re: If this was about tariffs, why was Switzerland targeted?

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Tariff's......Making Recessions Great Again.....see Smoot/ Hawley and Hoover in 1930.....took a bad situation and made it worse.

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I spelled out the problems in my post. If you think we were doing fine prior to Jan 20, 2025, you don't understand any of this. If you take away the enormous fiscal stimulus of the past 5 years, we would be in a depression, not a recession. Instead, we ran those enormous govt deficits, which allowed consumption to run even further ahead of production and, voila, record high trade deficits. Those weren't the halcyon days of prosperity, we were rapidly digging a deeper financial hole. Now our interest expense alone is well over a trillion dollars a year and climbing fast.

As a general rule, I don't like tariffs, but nothing has been done for too long. Congress won't help. What is your solution? I'm always up for contstructive debate. Lower regulatory burden? Increase govt efficiency? Go after corruption? Slash govt spending? How do you propose we bring jobs back home and turn our twin deficits (trade and budget) around? If you think this situation is fine, you're mistaken. If you think it can be fixed without pain, you're mistaken. Recession is the least of our worries.

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Tariffs cause stagflation a'la Jimmah Carter.

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No they don’t. Stagnation? Sure. But inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. Tariffs neither increase the money supply nor decrease the amount of goods. So if tariffs cause some prices to go up they will cause others to go down, as those other goods will see a reduction in the amount of money chasing them. And those reductions are equal to the amount of extra money being spent on the tariffed goods.

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So become dependent on revenue from imports?

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In the long term? No. But I believe this is part of the scheme to balance the budget in the short term. Someone has to pay for the $1 trillion in excess spending (making the big assumption that DOGE gets the other one trillion). In the short term, that second trillion will be paid for with tariffs; in the longer term, they plan to pay for it with increasing revenues from a booming economy that they aim to ignite about a year from now.

These are just educated guesses of mine and of pundits I read.

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and the government isn’t planning to retaliate against the U.S.

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Well. Damn look at that. A win.

When I say "Trump", I mean Trump, his cabinet, and every single R in Congress.

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Lower regulatory burden?

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Yes, absolutely. And Trump is doing that.

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Go after corruption

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Always a good thing. I hope Trump is doing that

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Slash govt spending?

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This is the single MOST important thing Trump can do. But, honestly, I just am not hopeful much will be done, and as a result, we are left with the unenviable reality of raising revenue, which means tariffs, increased taxes, etc.

There are other things. Tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts. Targeted tax cuts that encourage re-patriation of monies parked offshore.

How about a real commitment to worker training and education? You mention the trade deficit, and we can simply disagree on its significance, BUT one area we have a trade surplus is services. Services represent a far greater source of wealth, wage growth, jobs etc than manufacturing. A REAL commitment to educating our society to be participate in this is essential.

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Politicians Lie!

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'm the smiling face on your TV
Oh, I'm the cult of personality
I exploit you, still you love me
I tell you one and one makes three
Oh, I'm the cult of personality

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pedantic gotchya.

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Next you're going to call "2 + 2 = 4" "arithmetic gotcha."

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You literally live in a commie state

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Lots of military, natives and public land.

You can give us the bases and land and you dont have to spend another penny on them. In fact, the Federal govt never lived up to the Statehood compact in this regard.

Give us the land, you're free to spend that money on subsidizing industry (or taking over the means of production.)

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A better description is that they're being good NPCS repeating silly talking points so that other NPCs believe it and repeat it.

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Trump is trying to course correct the country. What is your plan? What is your party’s (democrats) plan?

Seems you spend all day on here arguing technicalities and calling everyone stupid, but you have as good a guess as they do about how all this shakes out.

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We absolutely are consuming more than we produce, and have been for 50 years. That's why we run a trade deficit; we consume more than we produce and the shortfall is met by imports that exceed exports. Unless you think we've been producing mass quantities of stuff that we don't consume or export, and storing it in warehouses for the last 50 years.

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Okay . . . . .

Goods, maybe. But total production, not even close.

Total domestic production is almost $30 trillion. Out trade deficit is just over $1 trillion.

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but they should have called it what it is.


The problem, as sad as this is, is that it didn't fit with the talking points (which have been focused on "tariffs" since 2016)

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Yeah, but they could have found a far better way to massage that message. Combine reciprocal tariffs with balance of trade, just make a wider sweep of the issue. Explain that tariffs are a part of it, but there are other factors.

It still would have required a bit of a song and dance, but better than what they have done. It's disappointing that his staff didn't intercept this.