Trump says planned April 2 tariffs will 'start with all countries'

[Bluetus]

33. Preaching to the choir a bit here, but

that Raygun philosophy only works as long as people have enough money (or credit, pushing people into impossible levels of debt) to buy the goods that are no longer made here. Union or no union, if the goods aren't made here, then the wages end up in other economies.

It was a long, slow slide, where the American work force increasingly turned into paper pushers, moving around the products actually made overseas. Our economy is 70% driven by consumer spending. When the money from good manufacturing jobs shrunk, they had to push massive amounts of deficit spending (and Raygun was legendary at that). But ultimately that just got worse and worse, and that is a big reason why Americans have been so angry the past 20 years.

Trump is right about the anger. He is dead wrong about the solution because we don't have the leverage to make tariffs work for us now. But a terrible idea beats no idea, every day of the week.

The right solution is to invest in education, support innovation, stimulate leadership in 21st century industries (primarily green energy and transportation), and try to return to a position of leverage. Ironically, Biden's team tried to do a lot of that but they refused to sell the merits of what they had done. Biden had mostly the right policies, and his team made good, competent decisions. But that's not nearly enough in today's world. You have to sell it. They did next to nothing on the PR front.