4 Comments
User's avatar
тна Return to thread
JanusIanitos's avatar

Willingly making coffee more expensive has to be among the dumber options on the list of things to make more expensive. There's dumber ones out there, but coffee has to be near the top of the list. Americans love coffee and buy it frequently. It's exactly the kind of price hike that can be easily noticed and easily assigned.

Dems just need to make noise about it.

Expand full comment
Marcus Graly's avatar

This definitely seems to be an application of the adage

"If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"

It's not like there's much of a domestic coffee industry that would benefit anyway, aside from a few growers in Hawaii. Also coffee trees take 5 years to start bearing fruit and by then Trump's temper tantrum, (and his presidency), will be over.

Cut flowers, on the other hand, were not always grown abroad, so a protectionist policy could in theory revive the industry. However it would have to be thoughtfully and consistently applied and just biased on day-to-day caprice.

Expand full comment
Jonathan's avatar

bottom line though is price increase

Expand full comment
Marcus Graly's avatar

Yes that's true of pretty much all protectionism and it's the probably the biggest argument for free trade. We get more goods and services than if we made them all ourselves.

Biden has an industrial policy focused mainly around national security and climate change. Trump's is focused around coercion and vendettas. There's no logic to how his actions in terms of how it will make the US economy more resilient in the long run to justify his choice. Just Colombia did something I don't like, therefore tariff. He's threatened a bunch of other countries with similar measures.

My point is that if you decided that cut flowers were an industry of national importance, tariffs on Colombian imports would be part of that strategy, not that Trump's action was at all reasonable or well considered.

Expand full comment