Tariffs all around, Except for ...

a reply to: FullHeathen
Haha caffeine addicts can suck it! I have not drank nary a single coffee in the last fifteen years and could not care less. A lot of people sure are going to be uptight though with having to deal with less of their preferred substance to use due to economic factors. Probably best to quickly legalize official pistol duels so as to help people calm down before a gunslinger challenges them for their crass behavior.

originally posted by: network dude
wow, so when tarrifs are collected, POTUS gets the cash? Thats a sweet deal.

No, POTUS doesn't get the cash, directly.

With tariffs, what the POTUS does get to do is pick winners and losers. He can selectively apply tariffs on products favoring country A compared to country B. Country B can then decide to give Trump some land on which to build a golf course and a Trump tower, and country B will suddenly find its tariffs reduced or eliminated. Then country A will suddenly decide they have to find a way to get some cash to Trump so that they are not at an economic disadvantage relative to country B. This is why Trump wants to eliminate or reduce conventional taxes and put tariffs on almost everything. It will dramatically increase his ability to directly manipulate a larger fraction of the nation's economy for his personal gain. His low-information supporters will see their taxes reduced and continue to support him for that, and will ignore the fact that he is using his office for personal gain.

Or let's look at a deal that actually happened during the first Trump Administration. Before he became part of Trump's team, General Michael Flynn was involved in a business plan with other former Generals to make Saudi Arabia a nuclear power. A company called IP3 was formed to push the plan forward. When Flynn joined the Trump team in 2017, he immediately began pushing this plan. The plan involved transferring some sensitive US nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia so they could build their own nuclear reactors. By law, this technology is controlled by the Energy Department, so Trump got Energy Secretary Rick Perry to sign off on the technology transfer, while keeping the details hidden from public view. Then, a couple of months after Trump leaves office, his son-in-law suddenly gets a 2 Billion dollar sweetheart loan deal from Saudi Arabia to develop real estate over the objections of the Saudi investment advisers.

There is abundant evidence that Donald Trump is a career, lifetime, white collar criminal. He thinks like one, talks like one, and acts like one. At his age, he is certainly not going to change his modus operandi now. He has in the past and intends in the future to use his office for those purposes when he gets the opportunity.