Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.
Not at all the same. That started as targeted tariffs as punishment for accusations of unfair trade. Tariffs have been frequently used in the past and targeted tariffs can be an important tool for specific types of trade issues. It did escalate into a trade war which didn’t help anyone, but with one specific country.
That’s not at all the same as widespread tariffs, including starting trade wars against important allies and trade partners
There might be a valid argument somewhere in there that constantly changing the trade policy is worse than keeping a bad one in place? Not sure the trade-off there though. If you know you have a certain tariff in place long term, you can work around that and the tariff can actually do the things it is intended to do. If the tariff changes on a whim, you can’t and the country just becomes a more risky proposition to do business with.
Adopting and expanding terrible policy long term signals future intent.
Anecdote, one of the biggest doorlock companies (i don’t recall the name) started migrating inputs and trying to expand sales towards europe, and set up a factory to assemble doorlocks in Vietnam during the 2nd half of Biden’s presidency. The CEO saw Biden maintain the tariffs and correctly understood Trump’s trade policy was not an aberration, but a bipartisan consensus. Unstable signals might delay expansion as businesses wait to see, bipartisan hostile signals tell businesses their long term plans do not include the US.
Honestly didn’t know that. Could you point me to a source where I can read more about it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China–United_States_trade_war
2x Trump’s tarriff on solar panels, 3+x on evs, +25% on aluminum, batteries, and more
Thanks for sharing!
Not at all the same. That started as targeted tariffs as punishment for accusations of unfair trade. Tariffs have been frequently used in the past and targeted tariffs can be an important tool for specific types of trade issues. It did escalate into a trade war which didn’t help anyone, but with one specific country.
That’s not at all the same as widespread tariffs, including starting trade wars against important allies and trade partners
That’s the same bullshit justification Trump used. If the dems genuinely opposed with Trump’s trade war, they would have undone all his tariffs.
There might be a valid argument somewhere in there that constantly changing the trade policy is worse than keeping a bad one in place? Not sure the trade-off there though. If you know you have a certain tariff in place long term, you can work around that and the tariff can actually do the things it is intended to do. If the tariff changes on a whim, you can’t and the country just becomes a more risky proposition to do business with.
Adopting and expanding terrible policy long term signals future intent.
Anecdote, one of the biggest doorlock companies (i don’t recall the name) started migrating inputs and trying to expand sales towards europe, and set up a factory to assemble doorlocks in Vietnam during the 2nd half of Biden’s presidency. The CEO saw Biden maintain the tariffs and correctly understood Trump’s trade policy was not an aberration, but a bipartisan consensus. Unstable signals might delay expansion as businesses wait to see, bipartisan hostile signals tell businesses their long term plans do not include the US.