So the best case scenario is that the economy two years from now is half as good as it was two years ago? You’re in a cult.
More seriously, how bad do things have to get before you admit the tariffs were a mistake? Inflation above what percent? SP500 down how much? Unemployment above what rate? How much time do you give for things to turn around?
Perhaps tearing your hair out and screaming that the sky is falling 10 minutes after the tariffs were announced is a tad premature.
Inflation was at a 40+ year high not long ago and you were making fun of people for complaining about grocery prices.
The stock market is not a good indicator of the health of the economy.
Unemployment is a garbage metric. The labor force participation rate is much more useful and we still haven't recovered from the pandemic.
Let's talk about labor force participation rate (because all of the conventional metrics show that the economy was good to great, so we'll pick something obscure).
For most of Trump's presidency the labor force participation rate hovered in the high 62.x% and ticked up above 63% for a few months towards the end of 2019, but fell to the 61.5% range for most of 2020.
It was 61.4% when Biden took office and climbed steadily through the end of 2023, when it reached the high 62.x% range (comparable to the first few years of Trump's presidency), before leveling off.
On a longer term basis, the labor force participation rate has dropped steadily since around 2000 due to changing demographics (i.e., when Baby Boomers started claiming Social Security). If the nearly linear decline in labor force participation rate since 2000 is extrapolated through the COVID years, then it has recovered to its expected value (or maybe even exceeded it).
I'm not sure how this tells a different story from unemployment rate, which fell from around 5% in 2016 to 3.5% in 2019, spiked for COVID, recovered to pre-COVID levels while Biden was in office, and softened a bit in the last year.
Sounds like Biden did a great job with economic recovery after Trump bungled the COVID response.
If you think the MSM isn't biased against Trump and need proof there's no reasoning with you.
You don’t need to rely on my reasoning ability. Make it idiot-proof. You made an assertion that you should be able to support with facts.
Help out any onlookers who might be interested in seeing that you don’t rely on lies to make your points.
You claim that “media would have you believe 100% of these tariffs are being levied on countries with no existing tariffs.”
So just provide examples of media doing exactly that. As a matter of fact, I’ll give you some leeway: Instead of ensuring that they say exactly what”100% of these tariffs are ..,” you can just show how overwhelmingly their rhetoric strongly implies that it’s 100% and that it’s even extremely close to “no existing tariffs” rather than exactly “no existing tariffs.”
The articles I'm seeing do not mention the tariff imbalance already in existence.
They focus exclusively on the Trump tariffs because the focus is political not economic and intended to be entirely negative.
False. Everybody with an IQ over 30 knows this is a completely stupid idea. Only those in the cult are defending it because they have to.
The same self appointed international trade gurus said the tariffs were stupid in Trump's first term and they were all wrong.
Biden left the tariffs in place.
If the opinion is anti Trump you will run with it.
No one alive knows how this will turn out yet.
No one.
Anyone yelling you otherwise is just givng you an opinion which is very often grounded in politics not economics.
They were completely stupid in Trump's first term. Something like 90% of the revenue on tariffs with China was given as aid farmers. It was a f*cking disaster.
Perhaps tearing your hair out and screaming that the sky is falling 10 minutes after the tariffs were announced is a tad premature.
Inflation was at a 40+ year high not long ago and you were making fun of people for complaining about grocery prices.
The stock market is not a good indicator of the health of the economy.
Unemployment is a garbage metric. The labor force participation rate is much more useful and we still haven't recovered from the pandemic.
Let's talk about labor force participation rate (because all of the conventional metrics show that the economy was good to great, so we'll pick something obscure).
For most of Trump's presidency the labor force participation rate hovered in the high 62.x% and ticked up above 63% for a few months towards the end of 2019, but fell to the 61.5% range for most of 2020.
It was 61.4% when Biden took office and climbed steadily through the end of 2023, when it reached the high 62.x% range (comparable to the first few years of Trump's presidency), before leveling off.
On a longer term basis, the labor force participation rate has dropped steadily since around 2000 due to changing demographics (i.e., when Baby Boomers started claiming Social Security). If the nearly linear decline in labor force participation rate since 2000 is extrapolated through the COVID years, then it has recovered to its expected value (or maybe even exceeded it).
I'm not sure how this tells a different story from unemployment rate, which fell from around 5% in 2016 to 3.5% in 2019, spiked for COVID, recovered to pre-COVID levels while Biden was in office, and softened a bit in the last year.
Sounds like Biden did a great job with economic recovery after Trump bungled the COVID response.
The LFPR was over 66% for decades until the boomers started to retire.
Then the story was that the rate would decline and continue to decline
It hit a historic low of 62.5% at the end of 2015 and by February of 2020 it had climbed back up to 63.3.
Today it's at 62.4.
We still haven't gotten back to employment levels from 2020.
The unemployment rate only counts people who are looking for work. If 10 million people decide they're happy on welfare unemployment goes down while the labor force gets worse.
The idea that the country with the strongest economy and most powerful military in world has, for decades, been universally taken advantage of in trade is a retarded lie. The notion that these are all merely "reciprocal tariffs" is also a retarded lie. We are pursuing a course of action no credible economists support, in order to solve an entirely imaginary problem.
It's so obvious that this isn't really about "free trade." The goal of these blanket tariffs is to try to bully corporations and countries into showing fealty to the King; It's a power play. Are you a special interest seeking tariff relief? Prostrate yourself at the feet of Dear Leader and receive your just rewards. Trump profits while the American people pay the price.
Anyone that doesn't mention that these are reciprocal tariffs is making a political argument not an economic argument.
The status quo was not free trade or fair trade.
Trump's goal is free trade.
Oh, man. The government has posted the formula it used to determine the tariffs, and other countries' tariff rates aren't in the formula. It's only based on trade deficits. And even countries with a 0% trade deficit got slapped with a 10% tariff.
It's all there in wejo's comment. Every last detail showing how wrong you are.
You got dunked on by wejo. How do you ever recover from that?
Imagine going from bipartisan efforts like the Marshall Plan to assert influence, dominance, and removing trade barriers to the benefit of everyone, to whatever this is.
And "whatever this is" is a pouting 4 year old's zero-sum vision of international trade where every "deal" has a winner and a loser. And the "winner" is the one who sells more stuff to the "loser". Tariffs are a tool to protect critically important industries from going bankrupt. It's not meant to cause a global recession for no good reason.
On a little piece of paper it says the US has both the biggest stick and the money printer for the world's de-facto reserve currency, but it remains to see how much longer that holds true with these self-sabotaging decisions. In the long term it's destined to go one of two ways, either a change in policy/leadership, or (attempted) conquest.
The idea that the country with the strongest economy and most powerful military in world has, for decades, been universally taken advantage of in trade is a retarded lie. The notion that these are all merely "reciprocal tariffs" is also a retarded lie. We are pursuing a course of action no credible economists support, in order to solve an entirely imaginary problem.
It's so obvious that this isn't really about "free trade." The goal of these blanket tariffs is to try to bully corporations and countries into showing fealty to the King; It's a power play. Are you a special interest seeking tariff relief? Prostrate yourself at the feet of Dear Leader and receive your just rewards. Trump profits while the American people pay the price.
The wealth gap and the destruction of the US manufacturing base isn't an "imaginary problem".
Not one of you has any idea how this will turn out.
Let's talk about labor force participation rate (because all of the conventional metrics show that the economy was good to great, so we'll pick something obscure).
For most of Trump's presidency the labor force participation rate hovered in the high 62.x% and ticked up above 63% for a few months towards the end of 2019, but fell to the 61.5% range for most of 2020.
It was 61.4% when Biden took office and climbed steadily through the end of 2023, when it reached the high 62.x% range (comparable to the first few years of Trump's presidency), before leveling off.
On a longer term basis, the labor force participation rate has dropped steadily since around 2000 due to changing demographics (i.e., when Baby Boomers started claiming Social Security). If the nearly linear decline in labor force participation rate since 2000 is extrapolated through the COVID years, then it has recovered to its expected value (or maybe even exceeded it).
I'm not sure how this tells a different story from unemployment rate, which fell from around 5% in 2016 to 3.5% in 2019, spiked for COVID, recovered to pre-COVID levels while Biden was in office, and softened a bit in the last year.
Sounds like Biden did a great job with economic recovery after Trump bungled the COVID response.
The LFPR was over 66% for decades until the boomers started to retire.
Then the story was that the rate would decline and continue to decline
It hit a historic low of 62.5% at the end of 2015 and by February of 2020 it had climbed back up to 63.3.
Today it's at 62.4.
We still haven't gotten back to employment levels from 2020.
The unemployment rate only counts people who are looking for work. If 10 million people decide they're happy on welfare unemployment goes down while the labor force gets worse.
The LFPR was over 66% for 15 years (from 1988 to 2003), then hovered around 66% (but frequently dipped under) for the next 5 years. So, hardly "decades".
Then the rate dropped like a rock, as boomers retired (as I said in my post and you agreed with). Changing national demographics continue to influence the LFPR, independent of any government policy, which is why it's not a great metric on its own.
If 10 million people lose their jobs, the LFPR doesn't change (as long as they're looking for jobs), but their economic situation is much worse.
Those Cambodians may be nice people but they sure are screwing us over. They have their children working around the clock in horrible conditions to make all the shoes we're importing from them and they won't even buy any shoes from us. It's time to stop letting them take advantage of us like this
The idea that the country with the strongest economy and most powerful military in world has, for decades, been universally taken advantage of in trade is a retarded lie. The notion that these are all merely "reciprocal tariffs" is also a retarded lie. We are pursuing a course of action no credible economists support, in order to solve an entirely imaginary problem.
It's so obvious that this isn't really about "free trade." The goal of these blanket tariffs is to try to bully corporations and countries into showing fealty to the King; It's a power play. Are you a special interest seeking tariff relief? Prostrate yourself at the feet of Dear Leader and receive your just rewards. Trump profits while the American people pay the price.
The wealth gap and the destruction of the US manufacturing base isn't an "imaginary problem".
Not one of you has any idea how this will turn out.
The wealth gap is only going to be closed by large taxes on the wealthy. There are few alternatives to that if your objective is to reduce inequality.
Increasing manufacturing is completely reasonable and can be achieved by government spending to jump start the industry.
it was beyond frustrating seeing that Teamsters member yesterday saying he voted for Reagan and then saw his industry collapse, but still couldn't connect the two events.
The LFPR was over 66% for decades until the boomers started to retire.
Then the story was that the rate would decline and continue to decline
It hit a historic low of 62.5% at the end of 2015 and by February of 2020 it had climbed back up to 63.3.
Today it's at 62.4.
We still haven't gotten back to employment levels from 2020.
The unemployment rate only counts people who are looking for work. If 10 million people decide they're happy on welfare unemployment goes down while the labor force gets worse.
The LFPR was over 66% for 15 years (from 1988 to 2003), then hovered around 66% (but frequently dipped under) for the next 5 years. So, hardly "decades".
Then the rate dropped like a rock, as boomers retired (as I said in my post and you agreed with). Changing national demographics continue to influence the LFPR, independent of any government policy, which is why it's not a great metric on its own.
If 10 million people lose their jobs, the LFPR doesn't change (as long as they're looking for jobs), but their economic situation is much worse.
The LFPR captures those 10 million whether they are looking for work or not.
The unemployment number ignores them.
That was my point and why the LFPR is a more useful metric.
This post was edited 4 minutes after it was posted.
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