The USA’s new Golden Age starts today. It’s the president’s flagship policy, all based around his favourite word: tariffs. This is his opportunity to show that he can run the country just as well as he does his businesses.
He started this on day one, raising arbitrary tariffs at random levels. Cancelling them. Reapplying them. Increasing them. Delaying them. Nobody seems to know what is going on. Fortunately, they can spend their time congratulating themselves on having such a strong and decisive leader.
In the past, there were monolithic factories where raw materials went in at the start, with finished products coming out at the end. This is not the way things work anymore. Components are produced all over the world and supplied just in time to the assembly process. It’s more efficient.
All that tariff increases do is increase costs at particular points in the process. Some components can even be hit several times by tariffs as they move along the chain.
These tariffs will not recreate the old and inefficient processes of the past, at least not within the next five years. They will also do nothing to reduce the trade deficit, its stated aim. All they will do is raise costs for USAian businesses and consumers, and create loads of unnecessary trouble for everybody else in the world.
In other news, Marine Le Pen has been convicted of corruption and banned from office. This sort of thing is possible.