Trump's Tariff War Is The Final Act Of A Broken System

[LiberalArkie]

President Donald Trump’s trade agenda is a corrupt, chaotic mess.

He made trade concessions to China after its government agreed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a Trump-branded resort. He announced a modest trade enforcement action on steel and aluminum and declared it a “trade war” ― something both “good” and “easy to win.” He then shifted his sights in this combat from China to Canada without any apparent rationale. The president has even threatened Ecuador’s economy with crippling sanctions if its government offered public support for breastfeeding.

As with so many Trump debacles, his bluster creates an appearance of radicalism — a dramatic break with a stable and happy consensus. Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell has lamented that he is discarding more than 300 years of settled economic knowledge. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has been more modest, accusing Trump of jeopardizing a free trade system that dates back to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It’s easy to forget that just before Trump’s election, elite Washington was rethinking the approach to free trade and globalization that the United States had taken since the 1990s. Centrist think tanks held major conferences calling to restructure the U.S. relationship with China. Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and even libertarian experts at the Cato Institute agreed there were serious problems with the way trade agreements were enforced.

More

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trumps-tariff-war-is-the-final-act-of-a-broken-system_us_5b48f061e4b022fdcc59390b

[duforsure]

1. This trade war is probably

putin telling him to do it , or its been planned to do this to hurt our economy, and China's with , and to help russia and putin make billions from it.