How this current situation with the tariffs will play out — I don’t know.
No one does, really. During PDJT v.1.0, China devalued their currency and ate the costs....there was no net effect to the American consumer. No country wants to lose access to the largest consumer economy in the world....so there is that leverage. We are seeing a face-off between Wall Street and Main Street right now here in the USA - Wall Street is throwing a tantrum so I guess we will see how it plays out.
It's interesting that the Marshall Plan is essentially still in effect for Europe (and expanded to much of the rest of the world), 80 years after the fact. It's been renamed/replaced several times, culminating in the creation of USAID......DOGE has identified/demonstrated massive fraud associated with that program....from Wkipedia.....
Essentially, we give our tax dollars to a large portion of the world (without our buy-in), and I think "We the People" have decided that's not such a good idea anymore given the almost 40T of debt you mention.
The United States transferred $13.3 billion (equivalent to $133 billion [A] in 2024) in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II in Europe.......though in 1951, the Marshall Plan was largely replaced by the Mutual Security Act.
The Mutual Security Act of 1951 launched a major American foreign aid program, 1951–61, of grants to numerous countries. It largely replaced the Marshall Plan. The main goal was to help underdeveloped US-allied countries develop and to contain the spread of communism. It was signed on October 10, 1951, by President Harry S. Truman. [1] Annual authorizations were about $7.5 billion ($ 90,855,769,231 today), out of a GDP of $340bn in 1951, for military, economic, and technical foreign aid to American allies. The aid was aimed primarily at shoring up Western Europe, as the Cold War developed. In 1961 it was replaced by a new foreign aid program, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961,
The Foreign Assistance Act ( Pub. L. 87–195, 75 Stat. 424-2, enacted September 4, 1961, 22 U.S.C. § 2151 et seq.) is a United States law governing foreign aid policy. [1] It outlined the political and ideological principles of U.S. foreign aid, significantly overhauled and reorganized the structure of U.S. foreign assistance programs, legally distinguished military from nonmilitary aid, and, through executive order by President John F. Kennedy Jr., resulted in a new agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to administer nonmilitary economic assistance programs.
This discussion really belongs on your other board, sorry for the clutter here. |
