Transitory inflation, obviously. Turns out nobody knows what they’re doing.
Economics Thread
- Thread starter sturg33
- Start date
cajunrevenge
Well-known member
Hold on a second here. Now I may be a southern wannabe lawyer but are you telling me when their cost to buy something goes up they charge more their net revenue goes up?
chop2chip
Well-known member
Sure if you buy that’s the case then let’s have that discussion.
I just fundamentally disagree with the assertion that low prices are “entitlements”. You either have a market economy or you don’t. I don’t need any president (Trump now, Zohram later) deciding what price I should pay for something for the “health of the country long term”.
I think one of my biggest challenges in understanding the goal of MAGAnomics personally is that I don’t see why I should be drawing my line at supporting the growth of manufacturing in the United States. I can respect that being the aim of the federal government, but I don’t see why I, a person within one community out of the entire US should be willing to put up with short-term pain for the specific benefit of some group of specific industries that are likely to be operating in a different community altogether to begin with. This is a policy that specifically harms parts of the economy and by extension Americans within those sectors for the benefit of other specific industries. And due to the haphazard way we’ve implemented the tariffs, the number of industries benefitting are even lower. How many people need to find marginally better employment opportunities for the entire country (including those very people) to pay significantly more for goods or services? And why should I care about steel producers in Pennsylvania more than I care about both steel producers abroad *AND* retail workers in my community?
acesfull86
Well-known member
I think I’ve given up trying to understand the goal of MAGAnomics.
Some in that camp want tariffs to bring back manufacturing, some want to replace taxes with tariff revenues, some want to stick it to China, some want to use them to negotiate border enforcement, some have no particular stance other than being on team MAGA for the vibes.
No one seems willing to acknowledge that the various “goals” of these tariffs are often mutually exclusive, especially those closest to the president. They’re content to elevate whatever angle gives them the best chance to win the particular Twitter spat of the day, subject to change tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the president doesn’t have any ideology at all, no matter how much those around him/his supporters try to manufacture one around his bullshit. I don’t think he’s particularly interested in achieving any of the stated goals of tariff policy. More than anything in life, he just loves the idea of making deals and coming out a winner. There’s no equilibrium he’s trying to reach, or any sort of logical end point where the economy has been reshaped in his vision. The next time he gets a bug up his ass about whatever, he’s going to go to the tariff well because that’s just what he likes to do.
I feel like there’s an interesting question to be found here, actually. While I’d imagine any potentially injured Intel shareholder is more likely to benefit from investor confidence in the United States government propping up the damn company, is there a possibility that this is actionable depending on what the government does with its shares? And how does the federal government successfully regulate this industry going forward? If any competitors were to attempt to merge, does the federal government, as an investor in Intel, have the ability to stop that still without a legal challenge? If they didn’t try to stop it, do Intel investors have a claim (legal or with the board) that the government needed to act in the best interest of Intel?
But what is it that we’re gaining? If we sell our shares that Intel created, we aren’t investing in jobs/manufacturing and if we hold, we aren’t gaining anything, right? We can’t pay off the debt with our shares of Intel or fund programs, can we? I don’t actually understand the mechanism where we gain here.
acesfull86
Well-known member
I don’t know how to take someone seriously when they’re saying shit like this without recognizing that consistent quarterly growth was practically a given as we came out of a global shutdown that crashed basically the entire supply chain. I agree with his supporters that much of the inflation attributed to Biden was also not his fault, but it cuts both ways.
chop2chip
Well-known member
Industrial manufacturers need to suck it up along with the teenagers who play PS5, little girls with dolls, and the DIY dads. We’ve grown soft in this country from all this entitlement.
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
Decades of pain.
Jaw
It's OVER 5,000!
I wish that someone in the US knew the magical spell for making steel. Then maybe we could produce it here instead of sending wealth to another country with lower environmental and labor regulations to make it for us.
Fair enough, but if we haven’t managed to figure it out yet, I’m not sure how it supports even the stated goals of the Trump Administration to enact such debilitating tariff rates on these materials.
It’s similar in many respects to what the left has done with EVs. If Electric vehicles were actually affordable and preferable to gas ones for most consumers, they would simply buy the vehicles. Instead we subsidized the industry which primarily resulted in companies already trying to make those vehicles getting giant stacks of government cash (looking at you, Elon) and customers who were already willing to buy EVs just paid less. We threw a pile of money at the problem of a lack of natural demand. Now we’re doing the inverse on certain raw material imports and taking in piles of money to account for the lack of natural supply.