Deputy Travis Junior said:
Logos Stick said:
Biden
Okay, so in this post, trump wrote "As everyone knows, under President Biden, beef prices soared at their fastest rate and the American beef herd fell to its smallest size in modern history."
If the herd was so small (ie beef supply was catastrophically low), why did Trump implement tariffs on beg to begin with? This isn't complicated - If you have a supply issue, you don't implement policies that shrink it even further!
The cherry on top is he realizes he ****ed up bigly, so he's now arm twisted foreigners into dumping beef in our markets. Think about how ludicrous this is. Nations sue other nations in international trade court when they dump goods. But now trump is begging them to do so at the expense of the domestic producers that he implemented the tariffs to protect, all for a quick electoral gain (he hopes, anyway).
I'm trying to analyze this from all sides, but no matter how I frame this series of actions, it's incoherent stupidity. When big rob rants on here about fiscal idiocy always bringing ruin, this is what he means. American beef, American beef consumers, and the republican party all would have been far better off if Trump had never mucked around in the markets.
Yeah, that take is trying way too hard to turn a pretty basic supply problem into political theater.
The herd didn't shrink because of tariffs. It had already been shrinking for years because of drought, high costs, and the cattle cycle. By the end of Biden's term, cattle numbers were at lows we hadn't seen in decades. That's why prices exploded. Fewer cattle, higher prices. Not a mystery.
Tariffs on imported beef didn't kill American cows, either. They helped keep cheap foreign beef from undercutting the prices ranchers need to justify rebuilding the herd. If ranchers don't make enough money to hold back heifers, the herd doesn't rebuild. Pretty simple.
What Trump is doing now is a 90-day, capped increase in imports, mostly lean beef used for hamburger.
Calling that "begging for dumping" is ridiculous. Dumping is flooding a market with cheap product to damage the domestic industry. A temporary, limited import increase to take some pressure off beef prices isn't remotely the same thing.
And here's the part everyone wants to hand wave away: you can't have a small cattle herd, cheap hamburgers, and happy ranchers all at the same time. Ranchers hate the imports. Consumers hate $7 ground beef. Pick your complaint.
The herd liquidation already happened. This is dealing with the consequences, not causing them.
