Wow. Raise taxes on your citizens (which is what a tariff is) and you can reduce the deficit. AMAZING.
Now… what about the extra $4T in deficit his BBB is creating?
Waste of my time listening to that.
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Keep raising tariffs, and withdrawing services, from the Proles, until the deficit is made up…..of course, past practice shows that, by the time they have recovered 10% of the deficit from the Proles, they will enact more “JC” tax cuts.
Steve
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My take away - We’ve never seen the dramatic changes taking place. We don’t know what will happen. Maybe it will be good?
I feel much better now.
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Quite agree. getting that first ‘rush’ from the drug of fiat feels nice. Then the fiscal rot sets in requiring a bigger hit. Result - where we are now
It looks like we might be returning to gold soon:
More specifically, raise taxes on US corporations - which used to be the anathema of the current party in power.
Blows my mind at the level of cognitive dissidence displayed by those that rail against taxes, especially for corporations, while at the same time touting tariffs.
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@Hawkwin “cognitive dissonance”
There’s no cognitive dissonance involved. The taxes on corporations reduce the profits of the corporation directly. The tariffs can be passed on to customers by raising prices. If price elasticity causes customers to buy less the impact on the corporation is less direct.
Wendy
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It would result in a world wide depression of a level unseen in our lifetime. There isn’t enough gold in the world to make it work.
Additionally, if governments tried to do this, they would also make it illegal for you to own it - and they would set a price at which you would be required to turn it in. The absolute last thing a Gold Bug should desire is a return to the gold standard.
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I hope not. It would restrict economic development, recovery from economic calamity, and likely be massively deflationary.
I suspect it would not do anything to assuage economic inequality, but would shift the power to current holders of gold.
Good luck to you on that.
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You get rid of the cognitive dissonance by convincing those people (ahem, lie to them) that the exporting country is paying those tariffs and then POOF, it all now sounds like puppies and daisies.
Remember, these are the same people who cannot understand that when Trump brags that he can bring down the price of prescriptions by 1500% that that is not mathematically possible in the first place. (And nobody in the media is pointing out this simple fact).
We are living in Idiocracy.
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???
Taxes reduce profits effectively in the same way tariffs do. Both are an expense than can be passed on to customers.
If we increase taxes by 50% on a select industry, are their prices likely to go up or down?
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Of course they are likely to go up, including competitors who aren’t being tariffed. That’s why I think inflation will rise.
Wendy
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So, are all taxes are inflationary? Or does the fact that the government revenues get recycled mitigate that?
DB2
So when you stated,
The taxes on corporations reduce the profits of the corporation directly. The tariffs can be passed on to customers by raising prices.
what was your point? You clearly agree that taxes can also be passed on to consumers by raising prices. They are both a cost born by US corporations.
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Anything that raises the price of consumer goods will increase Consumer Price Inflation which feeds into the interest paid on TIPS and the inflation adjustment for Social Security.
Wendy
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Unless the inflation data is cooked. I’m old. I remember the US ridiculing the Soviets for claiming there was no inflation, no unemployment, and no poverty, in the Soviet Union.
Steve
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Yesterday, televised from the White House itself, we saw “new data that nobody has seen yet” about how great the economy is.
THE DATA IS COOKED.
Face it, all the things we said about not being able to trust the numbers out of China several years back as reasons to not invest in Chinese companies (valid arguments, I’d add), are coming true here. Put differently, “If Joe had done this…”
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It’s not the end of the rule of law, it’s the weaponization of it that’s super frightening.
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That “first rush” has been going on since 1971, or roughly 54 years.
Where are we now? Oh yeah, the richest, most powerful country in the history of the planet, with more billionaires than anywhere else, and where even the poor people have cars. Yes, I can see how awful everything is.
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Captain, he is up to his eyes in brown stuff.
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