> “Consumers from the country imposing the tariffs suffer either by settling for inferior quality or artificially higher prices. In doing so, tariffs tend to lower the standard of living of the tariff-imposing country.”
You have it backwards. Standard of living is determined largely by a country’s productivity and competitiveness, among other things; and it, in turn, determines what kind of goods people can afford, not the other way around. Consumers who can afford to pay more will not put up with inferior goods, tariffs or not.
And prices are largely determined by SUPPLY and DEMAND, not costs.
> “The importing country, however, can go elsewhere to sell their goods.”
Where else can China sell their 500B dollars’ worth of goods if not in the US? If there were new markets in which they could sell, don’t you think they would have already done so while they are selling to us? I’d say even 20% of the 500B would be hard to replace.
By the way, please don’t confuse others by repeatedly referring to “importing country” when you meant exporting country.
> “the country imposing the tariffs will eventually eliminate them because the tariffs harm their own economy.”
One will be hard-pressed to find any specific data to support the claim that imposing tariffs harms their own economy, since there are always winners and losers. But the case can easily be made that tariffs are useful tools that can serve many purposes.
> “Tariffs are illusory….
the threat of tariffs was/is real, but the effect hurts the tariff-imposing country more than the importing country”
Is the Mexico response to the tariff threat illusory?
Are the detrimental effects on the Chinese economy so far illusory? (By the way, Samsung is just starting to lay off workers in their last factory in China, having closed the other factory last December.)
It is very curious that you keep asserting that tariffs are a hoax and illusory while ignoring the tremendous results real tariffs on China and threatened tariffs on Mexico have already achieved for us. I doubt Milton Friedman will do anyone any good if they are not even interested in honestly looking at the real world cases unfolding before their eyes.
> “But tariffs fail to solve the root causes of our economic woes which lie squarely at the feet of the federal government”
Questions:
What do you think is the root causes of our economic woes? And how do you think they can be solved??
Those small minded myopic quarterly thinking pea brains like jim will be gone soon. Instead of a flag draped coffin for him and his ilk, we will paste their final 401K statement to it. It's what they are most proud of.
“What do you think is the root causes of our economic woes? “
Thank you for asking. The short answer is mainly the federal government. To show how, we’ll use the auto industry as an example.
The REAL reasons foreign autos out-compete American autos began in the 60’s and 70’s when the fat-cat manufacturers in Detroit ignored warnings that foreign auto makers were innovating their engineering and manufacturing techniques. Detroit got lazy and did not want to be bothered until, as the story goes, one day an executive on a trip to the west coast in the 70’s was stunned to see so many Japanese cars on the road.
So the first reason for inferior American auto products was LACK OF COMPETITION.
When Detroit finally saw they had real foreign competition, it ran into another big problem – unconstitutionally federally protected unions. “UAW contracts bound and gagged the Big Three with costs and obligations that fatally restricted their ability to innovate and compete” https://cei.org/2013/07/29/empire-of-rust-how-the-uaw-killed-detroit.
So UNCONSTITUTIONALLY FEDERALLY PROTECTED UNIONS were the next reason for inferior American products that could not compete.
So what was the reaction? Of course, more government. In business, if you fail, you correct or die. In government, if you fail, you just call for more money and more government and you end up with an even greater degree of failure.
So what has government done? Imposed suffocating HIGH TAXES, unconstitutional dead-end REGULATIONS, unconstitutional business-and-job-killing FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE, and engaged in basically unconstitutional SUBSIDES (BRIBES) FOR SPECIAL INTERESTS. They also stupidly DESTABILIZE & DEVALUE THE DOLLAR. Result? A greater degree of failure.
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, not the EU, China, or the Man in the Moon, is the MAIN reason for our failure to compete in the marketplace. Federally protected unions, high taxes, regulations, minimum wage, subsidies, and a weak dollar all have converged to “bind and gag” American business and drive industry from our shores. Kill these mostly unconstitutional and boneheaded acts and policies and you’ve gone a long way to fixing the problem. Trump has directly addressed some of these problems. ALL need to be abolished.