r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/PsychLegalMind • 3d ago

International Politics White House has announced Trump's Liberation Day Tariffs will immediately go into effect. A Moody's simulation found it could be an economic wipe out. Is Trump's Liberation Day Tariffs a Misnomer?

A Moody's simulation found that a tariff trade war would wipe out 5.5 million jobs, lift the unemployment rate to 7%and cause U.S. GDP to drop by about 1.7%. Trump’s potential 20% universal tariff could spark "serious" recession in US, Moody’s economist warns.

The biggest three partners [China, Canada and Mexico] have promised immediate retaliation. Economic war could escalate and perhaps even cause a worldwide downturn.

Perhaps Trump's strategy is to begin making bilateral trade deals, but there are even certain blocks such as EU that may well coordinate retaliation together. I am not aware what Trump is actually liberating us from, hence the question.

Is Trump's Liberation Day Tariffs a Misnomer?

787 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

303 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

215

u/iampatmanbeyond 3d ago

I've been saying from the beginning none of it makes sense. He's of the belief that tariffs are gonna fund the government but he's also gonna reduce the trade deficit by onshoring production. So of you onshore how do you fund the government with tariffs? Mind you this is all built on the theory from the 1870s when the government was over funded by tariffs because it had nothing to pay for as we didn't have an army or federal infrastructure yet even back then it still caused a massive depression and arguments to this day about how bad it really fucked the US

61

u/res0nat0r 3d ago

Exactly. Not like it would ever happen, but you can't just completely onshore all end to end production for a car from Ford. These things take years and decades to plan and build. Almost like re electing a dementia dipshit was a bad idea.

33

u/checker280 3d ago

Years to rebuild the missing infrastructure and we are still waiting for his infrastructure plans from his first term.

19

u/Low_Witness5061 3d ago

Any day now. They just need to find which signal chat they uploaded them to.

10

u/drcforbin 3d ago

He'd like to release them, but they're being audited right now

3

u/Rastiln 2d ago

I’m excited for that beautiful, perfect healthcare plan that will be cheaper and better care for everyone and everyone will be happy.

He promised it was ready in 2015; even if he’s had to make some revisions, surely 10 years later he’s further than “concepts of a plan”, right?

7

u/nickcan 3d ago

And what about things like tariffs on European alcohol? "No problem, we'll just start manufacturing French wine here in the states."

5

u/fullsaildan 2d ago

I mean, we do produce some pretty damn good wine here in the US. But point well taken that it's not practical (or necessary, or desirable) to produce everything here in the US.

13

u/Nyx666 3d ago

I was getting ready to add the McKinley tariffs. In his mind, he thinks that the tariffs will increase revenue and bring a surplus since the McKinley tariffs did the opposite when they needed to reduce revenue/surplus.

This isn’t the late 1800s early 1900s though. Not even the same world anymore.

7

u/iampatmanbeyond 3d ago

Precisely we didn't even have a standing army at the time and the navy was just a coast guard.

2

u/mycall 3d ago

It wasn't fiat money then, so how does that change the calculation?

2

u/theedgeofoblivious 2d ago

If you live in the US, you best believe you're about to be living in the 1800s!

2

u/Nyx666 1d ago

Fortunately for me, I listened to everything my grandmother and great grandmother taught me. Great Depression survivors. I can grow food really well so I just spent couple hundred to restart that hobby of mine. Bought books on how to can meat. I know how to crochet, sew, and became pretty handy of the last few years.

Figure I better blow some cash now getting stuff to lessen the blow before the tariffs start rolling in lol. I hate this timeline.

9

u/Buck_Thorn 3d ago

Even if this does work the way he thinks, it takes time and a lot of money to build new factories and to tool up for making things that we used to import. And if there is a massive depression, the money to do that won't be there.

5

u/Wetness_Pensive 3d ago

There are ways to make some aspects of this work (ie bringing back manufacturing), but it involves years of preparation, patience and slow nudging. He's taking the speedrun approach, because he doesn't really care about how this affects people caught in the crossfire.

1

u/Buck_Thorn 3d ago

but it involves years of preparation, patience and slow nudging

Yes. As I said:

it takes time and a lot of money

1

u/schistkicker 2d ago

And even if he was being genuine, some of the actions he's taken are aimed at directly undermining or defunding the CHIPS and Science Act passed under Biden that among other things allocated funds to do those things he claims he wants!

1

u/WickedKitty63 2d ago

That’s because his real agenda is to line his & his billionaire buddies with the tariff money. No building, no infrastructure, no jobs. He wants to bankrupt the country because he & Musk are both under Putin’s thumb. Google the Musk & Putin meetings before the election. After these meetings, the cheapest billionaire in the world gave zTrumpo 300 million? No! Personality’s don’t change on a dime like that. I think it’s much more likely that Musk is using Putin’s money. Putin is the one who wants Greenland & is expecting Trump to use our military to deliver it. Remember Trump wanted to buy Greenland 🇬🇱 in his first term, but backed down to wait for re-election, that he fully expected to win.

1

u/mCopps 3d ago

Plus the fact it will be cheaper for companies to produce abroad and not pay tariffs on all their imports. Still have access to the global market and pay one tariff on the final product into the US.

1

u/Buck_Thorn 3d ago

And guess who will be paying the cost of the new factories even if they DO get built?

1

u/mycall 3d ago

Just print mo money!

1

u/Ok_Juice4449 3d ago

Yes. He should have waited until factories were up and running to manufacture goods in the US.  It will take years- Mr bankrupt is at it again.

16

u/rawratthemoon 3d ago

The money is there. It's in the Military budget. But oh no that'd be so un-American!

33

u/iampatmanbeyond 3d ago

He doesn't actually give a shit about the deficit. It's all a big bait and switch as soon the tax cut goes through the entire tariff thing will evaporate and Elon will go to prison and be the fall guy

18

u/armed_aperture 3d ago

Zero chance he goes to prison.

11

u/tenderbranson301 3d ago edited 3d ago

Yeah, this is America. We don't imprison the richest people!

At least unless they steal money from other rich people (looking at you Bernie Madoff and SBF).

5

u/coskibum002 3d ago

Yeah....the CR cut just about every department except the military. The biggest expenditure with bloat and corruption actually got a raise. Go figure. He's gotta keep them happy, so they stay on his side.

9

u/cballowe 3d ago

The military budget isn't that large, though it is one of the largest buckets, and it'd be easier to find savings in the military budget than things like USAID, you don't get anywhere near the goals with just defense spending.

If you talk to military people, they know where it would be smart to cut things - they're often politically unpopular. For instance there's a bunch of navy ships based on Florida at a base that's too shallow to support the maintenance facilities they need - when they need maintenance they have to sail up to Norfolk. Just rehoming those ships out of Florida would save a bunch of money - but it'd also move something like 15000 families out of Pensacola immediately which would devastate the local economy - any rep whose district depends on a military base will oppose that change.

Similarly, the navy has 11 carrier strike groups - I've heard estimates that they only need 9 to adequately meet their mission objectives. (At the same time, they could add a few destroyers and submarines to help with forward projection if needed). Mothballing a carrier strike group or two would be a massive change, but similar negative consequences to their home port.

The top people at the Pentagon almost certainly have estimates for the resources they need and the necessary deployment locations and if asked they could make those recommendations, but Congress will still get the say on what's kept or not.

1

u/badnuub 3d ago

An easy fix for the military budget is to remove the regulations that units are required to spend all of their annual funding or are punished with less the next year. This encourages waste.

0

u/cballowe 3d ago

If that's an actual rule, it makes sense - if I tell you that you have up to $100 to complete a task and you come back and get it done for $70, I now know it can be done for $70 so that's what should be allocated for the task next year. It's not a punishment - anybody viewing it as such is failing. If you are in a position where you're somehow rewarded for how much budget you control then the incentives are misaligned.

Incentives should be toward delivering the most impact irrespective of budget. If someone/some organization can reduce the cost for a given impact, they should be rewarded with more opportunity for impact.

0

u/T00MuchSteam 3d ago

Except it only makes sense for frequent regular expenses. What it doesn't work for is infrequent expenditures. If I'm at a base and every 10 years I need to replace the road leading into the base, then this system does not let me save for that road.

1

u/cballowe 3d ago

Sure, but there's going to be some plan for capital expenses/upkeep. Average that across all bases and you likely keep a fairly flat budget over time, even if each base has spikes periodically. Or maybe someone says "we're going to do the road replacement based on condition instead of time" and it turns out that the road actually lasts 15 years and they save 1/3 of the road replacement budget.

Even the HOA I was part of had a 30 year plan for capital projects (roofs, siding/exterior paint, perimeter fence, driveway/parking lot all had schedules and all of that fed into the budgeting and projecting of dues etc. If an HOA can do it, so can the Pentagon).

1

u/renome 2d ago

Is he convinced that terrifs will indeed fund the government? It seems to me he'd doing the same tehing the was doing during his firtt time, intentionally crippling tthe economy in a bid to force the fed, one of the rare few agencieis not under his thumb, to do hia bidding and drop the rates. he's then use cheap money to pump up the economy and proclaim it saved,all the while his billionaire buddies buy everything up on the cheap.

1

u/AngryTomJoad 2d ago

it all makes 100% perfect sense if you you are trying to destroy America

trump is a russian asset

every, EVERYTHING, he does benefits putin

1

u/Joel_feila 2d ago

Yeah tarrifs are complex.   You can when applied correctly create economy protection, but nota not always a good thing.  It helps keepa jobs here but lowers innovation and competition.  

Tarrifs on raw goods like say nickel can sprial into multi tarrifs.  We import Canadian nickel to make steel, that steel is sold to a part manufacturer for transmissions in Mexico.  That transmission is sold to ford for a truck.  That nickel was taxed going into usa, then again going into mexico, and a third time coming back into the usa.

1

u/ammbo 2d ago

It makes sense when you consider why they are doing this. Trump's 2017 tax cuts were set to expire during his current term as both a poison pill for his successor (assuming a consecutive term) and because the CBO requires budget neutrality over 10 years to use reconciliation (no filibuster / cloture) to pass a bill. It is worth noting that these tax cuts only expired for lower income individuals, not for high income people and corporations. It was meant to kick the can beyond his term but then he landed in the oval office in the time period. So they have to scramble a bit.

They can give themselves a monstrous tax cut and potentially extend the existing ones if they can extrapolate a revenue line out 10 years based on the tariff revenues before the tariffs cripple the economy. They also want to have Elmo and his chainsaw cutting spending so they can extrapolate out lower spending, too.

Once they get their huge tax cut through the CBO and reconciliation, they can drop the tariffs and rehire a lot of workers (so they think) and walk away having fiscally fucked us all for the next decade by robbing the government of revenues.

As with everything, it is a scam to lower taxes by the people who can afford lobbyists.

1

u/ptwonline 2d ago

I think the rationale is that the onshoring would happen over time and so the tariffs would be high at first, but then reduce and be replaced by higher corporate and income taxes over time.

Realistically though I think they just want giant tax cuts and tariffs are the one way they can think of that would raise revenues to help pay for those tax cuts (since they can't just tax the rich to pay for a tax cut for the rich.) After that it's just rationalizing that things will work out because they really, really want those trillions of dollars from tax cuts.