I'm not a "free market"ist. The "free market" can go to hell.
But this new "universal tariffs" plan is just stupid.
Tariffs, by their very nature, are not meant to be applied universally. They are meant to be targetted.
It would have made sense if tariffs were applied to China, and then these were offset by closer trade with Europe.
"Tariffs have been part of U.S. trade policy since the founding, but in the period that tariffs were high, they were consistent and targeted. There is little historical precedent for this sort of rapid experimentation in tariff-setting, where tariffs are declared one day and dropped the next, or applied to all products from a country."
Instead, Trump gave the middle finger to everyone (except North Korea, Afghanistan and Russia -surprise, surprise), which means American losses due to restricting their access to Chinese goods won't be recuperated because no one else will be willing to help because they've been fucking tariffed as well.
Double-irony is that now Asian markets are being forced to get closer to China in response, to protect their own economies. The United States spent literally half a century trying to get these markets to link with the American one. And now all that is in the trash.
Man, Trump is a fucking idiot. Honestly, Biden is more cognicent...
The other day he was talking about "Signalgate" and said that he thought the whole issue was about "phone signal". He fucking said that Baron Trump was a prodigy because he "learned how to switch on his laptop.
