re: Is the goal of the tariffs to negotiate free trade deals or is it to onshore jobs?

Technology actually can decrease labor costs.


But you don’t want free trade anyway and it’s not going to happen.


Prior to Trump getting in office there have been tariffs, duties, vat, and economic sanctions placed on various countries over the years.


We haven’t been operating under a free trade world and won’t be in the future.


We might have individual deals with countries or groups of countries, but it’s never going to be a global thing.



Which goes back to my point of people crying over tariffs. You already had them.

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It’s both….they aren’t mutually exclusive, because with some industries the goal is on shoring, with others it’s free trade/better terms…the status quo is no more.

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That's exactly what we already had. tariffs on some items and free trade on others.

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You're conflating public debt with the trade deficit Our public debt is a problem. The trade deficit has minimal impact on it. Federal spending is the fix for that.

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You are right these are two different things but both increase our debt.


Trade deficits increase our debt like I’ve pointed out numerous times.

Overspending also increases our debt.

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Foreign Lending: When the U.S. runs a trade deficit, countries like China, Japan, and others that have trade surpluses with the U.S. end up with a lot of U.S. dollars. Often, they use those dollars to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, effectively lending money to the U.S. government.

This increases the U.S. national debt because those Treasury bonds are a form of government borrowing.

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You aren’t always right you know?

It’s okay to say I’m a lawyer and just kind of winging this shite.


One thing Trump is trying to do with spending, since no one is going to cut ss or Medicare, was raise money through tariffs instead of increasing income tax.


And everyone should want this to work.

I understand it might not. But if it doesn’t, we run into the issue of printing money for the debt. That can lead to hyperinflation.

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Is the goal of the tariffs to negotiate free trade deals or is it to onshore jobs?

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The goal is to drive you leftists crazy. It's working!

If you Google "How much do other countries around the world owe the United States?", Google and "media" refuse to answer the question

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A huge chunk of our debt is owed to our trade partners, which they hold because of our trade deficits

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Not necessarily

They also hold it for stable investment purposes

Few assets are as safe as UST

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They support our consumption by lending us money that we can't afford to repay.

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We print money and create debt that we disproportionately hold.

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Our public debt is absolutely a problem

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Yes, but a different problem than trade

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and it's why we will soon default on that debt we owe

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I think this is doom casting a bit

We are in no threat to default

This trade war is not directly related to that default if we do. The default will most affect America as we hold the most UST

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This trade war is not directly related to that default if we do. The default will most affect America as we hold the most UST

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There's no way we default on foreign debt. We would absolutely default on domestic owned debt first.

Defaulting on foreign debt is a the real doom and gloom scenario. Defaulting on Americans would hurt but the country doesn't end and still could borrow albeit at higher rates...

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Everybody says that but their clothes are still made in Vietnam or China.

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Because the playing field is too slanted right now. Hence the entire point of meshing trade and tariffs. You finally see the point of what Trump is doing. Congrats.

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We run a deficit by sending them dollars. Rather than debase the dollar, which would happen if the sent the excess dollars back home via foreign exchange markets, they lend them back to us.

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This is not true. Our deficit is from our government spending being higher than our government's revenue. This should be obvious.

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There may be some confusion, but what I said above (first quote) is absolutely true. We run a trade (added for clarity) deficit by sending them dollars. Your response is to something I did not say. I did not say that our budget deficits are caused by our trade deficits. I said that our trade deficits are partiall financed by lending from our trading partners and that is impossible to deny. On net, they send us more stuff than we send them, we cover the deficit by sending them dollars, they exchange some of those dollars for US debt. That's US debt exchanged for imported goods no matter how you twist it. If they didn't use those excess dollars to buy and hold dollar based assets, they would sell them on the Forex market and the dollar's value would have steadily declined vis a vis our trading partners currencies over the last 50 years. Their goods would've become too expensive for us to buy. That continuous trade deficit was financed in part by, and would not have been possible without, foreign lending.

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the trade deficit is more closely responsible for foreign investment in the USA.

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Right. Them lending us money and buying our assets to support the dollar is an investment, because foreigners really want to invest in the US instead of their own economies. And not only that, it's a gift because we can just print money to pay off public or private debt when it becomes unaffordable. The fed has monetized probably 6 trillion dollars worth of debt in the last 20 years or so, which would probably cover a sizeable chunk of our trade deficits over that time period.

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Because the playing field is too slanted right now. Hence the entire point of meshing trade and tariffs. You finally see the point of what Trump is doing. Congrats.

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You just said absolutely nothing other than admitting you buy cheap foreign clothes.

I think we've got a few months before we KNOW how this plays out. I hope it works out for the better but people should stop pretending that they know what's going on.