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Rich Wingerter's avatar

I don't like free trade and I don't like protectionism; what I like is managed trade.

We have been running an enormous trade deficit, the deficit that matters, for years. It sucks on the order of a half-trillion dollars a year out of our economy. We sell off assets or take loans against them to pay for that, and it runs up the cost of things like real estate, hurts funding for Social Security and Medicare, and depresses our employment levels.

My problem isn't with tariffs--it's with stupidity. It takes time (months, years) to build production capacity. A smart way to use a tariff is to identify an industry where we could reasonably produce goods and announce that in the future we will have a sensible tariff for that industry. This gives it time to build domestic production and hire U.S. workers for it, reducing the trade deficit.

Note that literally nothing in this sensible plan is happening here. Tariffs of maybe 5%, targeted to an industry in the future would encourage domestic production. The tariffs announced aren't sensible and are telegraphed. They are 10, 20, 50%. They are all over the place without regard to what can reasonably be produced in the U.S.

I'm not an economics professor. I'm not a hedge fund manager. But even I can see that what Criminal Trump is doing here is destructive. It's indefensible.

That's why clowns on TV can't defend it.

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