re: Trade Data Shows Trump’s Tariffs Are Working

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Wherever I B Freeman is

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Hopefully, he readjusted his supply chain.

I mean inflation just hit 4.2% so there’s that

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They don't like to get into details about the policy

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That is an unbelievably odd dismissal given the detailed threads on this board regarding the topic.

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But are we producing more?

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We are importing less, and consuming more. It is an equation.

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That is an unbelievably odd dismissal given the detailed threads on this board regarding the topic.

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We're importing less and consumers are spending more. Did I miss the discussion of the cost of goods consumers face in the market?

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We are importing less, and consuming more

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Consuming more or spending more on consumption?

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Did I miss the discussion of the cost of goods consumers face in the market?

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You mean in the roughly 50 threads discussing it? Yes, I guess you missed it.

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It was way past time to try something new. Free trade is doing nothing but bankrupting us

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It wasn’t bankrupting us. That was being done by profligate spending. It was doing a lot of other bad things, though, like making us dependent on foreigners for strategically necessary products, and exposing our labor to unrelenting competition from foreigners emerging from destitution.

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At most it reduces sales for a small handful of Americans trying to export goods to markets that they probably don't really need in the first place, since the largest economy in the world is right here.

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You were on your way to a thoughtful post, but this is tendentious bullshite. The rest of the world’s consumer spending is over twice the US’.

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It wasn’t bankrupting us. That was being done by profligate spending. It was doing a lot of other bad things, though, like making us dependent on foreigners for strategically necessary products, and exposing our labor to unrelenting competition from foreigners emerging from destitution.

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The irony in TDS (tariff arrangement syndrome) is that those who are struck with the syndrome ignore the fact that trade deficits, in and of themselves, are inflation contributors.

Milton Friedman discounted that fact by observing that growth concomitant with trade deficits outpaced the cost of financing them. His argument was cogent when our national debt was lower, but it is decreasingly applicable now.

His argument was that monetary outflow to international partners results in a need for those partners to put their money to work someplace. Often the result is the money being transferred to US debt instruments. The purchase of US debt instruments is (presumably) financed at a lower rate than the growth generated through the imported materials.

However, as our debt precipitously rises, so will the inevitable rates demanded of those same debt instruments. Concomitantly, as our debt rises, with trade deficits being a fractional contributor, the value of the US dollar in real terms declines. A devalued dollar is synonymous with inflation.