Tariffs, tax cuts, energy: What is in Trump’s economic plan?:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to bring back US manufacturing and lower costs, relying on tariffs to boost coffers and exert pressure on other countries — but the reality is less straightforward.
Ahead of November’s election, economists warn his policies could raise consumer prices and shake up global trade — with unclear benefits to US production.
The pitch is for tariffs to add billions in revenue and take aim at countries like China which have been “ripping us off,” while pushing businesses to bring production back on US shores.
“Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world,” Trump said in his September debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
The former president has vowed a 10 percent to 20 percent across-the-board tariff on imports and a 60 percent rate on Chinese goods — more recently threatening a 200 percent levy on automobiles made in Mexico.
“To me ‘tariff’ is a very beautiful word,” Trump said in a Fox News interview broadcast on Sunday. “It’s a word that’s going to make our country rich again.”
“Without tariffs, we have a busted country,” he added.
Despite what Trump often asserts, it is US businesses — not foreign governments — that pay import taxes on overseas purchases when there are tariffs on such goods, and they can pass on the higher costs, which could add to inflation.
Alongside his tariff plans, Trump wants to extend expiring tax cuts and lower corporate income tax further.
But proposed tariffs could counteract the benefits from his tax policy “while falling short of offsetting the tax revenue losses,” said the Tax Foundation think tank.
Higher costs
US inflation could rise 1.3 percentage points above baseline next year if Trump imposed a 10 percent universal tariff and other governments retaliate, said the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).
Sharp hikes on Chinese goods would also fuel inflation, it added.
Others, like Bernard Yaros of Oxford Economics, estimates a Trump presidency could raise inflation by 0.6 percentage points at its peak.
Previously, businesses bore the brunt as imported components got costlier, said Kyle Handley, professor at UC San Diego.
But he noted: “If they do an across-the-board tariff of 10 percent to 20 percent, there’s no way we’re not going to see that on store shelves.”
And it is unlikely manufacturing can return to the United States in short order.
“We haven’t made TVs in the US in decades,” Handley said, adding that American factories are not producing at the scale needed to satisfy consumption either.
In his Fox interview, Trump again denied that raising tariffs would lead to higher prices for consumers.
But Handley estimates the supply chain frictions exporters faced were equivalent to a two to four percent tariff hit — and companies tell AFP they have had to pass on some costs.
A 2019 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that by end-2018, import tariffs were costing US consumers and importers an additional $ 3.2 billion per month in added tax costs.
Rerouting trade
Trump’s tariff plans could also slash bilateral US-China trade by 70 percent, redirecting or eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of exchanges, said Oxford Economics.
US trade volumes could drop 10 percent, becoming more centered on North American and other free trade agreement partners, the advisory firm added.
While the added tariffs would raise some $ 500 billion in revenue annually, rerouted trade from China could eventually slash this figure closer to $ 200 billion annually, Yaros said.
Other proposals like revoking the “permanent normal trade relations” status that shields China from various US levies could also raise inflation by 0.4 percentage points in 2025, PIIE added.
Although Trump wants a “reciprocal trade act” where “countries that make us pay a tax to do business with them will be charged the same tax when they send their product into the United States,” Yaros believes this is less likely as it requires bipartisan support in Congress.
Food, energy
Trump regularly promises to eliminate inflation, too — a critical voter concern — saying he would slash energy bills in half within a year.
Analysts expect this refers to more deregulation in the domestic oil and gas sector.
But Yaros expressed skepticism this would “unleash significantly greater production” given that it depends on major energy producers, who in turn have shareholders to answer to.
While Trump wants to lower food costs by allowing in fewer foreign agricultural products, economists have noted import barriers could trigger retaliation.
This could harm US farmers who export significantly.
© Agence France-Presse
A new book revisits the ideas of Rick Turner, the philosopher assassinated at his home in Bellair, Durban, in 1978. It continues a process of restoring Turner to public consciousness.
Turner was a gifted, serious and well-trained academic. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris where he wrote his thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre, the great philosopher of freedom, under the abundantly creative French intellectual Henri Lefebvre.
Lefebvre was also deeply committed to radical freedom and developed the idea of “autogestion”, a commitment to democratic self-management in the form of worker control over production and community control over urban spaces.
Turner was also a dazzling teacher. Charisma is not always an expression of a personal will to power. It can also be energised by a desire for connection and find its spark in the attainment of forms of encounter premised on mutuality.
Turner’s charisma is recalled as catalytic and enabling and he radicalised a generation of students, many of whom became significant political actors able to work with popular organisations and struggles in productive ways.
He was close to Steve Biko and engaged both the Black Consciousness Movement and, after the 1973 strikes in Durban, the growing trade union movement.
His commitment to participatory democracy, as both a means of struggle and its goal, connects his thought to the spirit of the best of the popular democratic forms of politics developed in the unions, and taken into the United Democratic Front.
By the 1980s, millions of people were organised in struggles in which ideas such as workers’ power and people’s power had considerable momentum. These ideas do not derive from Turner, but they certainly resonate, and a number of people inspired by Turner contributed to theorising and building democratic forms of politics in workplace and community struggles.
Turner’s commitment to democratic socialism did not only draw on ideas gleaned from anti-colonial struggles and the European New Left. He also understood the significance of what he, unfortunately using the colonial term “tribe”, described as “an effective ‘counter-culture’ embodying communal and person-orientated values” and connected to forms of collective decision making arrived at “through a process of discussion and consensus”.
This is a frequently ignored element in popular democratic forms of politics in South Africa, one often only attested to in the margins of the historiography but still intensely present today.
There are political militants, such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, who produce extraordinary writing in the heat of struggle, work with power that accumulates across space and time. There are also militants who, like Pakistani radical Eqbal Ahmad, largely sublimate the self into political work, leaving little in the way of substantive texts.
Ahmad was an inspiration to great figures such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, both of whom often sought his counsel, but did not leave the sort of books that fully record the reach and power of his intellect.
This is also largely true of Turner. His substantive philosophical work, said to be brilliant, remains unpublished. The book he published in 1972, a few years before he was assassinated at the age of 37, was written at the invitation of a Christian organisation and for their constituency.
Titled The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa, it makes a sustained argument for a democratic conception of socialism.
There is a clear commitment to education as, in the words of the Brazilian radical Paulo Freire, a practice of freedom and an equally clear vision of workplace democracy.
The book does not carry independent theoretical innovation or the weight of the anti-colonial writings of people like Fanon or Cabral. What it does do, though, is to deftly bring a set of generative and radical ideas in the air at the time into conversation with the South African situation.
Turner was able to reach into the wider world, bring threads of radical thought home to Durban, and weave them into a coherent engagement with a particular conjuncture.
Taking measure of Turner’s significance in that conjuncture is important and people have acted to ensure that his memory is sustained against the now declining but once powerful hold of a national liberation movement on the political imagination.
A biography of Turner, disappointing in some respects but containing useful fragments from interviews and other texts, including police reports, was published in 2013. Two years later The Eye of the Needle was republished by Seagull Books in New York.
In 2022 a number of articles were published, and a discussion hosted at the University of the Witwatersrand, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first publication of The Eye of the Needle. This was largely driven by people who had known Turner, much of it taking the form of recollections of his extraordinary contributions as a teacher and politically committed intellectual.
Turner was remembered for the catalytic power of his charisma for a generation of brilliant students who became important political protagonists, his friendship and engagement with Biko, his contributions to the development of the trade union movement after the strikes in Durban in 1973 and his courage to live against the strictures of apartheid.
He was also remembered for his ideas, most significantly his commitment to radically democratic forms of education and politics as both means and end, the political necessity of personal transformation and his argument for the importance of utopian thinking.
There was also critique. David Hemson examined Turner’s naivety about the political character of Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the “homeland” system. He noted that Biko had taken a very different position, implying that Turner’s misjudgment cannot be explained away as being of its time.
Turner’s Politics as the Art of the Impossible, a new collection of essays published by Wits University Press and edited by Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Lawrence Hamilton, Laurence Piper and Gideon van Riet, is different to the set of recollections published in 2002. The editors are from a generation who came to academic prominence after apartheid and the contributors include gifted younger people such as Ayesha Omar and Tendayi Sithole.
The essays primarily engage Turner as a thinker rather than a historical figure. Both of these facts are important because, for an intellectual to be a living presence as a thinker rather than as a person with a place in the history of thought, their work has to be engaged, and critically, by succeeding generations.
Nonetheless one of the strongest pieces comes from Paula Ensor, who was a participant in the political milieu in Durban in the early 1970s.
She reads The Eye of the Needle through Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex, first published in 1949.
Turner would certainly have known this book but Ensor shows that in his writings, including work on the Durban strikes in which he had significant influence, the question of gender is elided.
Crain Soudien’s contribution is also particularly significant. He reads Turner’s ontological optimism — his sense of our capacity to change ourselves, our ideas and the world — against what he sees as the pessimism of Achille Mbembe.
Soudien draws out Turner’s ideas with great care and affirms his contribution to the tradition of education for liberation but concludes that, while Turner’s positions have enduring value, fresh politics are required to think of liberation in what Soudien calls the “complexity of the technological turn”.
Turner awaits a first-rate biography and there is still much to be said by people of his generation, people politically formed in the ferment of the early 1970s. This includes Mabogo More, the preeminent Sartrean in our intellectual life, who was in the audience at the 1972 graduation ceremony at the University of North when Onkgopotse Tiro gave his famously defiant speech.
More has dedicated his life to thinking and writing in fidelity to the emergence of Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement on the political stage and spent many years as a trade union educator, often teaching Turner’s ideas about workers’ democracy.
However, there is also much to be said by new generations of thinkers, including participants in the experiments in democratic politics being carried out, in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, by contemporary grassroots activists.
Every generation needs to extend its own invitation to our intellectual ancestors to enter the present, and Onyebuchi, Eze, Hamilton, Piper and Van Riet have done well to keep an important conversation going.
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.
Wildlife populations plummet 73% in past 50 years:
The average number of monitored wildlife species populations has shrunk by 73% over the past 50 years, according to the Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures the state of biodiversity globally.
This is based on almost 35 000 population trends and 5 495 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. Freshwater populations have suffered the heaviest declines, plunging by 85%, followed by terrestrial (69%) and marine populations (56%).
“Nature is being lost — with huge implications for us all,” warned the latest edition of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF’s) biennial flagship publication, the Living Planet Report, produced with the Zoological Society of London. “Biodiversity sustains human life and underpins our societies. Yet every indicator that tracks the state of nature on a global scale shows a decline.”
The fastest declines — 95% — have been witnessed in Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by Africa (76%), then Asia and the Pacific (60%).
Declines have been less dramatic in Europe and Central Asia (35%) and North America (39%) but this “reflects the fact that large-scale impacts on nature were already apparent before 1970 in these regions”. Some populations have stabilised or increased, thanks to conservation efforts and species reintroductions.
Habitat degradation and loss, driven primarily by humanity’s food system, is the biggest culprit, followed by overexploitation, invasive species and disease, the report said. Other threats include climate change, which is most cited in Latin America and the Caribbean, and pollution, especially in North America, Asia and the Pacific.
Africa is unique as a region and home to significant numbers of large mammals and is rich in biodiversity. The LPI for Africa shows a decline of 76%, equivalent to 2.8% per year.
“The continent’s biodiversity provides essential resources for many rural populations, as well as for the rest of Africa and globally,” the report said. “Overexploitation is more commonly reported as a threat to LPI populations in Africa than other regions and trends in populations that are used by people show greater declines than in other regions. This highlights the urgent need to protect these vital resources.”
Stable populations over the long-term provide resilience against disturbances like disease and extreme weather events. A decline in populations, as shown in the global LPI, “decreases resilience and threatens the functioning of the ecosystem”.
This, in turn, undermines the benefits that ecosystems provide to people — from food, clean water and carbon storage for a stable climate to the broader contributions that nature makes to cultural, social and spiritual well-being.
The index and similar indicators show that “nature is disappearing at an alarming rate”. While some changes may be small and gradual, their cumulative effects can trigger a larger, faster change. When these reach a threshold, the change becomes self-perpetuating, resulting in “substantial, often abrupt and potentially irreversible change”.
This is called a tipping point. In the natural world, several tipping points are “highly likely” if current trends are left to continue, with potentially catastrophic consequences. These include global tipping points that pose threats to humanity and most species, and would damage Earth’s life-support systems and “destabilise societies everywhere”.
There are early warning signs that several global tipping points are “fast approaching”, the report warned. These include the mass die-off of coral reefs that would destroy fisheries and storm protection for hundreds of millions of people living on the coasts while the Amazon rainforest tipping point would release tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere and disrupt weather patterns around the globe.
The world’s nations have set global goals for a thriving, sustainable future, including halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity (Convention on Biological Diversity), capping global temperature rise to 1.5ºC (Paris Agreement), and eradicating poverty and ensuring human well-being (sustainable development goals — SDGs).
Yet, the world is falling far short of what’s needed to meet the 2030 targets, the report said. “Over half the SDG targets for 2030 will be missed, with 30% of them stalled or getting worse from the 2015 baseline.”
National climate commitments would lead to an average global temperature increase of almost 3°C by the end of the century, “inevitably triggering multiple catastrophic tipping points”. National biodiversity strategies and action plans are inadequate and lack financial and institutional support.
“Approaching climate, biodiversity and development goals in isolation raises the risk of conflicts between different objectives – for example, between using land for food production, biodiversity conservation or renewable energy. With a coordinated, inclusive approach, however, many conflicts can be avoided and trade-offs minimised and managed.”
To maintain a living planet where people and nature thrive, “we need action that meets the scale of the challenge. We need more, and more effective, conservation efforts, while also systematically addressing the major drivers of nature loss. That will require nothing less than a transformation of our food, energy and finance systems.
Morné du Plessis, the chief executive of WWF South Africa, speaking at the report’s launch, said: “We all have to come together and do something that’s radically different,” said. “The statistics are simply telling us that we cannot just keep drawing, we’ve got to put something back.
“What happens in the next five years is that all of those agreements — the SDGS, climate goals and nature goals — converge. That’s the time when we need to be able to look back and say that we’ve moved faster than we ever have before because we have to. We live in a very, very fragile environment.”
Locally, there are inspiring examples of institutions and initiatives that are relevant for South Africa. “A pertinent example of the level of ambition that is required is SANParks Vision 2040, which reimagines the future of conservation on a much greater scale and in a more inclusive manner through the concept of mega living landscapes.”
These are large, interconnected areas of land that encompass protected areas, private and communal land and a variety of compatible land uses. More momentum and more of this approach is needed to succeed in halting further biodiversity loss.
“Such approaches are not only more inclusive of society, but are also much more cost-effective to manage, enabling conservation efforts to be scaled to new levels,” it said.
Referring to the 30×30 targets, Du Plessis added: “We have to transform the way in which we do conservation or interpret conservation. It’s going to take a very different way of going about these things because most countries are sitting somewhere between 10% to 16% [of formally protected areas].
“Depending on how strict we are on ourselves, we sit somewhere between 12% and 15% so we have to double what is currently formally protected. Then, on top of that 30%, we have to restore 30% degraded land in order to get some of these pop rivets back into the aeroplane wing that we’ve been taking out.”
A lot needs to be done, he said. “Among these is to scale up and expand the properly funded systems of protected areas. We have to massively boost our efforts outside of the current formal protected areas. We’ve got to find many creative ways, including through the draft biodiversity economy strategy … that incorporate nature-based solutions to mitigate climate and to stem biodiversity loss.”
He emphasised that people are not an afterthought. “For all of these recommendations and activities to endure, all solutions will have to be inclusive, just, equitable and grounded in human rights.
“Now, that’s not just simple speak. This is some of the most difficult stuff for us to achieve but WWF and other environmental organisations are determined that people and nature together will thrive.”
Deon Nel, the head of environmental programmes at WWF South Africa, said that what happens over the next five years will be crucial for the future of life on Earth.
“We have the power — and opportunity — to change this trajectory. In December 2022, South Africa, along with 195 other countries, signed a global plan to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity and set nature on a path to recovery by 2030. This requires us to think, act, collaborate and marshal resources at exponentially different scales. Incremental gains will not be enough. Institutions will need to reinvent themselves to rise to this challenge.”
A critique of the Living Planet Index published earlier this year by academics found that it is not a reliable measure of population changes and “suffers from several mathematical and statistical issues”, leading to a bias towards an apparent decrease even for balanced populations.
“It would be naïve to assume that the pressure on vertebrate populations started in the 1970s — many vertebrate populations were severely exploited already in the 19th century and the first half of the last century, and they recovered only in the last few decades due to increasing global awareness of environmental issues and socioeconomic changes across the world.”
The current phase of the Anthropocene is thus characterised “by more complex changes than the simple disappearance of vertebrate populations. And this is good news, after all,” the researchers noted.
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