“Durante said he doesn’t believe Trump will ever want a “zero-tariff world” but is using the drastic levies as a negotiating tool for trading partners. In return for commitments to purchase more U.S. products and invest in the country…”
But of course all of this is total nonsense, because “countries” don’t invest. “Countries” don’t purchase. It’s done by individual corporations and they’re not government run. So Trump is “leveraging” fairy dust and moonbeams.
He’s too demented and deranged to remain in office.
This creep in the photo holding up one finger could be cast as O’Brien in the novel “1984”.
He could order someone tortured as you and I order a pizza.
It’s a far cry from Hamilton’s original tariff policy for funding the new government: tariff luxury goods, so that those most able to pay extra would do so and help fund the government. Spare the less affluent. And encourage local industries.
The administration is prepping to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling by finding another fig leaf to cover its blatantly illegal actions, and let another case work its way through the courts. Rinse. Repeat.
For all that, we know, it was designed that way.
A case of wagging the dog.
After all, what is the value of a few Latin American lives…compared to the utter importance of protecting Dear Leader from the consequences of his actions?
I just know that these tariffs, and how to use them, didn’t directly come from DonOLD’s pea brain. So is this economic policy from The Heritage Foundation or another Right leaning economic foundation.
And wouldn’t you like to be a fly on wall when whoever is really in charge of tariffs had to explain to DonOLD what and how they wanted him to present this sham scam of a policy?
To me it seems like it’s just like the pardons, an assembly line of pump and dump moves being manifested on a daily basis for what’s gonna happen next. People have made a lot of fucking money from this. The kind of people that he hangs around with.
Been reading up on the history of US tariff policy. Tariffs are a regressive tax (they disproportionately impact lower income folks) but at the time of the founding, there was no way to measure and tax individual income. Once progressive income tax became administratively feasible, tariffs became a secondary source of government revenue, to be used sparingly. Unless of course you don’t want to tax the rich and powerful, so you leave out the progressive part.
The only catch here is that the Plutocrats pay the SCOTUS for their rulings, and if the tariffs are impacting the Plutocracy’s wealth accumulation they may order it to be outlawed.
