When former President Donald Trump was asked about his plan to lower the cost of groceries, he said that he would slap tariffs on foreign food imports.Scott Lincicome and Sophia Bagley of the libertarian Cato Institute, however, believe Trump's plan is "deranged" and they write in The Atlantic that ...
  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    63·
    11 days ago

    Why do average Americans still rate Trump as better on the economy? It’s certainly nothing rational.

  • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    11 days ago

    I’ll slap tariffs on banana imports so people buy domestically grown bananas!

    I’ll slap tariffs on cocoa imports so people buy domestically grown cocoa!

  • toots@lemm.ee
    English
    17·
    11 days ago

    Something belched up thoughtlessly does not count as a plan.

  • OlinOfTheHillPeople@lemmy.world
    15·
    11 days ago

    Here’s his VP’s plan:

    “I think we are increasingly in a situation where we are going to choose between one or the other. We’re going to have to get a little uncomfortable on some of these things or maybe you’re going to have to be willing to pay a little bit more for certain consumer goods. We may even have to be willing to attack some of the companies financially that are waging war on the American people.”

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
      2·
      10 days ago

      Hey, that sounds a little bit like anti-monopoly talk, doesn’t it. Crazy how price fixing might be bad for the average person.

      … I don’t think that’s where he was going, but that’s where he started.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    14·
    11 days ago

    I’d quibble with calling it “deranged”. Illogical sure. Nonsense, even ridiculous, but not deranged.

    His only real play has always been to define a scapegoat and stoke outrage. That’s the point here, rather than anything useful

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
      3·
      10 days ago

      No, slapping tarrifs on imported goods means they become more expensive as the tarrifs will be included in the price.

      If you think that american companies that produce domestically (untariffed) will not raise their prices to maximize their profits you might have what Trump has. Plus a lot of their raw materials/components come from abroad and will also be tariffed.

      Laat round of tarrifs Trump imposed led to retaliatory tarrifs by china. This hurt the US farmers so hard that most of the us tarrifs revenue went to farmers as subsidies.

  • Sludgeyy@lemmy.world
    7·
    10 days ago

    Hey! USA Avocado industry would be thriving if Mexico wasn’t shipping all theirs in without a tariff.

    But a sable genius once said. “What we have is a thing called the gasoline. We have gasoline. We have so much gasoline, we don’t know what to do. They don’t have gasoline. So why are we making a product that they dominate? They’re going to dominate.”

    This was in reply to the question “How are you going to bring down the cost of food and groceries?”.

    I think you can apply the same logic here. “What we have is a thing called the corn. We have corn. We have so much corn, we don’t know what to do. They don’t have corn. So why are we making a product [avocados] that they dominate? They’re [Mexico] going to dominate.”