Fear is the mind killer.
Paul Muad'Ib
Tweet of the Day
Primum non nocere. Politicians need to put American consumers first, more choices,more competition for their dollars. Unilateral free trade!
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) August 23, 2015
More on the Hillary Clinton's Violation of Government Recordkeeping and National Security Laws and PoliciesFacebook Corner
(George Will). Trump’s immigration plan could spell doom for the GOP. The policy is: “They’ve got to go.”
Duh! I'm a progressive, liberal, Democrat. But do you think I wake up in the morning and think, I'm glad all these Mexicans are having babies here so they can grow up and vote for Democrats? Because that's what the right wing talk shows are saying. And the GOP instead of being moderate and reaching out to minorities instead has reached out more to the right wing radio audience. I even heard Ann Coulter encourage this.
The nativists are NOT conservatives! Do not conflate real libertarian-conservatives like me, who want our historical open immigration, with right-wing populists like Trump and Coulter. As you know, Reagan and the two Bushes were immigration reformers. Restrictions (beyond unconscionable Asian ones) started during WWI. As others had noted, there had been around 1M arrests at the beginning of the 1950's when Congress implemented the Bracero program, which cut arrests by 95%. What caused today's problem was :JFK/LBJ under union pressure ended the Bracero program.
As the ill-tempered, thin-skinned, incompetent, unqualified, flip-flopping unprincipled right-fascist Trump (ask me what I really think of the political opportunist), he's trying to buy the Presidency by pandering to the nativists.
(Independent Institute). "From time to time, people of my acquaintance were rounded up and deported, as if they were criminals. What was their crime? Picking cotton? If so, then I was guilty, too, because when I was growing up, many of the ranchers had yet to switch from Okies and Mexicans to mechanical pickers, and by the time I was eleven or twelve years old, I could fill a 12-foot sack and, having weighed my pickings, haul it up the ladder like a man to empty its contents into the cotton trailer."
Higgs has written a brilliant essay that is spot on. The economically illiterate usual nativists, xenophobes, and bigots are spamming the post; they worship the anti-liberty State.
Immigration laws are extension of private property laws. If you have a right to control who you allow into your house, onto your land, then the state, by extension of your personal property rights has the right and obligation to control those who enter its jurisdiction. Just because a citizen of a sovereign state has a child born in another sovereign state should not grant citizenship to that child.
No. Everyone has a natural right to migrate and in context (e.g., your property surrounds mine) easement rights to other property. This country has traditionally had open immigration policies, and birthright citizenship derives from our shared English common law tradition. The fourteenth amendment put it in stone. It was an issue at the time because California wanted to deny citizenship to Asian immigrants.
(Reason). How exactly will high import taxes help "make America great" again?
Trump has a paternalistic attitude that the American consumer is incapable of making his own purchase decisions. The American consumer benefits from the greater variety and price competition of open trade. Central planning of the economy is futile and counterproductive (one need look only at the latest poster boy of socialist failure, Venezuela). This is true whether we discuss economic nationalism from the left (Sanders) or the right (Trump). This absurd demagoguery--that American negotiators are "stupid" and foreign negotiators are "smart", but Trump will somehow impose his terms on the other party by the very force of his persona--goes beyond the gullibility of his minions.
Primum non nocere. The government is the problem, not the solution. We need to declare unilateral free trade!
[I forgot to clip the troll's exerpt. He was saying effectively I owed it to my country and my fellow citizens to buy American. ]
HELL NO! You don't have the right to tell me what to do with my own money, you bastard! You're just an asshole Statist. I don't owe another American anything unless I transact with him. If an American farm is able to produce bananas at $10/pound and if the supermarket down the street offers it at 59 cents/pound, there are a hell of a lot more things I could do with that $9.41--foreign or domestic goods and services. You slap an addtional $9.41/lb tariff on import bananas. I'm not buying bananas, period. I agree managed trade is not free trade, but consumers benefit from greater competition, not less. A corrupt businessman like Trump, who has admitted to buying political influence, would put government corruption on steroids. If you think the Chinese central planners are more effective than the free market, you haven't looked at what's been going on in China over the past year.
Tariffs have always been an issue. Where, when, how high or low and, ultimately, if at all.
Higher tariffs have occasionally worked throughout our history but the clear majority of the time they have been applied, they have backfired with damaging results and primarily to our workforce.
The Carter grain embargo of the Soviet Union has our now once world leading and primary Ag commodities competing with numerous other countries that stepped in to make up for what the Soviets could no longer get from us. The damage done to the American farmer and Ag industry is still visible as it started the death of the American family farm.
Higher steel tariffs in the 60's and 70's helped doom American steel in the long run by driving down the need because of the costs.
We should have equal tariffs if and only if they serve a need without significant risk. Determining this is at best a guessing game due to the unknown of how whomever the tariff effects will respond. Whether it's a foreign country or the American consumer or both.
One reality we must face is that we have been, are and will continue to be in a global marketplace and we have to compete, for the most part, in a global marketplace. This fact must be accepted and dealt with in every debate or discussion on regulations, tariffs, taxes and trade.
Trump knows this and is most likely referring to those tariffs that benefit others while punishing us and they do exist. He is also talking about a subject that very few truly understand. Obviously the author of this Reason piece has some understanding of tariffs but is allowing, knowingly or unknowingly, his bias or ignorance or both to pick only part of the tariffs issue to claim a serious fault with a presidential candidate known for using populist rhetoric.
No. Higher tariffs have NEVER worked. We should unilaterally declare unilateral free trade, period. Your blind faith in Trump is, at best, gullible. Trump lacks experience in global economics and economics in general. He has no clue about trade wars and their cascading effects. For example, one of the reasons farmers did poorly during the Depression is that trade wars largely shut down their export markets. Trump famously bashed Ford, threatening to slap tariffs on Mexican-produced vehicles. This is a violation of NAFTA, which is American law, and the President has no such power. He knew the average voter wouldn't know that. It's demagoguery; it's economic nationalism--and it's freaking dangerous to anyone who knows a modicum of real economics..
just charge the the equivalent of the cost to US producers of epa,OSHA Obamacare eyc their producers don worry about
HELL NO! You've got it ass backwards. You need to reduce noncompetitive government policies. It's not the fault of foreign producers that Americans elected this economically illiterate government.
Not high import taxes. Just make the import/export taxes even across the board. Level the playing field.
No. We should declare unilateral free trade.
If we had no or low corporate taxes here vs a tariff, then theoretically foreign products and prices would be lower in cars made here and businesses would move here. the problem is that prices could be raised to compensate for tariffs.
For foreign exporters, there are already logistics costs, not to mention things like currency risk. It's not clear why you mean by prices being raised; for example, do you mean the government would raise domestic taxes to accommodate loss of revenue from tariffs? Cutting tariffs would make imports more competitive. Overall, we still have supply and demand; if the foreign competitor wants to gain market share, he'll lower prices, not raise them, regardless of where the goods are produced; he would raise them reluctantly, only to protect margins. Now, of course, the government could try to manipulate supply to artificially support prices, e.g., by high tariffs. I suspect that the domestic industry would probaby lobby for increased barriers to entry.
No, the way to attract foreign investment includes more globally competitive economic policies (low taxes, streamlined red-tape/regulations, etc.)
Also monetary and cost of living deltas are unfairly causing jobs to outsource. An engineer in India mskes 14k a year per a company sponsored seminar I took a few years back. The Indian guy giving the seminar said that pay level there is enough to hire a chauffeur to drive you to work. His words, from living n working there. How do we compete with such huge deltas in costs? Here's how, tariffs.
HELL NO. You don't win by starting lose-lose trade wars, by attacking consumers. Trade wars hurt engineers in export industries as well. (From what I understand, young Indian engineers are also having problems finding jobs--and our economy is much more diverse, and engineers overall have a lower unemployment rate than the national average..)
One major problem is the sluggish global economy; if you had bought stock in Cisco and Intel in 2000, you still might be in the red on your investment, and those are blue-chip techies. I remember briefly working in Brazil in 1995, and the professionals there made maybe 25 cents to our dollar. All of us have had to adjust; as an IT consultant I'm still making less than I made in 2000; I've had to move out-of-state 4 times, take cuts in compensation.
What we need is less, not more government. You think that a man who has had 4 company bankruptcies knows the answer? Bullshit!
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Kenny Rogers (with Dottie West), "All I Ever Need Is You"
