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Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
Isn't Bernie a big tariffs guy too?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sidney Crosby's Hat
Historically, Democrats had always been more tariffs (due to historical ties to labour unions) and Republicans more free trade. Trump kind of flipped that.
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This sort of came up during Bill Maher (who I'm not a huge fan of generally) where he pressed Al Franken on the fact that Biden has tariffs on foreign auto makers and Franken had a hard time "spinning" it which bugged me. Because, as with most economic policies, it has different outcomes in different markets. It CAN make sense to tariff an industry where you have domestic operators to keep your domestic goods competitive. It especially makes sense if that competitor is coming from a place of way lower wages, material cost, massive government intervention in markets and currency, and stolen technology (aka China). So to keep Ford competitive with Chinese automakers it could at least be argued for (not saying it necessarily works that way).
Blanket tariffs on a bunch of foreign goods like Trump is talking about is obviously idiotic.
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Originally Posted by Itse
Just a reminder:
Economists, whether they're "Democrats" or "Republicans", will basically always hate anything that sounds like regulation for American corporations, it doesn't matter who says it and it's just not credible.
Economists are generally not a super credible bunch. Let's remember that you can still be a professional, credible economist and defend trickle down economics or austerity politics, even though both are at this point fairly thoroughly debunked. It's basically the economical equivalent of climate change denialism.
Economists are, with some exceptions, not scientists, they are the priests of capitalism. Now some priests are really smart people and think for themselves, but you gotta be more specific than "economists say" if you want to make a plea to authority here.
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I'm not an Economist, but I do have an economics degree and I have to push back a little here. Acknowledging it is indeed not really a science except in its most data driven forms, and even then there are a lot of assumptions and faulty data. BUT the age of the internet has given us much more detailed data to study the past 100 years of economics to the point that we've actually run long-run experiments in major economic policies enough to see some scientific outcomes.
- American policies are pretty right wing even at its most "leftist". Thus, most of the economists you hear from have those leanings at least. America is literally afraid of (what they think is) socialism so even tame government intervention gets spotlighted as terrifying by the same loud mouths that shout about everything. The loudmouths don't actually believe it's terrifying, they just know they can scare people into voting for them by calling basic things like healthcare communist/marxist. I wouldn't call them the "priests of capitalism". Many economists think capitalism is collapsing.
- Trickle down economics is NOT "capitalism". It's actually Anti-capitalist and I really wish Democrats and "left" politicians would hammer this more. Capitalism involves re-investing in your labour force, and TDE involves stealing from your labour force. TDE has become a total joke, and honestly always was. It was never sound policy, it was literally a trick. A bunch of rich knobs got together and "said if we tell them this, they will give us all their money." As as per above point, the USSR collapse made it easy to point at how government=bad, because no one understands that corruption killed the USSR, not communism, just like corruption will kill the USA.
- Capitalism, in theory, works. The same way communism, in theory, works. The problem is they both involve people and people are greedy, and the problems with both don't stem from a fault in underlying theory (incentive with drive innovations, yes. A community needs to work with and for each other to survive, also yes. Most well-functioning societies use pieces of both). The endgame leaning too far in either direction has been pure cronyist oligarchies because people like things and friends.
- "Regulation" is a naughty word amongst American conservatives because they know they can poke at to enrage people to vote for them, not because they actually think it's bad for an economy. We all hate regulation. We all hate standing in line to renew driver's licenses. We all hate that we have to wait at a red light, despite being no traffic. We have all encountered bureaucratic nonsense and been frustrated by it so it's easy to poke. And then we forget about consumer protections and environment protections and on down the list because it doesn't feel like they affect us day-to-day but they do. It's challenging to show how because it's a long-term drag vs the very immediate cost of filling your gas tank.
- The American public (and many Canadians) is literally brainwashed to think this is the only and best way. Even hyper critical people like Jon Stewart actually have no idea how other governments run and that many actually run better than the US. He actually thought, despite it being a disaster, that it is still the best disaster. It kind of blew my mind that even someone like him can still think America is doing it the best.
