THE ERA OF TRUMP

[Smitty-48]

You don't need an economics degree to figure out that America's negative current account balance is the whole world transferring wealth to America by subsidizing you at their expense, it's literally render unto American Caesar, nary a shot fired.

[Speaker to Animals]

Well, you need a basic understanding of the different schools of thought about how this shit actually works to pontificate on these matters without looking like a fucking loon.

There is no one way in economics. It's more like art. There are different approaches that can have completely different effects depending upon the circumstances of the time and place in which they are applied.

The people who act like neo-classical economics is always right, or Austrian school is always right.. those are ideologues. You don't want people like making any economic decisions. The same is true of the Keynesian ideologues like Krugman.

There is no "right" school of economics.

[Smitty-48]

You raise prices in America for you, to subsidize selling the same product to me for less than you pay for it, direct transfer of wealth from you to me, that's not art, that's math.

[Speaker to Animals]

Dude, enough with the flaccid neocon talking points. We literally have all heard them a million times. Americans are, by a majority, completely done with that stupid shit. It didn't work. Your ideas failed. We rejected them in the elections. Move on already.

[Smitty-48]

Country with lowest average tariffs, USA, country with highest average tariffs, Botswana.

What a disaster.

[Speaker to Animals]

Oh is this fallacy day too? LMFAO

[Heraclius]

Okay so GDP is made of four things: consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports. Obviously if GDP is the sum of these four things, it seems obvious that a trade deficit would mean you are losing GDP and no one likes that. However, the reason a trade deficit is subtracted from GDP is because the reason a trade deficit exists is an increase in consumption, government spending, whatever. That means that a trade deficit has no detrimental effect on the GDP of a nation and trying to manipulate the variable through tariffs is totally arbitrary.

Any macro class will constantly beat it into your head that a trade deficit has zero effects on GDP. It will always be on your first exam and probably your final.

There are other factors that go into trade deficits and whether it is a "problem" but they aren't really things that are addressed by tariffs. Tariffs won't solve the issues of it not being attractive to invest capital in the US nor whether there is an investment boom. That requires totally different policy.

[Speaker to Animals]

Okay so GDP is made of four things: consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports. Obviously if GDP is the sum of these four things, it seems obvious that a trade deficit would mean you are losing GDP and no one likes that. However, the reason a trade deficit is subtracted from GDP is because the reason a trade deficit exists is an increase in consumption, government spending, whatever. That means that a trade deficit has no detrimental effect on the GDP of a nation and trying to manipulate the variable through tariffs is totally arbitrary.

Any macro class will constantly beat it into your head that a trade deficit has zero effects on GDP. It will always be on your first exam and probably your final.

There are other factors that go into trade deficits and whether it is a "problem" but they aren't really things that are addressed by tariffs. Tariffs won't solve the issues of it not being attractive to invest capital in the US nor whether there is an investment boom. That requires totally different policy.

Maybe yours did. It depends upon the school. Classical economics: no. Monetarist and Austrians: no. Keynesian and common sense: uh.. yeah.. does the Great Depression ring a bell?

[Fife]

We already established you have no idea about macroeconomics if it's not in your Thomas Sowell book. We have all heard neocon talking points about globalism for twenty-five years and counting now. Thanks for your contribution, but consider economics is not a science, and you are essentially acting like a progressive who carries on as if democrat party politics is the proven political solution to everything, and anybody who disagrees does not understand "science".

Politics and economics are not actually sciences. There exist completely opposing schools of thought that do not agree, and they all make sense internally. Mind blowing. I am sure.

And yet while acknowledging economics isn't a hard science you continue to rely on a college minor and nary a sensible economic idea articulated from your own mouth as some kind of immunity against my actual arguments

Appealing to your own authority where you've neither demonstrated any nor been certified as having any.
Impressive.

I don't have to appeal to my own authority to show you out as a fucking idiot.

You were just using macro and micro demand curves interchangeably, as if they have the same underlying mechanics (they do not). When one poster was talking about the impact of the lost jobs to macro demand, you started talking about it like it's a micro demand curve for a specific product. You obviously don't have any idea what the fuck you are talking about. You are over your head and you refuse to actually go read a textbook instead of these partisan propaganda books.

I don't know of any school of economics that disagrees about what exactly a macro demand curve is. That's not debatable. You just don't understand.

You see, DB, the macro demand curve is the key to understanding the magic of protectionism. It's worked everywhere--where people understand the special nature of the macro demand curve.

You just don't understand, you poor illiterate fool. Any citation or actual argument would just be redundant and a waste of your econ-minor interlocutor's precious time.

[Heraclius]

Also interested in hearing what school of economics has a different interpretation of tariffs.

Perhaps the ever well-reputed Austrian school?

What different "interpretation" do you think the Austrians have?

I'm really interested to see where the controversy exists among actual economists on this *extremely* mundane issue.

We're in Flat-Earther territory here.

Most economists agree on the micro part of economics. That tends to be the least controversial but also the "boring" area away from all of the spicy issues that excite the freshmen going into the major. Everyone wants to go into economics in order to solve issues of brain drains or deficits but the macro area is where you can pick 10 economists and get 12 opinions. At least that's how my professors always explained it.

Austrian school is the black sheep of the economics community and will always be the butt of the joke. They are basically the English major sitting at a table of STEM kids and having to deal with everyone mocking them. The Austrian school isn't a big fan of mathematically proving their ideas and so it is kind of impossible for most serious economists to really have an actual conversation about the ideas. They are kind of a call-back to the old Adam Smith way of economics which looked at the field as more of a philosophy rather than the modern approach which is trying to develop it into a hard science.

Free trade is the global warming of economics. 9/10 scientists agree but the 1/10 that don't get all the attention.