Treetop wrote:A tariff also enables industry to sell their local made goods for a similar price.
An artificially high price. It's a price control. It's been tried and failed.
Treetop wrote:The money raised through tariffs can offset our taxes while making our potential production more competitive.
Bahahahaha. You honestly think a new tariff would result in lower taxes anywhere else? You think the feds would give up existing revenue if they got new revenue? You have far more faith in government than I do. Besides, by your own logic, that new revenue should be used to pay down debt, not lower taxes.
Treetop wrote:Without those social programs what jobs would these folks have? Sure there are alot more little niches out there those with drive can do, and a few million jobs illegal immigrants have today but you dont even think we can effectively make the ilegals leave anyway. It is easy to just say go get a job but you need one to get.
There are millions of unfilled skilled jobs available right now, with no government "job creation" program needed. Plumbers, mechanics, HVAC, electrical, industrial maintenance. They exist. They are real. We are sending kids to school for the wrong things and telling them that jobs where you do physical work are beneath them. We have millions of unemployed people in their 20s and 30s with bachelor degrees in arts and writing and political science and gender studies and foreign languages with nothing for them to do. The student debt bubble is unsustainable. That's something we can fix domestically. Check out what Mike Rowe is doing. It's awesome.
Plus the millions of unskilled jobs that get filled by immigrants because Americans won't do them. Why would they ever want to do such jobs when we pay people close to minimum wage to not work? We could fix that too. Limit unemployment to 30 days. Require community service to collect welfare and food stamps. Make food stamps only work on actual food staples. I see people blow their food stamp cards on soda and junk food at the gas station all the time.
We don't have to blame and go after China to improve the job situation at home. These are things we can do by reducing government spending instead of expanding it, and without increasing the tax burden with tariffs. China is a distraction, a scapegoat.
This is how twisted this election is. You are arguing in favor of social safety nets that pay people not to work, in favor of price controls (tariffs) that force people to pay artificially high prices (for the benefit of government revenue), in favor of government job creation programs, and against basic free market principles. This is why I said (months ago) that I was concerned about Trump destroying what resemblance we still had left of a "conservative" party. He's repeating his "China is stealing our jobs" propaganda and completely unrealistic protectionist promises so much that people are actually buying into them. Yes, we have lost a lot of manufacturing jobs to China. We also have millions of new jobs in IT, technology development, web development, app development, in designing and marketing phones and tablets, things that were barely a blip on the radar 20 years ago.
It's much easier to just say "China is stealing our jobs and I'm going to fix it" than to address the real problems which are here at home.
If you take a step back and look at the big picture, Trump is pitching the same thing Hillary is pitching. The government is going to fix the economy, the government is going to create jobs, the government is going fix healthcare, the government is going to make everything great again. All through government doing MORE. If we go back to before we were bombarded by 24/7 Donald Trump, true conservatives believe that the only way government can help fix these things is by getting out of the way. Less government is the answer, not more. Trump is convincing people that he is a small government conservative, but everything he is proposing requires or results in bigger government and more control.
Treetop wrote:He was right on the entangling alliances and not playing world police but fatally wrong on free trade.
Trump is fatally wrong on free trade. Of course he wants more government control over trade. His entire career has been about leveraging government control over trade. Build housing for the government, use government to take over property he wants, pay off government officials for special treatment. Trump supporters like to say "that's just good business" or whatever. But it's not. That has shaped his view on what the role of government is. Trump is saying things to appeal to conservatives but proposing decidedly liberal social policies and corporatist economic policies, and somehow convincing his followers that they are something else. He's a snake. Maybe not quite as bad as Hillary, but nowhere close to less-bad-enough to deserve conservative or libertarian support.