Over 100 Million Now Receiving Federal Welfare

www.weeklystandard.com ^ | 08-08-2012 | Daniel Halper

[publius911]

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[Bob]

Raise Import tariffs. It’ll provide the government more revenues to help pay for this, while encouraging more production here at home. Jobs are needed to get people off of welfare.

Absolutely!! Just look at the stunning success of Smoot-Hawley in preventing the Great Depression. Well, maybe not.

[DannyTN]

There are a lot of opinions about what caused the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley may have been unfairly blamed.

The fact remains that 25% of our people are unemployed, yet you walk into any wal-mart store and most of the goods are made in China. Why are we paying China to do what we have unemployed sitting around that could do for our selves?

When you look at the history of tariffs, our founding fathers started out with protective tariffs on the order of 15%. Since 1980 we've almost completely eliminated import tariffs, and our domestic manufacturing has paid the price in jobs.

Tariffs in United States history"

[DannyTN]

Bipolar rates have increased over that same time frame.

Though I found it interesting that 7.7% of people taking anti-depressants convert to bi-polar.

[Bob]

There are a lot of opinions about what caused the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley may have been unfairly blamed.

I agree that it's arguable whether or not Smoot-Hawley worsened or lengthened the Great Depression. Any blame may certainly be unfair.

Smoot-Hawley, though, clearly didn't help to alleviate the Great Depression. After its passage in 1930, the depression continued unabated through the rest of the decade.

[semantic]

Are things too far gone to fix?

You're kidding, right? Imagine cattle @ feedlot being loaded for a one-way trip to the slaughterhouse. At what point do they realize it was all a set-up from the git-go? When the stunbolt gun is being lowered to their head?

On our human/national time frame, the system that is harvesting the assets of tax donkeys and other associated productive people was launched in 1913. It really was ingenious - how many people knew the eventual outcome and played the suckers for all they were worth?

There's a reason they don't teach this exponential curve in school. The sheer ussustainability would be so obvious even the most clueless would catch on to the con:

[DannyTN]

In 1929, imports were 4% of GNP and exports were 5%.

This article makes the case that the impact on Imports/Exports was simply too small for Smoot-Hawley to be a causative factor.

According to this Imports are now 16% of our GNP.

To be sure there will be retaliatory tariffs, and exports will be similarly affected. We need to select very carefully the industries we want returned to the U.S. and tariff those. That would include all military components and most high tech stuff that's not highly toxic.

We really ought to tie our tariffs to unemployment levels, so that they can automatically drop as unemployment goes down and automatically raise as unemployment goes up.

[DannyTN]

That 16% is understated. Chinese don’t even make minimum wage. That 16% may well be a 25-30% increase in the economy in the U.S. Some things would cost consumers more, but government entitlements would drop as employment rose. Government revenues would go up both due to the tariff and due to the greater employment.