4mo ago

Trump vows to take ‘hundreds of billions’ in tariffs as Australia’s hopes of getting exemption fades

www.theguardian.com

Australia’s chances of escaping America’s global steel and aluminium tariffs appear all but extinguished, with the US president reconfirming his commitment to a comprehensive tariff regime he argues will be “the greatest thing we’ve ever done as a country”.

“We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money,” Donald Trump told reporters on board Air Force One flying from Florida to Washington DC.

“We’re basically going to take back the money – a lot of the money that we’ve given away over many decades.”

70 comments

“We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs"
...from ourselves.
Trump still doesn't understand what tariffs are. You'd think the moron would have Wikipedia'ed tariffs at some point after talking about them for so damn long.
- My theory is he fully understands tariffs, but it’s a convenient way to siphon money off from Americans into a coffer he can steal that doesn’t require the IRS.
  
  .. and, he understands that every new tariff threat tanks the US stock market briefly, so he & his masters can sell first, 'buy the dip' a day or so later and make quick profits as the market recovers. Blatant manipulation.
  
  it is a grift, he knows his supporters are pretty stupid, that he has stated in the past. and he will probably be selling them something down the line.
  
  Bingo, he’s robbing from the poor to give to himself.
  
  I don't think he even understands how taxes work in all honesty.
  
  Yup. And they're something he controlls, so when a company or country wants to get an exemption to his tarrifs so they can be more competitive they need to grovel.
  It's an extortion racket, mixed with a poor tax, mixed with insider trading. Honestly as far as Trump grifts go, this one is pretty impressive. Just don't know how long he'll get away with it before his followers start to feel the pain.
  
  I actually think I know how he plans on "legally" stealing the money for himself too.
  Remember that sovereign wealth fund? I would bet dollars to donuts that he is going to funnel the tariff money into that. Then he uses that money to buy crypto, which pumps up the whole market including his coin. Then they sell off some of there crypto assets, rinse and repeat.
- I noticed this phrasing as well. Our government is taking this money from the poorest half of its citizens, and Trump either doesn’t know that or is intentionally clouding the waters for those who still dont know what tariffs are.
- When he's saying "we" he just means himself and his lackeys
  
  Yeah, I have been reading this over and over. This is what happens when a person is imprisoned in an isolated upper class society. He is sick and has no idea that the majority of his own people are already suffering. People are dying because of this horrible man and it won't stop with those who are deemed others or people across the borders and ocean he absolutely gives zero fucks about. Before too long, it'll be Americans who will die horribly and the country will reap repercussions for decades to come. I didn't think I'd live to see America become the enemy, but here we are.
- so, he's gonna put a 10-15% tariff on all imports? everything?
  that would do just one thing, get every other country trading ONLY with each other---and NOT the u.s.
  
  I mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.
  I don't see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).
- I think he does, he just expects that in 4 years time the US will be booming and the bitter pill at their inception will have passed
  He probably should look at the effect of China's tariffs and trade disputes on Australia.
  
  he only look what he did the first time with soybeans and china. China found a new source of soybeans elsewhere, american soybean farmers never recovered.
- I'm sure he does. But his constituency still doesn't.
  Let's again quote this from some 2016 article that stuck in my head:
  They voted for the elephant in the china shop. Little did they realize that they were the china.
  And. They. Still. Don't. Realize.
  My only hope is that right now, his supporters are dwindling. How much though and will it still have an effect come next election and won't it be too late anyhow...
  
  People need to wake up and realise that there isn't going to BE a "next election". At least not a fair one. Trump will win it the same way Putin and Orlov "win".
  The sooner American's wake the fuck up to this and deal with it in the inevitable way, the sooner the planet can be done with this nightmare.
Wow I'm so so glad we fucked over France for a submarine deal. We're definitely going to get those submarines right? For no more than the promised amount? I'm feeling super confident that fucking over France was a clever thing to do.
- Honestly it sounds like both of them were shit deals, but that's what we get for living in plutocratic dictatorships masquerading as "democracy".
- Honestly? I see a U-turn on that project in the future - especially if DCNS can get their shit together (one of the reasons for the pivot was a TON cost and time overruns and some pretty significant data leaks) or they pivot to another manufacturer / maybe make it a joint European project or something like that. And make them nukes, because that frankly works way better for Australia’s geography, geopolitics, and use cases.
the US president reconfirming his commitment to a comprehensive tariff regime he argues will be “the greatest thing we’ve ever done as a country”.
I will never understand how Americans developed a taste for his constant hyperbolic bullshit.
Really? Tariffs? Rehashing pre-WW1 economics theories is the greatest thing America has ever done? Greater than abolishing slavery? Greater than the civil rights act? Greater than the moon landings? Greater than the invention of the transistor?
Trump is at a point where nobody bats an eye to this. Trying to hold him accountable for literally anything he says is futile, and half the country things that quality is a good thing and they enable it.
- You have a section of America that wants more manufacturing to return to the US, and they see tarrifs as a way to make more production domestic. Those people haven't thought through that that will cause a lot of inflation and will heavily impact a lot of the manufacturing industry that the US still has.
  
  Even if this plan succeeds, it's not like the countries you just tariffed are just going to allow American exports into their markets. It will shrink the whole economy AND cause inflation at the same time. Economics fear this state for a reason.
  
  They forget they don't have the production plants or skilled labor for all this stuff they plan to build. Hell, they won't even have unskilled labor after they finish deporting everyone.
  OK, so even if they do build it all and somehow get it working, nobody is going to buy any of it because they pissed the world off.
  
  Those people are, sadly, too shortsighted to realize that they can't have their cake and eat it too. They want domestic manufacturing back, but they turn around and buy cheap Chinese shit from Walmart for a fraction of what it would cost if all manufacturing were here instead. Those two things are pretty much mutually exclusive.
  If it came between Trump getting his way or big business getting their way, I'm betting on the big box retailers lobbying to stop Trump from doing anything that might dig into their profits. Rich folk aren't ideologues, they're just greedy assholes.
Finally! The American kangaroo farmers were really hurting because of unfair competition from Australia.
- No amount of protectionism will ever dent our dominance of the spider market.
  
  But if another country wanted to then I am all for it. Yours Truly the Australian Arachnophobiac.
  
  Australia can keep their nightmare spiders thankyouverymuch.
I can't wait for Trump to come up with the brilliant, never before thought of "just print more money."
- ""We found the gold that was in Fort Knox! It was just sitting there. We could just use that. America will be so rich with all this gold Sleepy Joe and his people wanted to keep from all of us. We're gonna take this gold. It'll be the best thing. Lotsa lotsa gold. It's a lotta gold. Gold....yeah."
  Said President Musk's little orange pet on Monday."
  /s
  Unless this already happened in our reality...man I wouldn't even be surprised anymore...
He was never going to give us an exemption and anyone believing he will is delusional, like Trump.
As an American, I am just hoping Trump doesn't learn any additional economic terms. I keep expecting him to try to replace our federal income tax with a VAT.
Dear Australia, please sanction the shit out of us. We deserve it. Sorry we are so terrible.
- VAT has tax in the name, and it goes on a receipt. It would be harder to tell people other countries are paying for it
I don't speak for all Australians, but fuck Trump.
Maybe learning Mandarin wouldn't wouldn't so bad
- If you have to chose between Mango Mussolini and Winnie the Pooh. Winnie starts to sound better all the time.
  
  At least the CCP values education, and is basically the most highly educated regime in all of history.
  America is just a religiously mentally ill idiocracy that aggrandizes pure narcissism and individualism. It's a dead end.
Trump is very clearly there to line his own pockets with these tariffs. Do they really need to cut all these federal jobs with all that new federal income?
Time to shut down Pine Gap
- Especially now that
  The US have told the Five Eyes to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine - something I suspect the other Four Eyes may have a moral problem with, and
  The US is obviously compromised. Sharing intelligence with them is akin to just handing that intelligence straight to the "enemy", whoever that may be these days.
He's like someone rocking back and forth in the corner of a padded room repeating to himself that "the tariffs will save the economy" and "the tariffs will make us billions" over and over again while those tariffs, especially the way he tries to use them, are the very thing that is destroying the economy.
This man will cling to his delusions that the problems their economy is having right now are caused by his predecessors and keep doubling down in doing the very thing that is sinking the economy, completely incapable of admitting fault, until his entourage finally turns on him.
I'm giving him another month if the stocks continue tanking at the rate they currently are. The collapse has sped up today.
This is just a way to plunge the market value so he and his cronies can buy cheaper stocks.
- And buy out bankrupt companies and liquidated assets.
- Plunge the market so they can do options on the way down. Then with the profits but the stocks at a cheaper price. Also do options on the way up.
“Common what?”
“Sir, it means the Commonwealth of…”
“Fucking get it.”
I fucking hate this. I fucking hate every day in this countrymen I FUCKEN HATE YOU TRUMP
- "Think how stupid your average ~~American~~ person is, and then realize half the population is dumber than that."
So the US recession is not coming fast enough then.
Civil war when? When will people take to the streets to get rid of this guy who is making their country even worse than it was before?
- americans are still to content and complacent and coddled to even go through a civil war right now.
  
  Maybe at the higher end of things, in the nice neighborhoods.
  Lots of us are wondering by now when that whole "... Against enemies foreign and domestic." clause will kick in for the supposed defenders of the Constitution, seeing as we've got plenty of both in the Casa Blanca right now. Still waiting...
  As for the working class: A majority of folks are just constantly bombarded socially and civically by a thousand little dictators. Their bosses, the landlords, the grocery chains, the media, their utility companies, whatever. They keep having to scramble to find the next thing to keep themselves above water. There's so much noise.
  They don't know who to trust, or where to start.
  And it's structured in such a way that it's so individualized, and difficult to create a rallying banner to do anything meaningful under. When most people are a single missed paycheck from abject poverty, how can you convince them to take up arms, much less go protest, or whatever?
  Also the democratic party has poured tons of money into making liberals (not leftists) terrified of gun-like objects, so you'd have to train them on how this whole use of force thing works before arming them. They'd probably still refuse and decide buying matching outfits was solidarity enough for one day. ✊ Lol
  That's the real struggle we have right now: Nobody knows each other, and the "radicals" who would organize are sometimes more focused on maintaining absolute ideological purity rather than rallying various viewpoints under the same cause.
  Then you gotta figure out what moves would actually hurt the bottom line of the oppressors. And we're back to "Why didn't they just do this to their bosses ages ago then?"
  Because it's the same people. Orange Menace / Krasnov / and his puppetmasters want to "run the country like a business." Like (y)our bosses. They want to be petty, and isolate workers, and cut incomes, and demand more than ever. It's just suddenly really bad because the moderately privileged realize "Just get a better job then lol." is even less practical than it was, when you're talking an entire country's economy sliding down the hole.
  This is all by design, it's the same tactics that shitty retail work might use to keep employees feeling powerless and miserable, with the stakes and scale multiplied.
  We saw some movement with the AntiWork crowd, because they would educate each other on unions, and share their stories of standing up to their bosses, and quitting defiantly. We need that kind of ideological action x20.
  If you could defy the fascists in some meaningful way, and know that you'd have people backing you up, that could be powerful. Powerful enough that we wouldn't have to fire a shot. But I don't think we'll be THAT lucky.
I think the rest of the world has 5 billion total. All the rich assholes have 3 trillion total.
Go on Trump... DO IT.
The moment you do, AUSFTA is torn to pieces, a very one sided agreement but you seem to want to throw away all your benefits, so go ahead!
We'd all love you to do it Donnie!
How is he going to get "Hundreds of Billions"?
Putting aside that's not how tariffs work- we only export around $13billion per year to USA. Even a 25% tariff would require somewhere around 30 years for that US consumer paid money to even hit $100m, but he said Hundreds (plural)
Is this some 42D Chess (no) that Australia is going to see a 5x or more uptick in exports to USA?
ok 👍

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