On the subject of Project 2025...
I was reading an article today by a Project 2025 affiliated economist who was defending Trump's tariff plans, and I think it's a really good study in the sort of thought behind it. The article doesn't mention Project 2025, but it only makes sense when you think about it through that lens. (And blanket tariffs are one of two competing economic models proposed by Project 2025.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...-trump/680015/
Everything here is presented through long-term focus: regardless of any short-term pain, the long-term benefit is that the manufacturing sector gets rebuilt. And my first thought was that this is nonsensical. Nobody is going to invest in building factories in America when the only thing keeping the factory viable is tariffs that will be broadly unpopular as they increase costs. Add to the fact that tariffs will increase costs for those businesses as well. What happens when you overinvest building a factory, a future government rolls back those tariffs, and suddenly you've overspent, you can't compete, and your assets are devalued?
So the only way to justify that is to hand-wave away all of the short-term pain. In his delayed book (
The New Republic got their hands on a copy and what they say about it is chilling), the Project 2025 architect talks about how Americans should value producing as many children as possible over living within their means. There's a startling lack of care here. Overhaul the education system to produce more low-wage workers, leaving high-income career paths to the already wealthy. Costs of living go up, further making advanced education unattainable. Removing abortion access helps here, not just producing more children but to force young people away from being able to follow through on their own education. Remove democratic rights so that the government has decades in control it would need to implement this. Keep the focus on culture wars so that they aren't voting for their own self-interest. Destroy worker-rights and industry regulation. Eventually, you get a society full of low-education workers, and high unemployment. And now, finally, there's an actual incentive for investors to build factories, because they have a cheap, desperate workforce. This brutal, callous, long-term vision about reshaping American society is the only way you can make blanket tariffs make sense.
I know the way that people talk about Trump's economic plans is that he simply doesn't understand anything about economics. And he doesn't, but he has advisers that do, and they have reasons for advocating for tariffs, in which the harm that they cause is not only justified but useful.