Speaker to Animals wrote:Sure. The people who benefited from these trade deals are crying rivers. But the people who have been utterly ruined by it (who outnumber you I might add) could have a real chance at recovery.
Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
-Thomas Sowell
Fewer jobs makes for a poor recovery.
Fallacy. Most of the world's demand (global market demand) for steel is in the United States. China produces its own steel and they fuck with our ability to export to them anyway.
It's a rigged game. The United States has more than enough macro demand for our own fucking industries. It's the net exporters that will get fucked in a trade war, not us.
Well, I think we can both agree that tariffs will make the price of US steel climb. And I think everyone agrees that rising prices leads to a decrease in demand.
So if there is sufficient domestic demand for steel, such that it bears the price increases from tariffs, you will be right.
Yet that begs the question - if such a demand for domestic steel exists at higher prices, why isn’t it also being demanded at our current, lower prices?
DBTrek wrote:
Yet that begs the question - if such a demand for domestic steel exists at higher prices, why isn’t it also being demanded at our current, lower prices?
If any of you are interested in economics as much or more than politics, and I expect one or two of you are, check out some Henry Hazlitt:
Who’s "Protected" by Tariffs?
. . .
And this brings us to the real effect of a tariff wall. It is not merely that all its visible gains are offset by less obvious but no less real losses. It results, in fact, in a net loss to the country. For contrary to centuries of interested propaganda and disinterested confusion, the tariff reduces the American level of wages. Let us observe more clearly how it does this. We have seen that the added amount which consumers pay for a tariff-protected article leaves them just that much less with which to buy all other articles.
. . .
As a postscript to this chapter I should add that its argument is not directed against all tariffs, including duties collected mainly for revenue, or to keep alive industries needed for war; nor is it directed against all arguments for tariffs. It is merely directed against the fallacy that a tariff on net balance “provides employment,” “raises wages,” or “protects the American standard of living.” It does none of these things; and so far as wages and the standard of living are concerned, it does the precise opposite.
A billionaire investor and former presidential adviser unloaded nearly $31.3 million in a steel-related stock company just days before President Donald Trump announced he would impose steep tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum—news that sent stock markets tumbling around the world.
Carl Icahn, a former special adviser to Donald Trump, sold $31.3m of shares in a company heavily dependent on steel imports last week, shortly before Trump’s announcement of new tariffs sent its shares plummeting.
Icahn, a billionaire investor who was a major Trump supporter, started selling shares in the crane and lifting equipment supplier Manitowoc Company on 12 February, days before the commerce department first mooted plans to impose stiff tariffs on foreign steel imports.
Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world... thus have I made it.
Carl Icahn, a former special adviser to Donald Trump, sold $31.3m of shares in a company heavily dependent on steel imports last week, shortly before Trump’s announcement of new tariffs sent its shares plummeting.
Icahn, a billionaire investor who was a major Trump supporter, started selling shares in the crane and lifting equipment supplier Manitowoc Company on 12 February, days before the commerce department first mooted plans to impose stiff tariffs on foreign steel imports.
