Why Is The Tariff Issue Controversial?

rikroll south Korea and Japan, both as china countries that need to import significant amounts of natural resources for all around development, exist and prove you can develop really fast, in Japan case even after they literally atom bomb your ass (much worse than anything the west ever did to china), without meaningful tariffs and you end up competing with first world "colonial powers" anyway.

now if the topic was silly, insane, made up "intellectual property" protection I might agree with you (that developing countries should disregard copyrights and patents in the west and copy without paying), but tariffs? lolmg no.

big picture is that actual free trade is one of the very few proven ways to objectively meaningfully benefit your people. to the point it would be optimal to unilaterally drop all tariffs, make them unconstitutional, and not use them even as retribution if others put tariffs on.

this is especially true since gold standard doesn't exist anymore. you don't even face any monetary unbalance since gold standard ceased, you don't have to sen dgold overseas to compensate a trade balance, people in foreign country are literally accepting your paper to sell you real things. they are giving up on their own quality of life to get your paper instead.

which when they incest in your country, you decide how much to tax and regulate lol.

Yeah, bro, it wasn't tariffs that led to all that economic development in China; it was American CEO's outsourcing jobs to cheap labor so they could bring prices down in the states while also massively increasing profits.

But okay man, explain how Trump tariffs will help poors be able to afford housing? You think a 25% tariff is going to bring back manufacturing to the US? Even Trump has all his garbage trinkets and clothing made in China.

It was "just" allowing China in the "global community". And the "outsourcing" happened more from europe than from the USA (which outsourced to Mexico already the decade before China entered the WTO) . Italy in particular was the "low value added mass producer" of the west in the late 20th century and got annihilated.

Outsourcing didn't "massively increase profits". Investment in China notoriously had very low profitability (but this was only known ex post). But it helped keep or increase market share. It was a massive boon for western consumers to the detriments of producers (capital in the west in the outsourced sectors + jobs in the outsourced sectors lost). for capital it was about surviving, not thriving.

If you want to frame it in a class war sense, pensioners and "white collar" professionals benefited in unprecedented ways , blue collar workers in tradable sectors (outside some rare "protected" cases) got massacred.

Keep in mind the most outstanding social stat in the last 20 years, besides fertility dropping everywhere in the world outside subsaharian africa, is how well the over65 are doing everywhere in the rich world compared to everyone else. They are doing far better than they ever did in a way that's incomprehensible for anyone from 1990 or before to understand. Poverty rates have always been higher for the elders than for working people for all of history EXCEPT in the last 20-25 years for example.

Globalization is an exceptional benefit for everyone who doesn't have to compete for his wage, and pensioners are the biggest class that doesn't have to compete for it's wage

Yup no idea how to explain it otherwise .
Tariffs has nothing to do with this .
Americans always wanted the cheapest possible price possible and so government and ceo did what they had to do .
Cutting production cost shrug .
Let’s send like 4 millions manufacturing jobs to China and in return cut taxes from corporations lol ….

And then people wonders how the hell the debt been growing that much (adding 2 wars in the mix since 2001 on top ….) .

Tariffs are great to fight disingenuous market practice (dumping, manipulating currencies , etc) or to protect national vital interest .
But beside that nothing much else .

there's a whole slew of billion dollar companies from china with massive global presence which only exist today because tariffs gave them the room to survive and operate in their early and more inefficient years

but sure, label that as net negative

you guys can't see the forest for the trees

China was able to build those due to the expertise gained from over 2-3 decades of massive export of jobs to China, a liberation of economic trade with the west and China been known to steal many industrials secret at the same time .

To claim otherwise isn’t serous and has nothing to do with tariffs ….
And what tariffs you speak about anyway with China during the last 3 decades ?

lol, just listen to yourself man, confirmation bias at its finest

China's GDP per person is the same as world gdp per person. So it basically comes down to "yeah, a country with a population more than North and South America produces a lot". It's not some great mystery that needs to be explained, it's completely expected. Things in China would have to be really bad if they were only 10% of US GDP or something with the spread of modern technology.

Bias about what ???
All I know is believing tariffs won’t create inflation is bs and historically speaking , tariffs almost never ends a a positive outcome in aggregate shrug.

I actually in favour of tariffs in some instances but trump use them for no reason at all economically ( except vs china) .
It will end up badly for Americans .

i never mentioned inflation or anything of the sort, just pure bad faithed strawmanning

That’s the problem isn’t ?
It should be much higher being the second economy in the world ….

Look at India , they didn’t got the U.S. jobs China got and it shows .
It ain’t about tariffs .

Jobs is what create true wealth in the end , not monetary or trade strategy .

Fine then I don’t what you are talking about , it’s ok .

you're so close here, so close

where do jobs come from?

What freakn tariffs u talking about ?
Many U.S. companies moved production there and sold back in the U.S. and throughout the world .
What freakn tariffs u talking about ?
And if it was true about tariffs , why gdp per capita is still so low in China after all those decades …?

Ok so if I got you right , those tariffs from China ( while I personally have no idea what they are and on what products ) would be the reason of the rust belt and not that American simply lost their jobs to globalization which was concentrate mostly into China ?

I found some some study that speak about how devastating those migration of jobs from the U.S. to China has created massive amount of trade deficit throughout the decades (which is what you allude too in the end I guess ?) .
And no where does it mention tariffs .

But here a simple question .
If you believe tariffs was the reason why U.S. products didn’t enter China , what products could Chinese possibly buy from the U.S. when the gdp per capita in China in 2000 for example was only 900$ US per years ?
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metri...

Ps: which is what in wages , earning .50 cent an hour ?)

While gdp per capita worldwide was 5k per year ?
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metri...

It ain’t about tariffs , it’s about Chinese being too poor from buying anything the U.S. makes and the U.S. got poorer by losing their jobs .
I can’t see nowhere what tariffs u speak about …

But it isn't necessary to retaliate as it isn't a war. If china blocks you to sell to them it's their consumers loss, you (your citizens) still gain from getting the Chinese stuff in without extra taxes.

There are the caveats for national security and so on that I listed at the beginning but for a lot of stuff no such caveat applies

India will undergo the same emergence over the next couple decades. When you go from a sustenance agrarian economy to industrial you’ll produce more. If you have billions of people working n a single country you’ll produce as much as any other country in the world. Hell the USSR had massive growth as they industrialized without US trade and Stalin was killing and gulaging half the population at the time.

you should be absolutely embarrassed and ashamed and take a break from posting

i've been abundantly clear from the very beginning that this was about combatting their tariffs - fact you just ignored all of that for a choose your own adventure argument is telling

even if you had listened, how can you possibly even fathom engaging in a discussion about retaliatory tariffs with so much conviction when you don't know the first thing about the original tariffs to which the new ones are a direct response to

jfc man... you could be so much better than this, this is outright garbage and deplorable behavior

^^^^^^^ rickrolls standard move when his arguments get crushed. Make is personal and declare deficiencies in his opponent.

And, it fails once again.

I just got no idea what time period rickroll speaks about .
Im talking about what happen since like 1990 with the offshoring of about 4-5 million Americans jobs and seem rickroll speaks about the last 5 years on tariffs ……

I'm willing to listen to him walk us through step-by-step how the tariffs would help American consumers, but he keeps skipping over that question and launching personal attacks instead.

I’m sure he has a perfectly reasonable explanation of how a tariff war between the USA and China will be beneficial to both countries’ consumers.

He learned it all back when he worked a few months as a…..blah blah blah.

where did i say anything about it helping consumers

i've been incredibly clear and you can go back and read what i've written instead of your imaginary strawmen

i used to respect you but you're just actively posting in bad faith now - shame on you