Surprising optimism

Economist Jeff Rubin, interviewed by Tara Henley, offers one big positive surprise plus some unsurprising facts.

Surprising: Rubin points out that Trump’s first term imposed new tariffs on China**. Biden bashed the tariffs for partisan advantage, but actually continued and expanded the tariffs. Now Trump 2 is imposing more. These tariffs are bringing one genuine positive effect. We aren’t growing new industry yet, but the LOSS of industrial jobs has stopped. Before the tariffs, companies simply fired striking workers and moved to China, so unions couldn’t raise wages. Since 2018 the companies recognize that they can’t gain by moving, so they’re giving in to union demands. Industrial wages are rising for the first time in many decades, and prices are rising at the same time. We’re moving back toward the 1920-1980 setup with higher wages, more useful work, and higher prices. Back to Fordism. Of course our Wall Street owned media won’t tell us about this.

PURELY GOOD!!!!! MORE, PLEASE!!!! BUILD MORE FACTORIES NOW!!!!!

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Unsurprising: our tariffs are helping China and Russia, not hurting them. As I’ve repeated a billion times, sanctions and tariffs force a country to break out of Free Trade dependence and DEVELOP ITS OWN SKILLS. The Soviet system was BASED on developing Russia’s own skills to the max, so it didn’t NEED free trade.

It’s refreshing to hear an ECONOMIST who understands globalism accurately. Most of our “experts” and all of our media insist that tariffs are the worst sin in history, and maintain the bizarre Shared Lie that blames the Smoot-Hawley tariff instead of Wall Street terrorists for the 1930 depression.

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** Footnote for clarity: Tariffs against cheap-labor countries like China can have a good effect if our policy also encourages industry to build here. Such tariffs make the cheap labor equal in cost to local labor, so a company can’t raise Share Value by moving overseas. Tariffs against Canada make no sense at all. Canada’s labor cost is the same as ours, so there’s no automatic motivation to move there. Our industries have been running Canadian branches for 120 years. Before NAFTA those branches weren’t sending any products here. After NAFTA there’s more back and forth traffic, but Canadian jobs were never stolen from American jobs. Penalizing Canada seems to be part of Trump’s LBO takeover, not part of normal industrial policy.

Conclusion: Tariffs for the right reason end up helping both sides when the target responds correctly. Tariffs for the wrong reason hurt both sides.