Posted on 04/16/2016 2:55:11 AM PDT by lowbridge
So was George Washington acting immorally when he signed the Tariff Act of 1789? What an utterly ridiculous position you hold.
What was once a funny movie is now depressing.
Too much reality in it.
“So was George Washington acting immorally when he signed the Tariff Act of 1789? What an utterly ridiculous position you hold.”
The Tariff Act of 1789 did not include “protectionistic” tariffs. “The goal of using higher tariffs to promote industrialization was urged by the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and after him the Whig Party. They generally failed because Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats said the tariff should be only high enough to pay the government’s bills; otherwise, it would hurt the consumers.” (first paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history “
Your post is completely wrong because the Tariff Act of 1789 says it is protectionist
"Whereas it is necessary for that support of government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and protection of manufactures, that duties be laid on goods, wares and merchandise:"
So you are wrong just admit it.
“The goal of using higher tariffs to promote industrialization was urged by the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and after him the Whig Party. They generally failed because Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats said the tariff should be only high enough to pay the government’s bills; otherwise, it would hurt the consumers.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history
A preamble to an Act can say pretty much anything. The test comes when the text of the bill is examined. The tariffs were only large enough to fund the government and were not high enough to protect jobs/manufacturers.
So, you’re wrong again.
Or it could be that you spout populist nonsense which has no basis in reality, presents no workable solutions, and is just generally BS.
You have a mental problem when presented with facts you deny them. You are delusional.
Free Traitor™ Republicant talk. Trump kicked Cruz’s a$$ again in NY. Go Trump go!
My facts are better than your facts.
It is a very dangerous game you play and it is right out of the Fascist play book. Free Trade is a form of Fascism so be careful.
Yaaaaaawn. Nothing but insults, and poorly assigned labels. I’ve never once said anything pro free trade, I’m pro taking the time to understand how the world works. And Trump is a habitual liar who won’t even attempt any of the populist BS he promises. Which is actually good news, because if he did those things he’d crash the economy so hard he’d make Obama seem competent.
What would a complete embargo on imports do to the economy?
It would kill us. It would crush the supply chain to every store in the country, empty shelves everywhere, mass closures. Basically it would make us Venezuela.
See that is where you are wrong. The opposite would happen. Factories would reopen or have to be built from scratch. Domestic supply chains reopened. The economic activity would be thru the roof. Like China. It works both ways.
You too have lost faith in America and Americans. What sad pathetic creatures Free Traitors™ are. I'll bet you were not always like this.
See that’s where you don’t understand the supply chain. The retail world lives on JIT. Just in Time. They don’t have years of stock hanging around waiting for factories to be built to make the stock elsewhere. They don’t have months of stock. Hell, they don’t have weeks of stock. Before the factories could break ground retail stores would be locking up. Even if we could make all that stuff, which we can’t, the economy would be crashed before we could.
It’s not faith. It’s math. We’ve consumed the vast majority of the world’s finished goods for decades. We quite simply can’t produce enough stuff to satisfy our need to consume. 300 million people can’t produce as much as 7 billion, period. Just not possible. And frankly we shouldn’t want to. Because even if we somehow manage to muddle through long enough to make all that stuff without us consuming their stuff the REST of the planet goes bankrupt, and probably a ton of wars start, and some of those go nuclear.
I’m quite proud to have always been like this. Logic, facts, truth and math have always been my friends. And delusional BS has always been my enemy.
“Only a Fascist would deny facts and try to rewrite history. You can argue the merits of so called free trade. But you cannot rewrite history. The US government was funded by tariffs for 130 years. Under this stated protectionist umbrella the USA became an industrial power.”
You just can’t stop calling people names can you?
I would suggest you need to do more homework before you continue to call people names. For example, you might discover that tariffs to protect industries and jobs were extremely popular under fascist regimes like Hitler and Mussolini. That implies that you’re the fascist one.
I completely agree with the statement that the US government was funded, in the most part, by tariffs upon until the early parts of the 20th Century. You’re missing the distinction between tariffs designed to raise revenue and tariffs designed to be protectionistic. The tariffs you’re extolling were designed to produce revenue, not protect jobs.
It’s very difficult for a tariff to be both revenue producing and job protecting. A tariff high enough to protect jobs will produce little revenue since it must be high enough to severely limit trade and will, by definition, produce very limited revenue. A tariff low enough to produce revenue will be too low to protect jobs. As a conservative you should recognize that lower tax rates produce more income taxes than very high rates.
You insist upon believing that because the Tariff Act of 1789 mentioned protecting manufacturers it was protectionistic. That could be true but one would have to go beyond the preamble and examine the actual act to see if it did provide protections to industry. BTW, I provided you a citation that showed the founding fathers considered protectionistic tariffs as a part of this act but rejected them as ‘harmful to consumers’.
Just because an act makes a claim does not make it so. After all, the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA) includes many statements. If we apply your standards, that if an act claims something it must be true, then PPACA must have improved the quality of health care, lowered the costs of health care, and extended health care to millions.
Now, lets continue to some real facts.
We currently have tariffs on imported sneakers which raised about $2.7B from American consumers in 2014. There is only one sneaker manufacturer (New Balance) in the US. New Balance is fighting efforts to remove these tariffs to “protect American jobs”. New Balance employs 1350 people. Do the math. American consumers are paying $2M per year for each job protected. Do you consider that an efficient use of funds?
FWIW, Nike says that the removal of these tariffs would allow it to introduce new manufacturing technologies that would add 10,000 new domestic jobs over ten years.
Now some say, we have a choice. We can pay the prices of tariffs or we can pay for welfare for those displaced by imports. $2M per job pays for a lot of welfare, job training, etc.
FairTraders lament the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some say we have lost 10M, 20M or more jobs. Consider the cost of ‘protecting’ 20M jobs. At $2M per job, it will cost us $40 Trillion per year. The US GDP in 2015 was $17 trillion. IOW, FairTraders would have us spend over two times the US GDP to protect jobs.
Well, you could say that we could protect jobs for only $100,000 per job per year. OK, Fine, that means we would only pay $2 Trillion per year to protect 20M jobs, approximately 12% of the US economy.
Do you see the folly of this?
The only folly is to continue to do what we are doing. Tariffs that were put in place were specifically designed to be protectionist. That is a fact that you cannot refute no matter how you try to word smith it. Basically your post is bull sh!t.
China is becoming a world power behind a wall of protective tariffs. So that is proof enough that tariffs work.
So, you believe the PPACA improved the quality of health care, lowered the costs of health care, and extended health care to millions? After all, that’s what the act said it did.
Question, my freeper friend. Lots of articles about automation replacing workers. For example, several fast food chains are experimenting with kiosks where one can place his/her order in response to efforts to raise the minimum wage. Here’s the question: Would you support special taxes on these kiosks to “protect jobs”? If not, why not? BTW, tariffs are taxes.
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