More tariffs paid by US consumers

[GMDino]

There is always a tweet....


https://theweek.com/speedreads/875233/trump-celebrates-19-percent-gdp-growth-blasted-exact-same-number-under-obama

Quote:Trump celebrates 1.9 percent GDP growth. He blasted the exact same number under Obama.
[/url]
To quote everyone in President Trump's Twitter replies, "there's a tweet for everything."

Trump on Wednesday celebrated the news that the U.S. GDP's growth rate had fallen from 2 percent to 1.9 percent. To Trump, that slight drop quantifies "the greatest economy in American history!"

Quote:
Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump




The Greatest Economy in American History!

84.6K
7:38 AM - Oct 30, 2019
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32.2K people are talking about this

Compare that with how the economy performed back in 2012, when GDP growth similarly dropped to a revised 1.9 percent in the first quarter of the year. That was under former President Barack Obama, so Trump had another opinion on the matter. 

Quote:
Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump




Q1 GDP has just been revised down to 1.9% http://1.usa.gov/3hAL  The economy is in deep trouble.

553
3:24 PM - May 31, 2012
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1,178 people are talking about this

[url=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/208277697279963137]

[GMDino]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/why-donald-trumps-economic-dream-crumbled/601153/?fbclid=IwAR10RlP16CK_r0jtPzhqETVHHGKk0xLiUhekbNr2N4VV3O_xLmHIIKaI5RM

Quote:The GOP Tax Cuts Didn’t Work

Republicans said the reform would grow the economy by up to 6 percent, stimulate business investment, and pay for itself. None of that happened.

Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement was the corporate-tax cut he signed in 2017. Republicans said it would grow the economy by up to 6 percent, stimulate business investment, and pay for itself.

None of those promises have come to pass. GDP growth has declined to less than 2 percent according to the latest report, released yesterday. Business investment has now declined for two straight quarters, dragging down economic growth. And the federal deficit exceeds $1 trillion.

These shortcomings alone might be enough to embolden Democrats to fight Trump on economic grounds just one year from a crucial 2020 election. But they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

Trump swept into office pledging to restore the U.S. economy to the good old days of brawny work and global swagger. He had a vision of the United States where the exports would be bigger, the trade deals would be better, and “forgotten” Americans working in declining sectors like coal mining would be restored to their rightful place at the center of the economy. This bold strategy hinged on the theory that trade wars were “good, and easy to win.”

None of those promises have come to pass, either. Let’s go through them one by one. The U.S. manufacturing sector is practically in a recession. The ISM index, a key measure of that industry’s health, registered its lowest number in 10 years. Real exports of goods and services have declined in the past year, after peaking in 2018. Mining jobs have declined in the past 12 months, too. Finally, hovering in the background behind declining investment, sputtering manufacturing, and wilting exports is the trade war with China, which has proved neither “good” nor “easy” for American businesses.

All of this might make it sound as if the U.S. economy is a disaster. It’s not. As I wrote earlier this month, we are in the midst of the longest labor-market recovery in American history, and the stock market has set new all-time highs almost every year this decade.


So how do we reconcile these two facts: The promises of the Republican tax plan have failed as spectacularly as Trump’s grand vision of a New American Mercantilism, and the U.S. economy as a whole is actually doing fine for now?

The answer, basically, is that while the Trump can’t deliver, the American consumer continues to chug along. Consumer spending, which was the one bright spot in yesterday’s GDP report, beat forecasts by rising nearly 3 percent. Unemployment is at a 60-year low, and wage growth has accelerated for the poorest workers. (Ironically, these positive trends have been buoyed by large federal deficits, which break another Trump campaign promise.)


While the president has tried to engineer a return to the economy of the 1950s, based on manufacturing and trade surpluses, the country is racing inexorably toward a very different economy, dominated by both high-tech firms and low-tech services. Since 2018, service-sector jobs (at hospitals and restaurants and software companies) have grown five times faster than those from the “goods-producing” economy (in construction, manufacturing, and mining). There is a cliché that Millennials prefer experiences over things. You could say the same about the U.S. economy, which is devoting more and more spending to health care, education, and consulting.

This isn’t necessarily a good thing. We could use more things in this country—particularly things that people can live in, otherwise known as apartments and houses. Private and public investment in fixed capital like real estate has declined tremendously as a share of GDP in the past 60 years. This fact has contributed to a housing shortage, particularly on the coasts, which has made homeownership nearly impossible for the middle class near America’s richest cities.


Some debates about Trump seem split between those who consider him infallible and those who consider him dangerously all-powerful. When it comes to the economy, he is rather obviously neither—both too stuck in the past to help the economy and too weak to destroy it.

[GMDino]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-vowed-to-shrink-the-trade-gap-it-keeps-growing/ar-AAJTqg9

Quote:Trump Vowed to Shrink the Trade Gap. It Keeps Growing.


 
Ana Swanson
 
22 hrs ago

WASHINGTON — The overall United States trade deficit continued to widen in the first nine months of 2019, data released Tuesday morning show, defying a Trump administration plan to try to shrink the figure by renegotiating trade agreements.
Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times President Trump speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday.

The trade deficit for both goods and services grew to $481.3 billion in the first three quarters of the year, up 5.4 percent from the same period last year, according to data released by the Commerce Department. Total American exports fell by $7 billion from the previous year, while imports grew by $17.8 billion.

The trade deficit in goods for the first nine months also widened slightly from the previous year, as exports of American products fell by more than imports.

Economists have argued against the Trump administration’s focus on the trade deficit, saying the figure is a poor metric for measuring American well-being or the health of the economy. They say the trade deficit continues to rise largely because the United States is growing faster than other countries around the world, which boosts American purchases of foreign products and weighs on its sales abroad.

But President Trump has pointed to the trade deficit — an excess of American imports over exports — as a sign of a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, and promised to shrink the figure by reworking the terms of trade between the United States and other countries.

The data released Tuesday suggest that the global trade wars Mr. Trump has launched have not had the desired effect.

The tariffs Mr. Trump has placed on more than $360 billion of Chinese goods, and the retaliatory tariffs China has placed on the United States, have clamped down on trade between the countries. The United States trade deficit in goods with China shrank in the first nine months of the year to $263.2 billion, down from $301.7 billion in the previous year.

But the United States has shifted to importing more goods from other locations instead, as American companies turn to buying more goods from Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan and elsewhere.

The trade deficit in goods with Mexico grew to $76.1 billion in the first nine months of 2019, up from $59.1 billion last year. The trade deficit in goods with a group of countries along the Pacific Rim, excluding China, rose to $84.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2019, from $66 billion in the same period last year.

The figures also provided the first look at how new tariffs the Trump administration put into place on more than $100 billion of Chinese goods on Sept. 1 have affected trade. Compared with the previous month, both imports and exports of goods to China ticked down in September as the new levies went into effect.

“In a very narrow sense, higher tariffs on China are working: They clearly have reduced trade and thus the trade deficit with China,” Brad Setser, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter.

In September, the overall trade deficit in goods and services narrowed slightly from August to $52.5 billion, continuing several months of decline as imports fell more than exports. But economists typically caution against reading too much into figures from a single month, which can be volatile.

The new data come as Trump administration officials weigh whether to further roll back tariffs placed on more than $360 billion of Chinese goods in order to clinch a so-called phase one deal in the coming weeks.

President Trump announced on Oct. 11 that he had reached a verbal agreement with China on an interim pact that the two sides would sign. The deal would increase Chinese protections for American intellectual property, open up Chinese financial markets and ensure large Chinese purchases of American agricultural goods, Mr. Trump said.

The two sides intended to sign that deal at a summit of global leaders in Santiago, Chile, in mid-November. But last week, Chile canceled the summit because of domestic protests.

They are now searching for another location for a signing ceremony. President Trump has floated Iowa as the site, likely to tout China’s planned purchases of American farm products.

“First, we’ll see if we get the deal,” Mr. Trump told reporters last Saturday. “And if we get the deal, the meeting place will come very easily. It’ll be someplace in the U.S.”

[Belsnickel]

(11-06-2019, 12:43 PM)GMDino Wrote: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-vowed-to-shrink-the-trade-gap-it-keeps-growing/ar-AAJTqg9

It's almost as if a conman with no experience in government has no idea how this sort of stuff works. Who could have foreseen this?!

[GMDino]

(11-06-2019, 12:54 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: It's almost as if a conman with no experience in government has no idea how this sort of stuff works. Who could have foreseen this?!

About 3 million more people than couldn't.