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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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One topic that I was thinking about lately is regarding tariffs and some sort of hidden cognitive dissonance behind the whole policy. It seems to be a clash of different type of worldviews, one being the so called industrial policy, which is a policy where a nation creates favorable environment to grow domestic behemoths and grow their domestic economy. There are multiple examples of countries employing this type of policy such as South Korea, China or even Japan back in the day.

On the other side of the spectrum you have standard economic theory in favor of free trade. It has formidable range of theories for why this is ultimately the best policy, the most important one being the concept of comparative advantage.

Now to get back to the cognitive dissonance stuff, there is one huge question. If you are in the latter camp where you oppose tariffs and trade regulations - why are these people not against retaliatory tariffs? From this standpoint it seems as if you are shooting yourselves in the foot. If USA imposes tariffs on some goods like steel, then you can actually take advantage of that in free trade framework: buy state subsidized steel from USA to build your own infrastructure and factories for cheap, and then use this advantage to sell things you produce back. And even if USA decides for some broad tariff regime, it still enables you to use this advantage to sell goods to other countries. Under this framework the only country punished should be USA and the rest of the free trade world should be winners.

The other side of the cognitive dissonance is that in fact at least during last few decades a lot of economists are actually pro industrial policy. You can easily find articles like these where protective measures are praised. The same goes for EU, which explicitly aims to subsidize certain industries.

I think that the most interesting example here is China, which especially subsidies the basic production capacities: energy, steel, concrete, basic chemicals etc. These basic commodities tend to "supercharge" the rest of the economy, mostly as they are hard to transport and thus create at least local monopolies. It also benefits and/or suffers from so called double marginalization problem, as costs of goods at the bottom of supply chain propagate positively/negatively throughout the rest of the economy. Moreover creating complete supply chain in certain place increases intangible "know how". You can then have experts on the whole supply chain working collaboratively with each other to produce superior goods cheaper. Think of Detroit being the old car hub or Silicon Valley as a hub for software or Hollywood for entertainment industry.

To be frank I am leaning more into industrial policy side now, especially since COVID-19. Noah Smith has an article defending such a policy for national security reasons. But in the end with how complicated the supply chains are, this becomes almost an impossible conundrum. Just take chip production issue: you have to have mining facilities for pure silicon and other valuable minerals. Then you have to have companies designing new chips in research labs. Then you have companies capable of producing highly sophisticated lithographs capable of producing high-end chips, such as ASML in Netherlands. Then you have to have companies capable of producing said chips such as TSMC in Taiwan. The whole system is very fragile and even one of the chains in the links proves security risk. The same goes for pharmaceutics or other technologies.

If states were a single economic entity, then one would really need game theory to explain why harming yourself plus the party that defected from free trade would be a good idea. But states are generally not a single economic entity.

For consumer goods, a simplified model would be that a state contains both industry which builds consumer goods -- cars, smartphones, TVs and the like -- and people which buy such things.

The consumer side -- which will bear the impact of import tariffs -- has a coordination problem. If everyone has to pay 50$ more for a smartphone, that is not worth anyone's time to really get upset about. This is especially true because the consumer might not even know what fraction of the prices they are paying is tariffs. And of course, they also will not see the international competition which decided not to compete in their domestic market in the first place. Even for major investments like cars, it is hard to get upset if you don't know what offers you might be missing.

The supply side -- both the workers and the owners of the factories -- has no such coordination problem. If a small minority in a country is losing their jobs due to tariffs imposed by another country, that is very likely to result in political action.

In net, import tariffs hurt your own consumers and foreign producers, but because nobody cares about the trivial pain of a lot of consumers, they can be treated as mostly hurting the foreign producers.

In other areas, things work differently and a state is closer to a single economic entity. For example, for military hardware or critical means of production (such as the lithography machines you mentioned), things are reversed. China does not go: "Europe, if you impose a tariff on our electric cars, we will retaliate by placing high tariffs on ASML", as that would hurt their semiconductor industry far more than it would hurt a niche European company. Instead, strategic concerns dominate here. If you buy weapon systems, you want to be reasonable certain that you will still get ammo for them in conflicts which you anticipate. If you sell weapons, the strategic impact of them will likely be a more important consideration than just making a quick buck. I guess on the buyers side, strategic considerations might work kind of like a tariff -- if country A would be indifferent between buying a 50M$ fighter jet from country B or a 100M$ jet from country C, this could be seen as a 100% tariff on fighter jets from country B (imposed by and paid for by country A, so no money is changing hands). Of course, on the supply side of things, often it is "we will not sell the AI chips / ICBMs to you for any price you would care to pay" instead.

Tarriffs are bad.

Tarriffs are bad because they are a particularly inefficient sort of tax. Retaliatory tariffs are bad because they're tariffs.

But--

To the extent that it is pigouvian-- to the extent that it promotes industries that have positive externalities (like, e.g., the defense industry, or the propaganda media industry) Industrial policy may be good. The efficient way to do it is probably some mix of Land Value Tax and subsidies though. That and getting rid of intellectual property law. That part is really important. I ride an electric unicyle, and segway has all the important patents for that... but chinese companies are doing all the innovation, because segway has no american competition to drive it and also because it can't just yank everyone else's good ideas and use it for itself.

Let our industries buy and copy whatever they need to get their supply chain to work, and then subsidize american consumers buying domestic products in proportion to how much of the value of that product accrued domestically and in proportion to the externalities generated by the industries in question. (Sort of like a reverse VAT tax, funded via LVT. Except industries that cause a lot of local pollution don't recieve subsidies, because we want bolivia polluting itself, instead of having to mine our own lithium.)

Discussing the tariffs as industrial policy seems to leave out the lack of any industrial policy behind themZ

I think this post conflates different policies and their impacts. Tariffs, for example, do not lower the price of domestically produced goods for international consumers. That is, if the United States imposes a tariff on steel that does not make US-produced steel cheaper for international steel buyers. It makes internationally-produced steel more expensive for US steel consumers. Government subsidy of US steel production may lower prices for international consumers but that's not what a tariff is. Both articles you link to (Noah Smith and Asia Times) are specifically about industry subsidization, not tariffs. The two policies operate differently and there is no reason to conflate them like this.

It conflates them for good reason, because what was being suggested is tariffs instead of taxes. Removing corporate taxes would lower the price of domestically produced goods. In a context where they benefit from government provided services (roads, law enforcement, the stability of being protected by the army, courts that parse and enforce contracts), being exempt of taxes for it does amount to a subsidy. Of course, it's not the tariffs part that reduces the cost, but it offers an alternative to taxes for funding the government.

Personally I'm doubtful that the Trump administration will manage to get enough cuts, enough tariffs, enough deregulation-fuelled growth to actually balance the budget, but getting at least part of the way is an improvement.

Nothing in the OP mentions taxes at all, including getting rid of them for tariffs. In any case it is very unclear to me why tariffs are a better source of revenue than corporate income taxes are. The net change in corporate expenditures also seems quite ambiguous. If you are a company that does not do much importing then yes, sure, removing corporate taxes for tariffs may be a subsidy. But if you are a company that does a lot of importing tariffs may be even worse than a corporate income tax, in terms of your costs.

It seems to be a clash of different type of worldviews, one being the so called industrial policy, which is a policy where a nation creates favorable environment to grow domestic behemoths and grow their domestic economy. There are multiple examples of countries employing this type of policy such as South Korea, China or even Japan back in the day.

On the other side of the spectrum you have standard economic theory in favor of free trade. It has formidable range of theories for why this is ultimately the best policy, the most important one being the concept of comparative advantage.

On this debate, I recently read this lengthy 2017 American Affairs article, which I found pretty good for firming up and supporting a number of my views on this issue, particularly "free trade" as perhaps the archetypal example of economists succumbing to "the Ricardian Vice."

The bit that was particularly new for me, and thus stood out, was the bit about The Atlas of Economic Complexity and diversity beating specialization due to development spreading via "proximity":

Thus, although they claim to be experts on the effects of trade policy and argue almost unerringly for liberalization over protection, economists have not yet even asked the questions that are crucial to the real-world impact of trade liberalization: what does it do to the level and distribution of output, income, and employment?

Given that economists have not even considered these issues, it is not surprising that other researchers who have done so have reached conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the biases of economists. By analyzing the enormous Standard International Trade Classification database of international trade flows, data scientists at Harvard University, working on what they have christened The Atlas of Economic Complexity,19 have found that diversity, rather than specialization, leads to national success in international trade.

Their methodology was to classify products on the basis of their “ubiquity,” which they defined as how many countries exported the product, and countries on the basis of “diversity,” which they defined as how many products a given country exported.

…

The message that comes through loud and clear in this empirically grounded analysis is that, for countries to succeed at both growth and trade, specialization is essential at the individual level, and diversity matters at the level of the nation-state:

…

The researchers used the measures of ubiquity and diversity to develop a composite index they called “complexity,” which quantified “the amount of productive knowledge” products and economies contain.23 This complexity metric correlated well with living standards—with countries like Japan and Switzerland at the head of the 2015 index (at 2.47 and 2.18 respectively) and Papua New Guinea and Nigeria at its tail (–1.81 and –2.18 respectively). But movements up the complexity scale also correlated strongly with improved growth performance:

An increase of one standard deviation in complexity, which is something that Thailand achieved between 1970 and 1985, is associated with a subsequent acceleration of a country’s long-term growth rate of 1.6 percent per year. This is over and above the growth that would have been expected from mineral wealth and global trends.24

The success of this index in predicting which countries are likely to outperform growth expectations in the future was related to the role of product diversity within a country, which enable new products to be invented. The authors of The Atlas found that a country was more likely to develop a new product if the country had other industries which were close to that product in a third metric they called “proximity.” Technically this was measured as the likelihood that a country exported one product given that it exported another; practically, it indicated that invention of new products required knowledge of existing, closely related products. A country with a diversified export profile (and by implication a diversified industrial base),25 rather than one with a specialized portfolio, is more likely to have the product proximity that allows new products to be invented and the economy to grow.

…

These empirical findings also cast a very different light on the populist revolts that are currently disturbing the pro-globalization consensus, which has dominated economic policy for the last thirty years. These revolts are not unthinking reactions against rationality, as mainstream economists like to believe, but reactions to the failure of the real world to conform to the irrational thinking of economists, and the damaging policies that have been imposed by politicians following their advice.

Thirty years of trade policies pursuing the false promise of specialization have meant that residents of the Rust Belt states of the United States, and the economically depressed regions of the United Kingdom, can now compare the promise of globalization with the reality. They voted against globalisation, not because they were too intellectually limited to perceive its benefits, but because experience gave them the lens through which to reject the Ricardian Myth of the advantages of national specialization.

Policymakers should too. The empirical research that underpins The Atlas of Economic Complexity—as opposed to the armchair speculation that has characterized the development of economic theory—provides strong guidance on how to achieve economic development. It starts from an understanding of where the increased prosperity of the last two centuries has come from. It has not come from specialization in the allocation of existing resources, but from acquiring and developing new knowledge over time:

During the past two centuries, the amount of productive knowledge we hold expanded dramatically. This was not, however, an individual phenomenon. It was a collective phenomenon. As individuals we are not much more capable than our ancestors, but as societies we have developed the ability to make all that we have mentioned—and much, much more.26

Industrial policy must either put cash up front, or create stable incentives that everyone knows will last for years, to see any results.

Suppose the US government wants to have a complete domestic supply-chain manufacture of computer chips--good idea for military defense purposes--and we are in a situation where US has no semi-conductor fabrication facilities (fabs) and no expertise in building or operating such. As was the case two years ago. US government's options are:

  • (a) Take on the task of building and operating a fab and subsidize the entire expense directly like one does for military projects.

  • (b) Put up massive up-front cash incentives for already-existing foreign companies to invest in building and running US-based fabs, and hope both companies and bureaucracy move fast enough to get started before political winds shift.

  • (c) Massively raise tariffs on imports of foreign-made chips, or any products containing foreign-made chips, using some mechanism that ensures those tariffs stay high for many years to come.

The tariffs option only works if there's a strong guarantee of the high tariffs sticking around for a long time. This way, the demand in the domestic market may be sufficient to entice US-based firms to put the costly investments of building a fab, developing or importing operational expertise, and training staff from scratch, which takes at least a few years to even begin to produce chips. One would also expect the first five years of production will be purely playing catch-up, even if one is optimistic in American manufacturing ingenuity in the long run, so the US-made chips will be more expensive to make than, say, the ones made in Taiwan's mature fabs.

So one could indeed use tariffs to promote the country's industrial policy, but it has to be through a stable policy that can't be easily reversed: at the least, it needs be a law passed by congress.

buy state subsidized steel from USA to build your own infrastructure and factories for cheap, and then use this advantage to sell things you produce back. And even if USA decides for some broad tariff regime, it still enables you to use this advantage to sell goods to other countries.

The problem is that the US market is one of the biggest. And if a big portion of your economy is around exporting goods to America, then it will be hard to pivot and retool to something else, even if the market and comparative advantage is there.

The work of Ha-Joon Chang has convinced me that

  • Most (but not all - in particular Hong Kong didn't) of the Asian development success stories relied on smart industrial policy rather than laissez-faire
  • Depending on what your industrial policy is, tariffs are often a useful tool to execute it.

But there doesn't seem to be an industrial policy behind the Trump tariffs - in the sense that I can't work out which industries Trump wants to promote and which he doesn't.

There is a separate problem that development-orientated industrial policy is impossible when you are at the technological frontier because the knowledge you need to think about the economy ten years out simply doesn't exist. Whereas if you are trying to go third-world to first quickly you know that you start with textiles because everyone does, do car parts before cars, don't do aerospace or semiconductors until you are ready etc.

The even thornier problem is that the supply chain for high-end semiconductors appears to be too big and complex for one country, even the US or EU, to host a full-stack semiconductor industry. Right now ARM, TSMC, ASML and Zeiss are all close-to-irreplaceable in their niches.

I can't work out which industries Trump wants to promote and which he doesn't.

Probably everything, but I think an underappreciated one is cheap, mass produced knicknacks in the $1-$5 range. With injection molding, die casting, and dfm, these products aren't labor intensive to make, and can actually be made in the usa while still being in the price range where consumers don't really care. But penny pinching corporate types will still pick the cheapest, and Chinese d2c sites like shein and temu are surging.

I am against retaliatory tariffs. They are in fact shooting yourself in the foot.

1930s was the last time everyone went all in all retaliatory tariffs and it basically wrecked the world economy.

There are always economists in favor of bad ideas. They still can't even agree on the minimum wage.

What you'll find with economists that support bad economic policies is that they'll point to a paper or theory that justifies it in a very convoluted way. There are papers out there that justify minimum wage and tariffs, but they require a perfect set of market conditions and a government run exactly to the specifications of these same economists.

The most famous example of protective industrial policy in the US is the Jones act. It is stronger than a tariff because it represents an absolute ban on foreign products in certain categories. It has been a total failure. The US has instead just crippled its domestic shipping, impoverished its own people, and all it has to show for it is a sclerotic ship building industry.

Other countries like Brazil and India have also been trying to industrial policy themselves into success for a few decades. They've also only managed to further impoverish their people.

There is no cognitive dissonance. Just bad economic policy that we will trick ourselves into every few decades.

The problem with the Jones act is that many goods shipped by boat are fungible, and international shipping is too cheap. Combined with free trade, it's cheaper to export the goods and simply import an equivalent product back. In the end the Jones act failed because domestic shipping isn't essential. If it were totally banned, people outside of a few tiny islands would scarcely know the difference.

Domestic shipping is no longer essential, we made it that way through the Jones act. While every other form of transportation has gotten cheaper, faster, and more plentiful domestic shipping has gotten worse in all those ways.

In a counterfactual world where the Jones act never existed I'd bet that domestic shipping would look incredibly important. There are some very useful navigable waterways in the US and for the century or two prior to the Jones act they were absolutely essential to commerce.

However, we live in clown world reality, where a transportation method that has served humanity for millenia is denied to the US because of bad economic thinking.

Other countries like Brazil and India have also been trying to industrial policy themselves into success for a few decades. They've also only managed to further impoverish their people.

At least in the case of India, we've emerged from crushing poverty largely due to late 80s and early 90s liberalization and movement away from mercantilist policies.

Recently, there's been an effort to reduce the attractiveness of cheap Chinese imports through tariffs and subsidies of domestic industry, and the jury is out on their effectiveness. We'd have congenial relationships with China if they weren't so myopically focused on Arunachal Pradesh and random mountains in the Himalayas. It makes me sigh when I realize how much of the international opprobrium China faces is entirely due to its own weight throwing, for very little potential gain in this particular case.

I realize how much of the international opprobrium China faces is entirely due to its own weight throwing, for very little potential gain in this particular case.

Chinese foreign policy is a bit of a throwback in that it's strongly driven by concrete strategic military goals, AIUI -- if they care about the random mountains, it's because they think that they are useful in an all-out war. Same with Tibet, same with Taiwan.

The issue is that there wouldn't be any need for an all out war, at least with India.

The Himalayan mountains mean a lot more to us than they do to the Chinese. They're literal high ground, covering the flat and very hard to defend Gangetic plain. In a shooting war, neither sides could actually make much territorial ingress, the logistics wouldn't work for moving the millions of troops necessary. Even aerial warfare and artillery duels wouldn't really change the picture, not when the largest mountain range in the world has had its say.

India recognizes Chinese control of Tibet, and our sheltering of the Dalai Lama is inconsequential. The Tibetan secessionist movement is just about dead. We never contested ownership of that godforsaken place, beyond a short lived backing of guerilla movements that ended in the 70s.

Arunachal Pradesh was never Chinese, at most it alternated between tenuous control between Indian kings and the Tibetans. Even when China seized control during a war with India, they voluntarily withdrew after a cease-fire.

If China didn't press these territorial claims, then it could easily exist as a neutral power that happened to have an overlapping border with India. We're not territorially expansionist, and we've had congenial ties with the rest of our neighbors, barring the obvious exception in Pakistan (and even then, they were the ones who instigated most conflict). It would be very easy to live and let live, and enjoy warm trade relationships. That is hard to do, at best, when one party considers over a million people to be their rightful citizens, for no good reason.

The issue is that there wouldn't be any need for an all out war, at least with India.

China doesn't see it this way, so none of what else you say matters -- if there's a possibility that a war might occur, they want to be in the best possible position for it.

Like I said it's a bit of a throwback to pre-WWI international relations, but you see it a bit in Russia's adventures in Ukraine. Happens when high-ranking military officials get a direct voice in diplomacy.

I think context matters here. I’m generally in favor of enforcing fair trade more so than free trade for tge simple reason that some countries are protectin* their industries from competition and therefore it’s not always fair trade. This isn’t always bad, as a sane economic policy would tend to protect industries that are either in early development, or of vital importance to the country. The issue I have with the tarries is that I fear they are too short term to do anything good — the minute a neoliberal government is established in the USA, those tariffs are gone. No one is therefore going to invest in American manufacturing if he thinks that import policy will revert to the old way in which it’s much cheaper to build the factory in a third world country and import it.

I think having some manufacturing in the USA is good and should be supported with tariffs. It provides decent jobs for people who cannot go to college, it is good for security because it means that the country cannot be choked off from things it needs to survive or wage war. And I think it’s good for trade that the United States be at least neutral if not a net exporter as this builds national wealth.

Now to get back to the cognitive dissonance stuff, there is one huge question. If you are in the latter camp where you oppose tariffs and trade regulations - why are these people not against retaliatory tariffs?

Isn't that basic game theory? A retaliation might hurt you, but it beats the alternative in the hypothetical pay-off matrix where you meekly accept unilateral tariffs. At the very least, it dissuades future trading partners from considering tariffs when you have a reputation for tit-for-tat.

I would agree, but only in case when tariffs actually have some impact on targeted nation. Again, the free trade doctrine would mean that tariffs are bad just for the country enacting them. There is no game theory where you have two players and one just shoots himself in his foot. The other player either does not care, or maybe he can use the now injured other player to take advantage of. He should definitely not "retaliate" by shooting his own foot. It does not make sense.

So even if adopting this game theory framework - if tariffs are so universally bad, why interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake? And if tariffs are so effective that they help the enemy player at your own cost, then tariffs are actually useful and good at least in some case and we can have honest discussion who is benefiting and who is losing given certain trade framework. That is the core of the cognitive dissonance I am talking about.

No, if your opponent shoots himself in the foot (and splatters blood on you, which is irritating and expensive), you respond by shooting him in the kidney and try to dodge the blood spray.

When the US put tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum, the Chinese put tariffs on American soy beans, which directly hurt the republican heart land and didn't really hurt their own farmers all that much - Brazil was still selling soy beans after all.

Effectivity, this is a step beyond the standard prisoners dilemma. You can choose where you defect, and the gain/loss can be very asymmetrical. It also can be more than monetary gain/loss, since the payoff might be in geopolitical position or voter opinion instead of trade balance.

I'm no economist, but my understanding is that tariffs harm both parties. If, likely due to ideological reasons, someone makes a mutually negative sum decision, then you're justified in punishing them.

So they're not just shooting themselves in the foot, the spread from the shotgun is hurting the other party too. They're making a mistake that hurts you too, and you'd very much prefer they didn't do that, even if you're agnostic on whether you want them better or worse off.

I'm no economist, but my understanding is that tariffs harm both parties.

Sure, but then the question is how and why. Details matter in this case as reasons may bring more light into the whole issue of tariffs.

Moreover this to me seems quite a different statement: any country that refuses to trade with us under any circumstances except of condition of absolute free trade, is harming us and we will retaliate. This is quite a statement, especially when it then comes to oxymoron of mandatory "free" trade. You would probably not deal like that with an individual.

Also there is more to this type of thinking. In this framework Trump is then also right regarding VAT/Sales tax. If country A has sales tax of 20% and uses this tax for instance to provide free health care, then it is using taxes on foreign goods to artificially bring benefits to its domestic workers. Country B with sales tax of 0% is thus "harmed", right?

This is why details matter.

A VAT applies equally to foreign and domestic goods. It is not similar to a tariff.

Whether applying a retaliatory tariff (harming both sides) in order to kick the first side into dropping their tariff is a quantitative question that can easily differ from one situation to the next. It is not amenable to a reductio like "any country that refuses to trade with us under condition of absolute free trade is harming us and we will retaliate".

A VAT applies equally to foreign and domestic goods. It is not similar to a tariff.

It is similar to tariff, as VAT on foreign goods is used to subsidize domestic production. Revenue from VAT is used to subsidize domestic infrastructure, healthcare and other benefits for domestic workers and companies, or they can even provide direct subsidies. None of these are available for factories or workers from foreign manufacturers who get nothing from VAT imposed on goods they produce. So in the end domestic producers reap more advantage compared to what they pay as a tax.

Whether applying a retaliatory tariff (harming both sides) in order to kick the first side into dropping their tariff is a quantitative question that can easily differ from one situation to the next.

Okay, so what are these quantities and what are costs or benefits to that? If retaliatory tariffs are beneficial then under what conditions? What if these conditions are met when you are the one enacting the tariff as first mover - should you do it?

It is similar to tariff, as VAT on foreign goods is used to subsidize domestic production.

It's the subsidy to domestic production that's the issue here, not the VAT for raising revenue. The VAT falls on domestic and foreign producers equally. An income tax is no different from a VAT in this respect.

Okay, so what are these quantities and what are costs or benefits to that?

The cost to the retaliating entity of the foreign tariff, and hence the benefit of getting rid of it. The cost to the retaliating entity of the retaliatory tariff. The chance of success, and how long it would take.

What if these conditions are met when you are the one enacting the tariff as first mover - should you do it?

Under the assumptions in this discussion (that a tariff harms both sides), the conditions cannot be met enacting the tariff as a first mover.

Furthermore, despite obvious structural problems the USA is economically much healthier than the EU, Canada & Mexico.

So from a leverage / bargaining position tariffs make a certain sort of sense; we are much more well placed to absorb the hit and bounce back. It’s like a Mexican standoff where one person has a Kevlar vest and the other person has the shakes from alcohol withdrawal.

It’s completely in line with the “Daddy’s home” / “My house my rules” vibe that sustains the MAGA movement. Trump has been entirely consistent in his sentiment that the USA has been taken for a ride by its supposed closest allies and partners, and it’s time to play our hand. He’s been saying it for like thirty years, it’s his most deeply help political belief as far as I can tell.

We are stronger than Canada, Mexico, the EU, China, and Japan. We are not strong enough to pick a fight with all of them at the same time! The only sane trade policy for industrialization is to encourage trade within the Americas, with our friends, with whom we exert outsized influence as opposed to the EU and the Pacific. Free trade has very clearly worked in this context as evidenced by the comparative economic success of the US. The extent to which it hasn’t is the extent to which we should fuck with it (not much) which I was under the impression that we already resolved under Trump 1.

How much has Canada actually taken advantage of the US?

At the end of the day, the US will not be a net exporter and have the strongest currency in the world.

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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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