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**Hugh** · Today, 18:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by thenry

done a poopsie

Well that's shit news ain't it. To become more reliant on itself it has broken rules. How shitty trying to do right thing for its own cause.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris

Yeah, how awful that governments aren’t above the law.

I think this article from King’s College last year sums it up…

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/trumps-tariffs...will-they-work

Quote:

“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word”, Donald Trump said in 2024*. He wasted no time following his inauguration on 20 January 2025 in announcing a 25 per cent tariff on Canada and Mexico, which he said were taking advantage of the US. “I look at some of these agreements" he continued*, "and I'd say ‘Who would ever sign a thing like this?’". Fun fact: the US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement was signed by Donald Trump in 2020.

And here is the central problem with trying to make sense of what the Trump administration is doing on trade. There is precious little coherence to the pronouncements he makes, and little exposition of precisely what the administration wants to achieve. Some of the claims are obviously nonsense, but are endlessly repeated by the administration regardless. An example is the assertion that the tariffs will be paid by foreign governments, not consumers – a claim that should be self-evidently false. Or the stated justification for targeting Canada being the flow of Fentanyl and migrants across the border, when both are insignificant.

And a second problem is the lack of direction. Tariffs are announced, then postponed, then put in place, then partially cancelled again, then increased when affected countries retaliate, and so on in an endless confusion of mixed messages and disorder.

This factor has prompted the question whether the Trump approach to tariffs is (i) strategic – in which the chaos is a deliberate ploy to make trading partners more willing to offer concessions, fearful of what is coming next from an president that is carefully crafting a reputation for unpredictability; or (ii) just chaos with no real underlying strategy, being made up largely on the hoof by a president who does not know much and is uninterested in the complexities of public policy. Alan Beattie at the Financial Times* examined this question, coming down on the side of the latter option.

Quote:

The model of manufacturing that underpins Trump’s approach simply hasn’t existed for the best part of 40 years, and is not coming back.

Moreover, the loss of manufacturing jobs is much more a result of increased productivity than foreign competition. The Center for Economic Policy and Research has done a rough calculation* on this that is a useful yardstick. If Trump were to succeed in balancing US trade exclusively through expanding manufacturing, they would need to increase production by around $906bn. This equates to an increase of 12.6% of current manufacturing production. Since roughly 12.8 million workers are currently employed within manufacturing, a 12.6% increase would lead to about 1.6 million new jobs. While this may sound significant, it is only around 1.0% of the current total US non-farm employment.

In short, manufacturing jobs are not coming back. Once upon a time the majority of people were employed in agriculture, but increased farm productivity put an end to that. The same is now happening in manufacturing. Reversing this trend is no more likely than great swathes of workers returning to farming.

tl;dr - Trump’s not trying to do the "right thing", because he keeps changing his mind about what the "right thing" is…