Of course he’s probably going to blow hard is way into it, almost immediately scale it back to selected goods, land on a tariff on figs and oak barrels and then claim that’s what he was always planning to do.
the dumbfuck already did this once before.
Two words. Tariffs. Bailout.
The $28 billion for farmers raises questions about using taxpayer money to shield policymakers from the consequences of tariff increases.
www.forbes.com
After a series of tariff increases on Chinese imports, the government of China retaliated against U.S. exporters, as predicted by trade analysts outside of the administration. As a result, U.S. exports, particularly of agricultural goods, dropped significantly. “Losing the world’s most populous country as an export market has been a major blow to the [U.S.] agriculture industry,” reported the
New York Times in August 2019. “Total American agricultural exports to China were $24 billion in 2014 and fell to $9.1 billion last year,
according to the American Farm Bureau.” In 2018, U.S. farmers’ soybean exports to China declined by 75%, according to the
U.S. International Trade Commission.
To shore up political support from farmers, Donald Trump approved increasing amounts of government aid to farmers harmed by the trade policies that the Trump administration itself initiated. Trump was open about the purpose of the payments. “I sometimes see where these horrible dishonest reporters will say that ‘oh jeez, the farmers are upset,’” he
told attendees of an Illinois farmer show in August 2019. “Well, they can’t be too upset, because I gave them $12 billion and I gave them $16 billion this year. . . . I hope you like me even better than you did in ’16.”
