Australia’s chances of escaping America’s global steel and aluminium tariffs appear all but extinguished, with the US president reconfirming his commitment to a comprehensive tariff regime he argues will be “the greatest thing we’ve ever done as a country”.
“We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money,” Donald Trump told reporters on board Air Force One flying from Florida to Washington DC.
“We’re basically going to take back the money – a lot of the money that we’ve given away over many decades.”
I can’t wait for Trump to come up with the brilliant, never before thought of “just print more money.”
"“We found the gold that was in Fort Knox! It was just sitting there. We could just use that. America will be so rich with all this gold Sleepy Joe and his people wanted to keep from all of us. We’re gonna take this gold. It’ll be the best thing. Lotsa lotsa gold. It’s a lotta gold. Gold…yeah.”
Said President Musk’s little orange pet on Monday."
/s
Unless this already happened in our reality…man I wouldn’t even be surprised anymore…
the US president reconfirming his commitment to a comprehensive tariff regime he argues will be “the greatest thing we’ve ever done as a country”.
I will never understand how Americans developed a taste for his constant hyperbolic bullshit.
Really? Tariffs? Rehashing pre-WW1 economics theories is the greatest thing America has ever done? Greater than abolishing slavery? Greater than the civil rights act? Greater than the moon landings? Greater than the invention of the transistor?
Trump is at a point where nobody bats an eye to this. Trying to hold him accountable for literally anything he says is futile, and half the country things that quality is a good thing and they enable it.
You have a section of America that wants more manufacturing to return to the US, and they see tarrifs as a way to make more production domestic. Those people haven’t thought through that that will cause a lot of inflation and will heavily impact a lot of the manufacturing industry that the US still has.
Even if this plan succeeds, it’s not like the countries you just tariffed are just going to allow American exports into their markets. It will shrink the whole economy AND cause inflation at the same time. Economics fear this state for a reason.
If they don’t, Trump will do what he did to us here in Canada today and double the tariffs.
What do you mean? America is so strong and powerful, these countries would never fight back.
/s
They forget they don’t have the production plants or skilled labor for all this stuff they plan to build. Hell, they won’t even have unskilled labor after they finish deporting everyone.
OK, so even if they do build it all and somehow get it working, nobody is going to buy any of it because they pissed the world off.
That’s a great point lol.
Yeah, they’re so anti-immigration, but higher education is still behind one of the most absurdly inflated paywalls in the country, and you can’t find a job that wants to actually train anybody anymore.
Who’s gonna do this stuff?
What absolute geniuses. Prosperity is right around the corner. /s
and its also increased prices of domestically produced products, due to higher wages, and other stuff that goes with it.
It isn’t a well thought out plan.
Those people are, sadly, too shortsighted to realize that they can’t have their cake and eat it too. They want domestic manufacturing back, but they turn around and buy cheap Chinese shit from Walmart for a fraction of what it would cost if all manufacturing were here instead. Those two things are pretty much mutually exclusive.
If it came between Trump getting his way or big business getting their way, I’m betting on the big box retailers lobbying to stop Trump from doing anything that might dig into their profits. Rich folk aren’t ideologues, they’re just greedy assholes.
even if some manufactering comes back, they still need to source materials from other countries.
As an American, I am just hoping Trump doesn’t learn any additional economic terms. I keep expecting him to try to replace our federal income tax with a VAT.
Dear Australia, please sanction the shit out of us. We deserve it. Sorry we are so terrible.
VAT has tax in the name, and it goes on a receipt. It would be harder to tell people other countries are paying for it
“We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs"
…from ourselves.
Trump still doesn’t understand what tariffs are. You’d think the moron would have Wikipedia’ed tariffs at some point after talking about them for so damn long.
My theory is he fully understands tariffs, but it’s a convenient way to siphon money off from Americans into a coffer he can steal that doesn’t require the IRS.
… and, he understands that every new tariff threat tanks the US stock market briefly, so he & his masters can sell first, ‘buy the dip’ a day or so later and make quick profits as the market recovers. Blatant manipulation.
… up until it stops being a “dip”. I don’t think these people care about having more. I think they want everyone else to have less.
it is a grift, he knows his supporters are pretty stupid, that he has stated in the past. and he will probably be selling them something down the line.
He’s never stopped. Bibles, those weird digital fantasy representations of himself, coins…
I love browsing estate auctions. Maybe that makes me a voyeur of sorts, either way, the amount of Trump coins that show up, consistently, since 2021 or so shows how much they’re buying.
What metal (if they even are metal) are they?
I can’t say I pay that much attention after seeing his face on it, gold and or silver colored.
So brass and chrome plated tin.
that sounds kinda cool actually, i just got into thrift shopping. Any good resources for getting started with estate auctions, and do you ever find anything worth the effort? Im a minimalist and just sort of furnishing my place or trading up
Yup. And they’re something he controlls, so when a company or country wants to get an exemption to his tarrifs so they can be more competitive they need to grovel.
It’s an extortion racket, mixed with a poor tax, mixed with insider trading. Honestly as far as Trump grifts go, this one is pretty impressive. Just don’t know how long he’ll get away with it before his followers start to feel the pain.
Bingo, he’s robbing from the poor to give to himself.
I actually think I know how he plans on “legally” stealing the money for himself too.
Remember that sovereign wealth fund? I would bet dollars to donuts that he is going to funnel the tariff money into that. Then he uses that money to buy crypto, which pumps up the whole market including his coin. Then they sell off some of there crypto assets, rinse and repeat.
I don’t think he even understands how taxes work in all honesty.
How could he understand something he has never even tried to deal with.
I noticed this phrasing as well. Our government is taking this money from the poorest half of its citizens, and Trump either doesn’t know that or is intentionally clouding the waters for those who still dont know what tariffs are.
When he’s saying “we” he just means himself and his lackeys
Yeah, I have been reading this over and over. This is what happens when a person is imprisoned in an isolated upper class society. He is sick and has no idea that the majority of his own people are already suffering. People are dying because of this horrible man and it won’t stop with those who are deemed others or people across the borders and ocean he absolutely gives zero fucks about. Before too long, it’ll be Americans who will die horribly and the country will reap repercussions for decades to come. I didn’t think I’d live to see America become the enemy, but here we are.
trump and his father did bully one of his brothers to alcoholism for being a pilot. he only knows how to bully people. i think that is one of the reasons why trump doesn’t touch liquor too.
so, he’s gonna put a 10-15% tariff on all imports? everything?
that would do just one thing, get every other country trading ONLY with each other—and NOT the u.s.
I mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.
I don’t see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).
I think he does, he just expects that in 4 years time the US will be booming and the bitter pill at their inception will have passed
He probably should look at the effect of China’s tariffs and trade disputes on Australia.
he only look what he did the first time with soybeans and china. China found a new source of soybeans elsewhere, american soybean farmers never recovered.
That’s the other galling side of this. It’s just so fucking dumb even as a way to “do” capitalism. Yes, theoretically one of the options in the face of tariffs is that an exporter can choose to eat the cost and both the importer and its country “win,” but that presupposes a market with few buyers and exporters with big enough profit margins that they can eat the cost. In reality of course, the exporter will instantly seek out other customers and if none can be found, they might eat some of the costs, but also pivoting their production to (previously) less profitable goods now makes much more sense because of the artificial barrier, and in the extreme case simply shutting down and liquidating assets is better than losing money on every sale. Then of course there are retaliatory tariffs, which work much better than the initial ones because they are targeted and leave the remainder of the global market available to country levying them.
I’m sure he does. But his constituency still doesn’t.
Let’s again quote this from some 2016 article that stuck in my head:
They voted for the elephant in the china shop. Little did they realize that they were the china.
And. They. Still. Don’t. Realize.
My only hope is that right now, his supporters are dwindling. How much though and will it still have an effect come next election and won’t it be too late anyhow…
People need to wake up and realise that there isn’t going to BE a “next election”. At least not a fair one. Trump will win it the same way Putin and Orlov “win”.
The sooner American’s wake the fuck up to this and deal with it in the inevitable way, the sooner the planet can be done with this nightmare.
I fucking hate this. I fucking hate every day in this countrymen I FUCKEN HATE YOU TRUMP
Wow I’m so so glad we fucked over France for a submarine deal. We’re definitely going to get those submarines right? For no more than the promised amount? I’m feeling super confident that fucking over France was a clever thing to do.
Honestly it sounds like both of them were shit deals, but that’s what we get for living in plutocratic dictatorships masquerading as “democracy”.
I think the rest of the world has 5 billion total. All the rich assholes have 3 trillion total.
He was never going to give us an exemption and anyone believing he will is delusional, like Trump.
Finally! The American kangaroo farmers were really hurting because of unfair competition from Australia.
No amount of protectionism will ever dent our dominance of the spider market.
Australia can keep their nightmare spiders thankyouverymuch.
they have drop bears, and emus and buff kangaroos.
But if another country wanted to then I am all for it. Yours Truly the Australian Arachnophobiac.
I don’t speak for all Australians, but fuck Trump.
Maybe learning Mandarin wouldn’t wouldn’t so bad
If you have to chose between Mango Mussolini and Winnie the Pooh. Winnie starts to sound better all the time.
At least the CCP values education, and is basically the most highly educated regime in all of history.
America is just a religiously mentally ill idiocracy that aggrandizes pure narcissism and individualism. It’s a dead end.
Trump is very clearly there to line his own pockets with these tariffs. Do they really need to cut all these federal jobs with all that new federal income?
This is just a way to plunge the market value so he and his cronies can buy cheaper stocks.
Plunge the market so they can do options on the way down. Then with the profits but the stocks at a cheaper price. Also do options on the way up.
And buy out bankrupt companies and liquidated assets.
ITT: people still don’t get that all of his actions are taken to please his owner.
“Think how stupid your average
Americanperson is, and then realize half the population is dumber than that.”
Time to shut down Pine Gap
Especially now that
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The US have told the Five Eyes to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine - something I suspect the other Four Eyes may have a moral problem with, and
-
The US is obviously compromised. Sharing intelligence with them is akin to just handing that intelligence straight to the “enemy”, whoever that may be these days.
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He’s like someone rocking back and forth in the corner of a padded room repeating to himself that “the tariffs will save the economy” and “the tariffs will make us billions” over and over again while those tariffs, especially the way he tries to use them, are the very thing that is destroying the economy.
This man will cling to his delusions that the problems their economy is having right now are caused by his predecessors and keep doubling down in doing the very thing that is sinking the economy, completely incapable of admitting fault, until his entourage finally turns on him.
I’m giving him another month if the stocks continue tanking at the rate they currently are. The collapse has sped up today.
