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In the first place, I'm not perceiving the predictions of doom to come from "the most histrionic leftists", but rather "the most histrionic economists". Secondly, it seems straightforwardly useful to positively identify who the "most histrionic" people are so that we can stop listening to them. I learned that Paul Krugman was one of these people based on his predictions in 2016, and I'll never take anything he says seriously again. How is this not the straightforwardly correct thing to do?
It seems very clear to me that this policy is far, far outside anything the Economics consensus considers reasonable. If you disagree, the obvious next step would be for me to look for prominent economists predicting doom; I have not looked yet, but I'm confident they won't be hard to find. Do you think I'm wrong? "Less growth" doesn't cut it; we have "less growth" at home. Your list of mitigating factors seems entirely reasonable, but all of them apply just as easily to "this is a good idea, actually". Bad policies are bad because they have bad results, right? So what are the bad results we should expect?
I may be completely misinterpreting your post but it seems to me that the tariffs are clearly intended to be temporary bargaining chips. Long-term consequences are not expected.
That's not clear to me, but then, my sense with Trump generally is that we're flying blind. If this is a bargaining position, what result is he trying to extract from Canada?
One possible option might be to help accelerate the decline of the Liberal party and make the Conservatives commit as allies to Trump personally. That might make sense; I think the general international consensus has derived a very large part of its power from being the party of "normality", so ending normality might work directly against them if it can be done without excessive cost.
Mainly, I'm interested in people nailing down what they actually see happening and what they expect the results to be. I personally have been at least loosely thinking of these as permanent measures, with the goal being eventual re-industrialization of the US, but will happily admit that I might be wildly off-base with that.
If this was someone else doing it, maybe, but Trump doesn’t play 5D chess.
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Please post some examples. There are plenty of bad economists out there writing for progressive think tanks or leftist op-ed sections, but they're already widely reviled by the Right, so they don't serve as good examples.
I want to see economists who are regarded as at least somewhat neutral who are clearly saying that this will be an economic catastrophe, and not just "bad" to some degree. Preferably in an article of some sort, not just Twitter shitposts.
E.g. Noah Smith is probably most left-leaning econ guy I follow, and his article states unequivocally that the tariffs will be bad, but in terms of how bad exactly, he posts an image where the long-run effects are all in the single digits, mostly in the low single digits. This is bad obviously, but hardly cataclysmic.
Price increases on goods most exposed to the tariffs + less economic growth than we'd have in an alternative reality where the tariffs don't happen. As far as I know, this is the consensus of most economists.
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