I don’t see why we should allow 0% imports but be shut out of exports. Yes yes according to some chart this is actually a good thing but I find it unfair.

For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good.

The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah.

I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal. Using tariffs where imbalances exist, especially when countries arbitrarily lock your goods out of their markets, is a tool for fixing this.

One reason the US is so fucked up for the lower and middle classes is our global reserve currency and how it provides increasing pressure on the dollar and slowly deindustrializes our society. This has been pushing us towards ever more radical politics

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favflam 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

My middle school 7th grade civics class told me that this conversation happens in Congress in Congressional hearings.

I get to hear my Rep ask questions. There is a Congressional research office that acts as a kind of neutral arbiter of truth allowing for evidenced based instructions. Then, after weeks or months, a consensus builds and Congress passes a law and tells the President what to do (hence Congress=Article ONE -> two).

Now, I get to watch a single person dictating tax rates and dumb twitter threads doing a horrific job replacing what I described above.

I could debate you on the merits of your comment, but my real point is that before you wreck the lives of millions of people, you should make sure most people are onboard with all the consequences (1st order and 2nd order effects).

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Our middle school 7th grade civics classes taught us a heavily simplified version of civics suitable for 7th graders. The canonical story of how legislation works bears no resemblance to, for example, the process around NAFTA when some of us were in 7th grade - Congress was not invited to participate in negotiations nor permitted to substantially amend the agreement.
	▲	monero-xmr 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Trump is able to this this because the other branches of government are not stopping him, because his party has control and he is a very strong executive. A prior historical US example would be FDR, who my teachers growing up simply adored, who strong armed many aggressive executive policies through and radically reshaped America for a century.

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tzs 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal

Do you mean balanced trade as a whole, so it would be OK to have deficits or surpluses with individual countries as long as the total surpluses match the total deficits? Or do you mean trade with each individual country should be balanced?

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monero-xmr 2 days ago | parent [-]

I would be interested in balancing trade with each individual country, with magnitude of deficit taken into account (i.e. a tiny island country would have vastly less impact than China).

Tariffs artificially increase costs of goods with another country. That should incentivize purchasing the goods from other countries, with the cheapest being our own. Of course we have very high labor costs, and lack a huge supply chain, and on and on. But China only 50 years ago had very little of the same, and America systematically de-industrialized, teaching other countries, moving the kit, and so on, until we lost the ability to make things at scale cheaply ourselves. But the same thing can happen in reverse, there is nothing inherently impossible about having Americans build and run factories, with the benefit of robots and AI and all the latest tools.

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tzs a day ago | parent [-]

I don't see how balancing with each individual country makes sense.

Suppose for example the US needs to buy some natural resource from country X, which the US uses to build something that it sells to country Y at a very large profit. Suppose that the US doesn't export anything that country X needs or wants.

Balancing trade with X would mean cutting back on importing that natural resource, which would cut back on how much the US can build to sell to Y.

There will almost certainly also be loops in the graph of imports and exports. Things like A exports to B exports to C exports to A, with A, B, and C all having net balanced trade, but with each have a trade surplus with one of the others and a trade deficit with one.

If they all tried to force balanced trade with tariffs they just all end up paying more with no actual change in trade except possibly a reduction all around in the volume of trade.

	▲	monero-xmr a day ago \| parent [-]
		This would be an optimization problem and there would need to be far more nuance. But the goal would be balance, without persistent overwhelming differences in trade deficits.

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SpicyLemonZest 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah.

You're blaming the wrong economist. Keynes believed that trade deficits are a big problem and tariffs are an effective policy to remediate them.

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actionfromafar 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Another reason is the weird fetish for pumping the spoils of the strong dollar into medical middlemen and tax cuts for billionaires.

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monero-xmr 2 days ago | parent [-]

I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs.

How we redirect money to the medical system is so completely insane it must be the #1 place politicians get their graft from. It’s just so insane

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fzeroracer 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs.

Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.

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monero-xmr 2 days ago | parent [-]

My preferred way would also to be to eliminate expenditures, but failing that, redirecting taxes in a way that grows the US internal economy as much as possible, and incentives the re-industrialization simultaneously, is an interesting experiment.

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selectodude 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Everybody wants to reindustrialize yet I don’t see a lot of people signing up to work in a factory. Why don’t you go be the change you seek?

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Eliminating US government expenditures would obliterate the entire economy overnight.

	▲	monero-xmr 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I would not literally eliminate expenditures but as we cut the total taxation we similarly reduce spending 1 for 1