building walls raises the living standard of wall builders.

tariffs raise the living standard of the very specific beneficiaries of the domestic industry being protected by the tariff.


the question is, who pays for it and is it worth it in terms of the overall economy? given the likelihood of retaliation, it usually isn't worth it.

When is the last time republicans did anything to raise the living standard of anyone other than the 1%? To the right wing, the American people are nothing more than a cash crop, and they are swooping in for the final harvest.

Find a key industry,protect it until they can compete on their own.

access to its market.

What happens at the end of it at Brownsville--just walk around the corner of it?? Oh and MY it's going to extend a WHOLE five feet down into the ground. Like anyone couldn't tunnel under that??

So who gets the FAT $10-15 BILLION $$$ contract? The soon to be formed Drumph Wall Const. Company.

when they have to pay more for things...especially lower income people. The ones who supposedly flipped for Trashie.

I know that importing a car into China carries a 25% tariff, and a car in to the U.S. carries a 2.5% tariff. This encouraged car makers to build factories in China to produce cars for the Chinese domestic market and employed Chinese workers.

The general rule is that a country should only import with minimal tariffs raw materials, luxury / niche goods, and things it can't make/grow/harvest/mine itself.

The counter-balance is that you need to seriously prevent monopolies in the protected industries.

OK so free trade has not really helped the rust belt. That's an area we used to win.
The fact that we lost it over free trade signals a problem for us.

To think that you can tax something coming in from the country enough to make it worth moving here? I'm not sure you could do that due to extremely low wages elsewhere.

You could possibly raise taxes on incoming goods and create large amt of gov't jobs in the areas that have not recovered from trade, or use it to fund an infrastructure program.

So then you come down to the crux of the problem. It's not that free trade has been bad for the country. It hasn't. It is that it is bad for certain states and those states used to vote for us and gave the election to Trump.

For a long time free trade meant US businesses made more money, and workers, whose salaries were dropping were able to still buy cheap consumer goods. So for a long time free trade sort of blunted the destruction of the middle class.

But anybody seriously watching what was going on would know eventually the cheap goods were going to cost the same percentage of US salary as US ones used to be. We are there now and that is the problem.

Now if the companies making all that money had shared a bit more with the workers in the US, we might not have the problem. However in the absence of unions I think the working class rebelling against free trade is basically: "If you are not going to give us anymore money we are going to shut down free trade and fuck you out of YOUR money"

So tariffs and domestic production will mean more jobs. And more inflation which was the problem back in the 70's when prices of goods were starting to rise faster than wages.

So we may go the other way now. For a while the we'll have more jobs but eventually stuff will be unaffordable.

However the one thing I know is in states that can swing the election, they are not grasping these subtle things. If we stand for free trade we stand against the US worker in many people's eyes and we hand that popular issue to the GOP.