belval
I am Canadian so I am "biased" (whatever that means in this context) but tariffs on resources are just non-sensical to me.
Take Aluminium, it's produced in Canada because our energy cost is low, we don't even have bauxite deposits and it is shipped by boat to the factories. Adding tariffs on that doesn't lead to better Aluminium production in the US since energy in the US is still expensive.
I thought the point was to on-shore manufacturing, so things like planes and cars, all of which would need cheap steel and aluminium to compensate for the higher US manufacturing cost.
Still confused about the tariffs on Canada at all though seeing as I thought the mindset was more us-vs-China, but I guess that deserves its own discussion.
garou
Taxes of importation would be to protect the internal market of the taxed good. Taxes on raw materials that the country does not extract/produce enough somehow pointless and the consumers will pay for it.
Eventually your president will step back (as always).
Your president just want to take the news with these hot topics and bypass quietly worse things that will not appear in the big journals. It is not necessary to be a communist to see it.
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poli3
[dead]
caseyy
I'm not sure Trump news is the right content for Hacker News. It would be relevant if it related to technologists and their businesses, but this is a bit out of scope in my opinion.
Thankfully, it got flagged away. From the aggressive downvoting, I can already see that this was going to make a lot of unnecessary waves and stress.
This 1980 book
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...
made a damning indictment of the protectionist policies pushed by the Mellon family [1] to support US Steel which was unwilling to replace its obsolete open health furnaces with the modern basic oxygen and electric arc plants that competitors were using in Europe and Japan. It not only hurt US consumers but it hurt the rest of US industry, particularly the car industry, because it meant our industry was paying more to make products out of inferior quality steel.
Tariffs are not an "us-vs-them" policy but rather a "them-vs-us" policy which will let tired monopolies in the US conspire with tired monopolies in other countries to not compete.
[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife