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It is their preference for out-group-misery over in-group flourishing.
For all their faults, previous govts have never taken this much joy in hurting their outgroup. Bannon doesn't care about the flourishing of white people. He cares that America doesn't facilitate the flourishing of non-whites (non-natives?). Elon clearly cares about empowering his lackeys and winning, more than facilitating a good life for Americans at large.
I agree that Bannon isn't a Nazi. But, I have yet to hear him recommend policies that would facilitate positive change.
He can point out problems all day. No solutions. No appeal to positive change. No optimism. Just finger pointing and loud gestures.
That's Nazi mentality. Germany can't flourish until the jews are genocided. What fiscal policy will enable a pure-Aryan Germany to flourish ? Who cares. We need to get the jews out first. We'll figure out the big solutions later. Ofc, this mentality horse-shoes quite hard. Bernie, AOC, Stalin & Mao have similar traits, with different outgroups. (with varying degrees of severity)
Centrists look incompetent because nothing happens. But, gridlock can be feature too. Decision by committee means that no one group gets a raw-deal. In a functioning nation like the US (richest country), the govts job is to preserve processes, not uproot them. Drastic actions make more sense in completely broken systems like Ecuador, Argentina or places with no systems like newly independent Singapore.
Now America isn't perfect. Many of its systems are broken and deserve to be disrupted. Healthcare billing is broken. Border enforcement is broken. Accountability for military spending is missing entirely. The zoning and urban planning setups are broken. I have yet to see Elon do anything towards disrupting [1] any of these truly broken American systems. Leads to me suspect that disruptions are chosen with the goal of hurting enemies rather than fixing systems.
[1] I have heard whispers of LVT. That would be a welcome change. I have yet to see anything substantial on it. Until then, my point stands.
There is nothing clear about this, and I'm not sure what other option you have. Tariffs work to subsidize domestic industry. Tariffs allowed Japan to make cars. They work on steel, on manufactured goods, on everything.
They don't work in a month, and if your timeframe is measured in months then of course they're never going to work.
If all it took were Indians, then India would do it. They haven't, and they can't, because Indians are neither necessary nor sufficient. The same with Russians, and the same with Chinese.
That's a mild way of putting it. There were millions and millions of brown foreigners imported in the last administration for the purpose of displacing the native American population, again. It's worse now than than it was with the Italians and Irish, and those were as bad as you've ever heard. No Irish Need Apply was good, actually, and an appropriate reaction to importing foreigners to displace natives.
This is also why
in the first place. You're complaining about problems, but don't believe in the solutions, so you pretend they're not being offered.
Bold of you to assume the Biden border policies had a purpose other than 'doing not Trump'.
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They "work" on steel in the sense that they make American steel competitive at the cost of making stuff made out of American steel not competitive. It also happens to be the case that making stuff out of steel employs a lot more people than making steel. Solve for the equilibrium.
Every economist likes to think you can have the dirty raw material processing happening elsewhere and keep the fun, clean, super-profitable stuff for yourself. The problem as I see it is:
This is why successive countries were able to move from 'raw processing and cheap junk' to 'serious manufacturing contender' to 'holy shit, everything's made in X now'. It's also why places like the UK or the Rust Belt no longer do even advanced manufacturing for the most part.
We're outside the realm of "economists think" and in the realm of "past experience shows".
Even if true, this isn't an argument to speed up the process of eliminating manufacturing jobs by introducing steel tariffs. The American steel industry had plenty of time to stay competitive with cheaper countries and it has completely failed. Now you want to reward them so they can keep being fat and inefficient and at the same time make it so that nobody in the country can actually make competitively priced goods out of steel?
I doubt this is true in any meaningful sense, but in any case, we already have the next, more desirable steps. Why kneecap them by putting tariffs on steel?
When those countries were doing raw processing, were they as uncompetitive as American steel? Or were they cheaper than the competition and therefore entered into a virtuous cycle? Meanwhile, putting tariffs on steel in an advanced economy is ensuring that you'll produce steel but hardly anything out of it, because it's just not cost effective. This a kind of cargo cult approach - China made a bunch of steel and they were blessed with cargo. We must go back to making our own steel at any price, and we too will be blessed with cargo.
The starting points here are different. If you're starting from scratch as a developing economy, it makes sense to start with raw processing because that's the simplest thing you can get in on and it lets you build business connections, etc.
As a developed economy that already has a long tradition of manufacturing further along the value chain, it doesn't make sense to tariff steel in the hopes of reinvigorating the manufacturing that's further along the chain. You are already making the stuff that competitors wanted to make all along, just make it cheaper and better. Steel tariffs pull in the opposite direction.
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Quasi-Keynsian war economy with Konzern characteristics. The Nazis absolutely had plans for all sorts of things beyond just getting rid of the jews - not necessarily good plans, but they were there, largely in advance of taking power. The communist party also had lots of plans. Its quite typical of totalitarianism really. Very few political movements ever had as little plan as Trump I, which is precisely why he didnt do a whole lot. This idea that that makes it extra dangerous seems to be entirely a just so story.
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