re: #61 Eclectic Cyborg

Yep. So funny to see supposedly anti-tax Republicans getting giddy about slamming China with more Tariffs.

Not really. There’s been a strong “Mercantilism was sound economics” wing in the Rs since I was in high school, because the assigned mentor my counselor gave me (a senior to my, I think, sophomore) was the president of the Arapahoe High Young Republicans (yes, that one, though as I’ve pointed out on other sites, 14 years before “that event”, quite possibly due entirely to the principal we had (he retired less than a year before the rampage).

These folks think that the Sixteenth Amendment was almost as much a mistake as the Seventeenth, and proudly point out that the US wasn’t a low-tax country [when they aren’t claiming it’s an analog of the EU rather than of Germany, and thus ‘not a country at all’] before 1913, just a country that couldn’t tax individuals directly but only the products being imported. For the majority of them (see “Make Mercantilism Great Again”), the switch from Gross National to Gross Domestic Product as a measure of the economy was a grave mistake and one that needs to be undone, preferably with retroactive adjustments to the statistics compiled in my lifetime. Driving non-1%-of-1% Americans to be unable to purchase a product until a US plant starts producing it again is their goal.

And they figure it’s been a violation of common sense that no one going back before TR agreed with them.