IkePoR said:
sc94597 said:
The fact that inflation is the main reason why Trump won, and his two main policies: tariffs and deporting undocumented workers are highly inflationary is a great irony.Â
Trump will succeed the most by not succeeding in his campaign promises here.Â
Why are tariffs inflationary? The point of tariffs are to create a price-floor to make local manufacturing competitive with foreign manufacturing. They are taxes designed to make up for the fact that companies can underpay workers abroad to sell products at a lower price (while netting some margin with the arbitration for themselves.) The whole point of them is to make sure prices go up.Â
Why is deportation inflationary? Many industries that almost all Americans consume and were complaining about price-increases in: construction, farming, housekeeping, and child-care have 10-30% of their workforce as undocumented immigrants. If you deport them, that gives the remaining workers more bargaining power and ability to request higher wages. This is good for those workers of course, but the business/owners are going to want to offset a part of that onto their customers.Â
If we could teleport back in time and give Democrats a message, they should have focused on how to explain this to as many people as possible, while pushing the fact that they were ready to subsidize child-care, home-purchasing, etc and save Americans money. They should have also found a way to explain that while inflation was high over the course of the pandemic it has finally come down and while they are still not feeling the effects it takes a bit of time for these effects to be felt/noticed, just as it did for the high inflation of 2022 to be felt in 2023 and 2024. Democrats just threw graphs at these people without doing the work to ELI5 for them.Â
Edit:Â Â
Democrats love to talk about how they appeal to the educated, without doing the work to appeal to the less formally educated by educating them in a non-condescending manner. That is what needs to change.Â
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Can you explain how to improve the economy in a non-inflationary manner, and that is better than tariffs?Â
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Define "improve the economy." Do you want policy that focuses on helping people as consumers or specific sub-sets of workers?
If the problem is high-inflation, then no tariffs aren't the solution. If the problem is a lack of jobs available in certain regions or industries, then tariffs can be part of the solution (but you probably should be targeted in how you do them. They aren't a blunt tool.)
Given that people are mainly concerned about inflation and not jobs (we are at a very low unemployment rate currently, which is partly why inflation was high in 2021 and 2022) then tariffs are a very bad idea.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 07 November 2024
