U.S. President Donald Trump will act on his threat to levy 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican products, says White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Yeah the idea behind the tariffs, in addition to the simple extortion aspect where they believe that the mere threat of them is enough to get other countries to bend the knee and do whatever the US wants, is that they are supposed to foster a regrowth of domestic industries by raising the prices of imports. The problem is that this only works if you actually have a proper domestic industrial economic policy and you don’t continue to follow the same neoliberal financialized model that hollowed out your industries in the first place. Since they will not and cannot break the power of the finance monopolies, these tariffs are not going to do what they did back in the 19th century and instead will just lead to further economic deterioration and isolation for the US.
At a bare minimum they would have to massively bring down cost of living so that labor prices can be competitive with the rest of the world and such that industry will want/be able to hire US workers. Which won’t happen because that threatens the profits of the rentier class (which includes things like the whole healthcare industry racket and various other effective monopolies like tech, telecom, pharma, agribusiness), plus it would crash the housing market on which a lot of people’s household wealth and savings/pensions rely making it politically a non-starter.
On top of that you would then have to uproot the entire parasitic system of finance that prioritizes investment according to short term stock market gains over actual industrial growth. And the only real way of doing this is the nationalization of banking, which is never, ever going to be something that a US politician would even dare consider. It wouldn’t even cross their minds that’s how taboo the very idea of that is.
So how can you ever hope to solve a problem when your entire ideological, social and cultural indoctrination has literally left you incapable of even imagining the kinds of solutions that would be required? Well, you can’t and so they won’t.
Meaningfully bringing down labor cost would require inevesting in public services, and you’re right that it can’t happen. It would mean providing things like universal healthcare, public transit, pensions, etc. That goes completely contrary to the dominant narrative in the states.
I think the approach they’re gonna try to go with is to try and create a huge reserve army of labor by first creating mass unemployment. At that point people will be desperate enough to work jobs in terrible conditions just to feed themselves. They basically want to bring back Dickensian times.
Yeah the idea behind the tariffs, in addition to the simple extortion aspect where they believe that the mere threat of them is enough to get other countries to bend the knee and do whatever the US wants, is that they are supposed to foster a regrowth of domestic industries by raising the prices of imports. The problem is that this only works if you actually have a proper domestic industrial economic policy and you don’t continue to follow the same neoliberal financialized model that hollowed out your industries in the first place. Since they will not and cannot break the power of the finance monopolies, these tariffs are not going to do what they did back in the 19th century and instead will just lead to further economic deterioration and isolation for the US.
Michael Hudson explained this very well in an interview in which he appeared together with Richard Wolff a couple months ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r6Ovguv1BSA&t=7819s
Precisely, the only way industry would come back is through massive government programs that are not politically possible in the states.
At a bare minimum they would have to massively bring down cost of living so that labor prices can be competitive with the rest of the world and such that industry will want/be able to hire US workers. Which won’t happen because that threatens the profits of the rentier class (which includes things like the whole healthcare industry racket and various other effective monopolies like tech, telecom, pharma, agribusiness), plus it would crash the housing market on which a lot of people’s household wealth and savings/pensions rely making it politically a non-starter.
On top of that you would then have to uproot the entire parasitic system of finance that prioritizes investment according to short term stock market gains over actual industrial growth. And the only real way of doing this is the nationalization of banking, which is never, ever going to be something that a US politician would even dare consider. It wouldn’t even cross their minds that’s how taboo the very idea of that is.
So how can you ever hope to solve a problem when your entire ideological, social and cultural indoctrination has literally left you incapable of even imagining the kinds of solutions that would be required? Well, you can’t and so they won’t.
Meaningfully bringing down labor cost would require inevesting in public services, and you’re right that it can’t happen. It would mean providing things like universal healthcare, public transit, pensions, etc. That goes completely contrary to the dominant narrative in the states.
I think the approach they’re gonna try to go with is to try and create a huge reserve army of labor by first creating mass unemployment. At that point people will be desperate enough to work jobs in terrible conditions just to feed themselves. They basically want to bring back Dickensian times.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: