You're changing the subject. Say you have a U.S. company and a German company. They both manufacture the same product. They both incorporate Chinese parts into their product. The U.S. company starts paying 25% more for its parts, so it goes out of business, while its German competitor prospers.
your analogy is flawed. what happens when both companies play on even terms? free or at least fair trade. then it's down to who is simply the better company, as it should be.
You say "in a generally strong economy any business that fails has only themselves to blame. that is the case in any circumstances." No, in these circumstances, Donald Trump is to blame. And there are cases like this out there.
As to agriculture, for a good while Trump's additional support for agriculture was more than what we were raising from the new tariffs. How much sense does that make?
so what? you certainly know agriculture in the US has been subsidized for decades by the government. you don't deny that because you know it's true. so why is this suddenly all on Trump? it's not.
And as to your digging up some post where I say Trump's a genius if he gets China to play fair and both countries reduce tariffs to "0", well, he's not a genius. On this issue he's just as stupid as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. How about digging up some of my posts showing evidence for the benefit of "0" tariffs, or showing the U.S. under Trump has the highest tariffs in the developed world outside of possibly Norway.
i didn't say you said Trump was a genius. i said you agreed trade was unfair to the US. and you did. so don't make any more of it than that.
You question my patriotism because you support a senseless trade war that hurts everyone except the crony capitalists who hide behind tariffs.
it is unpatriotic to support unfair trade that harms the US. Trump has said he wants free trade, if not that, fair trade. how does that harm anyone? in the long run it's a benefit to all countries.
Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid
You and I agree 100% about agricultural subsidies and the benefits of free and fair trade. The way you interpret what's happening in the USA is the reverse of reality though. You're stretching hard to justify policies that make no sense.
As to your first point, about my analogy, it's Trump who created the conditions. The American and German companies compete on an equal basis.
Trump comes up with a system where trade is NOT free and NOT fair, so that the American company's cost of raw materials is higher than the German company's. They can't compete on an equal basis because of Trump's tariffs.
About agriculture you say for all you care American farmers can blast themselves in the head with shotguns because of all their whining and subsidies, then you defend their Enabler In Chief, Donald Trump, who upped the subsidies for a while in excess of what we were getting off the new tariffs.
As to patriotism, apparently you're not patriotic, by your own reasoning. Trump is responsible for unfair, unfree trade that hurts the USA and you're firmly behind him on this.
You're a smart guy. You need to take the blinders off. If you want to argue Trump is better than Warren or Biden I'll agree with you. But you don't need to go through the mental masturbation to be ideologically pure, with respect to a leader who changes his mind all the time anyway.
