Former President Donald Trump heaped praise on authoritarian Chinese President Xi Jinping during a lengthy interview Friday with the podcaster Joe Rogan.
“We’re dealing with the smartest people,” Trump said, referring to the leaders of U.S. adversaries, about an hour and a half into their conversation.
“They hate when I say, you know, when the press — when I called President Xi, [the press] said, ‘Well, he called President Xi brilliant.’ Well, he’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not. And they go crazy.”
The idea behind tariffs is to increase the prices of imports so that domestic production can compete. Higher prices are definitely the point, but the idea is that at least with domestic production the price increases get circulated back into the domestic economy as jobs/wages. But, if the domestic economy can increase production without increasing wage expenditure then the money from the higher prices just goes to the shareholders.
If it’s something for which there is no domestic production, it’s just a tax, and it should become a question of what does money from the tariffs get used for… probably taxcuts for the rich.