Maggie's Farm

The pride in that itemized opinion notwithstanding, it's still all symptomatic, and to conclude these things can be easily implemented and are eminently fair and reasonable is simply preposterous on its face.

Sheesh, rightists...

Do you know why there's a trade imbalance? Why the US is a gutted manufacturer? And no, it's not unions or Obama. In fact, Trump has already hit on it.

So very, very much wrong with that.

First, rightists are always on about their zero sum game where all tax on business is bad for business and all tax on the individual is as the Framers intended, "skin in the game". Neither are true as either pragmatic policy or original structuralism go. In point of fact, both are expressly warned against in the Founding.

Companies are not penalized by taxes any more than individuals are - typically much less - which is why the obsession with letting them go scott free (once they've corrupted government with the rightist's other myth, that they and their lobbies are the "free speech equals" of individuals) is so utterly wrong-headed and zero-summing. Even the arithmetic doesn't work.

Tax on companies is tax on an entity not the individual, which has a very great deal to do with original liberty, which happens to be the point of liberty. The rate of that tax is utterly irrelevant and any argument that conflates the rate with the need is therefore doubly wrong and adolescent.

Second, "cutting federal corporate income taxes to zero" is not how you solve a trade imbalance, not how you solve off-shoring, not how you bring back either manufacturing or trade, absolutely not how you correct globalism or monetary incentives like pegged currencies, and not how any sane argument would propose to do anything except recreate more positive feedback of the same kind that got us into these messes.

Third, "imposing a tax on all imports of 20% of retail value" is likewise idiotic, if for no other reason that retail value is irrelevant - wholesale value is maybe relevant - that in a system of pegged currency the exporter will avoid just by moving the peg and starting a whole new round of destructive positive feedback, and that it immediately starts a trade war, bankrupts 3/4 of the business that, artificially or not, depends on the current trade system, and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problems and causes.

Fourth, whether or not fair trade "implies a two way street" is completely irrelevant outside of the abstract and "limits on what can be imported from other countries that will encourage them to import from us" is exactly backwards. It'll encourage a trade war. Not only that, it directly conflicts your dumb 20% tariff rule and as such creates yet another positive feedback mechanism, this time before the ink's even dry on your own soil. Do you even own a spreadsheet? How bright is it to prevent the very trade you're taxing, Windy?

The problem is that rightists think like that neocon idiot Larry Kudlow who presumably actually believed it when he said it 20 years ago that the FIRE* economy was simply healthy capitalism seeking its natural course and level. Any fool knows you can't live in a haircut, eat a prostate exam, wear a yard service, or drive on a wait service staff, which obviously means that once you have given away your manufacturing sector to a nation that just absorbed all your industry because of monetary devices and mechanisms you're royally screwed.

The 2008 collapse should have taught rightists something: Monetizing everything that wasn't tied down is suicide. Of course, it didn't teach rightists a damn thing and so nobody's complaining about 100,000,000 unemployed, 100,000,000 on some degree of assistance, $1,000,000,000,000 a year in new debt, and $100,000,000,000,000 in total combined debt and unfunded obligations to actually go and reform anything. It's a tertiary problem behind our partisan political rhetoric

Rightists evidently see this as something to gently complain about but what remains a necessary component of "capitalism". It's neither. And some rightists value their own opinions so much as to present their foolish enabling notions with the patina of wisdom.

*Finance, Insurance, Real Estate.

Incorrect. The "business climate" in the US, above the level where offshoring becomes viable, is all cronyism. Making it more beneficial here is a terribly loaded term and needs a raft of definition.

All problems stem from their sources. Here, it's the monetary system, enabled and concurrent trade imbalance, and cronyism.

This is a point the ostensible American right is the greatest statist force on earth about.