Quote (Plaguefear @ Feb 2 2025 10:10pm)

This is ridiculous, you are THIRTY TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT, you lose 2% of your economy and you are losing your status as a world currency and going into a great depression, ironically literally EXACTLY how you did the last time the republicans controlled all three powers.
Do you have any idea how much money 2% of the us economy is?

Quote (ofthevoid @ Feb 3 2025 08:35am)

As of literally 6 minutes ago:



https://x.com/biancoresearch/status/1886435921983045814

I still don't get this deterministic "it is what it is and we should just accept it and do nothing" mentality. The short term downside is minimal to the potential benefit. If playing hardball leads to concession, why not? Why is everyone so scared and is so conditioned to never rock the boat?

Quote (SBD @ Feb 3 2025 10:51am)

This is why I am highly neutral on tarris, it's just an economic tool. If the greater objective can be achieved and its > than the suffrage of your people than its can be successful. The issue arises when it just becomes a game of tit for tat and the objective is eventually lost in a battle of countries egos.

I also suspected we would not see some stock market sell off like 2018's 20%. It was an overreaction at the time and quickly recovered. Market had already seen it. Okay article on it below.

https://wolfstreet.com/2025/02/03/what-trumps-tariffs-did-last-time-2018-2019-had-no-impact-on-inflation-doubled-receipts-from-customs-duties-and-hit-stocks/

Quote (uskittles @ Feb 3 2025 12:00pm)

It seems like Mexico has made an agreement and Trump has postponed the tariffs on Mexico for a month. This was my only defense for Trump. If Trump truly believes in enacting the tariffs I cannot support it. If he is using it as a weapon to threaten into trade renegotiation: Ok, but my issue is this cannot be a consistent and reliable method of diplomacy.

But then we have Trump supporters talking about tariffs and how they would happily spend more on eggs and groceries. At that point I'm like WHAT??? We want cheaper groceries. This is something he promised. How can you change the goal posts so unashamedly?

EDIT: I don't have a reliable source for this information so if someone can confirm let me know.

Quote (ofthevoid @ Feb 3 2025 01:13pm)

You're right, it's not reliable, so lets do what we've done prior which has reliably yielded literally nothing. Curious, why didn't Obama or Biden use some other more reliable way for us to get Mexico to seriously engage on cartels and illegal immigration?

Quote (uskittles @ Feb 3 2025 01:20pm)

I didn't say literally nothing and I do not care to defend any of Obama or Biden's policies, especially their foreign policies. This is the problem with people who defend Republicans and Trump in general. They cannot help but default to pointing at the incompetent Democrats. How about instead of threatening Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama we make active and sensible efforts that are in our interest. Then if all else fails we can make these threats. Instead Trump is doing his "shock and awe" playbook with no end game in sight.

Quote (InsaneBobb @ Feb 2 2025 08:43am)

I can report right now that prices are down for gas and most groceries. Eggs are the exception due to that last bird flu. Everything else is down.

Which is hilarious. I live in Arizona. Tariffs aren't a threat at all. They're a blessing. Combine them with a bit of border security and my state can provide for a good portion of the food we'd rather not have our processors going to Mexico for. I stand to do nothing but gain.

Does it bother you that NOT having the tariffs mostly benefits the massive corporations who're bypassing American farmers, miners, loggers, etc. etc. to buy in bulk from other nations, process here, and sell to our Citizens at a massive markup, all while cutting out the entire bottom level of the American supply chain? Quite literally, rather than paying for American workers, farmers, and landowners to produce good raw products that can then be used to make many, MANY other products, you want no tariffs, so that cartels and communist nations using slave labor at gunpoint will destroy half our production supply chain.

Here I am, thinking, "I'm an American, and one of the things about BEING American is that our nation is self-sufficient. We don't NEED anything from anywhere else. Yet nearly every nation has tariffs on US imports. The US, meanwhile, has been NOT tariffing the rest of the world. It's time for that to stop. Well past time.

But you keep on keeping on supporting globalist billionaires. It's how we lost microchip manufacturing. May as well be how we lose basic farming while we're at it, right? :rolleyes:

Edit: Oh, and I'd LOVE to see a 100% tariff on Taiwan, and 200% tariff on all electronics from China. Any guesses on just how fast tech manufacturing would boom in the US again?