Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman
Jim,
Today's rout in the stock market and the coinciding dump in folk's 401k's are a reflection of the looming recession on the horizon as a direct result of Trump's disastrous trade war with China. American manufacturing is already in recession. The American farmers union is on record today as saying Trump is making things worse and not better. The deficit, which should be at least slowing in a thriving economy, is going ballistic and all the while not a peep from the hypoctritical GOP that hounded Obama for less. The Fed can temporarily help matters by dropping interest rates but they don't have a lot of wriggle room. In the end it's another sad story of another Republican and another recession...
LOL.....the sky is falling, the sky is falling
The facts on tariffs just dont add up to the hysteria you are blowing out your ass Rod......Tariffs are nothing more than taxes. Trump cut taxes by far more than he added in tariffs
President Trump hiked tariffs from 10% to 25% on about $200 billion in Chinese imports. In other words, he just raised taxes by … $30 billion a year.
Oh, no!
The total amount we all paid in taxes last year — federal, state and local — was $5.51 trillion. This tax increase that has everyone’s panties in a twist is a rounding error.
Even if Trump slapped 25% taxes on all Chinese imports, it would come to a tax hike of … $135 billion a year. U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) last year: $20.5 trillion. So even this supposedly scary “escalation” of this “tariff war” would, er, raise our total tax bill from 26.9% of GDP all the way to 27.5% of GDP.
Oh, and isn’t it interesting to see some people’s priorities? Apparently the most shocking part of this trivial tax hike is that it might raise the price of new Apple AAPL, -4.62% iPhones.
Right now we export less to China than we do to Japan, South Korea and Singapore put together. That’s the point. So the effect of China’s new tariffs on the U.S. are yet another rounding error. Even if China banned all imports from the U.S., that would amount to only 0.6% of our gross domestic product. And we’d sell the stuff somewhere else.
Don’t buy the hysteria. President Trump is simply trying to pressure our biggest competitor to buy more American goods. That should be a good thing, even if you don’t like him.
