True-blue Republicans are fond of calling so-called GOP imposters as RINOs … or Republicans in Name Only.
Guess what. It appears that the president-elect of the United States is one of those RINOs.
Check this out: Donald J. Trump is kicking around an idea that would result in a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported into the United States of America.
Forbes.com calls it a “seriously bad idea.” Forbes, after all, is considered to be a mainstream Republican financial organ, yes?
It doesn’t like the notion of applying what’s historically been called “protectionist economic policy.” This is the kind of policy espoused by union movement leaders who seek artificial ways to protect U.S. jobs. Union workers historically have sided with, oh, Democratic politicians.
Now we hear that the president-elect, who ran for the nation’s highest office as a Republican Party nominee, considering a tariff on imported goods.
As Forbes writes: “To put it mildly this is not a good idea. For two rather important reasons. The first being that it’s not obvious that this would not be legal. The United States has a number of trade treaties in place and many of them will state that no such universal tariff will be possible. The second is that the idea itself is just not a good one. Why do we want to tax Americans more for the things they wish to purchase?”
That’s not a very free-market philosophy.
The president-elect — an apparently hard-core RINO — is making my head spin.