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Trump’s Deranged Plan to Lower Food Prices by Raising Them
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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So, the reality of the situation is that Trump literally would not pass AP Econ in high school, or a first year of Econ in college.
The basics of tariffs are widely known, not just theoretically as much of more advanced Econ is, but literally through the evidence of history.
This is not the esoteric complexity of regulations on financial markets or determining how to best do taxes or subsidies to minimize or compensate for externalities.
This is like Week 2 of MacroEcon 101.
Maybe literally Week 1.
Trump seems to genuinely think that foreign food exporters have no choice other than exporting to the US, as if we are some kind of monopsony.
He seems to think that, like with his idea of somehow getting Mexico to pay for a border wall, that what he is doing is taxing another country's GDP, directly.
No, just... no.
What happens is first domestic importers pay the import tariff, not the foreign exporters.
Then we get cost pass thru to consumers in the short run, to keep the show running.
Then in the medium term, various kinds of imported foods are just deemed too expensive to eat by consumers, and demand for those imports lessens or stops, they just stop being widely available.
Then in the long run, we might get an attempt to reorient some domestic farms to produce some of these no longer imported foods, but this means less farmland for what we were already making which drives up costs, and the newly domestically produced food is still going to cost more than when they were imported, because wages are higher here...
... unless we allow more migrant workers in to work for a pittance, but he's against that.
And that's assuming any food can be grown at the same cost in any location or climate, which is obviously false.
...
Trump's brain is operating at a level of Mercantilism, a dunce of a mercantilist.
The only way it makes any sense is if you pair that with old school Imperial Colonialism.
We'd have to literally, militarily, boots on the ground, conquer and subjugate all these places we import food from to actually effectively tax those regions and countries directly.
But he also says he is against militarism!
I feel like nobody called out his complete ignorance of how tariffs work. Like it's just 100% wrong.
Once upon a time I used to get into arguments with people on the comments section of Paul Krugman's articles, or with my Econ professor about how Iceland's response to the 08 financial crash (jail all the corrupt bankers) did not infact destroy their entire economy and thus austerity is not actually mandatory.
But alas, those arguments are over and we now just live in the dullest corporate cyberpunk dystopia, without all the edgy style or superhuman abilities of the genre.
I... I remember when idiocracy came out, and the general response to it was that the future of utter morons it depicted was far, far too implausible, that it was just a goofy, half baked 'dude bro' comedy. Many more popular sci fi had done far more interesting and cerebral conceptions of possible futures.
But now, people look at idiocracy as.. still flawed in many ways, but shockingly accurate in terms of the just total anti intellectualism, recourse to superstition and slogans, hypercharging of corporate control over everything and its rhetoric and slogans entirely being culture.
My big frustration is that the media (including this article) tries to read more into what he says. It's always just an incoherent word salad, and then reporters rewrite it into something that's semi coherent which they then try to analyse.
Demand that he write down his plans so they can be properly costed and judged, and if he says something in a rally, just say it didn't make sense.
His team wrote down his plans as project 2025, so report on just that.
Same with the Democrats BTW, Harris just gets to give vague speeches, but people have real questions about what she'll do about Gaza, if she's going to stay the course at the FTC, CFPB, NLRB, etc. I'm sure they're working on concrete plans, but I don't hear anyone asking her about those things directly.