According to who? That's not the most common justification provided for them, the more common refrain a bag full of lies about what a tariff is and what a trade deficit is.
Pretty dishonest. There is nothing about curbing consumerism there. Just telling people that they will HAVE TO buy less if consumer prices increase, in order to hurt China.
Lol, are you serious? Can you elaborate on your thinking here? Are you suggesting Trump imposed tariffs out of some altruistic goal of reducing waste or the social impacts of consumerism?? That can't be right. What is the motivation in your mind?
You can support some of trumps policies while thinking the insurrectionist peadophile should be behind bars
You can also support tarrifs in principal but not support the way they have been implemented (club not calpol, used as a political weapon or to extract mafia style favours)
The post being replied to says "the tarrifs", clearly referring to the current set of tarrifs implemented by this admin, not the concept of tarrifs in general, otherwise they'd have just said "tarrifs".
What's being pointed out is the retcon that "the whole damn point of the tariffs" is to end rampant consumerism. It's clear that the grand^{n}parent poster is flailing about and desperately trying to find the comfort of some coherent and intentional narrative behind a set of inherently incoherent and unintentional actions.
If your manager at work acted like a legit insane person, but said one true thing, you wouldn't be there saying that he/she is smart in that particular area.
If by some chance in hell tarrifs actually work, its due to pure luck, not due to any strategy. Which is what the original person I am replying to made it seem.
I know we don't want HN to devolve into political bickering, but this is a deeply important meta-observation about what's happening in our country right now. Trump's stochastically random decisions are so inscrutable, but his following is so cult-like, that his followers are forced to flail around to try and find any plausible justification for these actions.
You'd think that at some point the sheer effort of this would trigger some sort of introspection, but it never seems to come. Someone, somewhere, latches onto an explanation that's catchy enough, vague enough, and impossible to disprove enough, that the tribe can take the explanation at face value and latch onto it, no matter how thin.
I hate that this is somehow is still viewed as political, when the topic has moved far past that to the point where you are arguing with conservatives that can't comprehend actual reality.
