Posted on 01/18/2017 5:19:10 AM PST by expat_panama
You people have gotten lazy and overcompensated. It’s time for you to make an honest living rather than relying upon currency manipulation to line your pockets. You’re really incredible, in the original sense of the word. If, as you claim, currency exchange rates have “no effect” then you should be quite content with a weaker dollar.
To create wealth means you created something tangible, something that can be touched. Services just transfer wealth from one person to another it is not a creative process. The most important way to create real wealth are to "make it, mine it, grow it or construct it". Any other economic activity that does not involve those things are secondary services.
And yet that person sits in a new car, possibly even delivered to their own driveway. I wouldn’t expect them to spend much time wondering how it got there, or where all the parts and materials to build it came from, either. But I do know that the less they think about it, the more likely they are a protectionist.
“Tariffs also generate lots of revenue and if we can use it to balance the budget then the dollar strengthen even more. The trick is austerity.”
Tariffs would gen maybe $100 billion in revenue at most. The real gain is domestic production increases, something these anti-Americans think is a terrible thing since their favorite foreign nation would lose that production.
Trump is not a Luddite. So this is a straw man argument. I am a huge fan of automation just as long as the factory IS IN THE USA.
I'll go back to my previous example of tires and auto manufacturing.
Bridgestone is the largest tire manufacturer in the world. They have 15 plants in the U.S., but only about four of them produce new tires for cars (the rest produce tires for agricultural equipment and off-road vehicles, or produce retreaded tires for trucks). If Bridgestone closes a plant in Tennessee and opens a new one in Vietnam, did they "offshore" all of that manufacturing capacity?
I agree but 100B to the black is better than 100B to the red.
If I'm in the auto manufacturing business, how do I touch the rubber that is used for my tires when it is halfway around the world?
Services just transfer wealth from one person to another it is not a creative process.
If that's the way you understand the wealth creation process, I'm willing to bet that you don't create any wealth at all -- for anyone.
Sure, I’ll take the 100B. Definitely. That’s 1T over 10 years, in a static model. Of course, what I want is tariffs to go to $0. Zero. None.
I want fair trade that doesn’t result in tariffs, where companies are not incentivized to import. Where our imports are of items we simply don’t make, like bananas, certain furniture, specific materials, seasonal items like fresh fruits from South America, etc.
I am all for trade, but not at the expense of requiring America be weak to do it just so some foreign nation becomes stronger like expat_panama has demanded.
I have a manufacturing job, am I “creating” wealth? Personally, I think I spend most of my time staring at a computer. But when I was actually making stuff as a machine operator, was I creating wealth, then? Was I ever?
When I buy a car I look at the VIN to see where it is manufactured. I also think about the factory and the build quality.
If you made something, grew something or mined something you created wealth.
If Donald Trump wasn’t the president and he was still involved in the day-to-day management of his company, where do you think he’d be more likely to build a new resort hotel — Detroit or Dubai?
Just sit back, little boy, and let Trump show you how it’s done.
After 30 years of giving the rest of the world a chance to “play fair”, and they haven’t, do you really thing we can live in a world without tariffs?
Yup, you’re a protectionist. A free-trader looks at those, and then the form that states the vehicle’s domestic content. For my Ford (built in the USA), it was 60%. Did you look at yours?
The point I am trying to make would be this, If you could prefab an entire hotel in China and ship on some humongous vessel to Detroit that would be a bad thing. The Americans could have created that wealth(A new hotel) but we pawned the wealth creation off on to the Chinese and the middlemen pocket the difference.
So I created wealth at one time, got promoted, and create wealth no longer. Odd that I am better-off after the promotion. A real head-scratcher.
“After 30 years of giving the rest of the world a chance to “play fair”, and they haven’t, do you really thing we can live in a world without tariffs?”
Maybe. Tariffs may cause some domestic issue that business scream to congress to correct. If they find they cannot import and domestic production is hampered by taxes and regulations, maybe, just maybe, they’ll use their clout to change those taxes and regs instead of using it to allow unfettered imports as they have.
We need to change our taxes and regs. Tariffs, alone, will not do the trick. We need tariffs right now to cause the changes needed and get Americans back to work.
A serious consequence of Americans not working has been the knowledge needed to work. Colleges teach very little these days, high schools are a joke, and we as a nation have lost that can-do spirit. We’ll get it back quickly, but the catalyst will be tariffs causing domestic production demand.
The last thing we need is a weak dollar and more imports as these anti-Americans on FR keep advocating.
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