President Trump on Thursday unveiled a battery of new tariffs targeting exports from dozens of U.S. trading partners, forging ahead with a potentially disruptive plan to escalate his global trade war.
He’s compelled to brag about it. It’s a flex because he thinks there’s no way he’ll ever be held accountable, and his dimwitted followers all wish they were like the Beloved Leader and could rape trafficked teenage girls too.
Show us the Epstein files, Donnie
Must be time to pump and dump again.
And TACO’ed again, moving the goal another seven days.
I’ve had this odd thought lately that I just want to put into the ether. And honestly, I’ve been a free trade person pretty much all my life, because I think free trade can and should empower societies to trade what they’re best at, and it has the capability to help pull billions out of poverty.
But one thing I’ve always thought was fucked about free trade is the countries that we exploit, that is, those that pay the kind of wages the US suffered through in the 1800s and early 1900s. The kind of labor that works too long and still barely struggles to survive.
What if the tariffs do balance that a bit better? What if American workers get a fair shake to do work for American consumers? What if this awful, awful dark period in our lives somehow gives the Vietnamese or Cambodian worker a better life because the US is no longer willing to buy goods from countries that exploit their workforce?
I personally don’t want to be part of the tomato problem if I can help it. This is on no way an endorsement of the current administration, but why the fuck did it have to be this administration that acted upon this? Why couldn’t it have been prior administrations over the last 30 years?
What if the tariffs do balance that a bit better?
That would require a process of analysis a lot more sophisticated than the imbecilic back-of-an-envelope calculation that was loosely based on bilateral trade flows. And even then, selective quotas and a trade adjudication process would be more likely to succeed.
The tariffs were framed around unfair trade practices, intellectual property theft, and protecting American manufacturing—not improving labor conditions abroad.
What if this awful, awful dark period in our lives somehow gives the Vietnamese or Cambodian worker a better life because the US is no longer willing to buy goods from countries that exploit their workforce?
I don’t see how they can get a better life out of this, someone has to absorb the cost. In fact, many Southeast Asian countries saw trade increases as U.S. firms tried to move supply chains out of China.
What if American workers get a fair shake to do work for American consumers?
That’s the hope but for American workers to truly get a fair shake, tariffs need to be part of a larger plan. That means investing in domestic industries, enforcing labor standards, and making sure working people, not just corporations, benefit from any policy shifts.
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