So he not only blocks the Nippon merger, but he puts tariffs on foreign steel. Is he just trying to tank the country
Don’t forget. Alberta and Ontario premiers are calling for appeasement as a RESPONSE to Trump breaking his word a second time to Canada in less than a month.
We’ve got craven liers on both side of the boarder, and we can’t let either of them keep getting away with it.
“Fuck appeasement”
- Poland, 1939.
Well, I hope that pushes Canadians even more to double down on avoiding US products. He didn’t even stick with the 30 days delay in tariffs. Are there still people thinking he might not go ahead with them?! Let’s drop them like a hot potato!
I have a friend who runs a plant to make stamped steel parts for the auto industry, based in Canada. He’s so ready to increase the prices to offset the tariffs for US customers. The customers already invested big bucks for the tool development and they can’t just source the parts somewhere else. They’ll have no other choice than paying the tariff price increase. If Trump supporters think that the tariff can magically move productions local…well, I’m being presumptuous by assuming Trump supporters think.
He has brought up before that the US government used to get its revenue from tariffs before income taxes were introduced.
The US is running ginormous deficits but their religion doesn’t allow them to raise taxes. So this might be his least bad option (talking about his internal politics, not the actual economics) to start addressing his deficit.
This worked once, way back in the 19th century. It hasn’t worked since.
Not to mention that they got a massive trade war at the time as well, and seriously strained their international relations. But back then, the US was a nobody nation and nobody cared about them, so going from “nobody” to “annoying joe shmoe” wasn’t a problem. Now everybody watches carefully to see how the US rolls over even in its sleep, so every little thing they do on purpose has a huge rippling impact.
They’re not only starting a trade war when nobody has won a trade war in over a century, but they’re destroying a century of built up trust in the meantime, and economies are built on trust. Without trust, who the hell is willing to sign a deal that lasts more than a few months when the norm is to sign decade long deals?
I don’t debate the insanity of the economics of it. I’m saying they have a problem the solution for which is raising taxes but their stupid religion (bootlicking capital) doesn’t allow it, so he’s trying to raise revenue this way.
The executive branch gets revenue from taxes, independent from congress.
The reason for tariffs is to have a source of funding he and his Project 2025 cronies control without oversight. Need to pay wages for the American Sturmabteilung? This is how you do it.
Let Trump tax the American people. Will the US suppliers use the profits to reinvest in more supply or with the do the American thing and use the profits for bonuses and stock buy backs.
This is litterally what’s happening with the US oil sector. Trump removed regulations and put up incentives, and the industry just went “thanks for reducing our costs, but we’re not increasing production one bit” and instead just ate up the bigger margins while charging the same amount to their customers.
Yeah that’s the thing with being a transparent, transactional, narcissistic senile, misogynistic serial grifter. We kinda know you’re up to no good because you telegraph all your intentions.
Is any but the most gullible conservative Canadian fooled by the one month pause? This fucker is coming for our land, our sons and daughters and he will not be dissuaded save by terms he understands.
People are remarkably naive, especially those in decision making positions.
Remember how, during lockdowns and the slow return to normality that followed, many large online businesses made decisions that indicated they believed that consumer behaviour during lockdown would continue after lockdown? Even as all the businesses – *including those behaving thisbway – started forcing people back into the office?
The people behind those decisions really believed things would stay as they were. I’ve spoken to many more of them than I ever expected to, and they all said the same thing: We thought this was the new normal, and so did everyone else in the industry.
People are wantonly and willfully naive when their choice is between believing someing will be good, or believing something will be bad. It’s kind of shocking, particularly in the face of having already gone through the thing before.
I agree, and this is, in my opinion, the best evidence that the brain acts as a rationalization engine more than one of cognition. IE: “feelings don’t care about your facts”. I also don’t expect us to realize this while it’s occuring in our brains, affecting what we laughably call our “judgement”.
Ah sweet, so only the tariffs that will bankrupt all the car manufacturers except Tesla. I wonder who’s idea that was.
Why wouldnt it affect Tesla as much?
They don’t actually sell a lot of cars
They manufacture a lot more parts on site.
They aren’t making the aluminum which their cars are largely made of.
You’re correct that they will be hit by the tariffs but they won’t be hit by it multiple times. Most other car manufacturers have intermediate part production in Canada so they can end up paying tariffs again and again on the same part.
If cutting power is still on the table, sometime in the next 2 hours would be hilarious.
Aluminum uses a lot of electricity to manufacture too.
Sure would be a shame if it suddenly became uneconomical to manufacture in the US.
It’s already practically uneconomical to so, Canada produces about 4x more Aluminium than the US and the US imports about 80% of the Canadian production.
Canada doesn’t have to budge on this one, the US can’t just spin up that much Aluminium production in any reasonable time line, they’re going to keep importing it and just paying the tariff themselves.
Not just aluminum, but building factories for anything takes years nowadays. The sheer amount of equipment needed alone is staggering, not to mention that such equipment is usually made from steel and aluminum and is often foreign made.
And this is presuming that the owners want to build the factory as fast as possible. There’s quite a few from Biden’s incentives that are still not anywhere near ready to start producing anything. And that’s presuming that anybody has confidence that the economic environment will stay stable enough to make such a multi-decade investment worthwhile and won’t be reversed because of unexpected tariffs.
Would be a shame if Canada had to up the price to make up for the slump in sales. It costs a lot of money to run a smelter and lower production increases the overhead per ton of product.
We could stack export tariffs on there. Bureaucratically difficult since we currently don’t really do export tariffs. But it would be an interesting political response.
But we made a CZAR! A CZAAAAR~!
This is why you don’t give bullies an inch. EU trade deals can’t come quick enough.
We didn’t make a czar, we are changing the title of a position that already exists. Just because Trump is a bully doesn’t mean he can’t be placated by sweet nothings that caress his ego.
If Trump wants to play a game, we can play too. If you think that’s rolling over, that’s a you problem. Trump is obviously using this situation to allow him to declare a false national emergency to bypass Congress. These actions are technically illegal under both US and international law.
In a world where lying had consequences, this wouldn’t be happening. To expect Trudeau to fight back aggressively against a nation with the most powerful military in the world while it’s controlled by the most volatile and capricious politician in modern history is to expect it to rain cream soda - i.e., it’s stupid.
It appears the sarcasm in my czar lament wasn’t apparent.
Without sarcasm, I do think Trump is making a game or a joke out of threatening our sovereignty because of his size and military advantage.
His miscalculation is that he isn’t an emperor… yet. Economic consequences to tariffs on Americans will eventually become unpopular enough that republican reps and senators will collectively twist his arm to back down by taking away their rubber stamping. The rumblings are already happening.
Let’s hope that US senators and congresspeople can give the wittle baby a big new idea to distract him from starting WW3 in a way that minimizes collective suffering.
Good.
This will hurt us - a lot - but will absolutely destroy the US.
Frankly, it’s overdue.
I guess we shouldn’t be putting any money towards the border then if he’s just going to put tariffs in place anyway.
I think border security is probably a good idea but not for the same reasons.
At some point countries need to just stop sending the US anything Trump puts tariffs on. He says tariffs on steel would be for “national security”, but I bet having a chunk of their steel supply cut off would be a bigger national security problem than whatever he’s pretending to solve.
And Americans will suffer…
