• zedgeist@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Can someone explain the logic of taxing US citizens/companies as a way of punishing foreign countries? It’s never made sense to me. “You hurt my feefees, so I’m going to punch myself!”

    • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      By increasing the price of the product in your market, you decrease the demand for it in your market. This means the foreign companies lose out on revenue, and the foreign market loses out on export volume. The first decreases their GDP, the second weakens their currency.

      It’s not totally useless, but kind of a self destruction attack in that sense.

      • Karmanopoly@lemmy.worldOP
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        2 days ago

        What happens when it’s a product that is essential with no alternative… Like potash?

        And that potash is essential to the entire farming economy

        • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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          2 days ago

          The whole gambit fails on things with inelastic demand and no alternative sources.

          That said I think there are alternative sources for potash, Canada is just the largest supplier globally (around a third, I’m reading) and by far the largest supplier of the USA.

          Then it probably starts to matter how the price balances when one supplier can deliver but with higher shipping costs, and the other has lower shipping cost but a high tariff. If the tariff is high enough it would logically still depress the imports from Canada a bit.

          But it seems like a really stupid economic warfare move, because that for sure hurts the USA more than Canada. That said, this is a stupid administration in the USA, so who the fuck knows.

          • marcos@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            That said I think there are alternative sources for potash, Canada is just the largest supplier globally

            The supply is pretty much inelastic on single-presidency timespans, and I think the next largest exporter is Russia anyway.

    • taiyang@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      He likely doesn’t understand how they work (or if he does, is using it as a way to implement sales tax illegally).

      That said, traditionally they are used to discourage US consumers from buying competition to US businesses, like the tariffs they’ve had on light pickup trucks for a very long time that contributed to the shitty choices decades later. Also these are typically targeted on select products, since as you’ve seen, blanket tariffs on all goods from a country fuck up supply chains and screw everyone pretty badly.

      Both are bad, of course, just the latest ones are also very very stupid.

        • Carmakazi@piefed.social
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          2 days ago

          Keep in mind that for most of his life he’s been a sleazeball real estate developer/manager and that’s the lens he views many things through. Just get “the help” to do the landscaping, what’s the big deal?

          Doesn’t help that he’s one of the dumbest public figures alive, too.

          All that to say, yes, he literally said that about wildfires in the US northwest some years back.

          • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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            2 days ago

            It is ridiculous that he can be so stupid and yet americans are dumb enough that he can still get elected.

              • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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                12 hours ago

                I like to operate on this belief that most people are smarter than online media portrays them, but I’m often proven wrong by the people I meet in real life.

        • Rothe@piefed.social
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          2 days ago

          You should always have the opposite inclination when it comes to Trump, namely assuming it was something he said. And yes, he did say that.

  • Steve@startrek.website
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    2 days ago

    Funny how all the intermediate dominos are blank, just like fuckface’s thought process, or lack thereof.

  • damienr@ani.social
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    2 days ago

    Of all the dumb shit he’s said and continues to say, the raking the forest one in the context of forest fires, at it’s core, seems in line with what I’d encountered on the topic of forest management in regards to brush clearing and creating fire gaps as part of a comprehensive strategy of preventative measures and proper debris disposal.

    I don’t recall the specifics of the original quote, so I’m sure I’m just missing the explicit context that embodied his buffoonery, but this criticism always seemed more forced to me, taken literally to the point of absurdity, for the lulz, when there’s so much legitimate criticism of him elsewhere. Of course, I could just be an idiot rationalizing my own foolish understanding of forestry, haha.