Do you prefer Biden’s 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, or Trump’s 10% tariff on everything?

Photo above - The European Parliament, which bears an eerie resemblance to the senate building on Coruscant, where Queen Amidala got screwed out of her entire planet in "The Phantom Menace", over some kind of free trade dispute.

We have a choice! Your vote matters! We can either make affordable Chinese EVs completely unaffordable . . . or pay 10% more for all our imported stuff from EVERYWHERE! I know - it’s going to be hard to pick one. Perhaps we should look to Europe for guidance, since everyone is always yammering “Let’s be more like Europe!” (Except for their unemployment rate and cost of housing, which is waaaaay worse than in America).

So what did the EU do about Chinese electric cars? Split the difference. A 45% tariff. (See link below).

45% has the twin virtues of garnering votes from European factory workers members . . . PLUS keeping EVs out of reach for ordinary buyers. Europe thinks there are too many cars on the road already. And they're also running out of electricity, just like the USA. Win- win for millennials in the EU, right?

American economists – at least 18 of them - who won some sort of prizes for being super smart – have done the math. They are certain that the 100% tariff is the best for us in Planet Hollywood/America. I don’t know the names of any of these economists. Or their track record on previous predictions. Like the 2008 housing crisis. The growth of the national debt. How to create more affordable housing. So . .. economist-ically speaking, a grain of salt, perhaps?

I’m personally torn. I’d LOVE to have a $20,000 EV. One that doesn’t catch on fire if it gets hit with a storm surge. But I also don’t want any $140,000 UAW union guys sent permanently to the unemployment line. These guys are not good at money stuff, and a bunch of them are likely to end up homeless, and living in tents in Hollywood if their screwdriver and pliers' skills are no longer in demand.

But even if I do buy an affordable EV, I still have to worry about the lack of public chargers, skyrocketing electric rates, and all of America's electrons being bought up by the companies who are getting rich off The Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, and Bitcoin mining farms. I don’t know if the EU has a solution to this either. It doesn’t seem like splitting the difference – half the electrons go to tech billionaires and half to ordinary people – is going to be fix anything.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

EU slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs, risking Beijing backlash | Reuters