Tariffs, Taxes, Trade, Trends (August 26, 2019)
. . .
K “They’re back.”
J “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the economy. The tariff jaws are opening back up and may devour us.”
. . .
J “A tariff is a tax. A tax raises revenue and raises the price of the tariffed/taxed product and shapes the behavior of the product’s consumers.”
K “Our good friend price elasticity. The demand for the tariffed/taxed product changes and in most situations goes down but in unpredictable ways and at a unpredictable rate in different economies and markets and regions and sectors.”
J “The economists do not know what is going on in the economy as it is and definitely do not know what is going on when the tariff curve ball is pitched into the mess and the morass.”
. . .
K “The goal is to encourage domestic production, but domestic production is dead. No businessperson is willing or able or capable of responding to the possibility that there may be some ephemeral interest in a product in America based on a whim in policy this week.”
J “Why make the effort. Uncertainty is the greatest foe. No one is going to open a manufacturing plant in America except perhaps one run by robots that are cheaper than foreign labor.”
. . .
J “A tariff is a thinly disguised act of war.”
K “This economy is so fractured and fissured and fraudulent that the next jolt could be the Big Jolt.”
. . .
[See the e-commentary at “Terrorized By Trumpi’s Tariffs (March 5, 2018)”, “Tariffs Are Tarrible. Oh, And Happy Bastille Day! (July 16, 2018)” and “‘Mericanize: Monetize, Mechanize And Militarize (December 30, 2013)”.
Bumper sticker of the week:
“Powerful nations can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.” Mikhail Bakunin
e-commentary 
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