Justin

There is some contention about whether this can necessarily be attributed to the tariff. The Great Depression was already in motion before Smoot-Hawley, mainly due to financial instability, falling demand, and poor banking practices. However, the tariff worsened the crisis by shrinking global trade, hurting farmers, and reducing employment in export-dependent industries. Had it not passed, the Depression still would have occurred, but perhaps with less severity.

Monetarists, such as Milton Friedman, who emphasized the central role of the money supply in causing the depression, considered the Smoot–Hawley Act to be only a minor cause of the Great Depression in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot–Hawley_Tariff_Act

yeah maybe my nuance leaned too much to the no side, but I wanted to explain tariffs a bit. Trump tariffs are not protectionism or coercion, they’re just stupid.

Or Vietnam or Philippines or Malaysia

There’s a legal process that they have to get right, the investigation only started last year.

There is some nuance here. Smoot-Hawley didn’t cause the great depression, and there a lot of economists who say it didn’t have that much of an effect at all.

Tarriffs can have some useful effects when used for protectionism, diplomatic coercion, or trade barrier reduction coercion. However, Trump’s tariffs are way dumber than anything that came before, because he’s trying to do all three of these at once. All of these have conflicting effects on each other, and it is literally impossible to design a tariff strategy that can accomplish all three, since raising a tariff for one purpose means that you need to lower tariffs for other purposes. All he’s doing by raising across the board is causing instability in the economy and convincing all partners to ditch the US.

Insane that Github blocked their entire development without discussing it with them though. Ban the contributor, not the entire open source project.