WTH Trump? The economy is going great, so let’s slam on the brakes with a huge tariff on steel?
Couple that with a proposal to ignore the Constitution by taking away someone’s guns and letting the courts “sort it out later”, and you have the makings of a true autocrat. Maybe we should just round up folks we deem a threat because of race or religion and let the courts settle it later? Whoops we did that, that great man of the people FDR did it to Japanese Americans. How did that work out? Maybe those who think this is a good idea won’t mind if Trump daily rounds up the protesters outside of the White House, tosses them in jail, and waits until the “courts sort it out later”?
In other news, the White House Communications Director says she sometimes tells “white lies”. No, you are kidding me? A press agent spins the truth? I’m shocked and appalled. She was forced to resign. Trump better hope the next person in the job also has no qualms about fibbing. He won’t like the unvarnished truth being spread. No politician would. Remember Obama’s “blame it on the video” prevarication?
I see teens have moved on from eating Tide pods. Now they are seeing how long they can leave their arm on a hot stove burner. Yes, we should listen to this generation when it comes to our Constitutional rights; they are the future.
Young people are tired of being afraid of guns, tired of seeing their classmates shot. I can understand that. Sixty-four percent of road accidents in this country involve a cell phone. Maybe we should focus on that as a threat to society instead of one particular brand of rifle that is used less often in murders than common hand tools or knives?
Mixed feelings on the tariff thing. Locally we have been going through a on and off again steel plant being close and re-opened, this has happened three times in the last 20 years. We also have a problem with an aluminum plant that keeps demanding cheaper electrical power to compete. Strangley enough both are owned by foriegn investors. I check the impact on the employee's, over 1200 impacted. Something needs to be done before we lose the ability to make our own steel and aluminum and we are not far from that being a reality.
ReplyDeleteJames Old Guy
Historically, the correct response to foreign "dumping", state subsidized commodity production, has been tariffs.
ReplyDeleteMost of our foreign steel comes from Canada. Are they dumping?
ReplyDeleteWhen the US government put cash into GM were we then “dumping” cars?
I have been intimately involved in an industry beset by dumping and anti-dumping suits and tariffs. Dumping is complicated. It is beyond state sponsored industry. It is related to home country sale price and us sale price equivalency. This is protectionism.
Many think China is dumping cheap steel into the country. China provides very little of our steel imports. They use it to manufacture the over abundance of consumer goods and components into our retail and manufacturing sectors. A steel tariff will do nothing to alleviate that imbalance of trade.
ReplyDeleteWe will be living with the NAFTA fiasco for years. We have went from a country that produces to a consumer driven society. Reading the reactions to the proposal from europe and Canada doesn't seem to be shock to them. It's going to be interesting to see what other countries raise tariff's on from the US,since we don't really manufactor much of anything anymore.
ReplyDeleteJames Old Guy
It seems I read that the steel girders produced in China will not hold up in skyscrapers. This cannot be good or safe, no matter how cheap.
ReplyDeleteActually PP China sends very little raw steel to the US. As for their girders, they are using them in their own roads and skyscrapers. High rise buildings and apartments dominate the cityscapes in China. In fact I couldn’t believe e how much growth I saw in Shanghai between my visits in 2013 and 2017.
ReplyDelete