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China just retaliated with Tariffs of their own, targeting US Goods being imported into China. $60 Billion worth of NEW Tariffs, designed to drop the demand for US Goods in China — even further.
Chinese consumers will now be paying more for American products — primarily the products sold by US farmers. Farmers who were already hit hard by the last round of Tariffs, are now having to endure even more market pain. For many, it is breaking-point pain.
All because fake Billionaire Donald Trump is NOT an Economic Savant. Even though he somehow had managed to convince much of America, indeed much of the world, that he was some sort of “Business genius”.
Hell, the Economic Conman has been regularly tweeting, that the Tariffs he imposes (on Chinese Goods imported to America) at really a “Tax on China” — paid by China — when the exact opposite is true:
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Even if we accept all of Trump's numbers as accurate, and there's no reason to believe anything that Trump tweets is, it's not China that's paying the tariffs in the long run, it's American consumers. A tariff is a tax on goods imported into the U.S., and companies faced with that tax are just going to pass the cost on to the Americans who buy their goods. That $15 billion could certainly ease some of the strain that farmers are feeling as the slump in Chinese demand is causing the price of crops to drop, but a similar $12 billion relief package last year did little to take the pressure off of them. As the Des Moines Register reports, Midwestern farmers in particular are getting hit hard as prices for corn and soybeans are plummeting. And they don't see things getting better:
"It's a physical and mental challenge," said Renner, a 43-year-old who farms near Klemme, a town of about 500 people west of Clear Lake [Iowa]. "A lot of us think it can't get any worse, that it can only go up from here. But that's probably not a safe bet," he said.
More to the point, Trump and congressional Republicans have been crowing about socialism for a long time now. [...] But now, Trump is calling for the U.S. government to purchase billions of dollars' worth of products produced by American farmers, which is much closer to the centralized state planning that Republicans hate whenever it doesn't benefit them or people they hope will vote for them.
www.gq.com — May 13, 2019
I heard one pundit put it recently: “It’s like were borrowing money from China — so we can afford to pay for the Soybean crops that Iowa farmers can’t sell to China anymore.”
What is wrong with this picture?
But after weeks of optimistic statements by Trump and members of his administration about how trade talks were progressing, Trump abruptly escalated tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods last week and opened the door to even more --
prompting Beijing to hit back Monday by raising the tariff rate on $60 billion of US items.
The escalated tariffs don't hit agricultural products directly, since most were already facing a 25% tariff imposed by China last year. But the news still sent commodity prices plummeting.
"The President of the United States owes farmers like myself some type of plan of action," John Wesley Boyd Jr., a soybean farmer in Baskerville, Virginia, told CNN's Brianna Keilar on Monday.
"Farmers were his base. They helped elect this president ... and now he's turning his back on America's farmers when we need him the most," he added.
So the GOP is just fine with Social Programs to bail out the Loses that THEY cause. Well someone bookmark that. Because we haven’t seen the last of Trump-signature Deal-making.
Putting Donald Trump in charge of a Trade War — is like putting Kim Jong Un in charge of Nuclear Disarmament Talks. The results are not going to help anyone — in the long run.
Seeing how well Donald has tanked his “little” Economic War-with-China-vendetta — I can’t wait to see what he ends up doing, when John Bolton finally goes there — and starts talking about “tactical nuclear strikes” …
Bolton declared that “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime.” But, he added, “we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”
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The threat being promulgated by Bolton, CENTCOM, Pompeo, and the media ignores the reality that Iran has been preparing to strike American military forces in the Middle East for years as part of its efforts towards self-defense. Iran’s short-range ballistic missile capability is part of a larger missile threat that could, at a moment’s notice, blanket U.S. bases in the region with high explosives. Dispatching the Abraham Lincoln battle group and a B-52 task force to the Middle East is an act of theatrical bravado that will do nothing to change that. Iran’s missile force is, for the most part, mobile.
The American experience in the Gulf War, and Saudi Arabia’s experience in Yemen, should underscore the reality that mobile relocatable targets such as Iran’s missile arsenal are virtually impossible to interdict through airpower.
By purposefully escalating tensions with Iran using manufactured intelligence about an all too real threat, Bolton is setting the country up for a war it is not prepared to fight and most likely cannot win.
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Is America Ready for John Bolton’s War With Iran?
www.theamericanconservative.com — May 10, 2019
Well, if the fake Leader is as good as calming Military tensions, and he isn’t with Economic tensions — at least we won’t have to worry about bailing out the Farmers anymore. We will all have bigger Fears to somehow try put back into the Trump-bluster war-chest.
Once he tires of all the Toy-battalions scattered across the game-board. With no clear achievable objectives, anywhere in sight.
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Why do Americans always have to learn our lessons — the hard way? (American heartland Farmers, that includes you too.)
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