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Instant Inflation
Put some items in my Amazon cart last night, didn’t check out. Wanted to see if I still wanted them in the clear unsparing light of day. Called up the cart tonight, and every item – USB cords, a sweatshirt, a power converter – had increased in price by a dollar. The presumption, I gather, is that the replacement cost of the items will be greater in the future. It makes me want to scour Amazon for everything made offshore that I know I will need, and buy it now before the price leaps up again.
Published in Economy
Yet another way Congress has failed to keep their own House in order.
Why would you think that?
Or watching television and seeing nations instantly match your cretinous tariffs with ones of their own. Oh, the joy!
Israel zeroed out their tariff BEFORE Trump imposed a tariff on them.
Mises on Tariffs:
“In enacting restrictive measures governments and parliaments have hardly ever been aware of the consequences of their meddling with business. Thus, they have blithely assumed that protective tariffs are capable of raising the nation’s standard of living, and they have stubbornly refused to admit the correctness of the economic teachings concerning the effects of protectionism. The economists’ condemnation of protectionism is irrefutable and free of any party bias. For the economists do not say that protection is bad from any preconceived point of view. They show that protection cannot attain those ends which the governments as a rule want to attain by resorting to it. They do not question the ultimate end of the government’s action; they merely reject the means chosen as inappropriate to realize the ends aimed at.”
Pelosi on tariffs and trade deficit with PRC:
https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1907836058005295612
This is really good. She makes two things obvious: #1 inflation is stupid, and God didn’t make us to live under these conditions. Maybe it works on some other planet, but it doesn’t work here. #2 trading with the godless communist mafia is stupid.
I’m not arguing with you. I am out of my depth on this issue.
However, it appears to be a very complicated situation, and it may not have been a mistake. The Israelis removed their tariff on US imports to Israel only the day before Trump made this announcement so it is a fair assumption that Trump’s announcement is only the beginning of the negotiations that will be occurring over the next six months:
After Israel fails to win reprieve from Trump’s tariffs, how hard will economy be hit? | The Times of Israel
For another angle on this global tariff move by the Trump administration, see Larry Kudlow’s report here:
Kudlow: The whole world is watching
The cash-raising aspect of what Kudlow says about the tariffs is interesting in and of itself.
I know everyone is ticked off at Trump about this, and I don’t blame them. It seemed to come out of nowhere.
However, I am willing to wait. I have a feeling that this about raising revenue some other way than raising taxes, which would also fuel inflation and make people mad.
Of all the unpleasant options available for a federal government that has been on a spending spree, maybe this looked like a good idea to the Trump administration. I don’t know, but I can’t help wondering.
My instincts are telling me that Biden’s pandemic spending and his other spending have left us in a pretty big financial mess.
How about we have a tariff on Israel for as long as they had a tariff on us, and THEN drop it? Fair is fair.
I’m sure there are a multitude of complicating factors. Now-unemployed engineers in Detroit might love to move to LA or SF for an engineering job, but can they afford to? et. al. Including, for example, the risk of moving to a high-cost area for a job that might be sent to India shortly after.
Want has nothing to do with it. But if they deserve it because of how they’ve voted for decades etc, how am I supposed to stop it?
Only a slight correction to your thoughtful comment. It was Trump and the Republican Congress who spent like drunken sailors on Covid (something like $4 Trillion Dollars), not Biden. Biden added his own outrageous spending to the National Debt, but it wasn’t on Covid.
In fact, all along, I have held Trump in partial blame for causing the inflation of 2020 – Present. He borrowed Four Trillion Dollars to put into the economy, much of it either cash payouts to people, many not even in our country, or simply embezzled by fraud. Very little of it went into the medical field. All this “free” money circulating around was bound to devalue our currency and cause inflation.
How about if we pay 15% more in taxes across the board to our Federal Gubmint for as long as Israel has been paying more than 50% in taxes to their government? Fair is fair.
Throughout this entire thread you have been complaining that Americans are not capable of finding jobs, learning skills, owning homes, buying products, and now moving across the country. I’m going to join-up with the Bangladesh version of Ricochet where they all think Americans are rich and powerful geniuses who control their own destiny and the world’s.
Please elaborate kedavis
I’m as pro-Israel as the next man…ok, I’m a lot more pro-Israel than the next man. Nevertheless we have spent a lot of money and goods to help Israel in their (righteous) war with Palestine while spending a lot of money helping Ukraine in their defense against Russia. Trying to claw some of that back is…grasping. Or clawing. But we don’t have infinite money and do have trillions in debt. So while I’m not in favor of tariffs on our friends. But I can see the reasoning. And I can’t help but think that a lot of these tariffs are a wake-up call to say, “things can’t go on as they have been indefinitely,” or “let’s renegotiate how we do things instead of relying on decades old models and agreements.”
While I think the president’s tariff scheme is an enormous mistake, My guess (ok my hope) is that the economic fallout may not quite as bad as some expect. Mainly because services are now over 75% of GDP, manufacturing about 10% and agriculture 1%. In the years leading up to the trade war of the Great Depression services were 45-50% agriculture was maybe 20 25% and manufacturing 30% (source is Grok the AI chatbot and yes I know the figures don’t quite add up). As far as I know, the tariffs are not applied to services so the effect on cost of living and any retaliatory tariffs will not have as big of effect as the tariff percentages suggest. It is worth mentioning that we currently have a huge trade surplus in services with the rest of the world. Businesses will adjust though there will be collateral damage (sorry farmers).
The big damage is to our reputation throughout the world. Once damaged it will be hard to repair. We certainly are now seen as unreliable. Canada has already said it was a mistake to economically integrate so thoroughly with the U.S. Europe is reconsidering big ticket weapons purchases from the U.S for the same reason. Since we are treating friendly countries as adversaries they might do the same to us. It’s obvious to me that quiet diplomacy should precede public threats and hostile actions.
Ah, so this reciprocity and equalization nonsense is the bs we all knew it to be. At last, a confession!
Trump 1 saw the national debt increase by $8 trillion, a 25% jump, and this is the guy we’re supposed to trust with the economy.
I hear they can get Russian kit for cheap. Delivery will take a while.
If you wish to know about The Art of the Deal, you should check with its author, Tony Schwartz. I doubt that Trump, a man with no known interest in literature, art, sculpture, music, opera, dance, drama, or any subject other than golf (the “sport” at which he is a notorious cheat), has ever read it.
I’m curious where you got that figure for Trump’s covid spending. According to one analysis by the Heritage Foundation, Biden outspent Trump by quite a bit:
Furthermore, Trump’s spending was understandable given the nature and newness of the pandemic. He had to deal with the initial panic that had somewhat evaporated by the time Biden took office. In addition, it is hard to sort out the federal spending for that period into pandemic and non-pandemic, business-as-usual spending.
Wherever you got your figures may be more accurate or may be a different interpretation of the spending during pandemic than what I recall or what I’m looking at this moment. I’m sure the numbers are credible to you in your source, I know you well enough to know you are citing a respectable source. Nevertheless, I do believe those pandemic numbers are open to interpretation, especially given the accounting irregularities that the DOGE effort has uncovered.
Trump owns whatever pain and suffering he has caused. But I think he did a really good job managing the pandemic given what he knew at the time. I think Biden coasted for a year or two on the Trump administration’s work during the first year of it.
And then Biden went really went nuts.
At least that’s how I saw it and still do.
According to the Heritage Foundation, as of April 20, 2020, Trump & Company put forth three Covid bills totaling more than $2 Trillion. (they don’t give the exact figure). I don’t recall if they ran through another bill after that or not (I’m too busy to go seriously hunting).
As far as overall spending, Trump did add about 7-8 Trillion Dollars to the National Debt while Biden added a very similar amount, though his tally is not quite complete yet. Here is the source where I got a screenshot of this chart fragment. I circled the critical year where Trump spent a total of nearly $5 Trillion, most of it on Covid. That year alone spiked the National Debt by over 18%.
I disagree. I think Trump and the Republicans in Congress fell into the same mass-hysterical panic that the rest of the world did (with the exception of Sweden and a few other countries). They didn’t need to spend all that money and they didn’t need to recommend locking down all public activities. There were responsible scientists all over the place giving good information that were ignored by Fauci and the other bureaucrats in the government. Pandemics were not new.
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