China is turning up pressure on Walmart. That could mean higher prices for US customers

[Ol Janx Spirit]

18. That's not actually historically accurate. The Great Depression started in 1929 while the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act...

...wasn't enacted until June of 1930, so it could not have been the cause of the Great Depression. It may have exacerbated it--although even that point is in some dispute--but it did not cause it. The conditions we have in the world today are vastly different than they were in the 1920s, so it seems less likely that this type of monetary policy will lead to a depression, and they may not even lead to a recession. Tariffs have been such a huge instrument of economic policy worldwide for such a long time--tariffs were the primary funding mechanism of the federal government until the income tax began after 1913, and the second bill that George Washington signed was a tariff--that it is difficult to actually anticipate what will happen in the current climate. My point is that when Walmart uses their leverage to force Chinese companies to lower their prices to make up for the US-imposed tariff, the offshoot of that will fall heavily upon the workers that are already being exploited. The protectionist policies of the 17 and 1800s that were quite successful in standing up industries that America did not yet have really do not apply to today's world. And as the world's largest economy we may not even notice the real effects of it--just as we do not have to see the low-wage, child labor, and environmental destruction we currently promote in the rest of the world so we can have cheap disposable goods. It seems very likely that the real victims of this trade war will be the foreign workers--and possibly slave labor from our new El Salvadorian prison partner--offered up as fodder for our insatiable demand.