05-14-2019, 03:10 PM
(05-14-2019, 02:19 PM)fredtoast Wrote: This.
Like Benton said, tariffs are not necessarily bad, but in the end they will help corporate stockholders at the cost of all consumers.
Same thing happened with lower interest rates. Lower interest rates can encourage companies to build and expand their businesses, but instead they mostly just initiated stock buy backs that created huge profits for stockholders without creating any new jobs.
If companies stop importing cheap good from China due to tariffs they will just jack up consumer prices and import cheap goods from some other emerging economy (there are a few in Africa) and keep the profits instead of bringing any production jobs back home.
This is really what it comes down to. You can chase the foreign manufacturing around the globe trying to tariff them into submission but it isn't coming back. We could be investing a lot more money in our own infrastructure such as roads, bridges, water systems, electrical grids, etc. instead of fighting silly trade wars for a manufacturing industry that is never going to buoy the economy again, at least like it did in the "Good Old Days".
The path forward in the near future for the middle class is a new deal type of push to rebuild our infrastructure. This will provide good jobs for the next decade plus while setting us up to be more stable into the future. For some reason this always seems to be a campaign topic that gets no traction, probably because the lobbyist for public works projects are pretty limited compared to the others.
