Stalin
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2008
- Messages
- 3,210
well word a read..i wish to debate points raised by the article, not fend off ill-conceived and badly written insulting one liners...
" ..Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown markets into turmoil among his allies and enemies alike. This anarchy reflects the fact that his major aim was not really tariff policy, but simply to cut income taxes on the wealthy, by replacing them with tariffs as the main source of government revenue. Extracting economic concessions from other countries is part of his justification for this tax shift as offering a nationalistic benefit for the United States.
His cover story, and perhaps even his belief, is that tariffs by themselves can revive American industry. But he has no plans to deal with the problems that caused America’s deindustrialization in the first place. There is no recognition of what made the original U.S. industrial program and that of most other nations so successful.
That program was based on public infrastructure, rising private industrial investment and wages protected by tariffs, and strong government regulation. Trump’s slash and burn policy is the reverse – to downsize government, weaken public regulation and sell off public infrastructure to help pay for his income tax cuts on his Donor Class.
This is just the neoliberal program under another guise. Trump misrepresents it as supportive of industry, not its antithesis. His move is not an industrial plan at all, but a power play to extract economic concessions from other countries while slashing income taxes on the wealthy. The immediate result will be wide-spread layoffs, business closures and consumer price inflation.
...
America’s remarkable industrial takeoff from the end of the Civil War through the outbreak of World War I has always embarrassed free-market economists. The United States’ success followed precisely the opposite policies from those that today’s economic orthodoxy advocates. The contrast is not only that between protectionist tariffs and free trade. The United States created a mixed public/private economy in which public infrastructure investment was developed as a “fourth factor of production,” not to be run as a profit-making business but to provide basic services at minimal prices so as to subsidize the private sector’s cost of living and doing business.
The logic underlying these policies was formulated already in the 1820s in Henry Clay’s American System of protective tariffs, internal improvements (public investment in transportation and other basic infrastructure), and national banking aimed at financing industrial development. An American School of Political Economy emerged to guide the nation’s industrialization based on the Economy of High Wages doctrine to promote labor productivity by raising living standards and public subsidy and support programs.
These are not the policies that today’s Republicans and Democrats advise. If Reaganomics, Thatcherism and Chicago’s free-market boys had guided American economic policy in the late nineteenth century, the United States would not have achieved its industrial dominance. So it hardly is surprising that the protectionist and public investment logic that guided American industrialization has been airbrushed out of U.S. history. It plays no role in Donald Trump’s false narrative to promote his abolition of progressive income taxes, downsizing of government and privatization sell-off of its assets..."
comrade stalin
yale
" ..Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown markets into turmoil among his allies and enemies alike. This anarchy reflects the fact that his major aim was not really tariff policy, but simply to cut income taxes on the wealthy, by replacing them with tariffs as the main source of government revenue. Extracting economic concessions from other countries is part of his justification for this tax shift as offering a nationalistic benefit for the United States.
His cover story, and perhaps even his belief, is that tariffs by themselves can revive American industry. But he has no plans to deal with the problems that caused America’s deindustrialization in the first place. There is no recognition of what made the original U.S. industrial program and that of most other nations so successful.
That program was based on public infrastructure, rising private industrial investment and wages protected by tariffs, and strong government regulation. Trump’s slash and burn policy is the reverse – to downsize government, weaken public regulation and sell off public infrastructure to help pay for his income tax cuts on his Donor Class.
This is just the neoliberal program under another guise. Trump misrepresents it as supportive of industry, not its antithesis. His move is not an industrial plan at all, but a power play to extract economic concessions from other countries while slashing income taxes on the wealthy. The immediate result will be wide-spread layoffs, business closures and consumer price inflation.
...
America’s remarkable industrial takeoff from the end of the Civil War through the outbreak of World War I has always embarrassed free-market economists. The United States’ success followed precisely the opposite policies from those that today’s economic orthodoxy advocates. The contrast is not only that between protectionist tariffs and free trade. The United States created a mixed public/private economy in which public infrastructure investment was developed as a “fourth factor of production,” not to be run as a profit-making business but to provide basic services at minimal prices so as to subsidize the private sector’s cost of living and doing business.
The logic underlying these policies was formulated already in the 1820s in Henry Clay’s American System of protective tariffs, internal improvements (public investment in transportation and other basic infrastructure), and national banking aimed at financing industrial development. An American School of Political Economy emerged to guide the nation’s industrialization based on the Economy of High Wages doctrine to promote labor productivity by raising living standards and public subsidy and support programs.
These are not the policies that today’s Republicans and Democrats advise. If Reaganomics, Thatcherism and Chicago’s free-market boys had guided American economic policy in the late nineteenth century, the United States would not have achieved its industrial dominance. So it hardly is surprising that the protectionist and public investment logic that guided American industrialization has been airbrushed out of U.S. history. It plays no role in Donald Trump’s false narrative to promote his abolition of progressive income taxes, downsizing of government and privatization sell-off of its assets..."
comrade stalin
yale
