America Can’t Escape The Reality Of Trump’s Trade War Forever
At this point, suggesting that Donald Trump doesn't understand global trade is about like saying "water is wet".
In fact, the phrase "Trump doesn't understand" is almost a tautology. The US president's legendary imbecility is exacerbated by his disdain for reading, contempt for experts and generalized aversion to facts. Asked in February whether she believes Trump "has a grasp of macroeconomic policy", Janet Yellen said simply "No, I do not."
Of course folks like Peter Navarro are fully aware
The ignorance of the people are on display again. Whether it is economics or other aspects of reality people are either too stupid (to quote Gruber), too lazy, too preoccupied, or too entrenched to see and know reality. Whether trump uses this or is clueless to begin with doesn’t matter. The vast majority of the people are allowing damage to happen. If he was polling at 25% approval we would have an end to this trade (and other) stupidity.
Trump did what he wanted to do. He lowered the tax for the rich and now will distribute it among the lower to middle income brackets via tariffs. I can’t see how this will end well for the economy if it continues for more than a few months. A significant number of people are already having problems trying to make ends meet.
Complacency, laziness and the view that we can do no wrong are just a few of our distorted views that Amerika can do anything it wants. Everybody should pay for our “greatness”. What a joke and we will eventually pay a heavy price for this avarice.
To paraphrase Roman Hruska, ‘Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?’ Trump is an idiot, but there are a lot of people on the left and the populist right who do not understand the benefits of trade and globalization either – and the neoliberal and conservative politicians, media, and education systems have done a hideous job explaining them to the general public and blue-collar Midwestern swing voters in particular.
i think it is finally beginning to dawn on the Trump administration and the chinese Government that they are just throwing switches, pushing levers and turning knobs controlling a complex piece of equipment (global economy) that they don’t understand. can’t predict the outcomes of their actions on their economies. their phone lines are burning up with calls from business people signaling the alarm. I am hoping we don’t see any further escalation. we are probably in the “let’s see what happens” phase of this round of escalation. see if the changes have the desired results. If there is an actual meeting between Xi and trump at the G20, that would be a positive sign that the tariffs on the remaining chinese exports won’t happen right away. would probably be like the dec G20 outcome. hope the administration realizes that china is not going to abandon its economic model. that was an unrealistic goal. not sure what the chinese were up to by putting it on the table and then pulling it. seems like they were trying to gather information more than negotiating a deal.
that comment was from me, but i forgot to log in
wondered what occasionally causes that………….
The most telling part of this post lends itself to oversimplification ….. Trumps base (the general public) views things in a win lose because the media and in fact History has been rewritten to reflect win/ lose type choices ….Through our primary education years we have been programed to accept canned versions of events in a simplistic way… Day to day life reflects and mimics that style… Historically America because of a short History and geographical advantage of settling a (vacant….not really… Continent) has been in a situation where the concept of win came easy and without extreme cost….We are beginning to see the color of potential lose…Things change!!!!!
while i greatly appreciate your economic perspective, the description of Trump as simply naive on trade and economic issues is too simplistic. china is a communist dictatorship that has been allowed to employ aggressive merchantilist policies for decades, and to what effect? they have not become more democratic. there are plenty of economic theorists that all think and speak the same “facts”, but many of those facts are simply not facts. quite simply, there is no such thing as true “free trade” in the real world. Trump chooses to select his own rhetoric and define his own issues. it is not apparent whether he simply is ignorant of certain concepts, or simply chooses to ignore any information that are not part of the storyline that he has created to serve his own ends.
if you want to bash Trump, then what words do you have for his predecessors, who all bought into the common belief that allowing China to continue on the merchantilist path would end well? sometimes, when we have someone who shakes up the common wisdom, it reveals that some of the wisdom was just wrong.