the economy. Not just because someone hurt Trump's feefees and he reacts like the petulant child he is.
All the current tariffs will do is kill the actual US-based businesses they're supposedly supposed to help. Because foreign businesses can just stop selling in the US market and focus elsewhere, the US businesses don't have that option and instead just have to pay upwards of 140% MORE, in many cases more spent on tariffs than their entire product would sell for. Sudden changes like that just kill businesses.
US consumers don't have an extra 150% increase in their paychecks to go along with the price increases from the tariffs. I'd love to more than double my current pay. If that happened, I'd happily pay the increased tariff pricing.
Despite what neoclassical economists will have you believe, many economists do believe Trumps tariffs had solid grounds. The cutting edge of economic thinking is Modern Monetary Policy. And most of the experts I have heard from that school of thought agreed with the tariffs at some level. They mostly disagree with the implementation but they agree that the principles behind them are sound.
Just know that you cannot in one breath criticize billionaires like Musk and Bezos while defending the global neoliberal order in the other. They are one and the same thing.
Yes there will be pain, but that pain will come for us sooner or later and I think it better come sooner rather than later when we are in a worst position to recover from it. You can let a leg fester with gangrene or you can cut it off and save the rest of the body.
Can you show me one of these experts agreeing with Trump's tariffs?
It’s been mostly on podcasts, mainly 1Dime radio which has been having MMT people for a while and I highly recommend. But I believe this blog post by Bill Mitchell, who is one of the main forces behind Modern Monetary Theory enters into the rationale of why he would think the tariffs have a solid foundation:
Modern monetary policy falls apart when the globe decides to just ignore the US because it's isolated itself from global trade through idiotic policy.
No serious economists are claiming this implementation as anything other than absolutely insane.
Sure the implementation is fucked. But the basis of it is not necessarily bad. And I believe that even botched implement would have resulted in long term gains that would have been beneficial.
Also economic experts are almost exclusively coming from a neoclassical vision, which is incomplete because it disregards the role of money. Modern Monetary Theory simply fixes that limitation and adds a new perspective that is more complete than the neoclassical vision.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gvDcMU_ko1h5TeVjQL8UMJW9gmKY1x0zcqKIRTZQDAQ/mobilebasic
When the experts of any given field are said that they are incorrect they tend to react with rejection, so it is no surprise that they would reject MMT, as it destroys a lot of what their work has been based on. So don’t just listen to what the experts say, they have incentives to reject revolutionary ideas in their field.
You're acting like "the basis of the concept of a tariff" matters when the tool is used poorly.
Also, the long term effects of this implementation would not have been beneficial, it would only shrink US trade as it makes itself both irrelevant and an irrational unpredictable partner.
You really sound like you have the most surface level understanding of what is happening. MMT doesn't work when you remove your status as the reserve currency by doing this shit.
MMT doesn’t rely on being the reserve currency. In fact I think it sometimes argues against it? I’m not an expert on everything MMT yet though, so I can’t speak to that point.
But fair point yes, the implementation as not great. That still doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have had some very good effects for the rest of the world even at the cost of US hegemony. (Since when that became a good thing anyways?)
MMT relies upon taking in debt.
People have to have trust in the entity taking on the debt to give it the loan. Doing insane shit that causes the global trade to abandon the USD as the reserve currency means waaaaay less entities are willing to loan that money.
Which means interest needs to be higher.
Which also increases inflation more rapidly.
Which breaks the entire concept behind MMT being a useful tool.
Except his tariffs weren't doing anything to change that dynamic.
So, in fact, you do not agree with him in tariffs.
If you want to bring back manufacturing to the US, you didn't start off your tariff war by increasing the price of every single raw material we need to build those factories and their products. Which is what he did. He had imposed tariffs on steel, wood, aluminum, etc even before his "liberation day" tariff the planet stunt.
It would have been a byproduct of them that I believe he doesn’t give a fuck about, but he has allude to in a few occasions.
I agree on the second point. The tariffs needed to be wide ranging but somewhat phased. But he can’t do that because he knows he doesn’t have the time, so like everything else he’s doing it with the startup mentality of move fast and break shit. Which I favor in this particular case because I don’t see a neoliberal corpo puppet democrat pushing for tariffs ever.
It would NOT have been a byproduct, and I explained why already.
"Nuh uh" is not a rebuttal.
He certainly moved fast and broke our economy. That's not a good thing. Pretending it is shows your nativity.
It would have been a byproduct I agree, but it’s one that he’s aware about it even if it’s not the goal. I don’t care about his goal, those are always misaligned . I care about what the actual effect is. Again, the breaking of the economy is more of a feature than a bug. I said this already.
Now I would need to write an essay here to explain why that is a somewhat necessary thing but I won’t. I’ll just say that no paradigm change has happened without pain, so we either accept the pain or we let things hum along and hope that they get better (they wont, the existing structures will only calcify more until change is impossible and collapse ensues)
I hope the next president gets the vision, but they will inevitably be a neoliberal corporat so, fat chance of that happening.
My phone missed the word NOT.
We do not agree because you are flat out incorrect
Our economy has progressed from manufacturing to the tertiary sector just as it moved on from mining and agriculture (primary sector) over a century ago.
Not only that, but the way these were implemented is such a big component that can't be glossed over. We need food - that's included too? Just how quickly do you think we can get mangoes growing in Wisconsin for us to eat here in America? And if you want to bring up the ridiculousness of that idea... Exactly.
I am under no impression that manufacturing would return to the US to create jobs. If it did came back it would have needed to be highly automated. That being said, for me it is a moral imperative that we stop mass consumption of goods produced by people in abhorrent conditions. Bring it back here automate it all. Like Apple says they couldn’t produce the iPhones here but put enough pressure and I bet they’ll figure out a way; doesn’t Huaweii have a factory making phones with no humans in it at all? I do agree that the haphazard nature of the implementation meant that this was doomed from the start. But I was hopeful.
To address your second point:
I would argue that mangoes aren’t a necessity to your diet, you can replace them with fruits that do grow in the US. But I agree monoculture is a huge issue that has a somewhat easy solution but no one wants to touch the farmers living of the governments teat. Tariffs could have been a good tool to stop subsidizing them, without having a collapse in their agricultural sector.
for me it is a moral imperative that we stop mass consumption of goods produced by people in abhorrent conditions
Yes, I'd love to see a decrease in the cheap utter crap we are producing/consuming on this planet, and of course I'm all for humans being treated properly. But blanket tariffs with no apparent consideration of how people are generally treated in those countries (only how we are tariffed) won't encourage anyone to solve that.
I would argue that mangoes aren’t a necessity to your diet, you can replace them with fruits that do grow in the US
It was a flipping example. There are plenty of fruits you can replace that with. And in the winter we have hardly any fresh produce and have to rely on, for example, Chile (which has its summer conveniently during our winter. Yay geography). IIRC a ton of the world's garlic comes from China. Could we survive on our own locally-produced food alone? Perhaps. Would we have the same variety we enjoy today? Probably not. Year round? Almost certainly not. Can it all be done as quickly as these tariffs are implemented? Fuck to the no!
It doesn’t matter if he considered the conditions because he can’t force them to stop exploiting their workforce. But the net effect would have been a floor to the price of production at a global level so corporations would have to choose between slave labor, complex supply chains and overseas shipping costs or domestic labor with lower shipping costs and somewhat simpler supply chains.
Yes the economy would suffer. Medicine is bitter. The option is watching the train derail in slow motion.
It doesn’t matter if he considered the conditions because he can’t force them to stop exploiting their workforce
Sure he can. Or at least use it as a tool to help curb it. Anyone with the authority to exercise tariffs (in this case, that turned out to be the issue, but aside from that) can say that x industry in y country is exploiting their workers and products related to that industry is subject to whatever tariff they choose to implement. They may even use their powers (if only advocacy here) to help those affected. Thing is, Trump doesn't give two shits about any of that, so if any progress is made in the areas in which you're concerned it's out of dumb luck and nothing else.
If Trump's message is to be trusted, he wants to make deals and have more people buy from us, meaning global consumption might shift (assuming deals are made and all) but certainly not go down
It's a shame you're being downvoted for making valid points. I think the problem is that many people can't endorse a trump policy, even if it might eventually have an unintended positive outcome. I don't blame them either - I get the impression that a lot of the tariff stuff we've seen so far has been market manipulation for the benefit of shit-sack and his wealthy backers.
I've acknowledged like the ~two times he had a good idea. This is not one of them, and wouldn't accomplish what the OC wants to see accomplished.
It's a bad idea all around. On top of being illegally executed.
Your opinion is obviously not very popular, and I also think it is flawed, but I will say I appreciate you coming here to try to discuss it.
It's true that globalisation and long supply chains are not great from an environmental perspective. Obviously trump doesn't give a single fuck about this, it would have been one small, purely accidental positive consequence of the tariffs.