• albert180@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    Is there really a trade deficit when you factor in services?

    That’s what Trump conveniently “forgets” when talking about Evil Europe. Once you compare trade and services balance it’s quite even

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Building a service-based industrial economy would be good for capitalism.

      Unfortunately Trump does not serve capitalism. He serves fascism. And fascism requires factories that can be reconverted for a wartime effort once the immigrants and the queer start running out. That’s the fundamental lifecycle of fascism.

      Americans are sending us all on a path leading straight to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon if they don’t fix their shit but everybody’s too pussy to spell it out as if this demented ape doesn’t have unlimited control of the most powerful army on Earth and enough nukes to end civilization several times over.

    • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      The US has a global trade surplus if you account for tech, financial and healthcare services.

      There is an argument to be made that being able to produce certain things domestically is important from a national security standpoint (semiconductors for example).

      Whether tariffs could actually produce that, no one actually knows.

      • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 days ago

        semiconductors for example

        Agreed. That makes the apparent dislike from the Republican administration of the chips act so weird. It would work well in tandem with a reasonable long term tariff precisely tailored to the goods you need to produce indigenously in future.

        • caffinatedone@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          This would assume that their goal was to bolster American manufacturing in strategic areas or something along those lines. The evidence suggests that this isn’t their goal.

          What that goal might be aside from autarky is a good question.

          • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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            2 days ago

            When it’s not working, it’s working. The destruction of American economic might was the objective from the start. Just look at who benefits the most by this.

            It’s Putin. Its always Putin, using Skum and HitlerPig as his muscle.

            When will people truly internalize that the two biggest foreign Sociopathic Oligarchs, have partnered up with the most prolific traitor in American history? None of them have any loyalty or patriotism toward America, and only see us as a big, rich, fat, lazy target to be ruthlessly exploited and looted, and it’s happening in real time before our eyes.

            All they care about is money, and either Putin is paying them directly out of the Russian Treasury (HitlerPig would rape and murder his own mother for far less than a billion bucks, and Putin could order a lot more than that), or they’ve cut a deal to split the booty like the pirates they are.

        • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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          2 days ago

          Yeah, but the Chips Act happened under Biden, so it’s automatically bad. Can’t do anything that makes it look like Biden did anything positive.