Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumGary Cohn On Shitstain's Paralyzing Stupidity On Coal Vs. Solar Jobs, Tariffs
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COHN: The president ran on coal and coal jobs. I remember vividly having a conversation with the president on coal jobs versus solar-panel installers. We ended up putting tariffs on solar panels, which I didnt understand either. And I did turn to him one day and I said, Mr. President, how many coal miners do we have in the United States and how many solar-panel installers do we have? And I said, Im not here to trick you up the answers Ill make it simple: less than 50,000 coal miners in the United States and more than 350,000 solar-panel installers. And by the way, 10 years ago we had no solar-panels installers. Its a growth industry in the United States. In fact in California now, you cannot build a house without solar panels. Its an industry thats going to continue to grow. And we have to recognize where this country is going, not where this country has been.
DUBNER: And was his connection to that, what most people would consider an outdated belief, was that political, was it intellectual, was it just kind of spiritual?
COHN: I think it was all the above. I think during his formative years growing up, coal might have been an integral part in thinking about the energy sectors, but clearly in states like West Virginia and parts of Pennsylvania, he understood, and he was a bit of a marketing genius on this. He understood in West Virginia, and southern Ohio and Pennsylvania, you better go talk about coal. And he understood in certain steel towns, when he looked at the empty steel mills, he should talk about bringing back steel jobs.
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OHN: And when you put tariffs on goods that people in the United States consume every day, its a consumption tax. So all the tariffs did is they made products that Americans were going to buy more expensive. And in fact we got the final trade data numbers this morning for what trade deficit looked like for last year in the United States. And lo and behold, we hit an all-time record-high trade deficit globally, and with China.
DUBNER: Despite the best efforts of the White House.
COHN: Tariffs dont work. If anything, they hurt the economy because if youre a typical American worker, you have a finite amount of income to spend. If you have to spend more on the necessity products that you need to live, you have less to spend on the services that you want to buy. And you definitely dont have anything left over to save. So we should try and make the goods as cheap as possible. And we dont produce the goods in the United States; we import the goods from other countries. And if we could produce the goods as cheaply as other countries do, we would produce them in the United States.
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https://climatecrocks.com/2019/03/14/freak-o-nomics-indeed-trump-ignorant-of-solar-job-realities/
Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)MyOwnPeace
(16,929 posts)Regarding IQ45's response, Cohn was asked, "was that political, was it intellectual, was it just kind of spiritual?"
Cohn answered that it was "all of the above."
This is where he misses it - we KNOW that there is NOTHING intellectual going on with Trump. He is incapable of ANY intellectual thought!
OregonBlue
(7,754 posts)things. The man is a total idiot. He gets something in his head and it doesn't matter what facts you bring him. He's always right. An arrogant idiot."
tanyev
(42,578 posts)Trump has a certain cunning for knowing how to con, manipulate, or extort some types of people, but that does not make him a genius.