Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Trump Says Experts Are All 'Wrong' on His Tariff Proposals

Appearing before the Economic Club of Chicago in Illinois, a combative and often rambling Donald Trump tripled down Tuesday on his proposals to hike tariffs on goods brought into the U.S. from other countries, again saying they would help the economy despite the vast majority of economists saying such plans would spike inflation.

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"You're wrong. You've been wrong, you've been wrong all your life on this stuff," Trump told John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of business news giant Bloomberg News, when the pair disagreed about tariffs and their impact on the U.S. dollar.

"What does The Wall Street Journal know? They've been wrong about everything," Trump said when Micklethwait mentioned the paper's editorial page being critical of the bigger budget deficits it says his plans would cause.

Trump said his proposed tariffs - 10% to 20% for most goods and 60% or higher for Chinese goods - would not fuel inflation, which has been steadily slowing after hitting the highest annual rate since the 1980s in 2022.

Importers pay tariffs to bring goods into the country. Those charges, though, are then passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, most economists say. In a recent survey by the University of Chicago's business school, 95% of economists said they agreed that tariffs are passed on.

Trump said there are two possible objectives of tariffs: to raise money and to incentivize foreign companies to relocate production to the U.S.

"If you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10%, because 10% is not enough," he said.

After Micklethwait, who worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and was editor in chief of The Economist magazine before joining Bloomberg News, suggested that there would be a "massive" negative effect on the economy from Trump's proposed tariffs, the former president snapped back.

"It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong," Trump said.

#1 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-10-16 08:28 AM

Trump focuses on one aspect of tariffs: They increase the cost of foreign goods inside the American market, hopefully giving US based producers of the same goods a competitive balance with foreign producers who usually pay far less for labor than is required in the US. That part is right, however, it overlooks a few large factors tariffs alone cannot address.

Not every good or product can be made (or grown) in America regardless of what Trump might think, yet those products too will become more expensive for American buyers and consumers, obviously driving inflation higher. And there is no international nor American law that enables our government to collect any tax or tariff directly from foreign importers. Tariffs and taxes can only be collected from Americans, be they individual purchasers or corporations that market or use imported goods. If a foreign producer's imported goods are not price competitive within the US market, those goods won't be imported into the US, they'll be sold elsewhere in other global markets.

But make no mistake, unless there is direct competition with a US-produced product, the entire cost of any tariff will be added to the selling price Americans pay for the imported goods. The tariffs are not paid by the foreign exporters nor their countries.

Trump juvenilely thinks that high tariffs will force foreign producers to make their products domestically with American workers in order to maintain price competitiveness in our market. But not every product or good can be made domestically, nor do we have the existent infrastructure and capacity to immediately do so as his tariffs kick in. Even 25% of the Big 3 auto company's domestically-built vehicle content comes from foreign producers. The reason we talk about global supply chains is that 'global' is precisely what they are, usually for reasons of overall economic efficiency and industry profitability. And foreign governments will not allow their own export industries to see their US market negatively affected without returning in-kind tariffs against US exports, largely food products, but also many others.

Trump telling experts that they're wrong and he's right is simply another example of his own ignorance and incomplete understanding of what those in the room know intuitively. Trump - left to his own devices - will burn the US economy to the ground if given the opportunity. And those who know better are simply another set of 'enemies of America' for even questioning his economic genius exemplified by the six times he's driven businesses into bankruptcy because he knew better than those advising him.

#2 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-10-16 08:30 AM

Of course the experts are wrong.

Trump has let us know he's a real expert, not one of those fakes, in such fields as meteorology, astronomy, genetics, animal husbandry, medicine, sheetmeester, anything and everything.

And why does he tell us these lies over and over and over again?

Because he lives in his own dementia-driven "reality" and the rubes to whom he's delivering his endless pitch are pretty goddamn dumb.

#3 | Posted by Doc_Sarvis at 2024-10-16 08:50 AM

...the rubes to whom he's delivering his endless pitch are pretty goddamn dumb.

#4 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-10-16 08:56 AM

Why Trump's on-stage interview on economic policy was such a mess

Trump doesn't talk about policy because he can't. The former president has never been able to speak coherently about governing, and with three weeks remaining before Election Day, nothing has changed.

The Atlantic's David Graham summarized the Republican's appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago this way: "When Donald Trump speaks about the economy, he sounds like a child."

China gives us billions of dollars via tariffs. American auto workers take imported cars out of a box and stick the pieces together. These are very light paraphrases of statements he made today at the Economic Club of Chicago, in a sometimes combative interview with the Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait.

Trump didn't seem to know what the chairman of the Federal Reserve does. He spoke a great deal about trade tariffs, but struggled with the details. He talked about reserve currencies, but didn't seem to know what they are. When the conversation turned to small businesses, the former president talked about Apple - prompting his host to explain that Apple is not a small business.

I can appreciate why Republican officials keep urging their nominee to focus on policy, but they're effectively asking squirrels to do trigonometry: If Trump could talk about the substantive details of governing and policymaking, he would. But he can't, so he doesn't.

Steve Benen

#5 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-10-16 09:17 AM

#5 | Posted by TonyRoma

Like @Kaylan_TX on the Twitter machine, you always bring the receipts, Tony!

#6 | Posted by Hans at 2024-10-16 09:23 AM

Lawrence O'Donnell had the perfect summation as to who is going to pay the tariffs last night:

The President and Congress of the United States does not have the authority to impose a tax on any country other than the United States.

#7 | Posted by Nixon at 2024-10-16 09:31 AM

Trump juvenilely thinks that high tariffs will force foreign producers to make their products domestically with American workers in order to maintain price competitiveness in our market.

If the business could produce products in the US at the same price they could do so in China why would they make them in China in the first place?

Because they can't because our standard of living is higher than China.

Impose a tariff and the goods are still made in China. The price here goes up.

Impose a tariff and the goods are made here using components made in China. The price here goes up.

Impose a tariff and the business builds a plant here in the US to make all the goods and components here. The price goes up.

He doesn't understand that American workers will not work for the slave wages they pay the "employees" in the foxconn plants.

I'm old enough to remember the Wisconsin miracle of Walker and Trump bragging about how they were going to build a huge plant to for foxconn to build products here instead of China. That was just -------- too.

#8 | Posted by Nixon at 2024-10-16 09:36 AM

Trump's grasp of economics rivals his grip on any and all subjects about which he claims unrivaled genius.

By the way, that kind of behavior? Sane people don't act that way.

#9 | Posted by Doc_Sarvis at 2024-10-16 11:54 AM

... Trump Says Experts Are All 'Wrong' on His Tariff Proposals ...

Trump's Interview Remarks on Economic Policy, Fact-Checked
www.bnnbloomberg.ca

#10 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-10-16 01:17 PM

Trump comes to Chicago to insist tariff is world's most beautiful word'...
www.nprillinois.org

#11 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-10-16 01:19 PM

He's as dumb as a rock.

#12 | Posted by NOTGOINGBACK at 2024-10-16 04:53 PM

It must be hell to be poor Donald Trump; a polymath of all subjects!

#13 | Posted by e1g1 at 2024-10-16 05:06 PM

He craps his pants and stands around listening to songs during a "town hall".

#14 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2024-10-16 10:34 PM

Tariffs are not a bad tool to discourage outsourcing of manufacturing.

But they've got to be set up and targeted carefully. You can't just slap a new tariff on something and not expect it to fail. You've got to have a long term implementation for things that don't currently have domestic production, and that's hard to do. You've got to know how long it will take for US factories to be set up and people trained. You've got to target the entire supply chain, not just the final product. And you've got to implement at the right speed. If it will take 10 years to set up US production, you start slowly with a 1% tariff the first year as a "Yes, we're serious" with tariffs increasing very slowly over the next decade, not even hitting 5%, but with a law in place that at year 11 the tariff will jump to 200%. The concept is not that anyone will ever pay the high tariff, the concept is that the US company is essentially being told "If you don't move production to the US, you WILL be put out of business, and somebody else can set up production here." If you want to really make it hard for them to say no, if progress has not been made by year 5, start voiding their patents.

Now, for something that hasn't yet been outsourced, you absolutely can use preemptive tariffs to discourage it. And those tariffs can immediately be very high, punitively high.

But in all cases, tariffs and other punitive measures have to be carefully targeted. And we have to be ready to abandon the entire destructive concept of "free trade" as the failure that it is. The WTO must be crushed. If we want to use tariff policy to help some nations develop, then lower tariff policy needs to be targeted to do that, not the current worldwide "no tariffs for anybody" default.

And we do have to get away from the current "inflation bad" idea. Inflation is good, but that's if and only if wages and the social safety net are increasing faster than inflation. Inflation also reduces debt by making debt less valuable. And don't hesitate to revalue the currency as part of that.

All this is ultimately temporary anyway. At some point we'll have a planetary government and do away with all borders entirely. And that's a goal we should be working toward. But until fascist governments cease to exist, it can't happen.

#15 | Posted by DarkVader at 2024-10-17 11:34 AM

The Lie: "Other countries" will not be paying Trump's tariffs.
In reality Americans will pay an average of $2,600-$3,900, with the poorest households losing the largest share of their paychecks.
Take a look.

Trump's tariffs saw a decrease in solar industry job growth, while Biden's incentives and investment (which Trump plans to repeal) sent employment soaring. Take a look.

Before Hoover passed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs (didn't we all learn this in school?) that fueled the Great Depression, 1000 economists petitioned him to veto the bill.
This June, 16 Nobel Economists signed a letter warning against Trump's economic management " let's hope history won't repeat itself.
Finally - take a look.

#16 | Posted by YAV at 2024-10-17 09:51 PM

Argh.
The Lie: "Other countries" will be paying Trump's tariffs.

#17 | Posted by YAV at 2024-10-17 09:52 PM

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