That’s fair, as Trump is friends with all the big outsourcing CEOs and banking execs.
But he wasn’t doing anything novel. It was the exact same policy enacted under Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bush and Obama. Jobs outsourcing, automation, and financialization have been the federal policy for 50 years.
What is Harris planning to do differently? Send even more kickbacks to Big Three automakers and failing Silicon Valley firms? Shore up agribusiness by stealing more water from Mexico and subsidizing more resource ravenous cattle and pork production? Using more prison labor to supplant the aging blue collar labor force?
Because right now I’ve seen nothing out of the campaign to suggest it isn’t just a continuation of Neoliberal economics dating to the Milton Friedman era.
Trump did cripple the U.S.’s steel industry if I recall correctly. And he just wants to put more tariffs up which completely fuck over a lot of people.
So yea, the U.S. is not exactly going to be a utopia under Harris but Trump will absolutely be a nightmare for everyone.
Trump did cripple the U.S.’s steel industry if I recall correctly.
His tarrif was a huge boon for the steel industry. But because it kicked off retaliation from China, it undermined major exporters such as Boeing and Caterpillar and the soybean and pork industries.
One subsequent consequence of the tariff was a move by Nippon Steel to acquire the largest US manufacturer, US Steel. This has been held up by the Biden administration, but Republican stacked courts seem favorable to the acquisition. We’ll see how long Biden’s stalling can last.
But I’m unaware of what he may have done to cripple domestic steel production. The industry has been in the shitter for some time, largely due to how over leveraged manufacturers became during ZIRP.
That’s not a Trump problem, it’s a problem with American executives running Bust Outs on critical domestic infrastructure.
I dont know of youre purposely missing the point, but tariffs are usually met with retaliation. They reduce trade, which reduces productivity and the increase inflation.
tariffs are usually met with retaliation
I listed the instances of retaliation. But they didn’t include steel, because we import more steel than we export.
They reduce trade, which reduces productivity
Global productivity, maybe. But domestically, tariffs simply insource productivity.
For industries where savings simply come in the form of negative externalities, there’s no loss forcing production back into a more regulated environment.
That’s not what Trump was trying to do, but I note it to disabuse the notion that tariffs are universally bad.
