"Trump’s hard-nosed policies towards China are heaped under the patriotic-sounding rubric, “economic nationalism”, as if American workers derived some benefit from higher prices and soaring inflation. The fact is, however, is that ordinary people will suffer greatly from decoupling and see their standards of living fall even further. That’s because the policy is not intended to create jobs, increase wages, improve health care or provide lower-cost education. It is aimed at preserving Washington’s grip on global power so that corrupt western elites can create more mischief while driving the country further into debt and despair."

"Characterizing this as “cheating”, like Summers rightly says, should be rejected entirely. At the end of the day, who’s more “cheated”: the party doing the hard work of producing goods at very low prices on razor thin margins, or the party that simply prints a virtually infinite amount of fiat money to pay for all this stuff?"

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/trump-concocted-the-tariffs-hoax-to-decouple-with-china/