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Visible Hands
Donald Trump can't help himself. He has to escalate. I'd call it a compulsion, but he wants to do it
It’s also that the current executive branch members are lazy. They aren’t prepared and in most cases aren’t capable of doing the hard work required to run a complex economy/country efficiently. It’s much easier to make stupid one size fits all pronouncements that you can send out in a tweet that will most assuredly create chaos and pain for the proletariat.
I am seeing a lot of overlap between H’s conception of US-China trade competition and Republican political partisanship. Next up — big beautiful tariffs on Democratic voters?
The biggest benefit of the House being so close to even is that it limits Trump’s ability to target blue states via the tax code. Not to say he won’t take advantage of his leverage to “punish” blue states in other ways (never mind how much blue states already subsidize red states), but there are enough swing seats in California and New York to hopefully minimize the damage. Unfortunately, it’ll be the poor and minorities that take the brunt of whatever Trump does to punish blue states for the crime of not supporting him.
For all this talk about Chinese shipping, a startling fact I just learned is that less than 2% of all the cargo going through US ports is in US registered ships. There are only 180 US registered cargo vessels on the high seas. The Chinese didn’t do that to us; we chose that. We register our ships in Liberia, Panama and other seemingly illogical locations for legal, financial, and other reasons. Maritime law is rather interesting and has less to do with geopolitical issues that it does with finding the best way to skate on the world’s ponds. We don’t seem to want to take responsibility for our boats and are happy to let others do that so China builds the infrastructure for our ports, builds many of the world’s ships, along with South Korea, and is happy to move the world’s goods.
Like it or not, mostly by choice I would aver, the US doesn’t like big infrastructure. It’s really not all that profitable. Big buildings and other large and difficult infrastructure projects, even in the US, may be expensive but usually involve on-off projects and resist scale savings. These projects increasingly involve international crews of highly skilled individuals, an increasing number of whom are supervised by female engineers. Boats, trains, big construction and other complex projects are expensive and complex. There is no easy money in these kinds of projects so US companies focus elsewhere for bigger profits.
It’s not just the infrastructure. The Jones Act is pretty much the only thing keeping the US Merchant Marine alive. It requires US ships to be built and maintained in US shipyards, of which there are still a few. The problem is that the US shipyards are not competitive. I have been in shipyards all over the world (for repair work and new construction). In Singapore, Japan, Korea the work is done quickly, efficiently, and relatively inexpensively. On the other hand, I have seen ships being towed out of US shipyards months after they were due to be finished and way over budget. I don’t think you can legislate/subsidize an industry into competitiveness. It will be interesting to see how Intel does in the chip production business under what I see as similar conditions.