@karlauerbach I don't remember a lot of details, but my takeaway from history (back when they taught history) is that tariffs are an attractive idea to stupid people but don't work and usually backfire. If it's a trading partner they'll just tariff back at you. Now what? Everybody starves.

The end result is unnecessary, artificially stimulated inflation.

And let's not forget that tariffs are simply taxes on your own people, without calling them taxes.

I mean, if I were president I would remain open to the idea of tariffs but only for specific precisely targeted purposes. I want to bring chip fab back to the USA. Okay, maybe a tariff on imported semis, carefully adjusted to encourage semi makers to move production back to the USA.

But blanket tariffs are just dumb, especially when dealing with an economy like China's, where the USA is just a very small part of their market, like 3 percent. Our tariffs will be ignored by the Chinese. Irrelevant. Most of China's output is sold internally and in Asia. The USA is tiny. But we think we're "punishing" the Chinese. Hahaha. No. They won't even notice.

These tariffs Trump is talking about will do nothing but harm to us.

And if the tariffs worked and people tried to bring production back to the USA, where will we get the people to employ? Employment is near 100 percent of employable workers.

Immigrants, of course is the solution. But he wants to get rid of immigrants. We can't man the production even now. Lose the immigrants and his whole plan collapses. Can't be done. Don't have the people to do it here.

So Trump's whole "plan" doesn't make any sense. The result will be extremely high prices and shortages. We'll starve, in other words.