Post Reply - WAR

   DJ, On US tariffs;
Ben Norton
@BenjaminNorton
·
5h
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Trump supporters claim his tariffs aim to reindustrialize the US (which won't work without a real industrial policy), or to pressure countries to agree to a "Mar-a-Lago Accord". I'm skeptical.

I increasingly think Trump's goal is to use tariffs to replace income taxes. Trump in fact floated this idea in the past, and it seems like he is now attempting it with his huge tariffs on countries around the world.

While Trump slashes taxes on the rich and corporations, he hopes to make up for lost government revenue by imposing high tariffs. This will disproportionately hurt the bottom 90% of the population, while benefiting the richest 10%.

This idea is crazy and mathematically illiterate, and tariffs couldn't generate nearly enough revenue to make up for reduced income taxes -- but that has never stopped Trump before.

Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, meaning they are essentially a tax on consumption (given that the US imports so many consumer goods). Tariffs are also an extremely regressive tax. They put the burden of taxation on the poor and working class, who spend much more of their paychecks on cheap imported consumer goods, and therefore have a much higher marginal propensity to consume. Consumption by wealthy elites is not significantly impacted by tariffs, and they have a low marginal propensity to consume.

So tariffs are Trump's way of imposing an enormous regressive tax, moving the burden of taxation off of capital and onto labor.

DJ, A lot of economic "data" is "flexible"....GDP may "grow" when people have to pay a higher price for goods and services...So US imports are getting more expensive-in theory-may "boost" the US GDP...Meaning US debts may expand further...translating other countries will pay for US wars..(like they so far often did). 

One major reason why trump still did not attack Iran may be in trump did not get any real deal with Russia over UKraine (or zelensky to hand over UKraine to a US billionaire elite). 

So trump is still stuck in a "biden-made" UKraine war...The US may stay away from Ramstein-Germany "support UKraine" meetings..most other "western" countries still go for that war...NOT the war trump would like to start against Iran...

Another reason may be the US -in fact- simply can NOT pay for such a war with Iran...There are limits to debts...US need to increase replacement of weapons etc. Replacing air defense from East Asia to West Asia may indicate shortages of air defense...

A third reason may be that even with a lot of bombing Yemen still does not collapse...Gaza-Palestinians are still fighting US created USrael...USrael-with lots of help from NATO- fighting in Lebanon, Syria...

A major attack on Iran would further overstretch/exhaust US/NATO forces...