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Trump Announces $60 Billion Tariff on Chinese High-Tech and Other Goods (techcrunch.com)
Following months of investigations by the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, the Trump administration announced on Thursday at a White House briefing that the administration intends to place about $60 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods, with the bulk of them likely to be focused on the high-tech industry. The White House will announce a final list of goods subject to the tariffs in the next few weeks. From a report: "We've lost over a fairly short period of time, 60,000 factories in our country. Closed, shuttered, gone. Six million jobs at least, gone. And now they are starting to come back," President Trump said during the briefing. "The word that I want to use is reciprocal -- when they charge 25 percent for a car to go in, and we charge 2 percent for their car to come into the United States, that's not good. That's how China rebuilt itself."
Yes trade barriers are very bad.
Which is why these reciprocal tariffs against China will hopefully force China to abandon it's xenophobic, racist, and anti-free market trade barriers that it has maintained for years and years.
So Trump is clearly trying to end China's boneheaded move of having trade barriers against U.S. products.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
All the Libertarians the joined the GOP had better be saying "Not my president!" right now!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Please direct me to a 100% US-designed-and-built smartphone or tablet. Or for that matter, a 100% US-designed-and-built automobile.
Sometimes, there is no local option.
Well it did take about 70 years or 3 generations for the weavers to become employed again, so we can look at a prosperous 22nd century. The next wave of automation, even after shrinking the workforce by banning child labour, encouraging retirement, forcing shorter work weeks, still needed WWI to get full employment. Once that was cleaned up (always work when it comes to fixing broken windows) and the tractor enabled automation in the farmland, another big depression and once again a world war to fix the employment. That time there was enough destruction to enable a couple of decades of work. Then there was the cold war and the follow up war on terror, which created lots of work building new ways of breaking windows.
Now in America, lots of work building means of breaking windows to maintain the economy as well as the fact that the country is living on credit. Both government borrowing like crazy and the people going further and further into debt to maintain the lifestyle of prosperity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Do tariffs ever work long term?
Depends on why they are put in place. To pop up a dying industry? Nope, they don't work. To level a playing field caused by a difference in artificial costs by your own policies (e.g. health and safety, or environmental regulations) definitely.