Donald Trump went into a snit and his babysitter wasn’t around to control him, so he barged into a meeting and slapped high tariffs on metal imports. The stock market suffered a mini-crash, and according to some experts, 2 cents per watt have been added to utility scale solar projects.
The tarrif on steel is likely to affect US Energy across the board, but the good news is that this could make some proposed pipelines even less viable than they already were.
The Republican-Trump tax cuts were supposed to be spread around to the little people, in order to buy their votes in November, but that may not work as well as planned. Some utility companies will not be passing the tax cuts on to their customers any time soon.
We now know that the de-assessing of large parts of Bears Ears Monument was nothing other than a craven act to get at this wild land’s oil and gas reserves.
Despite all this mucking around with our economy and the environment, falling prices of renewables has pushed this form of energy into second place as the source of power in Minnesota. Also in mInnesota, it appears that Minnesota has met its 25% renewable goal. Ready to move on to 50% in a few years, if we can only get rid of these pesky Republicans in the state legislature, and if we elect a pro-environment Democratic governor, like this one.
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Yeah, according to Forbes and CNBC the rate of companies spending to buy back stocks has skyrocketed since the change in tax laws. The much publicized “these companies are spending more on their employee stories” are turning out to be one-time things that were in the companies’ pipelines before the tax change, with a few exceptions. And the tariffs, to be put in place to combat non-existent unfair trade practices, will not bring good things.
Good news about the energy stuff in Minnesota so far, a small thing compared to the national disaster we have with this incompetent buffoon in the White House.
This could happen https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-trade-war-tariffs-on-bourbon-harleys-and-orange-juice/
“A counter strike from the rest of the world would likely target products from politically sensitive Republican-run states, including include tariffs on Harley-Davidson’s made in Speaker Paul Ryan’s district; new duties on bourbon made in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky; and duties on orange juice from Florida — a critical swing state.”
🙂
> so he barged into a meeting and slapped high tariffs on metal imports. The stock market suffered a mini-crash,
These are not high tariffs. I had no idea liberals cared so much about the stock market.
If memory serves, they have been voting against every trade deal since forever. NAFTA was opposed by a majority of Democrats in the House and Senate despite a big push from Bill Clinton, and both Bernie and Hillary said they were against TPP.
Who is supposed to foot the bill to resurrect the corpse of what used to be our steel industry? I doubt if the now abandoned plants can be brought up to modern standards and/or new ones built without several years of planning and construction time and a huge outlay by somebody. And there probably aren’t a large number of talented people with the requisite up to date knowledge just sitting around waiting to start making steel either.
Besides that, If I remember correctly, working in a steel mill was an uncomfortable and dangerous but well-paying job back in the day but we aren’t going to compete with many overseas’ wage scales and tolerance for workplace danger without permanent high tariffs.
Seems like another road to bankruptcy to me. Oh yeah, well no wonder Trump thought of it.
Yup. Make a a reason, purely false, for the decline in the steel industry in the United States (“unfair” trade and bad agreements). Slap tariffs (picked out if the blue, with no rationale other than them being big) on importers, with most of the penalty falling on allies. Declare a trade war is good and easy. The economy be damned, but since the budget and tax bill show the Republicans don’t care about the economy that isn’t a surprise.
None of the rationale or other statements are true, of course, but the true Trump followers will continue to deny reality.
We should be surprised that Trump lies about the reasons for this – that’s his operating method. We just found out yesterday that his story about “working hard to get those basketball players out of prison in China” was a complete load of shit. When the sex offender in chief lies about little things like that, don’t be shocked when he lies about big stuff.
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Please, do yourself a favor and learn our reality. You can start with Elon Musk’s tweets about China and cars. Then you can move on to a managed and floating currency. One of these days, you morons will realize that “free trade” is an ideology and not a law, as in the law of gravity. As things stand now, the mercantilists of Asia are getting an entirely free ride from the US of A. We have the trade deficits to prove it. And since someone mentioned Dems, yeah, how about Slick Willie & Co telling us about how great NAFTA would be for the US. The fact is instead that a comfortable trade surplus shortly became a mega trade deficit. For how bad the psuedo intellectuals, we used to have a Commonwealth called the Commonwealth of the Philippines. The reason why the Philippines has near zero manufacturing despite their enormous natural resource wealth is that we had a free trade with them as well, their goods came in tariff free as did ours to the Philippines. Owing to such notions as economy of scale and underlying continental economy it was quite impossible for anyone in the Philippines to enter most manufacturing markets. Their economy remains stunted to this day. For how entirely dim most economists, there is not only that example but also Japan and South Korea. The Japanese built an entire auto industry behind a massive wall of protection and our Korean friends did things like allow the import of intermediate goods, say, car engines, which could be put in cars, but that was only for export as Korean law prohibited the use of imported engines in cars sold in Korea. Now they too have an auto industry. Why did both Japan and Korea do such a thing? Long term gain over short term pain. Why the idiot above is so entirely misguided when all he can see is his immediate satisfaction. Try having grand-kids, then you might one day get the point. The loss of manufacturing jobs has been truly staggering, and to those other morons who say that those jobs don’t matter, of the 114 metro areas studied, those with the least manufacturing losses had far and way the highest increases in every other type of employment. Those suffering the most manufacturing losses did roughly half as well. From our friends at Brookings:
However, the data show that the retention of manufacturing jobs and the growth of non-manufacturing jobs are complementary rather than competitive processes. Metropolitan areas that lost smaller percentages of their manufacturing job base also had more rapid growth of non-manufacturing jobs. The one-third of our 114 metropolitan areas that had the smallest percentage losses of manufacturing
jobs (with a median manufacturing job loss of 20 percent) had more than a 60 percent median gain in non-manufacturing jobs and a greater than 110 percent median gain in advanced service employment. In contrast, the one-third of the metropolitan areas that had the greatest percentage losses of manufacturing jobs (with a median loss of nearly 50 percent) had a median non-manufacturing job gain of just under 35 percent and a median advanced service job gain of slightly more than 60 percent.