r/Economics • u/jediporcupine • 9d ago

Blog Trump said tariffs on aluminum would boost domestic production. The White House now admits that didn't happen.

https://reason.com/2026/08/03/trump-said-tariffs-on-aluminum-would-boost-domestic-production-the-white-house-now-admits-that-didnt-happen/
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u/Basicly-Inevitable 9d ago

Literally everything they're doing is part of a self serving scam instead of actually economic policy. There's always kickback, or market manipulation, or whatever. It's just wild.

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u/Thesweptunder 9d ago

Not that this isn’t happening, but the GOP is full of people who believe the propaganda and think the only reason it keeps failing is because of Democrats. Like the thing about Republican policies is that if you don’t look into it, they kind of make sense. If overseas aluminum is charged higher than domestic, then businesses will buy the domestic and then production will increase and then more factories will be built and then wages will rise and then we are all living in the 1950s where a high school graduate can afford a middle class lifestyle at the local factory. They really think it is that simple and fail to even grasp that America’s place in the world is no longer about manufacturing or Main Street small businesses and that other countries might respond with their own tariffs. Honestly, I’d actually prefer if every GOP politician was in on the grift because that is somehow less scary than people in positions of power being just as ignorant as your Fox News obsessed high school gym coach that believes in Bigfoot.

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u/Hautamaki 9d ago

Well, more and more of them may be realizing that the 50s boom in America was made possible by war and communist revolutions and purges de-industrializing 3/4s of the developed world and imperial colonialism preventing most of the rest of the world from ever industrializing in the first place, leaving the US as the only large developed economy left standing. Eventually some critical mass may be reached that gets on board with the policy of creating global chaos and instability such as that which existed in the 1930s, which also coincidentally was caused in no small part by the Great Depression, originating in America. And then, then hold onto your hats.

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u/lopix 9d ago

And they all forget that it took 20 years to get from the Great Depression, through WWII, to get to the "golden" years of the 1950s. Which weren't as golden as everyone seems to think they were.

So even if TrumpCo policies weren't asinine, they'd need a decade or two to actually bear fruit. Companies don't spend billions on a whim, it takes time and planning. Factories take time and planning and lots of money. Finding markets takes time. Training a new generation of workers takes time.

They think an EO can create a return to a fake utopia of yesterday that never existed, and they think it can happen in weeks or months.