What if Tarriffs to Protect the US Manufacturing Base Were Imposed in the 60s/70s?

Doesn't quality matter places like europe have higher health and safety regulations on food? American products sometimes are less regulated and use more chemicals, in uk here everybody talking about how we don't want american chlorinated chicken as we have stronger rules.

Sometimes rules are just a fig-leaf for protectionism
 

kernals12

Banned
Doesn't quality matter places like europe have higher health and safety regulations on food? American products sometimes are less regulated and use more chemicals, in uk here everybody talking about how we don't want american chlorinated chicken as we have stronger rules.
Chlorine removes bacteria. And our chickens all have to be approved by the FDA for safety.
 
Every nation has its tricks. Australia likes to wave the invasive pest flag. With some justification. But the rest of the world doesn't like it.

And the US quite happily keep out 1st world agricultural products. Not just Mexico's and other 3rd world nations. ;)
 
The consumer price index consistently overstates inflation rates because of substitution bias whereby people change their buying habits in response to changes in relative prices, for instance buying more apples when the price of oranges goes up. Therefore, it understates real income growth.

This conveniently ignores the plain fact that an apple is not an orange.

Would you say that a trowel was a cheaper substitute for a spade?

It also ignores that those who are poor enough have no cheaper goods to switch to when their favoured goods grow too expensive.

Also, even if the effect you mention did work as you say, no-one has been able to measure how big the effect is. All current uses of the CPI are bogus science of the worst kind.

fasquardon
 

kernals12

Banned
This conveniently ignores the plain fact that an apple is not an orange.

Would you say that a trowel was a cheaper substitute for a spade?

It also ignores that those who are poor enough have no cheaper goods to switch to when their favoured goods grow too expensive.

Also, even if the effect you mention did work as you say, no-one has been able to measure how big the effect is. All current uses of the CPI are bogus science of the worst kind.

fasquardon
Yes you can, you take the current basket of goods and figure out how much that basket would've cost the year before then find out what the average basket of goods was in the year before, see how much that costs now, then you take the geometric mean of the two.
f.bmp
 
I've read stuff saying that the American city went to Sh!t because of the manufacturing jobs were offshored in the 70s and 80s. Would tarriffs have helped?
Free trade is a net benefit for the country as a whole. The problem is that the benefits are widely distributed to the American consumers as a whole in terms of lower car prices, for example, but the costs are concentrated on steel workers whose jobs are outsourced. In theory some of the gains can just be redistributed to the economic losers as unemployment benefits and job retraining though a safety net and still leave society better off.
The laid off workers are much easier to see than the price of everyone's newest cars going down by $3000, so its easier for people to blame trade as a whole and advocate tariffs. America has a clunky, unresponsive welfare state so we get anti-system populists like Trump and Sanders.
 
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