4mo ago

'Deranged': Experts tear apart Trump's 'ludicrous' plan on grocery prices

www.rawstory.com 'Deranged': Experts tear apart Trump's 'ludicrous' plan on grocery prices

When former President Donald Trump was asked about his plan to lower the cost of groceries, he said that he would slap tariffs on foreign food imports.Scott Lincicome and Sophia Bagley of the libertarian Cato Institute, however, believe Trump's plan is "deranged" and they write in The Atlantic that ...

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Why do average Americans still rate Trump as better on the economy? It’s certainly nothing rational.
- Trump bizzness man, trump smart
  
  Don't insult the Pakled like that.
  They are smart.
  They outsmarted Captain Janeway by getting Rumdar onto the Enterprise as a spy.
  
  Gas prices lowwwww
- 4 in 10 Americans are fucking morons.
  
  That roughly checks out with our electoral results tbh
  
  https://youtu.be/KHJbSvidohg

He doesn't understand the nuances of making policy decisions, so his default answer to stuff like this is to just impose tariffs because that's all he knows. He doesn't care to understand and would likely eat the crayons you use if you were to try to explain it to him. He's just incapable of that sort of mental growth.
- He doesn't understand anything. He's lived in a completely separate reality his entire life.
- I don't know how you can miss that, though.
  Tariffs on imported goods means the price raises to cover the increased cost to import it.
  Tariffs are a mechanism to encourage domestic production by making foreign competition more expensive.
  It's literally the opposite of reducing the cost to consumers.
  Trump has to understand this. But he knows his rabid base do not. So he says it like it's going to help consumers, rather than exclusively the domestic producers that are already overcharging.
  
  Trump has to understand this.
  Who says? It seems like these days he doesn't even know which state or city he's in, I think the likelihood of him understanding literally any political theory at all is close to zero.
  
  Honestly no, I don't think Trump understands. The way he talks about his precious tariffs, I'm pretty sure he's under the impression that imposing a tariff on Chinese goods means making China pay for it. It's really just the latest iteration of "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it."
  
  You're giving him way too much credit. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. While Trump has certainly performed acts out of malice, he is also the epitome of stupidity. He's suggested nuking hurricanes, injecting bleach, and has stared straight into the sun during a solar eclipse, etc, etc. He's a terrible person of course, but he's also a complete moron.

I’ll slap tariffs on banana imports so people buy domestically grown bananas!
I’ll slap tariffs on cocoa imports so people buy domestically grown cocoa!
- Everybody knows that Arkansas grows the finest coffee beans in the world.
  
  Every year, I travel the world collecting the best coffee beans I can find. I collect them and bring them back to my home in Minnesota, and use them as fuel to roast the beans I grow by myself on the roof of my building under grow lights.
  
  Don't spill the beans
- I wonder if he knows the price of a banana.
  
  It is one banana clgoh. What could it cost. 10 dollars?
  
  How much can they be clgoh, $10 dollars?

Stable Business Genius: Let's lower prices by raising prices - checkmate liibs

Here's his VP's plan:
"I think we are increasingly in a situation where we are going to choose between one or the other. We're going to have to get a little uncomfortable on some of these things or maybe you're going to have to be willing to pay a little bit more for certain consumer goods. We may even have to be willing to attack some of the companies financially that are waging war on the American people."
- Hey, that sounds a little bit like anti-monopoly talk, doesn't it. Crazy how price fixing might be bad for the average person.
  ... I don't think that's where he was going, but that's where he started.
- Wouldn't it be simpler to have Mexico pay for groceries?

Something belched up thoughtlessly does not count as a plan.
- Does it count as a concept of a plan?

I’d quibble with calling it “deranged”. Illogical sure. Nonsense, even ridiculous, but not deranged.
His only real play has always been to define a scapegoat and stoke outrage. That’s the point here, rather than anything useful
- No, slapping tarrifs on imported goods means they become more expensive as the tarrifs will be included in the price.
  If you think that american companies that produce domestically (untariffed) will not raise their prices to maximize their profits you might have what Trump has. Plus a lot of their raw materials/components come from abroad and will also be tariffed.
  Laat round of tarrifs Trump imposed led to retaliatory tarrifs by china. This hurt the US farmers so hard that most of the us tarrifs revenue went to farmers as subsidies.

Hey! USA Avocado industry would be thriving if Mexico wasn't shipping all theirs in without a tariff.
But a sable genius once said. "What we have is a thing called the gasoline. We have gasoline. We have so much gasoline, we don’t know what to do. They don’t have gasoline. So why are we making a product that they dominate? They’re going to dominate."
This was in reply to the question "How are you going to bring down the cost of food and groceries?".
I think you can apply the same logic here. "What we have is a thing called the corn. We have corn. We have so much corn, we don’t know what to do. They don’t have corn. So why are we making a product [avocados] that they dominate? They’re [Mexico] going to dominate."

Trump is an economic idiot.

It's bad when you are the most vocally anti regulation party, and cato goes at you.

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