Entries Tagged 'Jobs' ↓

Those of us who lived through recession during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency will remember this word—stagflation.

During Carter’s time in office we had long-lasting rise in unemployment and even gasoline rationing – one could only fill up on certain days of the week. 

It was a frustrating time for me as, with two graduate college degrees I stood in a line of 200 unemployed workers in South Carolina trying for a grocery store’s cashier job. 

Stagflation is a word that conflates inflation with stagnation into one word.

First inflation comes about because there is “too much money chasing too few goods”. (And since our tariffs on imports are a tax on U.S. consumers, we expect prices of U.S.-made goods will go up in a trade war).

Then, if the government does nothing to curtail inflation, will come layoffs of workers.

After that, if too many Americans aren’t able afford to buy higher-priced U.S. goods, we’ll have stagnation occur in our economy because the production of goods and services slows down or even starts to decline.

Note too that the US. is a debtor country. We import $3.1 trillion and export only $2.5 trillion in goods and services.

Trump’s tariffs are threatening us with this fate again. Here’s why. Continue reading →

This year the Spring 2109 issue of my alumni magazine from the University of Wisconsin-Madison printed a brief article titled, “What’s the Tiff About Tariffs?”

In this article, U.W. Economics professor, Menzie Chinn, alleged that Trump’s tariffs are failing to protect domestic U.S. industries from foreign competition.

In previous posts on Brucenomics, the earliest on December 2016, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” and the latest on March 12, in “Word of the Day — Tariffs“, I argued that Trump’s tariffs were not likely to improve the U.S. economy.

In early 2018, when I first read about President Trump’s tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel, I worried his actions might well drive the U.S. into the arms of oligarch-owned companies in Russia. Previously we had bought the bulk of those two raw materials from Canada.

U.W.’s alumni magazine this year confirms my fears. Continue reading →

Nearly everyone and his or her brother and sister have come out against Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum this week! 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum.

I have read some things I didn’t know about tariffs on steel and aluminum. Most of these things came from an article in The Conversation titled “George W. Bush tried steel tariffs. It didn’t work” by William Hauk, Associate Professor of Economics at one of my alma maters, the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Here are some facts I didn’t know

Continue reading →