Excuse me for a sec. I have to pick up my jaw from the floor. I am too stunned to even imagine what possible defense we have to Trumpensteinian ideas. Impeachment? Not likely with today’s GOP. Removal of Trump for cause?
In my yute, my economics prof allowed me to take a couple of grad courses in econometrics. In exchange I had to research and write about the impact caused by the 1922 legislation that put more than 22,000 imported items under a tariff. The resulting economic disaster, the trade wars, is now called the Great Depression.
Compounding the disaster was an unbelievably lax system of stock investment, in which people could purchase 10-20x times the face value of stocks by buying them on margin. While it could magnify gains in a rising market, margin trading also magnified, nay, compounded losses, wiping out hundreds of thousands of fortunes, hundreds of banks, and destroying the economies of the world.
Smoot Hawley may not have caused the Great Depression, but it clearly made it worse.
This from Raw Story:
President Donald Trump has reportedly cast aside his Cabinet’s international trade plan and is mulling a move to out-and-out economic warfare with the rest of the world, including current trading partners like China and Germany.
Axios.com said Friday that a tense Monday meeting in the White House’s Roosevelt room saw the president’s team divided into factions, the larger more moderate group and a small cabal of “America First advisers” who demanded that tariffs be placed on all imported products, including steel.
These tariffs — taxes or “duties” paid on items imported from other countries — could extend to include crucial manufacturing materials like aluminum, semiconductors, paper and household appliances like washing machines.
The vote in the cabinet meeting was 22 — 3, with the ignorant, idiotic, maddening, and moronic three consisting of Commerce Sec. Ross, Steve Bannon and his royal hairness Donnie Trump. Obviously, the majority of 3 won.
What could be driving this utterly insane idea? My guess is ego. Trump has seen the reports of the rest of the world laughing at him. He has been advised that almost every other world leader finds his behavior to be abhorrent, dangerous, and maddening. The snub he received from the UK (disinviting him from a fall visit), the almost bipartisan reactions to his attacks on Mika Brzezinski, and even formerly loyal GOP outlets like National Review and Wall Street Journal finding his behavior scary and not sane, perhaps the perceived attacks on his ego have so disturbed what ever fetid, rotting collection of slime that represents his psyche, that he wants to take it out on the world at large.
Let me be blunt: If Smoot 2 passes, there will be a depression like no one has ever seen or read of. With a world economy that relies on the internet, international banking agreements, international trade as the rule, not the exception, the passage of such tariffs will destroy the world economy. It will lead to world war. Pestilence. Mass destruction. Death. Widespread poverty and disease. Suffering on a global scale.