Renaud 8 days ago

Universal import taxes on everything make no sense.

If you want to protect strategic production, you apply selective tariffs to support that local production while ensuring it can ramp up and import what it needs until it becomes self-sufficient.

Most countries, the US included, have used selective tariffs for this purpose. Applying a blanket tax on every type of import just increases inflation, as you can't possibly manufacture everything locally. For many products—especially cheap ones that were outsourced to China—there's no way to produce them cheaply enough for your internal market to absorb all production.

And you can't export them either, because their higher production cost makes them uncompetitive compared to cheaper alternatives from low-cost countries.

The secondary effects of import taxes are wide-ranging: they help when applied selectively and carefully; they don’t when applied capriciously and without thought.

The mere fact that high taxes were slapped on phone imports so "phones could be made in the US," only to backtrack mere days later, demonstrates that this is either the work of an insanely bright economist nobody understands, the scheme of a grifter aiming to benefit personally, or the capriciousness of a borderline dementia patient who cannot act rationally.

3
FooBarBizBazz 8 days ago

Really the way to do it, AFAIK (say, per How Asia Works), is to apply selective subsidies, not tariffs, and to subject the subsidized industries to substantial export discipline. That's what gets you South Korean world-beaters. Autarkic tariffs just get you Indian industry, where consumers have learned that the few goods marked "export quality" are superior.

And, I don't want to be partisan about this stuff, but, that's basically what "Bidenonics" was trying to do, in a small way: Subsidize a few industries like semiconductors and batteries and solar panels, that were deemed strategically important.

Whether the US was ever going to be as serious as South Korea or Japan about this remained to be seen. Frequently the subsidies seem to be handed out and then nothing happens (e.g., "Gigafactory" in Buffalo, NY).

klooney 8 days ago

Korea used to have substantial auto tariffs. Every nation with an auto industry does.

Tariffs are/can be effective, you're just not supposed to tariffs everything on a whim.

Yeul 8 days ago

You are advocating a stronger government when the GOP basically wants to eliminate it...

2muchcoffeeman 8 days ago

Would it make sense if you wanted to engage in some insider trading and short everything?

DonHopkins 8 days ago

Why not two out of three?