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I'm only gonna say this once - Tariffs hurt the lower and middle class

I saw Trump on this Bloomberg interview in Chicago today and realized he does not understand economics.


And here's a simple example -

Solar panels

They are made very cheap and sent to the US. Here's the impact:

1) Panels are made elsewhere - so the factories that were never built and employees that were never hired stay that way.

2) They are so cheap that they make economic sense for homeowners and commercial users to install them and save money on energy and help the environment.

3) Many new jobs a created - which includes the importers, distributers, installers and yes, financers that create the lease agreements that help make economic sense of panel use to generate electric.


Impose tariffs - the contractors that install them lose all that work, the homeowners pay more for electric, the power companies have to add capacity to their networks...

Other stuff -

Increasing the costs of things to consumers costs them more - building factories that people in the US are not willing to work in will not elevate the American Worker - only education will do that.

Nobody is raising there kid to work in a factory. Nobody. We are just going to pay more and alienate our suppliers...

Where it could work:

If there are producers in place here, we can protect them, but should be on a sliding scale based on what we can export
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Reason10 · 70-79, M
No they don't.
Because of the TRUMP tariffs (and the corporate tax cuts) MORE MANUFACTURING JOBS came back to America than at any other time in history.
Trump was smart in how he handled tariffs. He did so to prevent China from ripping us off.
@Reason10
MORE MANUFACTURING JOBS came back to America than at any other time in history.

Source?
Reason10 · 70-79, M
@BohemianBabe https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/new-economic-comeback-president-trump-breaks-70-year-record/

News broke this morning that real GDP grew at an annualized rate of 33.1% in the third quarter of 2020—beating expectations and setting an all-time record.

This jump in GDP is nearly double the previous record set 70 years ago.

Thanks to President Trump’s policies, the American economy is weathering the global pandemic better than any other major Western country, including those of Europe. As the Council of Economic Advisers wrote this morning:

While the pandemic hit every major economy around the world, the United States experienced the least severe economic contraction of any major Western economy in the first half of 2020, with the Euro Area economy’s contraction being 1.5 times as severe as the contraction of the U.S. economy.

Since April, America has gained over 11.4 million jobs, recovering more than half of those lost because of lockdowns. Retail sales are already above pre-pandemic levels, many construction and manufacturing jobs have returned, business activity is at a 20-month high, and new jobless claims fell to their lowest level this week since the beginning of the pandemic.

This “V-shaped” recovery is beating economist predictions and outpacing the slow recovery under former President Obama. After the 2008-09 recession, it took the Obama Administration 4 times as long to regain the same share of lost economic output.
@Reason10 So the source is a website that was made by the Trump-Pence administration, which lied constantly to make Trump look good. Fantastic.

Here's the truth.