EDIT: I can find very few voices (not currently working directly for the administration). There's Jeff Ferry who believes "tariffs imposed during the 19th century spurred industrialization and ultimately positioned America as a global superpower". (That historical view is uncommon and wouldn't account for the current realities of global supply chains.)
If you were thoughtful about economic policy and truly believed a trade war was the solution, you'd prepare ahead of time (e.g. by stockpiling things like rare earth metals that are important to your economy and likely to be impacted by retaliatory tariffs).
That they haven't done that is one more indicator that they are thoughtlessly winging this. Even if there's a solution that involves tariffs, that's not the play they're running.
Additionally, China is much better prepared for a trade war in that it has a populace that has been very well conditioned to go through hardship for longer term wins. The US does not, and there will be massive revolt for small hardship, or even the perception of hardship. This is largely why Harris lost: she was blamed for the inflation under Biden, even though the US did far better than the rest of the world economically for the period 2021-2024.
The prior trade war with China was short and inconsequential, Trump could buy off the farmers who were really hurt by it with less than a dollar sum of 10-11 digits. That won't be possible with the trade war that's currently planned, and the effects will be large enough to cause large inflation, while simultaneously providing zero methods for investors to safely build US-based production capacity.
The US has benefitted for a couple generations by being the reserve currency, meaning that we can make big mistakes and not suffer for them, while any other country would suffer. This coming trade war, if it actually happens, may finally break this exceptional status.
The biggest crunch to the US will be to the consumer, the biggest crunch to China will be the worker. People in the US will need to buy less shit, and pay more for what they do buy. People in China will need to work fewer hours and bring home less money.
Of course, the situation is fractal and ridden with unknowns. But I think a lot of people have this view of China as being a young slick economic powerhouse and the US being a weak economy with old decrepit money pile. That's far from the truth.
Sounds like we need to really start hustling and push the lie flat movement hard on the Chinese platforms.
In the meantime Trump will find a way to blame Biden, he has already started.
Can you link some examples? I (shamefully) have been spending a lot of time on TikTok lately but it's mostly devoid of politics.
My YT home page is still the same 3-4 topics I already watch most often. No politics.
Nevertheless I saved a couple pieces I found interesting or amusing:
[1]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGz-LXXRuZT/
[2]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIcfiVwyobj/
[3]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIctsOCC5Zy/ (<- that one got me bopping to the song lol)
[4]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DItvZlXtnPJ/
[5]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DI4AcPvMuCt/ (Guess the algorithm thinks I like Tom & Jerry lol)
Youtube Premium is the only "streaming service" I actually pay money for, and I use it quite a bit. Rarely ever does something off the wall get pushed to me. I do consume politics on YT, and occasionally something right wing shows up, but it's rare. I have no doubt that this stuff would be prioritized on a new account though.
Have you not noticed that he keeps pushing out the enforcement date for the tiktok sale legislation?
He's extremely transactional. So why do you think he keeps giving them a break?
Why?
The more obvious solution is to just blame the person responsible for the mess instead of trying to get involved with other countries' politics.
You are acting like this started as soon as Trump opened his mouth, its been in the shadows for years but it really ramped up after he started this nonsense.
Like, if I hate the idea of eating kittens, and someone I hate also says they hate the idea of eating kittens, I'm not going to say "oh hell no, I can't let them shittalk OUR kitten eaters!"
I'm just going to be like "yeah, they have a point on this one", accept that a broken clock is right twice a day, and move on. Nationalist/jingoist garbage just for the sake of it makes countries worse.
To that end, the US's rivals have long used its weaknesses against it. While there are unconfirmed reports that China and Russia helped to prop up BLM in 2020, we do know for a fact that the USSR fanned the flame of racial tensions during the cold war. The best way to fight this? Get as close as you can to a fix for the problem. In that regard the USSR's attacks could have been used against them as a motivation to improve things and the US has improved.
Likewise its questionable if pushing the lie flat movement would harm regular Chinese people. From the government's POV, it looks bad: Chinese people being worked to death, can't afford a one bedroom apartment and one couple has to take care of possibly four elderly people. Of course some will just decide to 'opt out'. Makes China look bad while also possibly helping regular Chinese people in the long run.
Not the MAGA/Fox News Watcher, they simply don't live in reality.
Luckily the "swing" voters aren't that dumb, they will realize they fucked up voting for Trump and he's to blame even if they won't admit it.
At the end of the day, the US represents only 8% of China's exports and only 2% of China's GDP. Losing that will hurt, but China is far better placed to weather the loss than the US.
Just noting that trade can often find a new country so it's unlikely that 8% will all simply vanish. How much will vanish I don't know, but not all.
Whereas it is near certain that items going into the US will be priced higher. Tariffs have to be policed after all.
The US has tarriffed the entire world, and every category - finished goods and raw materials.
I'm Australian: I'm shopping on Aliexpress in another window right now. I'm going to keep doing that.
China has far more options in this then the US.
In the US the poor are the ones who suffer from obesity. From having too many calories available cheaply. Let that sink in. The US is so much further from "needs not being met" than anyone understands.
[1]: https://hive.blog/economy/@davideownzall/in-the-us-the-top-1...
There is a lot of poverty in the US.
Try living on the US median wage only and let me know how much ludicrous amount of stuff you can afford.
The question is not what you can afford. The question is what you can get. And whatever else you want to say about US system, it made the ability to show that you have $desired_item257 relatively easy to obtain even at low income level. It is genuinely not impossible to own status luxury items with aggressive financing.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20720258/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14684391/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4254327/
it's interesting that many things like televisions and phones went from being multiples of rent or mortgage payments, to the reverse, so now cutting back on consumer spending to afford necessities wouldn't do a whole lot.
I do worry though about embedded costs up the supply chain the depend on Chinese made things. The parts of parts that go into machines that are made domestically. I think that has potential to be the real knife in the back. Most things need all the pieces to work, and even though the machine is 90% made in USA, the last 10% that is a Chinese export is going to cause pain in all sorts o unexpected places.
Are there any developed countries where "can get enough calories" is a real question?
Common opinion is that china has the opposite problem, with massive productivity outputs being shipped overseas and a population base who cant/wont consume their own outputs.
The US's current leadership is so economically illiterate that most of the people who backed Trump thought he was just joking about his economic policy. When the stock market finally realized that he was so stupid as to follow through on campaign promises the stock market tanked. It is currently only held up at current depressed levels because it is assumed that Trump will back away from the trade war.
Though the US economy is the strongest and healthiest on the planet by a large margin, and while typically the president of the US has minimal impact, we find ourselves in a strange situation where the president has found a way to throw all that supremacy away.
To some degree is it possible to frame this whole situation as America intentionally tanking the dollar because it is too strong (which has happened twice before, albeit in more diplomatic ways). The hard part though is getting our economic allies to go along with it while also not abandoning dollar supremacy.
How does the strongest boxer ever intentionally get weaker to avoid permanent injury, while also keeping bettors confident in his winning streak? It kind of needs to be done, but man I cannot think of a worse person to execute this than Trump.
China has been divesting itself of treasuries for a long time: a) because they create coupling between the two economies, and b) they know that the US will simply freeze them if China invades Taiwan. If China dumped all of its treasuries at once, it would hurt a little, but not that much.
Why do you think America will have a layoff- and insolvency-free recession?
China is also a large external creditor, for example holding a large amount of treasury bonds from other countries.
I certainly don't know how either of those impact the calculus of which is worse and/or more manageable though.
If there is a secret Trump plan to devalue the dollar and force us treasury holders to accept cheaper longer term debt, the biggest plenary will be to social security.
One visualization:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-heres-who-owns-u-s-...
(Though on the last numbers I saw had the UK and China with far more similar amounts of holdings.$
Calling T-bills debt is only half the picture. They function more like dollars, whose value can be deflated or increased after issuance merely by changing interest rates.
Let's look at car head-lights. These are highly integrated components, designed and manufactured by third parties using tools made by forth parties with the knowledge not in the hands of the car manufacturer. Swapping them may well need re-designs and re-certification. Hard to put an estimate on the overall process but it won't be quick.
And last but not least how is new business attracted: The rule of law makes a country safe for an inherrently very risky process of overseas investments. Expats are critical resources for knowledge ramp-up and managing the first years. Billionairs with a seat on Trumps table may not care so much about the rule of law but SME business do. Expats who may move with their family need to be able to rely on visa, green cards and travel being safe. The opposite of what is needed to attract business is done as far as one can see from afar.
A trade war with no clear path for winning started from a position of weakness.
It's funny that I saw more and more opinions that Chinese will win the trade war by shopping and eating out more.
> The US has benefitted for a couple generations by being the reserve currency, meaning that we can make big mistakes and not suffer for them, while any other country would suffer. This coming trade war, if it actually happens, may finally break this exceptional status.
Very doubtful. The main danger is lack of fortitude with continuing and enforcing policies, and letting ideological battles get the best of the Trump administration for cutting good and fair deals with the EU and others. You're welcome to invest in Chinese, Russian, or whatever capital markets, though.
Sure, the Chinese government finally capitulated to citizen demand eventually, but the degree of control compared to the US is hard to overstate.
We can put up with hardship just like anyone else, though our suburban ecosystems and factory farming make that more difficult than need be, it's just that we haven't had a real need to face true national hardship since World War II perhaps.
I don't disagree with the COVID-19 lockdowns or anything like that, but I'm not sure that's the best example here because as a nation we weren't really aligned on that being a hardship necessary to endure sacrifice.
But yes, instead of buying a made in China t-shirt you can just spend a little more and buy one made in the USA, or even other non-authoritarian governments throughout the world (EU for example).
I don't know off the top of my head, but that sounds like a great problem to have and I'd be happy to do whatever it takes to make sure we have that problem.
Tariffs do not provide capital security, they do not make it cheap to build the factories and in fact gigantically jack up the cost because we need to import a lot of the machinery to get the manufacturing going, and building the entire supply chain from scratch would add massive lead time to the other factories that use the machinery.
Further, the need for onshoring cheap tshirt manufacturing is far from clear. We have massive amounts of our workforce in far more productive areas that produce absolutely massive amounts of GDP, and reallocating the workforce to tshirt manufacturing makes us far poorer.
We are cutting drastically from scientific research, where each dollar spent by the government generates 2x-10x GDP, and telling those scientists to go work in factories. The very same types of factories that our trading partners would give up in an instant if they had the hi tech scientific research instead.
What do we need? Certainly not tshirt factories. We need scientists, services, and more productive sectors of the economy. It is absolute idiocy to give up the higher tiers of the economy only possible in the US in the 21st century, to return to far lower 20th and 19th century productivity level.
I was broadly responding to the OP's broad comment. Like yea you don't need to buy cheap crap from Temu that you saw on TikTok. And if you have to pay $5 more for a t-shirt suck it up and stop supporting authoritarian regimes. If that results in Americans working in t-shirt factories which aren't morally better or worse than any other factory, being paid higher wages and having that money stay here in our local economies at the expense of cheap goods with economic outflows to China, I say good and maybe tariffs are a good way to make that happen.
Remember, tariffs are just an economic and policy tool we can leverage. The EU uses them against China today even. I personally found the Biden administration's approach to trade to be better, but maybe we need a mix of policies to effect change?
To that effect I don't really understand your last comment about giving up higher tiers of the economy that are "only possible in the US" - we can't make computers and iPhones here. Those are those high tiers. That is a problem. Tariffs can be a tool to effect change there. Maybe not, maybe so. The status quo isn't sustainable though.
Nuking them is unlikely to end well politically.
As others have said, if you want to use tariffs to wage a trade war, you prepare first, so you're not cutting off the branch you're sitting on. You don't create tariffs and then build your factories.
Because you can't. It's just not possible.
But this regime has a shoot-from-the-microphone policy style which is completely irrational and unworkable, and minor considerations like practicality don't figure.
In any case, it's clear the regime is in a race between enforcing its grip on power with martial law (whatever it's going to be called) and political collapse brought about by economic collapse.
It's too early to tell, but if martial law wins, economic collapse on an unprecedented scale will follow.
You can be toxically positive and say that a lot of dead wood needed to be cleared. But in practice that just means whole swathes of the country will turn into Detroit of the 00s, but worse - rotting ghost towns, haunted by the ghosts of those who starved to death.
For your t-shirt example, sure we can buy US made shirts. But the US factories have a limit to what they can produce. Then what? What business person would invest in any new factories in the current environment? Where do they buy the materials to build the factory? (From our trading partners.) Where do they buy the tools and equipment used in the factory? (From our trading partners.) who do they hire to work in the factory? Former government bureaucrats? Immigrants? Oh wait!
as for MUSA, i buy a lot of t-shirts and none of them are made in usa, who are you thinking of?
There are quite a few but just an example: https://www.american-giant.com/pages/about-us (no affiliation or any further research other than identifying from a lengthy list of made-in-USA clothing).
"The U.S. imports a wide variety of products from China, with the top categories including electronics, machinery, and furniture. Specifically, significant imports include computers, smartphones, electrical equipment, toys, and furniture."
I just don't think there will be riots in the street over this stuff. Maybe there will be, maybe there should be, I can't say for sure. I do know kids will survive just fine without toys, and I don't see riots over furniture. I don't know about the rest of it.
The other side of the coin is interesting: What if China decided they were never going to sell anything to the US? Would people riot in the street? Even more interesting, if China really wanted to play that game, why don't they? Why are they so mad? If this wasn't a threat to them it would be a giant nothingburger on their end.
Think of all the Made in USA stuff that makes use of Chinese components.
Many of the machines used in factories are made in China.
A lot of tool making is outsourced there (an injection molding die that might cost $50,000 to make in the US might be $10k in China, and the Chinese typically make them with a quicker turnaround time, even with shipping.
I have the feeling, not only from this comment but also those about Foxconn suicide nets, that people have a hard time judging quite how big things in China are.
Losing a million jobs would change China's unemployment rate by… 0.14% of the workforce.
* Job loss/gains wouldn't be 1-1 as new US factories would likely use fewer workers.
The US is currently at fairly high employment[0]. To a first approximation, if you attempt to move factory jobs to the US, not only do you need to build a factory, someone not currently working in a factory has to loose their non-factory job… or you have to encourage a lot more parenting and wait about 18 years[1].
More likely is that the US looses all the jobs that the imports were dependent on, and unemployment goes up.
"Dependent on" is also hard to determine. Lots of people now rely on smartphones, and even in a scenario like this the phones themselves won't evaporate overnight — they won't even really shift back to being the status symbol for the wealthy that they once were given how cheap the cheap brands are, but for the stake of illustrating the impact of consequences, *if* they were to shift back to being that status symbol, gradually there would also be much less call for mobile app developers and Uber, Delivery Hero, etc. drivers.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
[1] or whatever school leaving age + 9 months works out as; theoretically there's also "encourage immigration", but that's already been ruled out.
Because we don't live in a static equilibrium with respect to population? Even if we didn't gain jobs because the population was stagnant, this just puts wage pressure on employers to the benefit of workers. Or is that not a good thing?
But you are providing an argument against your own point:
> More likely is that the US looses all the jobs that the imports were dependent on, and unemployment goes up.
> The US is currently at fairly high employment[0]. To a first approximation, if you attempt to move factory jobs to the US, not only do you need to build a factory, someone not currently working in a factory has to loose their non-factory job
Which is it?
Wage pressure in this case would be pointing in the opposite direction.
First: If the average tariffs are less than something like 558%, at current salaries and exchange rates it is currently still cheaper to import, because US salaries (well, nominal GDP/capita, I approximated) are on average that much higher than Chinese salaries. The Chinese can cope with this because of two things you don't have: (1) lower starting expectations because they're moving through the process of industrialisation and started low, (2) lower cost of living. This means that below that level (which a more detailed analysis will likely show varies between products), all the tariffs do is act like a stealth purchase tax that reduces aggregate demand without inducing production to relocate (though production may *claim* to relocate for reasons of political correctness, they won't actually move from tariffs below this level).
Second: The only way to free up US workers to work in these factories, is to first cause massive unemployment so that people are willing to take on much lower paid manufacturing jobs. Otherwise everyone says "no, I will not take this stupid manufacturing job that pays $6.5k/year, why would I want that? This won't even cover my rent!"
And that $6.5k/year is what I've heard Foxconn pays line workers — great when your rent is $2k/year; awful when your rent is $2k/month. If there were any wage uplift from moving the jobs themselves, it would act exactly like a permanent tariff, and lower aggregate demand accordingly.
> Which is it?
Which is what?
Those are the same point.
To move a factory, people have to stop doing the work they're currently paid to do.
Destroying your ability to import things that people need for their work will indeed free up people to make those things in local factories, by massively increasing unemployment. Do you, personally, want to switch from your current job to making iPhones?
> Destroying your ability to import things that people need for their work will indeed free up people to make those things in local factories, by massively increasing unemployment. Do you, personally, want to switch from your current job to making iPhones?
I don't, but that's because it wouldn't be economically productive for me to do so. For someone working at Waffle House it might be.
Let's be very clear though that every economic decision we make as a country has repercussions, and winners and losers. Remember the coal workers who had to Learn 2 Code?
> all the tariffs do is act like a stealth purchase tax that reduces aggregate demand without inducing production to relocate (though production may claim to relocate for reasons of political correctness, they won't actually move from tariffs below this level).
Well we do need to raise taxes to pay for these services we want and/or to reduce the national debt. I don't believe that this is the best or only way to do that but that's a nice benefit in the scenario you are describing. If we purchase less that's better for the planet too.
No doubt many companies won't relocate at least in the short term, but some will.
I don't disagree with your assessment related to the average tariffs right now, but that figure is very much subject to change, and something like the exchange rate where China has put artificial pressure on the currency to keep it lower in value than it might otherwise be is an example that I think would be worthwhile analyzing when looking at the entire picture.
> The Chinese can cope with this because of two things you don't have: (1) lower starting expectations because they're moving through the process of industrialisation and started low, (2) lower cost of living.
Cope in what way? America will be just fine even with higher prices or even supply change shortages and can find other manufacturers to produce goods. China will be just fine too losing money and jobs but finding other markets like the EU for products that no longer come to America. Both countries can cope with less trade with each other. I've seen this trope repeated time and time again in these discussions about how China somehow is exceptional and can cope with struggle more than Americans and it's just as faulty of an assumption as claims to American exceptionalism are.
> Wage pressure in this case would be pointing in the opposite direction.
> Those are the same point.
I don't think so but maybe you cold elaborate if you have the inclination? It's also a little difficult to discuss because neither of us have really laid out assumptions very well so we may be discussing different things at times.
Generally speaking though in the case of unemployment rates which I think is what I was responding to, having to build new factories in the United States (however many) with a low unemployment by definition would increase wages simply due to labor supply and demand.
The person I was responding to (again going off memory here and could be wrong and I apologize if so - maybe it was you! :) ) was supposing that this was a bad thing or that the jobs couldn't come back because of the low unemployment rate because there wouldn't be any workers.
I disagree with that general assessment completely.
We would see a rise in wages and increases in investment in automation and manufacturing technology due to the rise in labor cost.
Why in the world would you think this is the case? China leads the world in manufacturing efficiency, maybe behind only Japan and South Korea.
Of course, I simplify. But despite the wage difference, China's no longer the place you go to substitute expensive machines for cheap humans.
The wage difference between the USA and China also means that for any given product, there's a minimum tariff below which it still makes more sense to import and pay the tariff rather than to pay local workers. To paint a very broad brushstroke, if I naïvely compare GDP/capita, that's about 558% — from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... I get US 90,105 and China 13,688; then 90,105/13,688 = 6.58…, less 1 because tariff of 0% means the importer pays 100% of the money to the exporter.
I guess it's possible if China is that good at efficient manufacturing that the number of jobs in the United States would increase relative to the job loss of the same factory in China, but I wouldn't view that as a bad thing. Higher employment and more wage pressure for regular workers, and companies will have to invest in better technology and processes to alleviate that wage pressure.
If the factory gets staffed at all, it will be competing in a labor pool in the US that only has 4.2% unemployment. The high employment rates, and inability to find workers during Biden's presidency, led employers to revolt against Biden.
The question is whether those automated factory jobs will be better than other jobs for the workers, whether they will be created in places with the appropriate worker pool (education, unemployment high enough etc.).
There's also the question of whether there's anybody willing to build some new high-cost automated factory when the same capital could be deployed to another purpose that likely has a far higher capital return rate. There's almost zero protection that the impetus for having the expensive highly-automated factory--namely the tariffs--will exist past for most of the life of the factory. Or in fact if they will even be in place by the time that the factory is constructed and ready to go, which will take a minimum of 3-4 years.
All the stars have to align perfectly for some sort of new jobs to appear and then it's not clear that they will be better than existing jobs. And if it does happen, we all suffer from several years of being poorer in the mean time.
I mentioned in another post, but I think having a 4.2% unemployment rate and putting even more pressure on that rate is a good thing, particularly for workers who will see wages rise, and technology as new automation techniques will be created to also alleviate that same pressure.
The status quo today is, well, we have none of that and those factories sit in China and we continue to buy things and ship them over - not really great for the environment either.
> And if it does happen, we all suffer from several years of being poorer in the mean time.
Yes, that's kind of how America operates - quarter by quarter. We focus on the short-term and worry about Temu products* doubling in price, but fail to see the long-term implications - economic outflows, loss of manufacturing capacity and know-how, etc.
* Yes, I know China manufactures more than these specific products and "we can't", which is all the more reason we need to figure out how to do it, even if it costs more money to do so. Absolute efficiency and the cheapest possible price for a good/product are not ends in themselves, but outcomes to economic policy decisions we make.
Trump administration only succeeded in making the EU see the US as a foreign hostile nation.
At this point I think it's more likely the EU cut deals with China.
The EU is actually quite protectionist, despite public claims to the contrary. Most countries are in various fashion protective of many or certain industries.
Trump no doubt damaged ties, and again I think the Biden administration's approach was superior in many ways, but there's a limit to what agreements the EU will make with China. The manufacturing capacity that the Chinese have built isn't sustainable without a substantial increase in Chinese domestic consumption.
The US problems are problems of their own making.
EU has only trade rivalries with China, not ideological issues like the US has. Those can be ironed out. And honestly the US administration also has an ideological hatred for Europe, as illustrated by the vice presidents own words. Not really conducive to any sort of deals.
As for China dumping cheap things here, as you said, EU is very protectionist (China is as well), and EU consumers have a lot less appetite for consumption than the US. I really think that is less a problem than you believe.
> Trump no doubt damaged ties, and again I think the Biden administration's approach was superior in many ways, but there's a limit to what agreements the EU will make with China.
I think you really downplay the kind of generational damage the US is doing to the relationship with former allies.
> The manufacturing capacity that the Chinese have built isn't sustainable without a substantial increase in Chinese domestic consumption.
You forget that China is only in a trade war against the US. The US is in a trade war with everyone else.
Depends on the specific trade issue. There's a limit to what can be ironed out, and the large bulk of the problem is that both the EU and China are rather protectionist even compared to the United States and so for either to iron out these trade issues they'll have to both open their markets. So far that hasn't worked out for the United States, even prior to the ideological battles, and I'm not sure I see a path forward for the EU that's significantly different than the status quo.
Also China is happily helping Russia fight a war in Europe so I wouldn't be so quick to assume the EU only has a trade issue with China - that's rather naive.
> I think you really downplay the kind of generational damage the US is doing to the relationship with former allies.
I was just in France for two weeks, nobody I spoke to in my broken French really gives a shit outside of "man that guys sucks right?" The internet isn't day-to-day life. For some reason people think that political grandstanding and harsh rhetoric is only an American phenomenon and that European leaders don't do the same. The issue with Canada I would argue is much more as you are describing, and is rather unfortunate to say the least.
> You forget that China is only in a trade war against the US. The US is in a trade war with everyone else.
Sure ok - feel free to buy all the Chinese products that are made and shipped to your country from China. Best of luck! Let us know how that turns out for you.
The US is also helping Russia in its efforts right now, it's important to underline this.
While China is more pragmatically washing their hands and keep trading with Russia, the US actually calls for Ukraine to just capitulate.
> I was just in France for two weeks, nobody I spoke to in my broken French really gives a shit outside of "man that guys sucks right?" The internet isn't day-to-day life. For some reason people think that political
1) I don't live in the internet. I barely have any online presence beyond this forum.
2) People are generally polite. I know people from the US, from very liberal to very MAGA. I try to be pleasant to them. And I don't fault them for their government, even the ones that obviously voted for the current president.
3) When I speak about generational damage to relationships, I am talking at the diplomacy level. Building a web of great allies was something that the US could do after the two world wars because the opportunity was there and they seized it. I think it will be very hard, on a diplomatic level, to repair that. This ship has already sailed.
> Sure ok - feel free to buy all the Chinese products that are made and shipped to your country from China.
Have been for a while. I don't see that as a huge problem. As I said, Europe consumers have a lot less appetite for consumption than the US ones. Partly for cultural reasons, partly because the US had the strength (yes, strength) of commandeering a huge trade deficit that actually benefits immensely its economy.
There are some industries that for strategic importance is good to have around, but I would see no benefit in bringing over manufacturing like textiles or cell phone assembly sweatshops. Those can stay in China no problem.
Protectionism is good only for what you need protectionism.
1. That's definitely false.
2. China supplies intelligence to Russia and also equipment directly or indirectly.
3. The US continues to provide intelligence and directly military support to Ukraine.
> People are generally polite. I know people from the US, from very liberal to very MAGA. I try to be pleasant to them. And I don't fault them for their government, even the ones that obviously voted for the current president.
Right - but that's not because people are seething with anger at the United States (aside from Canada which is deserved), it's because life goes on.
> When I speak about generational damage to relationships, I am talking at the diplomacy level. Building a web of great allies was something that the US could do after the two world wars because the opportunity was there and they seized it. I think it will be very hard, on a diplomatic level, to repair that. This ship has already sailed.
You're over-reacting. We dropped nuclear bombs on Japan and we're best buddies now. It's certainly a temporary setback, however. There's a lot of political grandstanding but that's just for placating domestic audiences. EU and US are the same there, as is China and Russia. Talk big and all that.
> Have been for a while. I don't see that as a huge problem. As I said, Europe consumers have a lot less appetite for consumption than the US ones.
Great, this seems like a win. European customers will buy more of the Chinese products (China needs to sell them somewhere to make up for losses in US sales so that'll be going to your markets), and the US will just suffer without the imports and everyone wins and America loses. That sounds just fine to me. We can be less consumerist oriented and the EU and China can increase their consumerism. Well, unless you're suggesting the EU won't buy more Chinese made things, in which case who will buy the Chinese products?
As for the rest, I think you very much downplay the gravity of going in a trade war with the whole world at once can do to the US economy, while you massively amp up the damage simple trade between China and EU can do to EU.
This conversation quickly got nowhere anyway, and I already said everything I wanted to. Time will tell who is right. Feel free to have the last word, and have a pleasant evening.
No, no I'm really not. It's more so that you are overstating the damage. All of a sudden we are "former allies" now? That's nonsense.
> For example, you seem to forget the very real threats of US annexing Greenland, which is part of Denmark. Such an act of war would force every EU nation to go in its defense, even non-NATO ones.
There's 0 chance the European Union would go to war with the United States over this. Not that I condone it, but it just won't happen. The EU can't fight Russia (why are 500 million Europeans asking 330 million Americans to defend them from 180 million Russians?) let alone the United States.
> As for the rest, I think you very much downplay the gravity of going in a trade war with the whole world at once can do to the US economy, while you massively amp up the damage simple trade between China and EU can do to EU.
Well we're not really in a "trade war with the whole world" - many tariffs haven't been implemented, some are already being suspended, exceptions are carved out, etc. I don't agree with the way we're going about things, but I think you're overstating things again. The EU isn't going to absorb the former US - China trade. That's simple a fact of reality.
I'm sad you feel the conversation got nowhere, but I suppose that happens when two people just see the world fundamentally differently. I have no interest in getting in the last word, I simply am interested in discussing and debating things and so I usually reply. I sincerely hope you have a good evening as well.
It’s your president and VP saying it (and a lot of their acolytes). What do you call an "ally" who threatens to invade you? And don’t say it’s not serious. The bullshit trade wars was also something that was not serious and that he would not do, until he actually did it. A tip we learnt the hard way and that may be useful: when a wannabe dictator tells you what he wants to do, believe him.
It’s not a hypothetical. The EU in general is a trade partner of China. Both have a long history of trading with ups and downs, tensions and détentes. History is full of proofs that these issues can, in fact, be ironed out. We’ve been there before.
Similarly, there were a lot of trade skirmishes between the US and the EU (and various member-states before the EU was a thing). Again, nothing you cannot solve with diplomacy, negotiations and horse trading. What you are saying is fanciful.
> Also China is happily helping Russia fight a war in Europe so I wouldn't be so quick to assume the EU only has a trade issue with China - that's rather naive.
So is the US. I don’t think you get the full picture. As a citizen of one of your oldest ally, I have to tell you: the US are not the good guys in this. Trump is demonstrating every day that we cannot trust the US long term anymore, and that you could turn hostile very quickly. It pains me, but it is true. So you can talk all day about this and think that you are reasonable, but in fact it is completely unserious. Or indeed naïve.
> I was just in France for two weeks, nobody I spoke to in my broken French really gives a shit outside of "man that guys sucks right?"
The US have an advantage because regardless of the disagreements with France (and there were many), ultimately either side could rely on the other in the long run. Again, look at recent history. French people were at the "your countrymen are fine but your government sucks" with Russia about 10 years ago, they always have been mostly Russophile. Now, the vast majority of the population would tell you that Russians are murderous war criminals and brainwashed sycophants. What changed was that Putin got aggressive and it turned out that actually a lot of Russians supported him.
The parallel with the US right now is clear. Trump is agressive and you collectively support him. He won the election fair and square, including the popular vote.
So, give it time. 4 years of this and there will be much less sympathy for normal American people in Europe.
> For some reason people think that political grandstanding and harsh rhetoric is only an American phenomenon and that European leaders don't do the same.
Again, you don’t understand. The issue is war at our doorstep and a hostile neighbour that thinks its sphere of influence includes half the continent. It is not grandstanding, it’s about our future. Look at what most European governments are doing and you will see that they are dead serious.
> Sure ok - feel free to buy all the Chinese products that are made and shipped to your country from China. Best of luck! Let us know how that turns out for you.
You don’t have a commercial problem with China. Nothing existential, anyway. China did not prevent you from reaching a peak in manufacturing what, 2 years ago? It does not prevent you from having an overwhelming military, or a disproportionate amount of soft power. It does not prevent you from flooding the world with your services.
The trade deficit is a red herring. You do have a strategic problem with China, because they want to kick you out of their backyard, and they want their turn at being the bully in chief. We are not in the same situation.
Why is it that the EU and China can have a long history of trade and détente, but the United States can't or doesn't? Remind me which country brought China into the WTO? Which country negotiated opening of Chinese markets to the world? Which country provided direct military support to China against the Japanese? Your premise is faulty. The United States has a long history with China and can engage in the same diplomacy and negotiation that the EU or its member states can. We also have agency, less you forget.
And why are you suggesting that the United States cannot also solve issues with diplomacy? Certainly in my view the Trump administration is doing a bad job at it today, but so what? Things change. Maybe we have tried diplomacy and been undercut along the way? You are being overly reactionary to words and statements and espousing an ideal that this is somehow "it" or the end of everything. I mean look at where you are already - you're literally arguing that the United States is helping Russia fight a war in Europe...
Last I checked the US has and continues to provide tens of billions of dollars in direct military equipment and financial support to Ukraine, and has continued to do so since the start of the war.
Trump running his mouth hasn't changed that, and I'm not sure if you're just spouting misinformation or generally misinformed, but China isn't providing that support to Ukraine, and it is providing support, albeit covertly, to Russia. How in the world do you equivocate the actions of China and the United States here?
It's unfortunate to read comments suggesting that I "don't understand" when you're borderline parroting Russian misinformation and suggesting the US is helping Russia.
> We are not in the same situation.
Then why the complaints? The EU can increase their trade and imports with China of very valuable technology at cheaper prices and the United States as we would like can reduce that trade. Everyone is happy.
And and hostile tariffs from USA on flimsy excuses.
China is much better at components, consumer items, and mid-weight machinery.
The EU also sells a lot of food, including staples like pasta, and also niche/prestige branded foods, some with localised brand name protection. (Like balsamic vinegar from Modena.)
They're not really competing markets. The auto industry is one of the few sectors with direct competition, and the EU is working on setting minimum prices instead of tariffs.
America has survived stagflation before in the 70s, but there was a large political fallout.
As I've done with just about everything that makes no sense from this administration, I go back to: what would Russia want?
Russia would want the US to piss off both all of its closest allies and its largest trading partner at the same time, because it would significantly weaken the country, and potentially result in social unrest. They would want Trump to continually talk about annexing neighbors because it justifies their attempts at annexing Ukraine.
Until someone can give me an explanation that makes more sense than: Putin is pulling Trump's strings - I'm going to continue to just assume he's literally a Russian asset.
What if the goal is to deepen income inequality? Opening up low income jobs by deportation. Impoverishing households whose primary savings were in stocks, not business ownership or real estate. Hurting consumers, especially those whose disposable income is lower.
Every lower middle class person, can "command" about 100 other 1/100ths of a person to supplant their life with food, fuel, vehicle, staples, etc. But billionaires have the labor of 1000s or more people at their fingertips. It doesnt matter if the 1000 are destitute, undernourished, sick, weak, dumb, or unhappy, as long as they're subservient enough to maintain or increase class division.
Somewhat disagree -- stockpiling things is exactly the consumerism mindset that we (Americans) have all taken for granted and that no one seemed to have realized the potential growth in investing and/or building _actual_ infrastructure to accommodate the massive amounts of e-waste EOL versus just shipping them in bulk abroad to places like China.
I remember a story not too long ago where the CCP instituted a policy where they formally declared via the WTO to reduce their imports of American e-waste and effectively killed that faux industry. Faux as in that the stories that followed showed that our own recycling programs were just fronts to launder money than perform actual processing -- whether it'd be from lax oversight, cross-border shipments, mislabeling of contaminants, or being complicit in schemes to inflate their recycling credits globally.
Maybe its not directly REE related but we sure could have had those industries when it is still less unfavorable than the cost-benefit ratio of spent nuclear fuel reprocessing though the irony is, we're now less reliant on uranium imports from Kazakhstan and Russia (of all places).
Dugin envisions the fall of China. The People's Republic of China, which represents an extreme geopolitical danger as an ideological enemy to the independent Russian Federation, "must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled". Dugin suggests that Russia start by taking Tibet–Xinjiang–Inner Mongolia–Manchuria as a security belt.[1] Russia should offer China help "in a southern direction – Indochina (except Vietnam, whose people is already pro-Russia), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia" as geopolitical compensation.[9] Russia should manipulate Japanese politics by offering the Kuril Islands to Japan and provoking anti-Americanism, to "be a friend of Japan".[9] Mongolia should be absorbed into the Eurasian sphere.[9] The book emphasizes that Russia must spread geopolitical anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."
And what better way to facilitate the scapegoating of the US than having an incompetent aggressive fool in the Whitehouse.
--The Great Gatsby
You're going to start a hot war with China demanding....what? That they reload the container ships with Shein clothing?
[1] https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/04/29/mr-art-of-the-deal-str...
The other road is isolation, which I find much more likely. They'll just cut us off completely and deal with it.
But one can still hope that the economic "warfare" won't become a literal one.
I'm not saying that I can tell how likely a real military conflict between any of China, Europe, India, Russia, the US actually is.
What I can tell is that even fellow agnostics should... pray (or hope) that this isn't the most likely scenario.
In this regard, I don't care about globalization, injustice + capitalism.
I truly just hope for the lesser evil.
Regardless of the continent, political system, leaders.
The lack of stockpiling or any other preparations before issuing the shock to the markets makes me think this is a quick sell off of the country that only benefits a few investors at the top.
But, it is possible that his policy of "do everything at once, without taking the time to do it right" is more reflective of his belief that whatever he tries [even just being president] will be fought, so his options [from his POV] are "do it now" or "don't do it at all", not "do it right".
EDIT: Am willing to be learn, would the downvoters explain - do you disagree that this is his view? Or does his understanding not matter when he acts upon it?
I am firmly of the opinion that his only goal is the be the center of attention, and the more outrageous the things he does are, the better. Ie, there's no such thing as negative publicity.
Other people in the administration or in the penumbra may have ideologies more advanced than this, but Trump definitely does not.
Is it the imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico? Or is it the rescinding of those tariffs a day later. Or is it the pause but when the pause was supposed to end nothing really changed?
Or is it the liberation day tariffs on everyone? Or the subsequent reduction of liberation day tariffs a few days later but an increase in tariffs against China.
Or is the “it” the fact that the administration reveals these major market moving actions a few hours before making them public to friends, family and donors?
Once anyone can figure out what “it” is supposed to be one can have a discussion about whether it’s good or not.
You can't expect companies to make long term capital investments when everything is in flux like this.
How do we get cheap fruit & veg in the winter when it's not growing season in the US? If we're not going to import it, then I guess we need to grow it here in hothouses, and that's not going to be cheap either.
I'm guessing the midterms will be a bloodbath for the Republicans, and Trump is unlikely to care unless he takes his own 3rd term talk seriously.
Testing tariffs in realtime is nothing like, say, fuzzing idempotent methods in a framework.
It is a lot more like testing sending out spam from a set of static IP addresses. It's not just that you could fail-- it's that you could end up fucking up those IP's ability to send email into the foreseeable future.
This is a sufficient question, and sufficient answer for a meager understanding of how economies work.
For the kind of place America is, with the kind of intellectual, economic, and procedural fire power it holds?
Again, he isn't President of some backwater, and he isn't lacking for advisors, to give even more sophisticated analyses than what any Econ 101 student can do.
And now, to your own point:
> he tries [even just being president] will be fought,
by who? the Repubs have all 3 branches. Thank god, otherwise people would spend another decade ignoring the obvious and blaming forces other than Trump and Trumpism for Trump's actions.
---
The emperor has no clothes. Everything else, is people projecting from past Presidents upon the tableau they see.
Yes, you can argue that [person] is [performing an action] because they believe, from their POV that [reason1, reason2, reason3].
> Or does [what person believes] not matter when they act upon it?
Yes.
What people choose to believe is distinct from fundamental baseline reality.
Let me put it another way for you; if I believe that fairies have invaded from space and I go out smashing peoples cars because, I personally, believe that this will make the fairies go home…
…does it help to argue about whether I believe in fairies or not?
It does not.
The arguement must be about whether fairies exist in baseline reality or not.
What I believe is not a point worth discussing.
…so, to take a step back to your argument:
Does he believe this will help? Who. Gives. A. Flying. Truck? Does it matter what he believes? Can we speculate what he thinks? It’s a useless and meaningless exercise and a logical fallacy; because anything can be justified if the only criteria are “you believe it will work”.
The discussion worth having is, in baseline reality, will it actually help?
Which is what the post you are replying to is addressing; but instead or following that up, you’ve moved this discussion into a meaningless sub thread of unprovable points about what people may or may not believe.
Which is why you’ve received my downvote.
The consequences of your actions matter even if you disagree. When your actions hurt people, you've still hurt people. Doesn't matter what you thought you were doing.
You see this kind of thinking through all levels of American life. You, personally, are the only person on the planet who matters, fuck everyone else and let them deal with the consequences. You run a red light and someone else gets T-boned and killed? That's their problem, you got to your destination 3 minutes faster.
The trump administration is simply the manifestation of how sick our country is.
It's going to take us generations to recover from this kind of societal illness, if we ever can.
This seems completely wrong and ascribes motivations to Trump he clearly doesn't have. I think his framing is much more "everything I do is correct therefore this will work." Everything he does makes sense when framed that way.
For example, his habit of promising all sorts of things in "two weeks" and then doing nothing. [0] Neither "now", nor "never", but always "soon".
Or look at the stream of inconsistency from the White House about quantum-mechanical tariffs, as they endlessly mutated between: On, off, on but only when being observed, paused, never paused that was fake news, on but a different set of tariffs, off because a fabulous deal was made but don't ask about the details because you wouldn't know that country anyway, etc.
Something he has in common with Musk.
edit: The pro trump voting bloc showed up. Comment went from +2 to -3 in a minute. This chain will probably be flagged to death within the hour.
That doesn't make Trump any less demented.
They have a guy who can make the stock go up or down with a tweet, and usually seems to agree with the last thing he's heard. It's not difficult to see how this could be exploited for financial gain.
Now it's just about the concrete numbers and "wait and see." It all looks a lot higher right now than I imagine makes any sense, but you know what they say about the market and irrtionality...
There's plenty of people who are like myself... moved into cash just before Stupid Day, and then have been buying red, selling green every time He has a Nocturnal Idiot Emission / Repent cycle. I made a little bit of money, which is better than losing it... and now I'm just... waiting. There's likely millions of people like this.
JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon went from "get over it" to "oh fuck a recession" in a matter of weeks. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/business/jamie-dimon-tariff-u...
But after Biden dropped out, nobody seemed to notice any more.
Reminds me of a story told by someone who was an intern or assistant for a politician (or consultant?) way back in the day before social media. They recount their first experience watching the politician at a town hall - they were late and apologetic, and gave a speech that was funny, compelling and authentic and the crowd ate it up.
They attended the next town hall, and the principal was late again, and proceeded to give the same speech, beat for beat. The same routine was repeated dozens more times at dozens of locations with different audiences, save for the politicians staff. In truth, the politician was not as funny or as sincere as the practiced speech and routine made them seem.
All this to say; acting funny or brilliant behind closed doors without cameras rolling doesn't mean you actually are those things. It's easy to recycle the same schtick after years of honing it and figuring out what works and what doesn't, Trump has impeccable showman instincts.
With Johnson I at least had the impression that he understood the showmanship aspect of it really well. Less so with Trump, at least it seems less polished.
By whom? He has a subservient congress and the Supreme Court in his pocket. And he is willing to ignore anything the judiciary says anyway. Who is in a situation to hinder him right now, and in the next 2 years, in the US?
He could do it the right way, if he wanted to.
Presidents do typically get a pass during the first 100 days, and they do try to fit in as much as possible before inertia bogs down whatever they are trying to do.
I've heard the same said about Roosevelt (FDR). That he came in and made radical changes, defied courts, upset the norms, etc...
The problem is that the current president is going a bit more 'radical' than anybody has experienced since, lets say late 30's Germany. Like the executive order to send military equipment to the police to, lets say, 'quell dissent'.
So even thought Presidents do make big moves in the first 100 days, this is so far beyond norms, that saying it is "just typical of presidents in first 100 days" is really downplaying what is happening.
The fact that the MAGAts are so utterly incompetent that even the idea of opposition sends them into chaos and whining fits while they control the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government is itself supportive of if the "these morons are too stupid to make a plan" type theories. Instead of planning they attacked anyone who asked how they would handle the obvious consequences, they deny that the obvious consequences that are clearly happening are actually happening. They attack anyone asking for metrics that the plan is working, make unbacked claims that they are in talks to fix the situation that caused the trade war (while refusing to even articulate what the goals are and attacking anyone who asks that too). They aren't even communicating with each other to coordinate something that looks like a plan: how many times have one group of lackeys been talking about plan X while another group or the president himself does the opposite to the surprise of everyone.
There is no evidence that one of the key bullet points of a campaign platform was ever more than a bullet point - no plan, no attempt to prepare for consequences, nothing indicative of a plan at all. They truly believed that imposing tarrifs would magically make factories appear overnight.
Of course maybe the audience is Trump himself. He enjoys playing tough guy and could care less about the people who voted him in, or anyone else for that matter.
This has a lot of impact on business at large and arguably an outsized impact on both high tech and entrepreneurial businesses. It would be deeply weird if it weren't being discussed here.
It's this kind of person that allows autocrats to take over. There's too many of you with your head in the sand. There's still plenty of technical posts on here, but when you have a tech billionaire appointed to spearhead an agency dismantling Federal agencies in order to give the executive unchecked power and deregulate tech industries, it's going to be a recurring story on here. So is Trump achieving Project2025 goals, since I'm guessing most hackers don't want to live under Christian Nationalism.
Normally someone makes a case and tries to sell it to the public, congress. What's the purpose of tariffs to bring in income or to bring back jobs or to level trade agreements? You can't do all things at once and how does that work with other promises like lower prices. The lack of an overall plan is causing the issue.
If you take immigration he has a plan and he stuck to it and those are where his highest approval numbers are. Imagine he one day opens the border another day closes it starts kicking out American families the next day invites the world back in. That's his trade policy.
Get a solid plan, understand the downsides and if you can live with it stick with it and keep the personal insults out.
He is not. A President is a lame duck between the election of their successor and the end of their term, not at the beginning of their Constitutionally-final term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lame_duck_(politics)#United_St...
A president elected to a second term is sometimes seen as a lame duck from early in the second term, since term limits prevent them from contesting re-election four years later.
It looks like we are in for a pretty bad time economically. But even so, he is running the party. Wouldn't shock me if he ran again and got nominated.
Doesn't his party control both houses of Congress?
2: What 10 democrats would work with Trump? It would be gridlock for four years (which is fine).
I used the "act of congress" phrase intentionally, as it is generally a euphemism that describes, among other things, how long something can take or how hard it is to approve a thing.
I don't have a good solution to that problem.
Do we love or hate kyrsten sinema for protecting the filibuster now?
Also, posting limits are annoying as fuck.
Hes the most powerful President America has seen in living memmory.
However time is marching forward and as always happens other politicians are catching on - the house will be in full campaign mode in less than a year (except a few who retire - and the scary possibility that some have already lost a primary). 1/3 the senate is in the same situation. The 2026 election season is (as always) scaring a lot of politicians and in turn they will be trying to figure out what to do about it.
I can't tell you what will be done about it. Each politicians will make their own decision behind closed doors. Each will be re-evaluating their decision as every poll and constitute letter comes in (not to mention other indicators like the economy). As a result he will be losing power as congress starts to worry about the effect of his actions.
That is not the solution. In business yes, but for the president the answer is still NO.
Presidents should be eliminated for writing executive orders. It should be a constitutional amendment if necessary. Everything the president wishes to order is either under the responsibility of the legislature or is already within the President's scope of responsibilities.
However congress shouldn't have left something so important as tariffs up for modification by executive order.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federa...
The Brenner tunnel is part of an EU-wide transport network called TEN, planned and built since he nineties. It hasn't taken 30 years because of delays, but rather because it required planning far ahead and a lot of execution.
Devils advocate argument could be that they needed to do this immediately and could not take the time to stockpile.
But they did not, though. Nobody gave any argument about why it needed to be done now instead of in 6 months or a year. We can speculate all we want, but the overwhelming evidence points to recklessness and stupidity.
There are people who consider themselves 4th generation Republicans. It's passed down through their family like their religion.
When (not if) the economy craters, each team's news bubble will spin it how they like, and ultimately both teams will keep doing the same things and voting the same way for the foreseeable future.
Are you sure? People often claim this, but don't follow through. There's even an expression, "fair weather fan".
It's true some people seem to support some political parties beyond all reason. But to keep the support through personal hardship is different, and hasn't been tested as often. Worldwide, nothing particular to US.
That story applies to both sides of the aisle in US Government. The battle is for the 1/3 that doesn't vote and the sliver of folks who switch back and forth.
Just fair weather fans exist. They are probably a majority. The minority that is die hard fans are still significant though.
Arizona Coyotes?
Not many fans in seats anymore.
America is getting less and less involved with traditional organized religion, and I honestly think this personality cult is taking a lot of its place.
go kings (sacramento)
It wasn't because they're ontologically evil. It's because order is a very delicate thing. As we've seen, it's incredibly easy to espouse reactionary sentiments and get a lot of people supporting things out of misplaced fear.
If for example you're trying to build a social/political project based on dialectical materialism, a particularly enigmatic liar is like a fire in a barn. You can't "Marketplace of ideas" your way out of a liar who serves to benefit off their lies.
So what do you do? You throw them in the gulag, shoot em, put them to work, put them into reeducation. One liar isn't worth sacrificing the project as a whole.
Cuba reached near 100% literacy, eradicated parasites in children, and took the mob bosses who ran the country out of power. Of course they had to show no mercy to the bay-of-pigs types. The people who benefited when children had feet full of worms and the laborers couldn't read. They were a fire hazard.
Sure, but if the Eagles lose every single game, it doesn't materially impact your brother.
Imagine if the size of your tax return was determined by the win rate of your selected football team and I suspect you'd have a lot less loyalty to losers.
That will only intensify if his policies go and tube the economy; the reason he got re-elected was because enough people wanted the 2019 economy back and thought his policies would do it better than Harris's.
Like, I worked for a few companies (I live in Ireland) who had moved their roles from the UK to Ireland because of it.
More generally, it's just made life much harder for UK exporters, as they now have way more customs declarations and tariffs on both sides.
The big thing for me (and lots of Irish people) was that we now avoid ordering from UK sites as it's likely to take longer and cost more.
Overall, it's been bad and kneecapping your productive industries on the promise (not fulfilled) of reducing immigration seems to be a bad idea.
That being said, the UK is still there, still a big market so it's more that they get less investment from multinationals than they otherwise would have, and their companies face much higher barriers to export.
And the worst part was that the EU introduced checks on agriculture immediately, while the UK didn't which basically meant that EU farmers were much more competitive in the UK than UK farmers could be outside it.
To be clear, Brexit could have been managed much better, but it was a bad idea executed poorly.
I'm curious what the response is from folks who voted for it. Denial? Didn't go far enough? Resignation? Change of mind? Something else?
I guess the original commenter may have been surprised how long it took for that reversal to come (and that it didn't happen until after Covid exacerbated everything).
For me personally, nothing much really has changed. You can't bring as much wine back from France on holiday, and it is harder to take your pet to Europe.
The UK economy is shite, but it's not a significant outlier amongst other EU countries.
There is a huge impact on people who export things like food to the extent that some of them have given up
Long term, the estimate is a 15% hit to the economy.
And only 12% of people think that it went well. (For reference, that's about the same proportion as 'Americans who believe shape-shifting lizards control politics, or aren't sure' [1].)
In personal experience, my purchases of UK products have taken a massive drop.
And that's not even mentioning the losses to the environment or human rights.. So... Not what I would call a mixed bag. More like a deeply homogeneous bag.
0 - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/damning-statistics-reveal-true-cos...
1 - https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
What does "senate reform" mean other than filibuster reform, which if you ask anyone who has studied government will tell you is an intentional design decision for a more deliberative body. "Pass laws quickly" is, depending on who you ask, either not the right thing you want to optimize for, or the exact opposite of what you want.
"Tax law reform" okay great but that's going to mean 15 different things to 10 different people.
Along with more conventional and familiar ideas, I like to toss in the occasional radical one like "abolish the senate" to stretch people's minds a little.
Opinions on the filibuster are often also time dependent. If the person's preferred party has a majority in the Senate, then the filibuster is called an evil relic of the past that should be removed. If the other party has a majority, the filibuster is a sacred part of democracy and must not be touched.
The former is much shorter to say, but... not really accurate.
Tangential gripe: Anyone who says it's "to protect the rural areas" or whatever is talking nonsense. The greater NYC area could legally convert to ~14 new states, and all those very-urban voters would reap the same kind of unfair benefits that Wyoming does with the equivalent population.
Why is that important? Put a little more crudely, and with a lot of hand-waving generalization, Senators aren't supposed to represent people in a district, they're supposed to represent the interests of their state as a whole. They're not just "Representatives but Bigger," they're something else entirely.
So the fact that "but disproportionate representation!!1" is even an argument belies the lack of understanding about why the system was set up that way in the first place. It has nothing to do with rural or urban but that's a great "I don't like Republicans" dog whistle. The needs of Wyoming are different than the needs of Kansas, which are different than the needs of Upstate NY (even considered in isolation from NYC) and a representative body concerned primarily with the interests of a state protects those needs better than one Senator covering several states would be able to.
Your reply belies a lack of bothering to read before making a hostile rant.
I literally just said the situation involves "a join-up bribe from 237 years ago", and I don't see how any minor-amendment-citer such as yourself could have missed the meaning, namely: Smaller states were granted disproportionate influence on federal policy, via the Senate, as an inducement to get their state-legislatures to ratify the federal constitution.
That decision involved sacrificing democratic principles and ethics in favor of reaching a deal. The same tradeoff occurred with the infamous "3/5ths compromise." One of those two thankfully became moot, and it's high time we got around to fixing the other.
_________
> a representative body concerned primarily with the interests of a state
You have provided absolutely nothing to justify giving some states disproportionate influence on federal policy which affects all states.
At best, you've provided an argument for reverting the 17th Amendment and changing how senators are chosen. That is orthogonal to how many senators a State has.
_________
> > Anyone who says it's "to protect the rural areas" or whatever is talking nonsense.
> that's a great "I don't like Republicans" dog whistle.
LOL, this is one of those times when the indignant response is an indirect admission. Yes, it is nonsense, and yes, you disproportionately see it from Republicans.
Kind of like when a context-free "Nazis=Bad" sign leads someone to complain that the sign is hostile to their party.
_________
> pretty glaring ignorance of how the government worked prior to 17A
A pedantic non-sequitur:
1. How senators are chosen is orthogonal to how many exist.
2. Only tangentially related to "gerrymandering" if you mean that the state legislators' boundaries were gerrymandered. If anything, 17A change made gerrymandering less relevant.
This shows you're thinking about population which is irrelevant. Wyoming is a state and California is a state and as states they have equal weight in how their federal government is run. There are 50 equal states, regardless of how their populations differ.
That was literally the only point I was making, was that decrying disproportionate representation based on a population:Senator ratio has nothing to do with how the Senate operates. California gets the same number of Senators as Wyoming because each state gets two Senators.
> you're thinking about population which is irrelevant. [...] There are 50 equal states, regardless of how their populations differ.
Imagine it's 1915 and you're campaigning for women's rights to vote, and and somebody says: "You're thinking about population which is irrelevant. Women can't vote, regardless of how many there are."
I think you'd be pretty frustrated at such an obtuse dismissal.
These same people have no object-permanence, and would vote for someone even worse than trump in 4 years though.
Up to US citizens to decide how they want their future to look like.
From the outside we can only express our sympathy to those that suffer under it.
I have a friend who voted for Trump because (paraphrasing) "he's different or we need to shake things up". Like our entire country is some game where the outcome doesn't affect people.
Whether he’s on their side, lying, or a net negative is irrelevant. Things steadily getting worse for the poor and lower-middle class is nothing new, but things finally not going the way the elites want and seeing them seethe is cathartic. The fact that nearly everyone who is responsible for the erosion of the middle class hates him is reason enough put him in power, because what else can the average voter do to make those who hold all the power feel the same uncertainty they have.
That’s what people don’t understand about a significant part of who they think is his “base”, who in reality just consider the enemy of their enemy to be their friend.
Trump is a rich real estate mogul and Elon Musk is the richest person in the world.
>The fact that nearly everyone who is responsible for the erosion of the middle class hates him is reason enough put him in power
Republicans aren't also responsible for the erosion for the middle class? If so, they don't hate him, so how is this a meaningingful coloration?
>who in reality just consider the enemy of their enemy to be their friend
Who are their enemies? Democrats exclusively? Why?
Trumpists have been telling everyone, everywhere, precisely this at every opportunity, on every platform since before Trump was even elected. We know. They won't fucking shut up about how badly they want to burn the country down and piss on the ashes just to spite the elites. And the wokes. And the city dwellers. And the gays. And the transgenders. And the immigrants. And every woman who wouldn't return their texts. And everyone else they have a grievance against.
But the thing is, the country is full of poor and lower middle class people who are suffering but also haven't turned into the Joker, even, apparently, including a lot of Trump voters. Maybe it isn't the country, or the elites, or the wokes, or the city dwellers, or the gays, or the transgenders, or the immigrants, or the women who are the real problem. Maybe it's them. Maybe they're the assholes.
Of course maybe it’s not just losing a job. Maybe it’s watching your whole community fall apart piece by piece. Maybe the tax base dries up so the schools get worse, the local stores shut down, the houses rot, and the kids who can leave bounce the moment they’re able to. Maybe the ones who can’t are left behind with no real options and no way out leading to all the shitty outcomes one would expect. And maybe… none of the people responsible for any of it have to live with the fallout. The politicians, the executives, the media, none of them are losing sleep over it. Their towns don’t get gutted. Their futures don’t disappear. Their kids aren’t overdosing.
But hey, it’s probably easier to just write off 70 million people as brainwashed idiots who joined a cult for no reason. Occam’s razor certainly suggests that your internalized caricature courtesy of r/politics is far more likely than any of these far-fetched hypotheticals right?
That's fucking capitalism, the thing these voters dick suck all the time. They are constantly afraid of any government control of the economy or socialism in general
No. No, it really isn't.
Because your sprawling victimhood narrative describes the situation of many in the US to some degree or another, but not even that of most Trump supporters. And not even most Trump supporters voted for him just for the catharsis of seeing the people they hate suffer. Although again, many did, and will admit so openly so I'm not the one engaging in caricature here. I never mentioned "brainwashed idiots" or a cult, although Trump does have an actual, literal goddamn cult so I don't even know what you're objecting to in that case.
It isn't my fault that the more you try to defend these people, the worse they come off.
Good day.
And no, it’s not everyone. It doesn’t need to be to win the election.
If it makes it easier to maintain your narrative of being on the good side, go ahead and pretend everyone who doesn’t agree with you is an asshole. Cheers.
Do not imply that both parties are the same on this. That is factually incorrect and Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated an interest in improving democracy.
The GOP, on the other hand, is cheering Trump on as he arrests judges and ignores due process.
While Democrats don't like losing to Republicans they also don't like losing to a third party. Elected Democrats oppose any system that modifies the status quo that "correctly" elected them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
These are not the same.
Honestly IRV is worse than plurality so there are plenty of reasons to oppose it other than a two-party domination conspiracy theory. Using IRV gives up monotonicity, possibilities for a distributed count, and some elements of a secret ballot (for even a medium-sized candidate list) for basically nothing.
Monotonicity is not a theoretical concern. Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2].
[0] https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html
[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congr...
Range voting may well be much better, and there are certainly more mathematically sound versions of ranked-choice than IRV, but I think they utterly fail to convince that IRV is just as bad as plurality. They also seem to only take their game theory as far as necessary to reflect Range Voting in the best possible light. For instance, they argue that voters will almost always rank their less preferred of the front-runners last even if they have greater opposition to other candidates, but they don't explore that candidates can and do chase higher rankings among voters that won't rank them #1. It's an obvious and common strategy (candidates were already doing it in my counties first ever RCV election) so I can only assume the reason its not mentioned is that it improves the soundness of RCV in practice.
Their link is referring to the Irish presidential election, which does use IRV—but it’s a meaningless figurehead position, so it’s unclear how relevant the comparison is.
Also to note, there's nothing technically stopping the US House from moving to proportional representation along with ranked-choice and dems have proposed it recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Representation_Act_(Unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Unite...
And probably without even trying. Once it becomes better known, gaming the system like this will happen more often.
It's a shame that's not what everyone uses :/
though: this does go the right way. Condorcet methods are worth discussion. IRV, not so much.
IRV gets implemented a ton in the US, surprisingly. It tends to get enacted because people understand it really quickly, and it tends to get repealed because of center squeeze.
If they don't like it, they should be pushing for ranked-choice voting.
The Washington State Democrats are about to have one of our regular meetings this coming weekend, and I guarantee as is the case all all of our meetings, there will be a contingent encouraging all of us to support RCV. As a candidate, I've already been approached again this year as to whether I will support it. It's absolutely a discussion point within our party.
Because we have a two party system. Third parties are nothing more than spoilers. If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other, and build a caucus to get their candidates elected. But they don't, because that's never the actual goal.
What we've lost is independent media having outlets to reach an audience. Pre proliferation of centralized social media platforms, it was easier to find independent voices on the internet through more de-centralized means. I remember coming across the works of Fredrich Hayek and Paul Krugman via the same message board in the early 2000s. Diversity of thought was at least respected, even if it got heated.
I've noticed a steady decline in diversity of thought co-existing on the internet as general social media coalesced around Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok. Reddit has also had a slower but meaningful decline in the co-mingling of ideas on merits, and perhaps subjectively, I feel it took longer to get there but ultimately has ended up in the same place, an echo chamber.
There was a time I remember, when progressive, liberal, and conservative people also could seem to agree on some baselines, like not enabling racists.
I don't see any reason to think this is accurate.
We are living through a successful attempt at this right now. The Tea Party completely engulfed what was once the GOP and morphed into MAGAism. Sadly the progressive wings of the Democratic party never got the memo, and wrote them off until it was too late.
Eh? They've never meaningfully had control of the party, and are surely far more willing to e.g. abandon neoliberalism to avoid that handicap vs. a MAGA-ified Republican Party that's abandoned neoliberalism, than most of the rest of the Democratic Party is. It's the 3rd-way sorts and "centrists" who've been, and remained, in charge of setting direction and who've just kept on trucking with the "we mustn't upset the status quo!" and "maybe courting traditional Republicans will suddenly start working, so we should keep trying that" strategy, no?
This is such nonsense there's no reason to take you serious as a person. The two independents in Congress caucus with the Democrats.
> Their preferred world is a two party system where the Republicans are losing.
A private political party doesn't support other private political parties?! Definitely a first in the world.
Democrats are an organization with a specific political agenda. As are Republicans, and every other party.
It doesn't help that most of our third parties are terrible choices too.
Meanwhile Republicans have pre-emptively banned all forms of ranked choice voting at all government levels in eleven states.
But do go on.
Oops
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3040...
I don't think RCV would do much to change that. In order to be elected, you need to be seen, so you need a sizeable media presence. The billionaire class controls enough of the media (traditional, social and "independent") that the people will keep voting for their servants under pretty much any voting system, bar a few exceptions here and there. It's a fundamental issue of electoral democracy, not of the voting system.
One potential alternative would be to switch to non-electoral democracy, e.g. drawing representatives at random rather than electing them, but that's even less likely to happen, and it may end up having different problems. At least it'd suppress all the circus around elections and all that party nonsense, so there's that.
Example? I hear this constantly and yet there's one party that has spent decades trying to protect the environment, protect workers, fund schools, fund health care, provide day care, prevent gun violence, equalize economic opportunity, increase and protect civil rights -- and then there are Republicans acting to stop all of that. I cannot even begin to fathom how anyone - especially in light of the past 100 days -- can tell me with a straight face that my party is the "lesser of two evils."
And as for RCV - how, please offer me an example - of how you think it makes one bit of difference in freeing us from being the "servants of the billionaire class." You want to actually do that? End citizen united and get money out of politics; and good luck with that.
- Repeal of 1999 Glass-Stegall act, leading directly to the 2008 crisis
- Biden’s support for fossil fuel (Willow Project)
- Obama and Biden’s continued expansions of the mass surveillance state
- Prosecution of whistleblowers under Obama
- Fusion centers and protest surveillance
- Bailing out the investment banks in 2008. Refusing to prosecute bankers.
- The Libya regime change
- Support for Saudi in the Yemen war leading to humanitarian crisis
- Drone warfare including extrajudicial killing of American citizens
- Guantanamo Bay. It’s still open.
- Continued material support for the Palestinian genocide (Biden)
- Sanctions on Cuba
- Obama’s “pivot to Asia” to begin a Cold War with China
- Support for many dangerous Latin American right-wing governments
- the continued rise of wealth inequality
I agree Democrats are still better than Trump. That’s why I described them as the lesser of two evils. I also think it’s rational to support Democrats and other factions against the Republicans - without losing sight of the big picture.
> good luck with that
The billionaire class can only see its own narrow interests and actively engenders destruction in the long run. The fossil fuel industry is going to run us into the ground with climate change. The billionaires are instituting a dictatorship that has a long term goal of war with a China (a nuclear power). The long term plan of many of these billionaires is to live on seasteads and in luxury bunkers - or maybe inhabit a dead planet.
Society is undergoing a deep crisis. You speak with confidence that citizens united won’t be overturned. The fact is society is going to be overturned. It’s already being overturned. The future holds for us outcomes such as mass migration and death due to climate change, political instability, nuclear war. These are the outcomes everyone is faced with. We are collectively choosing our future - and the choice is between self-destruction under the reins of these narrow interests - or the divestment of these interests in the spirit of solidarity and democracy.
If you had open system (not one or two-party system) there would be more than three parties.
The Democratic party is a god damn big tent. It's the equivalent of 3-5 parties in any other country. It is mind-blowing how much diversity of thought exists in the Democratic party and we spent an ungodly amount of time and effort fighting amongst ourselves to produce meaningful policy and platform ideas. If you don't like our party, the best thing you can do is join us and use the party as a vehicle to go in the direction you want. I can't say enough - people need to understand that you don't need another party, you just need to understand how you can shape the party to be what you want. It's absolutely mind-blowing how much opportunity there is to work inside the party and move the ball forward rather than stand on the sidelines trying to form some other party and all the BS that would go along with trying to be viable.
Open a news website. Several news websites. Turn on the TV. Talk to some people about politics. How often do those topics come up?
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...
I'd rather use the scientific method: make predictions, let the experiment run, and compare to the results. Predicting that the national debt ceiling will be raised or removed, taxes cut, labor unions attacked, and "elites" not correcting anything or being heroes.
Next, I was amazed at a lack of coordinated opposition. Nobody joined the barricades, there was no unrest, no opposition party garnered votes.
Biggest take away was that life went on. There was no shortage of goods on the shelves and nobody cared that the pound lost 25 percent or so.
From Brexit, I anticipate much the same in America, for the economy to linger on due to generational wealth, with people just getting on with it.
The pricing due to tariff taxes will also be easier to absorb than what people think.
Imagine a finished good such as a bicycle, imported from China. Retail margins are not great for the retailer because they expect sales from accessories.
If the bicycle costs USD 1000 at retail, what does it cost to the importer?
The retailer buys the bike from a wholesaler for USD 500 and the wholesaler buys the bike from the distributor for USD 250. The distributor buys it from the importer for USD 125.
Margins will be negotiated with volume and delivery schedules, but the bicycle, at import is only valued at 125, not 1000 in this simplified example.
Lets assume the tariff works out so the importer has to pay 300 rather than 125 to get the bike out the port. Let's assume a 175 tariff fee. This can be passed down the chain much like how duty is charged on tobacco that gets imported.
Hence the customer is paying 1175 for the 1000 bike, not 2450.
The customer can buy a lower specification model of they don't like the price hike, or the retailer can shave their margins to gain market share, shift inventory and gain a customer. In time the price can creep up.
If the tariffs were collected at Walmart rather than at the port then this means of handling the tariffs would not be possible.
For a cycle manufacturer that owns the factory in China as well as the distribution chain to the customer, they could set up a shell company that imports the bicycle for a dollar, to then sell that bike to the retailer they own for proper money. The customer then pays the same 1000 with the 1.45 absorbed.
The company could also own a design office in the Chinese factory and sell their design consultancy services back to the US sales operation for millions, millions that won't be taxed as a tariff since it is a service, not goods.
In this way the USD profits are repatriated with the factory. The factory sells it's goods almost for free. Next there is the problem of what to do with those dollars since the factory workers are paid in Yuan. Those dollars need to be sold or used to buy oil, rubber and other raw materials.
This type of Hollywood accounting is standard for multinationals but beyond the reach of small businesses.
Apple do this type of magic accounting, most famously in Ireland. Amazon use Luxembourg. So why the exemption for iPhones? Well, if Apple have to pay USD 2 in tariff taxes on a 1000 iPhone then that is a big deal to them. They were never going to have to charge 2450 for that same iPhone.
Ideally a multinational makes a loss in the country of manufacture and a loss in the country of sale. This means minimum wages and no taxes paid. They then make billions in their chosen base for the shell company in the middle and use a tax haven to get the dollars out, which they then use to buy their own shares, thereby not paying dividends.
No, all of these business rely on percentage margins to stay cashflow positive, not absolute revenue. It's possible that a few companies will absorb a small amount of the percentage, and result in it costing 2200 or something, but the tariff is not like VAT, it won't get "tacked on at the end", because each step in the chain depends on economies of scale that in turn depend on demand that are sensitive to price. Price going up decreases sales, which incurs additional overhead per sale, etc. Businesses are not going to give up their net margin for free, they'll only do it if it's the least bad way to address the shortfall of sales as a result of price increases.
In B2B there is typically a doubling of price at each step so the 'trade price' appears incredibly cheap to a customer, yet that is a multiple of the import price.
Each step has its own risks and overheads so it is not greedy to have these markups.
B2B customers are in a strong position to negotiate prices and B2B sales staff know their customers well. It is therefore entirely possible for costs due to tariffs to be passed down the chain without everyone doubling that tariff tax at every stage. There is no incentive to do so, or for those costs to be absorbed.
What I am saying is that it works more like a customs duty rather than a simple price hike.
Wait for the panic to die down and see how this happens.
Two observations, much like Brexit, life goes on, shops are full and people still eat. Then, as for the vast bounty that the guy in the White House expects to raise, there is very little and no cash windfall arrives.
Clearly some products are more complex than others, I only really know typical e-commerce stuff, not automobiles that go across the Mexican border three times as they get assembled.
I have noted that the media has mom and pop entrepreneurs importing things such as plastic spoons for autistic pigeons to clean their ears with or diapers for left handed crypto-bros, where they are going to be exposed to the tariffs bigly. The media have not had typical medium sized retail businesses that buy goods from wholesalers that deal with distribution companies.
I am no fan of the tariffs or the orange man but I did live through Brexit and have my reasons not to go into panic mode.
I also think historical comparisons to tariffs a century or more ago are not helpful as the distribution chain has evolved over time. In these distant times a tariff would act like a customs duty on tobacco or alcohol.
Most of the costs would be in assembly, marketing, retail, shipping and sorting forth, so there would be just the imported parts to get the tariff tax, but you could just pass those costs on, for the customer to choose a lower specification model of they can't afford the product.
Some easier components could be sourced from the USA, for example, the handlebars are just a bent tube, so why get a Chinese person to make it? However, the aluminium for that tube will be taxed with a tariff so it is unlikely that a guy down the road will step up to make these things.
As mentioned, it will be like Brexit, the worst fears won't materialise, people will still be eating food and everyone will just become a lot poorer with a stagnant economy.
With Brexit the little guy stopped selling to Europe but the multinational didn't skip a beat.
this is in indication you live in a bubble
I know plenty of people that were watching the clock
some were very unhappy, some were jubilant, but most were completely indifferent
I'm not sure why anyone outside of the UK would ever care about a minor change in governance
in the same way I don't expect anyone in France to be particularly interested in the abolition of the Essex District Councils later this year
The issue is that labor productivity (level of tech) in American mfg hasn't broadly increased at the rate we'd need to manufacture many things at reasonable prices for the American consumer. This makes Baumol's cost disease a huge issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect You can see this manifest in healthcare as one of the most egregious examples; the top cause of margin pressure for hospitals is labor: https://www.hfma.org/press-releases/health-systems-near-thei....
While we can still manufacture things that require comparatively high levels of skill, technology, and capex, it's never again (absent a depression greatly outstripping the 1930s) going to be profitable to pay American workers to make t-shirts rather than Bangladeshis.
There's a good argument to be made that a combination of outsourcing and illegal labor caused problems by suppressing investment in tech and automation for thirty years plus, and there are certain things we probably should make here. But ultimately the stuff we actually need to manufacture are things core to sustaining life and the military. Medical supplies, weapons, food, oil, metals, chemicals, etc.
We can, with time and good industrial policy, bring back some manufacturing. That would be a case of short-term pain for long-term benefit. But even then, that's true only insofar as we give people a shot to actually buy American. Moonshot investments in roboticization and industrial automation for a few years would really make this easier, along with using the huge amount of post-HS education dollars we spend to focus on training skilled engineers to implement this sort of thing, along with things like skilled machinists. But these tariffs don't really give American companies a shot.
We cannot, with any reasonably-good outcome, bring back manufacturing jobs. That midwest factory worker is never going to be paid $30/hour plus pension/retirement contributions, good medical, etc. to make regular, el cheapo consumer goods.
Well, this is possible, but it will take very few workers to produce the huge amount of goods to make it profitable. Case in point: e.g. a Novo Nordisk factory that produces like half of the EU supply of insulin employs like 15 workers per shift, who mostly oversee automation at work, handle incoming / outgoing trucks, and ensure physical security of the plant.
It's the same thing that happened to the US agriculture: in 1800, it used to employ like 80% of the population, in 2000, 2% to 3%. Machines replaced human labor almost fully.
Your parallel to ag is a good one: it's something we need to be here, and we wisely embraced automation to ensure 1. we could do it even in wartime, when our male population is needed elsewhere, and 2. that we could produce in a way that cost little for the average consumer and the export market. We need the same thing to happen here.
I mentioned the "factory jobs aren't coming back" point more because Trump is playing hard to a rust-belt base that wants those jobs back, doing this in some ways as a hand-out.
Places like Bangladesh are experiencing the industrial revolution; to remember what it looked like in England, read some Dickens (or even K. Marx, haha); for the US, read some Mark Twain or Theodore Dreiser. It was bleak.
The paradise of 1950s, when a Ford factory worker could be the only breadwinner in a middle-class family, was only possible because most of the rest of the world was devastated by WWII, from which the US emerged relatively unscathed.
Maybe this is the situation the Trump administration is striving for
> the top cause of margin pressure for hospitals is labor
While it's true that the highest cost to hospitals is labor, the highest cost to consumers is insurance company bureaucracy.
You'll notice that hospitals are the largest component. Physicans and clinics are also substantial. Insurance costs fall under "Other health", which includes "spending on durable and non-durable products; residential and personal care; administration; net health insurance; and other state, private, and federal expenditures."
Drug costs, the other frequent alleged cause, are even smaller, representing less than a tenth of expenditures.
This explicitly does not include insurance costs.
Private health insurance costs are covered by "healthcare spending by major sources of funds" and reached 1.5 trillion, the same dollar amount as hospitals cost as a product group.
Then go look at the finances of those who take in insurance money.
Trust me, it's _very_ (read: very) clear who holds all the bargaining power in the healthcare market. People target their anger at insurance companies because that is who they pay. "My healthcare provider is good and my health insurance is evil" is exactly backwards. You are not the one paying $400 for your "I have a head cold" virtual visit.
Provided you pay for your insurance, in all likelihood you already have.
Another thing to point out is that there's no national security justification for bringing back even high-end manufacturing from close allies like Canada.
A good trade and industrial policy is one that tries to protect key industries among allies instead of insisting on every single important industry being done locally.
And that is a secure seas. Well, I don't think piracy or u boat torpedoing and many other forms of threats to overseas trade is going to appear in the near future, I do think that overseas shipping is going to get less secure.
China is exerting its "rights" in its near area seas and attempting to expand further. Ukraine has shown that capital naval vessels can be threatened with cheap drones. The red sea trade is being assaulted by Somali raiders and yemeni rebels armed with Iranian missiles.
The other thing I think is missing from your analysis is that the cost of labor to business is laden with healthcare costs. And the US has the most expensive healthcare by far in the world. So perhaps a comprehensive universal healthcare system and reform of all the profit and rent seeking systems that are in the medical establishment in the United States would need to be reformed. Can't wait for that unicorn to fly.
So again, while I agree with a lot of your analysis and it matches mainstream economic analysis, this mirrors a lot of my criticisms of economic analysis. It basically is a defense of capital interests and the rich, and strenuously avoids analyzing anything that doesn't serve those interests from a fundamental assumption standpoint.
- $1.53B for expansion of small unmanned surface vessel production.
- $1.8B for expansion of medium unmanned surface vessel production.
- $1.3B for expansion of unmanned underwater production.
- $188mm for development and testing of maritime robotic autonomous systems and enabling technologies.
- $174mm for the development of a Test Resource Management Center robotic autonomous systems proving ground.
- $250mm for development, production, and integration of wave-powered unmanned underwater vehicles.
Perhaps less-safe seas will mean it's better to on-shore, but we do seem to be focused on keeping them secure. If nothing else, while America is more capable of autarky than most, we still pull a lot of critical minerals and other feedstocks from other places.
The healthcare debate is really complicated. We do spend a ton, but we also demand an extraordinarily high standard of care. We don't tend to deny people anything and waitlists are very rare. Now while a universal healthcare policy is doable, a lot of Americans would demand some level of additional private care, which means net healthcare spending might rise between the two systems.
I tend to hear arguments for universal healthcare like "negotiating drug prices". While that could save some money, we spend less than one-tenth of total dollars on prescription drugs. Hospitals are still the largest chunk at ~30%, and I'm unsure how universal care would realistically save us money there. Doctors/clinics are about 20%, and I don't see obvious savings there, either. "Other health" is opaque but there's potential for savings here; it includes "durable and non-durable products, residential and personal care, net health insurance, and other state, private, and federal expenditures."
This is a very hard problem to solve, and is compounded by the fact that we have an incredibly unhealthy population. I also hesitate to attribute this to "lack of care": obesity is massively comorbid with heart disease (the leading cause of death in most states), diabetes (a large ongoing drain on the health system), and end-stage renal disease (dialysis accounts for ~2% of the entire federal budget.). And yet, obesity is strongly prevalent in every income group, across men and women both.
There are people who say we have a moral obligation to give free healthcare to everyone. I don't agree, but I understand that's moral position. But I am less sure that data bear out the idea that publicizing healthcare would magically save so many dollars.
I'm not "avoiding" criticizing the rich or capitalism. I'm just not motivated by my personal morality to do so. I understand you and others are, and can respect that too, but these are two separate conversations: on one hand, what is practically right and wrong with the current policies? On the other, how ought we to act? The latter underlies the former and, if you want to criticize the former on grounds of the latter, you've got a long row to hoe. It's probably easier to segment practical discussions to one place and moral dialogue to another.
Expenditure data: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
Obesity prevalence by income: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm
Well and having chip fabs as well.
More generally, though, there is another variable in-between wages and cost of products, and that is profits.
Perhaps the likes of Apple, Amazon etc could maybe make do with a few less billion in profits.
I read an article (in, I think the NYT) about how, prior to Jack Welch at GE, companies used to boast in their annual reports about how well paid their employees were. The only company I know of that does this now is CostCo.
I agree that paying workers well is a good thing; I like that the advanced mfg model still allows people to give good salaries. But, I don't see how it's strongly tied to the issue of tariff policy in terms of economic outcomes.
Indeed, America is the world leader in manufacturing Bangladeshis ;)
The major problem they have with that, though, is that they started with Mexico and Canada, and then progressed to declaring (trade) war on the entire world, moves which are exactly the wrong thing if the goal was to painfully but beneficially decouple with China. In order to achieve that goal, we would have needed to strengthen our trading appliances with other countries in North America, Asia, and Europe. But they've done exactly the opposite.
(Note, though, that even this strategy wouldn't be getting much if any love from economists. It's hard to find credible economists who think tariffs are anything but dumb, economically. But we would see a lot more support from foreign policy folks, many of whom do think that economic decoupling from China would be good for non-economic reasons, despite being painful economically.)
I've seen lots of policies I've disagreed with or despised, but very few that are just weird.
Our current situation is the result of decades of deliberate greedy systematic outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced. It's our own dumb fault. And it will take decades to reverse it if it's even possible. It's not a "short-term" kind of thing.
Our being the office working city/suburb living HN posting white collar types who have no visibility into the non service parts of the economy beyond what is made available in our investment account dashboards.
The industrial workers, the farmers, the blue collar tradesmen, none of them wanted this even back in 1995 or 2005, the evidince that rampant outsourcing was bad in the long term just wasn't concrete enough for their opinions to gain traction and there were other seemingly more important issues that decided elections back then and we did make a lot of money selling our economy out so everyone was willing to let outsourcing hum along even if they didn't like it.
The people who made bank shipping industrial tooling to the far east and bulldozing old factories, the middle managers coordinating with overseas suppliers, etc, etc. didn't want to do any of those things, they were uneasy about the long term impacts but they did it anyway because the managerial class structured the economy such that that's what they had to do to keep the lights on.
These countries also were lifted from poverty and into relative prosperity by this. It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day; the US would turn into an innovative economy producing high-tech gear, doing high-grade R&D and engineering, and producing software, all the stuff the Bangladeshi or even Chinese were not supposed to be able to do comparably well. It just turned out that the engineering and development thrive next to the actual production capacity, and can be studied and learned. Now Chinese electronic engineering rivals that of the US, same for mechanical, shipbuilding, even aircraft / space and weapons.
A similar thing once happened to Japan, then to South Korea: they turned from postwar ruins and poverty into high-tech giants competing successfully with the US by exporting inexpensive, good-quality stuff to the US. But these are politically aligned with the US and the West in general; places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, not so much, and China expressly is not.
Shipbuilding? The US shipbuilding market is dead and stinking of deep rot. No one buys the US-made ships unless they _have_ to.
Shipbuilding has been absolutely protected by the Jones Act, so predictably it became globally uncompetitive and obsolete.
A toaster off of the 1958 Sears catalog cost US$12.50 which amounts to ~US$ 160 today. We can make a $160 toaster today that'll survive nuclear war but no one will buy it.
Some things do get better with time, home appliances are the best example. They consume on average less energy today, are lighter, have more safety features, etc.
Cheaper prices are also a feature: more people have access to goods today because of it.
Not all that is old is great.
There are people who would buy a $160 toaster (I've seen different estimates closer to $130, I'm not sure how you calculated yours) if they knew it would last 50 years today.
This shift has more to do with what businesses want than with consumer demand. Companies moved toward manufacturing goods that don’t last as long, increasing demand by ensuring products deteriorate sooner, giving them more opportunities to sell.
>Some things do get better with time, home appliances are the best example. They consume on average less energy today, are lighter, have more safety features, etc.
While that’s partly true, putting a smart screen on a fridge doesn’t necessarily make it better. More often, businesses make changes to improve their bottom line, not to create better products overall. More durable materials were used in the past, and I would rank durability high among the most important features of physical products.
Look at the gangbusters runaway successes of shops like Temu and Shein if you want to know where the heart of American consumers is. Cheap shit. People love cheap shit. Even if they know it is shit.
And there are absolutely high-end expensive toasters that are waaay better than the cheap junk. But most people are going to choose the cheap junk in the end.
This isn't really true except for perhaps the most naive sort of person. It was well understood by most folks that there were going to be winners and losers. You can't gut entire segments of the workforce in less than a generation and not expect extreme pain.
It's just those people had very little political power.
Exactly zero people in actual power are genuinely surprised by the outcome here. Perhaps they are at the political backlash and how powerful it became, but that's about it.
More recently, US capital owners for the last 20 years 100% understood that they were selling off the industrial capability of the USA to the CCP. It was their monetary gain but our problem, so they went forward with it.
These are the goals of any "free market" company.
One of my great critiques of capitalism and the economic analysis of it is that all the economists seem to believe that every company wants to happily exist in a open market with lots of competitors optimizing entirely working to reduce costs for the consumer.
All you have to do is read my first paragraph and to see how utterly fantastical that notion is, and why regulation is needed to counteract every one of those simple game theory power politics end goals
Game theory should be taught much wider, I agree.
For last 20 years, I can agree; but the boom of outsourcung started nearly 40 years ago.
We want a more 'just' system, it requires regulation, so everybody is playing the same game.
Oh! We've deregulated. That's supposed to help make folks more profitable. But, whoops, it's the same playing field no matter the particular rules. So deregulation helps who? Big players, international players. Not you and me.
How would you reverse it?
1. Tariffs directly take money out of the coffers of private companies and move it into the government. Private companies therefore have less money to invest.
2. Tariffs are a tax on economic activity and therefore suppress it. This causes companies to want to hold more cash and invest more conservatively. Major changes take appetite for risk, which tariffs reduce.
In addition, the arbitrary, legally questionable way in which this particular set of tariffs has been imposed means they are not affecting long-term corporate planning. Instead most companies are seeking to just “wait them out” while issuing hollow press releases with big numbers they think the president wants to see.
Surgeons can push the limits of better and better surgery if they can spend their entire career focused on just that. If they’re required to farm or sew clothes half of every day, they will not be able to advance surgery as far.
The same specialization-driven innovation happens between companies who can trade freely, and between countries who can trade freely. Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize for exploring this idea.
Tariffs allow otherwise more expensive domestic products to compete against cheaper products from abroad.
In and of itself, that says nothing about quality one way or another. In practice, it often means the opposite of what you suggest: domestic goods are often of higher quality, and/or are made by workers in better conditions, because of stricter laws here than in the places manufacturing has moved to. (And not by coincidence—the cheaper labor and looser laws are exactly why manufacturing moved to those places.)
Of course, all of this only applies when tariffs are carefully considered, strategically applied, and left in place for a long and predictable length of time.
Skilled and willing workers (except, ahem, Mexicans) don't grow on trees in a couple months.
Motivation for companies to pay real wages to Americans doesn't exist
Tariffs are a consumption tax that will probably be highly regressive.
Honestly, it seems like the Trump administration thinks he's they're just playing a game of civilization or some other 4x game and just needs to adjust the slider for a couple cities in order to enact broad-scale production changes.
The consequences are so bad that everyone who remembers the disasters brought on by high tariffs must be dead for anyone to think it is a good idea.
So, even if the purported goals are good, even achieving them will be outweighed by the disaster.
Plus, companies in countries protected by high tariffs inevitably become globally uncompetitive.
Edit, add: Even worse, most high tariff schemes have distinguished between placing the high tariffs on only finished goods and exempting the raw materials or components from the tariffs. This administration makes almost no such distinctions, just sprays tariffs everything, so harms US manufacturers as well. The only exemptions are the ones who pay tribute (e.g., sponsoring inauguration, etc.), so it is almost more of an extortion scheme than a tariff plan. A particularly bad example was revealed as the Japanese delegation came to negotiate, asked what concessions the US wanted, and could get no straight answer [0]. It seems the US group just expects the tariffed nations to supplicate and bring adequate gifts, not make adjustments according to a master plan. Very strong indication there is no plan, which is the worst possible case.
So, while I completely agree with the concept of looking for a silver lining, I'm not seeing any...
[0] https://petapixel.com/2025/04/21/japan-cant-get-an-answer-on...
You need to read more history. The link between tariffs, or any specific federal policy, and how a time period looks to the next generations is iffy at best and probably not really correlated much or at all.
The 1820s-40s were looked upon by following generations the way many look at the 1950s today. From the POV of the mid to late 1800s it was seen as uncomplicated and peaceful because the tension and strife leading up to the civil war and the cultural messiness that followed had yet to build. From the POV of the industrial economy of the late 1800s and early 1900s it was seen the same way but with a heavier emphasis on cleanliness and purity because even if you were nominally poorer and subject to more chance of starvation living and working on a farm you owned was arguably nicer than a tenement and factory you didn't.
The 1890s on through the 1920s were also looked upon fondly by subsequent generations as a time of massive progress. Mechanical power via fossil fuels and steam became the norm, railroads were everywhere, factories sprung up, all manner of goods and services formerly reserved for the wealthy became the domain of the everyman.
Obviously the 1930s don't get looked fondly upon and the jury is still out on the 2020s.
I think we should do pretty much exactly what China does:
1.) you want to sell a product to the US? You have to produce it here and the facility must be partially owned by a US company. Also you must transfer IP.
2.) Since we can't get away with massive forced and/or slave labor (legally), then create a new visa class for temporary workers that is excluded from minimum wage, worker protections, social security, etc. (yes, basically a slave class)
Once we build capacity and knowledge back, then start shift back to a more domestic workforce.
Very very nasty... but doable. The other option is to just nuke China.
> other option is to just nuke
Ah yes the two choices americans have in their lives... enslave someone, or genocide someone. From the 1500s to the 2000s, some things don't change. Some even call it american ingenuity :-)
That only works if the policy isnt changing day to day (or across presidential cabinets / administrations.) It takes a lot of capital and time to build local factories, and I would not feel comfortable with that investment w/o assurances there will still be a market for local goods next week, next month, or in 10yrs
I've been shopping for an Airbrush. These were a dream of mine as a kid. Back then the major brands were Made in the USA and were expensive enough that they were out of reach for 14 year old me.
Today the main companies from back then have "Made in the USA" on their websites but Badger (https://badgerairbrush.com) doesn't look like it's been updated since 2018 and Paasche (https://www.paascheairbrush.com) seems only slightly better.
Another popular and slightly newer brand is Iwata from Japan.
I suspect that Chinese imports have been eating these companies lunch for decades. I suspect that the Chinese government is subsidizing the products and their shipping and artificially lowering the cost and that they have been doing this for a very long time.
Why would the Chinese government be subsidizing airbrushes of all things? Is that a strategically important industry? Are they planning on capturing the global airbrush market? To what end, exactly?
Just looking at the diagram of the airbrush, there's a little bit of complexity there in machining all of that good, quickly, and at scale. Lots of little parts to control it which to work well need to have high quality machining.
it's not "the one thing", which contributed to it. There are multiple factors which spurred industrialization, some of them are:
* Europe and Japan was destroyed and they had other problems to deal with
* Soviet Union was seen as an enemy
* Many US soldiers returned home from war and they needed a job
* When many people started working in manufacturing, they needed different optimizations for their process, which lead to more manufacturing
It was a combination of US soldiers returning home after drawing government pay while fighting abroad, rationing limiting what could be purchased by those who remained home, and the one-two-three punch of the GI bill subsidizing land purchases, the interstate highway system effectively creating the American suburb, and process improvements from the war making automobiles drastically cheaper.
A common example is Smoot-Hawley’s tariffs deepening the Great Depression, and early 2025 data already show trade and hiring slipping, but we won't know the full effect for a while.
As for the "bring manufacturing to the US" argument - tariffs often reroute, not reshore. GoPro moved from China to Mexico, Apple from China to India, Hasbro from China to Vietnam, to name a few.
No competently run company is going to invest in more-expensive domestic production based on what the administration is doing because there can't be any expectation that policies will remain in place until production can be brought online. It doesn't even make sense to consider planning to onshore production because there's no reasonable expectation that the current policies will be in place in a month, much less in the year or more needed for a production change.
I genuinely believe that this will be a decade long struggle to generate a long-term benefit to the American nation (ie, the average person) via tariffs as a tool of class warfare and economic restructuring. If you read around MAGA forums, you’ll see this described as a “Mag7 problem, not a MAGA problem”.
But that may not be what you’re asking.
The goal was never to bring manufacturing back to the US. It's to negotiate new tariffs.
With China specifically, I could also see a deal that included stricter enforcement of US IP laws, which is definitely destroying businesses and the job loss that comes with it.
It was or at least it was stated as goal. However the narratives changes quite often with these tariffs.
> China already dropped some of their tariffs today.
Such as?
Trump is 100% convinced his (long disproven both theoretically and empirically) trade theory is true, and no one can talk him out of it.
So it has to play out until the effects are unbearable.
Or until congress votes to take his tariff powers away: https://www.kwch.com/2025/04/30/senate-voting-resolution-tha...
Also nobody tries particularly hard. The secret to longevity in a Trump administration is to effusively praise the boss constantly and minimize direct contradictions. Which turns into "good tzar bad boyars" - the boss is never wrong, only badly advised.
I don't. I see this as the intentional razing of the US economy and interests.
It's a political angle because it's to the responsible politicians' advantage to push that economic theory. I think the claim is not necessarily that economists who believe this theory are acting politically, but that their voices may be amplified by politicians for, let us say, less than scientific reasons.
The Democrats could never do anything against China that imposes short-term economical pain because their own voters would immediately punish them for it and the entire media from left to far-right would put them under fire. Even marginal economical pain has immediate political consequences - I'd argue that Harris' loss was mostly due to rising and unanswered problems about exploding cost of living, chiefly eggs.
The Republicans however? They still have the same constraint from the left to center media and voters - but crucially, their own voter base is so darn high on their own supply (and their media has long since sworn fealty to even the most crackpot people), they are willing to endure anything because their President told them to.
It's "Only Nixon could go to China" all over again, and frankly it's disgusting.
Supply chains took a long time to get established again after covid for things coming in.
Do Americans really want to do the manufacturing they don't want to do anymore?
I think at a base level someone must think that isolationism is good. Personally I think the world should be building deeper connections not less in order for humanity to move to the next level. I fear that we'll never reach that level without an existential force (like aliens showing up a la Star Trek). Until then, our petty differences will continue to get in the way.
IIRC At the same time (early 20th c.), the US was a major net importer of people. This led to a very low effective tariff rate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
This era also featured lots of wars between European nations and spurred foreign conquests/colonialism.
Likewise, if you take “WW3 is going to happen in the near future” as a given, almost all of the Trump administration’s actions make sense, from the crackdown on dissent to the effort to deport any foreign nationals to the saber rattling against Greeenland and Panama to “drill baby drill” to appeasement of Russia to the increased defense budget to the tariffs and efforts to bring semiconductor and drone supply chains stateside to the elimination of climate change programs. The strategy is very clearly to hole up between our two oceans and produce everything ourselves while the rest of the world destroys itself.
Of course, you can’t say “WW3 is imminent” without making it significantly more likely and scarring your populace to boot, which creates some very strong information distortions and illogical actions.
Appealing to economists is the opposite of what they want, because economists look at macroeconomics efficiency which encourages globalism. They would rather be inefficient and hold on to their identity.
>They would rather be inefficient and hold on to their identity
What identity?
They don't. A large chunk of them were Bernie Bros before he dropped out of the 2016 election.
The 'uniparty' narrative denigrates the Western system of multi-party representative democracy and checks and balances, and equates it with Putin's monstrously corrupt and brutal one-party state.
Unfortunately these fascist narratives are extremely effective on underinformed and unintelligent people -- and our enemies know these people vote.
(Personally, I think they got played.)
Man, those guys are doomed. This is what they're aspiring to: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/25/michael-alex...
why are there are a great many democratic nations with (many) more than two parties, even with new parties arising and old parties diminishing. (I have firsthand experience with some of them. I highly recommend the experience.)
Is it wrong to 'intuit' that those nations may have a more vibrant democracy than a system of two parties that are both beholden to corporate capture?
Of course I will not be surprised at how asking this on HN will affect the scrip - oops I meant to say karma of course! - of such an inquirer as myself.
It's the US electoral system; each seat is individually elected, and the presidency is determined on a state-by-state basis, negating the votes of most of the country.
For contrast, take Germany. Its national parliament, the Bundestag, is the rough equivalent of the House of Representatives. It has 630 seats for 1/4 the US's population. Half of those are directly elected by geographical areas in first past the post voting, but the other half are proportionally assigned to the parties according to the "second vote", on a statewide basis. As a voter, you might or might not vote strategically for your direct representative, but the second vote is where you can vote your heart. The state-level parties come up with ordered lists of potential members to seat, and however many seats they get for that state is how far down their list they count. The caveat is that these proportional seats are only awarded if a party gets more than 5% of the vote nationally. This most recent election, we came within a few thousand votes of another new party getting added to the mix, and the CDU/CSU + SPD coalition not having a majority between them, and that would have been an even bigger mess. The FDP, the party that broke the last coalition and caused this election to happen early did even worse, and lost all of its seats, which I think is hilarious.
This all resulted in the CDU/CSU (center-right/conservative) getting the largest number of seats, the AfD (far right) getting the next (almost all from the former East German states), followed closely by the SPD (center-left), then the Greens and die Linke (leftists). The CDU/CSU has enough people in their leadership who remember what happened the last time conservative and centrist parties played ball with a far-right party (those parties no longer exist), so skipped over the AfD and instead negotiated a coalition contract with the SPD as the junior partner, whose membership recently voted to accept it (we'd have been complete idiots not to, and happily, 85% of the party are not complete idiots). The CDU/CSU and SPD don't love having to be in a coalition together, but have done this before and The Recent Unpleasantness Across The Atlantic has got a lot of people thinking a bit beyond their usual petty concerns.
So German voters appeared, on average, to want a center-right government, and that is essentially what they're getting. I say "they," because I'm not (yet) a German citizen, but the SPD's rules allow me to be a member and vote on things like candidate slates and coalition agreements. The Chancellor will be Friedrich Merz, who is the leader of the party that got the most seats (CDU/CSU). He is very boring, which is delightful.
There is a kind of senate (Bundesrat), directly chosen by the state parliaments (I think), but even that is somewhat related to population - Nordrhein-Westfalen and Bayern have more members than, say, Saarland and Bremen. I don't hear much about them, so I think they're mostly a veto on the Bundestag. Oh, and they pick the President, which is an almost 100% ceremonial position.
This electoral system made being a Green supporter in the 1980s if you were otherwise an unenthusiastic SPD voter who despised the CDU (CSU if you're in Bavaria) something other than a de facto vote for the CDU/CSU. It also let the far right corral itself into the AfD instead of taking over the major conservative party, as happened in the US.
If you really want answers, best thing to do is hang out in an area dominated by Trump supporters for a few weeks. Talking to them has changed my perspective on a lot of things. I don't agree with a lot of what they say, but I understand them now. They often aren't great at articulating their thoughts. They think in terms of macro-level complex systems. I shouldn't say 'think' - more like they intuit. They feel something is wrong, and they don't necessarily know why. You have to (kindly and with curiosity) interrogate them a bunch to figure it all out.
I follow a bunch of them on X, and they seem outraged by some of what Trump is doing, particularly the pro-war stance. Hence the low poll numbers?
[Sorry I really geek out on anthropology and understanding cultures.]
The trickiest bit is navigating the, ah, information gap. If you don't listen to Mark Levin or watch Fox News, your interlocutor is going to teach you about a bunch of things going on that you had no clue about (and when you look up the stuff afterward, at least 90% of it's pure bullshit) and you're going to get blank stares or hostility if you bring up any of a wide swath of current events that you assume everyone knows about.
You've gotta just roll with what they say and not do much talking, basically. You mustn't act surprised or incredulous when they make claims about things going on that you're pretty sure aren't real, you mustn't present counter-examples, you mustn't keep pushing if you try to broach a topic you assume is neutral and widely understood and they start to bristle at it.
It reminds me of that experiment where a part of the brain gets stimulated and the subject performs an involuntary action—then comes up with a logical explanation for why they did it, even though they didn’t choose it. I think that’s what’s happening with a lot of these Trump supporters. They're reacting to environmental triggers without really understanding why. It’s fair to say they’re being driven by something external—though then you have to ask, what’s driving that? Who's driving us?
In the end, they’re just human, like me or anyone else. We're all playing the Human game. No one’s really 'awake' or enlightened. After talking to enough people, I’m convinced most 'truth' is concocted, and no one’s actually in control. Truth lasts only as long as it’s useful.
Sadly, it's mostly just cult of personality which I figure you are graciously trying to avoid assuming.
Tariffs are the perfect example of this. Trump announces tariffs? Good, we need long-term investment in domestic production. Trump cancels them? Good, they are just a short-term negotiation tactic. Trump negotiates a trade deal? Good, now we get a better deal on imports from that country. Trump says tariffs are back on the table? Good, we need domestic production long-term.
There are no macro-level complex system ideals here. Pinning them down to one claim is like fighting jelly where on every strike it morphs into something else.
In 2016 I definitely saw ads from churches in Mississippi on local cable TV that were totally outright political advocacy combined with cult of personality. I was so astonished, I almost filed a complaint with the FEC/IRS. But to top it off, I remember very well an ad of Trump’s that said “I’ll make every dream you ever dreamed come true.”
I guess saying you don't understand tariff consequences and the like but you trust Trump to know what he's doing and make things great could be a reasonable position?
I'm hazy on some economics myself but don't especially trust Trump to make thing great. But I did kind of trust some previous presidents to do a decent job without following all the policies. (Clinton and Obama seemed quite good).
In 2016 that might have been a reasonable position without digging too much in to his background/history.
But we've had years of him in and out of office now, repeatedly lying. Lying about big things, small things, changing the lies, doubling down on the lies. Threatening people who question any of his lies in even the most polite/positive way possible.
Why anyone today would "trust" him on anything is just... insane.
Not exactly an economist of note.
If I were Trump, I instead would have pushed congress to take away the power of tariffs back from the presidency and make something like the Fed to manage them instead, with some checks added in. I normally don't like unelected officials making policy like that but in this case I don't see what else would work. As we've seen, broad tariffs are very unpopular even if they might be necessary, and we'd need them to have the potential to stick around much longer for them to be effective.
That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.
The power of the tariff is typically reserved for Congress; the executive has declared an emergency giving itself that power, while Congress (specifically the House) has abdicated its responsibility by redefining "legislative days" to extend the length of the emergency.
> That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.
Long term, maybe; short term, it'll spike inflation as the price of both raw materials and finished goods will rise to account for the tariffs.
Nope. Tariffs are associated with higher inflation, as consumers have to pay more. Over long term, if tariffs depress the economic growth and cause a recession, they indeed _might_ lower the inflation.
If you had inflation typical of what we had during/after COVID with our economy being too hot with too much money floating around, tariffs would absolutely help. Preferably they'd be tariffs just on consumer products, and not things used for manufacturing. You'd raise them for a time and then lower them.
It's essentially the same thing as raising interest rates. You're taking money out of the economy.
Economists across the political spectrum also agree that investment taxes and corporate taxes are bad: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Where was the appeal to economists when Trump cut the corporate tax rate during his first term?
But from what I've read/heard/understand tariffs can have the effect of on-shoring but only if they are fixed an unlikely to change/fluctuate. On-shoring production is not quick. Some Trump rep made a comment about how they delayed the tariffs on phones/computers 3 months because "Companies would need time to move production" which is just laughable, as if anyone could move production in 3 months (let alone 3 years).
None of it matters since the Trump admin changes its mind like it changes its socks. No serious company is going to do more that PR about how they are moving production back to the US because they can very easily get burned when Trump changes his mind. Moving production is a massive task and getting caught half-way through with policy changing (making it no longer profitable) could be a death blow to some companies.
When people actually want to solve large problems they want information and input. They move with deliberation and precision so they can accomplish the goal without creating unnecessary harm or stress. They communicate. I know: Techbro doofuses will be, like, "I know everything already, just do it all right now YOLO!" But that's not how the world works.
There is no evidence that these major actions are being taken with any amount of care. They're erratic. They're often illegal. They're clearly creating destructive side-effects. Instead of engaging with real information, the administration seeks to destroy it. Musk, in my opinion, has big ideas he thinks are good but no mechanism to actually implement them in a good way. Trump is just an ignorant, self-serving man. He neither knows nor cares except to the degree that something can make him feel powerful in the moment.
Fundamentally, the neoliberal project created a lot of billionaires in the USA and associated wealthy enclaves by pushing manufacturing out to US-controlled client state sweatshops while also importing lower-paid workers, from H1B visa holders in tech to undocumented labor in construction and agribusiness. The resulting wealth inequality has led to political instability and unexpected consequences (eg the Rust Belt not backing Democratic candidates who promoted TPP etc.)
The reality is, reversing de-industrialization and abandoning neoliberalism would require a massive state-sponsored effort to update the basic infrastructure - electrical grids, roads, high-speed rail, ports, bridges, fiber-optic networks, schools for engineers and researchers - everything that makes competitive industrial manufacturing possible.
The notion that tariffs alone could accomplish such a massive transition by pressuring private capital to build all that infrastructure is ludicrous. Capital flight from the USA is far more likely - so a massive socialist project would be needed, including high taxes on the wealthy and cross-border capital controls to prevent capital flight (as existed in the USA in the 1960s) - all of which is heresy to the acolytes of Milton Friedman.
Maybe I'm wrong and Apple will open an iPhone factory in the USA this year with entry-level living wages of $35/hr (inflation-adjusted to 1960s factory wages) and the shareholders and executives will take a massive cut in renumeration to avoid iPhone prices spiking to levels where consumers won't touch them. I rather doubt it, though.
This entire section is full of people (not everyone, but several) analyzing it carefully, as if it were a scientist handling a moon rock inside the nitrogen environment of a glovebox.
I can't see anything productive emerging from this post-hoc theorizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model?wp...
Also, I believe the above had an additional layer of an economics joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model
And my (formerly) trusty Black-Scholes model, based on the normal distribution, had to be replaced with a fat-tailed distribution model after the financial meltdown. Shoddy materials.
And then when he does, it will be his most amazing, brilliant strategy ever conceived and his backers will eat it up. Even though they're suffering the most.
Of course, liberals will promptly proceed to squander even that advantage with their usual grating condescension and smug incompetence, and then blame everyone else for their own myriad failings, again as always.
The Trumpers will blame Biden, Obama, Clinton, and every other Democratic POTUS going back to FDR. But you knew that.
They will not blame Trump. The cult leader cannot fail; he can only be failed by others.
It's up to business owners to capitalize on that advantage. Neither liberals nor conservatives are beholden to stabilizing prices at Costco or Adam&Eve. These are privately owned businesses that are fundamentally allowed to plan their businesses apart from (or even against the wishes of) the federal government.
This is how we ended up importing our cars from Japan and Mexico, and why our iPhones and Nike won't get made without slave wages. It wasn't Obama or Reagan that did that, it was executives and shareholders.
That pretty much sums up the delusion of the Left. The buck stops with the government, oligarchs understand that and work skillfully to turn the government into their tool. It wasn't ONLY Obama and Reagan who did that (the tool thing), it was the Democrat and Republican parties who almost unanimously did that, helped by a few gatekeepers who made the process more effective.
Bernie Sanders was a genuine and extremely credible leftist presidential candidate in 2016, and a sellout stalking horse for establishment liberal candidates in 2020 and 2024. Understand why that is and whom his antecedents are in the American political tradition into which his example falls, and not too much else in American politics remains obscure.
Part of the logic here is that Trump is indeed different from other authoritarians. He's even less competent. He's blowing all his political capital on imploding the economy. He also can't understand the legal battles, so when Stephen Miller tells him they won the Supreme Court case 9-0, he believes him. This seems to have been a big wake-up call to Gorsuch, Coney-Barrett and Kavanaugh. The administration has shown its hand much too quickly, before it fully consolidated its power.
What the Democrats should be doing already is campaigning more. Run ads that are literally just Trump quotes. Show people Trump calling January the "Trump economy" before inauguration, then calling April the "Biden economy" now that he's crashed it. If Trump polls low enough, more senators will jump ship, and impeachment could be possible.
Someone needs to stop listening to Carville. Every time I see/hear him I am reminded of everything wrong with the DNC. They don't even pretend like they want to fight for people's rights. That's not gonna win them any elections. I would argue the reason they lost the election was for how little they actually promised they would do beyond "maintain the status quo".
This alone will never convince anyone of anything who isn't already convinced. But as an absolute minimum, it should be effortless for anyone to demonstrate his lack of ideology every single time he speaks about how he's always/never supported something.
Maybe we could even educate "journalists" and the media on its existence so they can do more than "agree to disagree" whenever they talk about things.
They need to rise from the dead.
And it needed to be done way before Trump got elected the first time.
What were people thinking then, and why haven't they gotten off their butts yet?
1. Just make stuff up, MAGA and stupid people will believe it. For example, there are so may AI-generated political videos on Youtube that resemble Facebook boomer posts, with completely fake stories about some conservative figure getting the best of a liberal '...and then everybody clapped'. Even when it says in the description that the story is fictional, there are often hundreds of approving MAGA comments. (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM_ylQmJIHo )
2. Say the Democrats subverted something. Example, blaming judges or deriding DOJ lawyers who admitted the government deported someone by mistake as 'Democrat plants'.
3. Castigate the Dems for not actively supporting the President and imply they created a morale crisis.
I don't think many GOP senators are going to jump ship because they are afraid of MAGA people on a personal level. They are more afraid of being branded as traitors and putting their family in danger than they are of losing re-election.
> Run ads that are literally just Trump quotes.
TIL cliché "Democrats buy ads, Republicans buy stations."
I mosdef 100% utterly agree Dems should campaign more.
It's just that... Per the entire duration of the Biden Admin and post mortems of 2024 election, voters barely hear any Dem messaging. So I question the ROI on buying ads.
Like most others fretting from the sidelines (I'm still recovering from activist burnout, sorry), I have no idea how Dems, and "The Left" more broadly, can connect with voters.
AOC & Bernie's nationwide tour is doing a good job. A good start.
Insert something here about embracing social media(s).
Insert something here about owning our own media ecosystem.
Insert something here about loudly and proudly pivoting away from neoliberalism into full throated support for our working class(es).
Blah, blah, blah building and nurturing a movement.
Etc.
Please share any tips, ideas you have. TIA.
The Fascist Right does not, which is why they are winning this War of Ideology.
This is why ballots are secret. At least for now.
My spouse's ex put commie pamphlets in her luggage when they traveled. She was stopped for it. For many years after she was thoroughly audited by the IRS. If that's the price of free expression, put my name on the list. I won't go quietly.
What? Tell us more.
Who stopped her? Why was she actually stopped and searched? They aren’t going to just see or know you have “commie pamphlets” in your suitcase.
Parent’s spouse just got really unlucky that their ex put pamphlets in their luggage the same day they got randomly selected to have their luggage searched? And the TSA agent cared so much about pamphlets that they reported it somewhere? And then stopped her?
That’s a lot of really bad luck all in one day, don’t you think? That’s why I’d like a little more information before I blindly believe this isn’t just made up.
The thing is, Trump's poll numbers are declining rapidly, with his support being driven by people who just don't believe the consequences of his policies will happen. So the conclusion most people reach is that protesting and talking are the most effective things to do right now. If we're 7 weeks out from empty store shelves, then we're 7 weeks out from a huge surge of discontent, and we want to be ready to tell those people that Donald Trump is clearly responsible and they can help stop him if they'd like.
A mass strike in particular definitely doesn't make sense today. You can't run a mass strike if the Teamsters aren't on your side, and they support the tariffs.
By all means, share the wisdom!
The action alternative to that is massive numbers of calls to representatives, attendance of town halls, and large-scale protests to attempt to limit political maneuvering. People in America aren't rich and can't afford to take time off work to protest, so protesting off hours is more convenient... seems kind of insulting and elitist for you to dismiss civic participation.
And then there's the people who shout "impeach" or other absurdities, or criticize others taking actions while doing nothing themselves.
Bizarre to blame “the Right” for not voting to change a system democrats created 91 years ago.
That said, how is it bizarre to blame the Right for failing to take back Congressional authority, delegated for 'emergencies', when the President is abusing that delegated authority? This is like a basic concept the 'Right' has pushed very hard, now taken to the biggest extreme by a President that it ever has. Or are we getting too much fent from that Penguin Island and it's a real emergency that requires tariffs on them to stop?
The 'right' are showing themselves for nothing but hypocrites and liars, that beleive in nothing. Not even party over country. One man's zero thought out tariff scheme from the last century over EVERYTHING.
https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/trump-tariffs-vira...
That said, what’s the correct answer is only weakly relevant. One side vigorously defends the existence of executive-branch agencies that are supposedly “independent” of the President but somehow can make regulations with the force of law like Congress. The GOP would be committing political malpractice if they listened to those people’s quibbles about non-delegation doctrine.
Your charge of hypocrisy is misplaced. A charge of hypocrisy has persuasive force only insofar as the argument is “your rule isn’t a good one because you can’t even follow it yourself.” You can’t invoke it to insist that your opponents adhere to rules that you don’t even accept as valid. Constitutional norms are a two-way street. If you think “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law, then I’m under no obligation to apply a different standard from that.
Many of the GOP Senators are holdovers from that discredited prior regime. They cower in front of Trump because the base trusts Trump far more than it trusts the party establishment. And that’s not because Trump has magic powers, but because the Bush/Cheney era was utterly disastrous and about half the GOP has turned hard against libertarianism in trade and immigration.
The fact that Senators are afraid to cross Trump is a good thing. It means they are being responsive to their voters. If it wasn’t for that, they’d already be talking about TPP 2.0 and amnesty again.
In that case, why didn't they switch sides and become Democrats?
> about half the GOP has turned hard against libertarianism in trade and immigration
Oh, that's why--at least to some degree. But it's an incomplete explanation. Any GOP leader could have run on a more restrictive trade and immigration platform.
Then the question becomes, why does the base trust Trump so much? How much of it is because they're actually hurting (and in a way that can actually be cured by him); how much is because they are being lied to; how much is because they're easily manipulable; how much is because they are delusional; and how much is because they are morally bereft? Whatever it is, it cannot be explained by competence.
Because they’re republicans. The GOP historically was skeptical of engaging with the rest of the world—tariffs were a foundational plank of Lincoln’s party. The Reagan-era globalism was a temporary response to the soviet union—which threatened to spread atheism and socialism around the world—that brought liberal internationalists and neoconservatives into the coalition. Bush-era foreign intervention revealed that approach to be obsolete post-soviet union. So the party reverted to something more like it has been.
The minority of the coalition for whom bombing middle eastern countries and exporting jobs to China was the whole point did become democrats. Jennifer Rubin and Bill Kristol are cheering for abortion now as partisan democrats.
> Any GOP leader could have run on a more restrictive trade and immigration platform.
But they didn’t, because the party leadership was overrun by globalists and neocons.
> Then the question becomes, why does the base trust Trump so much?
Because he overthrew the globalists and neocons and has proven in office that he’s neither. Other republicans can’t be trusted. Mitch McConnell would vote for amnesty in a heartbeat if it was in exchange for going to war with Iran.
The USA’s global influence and entanglements go all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine and grew substantially after WWII as we sought to help reconstruct the world thereafter (Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, etc.). And the fact that we could produce goods while the rest of the world was practically shut down, given all the destruction that resulted from the war, boosted our economy into the stratosphere. There was practically zero competition for complicated and technologically advanced goods for 30-40 years. Many people forget (or simply weren’t taught) that the USA was not an economic powerhouse until after WWI. Until then, it was Britain, France, and the Netherlands.
Some of the adverse consequences of globalization started to appear domestically during the Reagan administration, though, as imported Japanese automobiles and electronics began to impact American sales, which in turn led to factory closures and pink slips.
Many of those impacted did get other jobs, but the echoes of anger reverberate. They reverberate even longer when they believe foreigners, who they have no power over, are to blame.
> Because he overthrew the globalists and neocons and has proven in office that he’s neither.
It still doesn’t explain how he won the GOP primary the first time and continues to maintain a cult-like following. If the poll numbers are to be believed, isolationists and nationalists never made up more than a slim percentage of the American electorate until very recently.
Even if they all voted for and support Trump based on this alone, it’s a losing battle. The 1940s-1970s were a unique period where American economic victory was practically assured because everyone else was nearly out of business. We’re not going to return to that situation by raising both trade and immigration barriers. Unless we’re willing to bomb the world to line our pockets again (which I’m not sure we have either the stomach or the practical capability to do), globalization is the most rational path to take. It’s a shame we all must suffer until they come to see the light themselves.
The U.S. had virtually no engagement with the world outside the western hemisphere between the GOP’s formation in 1854 and World War I. Between Lincoln’s election in 1861 to World War I tariff rates exceeded 40%: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Average_Tariff_Rates...
> It still doesn’t explain how he won the GOP primary the first time and continues to maintain a cult-like following.
He won the primary because he curb-stomped Jeb Bush on live TV and called for immigration bans when Rubio was proposing amnesty. https://youtu.be/H4ThZcq1oJQ?si=DCUKC_kDG0JpaREn.
He maintains a cult-like following because he’s the first republican in recent memory to actually deliver conservative victories instead of blowing all their political capital on wars. Since he took office in 2016, conservatives have ended affirmative action, overturned Roe, cut border crossings nearly to zero, established a legal framework for prosecuting DEI under the civil rights laws, ended disparate impact, shut down entire federal agencies, raised tariffs for the first time since the 1960s. We might get a $45 billion budget for ICE! I’m not even covering everything in the EOs, which have gone under the radar because everyone is flipping out over tariffs. Trump makes clear that Bush/Cheney republicans weren’t even trying.
> If the poll numbers are to be believed, isolationists and nationalists never made up more than a slim percentage of the American electorate until very recently.
Those are abstract labels that don’t mean anything to people. For decades, the de facto policy has been more and more immigration, something that has never garnered more than 34% support among the whole country: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i.... The percentage of people who want immigration decreased has far exceeded the percentage who want it increased since 1965 except for a brief period around 2020.
The New York Times of all places did a great piece on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi....
Most republicans aren’t “isolationists” in the sense they’d oppose intervention in a situation like World War II. But for example only 20% of people in 2022 favored boots on the ground in Ukraine: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-americans-oppose.... That is de facto isolationism because you’re not going to get a stronger test case for liberal internationalism absent Russia invading a country like Germany.
That’s not true. For example, there’s the Treaty of Wanghia (1844), the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1858) the annexation of Hawaii (1898), the Open Door Policy (1899), and the Philippine-American War followed by our nearly 50-year possession of it.
> Between Lincoln’s election in 1861 to World War I tariff rates exceeded 40%
Until the Sixteenth Amendment which permitted the collection of income taxes, tariffs were the primary means of funding the Federal government. Also, protectionism was the global standard before WWII, so we were in good company. But, like the gold standard and mercantilism, it still wasn’t an economically efficient thing. We get rid of antiquated ideas for good reason and to make the world better and more prosperous.
You can yell “economic efficiency” until you’re blue in the face, but most of the country isn’t buying that. You may well be right but the only way to know is to try change and see what happens.
Did you mean unhappy? That's always true of a democratic system. Making everyone happy is impossible, so we strive for something that tries to make everyone equally unhappy (if not in kind, then at least in degree).
> You may well be right but the only way to know is to try change and see what happens.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Logical people can follow the math. And if people can look past their own biases and limited horizons (which I know is not always possible), they will also clearly see that the world as a whole is much better off, and that even if they feel poorer, they themselves are objectively better off from a quality of life perspective, especially when compared to previous generations. I realize it's a difficult sell, but it is true.
The downside risk of erecting barriers is much worse than the upside risk. For those of us approaching retirement without a guaranteed pension to look forward to, the prospect of having our savings significantly diminished is incredibly scary. And poor people should be frightened, too, because maintaining their existing standard of living (which, BTW, is much better than it ever was, historically) is about to become much more difficult.
I've never seen a cogent and defensible theory of a nation that's economically and socially better off for most as a result of putting up higher barriers to trade and immigration. ISTM anyone who wants to eliminate free trade is cutting off their nose to spite their face.
That suggests you’ve just got a simplistic worldview that ignores variables. Do a thought experiment: say you replaced 200 million americans with Bangladeshis overnight. Would the country be better off or worse off? Obviously worse off. The things Bangladeshis think and believe and do that make the country the way it is—everything from corruption to littering to overthrowing the government—won’t change just because they step foot on american soil. They’d immediately vote to turn America into an officially Muslim socialist country, like back home.
Now, if you agree that 200 million Bangladeshis overnight would be bad, but say 100,000 Bangladeshis a year would be fine, you’re applying unstated assumptions about the rate and quality of assimilation. Which you likely have no empirical basis for assuming.
I would say your assertions about free trade are similar. You’re looking at a simplified model of the world that leaves out important variables and then declaring that free trade has no downsides.
I think it's time to close this discussion.
I used Bangladesh as an example because I’m from there. My entire family on both sides going back to time immemorial is from there. Yet half my family left Bangladesh for the west. We didn’t leave because we were desperate—like most skilled immigrants, we were affluent back home. We left because we didn’t want to raise our kids in a society run by Bangladeshis.
Bangladeshis, in the aggregate, are very different from Americans on numerous cultural dimensions. You seem to think either we’re not (self-evidently false), that those differences disappear when we set foot in America (false), or that those differences are superficial and don’t alter the society around us (more debatable, but based on my experience and analysis, false).
You cannot form a cogent view of immigration policy without delving into the link between culture and societal outcomes, and the stickiness of cultural attitudes in immigrants. Otherwise you’re like a hippy complaining about nuclear power even though you don’t know anything about it.
Good materials:
https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z...
https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran...
https://docs.iza.org/dp17569 (Dutch study about net contribution of immigrants; look at p. 39, showing how immigrants from different cultures have different contribution levels even adjusted for education)
Nevertheless, modern immigration doesn't change a place that dramatically and for the worse, especially when it's controlled. If you read your history, you'd know that every wave of immigrants to this country has been met with fear, contempt, and opposition (including my family's, as starving Jews escaping the Third Reich). Yet, in the long term, the feared outcomes--similar to the ones you describe--never came to pass. America doesn't look like Italy. It doesn't look like Ireland. It doesn't look like Israel. It doesn't look like Mexico. It doesn't look like Vietnam. It doesn't look like India. Maybe certain neighborhoods do for a while, but that's actually one of the nice things about America: that you can go spend some time and enjoy the fruits of a different culture without leaving home. Yet they're still subject to American laws, regulations, and supervision.
And immigrants don't get to vote, so they don't have much political influence for a long while, even locally. Remember, too, that it takes a supermajority to amend the Constitution, so for immigrant culture to have a serious impact on the USA itself would take generations, to the extent it ever does.
I never suggested that immigration should be entirely unregulated and that people and cultures are fungible. That's a straw man you created. And the fact that you are assuming that's the situation people want and the inevitable outcome that will result reveals who you are, and yeah, I'm going to fucking moralize on it. Racists and fearmongerers are evil, even those who hate their own kind. Your own argument supposes that morals are a part of transplantable culture, and let me tell you: Racism, fear, absolutism, and contempt for outsiders are not American values. Perhaps you need to work better on assimilation, yourself.
We’re done.
Religion is likely to stay for longer, and will change to become more like average US culture slower. For example, I don't know if and when a mild American version of Islam will develop which is more adapted to live in harmony with other cultures found in the US.
Putting that aside for the moment, the argument rayiner made, and that you appear to be supporting, is that if you bring too many foreigners into a country, it will change the cultural makeup of that country. It's an argument that seeks to exploit people's fears. It's not a new argument, and it's a largely discredited one. People who make this argument have to anticipate at least the following questions and provide some very difficult answers to them:
1. What exactly is American culture?
2. Is American culture homogeneous? If not, how do you know where immigration will disrupt existing culture, and where it won't?
3. How will you know when American culture is disrupted because of immigrants as opposed to intrinsic forces?
4. How much immigration is too much? How do you know?
5. Which immigrants do you believe are OK to permit into the country, in what numbers, and where?
6. For any potential individual immigrant, how do you know this immigrant will or won't assimilate?
7. How long should an immigrant be given to assimilate? What will assimilation look like for them? What does the bar for "good enough" assimilation look like?
8. Why isn't conformance to our laws sufficient for an immigrant to be accepted?
9. Should new immigrants be Judeo-Christian? If so, how do you square that with the First Amendment's freedom-of-exercise clause? What about all the Muslims already in the USA? Have they adversely impacted America? If so, how?
10. How do you think about the difference between a Black person already in the USA (see question 2) and a new African immigrant?
11. Do the impacts of immigration--particularly of Africans--manifest differently in the Americas than they do in other countries, say, in the UK? If so, why?
12. What about native-born Americans who don't conform to whatever American culture is (see question 1)? Should we eject them?
When I ask people these questions, they invariably end up falling all over themselves. People don't think about immigration rationally; they fall back to primitive "in-group" and "out-group" thinking and engage in "otherism." Sometimes it's religious hatred; sometimes it's racial hatred; other times it's class hatred. I encourage anyone who believes that immigration causes problems figure out for themselves the answers to the above questions and how they would craft a policy that serves everyone better, and not one that just suits their own prejudices.
We shouldn't be gatekeeping the ability of the average person to publicly petition their government for a redress of grievances. That's kind of a core function of an engaged populace.
While I can think of examples that I personally think are a bit silly, I'd agree it's not really a useful contribution.
If you subscribe to the views of documentarist Adam Curtis, that is because no one has any clue whatsoever.
Doing something to fix the US' executive branch problem with the proper Amendments would be likely to fail because it would be too neutral to collect from lobyists or sell on emotion.
This isn't about which tools should have been used at the end of the cold war. This is about which tools should have been used before the Great Depression in a country under a political party that has spent decades dismantling the tools that helped it end the Great Depression.
My ray of hope is that the full effect of these dumb policies have not really hit yet outside of the stock market. Once they do hit, hopefully it wakes up enough of them. The argument for pessimism is that many people convinced themselves that covid was fake and that the vaccines were some kind of conspiracy, so even when their own life was on the line, they chose ignorance tot he point that many people lay dying in the hospital in denial that covid was killing them.
Stories that create identities in peoples mind are a hell of a drug.
If you think the Dems didn't know that, think again. The Democrats put Trump into office with their insane choice of identity hills to die on. Then Biden woke up in mid summer: "Gosh am I still a presidential candidate? How come? Let's do Kamala now" ... with her disastrous electability record. Yeah right, "an honest mistake".
> "many people convinced themselves that covid was fake"
Covid has nothing to do with it... Trump was the first and most vocal vaccine salesman and he got elected anyway because in the eyes of the public there was no difference between Dem and Rep, the election was decided on a different set of issues.
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-turnou...
They’re clearly not! Around the developed world, people—especially younger people—are angry that their economies have been exported to the third world while their countries have been filled with cheap third world labor. Acela-class liberals and highly educated Reagan conservatives teamed up to bring about that state of affairs. Maybe they should do some introspection instead of crowing about how they’re right and half the country is just too stupid to realize how great they have it.
If (neo-)liberalism worked, people wouldn’t be so unhappy about the current state of affairs.
Making socks for $10,000/yr is not what these people want, nor will it help them. Instead, they will see housing and cost of living slip further from normal salaries as a result of tariffs.
Germans and Japanese don’t make socks for $10,000/year. Our former au pair lives in a small town in Germany. She was tracked into an apprenticeship program at 16 (off the college track), but now in her early 30s has a solid white collar job doing logistics for a baby formula manufacturer. Her boyfriend works in logistics as well—a big industry in a country that makes things.
By contrast, GDP is higher in the U.S., but is that real? As a corporate attorney, I make probably double what I would in Germany. Pay differentials seem to be similar for other knowledge-economy jobs like software development, marketing, etc. Our laptop class makes tons of money compared to their counterparts in Germany or Japan. But is that a good thing?
> By contrast, GDP is higher in the U.S., but is that real?
Yes it's real, we live in larger homes, have more cars, have more stuff. Maybe that doesn't drive a huge change in quality of life, but making us poorer isn't going to do that either. And when you talk to Europeans about why they like Europe they don't list how poor everyone is there, or how many factory jobs there are. They list a bunch of stuff that is anathema to conservatives like the socialized medicine (some love it, other's hate it), a carless culture, a social safety net, a slower speed of life, lots of vacation. (Which is a big reason why they are poorer)
And it's not just the laptop class, almost everyone who is full time is richer in the US. The exception is people who are marginally employed who would probably benefit from Europe's larger social safety net.
The liberals were right about this, and the Reagan/Bush conservatives were wrong. What you’re observing is simply the reshuffling of the party coalitions. The Buchanan wing of the GOP has gained the upper hand, and many of the Rockefeller republicans and neocons have become Democrats. Meanwhile, many blue collar Democrats in the midwest and south have become Republicans.
Mean purchasing power does, which roughly tracks GDP per capita, and this is what tariffs will hurt.
I think the characteristics you are looking at are orthogonal from the issue of tariffs. It is about labor mobility and income differentials.
For some reason, people seem to think tariffs will raise labor pay more than the cost of goods.
Cost of goods goes up more than labor compensation.
[1] To use a domestic example, compare Iowa and California. California has higher GDP per capita, but Iowa (which isn’t a manufacturing economy but rather an advanced agricultural one) is a flatter and less hierarchical society. People in Iowa can afford houses and afford to start families. Who is really better off?
It may be the case that tariffs reduce disparity by making everyone poorer
For those that went through Brexit, can you detail when the larger population realized it was stupid? That's the only pattern I can see the U.S matching at this point.
The three pillars of the Republican party were conservatism, religion, and race. I'm not saying every R is concerned about all 3 of these, but that they couldn't win elections without all 3 of them. Over the past 50 years, traditional conservatism has been hard pressed to explain itself to the working class in light of the rising prosperity of liberal democracies, and has become further detached from reality. People are becoming less religious, and more racially diverse. I think the R's realized that they were running out of runway, and also figured out how to exploit nearly 100% dominance over the "new" media.
Instead of progressive taxes and taxing the rich more, you end up instead with tax _breaks_ for the richest and regressive taxes instead (tariffs, which are effectively a national sales tax).
I guess the current tactic is to distract people with "those terrible immigrants are at fault" and DOGE and constant policy changes.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
So quite literally, the wealthy holding the money means less money to go around to everyone else. The more they hold themselves, the more is withheld from everyone else. You can have debates about wealth distribution endlessly because it's subjective and complicated, but you can't argue that the wealthy getting richer is good for anyone except the wealthy. Trickle-down-economics has already been established as propaganda at this point.
I understand that wealth is not static in the world and it's possible to create wealth for everyone, but my point is money hoarding is definitionally the cause of wealth inequality.
This split is particularly difficult to address because money is easy to tax (redistribute) while assets that may or may not be for sale at some arbitrary asking price are a lot harder to break up in this way.
Ultimately, to attempt to extract and redistribute this sort of ethereal wealth requires unpopular adjustments to long-held values of personal freedom and ownership that make the whole system possible in the first place.
The problem may in fact be insoluble sustainably. Most of human history provides examples of extreme wealth inequality.
I'm not talking at all about wealth being idle in my previous comment. My point is entirely that the more money the rich have, the less money the poor have.
What you're bringing up is how the wealthy use their money to change their political environment to benefit themselves. This is also a problem, but is parallel to the point I was making.
I'm curious how Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/etc have transferred money out of your bank account to their hoards.
Personally, I've transferred money to them, but only for things I wanted to buy from them and thought was worth the money.
You did say "less" money for the poor. That implies the wealth is being transferred from them.
> by definition there can be no wealth inequality without rich people
That doesn't all mean they are "holding" money. Money is not the same thing as wealth. Personally, I don't have any money other than pocket change.
> you're projecting so much political vitriol onto it.
Am I? I thought my statements were objective facts, and not at all political.
I'm using money and wealth interchangeably here because there is no meaningful distinction in this context. I cannot take you seriously when you keep bringing up irrelevant things. It's obvious you don't understand my point. And I've had enough arguments with you on this site over the years to know it's a waste of my time to engage with you more than I already have.
An investment in a company is not a "hoard".
You're free to make up your own definitions of words, but it doesn't work to expect others to adhere to them.
> it's a waste of my time to engage with you
I'm definitely the wrong person if you want to only engage with people who agree with you.
I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets. I also admit that it is not an easy thing to understand. How can a chaotic system possibly work?
For a given definition, it doesn't. At least, not without vastly understating the gov's role (some might say responsibility) to step in and monopoly bust, regulate strategically important sectors of the economy, and generally try to provide human-scale stability to a system that tends to want to burn itself and polite society down more than a caffeinated toddler with an outlet, a fork, and a dream.
Regulation along the lines of enforcing contracts, protecting rights, and internalizing exernalities are the proper role of government.
Governments have never managed to make economies stable.
I 100% agree.
> I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets.
I'm a believer in free markets. You just cannot stop projecting assumptions onto me. I've clarified my point multiple times already so I'm not going to bother repeating myself again. I think we can both agree it's okay to be misunderstood by people on the internet.
There's no such thing as "free markets", it's A. Smith's BS.
> "I also admit that it is not an easy thing to understand. How can a chaotic system possibly work?"
A chaotic system cannot work for any meaningful stretch of time. Moreover, we don't have a chaotic system, actually it's a system under finely tuned control: Biden placed 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, helping Tesla. Trump added more tariffs on China, exempted Tesla... Truly a chaotic coincidence /s
This is, I think, a blind spot for most people. Hoarded wealth isn't idle at all.
At the _very least_ it accrues interest (and compounds!) and grows!
Wealthy entrepreneuers created their wealth, it was not transferred to them. It does not reduce the amount of money elsewhere.
The wealthy do not "hoard" wealth, either. They invest it. All of it. Even checking accounts are not hoarded wealth, because the money you put in it is loaned out by the bank (less the reserve requirements).
Everything relies on thousands of other things. Products and services are huge graphs that nobody truly understands and that span hundreds of years. How much is created, and how much is reused? Hard to say.
At least some of the money is taken via exploitation. For example, if you opt to outsource product X to some third-world country and you drop labor cost 10%, and that in turn grows your company, you did not "create" that growth. You systematically stole it.
Another example we see a lot today is cutting quality. A lot of goods today are produced more efficiently, but not as much as you may think, because some of the productivity gains is simply pseudo-monopolies using their market dominance to cut quality without recourse. It's just human nature that we can't perceive a, say, 1% cut in quality. But if you cut 1% every year for half a century, then congratulations, you "created" a bunch of wealth. But you didn't actually create anything.
Pointing a gun at someone to get them to work is theft. Putting your name on a contract or your brains is also theft.
Work, especially for vulnerable, exploited populations, is not voluntary. Particularly when we talk about pseudo-slavery tactics used on migrant workers or other vulnerable populations.
There's a reason companies will often progressively move down to poorer, more vulnerable populations for their labor. Those people are much easier to exploit. We even see this in the US, to an extent. Tyson recently had a debacle where they threatened their (knowingly undocumented) workers with ICE if they attempted to unionize. To call this "voluntary" is willfully ignorant, at best.
Some things that are effectively out of reach for at least half of everyone:
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Mansions and Luxury Condos in desirable locations
Private Jet
Private Island
The best quality food
2021 Ferrari 812 GTS
The best legal advice
A favor from a US Senator
The federal government's credit card is funded by the saving of the rich, which allowed us to run up huge debt.
The vast inequality you seen is the result of undertaxation of monopolies and deliberate granting of monopolies. Disney wouldn't be as big if copyright actually expire some 20 years after the fact.
Anyway, the billionaire are less relevant to you than the average homeowner next door. They are the one who hold further infill development hostage and are inimical to anyone who would depress the value of their home.
(Apparently California has only issued 4 permits so far for people to rebuild after the fires.)
Texas's population has also gone from ~20M in 2000 to ~30M today.
With no zoning a place like Houston has shown what can be done by encouraging building.
Austin recently has also done well with allowing more building.
That's why we're in this predicament.
Take into account that CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, NYT, NPR, etc., were all solidly in the Democrat camp, the Democrats didn't need to fund them.
Just because team-R beat team-D doesn't mean both weren't being driven by huge amounts of special interest money from the wealthiest individuals.
HN has a lot of good people. HN also has a lot of people who consider themselves supporters of meritocracy and see everything they've achieved as solely a result of their own hard work. HN also has a lot of people with absolutely mind blowing levels of wealth. HN also has a lot of people who, saying it as kindly as I can, just do not know what life is like for a normal person.
I actually wonder how much of the stagflation in the 1970s was caused by tax cuts for the rich. It would make sense, if you think about it. If rich people spent more on luxuries, then the free market would naturally move resources away from creating necessities. This results in a shortage of necessities, resulting in higher prices. There's no increase in productivity caused by just shuffling jobs around, so the economy would be relatively stagnant.
I'm not saying the oil crisis wasn't a major factor, but I'm curious how much of it was from voodoo economics...
I agree. And further, the whole concept of "trickle down economics" always seemed like a propaganda scam to me -- I mean, how much _do_ the exceptionally wealthy even spend when going about their daily lives? And how much of that just ends up going to other super wealthy people anyway (private jets, yachts, fashion, etc)?
It isn't like they are buying millions of dollars worth of locally sourced items in their communities every day of the year.
They invest in companies. Take a look at the annual report for any public corporation. The category of "Expenses" is what gets spent on plant, equipment, salaries, interest, etc.
Roughly speaking, "Profit" is Revenue minus Expenses. Profit accrues to the investors. If the Profit turns out to be less than zero, that loss is attached to the investors.
> It isn't like they are buying millions of dollars worth of locally sourced items in their communities every day of the year.
The companies they invest in do.
Within limits. "Limitation of liability" circumscribes the investors' exposure to loss. The loss may also be attached to creditors, workers, and the general public.
Poor people spend close to 100% of their income on consumption, middle class people a little less, and up into the billionaires we're looking at less than 1%.
They "move money" in other ways, but I think the key here is that those other ways are just necessarily less economically stimulating.
Inflation results from deficit spending.
That can come from deficit spending, or that can come from tax cuts freeing cash for people to spend.
Tax cuts do free cash to be spent that otherwise would be spent by the government. As it gets spent either way, it is not inflationary.
Inflation is the result of an increase in the supply of money relative to the value of goods and services in the economy.
Interesting.
For example, let's say the only things you spend money on are eggs and gas. One day, the price of eggs goes up. You buy eggs, now you have less money to spend on gas. The demand for gas goes down, and so does its price.
I.e. a rise in the price of eggs does not result in an increase in your income to cover it.
But with money creation, there is more money chasing the same goods, so your income goes up along with the prices.
It's the Law of Supply and Demand in action.
That depends on their fiscal behavior and obligations.
Yes, I am. They always do. Federal, state and local.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the racially diverse shifted towards voting for Trump in the 2024 election: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-raci...
The shift couldn't have been huge, given that the election was won on the slimmest of margins.
For many Leave voters, the fact they voted Leave necessarily means voting Leave was correct - some of them rationalise this as "I was lied to" => "Maybe Leave was the wrong choice but I was misinformed" plenty more reached "Leave was correct but politicians screwed up Leaving somehow, it's not my fault". The current iteration of the Nigel Farage party, named Reform, takes this sort of line.
Once I was writing about the Achilles and the Tortoise story in GEB where the Tortoise rejects Modus Ponens and Achilles discovers, the hard way, that it's useless to argue any point with an interlocutor who rejects this principle. Somebody else on HN pointed out that most people probably would not accept Modus Ponens. And they're probably right, as hopeless as that outcome is.
TIL that the resulting defeat was soundly milked by Mussolini and friends to rise to power.
If at first you don't succeed, blame the Voices of Reason (and demonize them), until you do succeed.
> One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
> It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
Some people seem constitutionally incapable of ever doing that.
This is close, as it mentions changing beliefs for consistency, but not exactly the same still. The root isn't consistency, it's not having been dumb enough to get scammed.
It's very difficult to suggest to someone "hey, even though you invested thousands of hours ingesting this content, you actually don't know anything about it" - who wants to admit that, first to themselves, and second to your enemy?
Your Ben Shapiros, your Tuckers, Rogans, Maddows, Jon Stewarts are part of the industrial complex.
We need to find an off-ramp for people that lets them keep their dignity while accepting ignorance. I personally don't have any ideas on how to do this because here in tech, you either know your stuff or you don't, there's no ego when you don't know (you'll just look stupid).
There is obviously the nature of admitting to enemies that you were wrong that you touch on.
What I'm referring to is admitting to yourself that you're wrong, which seems much harder to do.
I just experienced this recently even in comments. For the record, I'm not a Trump hater, I'm rather neutral on politics. But in a recent interview Trump made an absolute fool of himself re: some guys hand tattoos. I felt secondhand embarrassment even watching it.
Yet there were so many defenders show up, to explain what he -really- meant, or that he knew it was wrong but was proving a point, etc.
I just don't get the mindset. Sometimes it's ok to admit the person you admire made a mistake. But not in the US, apparently. Because too many people have tied not only their identity but income to it.
That’s not really a balanced take in any way. Sure there are things that Stewart can be criticized about but at least he is generally semi rational and not a lying treasonous degenerate (like e.g. Tucker). It’s like saying that Trudeau, Trump and Putin are all the same because they are all politicians..
The politicians didn't enact it decisively enough. The EU punished us. The media lied about it. The "remainiacs" did everythig in their power to stop it. etc etc
To many, Brexit is their political identity and it is a politics of blame and grudges
I'm asking because I'd really like to believe that there's a point where a convincing majority of Americans will wake up and realize that Republican (and particularly Trump) politics are a sham and have been unabashedly so since at least the first Trump administration. I would like that, but I'm not hopeful at this point.
As an American generally uninformed on the manner, I only heard of pro-Brexit people in Britain.
The fact that they had literally no idea what would happen to Northern Ireland after Brexit tells you all you need to know about how well considered the idea was.
Part of this is down to the politicians who were running the show - David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, thought the referendum was a good way to put the issue to bed - you've had your vote, we're staying in, shut up.
He more or less directly said that they weren't going to make any concrete plans, because he thought the idea was so bad that they weren't going to spend the money on them, and because releasing explicit plans would probably just give ammunition to the 'leave' side. It certainly would have torpedo'd one of the major arguments of the 'remain' vote, which was that a vote to leave was a vote for uncertainty.
So in that way it was a self-fulfilling threat - you don't know what's going to happen because we refuse to make a plan!
> The referendum passed because people were largely ignorant of what Europe actually is
This too is a failure of politicians over several decades - the EU was always 'them', not 'us'. It was something that happened somewhere else. It was convenient to blame the EU when UK politicians couldn't or didn't want to fix something. MEPs were always pretty anonymous, unknown by local people who then (predictably) didn't turn out to vote in EU elections very much.
To the rest of europe brexit looks like voting Donny back in: the bicycle-stick-frontwheel meme. Except brexit was a bit more contained so easier to laugh at, Donny siding with the enemy in our biggest armed conflict is no joke.
How have those countries spun Brexit's failure? Just... "that wouldn't happen to US because we would be DIFFERENT?"
They always have like five taking points to whip their base in anger and it doesn't really matter what they are but they're always a bit lunatic.
In fact a lot of the sentiment tends to be more like "good riddance".
I think there were a good number of people to whom it was a coin toss: "maybe it'll turn out ok". I have friends in this group. Those, I suspect, have changed their mind. There have been no tangible benefits, and they weren't particularly attached to the idea.
For others it was a chance to give the establishment a kick in the balls. They were fed up with the stagnation and rot at the heart of our country. An honest assessment would have pinned the blame on conservatives that had been in power for a decade. But the EU made a convenient scapegoat for their own failings. By and large the media and politicians opposed Brexit. So the attitude was let's stick a knife in. Shake things up. I'm not convinced this group have changed their mind. Maybe some of them. But the Reform party promise to fix the whole mess (which they championed) in exchange for their votes. And I think they will get them.
For a more hardcore contingent it became an entire political identity. It's them, fighting for Britain's future, versus the "remainiacs" and the "media elite" etc who are frustrating the process. It would have worked out if people _just believed_ in it more! If we'd hard a harder Brexit. These people will never change their mind.
The politicians who told them (even for the time) quite obvious lies have not suffered any political consequences, far from it. A photo circulated on the night of Brexit where Farage was stood in front of a chart of GBP tanking while laughing. You'd think that would be his death knell! He likely shorted the pound for personal gain. Yet today he is more successful and more prominent than ever.
In short, I don't think there has been a reckoning. We are still dealing with the consequences, and likely will for a long time whether directly or indirectly
Perhaps it's obscene the US doesn't have an equivalent!
But what do I know, I just live here!
As a Brit who left the UK about 4 years ago but still keeps up on UK issues and news, I think this is overplayed. Sure, polls have showed the result would probably go a different way now, as it was somewhat marginal in the first place.
But the people shouting loudest about how much of a mistake it was are generally the same people who were shouting loudly about how much of a mistake it was going to be before the vote, who are (rightly or wrongly) still very bitter about it.
The generally accepted viewpoint on the ground seems to be "are we still talking about that?"
Which isn't so much an endorsement of the status quo, but a weariness of endlessly going over old ground and old battles, and general ennuis with the topic.
Politicians in the UK don't really discuss it much. The conservatives are still very pro-brexit because they own it, and because they are dancing towards the alt-right in an effort to end-run the 'Reform' party that's currently nipping at their heels (and who may as well be the UK branch of the MAGA franchise). Labour just don't want to touch it because they know that it's still divisive and they have enough other stuff to contend with. The most they're willing to say at the moment is that they would really like a better trading relationship with the EU and are pursuing closer trade deals. In the wake of Trump's tarriffs this seems to be accelerating as everyone else is scrambling to trade with whoever is more reliable than the US.
The media, AFAICT, have mostly lost interest too. The Guardian still runs some half-hearted pieces in the general direction every so often, but there's no serious 'rejoin' campaign even there. It doesn't help that many EU countries have since swung rightward and are taking anti-immigration stances now, so it's not such an obvious left-wing panacea as perhaps it once was.
The UK feels like a country in decline, and Brexit is probably a part of that, but while it casts a big shadow over everything it's not necessarily the most important problem the nation faces and it's not like there's an active political campaign to rejoin. It's been "kicked into the long grass" so to speak.
The UK public in general were never all that crazy about it, over the 47 years of membership the EU was always 'them', not 'us'. It was something that happened somewhere else, less important than local politics and local concerns. It was convenient to blame the EU when UK politicians couldn't or didn't want to fix something and needed a scapegoat. EU elections were always a sideshow with low turnout. For most it never felt like some aspirational thing, or relevant to daily life, just another layer of bureaucracy and a very remote one at that. British people were some of the least active users of freedom of movement to relocate, with more emigrating to the US, Australia and even China in recent years. It's easy to see why that created a situation where leaving was on the cards, and why the overwhelming response to it five years after leaving and almost a decade after the vote is "meh"
It'll take probably 5-10 years before the 10-20% own up to "being had".
And, by then, the damage will have been done. And you'll only start to be thinking about how to repair it then ... and then that will take a generation to execute and recover from.
Source: Brexit.
Approval numbers are already declining rapidly on key issues. The main effects of tariffs haven’t even hit them yet.
But honestly, there's one thing being "disapproving" and a whole different thing getting people to admit they were wrong.
And either way - given it doesn't matter who disapproving any of us are - the 5-10 year time frame is realistic as given your political terms.
It was hard to be sure as there were so many options - hard Brexit, soft and so on that it was unclear what the deal would be. At least with Trump you can vote him out again whereas we are kind of stuck with Brexit.
We hope. He keeps talking about ignoring the term limits set in our Constitutional Amendments. Jan 6 2021 was an ineffective coup attempt, but a coup attempt nonetheless.
Heinlein's Future History saw Nehemiah Scudder win the last American elections in 2012. We've luckily made it a few elections past that date, and the Future History was not a prophecy and was a bit kinder in that you could escape to the Moon or Mars or Venus this decade. But it's hard not to fear the same sorts of theocratic and fascist "urges" are cyclically at play in the current decade and not worry about possible consequences, such as and including the end of the US as we know it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22If_This_Goes_On%E2%80%94%22
I think a charitable reading of your comment ought to replace Brexit with the subsequent implementation of Brexit by successive Conservative governments.
That’s also quite possibly what you meant anyway, but it’s still worth saying aloud.
It's like signing your name on a blank contract and trusting the counterparty to write up something that's good for you.
The UK government explicitly refused to make a plan of action.
It turned out to be a foot-gun moment.
The leave campaign was not representative of people in office who were basically all remainers, and the referendum would not change the makeup of Parliament because it's not an election. As a result they had no ability to make an official plan or even an unofficial one which could be put into place afterwards, because they did not have the power to do that and the vote was not going to give it to them.
The government's reasoning for not making a plan seemed to be that it might be too appealing if there was a plan, and they didn't want to give leave campaigners the ability to say "See, there's a plan, it'll be fine", when remain campaigners could instead use the lack of plan to say "Are you crazy, you're voting for the unknown! There's no plan!". And they were confident that the leave vote was DoA so making a plan was a waste of time and money anyway.
This seems like dirty pool to me, and it backfired anyway. Turns out that chaos and uncertainty was more or less explicitly what some leave voters wanted - give the whole establishment a kick in the pants.
I voted remain, FWIW, but I think holding "there was no plan" over leave-voters heads is a bit rich given why there was no plan.
Could you elaborate on that?
I would assume that it would be the responsibility of the leave campaign to provide that, but that's not the case?
I wonder, then if the mistake was to allow the leave to be executed, even if a plan couldn't be created in the time frame allowed. Maybe having an abort clause instead of jump off the cliff if the bridge isn't built yet.
Maybe the referendum should have required the government to build the plan which would be decided on later.
The mainstream political parties in the UK since the 70s were pro-EU, though with some muttering at the fringes. Among the general public there was a bit more ambivalence. Anti-EU sentiment was generally written off as racist, stupid etc etc and this wasn't necessarily wrong because the loudest voices were parties like the BNP - basically 'out' fascists.
This changed with the accession of central and eastern european countries to the EU. <ost western EU countries imposed a two year stop on free movement but then Tony Blair wanted to "rub their noses in diversity" (referring to the sceptics) and opened the doors to the UK on day 1. Immigrant populations became much more visible very quickly and as a result so did anti-EU parties like UKIP. When a woman asked the next PM, Gordon Brown, something about migration, he was caught on a microphone he thought was deactivated saying something about "that bigoted woman" and the flames were fanned ...
2010s - the UK has a coalition and to curry favour with the eurosceptic side of the electorate the conservative prime minister, David Cameron, goes into the 2014 election promising a referendum. He's still sure it's a fringe issue and once people have had their say on the matter UKIP, (who are starting to eat 'his' vote share on the right, will be neutralised and we can all stop talking about it. This had worked for him twice - in coalition he was forced to run one on changing FPTP to AVC voting and through a campaign that I think was run on disinformation he managed to head off any further discussion on democratic reform. He also granted the Scottish government's wish to hold an independence referendum and then successfully campaigned for a "remain" vote there. He was on a roll.
So he calls the EU membership referendum.
The terms are set - a simple in/out question. It was legislated as a guiding referendum rather than a binding one. The difference is that the act of parliament introducing the referendum on AVC already contained legislation that would have been triggered the next day to change the voting system if it had passed. Power was actually delegated from Parliament to the people in that case. In contrast the EU referendum and the Scottish Independence referendum were more like national opinion polls - they didn't establish anything in law beyond the result itself.
So when the official Leave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave) and Remain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain_Stronger_in_Europe) campaign groups were established, that was their sole mandate - get information out there about your position, get people voting. They weren't the only campaign groups, but they were the official ones.
The PM and his whole cabinet are pro-business, fairly socially progressive conservatives. Definitely pro-EU. As are the main figures in the Labour party (mostly). So the establishment all rally behind the remain campaign. It is assumed that there will be an easy, comfortable win for remaining even among hardcore leave supporters. Despite the referendum being advisory/guiding, David Cameron says that a vote to leave will be acted on immediately with no plan or preparation to try and scare people into voting remain. When opinion polls start to look a little bit dodgy, the chancellor threatens the country with a punishment budget including big tax hikes if leave wins. The spectre of uncertainty is raised repeatedly but in the end that gives ammunition to the 'leave' side who call it out as "Project Fear", a term the pro-independence scots had coined to describe the 'remain' campaign in their referendum.
> Maybe having an abort clause instead of jump off the cliff if the bridge isn't built yet.
> Maybe the referendum should have required the government to build the plan which would be decided on later.
So thats the thing - the law that created the referendum didn't include any requirement or any plan to do anything whatever the result. The way the whole shebang was run, nobody had the power or the mandate to make a plan because the referendum was advisory and was really only meant to be for show. The real plan was that on the 24th of June 2016 David Cameron could address the nation and say "See, we told you, the British people have spoken, shut up about the EU, let's get on with our lives".
But when you as Prime Minister call a referendum and promise (or threaten) that the result will be carried out post-haste, even when you have quite deliberately not set out a course of action or legislated for it, and you lose ... you've backed yourself into a political corner and you basically have to do it.
Which is why he resigned the next day.
And that's why there followed years of parliamentary arguments, court cases and in-fighting about what the hell to do next. You can't just throw that sort of thing aside. If over half of the people who voted, voted to leave, it's probably electoral suicide to ignore it and you're paving the way for UKIP to rise. You can't ask for a do-over, because there's a perceived history of the EU getting people to re-vote on important issues (Ireland, Denmark IIRC(?), to do with referenda rejecting the new EU constitution/Treaty of Lisbon) and the 'leave' side would have had a field day portraying the whole edifice as profoundly anti-democratic. But the majority of the people who are tasked with coming up with a plan don't want to do it. Eventually the government collapses, but the conservatives are re-elected on a promise to "get brexit done", which brings Boris Johnson to power and gives further political mandate to leaving. Through a variety of political manoeuvres, some questionably legal, a plan is finally approved and put into action four years later.
Sorry for the wall of text :)
Anyway, all of that is to say that while Brexit may well be the greatest act of political self-harm the UK has carried out in a good long while, that's why I feel the specific criticism that "You voted for something when there wasn't even a plan you dumb shits!" isn't really fair. There was never going to be a plan, and if they didn't vote for it there was probably never going to be another chance.
tl;dr - there wasn't a plan because the people with the power to make one didn't want one.
>the chancellor threatens the country with a punishment budget
Biased. And whatever cause and effect ended up being, our taxes have risen, immediately after the result came in GBP dropped, we had inflation, and to counter it all interest rates were dropped from already extreme low levels even further. There are no widely respected economists (though they're hard to take seriously anyway) who think leaving the EU has not harmed the UK.
So, I consider it the duty of the chancellor to have informed us of this, because the other side of the argument (the brexiters) had not one bit of moral integrity to present reality. Remember, we're dealing with a group of people who lied for 40 years to achieve their aims. No other country in the EU required an EU hosted web page dedicated to countering all the anti-EU lies.
The brexit side effectively ran at least two campaigns, with plausible deniability by the "official" campaign because Farage wasn't on their team. Farage was the face of the less savoury side of the campaign, and his group ran using things like this: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1920x1080/p078zmng.jpg
While on the "official" campaign we have gems like this (I still genuinely laugh when I read this blog post):
https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit
I watched all of this unfold, as an immigrant living in the UK, and we (immigrants) were very acutely aware of the sentiment that drove the brexit vote.
So, what is my main take-away from all of this? That this referendum was about two valid political choices, remain inside a pooled sovereignty union, or leave that pooled sovereignty union. Both valid choices. But the travesty was how poorly the referendum was constructed and run. And that is because we just don't have a history of running referendums very well (see the alternative voting referendum), and this would never have passed the sniff test in for example Switzerland.
I don't think that bit's biased, myself, George Osborne literally threatened a punishment budget before the referendum. He may not have used those words, but everyone else did and he did come out telling everyone that he would be having an emergency budget after the vote which others in his party described at the time as "economic vandalism". IMHO there's a difference between telling people that they're making an economic mistake and detailing what will go wrong (which he did too), and saying "I'm going to raise income tax, raise inheritance tax and slash the NHS budget within a few weeks if you vote leave".
See - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/15/osborne-bri...
or for a perspective from the other side - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/15/osbornes-pun...
> So, I consider it the duty of the chancellor to have informed us of this
Absolutely agree, but that's not what I'm referring to.
I agree with the rest though, it was a clusterfuck in so many ways. I'm not going to try to claim I'm entirely unbiased - in the lead up to the referendum I was definitely in the 'leave' camp, part of the group of people who just wanted to see British politics given a righteous kick up the arse, regardless of what form that came in. I sorta came-round in the last few days and voted remain, mostly because I knew if Brexit happened a lot of people I care about would be upset, and some would have their lives upended. And then I got to watch it happen anyway.
Having seen the news from Runcorn today, I feel it's a shame the British people haven't got tired of the Farage clown show yet. But then my own father would probably vote for him (probably does), because he's got suckered into the Old-people's-outrage channel, GBNews, which can't be good for his blood pressure let alone British democracy. Currently I'm hoping (I think realistically) that my adopted home of Australia does better in the general election tomorrow. I'm not yet a citizen so just spectating on this one.
> https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit
"It’s 24 June, 2025, and Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebration. As the fireworks stream through the summer sky"
My word! I haven't seen that before, I can tell it's going to be a hilarious read from the first sentence!
Policy discussion seems to be something the masses cannot handle without clearly defining an "other". I feel Jeffersonian (bigoted) in suggesting that it's a mistake to give ordinary people access to this debate. Almost like letting ten year olds get involved in how mom and dad handle the mortgage.
Frankly, I don’t think any of the Brexits we stood any chance of actually getting could have been good: it was only a question of how bad the one we eventually got would be.
And the problem with the less bad Brexits was: they would be less bad, but they would also be more directly comparable with no Brexit (e.g. “in order to improve trade we’re going to follow all the EU’s rules but not have a say in any of them”).
We de facto do that anyway, because most of our trade is conducted with the EU and companies aren't stupid. They don't want to design and build to multiple different standards, so they just adhere to EU rules for simplicity and cost reasons. But now we don't get a say in those rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit#:~:...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-19/brexit...
There isn't a very high bar to understanding that immigration from "the thirld world" had nothing to do with the EU.
As an immigrant to the UK, I was very acutely aware of the sentiment leading up to, during and after the referendum, but I was mortified by the ignorance displayed by people around the topic.
I'm from one of those third world countries by the way.
Without immigration, future demographics will be fucked. Which means government finances, welfare, and the NHS.
That's one thing I don't get about anti-immigration opinions: it's burying ones head in the sand about demographic problems.
The real debate, if there is one to be had, should be about enculturation / integration and policies around that.
(Because unless developed countries substantially increase their fertility rate, immigration is a non-negotiable requirement)
Our trade deficit in the 1990s was under 1% of GDP. Some people may not remember that time, but we had toys on the shelves, toilet paper, etc. Not at all what the doomers are saying will happen without unrestricted free trade.
If trade deficits are so great, why does the EU try to maintain a consistent surplus? I can accept that Trump is an idiot and doesn’t know what he’s doing on trade. But I think the EU bureaucrats are pretty smart! I think the Germans and Chinese and Japanese are very sharp and have deliberately sought to maintain manufacturing-oriented economies with a large trade surpluses.
You know who else ran large trade deficits? The UK: https://ercouncil.org/2016/chart-of-the-week-week-19-2016-uk.... And it seemingly worked for awhile so long as people gave a shit about the pound and London banks, but that proved to be extremely fragile. The 2008 recession destroyed that and erased the UK’s higher standard of living.
I have a trade deficit with my local grocery store. Does that mean I'm being taken advantage of?
Imagine a small country rich in raw materials but whose people are otherwise poor. They export tons of valuable minerals to the U.S. but the profits are kept by an elite few who spend most of their time outside the country, and nobody inside the country has enough wealth to buy goods from the U.S. The U.S. would have a large trade deficit with that country, but would be benefiting enormously from the relationship. In this scenario, the country's people are certainly being taken advantage of, but the U.S. is absolutely not.
That's the problem with the trade deficit: it tells you almost nothing on its own. You can manufacture scenarios between countries involving a huge trade deficit, surplus, or an even balance, but where trade is fair, or where either country is taking advantage of the other. It's just not a useful number on its own.
In world wars, America never wanted to stop being militarily capable so they spend almost a trillion ensuring there's no deficits of the ability to wage war.
No one in government prior to trump was operating under the idea that all deficits are ok. Strategic deficits are bad. Now all deficits are bad, which is not the case, at all.
America would not suffer any reasonable damage having a coffee bean deficit. Or a tea deficit. Or beer deficit.
The terms of the current regimes debate is simply trying to use the word tariff in place of national sales tax and corrupting it as a Nazi isolationism tool.
Most of the trade deficits create a security dependency, because you need to secure the entire supply and skill chain. Prior to World War II, the U.S. had largely demobilized its military. But the U.S. built the world’s largest military virtually overnight thanks to its industrial capacity. At one point a Ford factory was churning out one B24 bomber every hour: https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/94614-how-fords-willow-....
Doing something like that requires a depth of capability the U.S. no longer possesses, but China does. To build warplanes you need, for example, aluminum and titanium machinists. Where are they? In China making Macbook cases.
China has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the U.S.: https://www.csis.org/analysis/threat-chinas-shipbuilding-emp.... Or if you think the future of warfare is drones instead of planes and ships, guess who makes all the drones?
Your example about small countries is irrelevant because nobody cares about the trade deficit between the U.S. and Bangladesh. Virtually the entire trade deficit is the EU, China, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, and Taiwan. The EU, Japan, and China are big, diversified economies and there is no reason we should have a trade deficit with them.
Yeah, it is not like someone would create a U.S. tariff policy with tariffs set based on (goods trade deficit with the US) / (bilateral trade volume with the US), irrespective of size of the country, because no one is stupid enough to care about the (goods or general) trade deficit between the U.S. and, e.g., Bangladesh.
Virtually our whole trade deficit is China, the EU, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Canada. Should we have just singled those countries out by name and grouped them together for purposes of imposing tariffs? Don't you think lumping Japan together with China like that would piss them off even more than tariffs would do anyway?
Except for the person in charge of America's trade policy, lmao
"He won't do massive tariffs, it's just posturing"
"He won't do mass deportations, it's just posturing"
"He doesn't care about those countries, it's just posturing"
"He won't ignore due process, it's just posturing"
"He won't ignore SCOTUS's orders, it's just posturing"
Meanwhile you're attributing beliefs like "trade deficits are great" to the other side so you can win imaginary arguments with them. Absolutely hilarious stuff.
I didn't say he won't put tariffs on those countries, I'm said he doesn't care about them one way or the other. Those countries have tariffs because Trump wanted a simple, blanket policy.
How do you know that?
What is simple about tariff rates changing literally day by day via all-caps blurted tantrums on Truth Social? I am actually curious for your direct answer to this.
He thinks that a trade deficit is an actual subsidy, giveaway, or "loss" to the other country. He has said it for literal decades. Sure, he may care more about bigger thieves than smaller ones, but all signs point to him to caring about every instance of "loss" to foreign countries. Both his words and his actions are in accordance with my theory. Neither is in accordance with yours.
He is an actual stupid person surrounded by sycophants. It's a really consistent explanation! No need for this whole "he didn't say that → he didn't mean it → he's just posturing → it's for simplicity → it's Good Actually" thing.
If it is just posturing, do you worry Trump will improperly benefit from it? UAE invested $2BN in his memecoin today. Maybe the posturing will lead to other countries making similar "investments."
He didn't say he was going to do the thing. It's liberal propaganda.
Okay, he did say he was going to do the thing, but he's not. It's just posturing.
Okay, he did the thing. But it's good! Everything will be better!
Okay, it's not making everything better. But it will soon! 5D chess!
Okay, everything is worse. But it's liberals' fault.
Okay, it's his fault. But we deserve it.
Can you link to any left-of-center elected official who has advocated for "unrestricted free trade?"
Or are you making these people up so you can win imaginary arguments?
Minor surgical changes aren’t going to move the needle when you have an economy addicted to debt-fueled consumption of foreign goods. Anyone who isn’t proposing major structural changes is endorsing the status quo of “trade deficits are great” and “unrestricted free trade.”
Side note, how is bringing back manufacturing really what American people want? Do you want to live next to a huge factory polluting air and creating unbearable noise? You think you children can or want to work as hard as Chinese folks doing repetitive tasks in stinky inhumane factories? At what rate? $2 per day? The reason it all got pushed outside of USA is exactly because the level of lifestyle Americans wanted and like. Now apparently we are being told by this Administration that "having cheap goods is not American dream."
God help us all!
"Put your hand up if you want more manufacturing in the USA."
"Ok thanks, hands down. Now put your hand up if you want to work in a factory".
The whole Pax Americana/Invisible Empire concept is dead now. Competitive great powers feel liberated from it and erstwhile allies are just never going to believe it again.
that's the key. "the subprime risk is contained", remember that? Anyone who claims they know what the economy is going to do 6 months from now should prove it with their stock portfolio.
In theory, real-time trading systems could reduce the impact of such disruptions. But in practice, global logistics still runs on Excel sheets, emailed quotes, phone calls, and months-long shipping cycles.
TLDW: "Americans are a bunch of babies, they're hard to work with", which basically applies to all developed countries. It's the same in Germany.
European companies, at least in this niche were not only more expensive, but worse quality, slower, more bureaucratic.
Now, how this anecdote translates to other industries, of course I don't know, but Shenzhen, I was told, it's something hard to even imagine as a European.
I want to think it's organic, but the Internet has ruined me. I have to believe they're shills.
I'm sure there are shills here, but the video is reflects my experience. I'm Australian, so for me it's comparing Australian and US companies vs Chinese companies. The broad picture he paints is exactly right.
But he gets the nuance all wrong, particularly when he called Americans "cry babies". To understand why, you have to appreciate just how hard the Chinese fight for business. One example: we were after samples of LPO batteries for a few, contacted a few sites. When they asked why were where hesitant, we told them we needed a slightly different form factor, and different control from the BMS. They said "oh we can do that", sent customized samples to us for same price and said when we wanted real quantities the price would be the same as the unaccustomed ones. To be clear: they had to build a new PCB for the BMS. Some deal with some DC motors: we needed different shafts and current ratings. They created customized for us (with different shafts!) at no extra charge.
The Chinese sales people are not just your typical order takers you deal with in the USA. They have in depth knowledge of the product and how it can be customized. They speak English, and seem to be always contactable regardless of the hour. They seem to have engineering teams on call to back them up. They must have literally a small army of tertiary trained people sitting in rooms with nothing better to do that provide that level of service to every Tom, Dick and Harry who walks in off the street. It would send a Western company broke.
Remember: China has the population of roughly USA and Europe combined. Yet, it still has parts that are very poor, little better than sustenance farming. This produces a steady stream of very bright young adults looking for a possible way out, which the government provides: tertiary education. It doesn't guarantee then a job at the end, it might just be a sales job at these manufacturing companies that pay little better than MacDonald's in the USA. Nonetheless, that's still better than prospects at home. They've been doing this for decades now.
And it's still happening. From https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2024.2... quote "Using data from official statistical sources and a nationally representative survey, we find that since 2001, China’s agricultural labor force has declined by over 50 percent—a loss of over 200 million smallholders, probably the largest in human history. ... The 150 million remaining smallholders". From https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361169258_Reasons_f... quote "Almost a quarter of recent college graduates in China are working in jobs that are not related to their college major".
The narratives you see here imply Chinese engineering talent is better than the USA's, or they work harder or longer, or god help us "American Companies are Cry Babies". Nope, it's nothing like that. It's just a huge education pipeline along with the raw human material to feed it producing very cheap engineering talent. It will end, just like it did in Japan, once that raw material runs out. From that link they are down to just 150 million people working on small farms now - around 10% of their population. The bad news is: 150 million is also about 1/3 of the USA's population.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-economy-tariffs-gdp-7494825...
“ Trump was quick to blame his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, for any setbacks while telling his Cabinet that his tariffs meant China was “having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business,” adding that the U.S. did not really need imports from the world’s dominant manufacturer. ”
He also posted on Truth Social today, blaming Biden for the economy.
At this point only QAnon/MAGA crowd and possibly Trump himself believes this shit. The rest of the world sees Trump for who he is.
> “Nobody wins,” he said. “China is America’s factory.”
China is a sovereign country on the other side of the world. Making the entirety of your supply chain dependent on it is madness. And while the article strains to talk about "blue and purple shirts" you should probably be more concerned about where the pharmaceuticals are made.
This article is writing from the perspective of those who are set to lose money on this horrible system of commerce. From my perspective they failed to read the writing on the wall and ran the system into the ground because it was the only way for them to keep their profit margins juiced.
> “We’re not talking about higher prices and companies figuring out ways to pass that on,” Santos said. “We’re talking about actual disruption to the supply chain.”
They say this as if it could only be a bad thing. What happened to the spirit of innovation and commerce in this country?
Manufacturing doesn’t have as much space to innovate; we moved on to greener pastures. Decoupling our economy from China somewhat could be an intelligent decision, but there’s absolutely nothing intelligent whatsoever about picking up a fucking hammer and taking it to our economy to spite the rest of the world. We could have acted against US-China trade without simply wiping it out overnight and bringing down economic hell upon the American people. Utterly ridiculous, bad faith horseshit in my opinion.
Our current situation is entirely different and must be viewed using more appropriate comparisons.
I'm loaded up on TVs monitors and other stuff already.
We need to do something to shake up global supply chain, we will see what happens because the global system that the US and allies put in is going down the drain unless if we do something.
China being an authoritarian country becoming the center of everything probably won't be good for us.
Easier for us to hurt ourselves now than the Chinese to hurt us more later. We can choose where to stab ourselves instead of someone else stabbing us later on.
I think most people go their whole lives without ever having to stab themselves or be stabbed. Stabbing yourself, as a human or metaphorically as country, seems like a pretty bad idea, even when you might suspect that someone (or another country) might maybe do it in the future.
The US have a personality disorder that swings every 4 years.
Definitely going to happen because it will take months for shipping to return, just like the pandemic supply-chain disruptions.
And maybe the tariffs stay while manufacturing decides to wait FOUR YEARS instead of changing anything.
Makes me think of the anecdote of Yeltsin entering a random grocery store, seeing their shelves full, and being shocked (the stop wasn't scheduled, and he assumed the US would've created a Potemkin grocery store): https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/13/how-a-russians-grocery-...
Wikipedia:
> Following the grocery store visit, Yeltsin and his entourage flew to Miami, their final location before returning to the Soviet Union. During the flight, Yeltsin was in a state of shock regarding the grocery store and remained speechless for a long time. According to Sukhanov, it was during the flight that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside" Yeltsin. Following his silence, Yeltsin asked aloud, "What have they done to our people?", questioning the Soviet Union's struggles with food. In a later biography, Yeltsin commented regarding his grocery store visit,
>> When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.
Heh, perhaps we should compare it to that fucking "useful" idiot Tucker Carlson going to a Russian grocery store...
If the shelves are empty in September, can someone recreate these photos, but with empty shelves: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/Bori... (assuming the press is still free at that point, and there's no risk of being sent to the gulag...).
https://retalon.com/blog/inventory-turnover-ratio says
“The average inventory turnover across retail is around 9x”
That means they have about 6 weeks of inventory.
Of course, it varies by industry, but for many, that shouldn’t be alarming.
What do I misunderstand?
What am I missing?
Most Asia-pacific nations have expanded trade with China, to make up for the shortfall from reduced trade with America.
US bluff is called. They can’t win a war with China, militarily or materially.
US wasted half a century and trillions on lost wars, instead of investing in its citizens. China did the opposite. And those fruits are just beginning to ripen.
Nobody wins in that war, that's why either side is so reluctant to start it.
> BRICS is larger than G7 now by GDP
That's BS. Easy to debunk. Try harder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS#/media/File:BRICS_AND_G7...
Either side!? Only the USA speaks of China as having no right to exist and attacks Chinese sovereignty openly at every opportunity.
The USA started the trade war, not China. US leadership and its propaganda news channels constantly speak of war with China. Not as a war to defend US territory but as a war to topple the Chinese government. The current defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote in his book "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free", that if Trump could return to the White House and Republicans could take power, "Communist China will fall—and lick its wounds for another two hundred years".
Hegseth said China “are literally the villains of our generation”, and warned, "If we don’t stand up to communist China now, we will be standing for the Chinese anthem someday".
Free speech is great and all but a lot of Americans seem to have internalized the idea of just saying whatever you like with no regard for feelings of or impact upon others.
War starts with weapons.
Please read more history.
And I would disagree that the US started the trade war. China has been much more aggressive than any other country when it comes to trade policy [...]
This too is historically illiterate. The US happily ripped off others to build its own industrial base, and arguably still does so, with AI companies training on vast archives of unlicensed content and data brokers laundering personal information with zero regard to consumer privacy. Historically the US forced open markets at gunpoint, most famously by sailing naval vessels into Tokyo harbor to demand the Japanese Shogunate engage in trade relations.
https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...
https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/07/05/americas-industrial-revolu...
https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/05/yes-us-industrial-revolu...
It's not that China doesn't leverage its own economic power in one-sided ways, but this comment reeks of 'it's different when we do it'.
Sans near-total embargoes on goods from a country, have we ever imposed sweeping tariffs of 145% on all goods coming from one of our most-imported trade partners?
No, no we have not. Certain tariffs were very targeted for specific reasons, you are correct. But those were not blanket-applied haphazardly at such high levels. Hence, "unprecedented".
This is another apples/oranges comparison.
Canada or the EU doing that and sorting their own food isn't the huge conspiracy against America that Trump seems to think it is.
Very free market.
When he called it "a hostile and political act".
Remember when just officially telling people that they are not horses turned out to be a free speech violation?
To what degree relative to what we're seeing now, though?
... You don't actually believe he cares about Bitcoin or the technology, right?
When the stock market (and confidence in the U.S.) falls, people typically flock to gold and bonds. If the U.S. is seen as unstable and at risk of not making debt payments, bonds are a bad place to move money into. That leaves gold (and to a lesser extent foreign stock markets).
With crypto though- that’s a con man’s wet dream. Volatile. No government oversight. Crypto pump and dumps are literally legal (though come close to being fraud, as people like Du Kwon have learned).
edit: ok, I didnt know that bussiness stop buying, but they must buy somethings in the future right either buy from other tax exempt or buy thing with add value tax
Edit to add:
Better example for me was the semiconductor industry. It was hard for years to design hardware because key ICs would disappear. You needed to buy the ICs the moment you thought you might use them, a form of stockpiling that had no winner - it's very expensive to buy stock that you potentially never use, and it deprives the rest of the market simultaneously.
Alternatively you can put the goods in a bonded warehouse[1], and leave it there until you wish to use it or transfer it to someone else. It's not free, but it allows you to postpone the declaration, and hence payment of tariffs, until you take the goods out of the bonded warehouse.
Typically a bonded warehouse requires physical security, paperwork and a bank guarantee to prevent goods disappearing, so it isn't free to keep goods there.
* Here's what I'm importing
* Here's where I'm importing it from
* Here's the value
Then you pay a bill based on that value and the tariff, and they let your goods clear customs and get loaded onto a truck to go wherever you want them to go in the US.
If you're shipping something by boat (like most goods), the "point of import" is the port.
Note: this is all actually much more complicated and individualized than I described because of networks of middlemen, logistics companies, distributors, manufacturers and lawyers.
We're about 1 or 2 months right now from some goods not being available in the US at any price. If people lost their mind over that happening during COVID, well, this is going to be just as bad.
1. new 30% tax
2. people stop buying so many goods due to (1)
3. due to lack of demand, our shipping industry seizes up and goods stop flowing, at least till (1) goes away
My main source for that theory is https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-...
I’m curious when they plan on deploying this. It specifies a 3-year schedule so you think okay is this to be signed into law in 2025 so that the IRS is abolished during the next election year, or are they going to wait a year or two and have the IRS abolishment only “trigger” if Republicans continue to control the government beyond 2028? Or perhaps they will push it through if/when Democrats retake some or all of Congress in 2026?
One thing’s for sure though, the 1% will use cryptocurrency to dodge this consumption tax and it will (as usual) disproportionately affect the lower and middle classes, who aren’t as savvy in tax fraud/evasion/“loopholes”.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/25/t...
> FairTax is a fixed rate sales tax proposal introduced as bill H.R. 25 in the United States Congress every year since 2005.
An R-GA sponsors it every year and it never gets further than "introduced", with fewer co-sponsors on it now than ever AFAIK. Technically, if it did get into law, it could create greater chaos, it has a provision to terminate itself if the 16th Amendment isn't repealed, so enough incompetence could eliminate taxes entirely.
The idea that we would give up progressive taxes is pretty antithetical to their platform, given how many campaign on raising taxes on high income earners.
Given how slow even a single-party-controlled Congress is, I sincerely doubt such a bill would ever see the light of day.
The Senate still has the filibuster, as well. This will not pass in the current Congress either.
The filibuster rule is vulnerable, but I don't think there's enough support from Senate Republicans to do so. If I'm wrong, it would be an escalation which would add more fuel to the 2026 fire.
Also, I remember there being talk when the DINOs were voting with the Republicans of ending the filibuster…. So… I mean the current admin just ignores rules, why wouldn’t this be the Congress that ends the filibuster? This could be their one shot to implement the “Final Solution” (Project 2025).
All ordinary votes just require a simple majority, but the filibuster is sort of a special-case that can be invoked any time, requiring 60 votes to bring the vote to the table at all.
You're right -- if this Senate abolishes the filibuster, it will likely be for "budget votes only" or somesuch. The Senate isn't quite as full of short-term thinkers as the House is though. I don't think the Senate Rs will go for it, because it's the only thing stopping a future D majority from doing what majorities do, and smart Rs know they are a minority party under ordinary circumstances.
But if I'm wrong, it will mean that the Senate Rs are going for broke on a short-term play, and may be discounting future risks. That would be the behaviour of the very desperate, or of the very powerful.
If the Senate Rs believe they are one of those two things -- either one -- the consequences could be enormous.
This is all very dramatic of course. Normally I'd dismiss such ideas. But the temperature is very high right now, and this time might actually be different, this time...
Not only is that not a “given”, I’d argue that you’re completely wrong. One doesn’t have to look very hard to find out how much income tax is paid by lower class: effectively zero.
1. Non-discretionary spending as a percentage of income is much larger for the lower (and middle) classes, who spend 100% or near 100% of their income on “essentials” like food and shelter.
2. The tax itself is obscene- 30% or thereabouts. As others have pointed out, the poorest of the poor don’t pay any income tax, and many essentials (like unprepared food) are not currently taxed. I don’t recall if the bill would add a tax on unprepared food. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/listin...
There are about 10 that still charge taxes on groceries, but are considering phasing them out.
Shelter is always tax exempt. There is no tax on rent. Mortgages, if anything, come with a tax rebate, as amounts paid can be claimed against collected income taxes.
Also, you are wrong when you wrote, "Given that the lower and middle classes pay a disproportionate amount of income tax".
In fact, most Americans who earn under about $40,000 a year pay no federal income tax. I believe the vehicle that effects this outcome is mainly the earned income tax credit.
- Clothes - Shoes - Plumber/Electrician/Handyman - School supplies (though some states have tax holidays) - Gas/public transit - Car maintenance - Utility bills
Full sales and gasoline taxes, and relative to income, disproportionately more.
>Bottom half of the population pays ~zero taxes.
?
The tariffs are effectively a 30-150% price increase on all retail products, along with some marginal price increase on all manufactured goods. Given the nearly assured recession, it is unclear how willing American consumers and corporations are to eat this tax. Some businesses will take it out of the margin, others will pass it along.
Not true. If you have watched Shark Tank you have seen that products cost, as an example, $6 landed, but retail for $24. Tariffs are 145% of $6, so around $9. So they only have to increate the retail price from $24 to $33 to keep the same profit margin. In this example that's a 37% increase, not 145%.
So, instead of relying solely on the best producer of each thing, economies want to also make sure they spend a little bit more to also get products from the second and third best producers to keep them producing just in case the first producer does something like (for lack of a better phase) throwing a firebomb in an apartment to kill a spider.
They then treat the extra cost of products as a risk premium so the risk is already priced in.
Markets hate higher prices, but they hate uncertainty more.
An important detail.
Back in Trump's first term he put up some targeted tariffs. They were reasonable, effective, non-destructive to the economy, and Biden actually kept them. Good trade policy often become bipartisan.
There's a way to repeat that success. To effectively incentivize supply chain re-shoring, without destroying the economy and stock market, and being so effective and smart that the next administration keeps the policy, even a Dem admin. Which is:
1. increase tariffs gradually, stepwise, over the first two years +/- of his admin. Also get the math right, not 4x too high.
2. tariffs only on China and other adversaries, not our democratic friends and allies. China is the main economic problem anyway, not EU, Canada, Mexico, Japan, etc.
3. use other tools in addition to tariffs like tax policy for manufacturers (tax credits, accounting changes around equipment amortization, etc). Don't be that guy with only a hammer for whom everything is a nail, diversify, use all the tools available.
A graduated, predictable, multi-pronged approach confers the policy stability and predictability companies need to forecast, plan, invest, and hire. That makes it more likely the next administration will continue the tariff policy, even a Dem admin.
But Trump and Navarro's ham-fisted approach that tanks the stock market and causes shortages and inflation is not going to last. Companies won't invest and hire under those circumstances. It will implode, potentially discrediting the entire concept in the public's view, making it more difficult to implement an actually effective and sensible policy instead.
April 30 2025: Port of Rotterdam - Congesting shipment containers originally inbound towards the United States but halted (by Chinese exporters?). Also risking storage and transhipment of containers inbound to Rotterdam. (Heard on local news a few minutes ago)
If Trump keeps this up, within ~12 weeks he is not going to destroy the economy of the United States but the entire West...
He'll find someone to blame for forcing him to change direction.
Our Congress is complicit in this mess.
Congress gave the president the power to impose tariffs about 50 years ago because it was too difficult for them to do it themselves without a bunch of horse trading and politics. Congress could in theory pass a new bill taking the power back but they would need a 2/3 majority to overcome Trump's inevitable veto, there simply aren't that many congress people who disagree with Trumps plan to get that to happen.
If they cared, they could stop him. OP's point still stands, I think.
I think that one of the key differences between HN and Reddit is that I can usually rely on HN to give me a lot more of this kind of context, which helps keep arguments specific and interesting.
As is so often the case, Fortune is burying the lede here and making the situation look better than it is. The administration _has_ indicated that negotiations are happening, but China has denied that any such negotiations have occurred [0]. Given the trump administration's horrendous track record of blatant lies, there is no reason to believe them.
In the best case, there are quiet negotiations going on, but there's a real chance here that trump is fully losing his mind, his mental state has been on the decline for years and the things he says are becoming more incoherent by the week.
I am more inclined to believe that there are effectively no ongoing negotiations, and our trade policy is being determined largely by whoever gets the last word in with trump before he tweets something idiotic. This is an unsustainable situation.
If you live in the US, now is an excellent time to contact your senators and representatives and demand some accountability.
[0] https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/business/money-report/china-...
>If you live in the US, now is an excellent time to contact your senators and representatives and demand some accountability.
They. Are. Complicit. At this point, any senator at all is complicit in this nonsense. They hold the checks and balances on the executive wing. They're not even trying to use them, at best, and actively subverting them, in all truth.
It should be very telling that a VERY long term congressman like Dick Durbin is not seeking re-election. That's a bad sign.
This is the real problem.
https://redarrowlogistics.com/international/dodging-tariffs-...
Excerpt:
> Put simply, transshipping is when a country ships product through a third country so that the product will look like it’s coming from the third country, thereby avoiding duties or tariffs. For example, one supplier, Settle Logistics, goes through Malaysia: a 4600 miles diversion compared with sending a container from China straight to the US.
> This is much more expensive: shipping via Malaysia costs $3,000 to $4,000 more per shipping container, at least $2,000 more than shipping direct. Those costs are still worth it in order to avoid tariffs.
So, as the article mentioned, the goods has to be significantly transformed in the third country in order for the goods to have its origin changed. Otherwise you're committing fraud and customs can punish you if they figure it out.
Thus doing this the legal way would indeed involve more than the ship making a simple detour.
Fundamentally this is a game of chicken, and China will definitely blink first. This will be for a few reasons:
1. Unemployment in China is rocketing. Prior to the trade war in February it was sitting at an estimated 16.9% [1] (although it's difficult to believe the stats). In the US it sits at about 4.2% [2], which feels about right with the UK at 4.4% [3]. China doesn't have the "disadvantage" of a significant welfare system, but these people will become increasingly desperate to survive and burden the system in one way or another.
2. With unemployment so high in China, demand for jobs is increased and the salaries are decreased. With less excess money, domestic spending is largely reduced. With the excess stock produced for the US market no longer being delivered, manufacturers look to dump into the domestic market at below cost just to recoup some of their investment and to pay back the supply chain. Remember that with such low margins, manufacturers often get supplies on the promise of payment upon selling the goods they prepare. You're looking at complete supply chain disruption from top to bottom even if the manufacturer didn't export to the US.
3. The Chinese housing market continues to be an extremely large problem. Housing represents approximately a third of their economy and you have several key problems. Prior to the trade war, Chinese property developers were having customers buy properties (with mortgages) before ground was broken and using this money and borrowing to develop the properties at relatively low margins. Due to corruption and corner cutting, a considerable number of these buildings were "tofu dregs" (meaning poorly constructed). Despite these cost cutting measures, there was still not enough money available to develop the promised properties. This lead to the likes of Evergrande, Country Garden, Zhongzhi, Vanke, etc, to (begin to) fail. The customer's money is gone and the bank paid it out to the developer, so the customer is still on the hook for a property that doesn't exist - the bank tells them to pay up and to take up their issues with the property developer. Even those that managed to get a property found that the developers were desperately liquidating properties at discount rates to cover debt interest, lowering the value of properties in the market. With reduced income, increased mortgage rates due to instability, some look to sell their properties and escape the backlog of missed mortgage payments. Those people may find their property devalued by some 50%, and that they still have an outstanding debt despite selling the property and receiving no equity due to the devaluation of the property.
Although not outwardly said, the Chinese leadership have long considered themselves at war with the US. They have celebrated every issue the US has had, reacted negatively when the US experiences wins, and generally want to see the US fail. We're talking about the same CCP of the Mao Zedong era that considered the UK, US and Japan as enemies to crush. This is why that despite very obvious economic issues being experiences, the CCP refuse to negotiate.
> “What we’re going to see next is retailers have about five to seven weeks of full inventories left, and then the choices will lessen,” Seroka told CNBC. That doesn’t mean shelves will be empty, but in Seroka’s hypothetical, it could mean if you’re out shopping for a blue shirt, you may see 11 purple ones—but only one blue that isn’t your size and is costlier.
Maybe you can't find a blue shirt for a while and have to wear a purple one whilst textile manufacturing is scaled up in other asian/middle-eastern nations, but things could be far worse.
> Earlier Tuesday, Gabriela Santos, JPMorgan Asset Management chief market strategist for the Americas, told CNBC: “Time is running out to see a lessening of the tariffs on China.” Everyone knows the tariffs are unsustainable, she said, but markets need to see them actually drop.
Translation: The tariffs will affect our bottom line. Remember that JPMorgan as an entity do not care if jobs are lost in either the US (historically) or China (currently), as long as it does not affect their margins. The idea that JPMorgan does well and so does the US populace is wishful thinking.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-youth-jobless-rat...
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
You are correct, I cannot edit any more.
In any case it is definitely trending upwards [1], and I'm hearing from people inside China that unemployment is rapidly increasing. A lot of factories are either on pause or shut down until further notice.
That all said, it's unclear how many of those are gainfully employed, or how that would even be measured in China. There are many working in the delivery economy that sleep homeless. I think those working unsustainably is also on the increase.
There are other countries in the world apart from US and China. US has effectively alienated most of these with tariffs (save for Russia).
So prepare for a lot of friendly blinking between these countries to gang up on the bully.
I'm not saying that it's right, it's just an observation.
China thinks in terms of decades and their population is very culturally disciplined. They will endure years of economic downturns if necessary. Historically they have.
They also have quite a few advantages being a planned economy, with a higher appetite for wealth redistribution than the US and the hability to shift investments very quickly. This quells most internal dissatisfaction that recessions bring.
They merely have to wait it out, as they have. Trump dropped some tariffs without them doing anything.
I think this is a lie that somehow gets propagated in the West. They are not somehow smart and forward thinking, they are stuck within a dictatorship.
Over a span of 3 years from 1959 15-55 million people died in China [1]. It wasn't because of a natural disaster. It wasn't because of a war. It's wasn't because of a disease. It was purely because the leadership was trying to achieve the same ambitions as they do today.
Nothing changed, it is still the same party and CCP will go to the same lengths to try to achieve it again. The result in 1961 was a -27.3% growth [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China#Annual...
I was more combatting the point that China has some super smart decade+ forward thinking leadership. Whereas the reality is that the same political party is still willing to sacrifice tens of millions of Chinese people for negative economic growth.
The resilience of course is another thing. The main reasons they have a higher pain threshold is that for many the quality of living never really changed drastically and there is a heightened sense of nationalism. More generally, on a personal level Asians try to "save face", meaning they could be starving to death and still smiling to not let their enemy see their pain.
I still maintain that they can't hold out, and that the CCP has been very quietly entering into negotiations with the US [1]. There was already an exceptionally difficult property market situation threatening stability, and now their entire supply chain is being disrupted on every level. The pressure they are under is immense.
> And it does appear that Trump has blinked first, last week hinting at a potential U-turn on tariffs, saying that the taxes he has so far imposed on Chinese imports would "come down substantially, but it won't be zero". Meanwhile, Chinese social media is back in action. "Trump has chickened out," was one of the top trending search topics on the Chinese social media platform Weibo after the US president softened his approach to tariffs.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-creates-list-us-ma...
I'm not sanguine. I think their leadership prides itself on being tougher and smarter than American leaders, and I think when they look at the results Canada and Mexico have gotten, complying with Trump, they're not going to feel like compliance will help.
I'm trying to think of a public traded company that could be true for. It just doesn't seem that there is going to be a company that is tied to the fortunes of the US populace. Conagra maybe.
Because today's climate in the US seems, even related to the tariffs, to be heavily weighted towards making those with deep pockets even deeper. The confusion in the markets, for example, have been a perfect opportunity for those properly placed to rake in a ton of money. Ditto with DOGE ending spending on a lot of projects, moving it commercial providers.
But overall? No, extreme shortages will mean people won't be able to receive essential goods. If they're sick, they could die. If their housing is precarious, extra costs of necessities could push them to homelessness. If they've been looking for a job to pay for necessities, good luck because businesses will be closing left and right and everyone will be looking for a job.
This combined with moves to strengthen police aggression and protect police who fall on the wrong side of the law means any protest against these moves will be met with greater violence. We were already seeing people being blinded or killed by riot police during BLM protests.
Imagine what kind of violence will be used against protestors who don't have anything to lose. They'll have lost their jobs, and with it their healthcare. They won't be able to afford housing, food, household objects, entertainment, etc. People in the US don't protest because we don't have social safety nets to fall back on. Now protestors wont have to worry about falling any deeper.
So no, being anti-capitalist doesn't mean being pro a hyper-capitalist sabotaging the system people rely on to survive without any meaningful plan to fix or replace it. This is just chaos.
There is no possible way for anyone to foresee the totality of effects from a serious trade war with China, but I can assure you, it will be far worse than a lack of junk on store shelves.
Seems pretty paternalistic to me. Why not let people decide for themselves whether they "actually need" the $5 plastic trinket from china? Do you not trust adults to make informed decisions on what they're buying?
The free rational market has no way to price these in.
Tobacco and alcohol, both of which have objective, measurable negative health outcomes supported by decades of research, versus some vague notion of "junk products" as defined by... who? And this is without even getting into the fact that the tariffs will raise the price of everything, not just these supposed "junk products."
So if the only lever you have to affect consumers is price, then you must factor in the negative factors with higher prices.
i.e. If the price is supposed to be a lever for labor conditions, why just tax China heavily and not Bangladesh?
Why tax more fuel-efficient European cars instead of American-Built Jeep Grand Cherokees?
And if reducing plastic waste is the priority, why would Trump's day include unbanning plastic straws?
Answer: It's not actually about reducing negative externalities, it's about geopolitics, otherwise it wouldn't be so negatively weighted towards a single actor.
The US does not tax trash, it taxes the origin of products. That applies regardless of if it's good or bad.
For example, buying solar panels is probably good for the environment and public health. On the other hand, buying sugary sodas is probably not so good for your health and maybe has some minor negative environmental impact. Most things are more complicated; running shoes might be good for your health and bad for the environment.
The tarrifs are just a blanket tax on all consumption, so I imagine the effects will be a wash. We’re getting rid of the good and bad.
In defense of those who may sincerely disagree, they may frequent higher quality retail than the bulk of U.S. shoppers.
I don't as such disagree with you that the junk needs to go, but there's also a big difference between a $2000 Lenovo laptop, made in China, and a $0.50 gadget, sold for $10, also made in China. You'd need to disincentivize companies from sell these products to consumers, then the flow of Chinese junk will stop.
If this administration cared at all about the environment, they wouldn't be opening up public land for oil drilling or firing hundreds of scientists working on climate reports as mandated by Congress [1].
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-climate-assessment-rep...
It's funny that the same party that likes to warn of "you will own nothing and be happy" is now defending economic policy that will decrease material wealth, but it's ok because it is "good for you" to practice having less.
Then furthest in the back you have the fresh produce: Eggs, vegetables, meat and chicken, fish sometimes, dairy and bread. The good stuff.
Now look down the shopping carts of your fellow shoppers: Filled to the brim with big boxes of the most unhealthy sewage on offer. They are subsidizing your shopping for quality ingredients from near and far.
I think it's the same with other stores. The low quality junk that appeals to the average shopper is subsidizing the quality niche item that you need to buy.
How dare you question the free hand of the market!
Not everyone will be buying expensive hothouse tomatoes come winter. People who can no longer afford to buy imported produce will change their habits and just buy more unhealthy stuff that they can afford.
I'd caution that no demand is totally inelastic though. The classic example is people not reducing their insulin use if the price goes up, but in actual practice, people absolutely do just that.
Manufacturing jobs of the future will be fewer and higher in the value chain, requiring technical abilities. Workers won't be mindless stamping parts over and over.
Now, the question is, do you want our adversaries to develop and own this new era or do you want the US to lead this next generation of industrialization?
Finally, if you don't think China is our adversary, then we're not living in the same reality.
The current administration's actions are not meaningfully helping push us towards that. There are plenty of things they could do to help motivate that, but what they've done so far isn't really in that direction.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-21/-chine... https://militarnyi.com/en/news/usa-unable-to-make-drones-wit...
