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https://archive.is/QKowS

So, a toddler is shaking a snowglobe.

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.

Get your Black&Scholes branded spear out and head to the pond for some trout!

As in, go harvest some of that market volatility? Definitely looking on the brighter side of things, hat tip to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model?wp...

Isn’t that Black and Decker (TM)

The market already tore Sears apart. Black and Decker is a zombie brand that continues in our IP-focused globalized JIT retail wasteland that certainly won't be on shelves "7 weeks from now". (Though maybe your grandmother's Black & Decker still works long past its lifetime guarantee and we'll be fighting to find the last of those.)

Also, I believe the above had an additional layer of an economics joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model

The tip fell off my old Black and Decker spear years ago. Shoddy materials.

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.

This is a general cultural problem with liberalism at present. My social media timelines are absolutely full of Serious People analyzing how we got here and situating our present condition in historical and theoretical context. And they're mostly right! but what's lacking is any discussion of what to do about it. Even advocacy for legislative remedies or mass strikes are mostly dismissed in favor of throwing up hands and waiting for the midterm elections, as if the outcome were assured and a repeat of January 6 2021 were unthinkable. I can only conclude that a large part of the populace either can't believe what's happening or can't comprehend the implications.

Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy. Let Trump implode so that he owns the inevitable failure. His base will desperately want to blame the left for not letting the policies work as intended. The less the Democrats do, the harder that is. I think a lot of Democrat politicians are going this way, and it's why Schumer rolled over on the budget.

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.

The dumb thing about this, is that the republicans are going to blame democrats whether or not they do anything. Play dead is a really dumb idea because it looks exactly like the rest of the democratic do-nothing strategies.

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".

Not just campaigning. Resourcing. By now (by 8 years ago, to be !@#$ing honest) there should be a very clean, crisp website that's a searchable list of topics/talking points, with immediately available videos, audios, screenshots of Trump contradicting himself, along with links to easily digestible facts.

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.

This is so easy to counter though.

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.

There's no playing. It's real. Flatlined a long time ago.

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?

> Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy.

Our tax money hard at work. What a fucking joke.

This is the Liberal Way; complain about the state of things, but when it comes time to do the work and change it, they are suddenly nowhere to be found unless you go to the various social media enclaves where they sure do talk up a big storm of moral outrage, mostly well-reasoned and justified. The problem is they wait for someone else to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

The Fascist Right does not, which is why they are winning this War of Ideology.

I call it pseudo-liberalism: people who don't understand that protecting rights actually damned hard work. They also can't see the mountains for the molehills. It is also when liberalism is used as a fashion accessory: they wear their sweat shop handbags to an anti-fascist rally.

All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I think that most people don't believe that there's anything that they can do that will make a difference. Realistically things aren't getting better in the short term no matter what we do and, as the saying goes, in the long term we're all dead. So why risk it?

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A large part of the populace has proven they’ll pick this option repeatedly. A lot of people are tired of fighting to keep toddlers from touching the hot stove and just want to let them learn their lesson for once.

Yes, this is what people voted for. Either they will get fed up with the outcome, or Trump will reverse course (I suspect the latter). Either way, time to grab the popcorn.

> Either they will get fed up with the outcome, or Trump will reverse course (I suspect the latter)

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.

I'm just waiting for Leavitt to tell us all how tariffs are a Democratic tax on good hard-working Republicans when he changes his mind again.

Walmart back rooms are emptying out nationwide. Shelves will do so next. Let's see what tune folks sing when their guy turns their everything store into a scene out of Solzhenitsyn.

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.

Let's see what tune folks sing when their guy turns their everything store into a scene out of Solzhenitsyn.

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.

The hard core believes this. We disagree on how large that is. My contention here is only that until the pain really starts, there's no knowing. That pain is about to start.

> Of course, liberals will promptly proceed to squander even that advantage

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.

Business owners and so on as you enumerated have names, addresses, and assets susceptible to seizure. And the law does not often anticipate novel crimes, nor need.

> "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.

So the 'delusion of the left' is that...the money power has exceeded its legitimate influence in government, to constitute some serious degree of corruption? I'm having trouble following your thesis here.

The money power couldn't have exceeded anything without help from the two governing parties. You're saying that the horses are out of the barn, I'm telling you who opened the barn door and went to the bar to drink with lobbyists. The government's got the key for that door, it might be worthless now but we have to be very clear with the situation if we want to have any hope of fixing this mess.

> what's lacking is any discussion of what to do about it

If you subscribe to the views of documentarist Adam Curtis, that is because no one has any clue whatsoever.

I get his PoV, but I think most people who have thought about it know which tools should have been used at the end of the cold war. The difficulty is precedent and the preference to the power two factions over structure.

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.

The amendments already exist! More than that, the core articles already exist! The Constitutional powers delegate taxation and tariffs solely to Congress. Doing it through Executive Order is Constitutionally absurd and if Congress wasn't asleep at the wheel and criminally "Do Nothing" (especially, nothing without a Lobbyist lining your tailored suit's insides with cash like filthy lingerie) and the Judicial Branch wasn't suborned into party politics mentalities and a lot of people in both Congress and Justice weren't being hugely negligent on their sworn oaths to Protect the Constitution, there should be a lot more Checks and Balances happening right now.

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.

Yeah, people would prefer to "coast it up" rather than doing something substantial. The weekend protests are literally self own, because you are protesting in the only "free time" that you can have.

There's only one possible route for removal but it requires simultaneous impeachment and removal of POTUS and all 18 in the USPLOS too. That would require immense pressure on a handful of Republicans to break from party such that 218 House and 68 Senate votes could be achieved. Furthermore, the Senate would need to agree upon a non-MAGA interim POTUS or not appoint one, and then extraordinary POTUS elections would need to be held and the electorate not make the same mistakes again. Odds of occurring: snowball's chance. Not gonna happen.

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.

The Senate wouldn’t even vote to end Trump’s tariffs.

Which is absurd too because tariffs and taxes are supposed to come from the Senate per the Constitution. The Senate should be protecting the Constitution here, if nothing else.

Only 3 Republicans in the Senate feel safe enough to stand up to Trump, which is not nearly enough. If you cross him, he will publicly bully and name-call you, and goad his base into rejecting you at the next primary, even if you otherwise agree with him 99% of the time. Recall how quickly Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio all turned tail and became utter sycophants after he became President.

You’re missing the forest for the trees. The Buchanan wing of the GOP overthrew the Bush/Cheney establishment, and salted the earth so a Bush or Cheney couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Texas/Wyoming.

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.

> the Bush/Cheney era was utterly disastrous

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.

> In that case, why didn't they switch sides and become Democrats?

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.

> Reagan-era globalism was a temporary response to the soviet union

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 USA’s global influence and entanglements goes all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine and grew substantially after WWII

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.

> 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.

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.

Yay, unaccountable government and the breaking of our Constitutional system. So much to celebrate. The Right is showing they don't actually stand for anything they have every said, but specifically the Constitution or our system of Government. But who cares about what the USA is/stands for when you are busy.... saving the USA. Hypocrites.

The power to levy tariffs was delegated to the President in 1934, when democrats had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, over 70% of the votes in the House, and the Presidency.

Bizarre to blame “the Right” for not voting to change a system democrats created 91 years ago.

I'm replying to you and your comment specifically. Your support for this seems very at odds with your historical posting. Suddenly you support the Democrats delegating Congressional authority and support Republicans not asserting the Constitution's authority.

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...

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There have been such a comical amount of protests over the last decade for every trite issue that it's hard not to feel like most of those people would defs not be there if they had any sort of other obligation or otherwise incurred a cost. Not to say that's the case with every issue, but there's a world of difference between the person showing up on a weekend for a bit to protest for climate action, hoping to end up in a photo, and the person protesting the actions of their home country's regime knowing that their government could abduct your family that's still there.

I see people saying this a lot, and I guarantee during civil rights marches people were saying the same thing. It's a cynical and jaded and not very useful viewpoint, IMO.

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.

Ya, in retrospect it does read as overly cynical and yelling at clouds in a way, I agree with that point. My comment captured more than I intended, but the civil rights example pretty much seems like a defining use of the term. Specific, tangible outcome, targeted, not trite at all, connected to a real oppressive issue of the time, but I can imagine people trivializing them at the time.

While I can think of examples that I personally think are a bit silly, I'd agree it's not really a useful contribution.

>for every trite issue

This speaks volumes

Republicans just voted against legislation to stop this nonsense. The only remedy is to convince people to vote against this party. the problem is that people identify as Republican and see Democrats as something that goes against the core of their identity. Most people don't follow politics closely and it will take a LOT to get them to wake up.

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.

> "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.

I really don’t understand how this is being downvoted. Whatever your interpretation of the reasons is, it’s objectively correct to say that democrats lost [1] instead of saying Trump won, even though the outcome is the same. Democrats alienated 19 million voters on a variety of issues, whereas republican turnout was almost the same.

[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-turnou...

Or a large percentage of the populace is afraid. Nobody wants to draw the attention of the far right, both the parts in and out of office. Everyone in the US knows someone who is illegal, a green car holder, a student/work visa holder or who otherwise may be vulnerable. Piss off the wrong people and the powers that be may cast their eye on you and your friends. Even if deportation is remote for any of my immediate friends, I dont want my name on one of those lists, such as the lists of enemy attornies/firms that have recently had to make "donations" and pledges.

This is why ballots are secret. At least for now.

Apathy and cowardice is how we got here.

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.

When I was a teenager after 9/11, me and my family had donated to the Holy Land foundation. For the next two years, my literal firewood delivery business I ran with my dad that grossed under 10K was audited by the IRS.

>My spouse's ex put commie pamphlets in her luggage when they traveled. She was stopped for it.

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.

Checked luggage gets opened legally without the owner present all the time.

Some luggage does, sure, but not most.

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.

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Trump is an unpopular lame duck president. Yes, people needed to be braver and it will be to their eternal shame that they weren’t. But opposing this stuff is only going to get easier and easier.

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There's plenty of discussion of what to do about it, including a legislative remedy which went up for a vote just today.

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.

The last time January 6 happened it had no implications except Trump's polling dropped slightly. If there is a repeat it is irrelevant except for optics - you will need to theorise something that is substantially worse.

If you know how to convince Trump to stop, or the GOP controlled congress to stop him, or the GOP packed supreme court to stop him…

By all means, share the wisdom!

> And they're mostly right

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.

What complete bullshit. I'm not advancing (or even describing) their arguments, I'm pointing out that they're stuck in analysis-paralysis without the ability to choose a course of action. For some reason you've chosen to project your ideas about people whom you disagree with onto this group, while missing or ignoring the point I was trying to make.

Sorry, I misunderstood the point you’re trying to make.

What economies are exported? US GDP growth been huge and unemployment is low. The economy is doing great, just not for everyone. =

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.

But does GDP growth reflect quality of life? The inequality you’re seeing is exactly what you’d expect from policies that reduce labor market bargaining power through the dual-pronged approach of outsourcing production and facilitating mass immigration.

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?

It's so weird to see conservatives talk about how great the European economy is. I used to have to argue with my liberal friends about how Europe is a sclerotic economy and now I'm arguing with conservatives about it. Weird world.

> 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.

> It's so weird to see conservatives talk about how great the European economy is. I used to have to argue with my liberal friends about how Europe is a sclerotic economy and now I'm arguing with conservatives about it. Weird world.

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.

No, GDP by itself, in aggregate doesn't.

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.

But labor mobility and income differentials reflect the structure of the economy. It seems to me that knowledge economies are inherently more unequal than manufacturing economies.[1] And tariffs and industrial policy shape the structure of the economy.

[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?

I don't necessarily disagree. I think there are some big advantages to being Iowa relative to California. I just don't think tariffs fix that. You get a poorer Iowa and Cali.

It may be the case that tariffs reduce disparity by making everyone poorer

Lack of imagination.

All the “smart” people have been going in the wrong direction for 40 years—pursing short term profits and encouraging wasteful consumption—so you got the toddler. Let that be a lesson.

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 don't know about "trade deficits are good", but trade deficits are basically meaningless in isolation.

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.

To extend your grocery store example: you have a trade deficit with your grocery store, but you have a trade surplus with your employer! You’re not running a structural trade deficit, and it would be bad to do so.

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.

> Your example about small countries is irrelevant because nobody cares about the trade deficit between the U.S. and Bangladesh.

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.

> Your example about small countries is irrelevant because nobody cares about the trade deficit between the U.S. and Bangladesh

Except for the person in charge of America's trade policy, lmao

The only trade deficits that matter are ones that create security dependency. Biden recognized that at the tail end of COVID and that's why they onshored chip manufacturing because so much modern tech needs chips.

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.

Can you link to one person with any sort of platform who has said "trade deficits are great?"

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?

What is actually happening matters more than what anyone says. “Trade deficits are great” and “unrestricted free trade” reflects the status quo. The weighted average tariff rate in 2016 was just 1.5%. The trade deficit has grown to over $1 trillion.

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.”

So imaginary people and imaginary arguments, got it.

We didn't even have more than one debate this election cycle going over economic policy. I was big Ron Paul fan on foreign relations, but whenever he went into economics you could see his views were just a little nuts. Practical fiscal conservatives were asleep at the wheel on this one.

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 Republicans successfully turned economic issues into social ones. Previously, immigrants were stealing our jobs. Now they're stealing our cats.

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.

Not to mention a _huge_ [1][2] increase in wealth inequality over the past 30 years as well.

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-...

The usual HN response to wealth inequality is "why do you care how much they have?" The answer is, of course, that money is power and the power that many of the wealthy are exercising is not to the benefit of most people.

You don't even need to think about money as power, you can just think about money as money. There's a far simpler way to think about wealth inequality. If you believe it's a problem, by definition the people holding the wealth are the cause of the problem. This isn't some social or philosophical construct - it's just basic deduction.

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.

If the wealthy held their wealth in money then there would be no problem. The problem arises because the wealthy hold their wealth in assets, the most productive of which become hoarded in fewer and fewer silos. Since the assets are desireable and increasing in scarcity their asking price increases. Since this price is paid in money, the value of money falls. This would be fine except that most normal people do hold most of their wealth in money so this reduction in buying power makes them poorer.

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 get what you say -- hoarded wealth is essentially idle. But I think there's more to it. The people who hold that wealth prefer to live in one country, and have inflicted themselves on the governance of that country.

> I get what you say -- hoarded wealth is essentially idle.

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.

> My point is entirely that the more money the rich have, the less money the poor have.

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 are replying to every single comment - you seem really upset about this. I never said anything was stolen from me. I said wealth inequality is the result of rich people holding money, because by definition there can be no wealth inequality without rich people. It's an objective statement and you're projecting so much political vitriol onto it.

I'm not upset at all. My question to you was a fair one.

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.

> 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.

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.

The dictionary defines "hoard" as: "a stock or store of money or valued objects, typically one that is secret or carefully guarded."

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.

[flagged]

It would be absurd to expect to change anyone's core beliefs with a couple of HN posts.

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?

> 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.

That's debatable. The US economy grew spectacularly in its first century, pulling scores of millions of poor people up into the middle class and beyond.

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.

> It would be absurd to expect to change anyone's core beliefs with a couple of HN posts.

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.

> "I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets."

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

> hoarded wealth is essentially idle

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!

Indeed, and if it's hoarded in the form of land, then the land definitely accrues political power.

> the wealthy holding the money means less money to go around to everyone else

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).

This is largely debatable and hard to measure. The thing about creation is that it's not black or white, it's gray.

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.

Offering jobs to people who don't have jobs is not theft, and a voluntary exchange is not theft, either.

Pointing a gun at someone to get them to work is theft. Putting your name on a contract or your brains is also theft.

Choice isn't binary, it's a continuous distribution. There's not "free choice" and then "gun to head".

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.

It's remarkable that even on HN so many people believe that economics is a zero sum game.

Some items absolutely are zero sum - anything that is in short supply with a high demand becomes unobtainable for anyone who isn't rich.

Some things that are effectively out of reach for at least half of everyone:

  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

It obviously to a non-insignificant extent. Only the proportion is debatable.

The wealthy aren't exactly hoarding the money under their bed. They buy treasuries and bonds so the money get used elsewhere in the economy to do something.

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.

High housing prices are the result of a housing shortage. The shortage is the result of government zoning, regulation, and slow-walking building permits.

(Apparently California has only issued 4 permits so far for people to rebuild after the fires.)

Which worth comparing to Texas where building is allowed.

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.

Particularly after Citizens United, money has squelched voter influence in favor of a few large donors. People don't seem to realize however imperfect the choices are, actively voting against this agenda instead of giving up and hoping it'll somehow work out will fail.

Kamala outspent Trump by about 3:1 in the last election. Money didn't buy it.

Elon buying twitter and changing the algorithm to support him probably isn't included in this calculation

Ironically, Elon tried to back out of the deal and the liberals forced him to buy it.

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.

Are you sure? We certainly didn't end up with Bernie on the Democrat ballot.

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.

I doubt Bernie is electable no matter how much he spends.

One easy thing you can do on HN is replace "they" with "we" in a lot of those instances.

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.

More than 30 years, it's closer to 50.

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...

> 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 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.

> how much _do_ the exceptionally wealthy even spend when going about their daily lives?

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.

>>> If the Profit turns out to be less than zero, that loss is attached to the investors.

Within limits. "Limitation of liability" circumscribes the investors' exposure to loss.

You could replace one rich guy with a larger number of average Joe shareholders and still obtain the same results (or better, since average Joes usually tend not to be ego-tripping activist investors).

You spend less, proportionally, of your income the richer you are. Economic activity scales inversely with wealth.

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.

What tax cuts for the rich were there in the 1970s? The tax cuts came in the 80's. There were also Nixon's price controls, which Carter continued, which were another disaster.

Inflation results from deficit spending.

Inflation results from more dollars chasing fewer goods.

That can come from deficit spending, or that can come from tax cuts freeing cash for people to spend.

> 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.

You are making the assumption the government will spend the extra revenue.

That depends on their fiscal behavior and obligations.

> You are making the assumption the government will spend the extra revenue.

Yes, I am. They always do. Federal, state and local.

Oh so the massive increases in the cost of food had nothing to do with the energy price spike post Ukraine invasion in Europe?

Interesting.

You can have price increases without inflation.

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.

But... When the cost of gas goes up, so does the cost of almost everything else because the trucks and trains and planes that deliver everything all use gas of some kind.

Supply and Demand still applies. If you have less money, demand drops, and so do prices.

> "...more racially diverse..."

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...

These two things could be true at the same time. A shift of some groups towards Trump, and the support of racism as an issue to motivate "base" voters.

The shift couldn't have been huge, given that the election was won on the slimmest of margins.

I couldn't put an exact time frame on it, but it took several years before the pro-Brexit politicians ran out of 'it will get better soon' arguments and the (majority of the) populace realised that they'd been had.

Still plenty (nowhere close to a majority, but more than a few nutters) who are certain the problem is we didn't have a hard enough Brexit. The reason the scientific method is considered an actual discovery is that this whole "In light of new data I realise I was wrong" just isn't how we tend to behave.

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.

The Italian socialist opposed joining ww1. The nationalists wanted to join, and the Italians joined, on the British and French side. They fought so bad that the British had to send troops to the new Austrian - Italian front, effectively weakening the allied effort and thus the spoils of the war were none for the Italians. Who did the fascists blame, the nationalist for joining this folly? No, the socialists for sabotaging their efforts.

Thank you for sharing that!

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.

For some people, the most important goal isn't success but power. Failure is fine, as long as they retain power.

I honestly think you are vastly overestimating how much buyer's regret there is, or even any sense of Brexit being wrong. Brexit wasn't wrong, it's everything else that was wrong!

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

The MAGA ideologues can stay cultists longer than we can stay solvent? I'm in Texas, and I've got a neighbor, down the road, who was in custom home construction; he's out of business now. Why? He can't import lumber, reliably; he used to hire "under the table", and he bought small steel supplies in bulk from Alibaba. So... pretty much his entire business model is kaput. He keeps telling me that, any day now, Trump's 11D chess moves are going to make him (my neighbor) solvent again. He just sold his (white) truck, and is selling his house. Still flying his Trump flag, though.

This is a quote from Carl Sagan:

> 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.

The first step to getting out from under a charlatan is admitting you were an idiot.

Some people seem constitutionally incapable of ever doing that.

I think this is probably the same phenomenon that makes people fall for romance scams despite the obvious red flags. Like a sunk cost fallacy for human emotion - is there a term for that? Nobody seems to want to admit they were wrong or 'had', so do the alternative - being had even more.

It’s categorized as a need for Consistency with one’s prior self.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistency_(negotiation)

This is kinda close, but not a perfect fit. It's best described as the brain putting up blinders to ignore obvious problems as not to have been duped.

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.

I think it has a lot to do with who you are admitting it to. Let say you know you are wrong, but you have to admit it to your enemy. Many emotional people would rather die than do that, hah (over my dead body!). Unfortunately, this is the end-state of arousing politics. There's a whole media industry around making politics emotional now days, and quite frankly we really need it to go back to boring men and women discussing boring things on CSPAN. It was never meant for the average American (or Britain), simply because it takes too much dumbing down to make it palatable for ordinary people. It's OKAY not to know what is the right thing to do about global trade. The political-media-industrial-complex survives by making people believe they actually know what they are talking about.

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).

I have seen that ego, fear, superiority, and otherwise emotional instability appear most prominently in technical people.

China did it better - most of their managers are engineers. US needs to make use of this pattern. Oh, and add an IQ and an EQ test as a requirement to being a president.

You make good points.

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.

> Your Ben Shapiros, your Tuckers, Rogans, Maddows, Jon Stewarts

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..

I can't leave Stewart out because any serious history on this topic must credit him for the genesis of this type of media.

It sucks having some semblance of critical thinking skills as an American. It grows more painful every day and I'd rather just give myself a lobotomy at this point. I'm sure it felt similarly for many folks during Brexit who knew better.

I'm curious how he reconciles his "under the table" payments with the Republican party's supposed "law and order" platform.

Sounds like the type that buys lottery tickets every week actually believing that they will hit one day. Just a matter of time.

Big if true. One more ; ought to do it.

11D, got to wait for the 12D move to fix everything. /s

As an American, is that the generally-accepted viewpoint now? That Brexit was a mistake? If so, do people feel like it was an honest mistake, or do people generally believe that the politicians and businesspeople who supported it were either incompetent or hoping to benefit personally at everyone else's expense? Something else?

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.

I'm not in England but in mainland Europe and yes, I don't know a single person who sees Brexit benefiting the Brits. It was all lies and pandering for politicians benefits.

Honest question because I'm ignorant, but did any (well, many/most since I'm sure there are outliers) mainland Europeans think it would benefit the British?

As an American generally uninformed on the manner, I only heard of pro-Brexit people in Britain.

Brexit was a vote by Britain to lose all influence in its largest export market and instead hamper its industries with dual regulation and increased barriers to trade. Nobody thinking rationally would think it was a good idea. The referendum passed because people were largely ignorant of what Europe actually is and because the referendum put a boring, complicated state affairs against a fill-in-the-blanks fantasy option.

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.

> 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.

No, except every countries eu-exit party. Every europeen country has a ~20% block of people who want the ratatouille of leaving EU, no immigrants, etc. Luckily countries with a multi party democracy evade being hijacked by them so far.

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.

Thanks! That is what I thought. Good reminder that each country has their own relatively small (but maybe annoyingly vocal) eu-exit supporters.

How have those countries spun Brexit's failure? Just... "that wouldn't happen to US because we would be DIFFERENT?"

They stopped talking about it. They dropped the issue from their list. In my country they went to covid masks, siding with Russia in Ukraine (one of our ministers literally called zelensky a dictator) and now back to border controls I believe. It's like the "today I'm an expert in X" meme.

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.

I don't think it was a majority of people anywhere, but it was certainly very popular among the bases of right-wing parties across the continent.

I always find it so confusing - the same people that want group X (Palestinans, Kurds, Tibetans, Catalonia, etc....) to have their own government/country, hate that Brits want to control their own country.

You're talking about two very different sentiments. People see leaving the EU as a foolish decision. But Britain has every right to make that decision if it wants. I don't know of anyone outside of Britain who "hates" that they left (in the sense of feeling anger or offense).

In fact a lot of the sentiment tends to be more like "good riddance".

Interestingly there seems to be even more foreigners working in London now than before Brexit. Just with less rights I guess.

You're talking as though there were blue EU tanks rolling through the English countryside and bombers from Brussels flattening biscuit factories. Britain is not and was not oppressed, it's just a former imperial power with a heavily financialized economy that is no longer the biggest wheel in a larger regional economy.

Yeah the EU is totally to the UK like Israël is to the Palestians or Turkey to the Kurds. The EU put a wall around the UK and is slowly colonizing the area.

I live in a deprived area that voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit, despite almost everything good in the area being bankrolled by the EU development fund. It was very much not in our interest.

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

"EU development fund" I can't imagine there being some North America development fund redistributing wealth to various projects. Sounds obscene lol

> As an American, is that the generally-accepted viewpoint now? That Brexit was a mistake?

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"

As a fellow Brit I'd say the above is a very accurate summary :)

The other 51 percent for are sophisticated economic analysts who ended up hoarding toilet paper and pasta during Covid.

Ron Paul 2008 and 2012 taught me this whole thing is a farce of statecraft. Consent to governance has to be manufactured, alchemically transmuting vice and violence into virtue and victory. Meme Magick™ is more real than anyone could imagine, yet so elusive many will never touch it and know.

I'm a Brit who went through Brexit. I think most people got the idea it was going to be economically stupid before the vote but the Brexit voters prioritized independence over that. Also just shaking things up because they were unhappy with how things were going for them personally.

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.

> At least with Trump you can vote him out again

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

As per most things these days ... there's a core 30% of nutjobs who will not change for anything. Another 10-20% ride along with them and balance against the moderates and, together, they either shift the Overton window, or outright win.

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.

> It'll take probably 5-10 years before the 10-20% own up to "being had".

Approval numbers are already declining rapidly on key issues. The main effects of tariffs haven’t even hit them yet.

Sure thing - might happen quicker. Hopefully.

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's also instructive to look at American attitudes toward the Iraq war. I'm pretty sure that many people who now say it was a terrible idea and that they voted for Trump because they don't want to be in any more wars were absolutely rock-ribbed supporters of it at the time. Asking if they think Obama did a good job in extricating the US from that conflict serves as a useful litmus test.

Long long before.

> For those that went through Brexit, can you detail when the larger population realized it was stupid?

49 percent for sure knew and voted against.

It’s not fair to characterize Brexit — a ridiculously over simplistic yes/no referendum question — as being inherently bad.

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.

What does it say that people who voted "yes" without a clear plan of action already on the table?

It's like signing your name on a blank contract and trusting the counterparty to write up something that's good for you.

That's representative politics in general, which is why trust is such a valuable commodity for a politician to get.

> What does it say that people who voted "yes" without a clear plan of action already on the table?

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.

> The UK government explicitly refused to make a plan of action.

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.

Sure, let me try to give you some context.

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.

Also in my understanding, it was a gamble by David Cameron. He promised the referendum before the previous general election, believing the Tories wouldn't get a majority and he could blame the Lib Dems coalition partner when they blocked the referendum, then the Tories did win outright and oopsie, what do I do now, I've got to hold a referendum with no plan. Basically unintended consequences. Moral of the story... be careful. Maybe Cameron had had a long day and was tired or something when he made that decision ;)

There are an infinite number of Brexits we didn’t get. We only got to try one. For most purposes I think it’s pretty reasonable to equate ‘Brexit’ with that one.

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”).

Yes. Yes, Brexit was inherently bad. And its implementation made it worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit#:~:...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-19/brexit...

If it had actually reduced mass immigration from the third world, as voters were promised, it would have been good.

The England and Wales fertility rate is 1.44. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvj3j27nmro

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)

I could have used wars as an example (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam), but Brexit feels like more of a parallel as it's non-violent and somewhat economic. We will absolutely have a conclusive outcome for what we've decided to do as a nation. The unfortunate thing is we are not going to get back 4 years of our lives. It's just going to evaporate and that's the thing that political fervor masks. You got one life, you can spend it fighting China, I suppose. In the case of Europe, you can spend it exiting it, I suppose. There's a serious opportunity cost here that wasn't properly discussed due to the zealotry of both sides.

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.

[dead]

Curious if there is anyone here who genuinely sees this as short-term pain / long-term gain for American economic interests. That is of course the political angle, but I've yet to see an economist concur with that theory.

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.)

Jon Stewart talked a lot about this on Monday, both in his monologue and interview with Chris Hughes.

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.

It's worth pointing out that China has been preparing for this exact trade war since 2016, when Trump first threatened it. And they have fairly good centralized command structure to force individual businesses to prepare for things like this. China is the primary target of the war, even if Trump thinks that trade imbalances with Vietnam are also theft from the US, as he frequently and loudly says. The administration has lots of China hawks, it does not have any Vietnam hawks.

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.

China's economic situation right now is worse than the US. They have incredible debt (accounting for provincial debt which is essentially state debt, China is not a federation), a massive housing asset bubble, and an aged population that is expensive to care for. Never mind also being stuck in a deflationary cycle with a high youth unemployment rate. And this is just working with the self-reported numbers from an authoritarian regime.

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.

I'm sure that China will suffer greatly from any trade war, and I'm positive the US will blink first. Chinese consumer and workers are already significantly less likely to revolt, stop working, drag their country down. The second that dollar store becomes $10store in the US, it'll be pandemonium, and they only have a single person to blame for their troubles. China? They may be doing anti-competitive trade practices and haven't been put to task, but if you ask the Chinese citizen who to blame on the trade war, it'll be trump. If you ask a US citizen who to blame for this trade war, it'll be trump.

In this case, that seems pretty accurate? Trump is indeed the one that started the trade war. External enemies are easier to unite against etc.

Our tiktok/instragram/youtube has been downright flooded with pro Chinese propaganda for the last few weeks.

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.

> downright flooded with pro Chinese propaganda for the last few weeks

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.

I actually have made it a personal rule to never sign up for TikTok. Instagram usually gets the stolen reposted content of whatever trends on TikTok a week ago. Browsing Instagram on the phone you are just swiping and taking in whatever the algorithm feeds you and unless you save it, that content might be gone forever. Who knows how much slop has just "drive by" messed up my brain.

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)

[6]: https://www.instagram.com/barto_lovo/reel/DILkfVzt-vs/

[7]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIPhTmjSOIb/

I made a new TikTok account out of curiosity after Trump "saved" the platform. No exaggeration, half of the "For You" content was from "Team Trump" or Charlie Kirk. They are actively pushing propaganda, but I've seen no signs that it's Chinese propaganda, unless you assume that Bytedance is bowing to Trump, and that Bytedance is controlled by the Chinese Government, which just raises more questions.

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.

> I've seen no signs that it's Chinese propaganda, unless you assume that Bytedance is bowing to Trump

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?

Probably because the content on TikTok is extremely favorable to Trump. I don't see how that counts as propaganda coming straight from the CCP.

The TikTok bill appeared to have died on the vine until it started to get a lot of Pro-Palestine content then all of a sudden it reappeared and the ban got put into law. I think Trump stopping the ban was actually the first major loss for pro Israel interests(certainly not the last we have seen so far).

> Sounds like we need to really start hustling and push the lie flat movement hard on the Chinese platforms.

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.

Like it or not this is a competition between two nations. If they are going to push content that sways the populace by exploiting weaknesses why not the other way around?

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.

It's a competition between nations, but why support the political party that straight up says they hate you just because China also hates them?

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.

[dead]

>If you ask a US citizen who to blame for this trade war, it'll be trump.

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.

China faces many long-term headwinds but they're not in crisis yet. The Chinese housing bubble has been deflating since 2020. The state pension and healthcare systems are less than generous so care for the elderly is not that expensive (yet). And Chinese government debt is less than half the US despite being 5x the population.

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.

> the US represents only 8% of China's exports and only 2% of China's GDP. Losing that will hurt

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.

What is the difference between paying more for the item VS having less money to spend? Both to me seem like being unable to afford the things you need.

Americans buy a ludicrous amount of stuff they only think they need. American consumerism is unrivaled in the world.

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.

In the US half of consumer spending is done by only the top 10%

[1]: https://hive.blog/economy/@davideownzall/in-the-us-the-top-1...

There is a lot of poverty in the US.

The US has one of the largest agricultural sectors in the world, it should be no surprise that food is not in short supply. But we don't live in an era where people live in homes built from local gathered sticks and rocks and just need food to survive, our modern lives depend on far more than just food. Poor people are fat because we made extremely calorie dense foods the cheapest foods, poor people often shop by calorie per dollar, not because they have extra cash to throw around.

Try living on the US median wage only and let me know how much ludicrous amount of stuff you can afford.

<< 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.

It's more expensive to buy and prepare fresh food than shelf stable ultra processed foods and requires more time. Poor people have access to 'poor' calories. I would wager that children would also inherit the eating habits of poor parents.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20720258/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14684391/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4254327/

right, but so far the consumerism has been the only thing doing bread and circuses away from the real problems of housing and whatnot.

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'm not worried about the consumer aspect at all. It will be painful and maybe pull the wool off all the trumpets eyes, reveling his idiocy. But people are not going to be starving. Maybe starving for new clothes and iPhones like they get all the time.

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.

> In the US the poor are the ones who suffer from obesity.

Are there any developed countries where "can get enough calories" is a real question?

This is flat out advocating "the Maduro diet" as a good thing.

Long term savings, productivity increases, and infrastructure investments. Buy less today to have more tomorrow. The us individual hardly saves at all, the US gov/society has financed decades of deficit spending n the outcome of ww2, 20th century global industrialization, and the “exorbitant privilege” of financing/coordinating it.

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.

While this is all true, China knows all the economic levers to cause lots of pain to the US (eg selling t-bills) whereas the leadership in the US is so economically illiterate that it thinks trade deficits are theft and that tariffs are free tax money that will strengthen the US.

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.

>China knows all the economic levers to cause lots of pain to the US (eg selling t-bills)

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.

A small amount of selling T-bills from bond vigilantes already caused Trump to drastically pull back his plan once. If a holder as large as China started a big dump of T-bills it would cause a massive financial disaster. China would feel some pain too, but the US having far higher interest rates as it rolls over new debt into new T-bills would be extremely difficult for us. We are at economic Mutually Assured Destruction levels this is still a lever that China can pull that is in their favor.

In some sense Trump and co would want China to sell their t-bills. It will weaken the dollar (increasing competitiveness of US exports) and strengthen the yuan (decrease competitiveness of Chinese exports).

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.

> biggest crunch to the US will be to the consumer, the biggest crunch to China will be the worker

Why do you think America will have a layoff- and insolvency-free recession?

Do you have any links to support the assertion that China debt is worse than US?

I think most of the Chinese debt is actually internal, whereas most of the US debt is external?

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.

US debt is also mostly internal. 2/3 of all US bonds are held by US citizens or companies. Of the foreign holders of US bonds, Japan holds the most.

Almost all of US debt is internal. Social security and the federal reserve are the two biggest holders. Only 25% is in other countries, and the largest single other country is Japan at 3%.

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.

Great info. I imagine most of that 20% of Intra-Governmental Debt is Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid?

Direct exports from China to the US is 15% of their total. It's the largest fraction but not a majority.

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 mind of a serial bankrupcy expert being in debt gives one leverage. In reality all the piled up treasuries give China breathing room and their sell-off would put the US under stress. The US may be the largest customer of China but is dwarfed by internal customers and the rest of the world. Loosing customers hurts China but it can be compensated. Now as a supplier of volume goods China is much harder to substitute. And as a supplier of specialized high-tech goods China is impossible to substitute. Loosing suppliers in manufacturing breaks complete value-chains so there is colateral damage. On the other hand imagine some smaller critical US component breaking a supply chain in China - there will be fewer of such cases and bad cases can be handled with exceptions. Much different from the US situation where there are many more specialized components from all over the world are impacted.

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.

> 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

It's funny that I saw more and more opinions that Chinese will win the trade war by shopping and eating out more.

As much as China can prepare, it's still in a pretty vulnerable position and the whole "the Chinese people are more conditioned for hardship" is as much Chinese exceptionalism as any claim to American exceptionalism. At the end of the day they lose millions of jobs, factories shut down, and people suffer there too regardless of the CCP marketing about being "tough" and "prepared". Appear strong where you are weak or something like that. Meanwhile the US can see prices go up, but aside from a few specific items we can buy or make the things that China has been. At an increased cost, sure, but Americans can handle it.

> 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.

It's not exceptionalism as much as authoritarianism. The lockdowns that happened in China for COVID were real and extreme. Meanwhile there were no lockdowns in the US and a significant chunk of the electorate acts as though there was extreme government overreach and in response gained control of large chunks of government with those arguments.

Sure, the Chinese government finally capitulated to citizen demand eventually, but the degree of control compared to the US is hard to overstate.

Americans nearly rioted over unenforced (effectively voluntary) Stay-At-Home and business closures that were openly ignored by business owners. If we can't even survive a few months of not buying khakis and eating at Olive Garden, how are we going to survive a hardcore and sustained trade war?

Americans are just like anyone else for the most part, albeit with some cultural differences.

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.

And you think trade war with China is something that the entire nation believes is necessary hardship, when even Trump allies like Musk are speaking out against it, as is the entire business world?

Well I don't think it'll be that much of a hardship, but yea I don't think everyone is exactly aligned with how the Trump administration is going about it. Generally speaking "we have a problem with China - they took our jobs!" has broad consensus, at least in my experience. Also politically the Biden administration and others have undertaken steps to defend US economic interests against China.

I see no evidence that we will be aligned this time. A large portion of the population will be angry and blame Trump and the Republicans who supported this.

Personally I see it as a win-win. Tough on China, people get mad about their trinkets being more expensive, and then they kick the traitorous fools out of office and we go back to more sensible Democratic foreign policy and tough on China stances.

> At the end of the day they lose millions of jobs, factories shut down, and people suffer there too regardless of the CCP marketing about being "tough" and "prepared".

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.

Great then it is very simple and it won't bother them too much and we can gain 100k* jobs or so and pay more to make things here and everyone is happy. China can stomach the loss of a few million jobs and they shouldn't complain since it's no big deal.

* Job loss/gains wouldn't be 1-1 as new US factories would likely use fewer workers.

Why do you expect to gain jobs?

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.

> Why do you expect to gain jobs?

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?

> 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?

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?

> 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?

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.

> * Job loss/gains wouldn't be 1-1 as new US factories would likely use fewer workers.

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.

They'd think it because otherwise the prices would be too high and it would be difficult to sell the goods. If iphones go to $3000, the market for iphones will get much thinner.

That doesn't explain the ratio. If a highly efficient and automated China is employing (say) 1e6 people to supply US demand, it's implausible that anyone (including the US) would be able to spot a way to fire 90% of the factory workers when rebuilding the production line at same capacity anywhere else (including the US).

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.

To be clear I was suggesting that the number of jobs gained in the USA would not be 1-1 with the number of jobs currently in a given hypothetical factory. I.e. the Chinese factory loses 100 jobs, a corresponding American factory is unlikely in my view to gain 100 jobs, and instead the number may be much lower.

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.

Oh so we would gain more jobs then? So we'll take a highly automated factory in China, shut it down since it won't be selling products to the US, build that factory here even though it might be a little less automated, and then we'll have the same number of jobs and maybe more than the Chinese factory had? Sign me up! That sounds awesome.

If there is a goal for more factories in the US, and it's certainly not clear at all that this is a policy goal of the current US executive branch, there's not a clear route to achieving that goal.

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.

All great points and great questions - today however they're not really available for consideration because those jobs remain in China.

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.

> cutting good and fair deals with the EU

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.

Nah, the problem is EU will face the same problems the US is facing (they don't want products dumped on their markets at subsidized costs putting their workers out of business), and a lot of the posturing (Canada I think is different) is for the public and because Trump is an asshole but the EU sees the same problem the US does. Nevermind China very overtly aiding Russia in its war in Europe which has the EU not very happy. Guess we forgot about that?

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.

> Nah, the problem is EU will face the same problems the US is facing

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.

> Those can be ironed out.

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.

> Also China is happily helping Russia fight a war in Europe

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.

> The US is also helping Russia in its efforts right now, it's important to underline this.

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 I said before, you very much downplay the sort of damage the US is causing to its relationship with former allies. 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. This is far beyond political grandstanding.

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.

> As I said before, you very much downplay the sort of damage the US is causing to its relationship with former allies.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Again, nothing you cannot solve with diplomacy, negotiations and horse trading. What you are saying is fanciful.

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.

What "the same problem" EU sees? Because one huge problem EU has is America being literally hostile nation, aligning itself with Russia and capitulating to it. Oh, and threatening annexation of parts of EU.

And and hostile tariffs from USA on flimsy excuses.

I believe we were talking about trade and tariffs, so the same problem that the EU would see in this context is that Chinese manufacturing is generally better and cheaper than what western nations currently do, so the EU will have to maintain current protectionist policies or enact further trade restrictions with China or risk losing jobs to cheaper and better products from China. Germany is going to protect its auto industry, for example.

Europe specialises in high-value manufacturing - aerospace, precision tools and machinery, some pharma. China has been trying to enter those markets, but not with great success.

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.

Not great success yet. But sure, hopefully the EU and China can work out a great trade deal that works for them since they're not as you say competing markets, and everyone but America wins. That sounds great to me.

We can “buy or make the things China has been”? Buy from whom? Make in what factories, with what workers, with what supplies, equipment, and materials?

Ok if we can't then you're proving the need for economic and policy measures to make it so we can.

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).

The unemployment rate is what, 3%? Where are you going to find the millions of people needed to make the iPhone domestically? Immigration? Hah, that would be an interesting stance. Automation? It would work to fill some gaps, but even apple doesn't want to pay Chinese workers for tasks that machines can do today. Someone in their company decides on when they automate, and when they use elbow grease. They may be able to afford a lot of the capital outlay to greatly improve the productivity of their workers if effectively required to onshore, or they may just stop selling iPhones in the US for a few years if all cell phones become prohibitively expensive to own. If Apple can't make the economics work, I can't see who can.

> The unemployment rate is what, 3%? Where are you going to find the millions of people needed to make the iPhone domestically?

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.

We instituted many processes during the Biden era for bringing manufacturing to the US. They were all carrot based: provide stability for capital investments and even some tax benefits. This resulted in massive investments in factories in the US, the most in a generation.

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 largely don't disagree with anything you wrote.

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.

Cheap crap on Temu and phones that mainline social media into everyone's pockets are part of the circus machinery that keeps the population distracted and docile.

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.

what EU countries have a good t-shirt supply chain? do you know? I am pretty sure limited to poland, and maybe a few other eastern european countries.

as for MUSA, i buy a lot of t-shirts and none of them are made in usa, who are you thinking of?

You can Google something like "made in America t-shirts" and should find plenty of results as I did (not trying to be a jerk and say "Google it", really just trying to be helpful if you are indeed looking). I'm not sure about the European Union.

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).

For some things, I agree it’s important to have domestic capability. For most things, global trade works well for everyone involved, so long as we do it in a cooperative way. The current tariff bullying approach is the worst way of building domestic capability or improving trade relations. More likely the US will sink into a decade or more of stagflation or worse as world markets move on without us, far more easily than we can become self-sustaining.

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!

All I did was a quick google search, but I searched what the US imports from China, to fill in the word "stuff" from your post:

"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.

Vastly underestimating the impact.

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.

Unfortunately our homes, offices, and lots of infrastructure kinda require things like electrical equipment (amongst other trivial things like wood, metal, insulation materials, etc)

You are making a lot of bold claims without much to back it up. As someone who reads a lot about the topic, I would characterize your assessment as far removed from mainstream opinion and rosier than the rosiest professional assessments that don't come from an acolyte of Donald Trump. In other words, a fairy tale.

If you have a specific comment or point to make I'd love to talk about it. Most mainstream opinions aren't very valuable, though certainly there are some that are better than others.

When so much is thrown at the wall at once it makes it onerous and boring to respond to every slapdash point. If they had stumbled on a truly valuable and novel perspective that convincingly goes against all prevailing knowledge, I can only imagine they would have presented it with significantly more evidence than they did in that screed. Otherwise, mildly-educated people like me discard it immediately as empty rhetoric or maybe just propaganda. Aka trolling.

I think that's rather unfair, and if you don't want to participate in a conversation you can just ignore the comment instead of accusing others of trolling. I'm not trolling, I like to discuss and debate these topics on the Internet, and if there are facts or concepts that you think should require a source in civil conversation you can ask for those. This is also a new paradigm shift in America and so most of the mainstream opinion articles you read don't have much more information than anyone else, and funny that you mention propaganda because that's exactly what you're going to find hidden away in those mainstream opinions.

If you go against established facts you have a greater burden to prove your views aren't bullshit. Yet people coming from perspectives that just happen to line up with the teachings of Donald Trump always seem to provide less information. Do you not notice this trend? If you want to convince people try being convincing.

What specific information are you asking me to provide and for what specific claims? Happy to do my best, but all you are doing is ranting about my post and that's neither interesting nor productive.

The same Americans who voted in Trump and gave Republicans in Congress a majority because of inflation? How long do you suppose it will take to build all the industries in the US to replace Chinese goods, and who is going to be performing the cheap labor making those goods after deportations kick into high gear?

America has survived stagflation before in the 70s, but there was a large political fallout.

> it does not have any Vietnam hawks

Only chickenhawks that dodged the draft

Not to mention if your goal is to fix a trade imbalance with a specific country, you kind of need all of your allies to help you with it or it's never going to work.

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.

At the risk of going full Sweeny Todd with Occam's Razor, what if it's as simple as enriching himself and his cohort via market manipulation?

For that to work, you need to know that the market will recover. One short bout of playing with tariffs might be recoverable, but he's reaching the stage of long-term damage on tariffs such that companies are avoiding import/export relationships with the USA. Also hacking off allies doesn't fit with enriching him or his cronies.

Hard to argue with that. If I can inject a random thought, might not even be worth a reply.

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.

It most certainly is. This crew would rather be kings of a ruined plantation of a country than to have a middle class with any economic or political power. And that goes double for their attitude toward non-whites.

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.

Why not both? Russia mentoring the US admin on speed running towards authoritarianism (good for the cohort) while making the country weaker (good for Russia).

Hanlon's Razor could also be used here, and it isn't treason or greed, but just plain old stupidity.

Putin has convinced Trump, both overtly and covertly, that Trump can have what Putin has - personal control over a country of oligarchs. All Putin has to do to pull strings is feed Donald pointers that he willingly laps up.

> 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).

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).

It's hard to see what the Trump administration is doing and not assume their preferred outcome is hot war with China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

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."

> 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.

On the back of incredibly stupid identity politics that is easy to instigate in online spaces like twitter, where all the journalists go to find out what the most important topics in people's lives are...

Yup. That is how the incompetent fool in the Whitehouse pulled it off. Scam of the century.

It kinda feels like they aren't taking time to consider the effects of their actions, and assume things will somehow work out.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

--The Great Gatsby

"Kinda"?

If you read Marcy Wheeler [1], she points out that the Trump administration just can't figure out how to negotiate. All three failed "deals": Harvard, Ukraine, tariffs.. there's just no ask there.

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...

Thats kind of my point -- they've been given an ultimatum that is logically impossible, and the only road left is escalation.

> the only road left is escalation.

The other road is isolation, which I find much more likely. They'll just cut us off completely and deal with it.

These are not totally exclusive — the world may isolate the USA, and the USA may escalate with anyone (or everyone) to a hot war.

China has no interest in isolating from the rest of the world, Taiwan especially.

OP meant the US. The world and its allies will isolate US. Just like they did with Soviets.

I don’t see the Chinese willing to escalate, at least not kinetically. For now, it looks more likely that they are going to let the US have enough rope to hang themselves, seize opportunities, and play the long game.

The other possibility is that there's no strategy or goal beyond the fact that Trump likes the word "tariff".

What you say sounds very disturbing, and also resonates with me in a way.

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.

My theory is that by sufficiently pissing off allies, we get kicked out of alliances, and that lets Trump reduce military spending. Without the tit-for-tat of military spending for social programs, the federal government gets massively downsized. The end goal is shrinking the government back to levels not seen proportionally since before WW2.

The reach of the US economy to the rest of world will be back to before WW2 too. If the USA step back other countries will fill the space they leave, especially if the USA vacate the military bases in Europe. Those countries will be more free to swing to another security and economy partner.

There is nothing preventing him from bringing the fleets and the boys back to the US and cutting the budget right now. In fact, he’s doing the opposite.

Trump already agreed to increase military spending by 12%, hitting a trillion dollars a year.

My question is how it's possible to massively shrink the government without simultaneously shrinking the economy and country as a whole.

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.

[dead]

That seems like the sensible take, offshoring all manufacturing does not seem smart long term, but Trump is recklessly smashing things while stretching the powers of the executive branch.

I know nothing of economics, and am not trying to defend Trump's moves.

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'd be willing to consider that, but he's doing a ton of things that very clearly have _no_ upside and obvious downsides. As one example, he literally fired entire departments that were _generating_ money for the government. It's too clear that he's just doing whatever he happens to think of without putting any thought into whether it will actually be helpful.

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.

You forgot his other goal m, which is to make him and his family wealthier. The back and forth on tariffs was certainly insider traded to hell.

The dismantling of government is an ideological goal — increasing government revenue isn’t a primary objective

It isn't Trump's ideological goal. His only ideology is being the center of attention and twisting arms to get bribes.

Other people in the administration or in the penumbra may have ideologies more advanced than this, but Trump definitely does not.

[dead]

What is this “it” you speak of.

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.

Yeah, worse than the tariffs is the drastic policy changes by the day/hour.

You can't expect companies to make long term capital investments when everything is in flux like this.

It is also reflective of the fact that mid-terms are in 2 years and election campaigning starts in 3. Even if you believe tariffs will work, there will be short term pain. Best to run through that now in the hope that economic indicators are improving come election time.

that's been my thought on the admin's motiviations, do the hard part now and hopefully ride the wave back up through the midterms. voters have a short memory.

Sure, but what's going to cause a recovery from the Trump-cession we're about to enter? The pain is obvious, but where's the gain? America can't compete on cost with Chinese manufacturing, else it'd already be doing so, so you just end up with expensive "made in USA" stuff rather than cheap "made in China" stuff. The price hikes will be here to stay if that's the path we're going down.

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.

It seems that many did not come across https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes … and are still busy trying to figure out the allegedly intricate but evidently incorporeal designs this administration is wearing.

That’s a premise that would make me consider the wiseness of my actions.

> "do everything at once, without taking the time to do it right"

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.

Your question: Is it possible. Answer: Anything is 'possible'.

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.

You’re being down voted because you’re not saying anything meaningful.

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.

This is a concept that is seemingly alien to Americans.

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.

[flagged]

>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"

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.

Yeah, I think there's plenty of evidence to contradicts the theory that Trump is somehow "now or never" decisive.

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZLmhF7TgzY

> 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".

Something he has in common with Musk.

> 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

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?

I downvoted you because there's nothing to suggest this viewpoint is grounded in reality, so it's not really worth discussing. His leadership style has always been autocratic & opposition from SCOTUS and his own party is pretty much non existent and the opposition from the opposition party is soft (not that they have the numbers to do too much anyway). He has basically ignored whatever pushback there had been in other policy.

He could do it the right way, if he wanted to.

It has to do with countries not buying US treasuries. That used to be how the dollar system worked. Now that countries aren’t, tariffs are being used as an alternative. You can read the war finance article series for some background: https://advisoranalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/zoltan...

There is no issue with countries buying us treasuries. They sail off shelves. Until the current administration started to make it look like there’s a possibility that the country may bankrupt itself, which threw a risk component into US debt for like the first time ever

I think the real risk isn't USA going bankrupt as much as the dollar losing significant value relative to other currencies, thereby making holding US debt a bad deal for overseas holders, and/or possibility that Trump could do something previously unthinkable such as stopping interest payments on debt or trying to "make a deal" and renegotiate payments in some way.

I didn't downvote, but I don't think this seems like a very well thought out description of Trump's behavior. He doesn't care if he "will be fought", he wants to be fought, dramatically, because that's the show he's putting on. The fight is the whole point.

Perhaps, but who's the audience? Trump's 1st term fighting the "fake news" media was popular with MAGA and didn't cost them anything. Fighting rest of world on trade might also be popular in theory "trump being tough!", but will MAGA voters really eat it up if they are personally suffering financially as a result (& they'll be suffering the most since red state incomes tend to be lower than blue state ones).

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.

No, I don't think people are going to eat it up. I think he's screwing this all up, badly. He's an adept showman but very far from being infallible.

Trump's goal is strengthening his position in power. Changing the economy so that companies, states, and foreign countries depend on him is just what he wants.

Have you listened to the guy talk? There isn't a comprehensible thought in there, and there hasn't been for years. He's old, older than Biden was when he started his term, and probably suffering from dementia.

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.

I used to believe this. Now I believe we're supposed to believe this, and continue ignoring how calculated this mess actually is... and it's always too late when enough people catch on :(

I'm sure there are competent people whispering evil things in his ear, he appears very easy to influence. Just look at how he keeps flip flopping on Ukraine every time he talks 1-on-1 with Zelenskyy versus when he gets back to being surrounded by his cronies.

That doesn't make Trump any less demented.

>I'm sure there are competent people whispering evil things in his ear

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.

FWIW he seems to be losing this power. The last two weeks it feels like the market seems to be treating his emissions more like "whatever you say, old man" than it was last month.

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...

Some of that is the market doing the "la la la la la can't hear you!" thing, though. Which won't make the problem go away.

I suspect it's more... routing around the manipulation. If you have people basically obviously doing deliberate dump&pump&dump&pump loops... that only happens a few times before -- on the aggregate -- it gets averaged out by people figuring out that's what is happening.

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.

Some of both.

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...

Oh yeah for sure, I think we'll shortly hit the "... And Find Out" phase where the Reality TV Show becomes very unpleasant Reality

The only reason he was the least bit acceptable to begin with is that Biden was even older.

But after Biden dropped out, nobody seemed to notice any more.

That’s because the GOP is mostly as bunch of greedy hypocrites who will say anything to gain power. They aren’t actually thinking or using logic or acting in good faith.

I didn't say he is rational or even comprehensible - I said that he believes everyone is out to get him, and that explains the rushing way he acts.

FWIW, Bill Maher met him, and said his public persona is an act.

It might be that his private persona is an act. Why is that not a possibility?

Depending on the personae (is that a word?), it would be pretty clear, no? If one is really stupid and one is brilliant, how would the brilliant one be an act? If you can act brilliant, you are brilliant.

> If you can act brilliant, you are

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.

The story is from a co-host with Boris Johnson for some award ceremony. It’s a great read: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2449074521979085...

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.

It indeed was Boris - thank you! It's weird to compare my faulty recollection to the actual account; only 2 occasions narrated, not dozens - though it is implied, and the narrator wasn't an intern.

Trump seems to be a stupid person's ideal of what 'brilliance' is. So... his acting as brilliant is their version of brilliant, regardless of anything else. He is their alternative fact.

Also the weakling's idea of tough guy and the poor guy's ideal of a rich man.

Bill Maher is a coward who is groveling because his personal sense of self-importance makes him believe he will end up in CECOT.

It's not worth anything. I don't know where people get this idea that someone's "real" persona consists only of the things they say in intimate private settings. A guy who runs around saying things he knows aren't true and calling people names is a liar and a bully, even if he understands himself to be playing some kind of role or acts politely in 1:1 conversations with Bill Maher.

Groucho Marx quote comes to mind: "He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot."

This isn't even about how much of an asshole Trump is. It's about how he literally cannot string a sentence together.

They’re being fought because many of the things he has done are wildly unconstitutional.

If Trump believes that, it would reflect a complete lack of self-confidence in his negotiating skills.

You are making a valid point, in form of a question, despite the downvotes.

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.

I downvoted you because it's politics, and there is always opposition, a plan worth acting on includes handling the opposition and having contingencies. This is true for every politician in every context for the history and pre-history of humanity.

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.

[flagged]

I am surprised the mods haven't made an announcement to address the shift towards politics. It could be that there's no way to avoid it, but everything on HN has become more political lately, and as you say, there is only one right way to think or you're not part of the in group. I don't care about politics and I wish this place could focus on what tech things people built or the nuance of some programming language. No, the solution isn't to just step over the steaming piles of dog shit that interleave the remaining tech posts. Maybe we should crowd fund them all memberships to the Daily Kos and block their accounts ?

Most of the audience here is technical, but with a bent toward the startup/web audience. The economic instability is a topic of interest for that segment.

Yep, this is a political story that is unusually relevant here (as is the DOGE stuff).

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.

> I don't care about politics

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.

He has to do everything at once because he is a lame duck president so that part makes sense. The conflicting messages sudden reversal of plans causes the biggest issues.

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 has to do everything at once because he is a lame duck president

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.

That's the traditional meaning, but also commonly used to refer to politicians who are term limited, and can't run again.

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.

He does not believe he can't run again, so it's a doubly inappropriate description.

Trump and Steve Bannon have talked about finding a way to run for a third term.

And who will stop him from running again?

How bad are the economy and midterms going to be? Will Republicans think that supporting a 3rd Trump term will be good for their own reelection prospects?

They turned right around to pick him after the insurrection.

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.

I'd not be surprised if Republicans supported an illegal 3rd term run, other than the fact that I think they'll save their own reelection prospects first if it comes to that.

> he is a lame duck president

Doesn't his party control both houses of Congress?

Then why is he trying to rule 99% solo by executive order instead of working with congress to pass legislation?

Because he's a moron.

1: I agree he should. Tariffs by presdential order is an obscene power for Congress to delegate.

2: What 10 democrats would work with Trump? It would be gridlock for four years (which is fine).

1.) I agree. However, if it other countries can impose tariffs at the drop of a hat and it takes a literal act of congress to pass a tariff, they'll never happen. Would that be a good thing? Maybe. Maybe not. Congress is obviously mostly useless. I was reading, of all things, a buzzfeed a few months ago where the biggest gripes of current house/senate members were along the lines of "it takes way too long to get anything done" and "I'm pretty sure most of my peers drink on the job"

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.

They have majorities, but arguably to "control" Congress, you need 60 votes in the Senate, otherwise most legislation can be blocked by the filibuster.

Do we love or hate kyrsten sinema for protecting the filibuster now?

Still hate her (but Harry Reid far more). The filibuster is why we are in this mess - we can’t ever fix a problem. There will always be 41 Senators (often representing more cash and/or cows than people) to pass meaningful legislation.

Removing the filibuster can be done by majority vote, as it's just a rule of the Senate.

Yeah, that's why I blame Harry Reid.

By that definition there hasn't been a non-lame-duck President since Obama for a few months in 2009.

I'm just saying having a majority doesn't mean fully controlling congress. It has nothing to do with whether one is a lame duck.

Also, posting limits are annoying as fuck.

How is he a lame duck President??

Hes the most powerful President America has seen in living memmory.

Given how much soft power the US lost by defunding USAID and alienating its allies, he’s actually the weakest president in a long time.

The strongest president of the weakest USA. It’s not mutually exclusive, there are lots of all-powerful dictators in tiny countries.

He is no more powerful than any other president. He has been using his power more than others - and demonstrating why most don't use it (well some of the reasons, there are a lot of other reasons not to use power).

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.

Or least-scrupulous, which looks similar in the short-term. :p

I'd argue post 9/11 Bush was the most powerful president. There was nothing that man wasn't allowed to do during that time. If Trump was president during that time.... Not something I want to think about.

> Get a solid plan

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.

Every president has used executive orders.

However congress shouldn't have left something so important as tariffs up for modification by executive order.

No, the executive order was an invention of Lincoln to bypass congress to expand war powers.

That is easy to refute.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federa...

While it might be easy to refute that article does not refute what I said. The only evidence to the contrary found in that article is an executive order from the 1830s that was repealed two years later, which doesn’t make a strong case of disagreement.

The article doesn't say what they were but George Washington issued eight.

Democracies can’t plan far ahead.

They can. They need nonpolitical institutions with actual power. Yes it adds bureaucracy but it is more resilient. It doesn't take away from democracy, on contrary it strengthens it. The juridical power is one of those. Just like we don't vote on every single law, we should empower people who spend their entire career on specific areas of expertise to make long-term decisions. EU has this to a point. The US doesn't. Almost all of US institutions are political.

Tell that to the Austrians, Italians or indeed the EU.

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.

> That they haven't done that is one more indicator that they are thoughtlessly winging this.

Devils advocate argument could be that they needed to do this immediately and could not take the time to stockpile.

> 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.

The upcoming shortages are a new Pearl Harbor incident. The self-induced crisis will be fully blamed on China then leveraged to drum up popular support for a war against China.

China will just say they're not blocking products, the US just needs to remove the self-induced tariffs and their products will come back.

Good point, though I'm pessimistic about people seeking the perspective of They, and pondering it, when Dear Leader says They did it

What of the theory that they just want to inflate their way out of a debt crisis?

We would need to see some evidence of significantly reducing the rate that we take on new debt.

The only way to achieve that would be hyperinflation, which would be a worse option than the debt crisis

You’re an optimist. I kind of expect the Trump Administration to roll over when China goes to take Taiwan.

Covid lab leak theory wasn’t enough?

The long-term gain might be that this administration so significantly craters the economy and is so obviously responsible that enough voters recognize vote out enough of these clowns and accomplices to enact real useful reform (gerrymandering, electoral college, senate, filibuster, tax law, etc.)

This is the least likely outcome. Voters are more like fans of a sports team. They stick with the team whether or not they're doing well or making good or bad decisions. My brother would stay an Eagles fan even if they lost every game they played and hired software engineers instead of football players to play.

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.

> My brother would stay an Eagles fan even if they lost every game they played

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.

Check out the Cleveland Browns. They have packed crowds, endless merchandise sales, and full-throated support of their team even in light of gross mismanagement, sexual abusers, and more losses than wins.

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.

The battle is mostly for getting your base to show up.

Have you checked out the other ample entertainment opportunities in Cleveland lately?

And the same will be said about election choices.

Cuyahoga County is Democratic. You are thinking of Mahoning County/Youngstown.

I don't have to look up their attendance to tell you that there are a lot of die hard fans. Look at any major sports team that is losing and you will still see a lot of fans at the game. I'd expect a 50k seat stadium to have 20k fans even when there is no possibility of making the playoffs and every seat full when they are likely to win. That is for any sport, football because they play so few games is likely to be closer to selling out even when the team is losing just because you if you can get in you go.

Just fair weather fans exist. They are probably a majority. The minority that is die hard fans are still significant though.

> Look at any major sports team that is losing and you will still see a lot of fans at the game.

Arizona Coyotes?

Not many fans in seats anymore.

If it was just politics, I'd agree with you. And I hate to be the "but this time it's different" guy, but I really think it is different this time. Trump is more of a religious figure than a politician. His fans literally (in the literal meaning of the word literally) worship him, and he can do no wrong in their eyes. People have made him their entire personality. My wife's church sometimes spends more time talking about Trump than Jesus. In a religious context, personal hardship just strengthens their resolve and convinces them they're being persecuted for Knowing The Truth, just like debunking a conspiracy theory only serves to further convince the conspiracy theorist.

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.

fair weather fan is an insult used by fans to deride their own if they begin to waiver during the bad times

go kings (sacramento)

This is a reasonable theory, but empirically we are already seeing a lot of defection from the "team", before the real pain has even begun.

And there are people who love to use the term RINO who belong to what is essentially a re-badged Dixiecrat Party. Trent Lott, at the time head of the Republican Senate caucus badly embarrassed himself by letting people hear him say that Strom Thurmond was right in 1948.

There's a reason why Communist revolutions had a vanguard and political prisons.

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.

Even with sports teams it's only the most hardcore fans who keep coming to games after years of losing. Try buying NBA tickets for a successful team vs a losing one.

Good point. Less enthusiastic Trump voters may not vote for a Democrat, but they might also sit out a midterm election. Even diehard Eagles fans probably attend fewer games during a losing year.

> My brother would stay an Eagles fan even if they lost every game they played

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.

This is not every voter. For sure, there is the "4th generation Republican" or the "vote blue no matter who" crowd. But ~40 percent of the electorate considers themselves independent. I can speak from experience having folks who were registered GOP up until 2016, and then who started voting Democrat or third-party out of utter disgust with Trump.

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.

The economy will tank, Democrats will get elected, then when it's not fixed in 6 months Republicans will blame them and their voters will eat it up

That's sort of how we got here in the first place.

I hate that I know you're right.

based on what we've seen with Brexit, I'm not hopeful about the ability of voters to analyze the results of their vote.

I'm interested in hearing more about this. In my news sphere, there was a lot of doom over Brexit, it happened, and then the story stopped. What's it like and why aren't people connecting the dots?

It was really, really bad if you were in tech or finance.

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.

Thank you!

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 honestly don't understand the comment that started this thread. Brexit eventually led to a historic defeat of the conservative party who was (rightly) blamed for it.

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).

And now Reform, headed by Mr. Brexit himself, is clobbering both Labour and Tories in the polls: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next...

You tell me, but isn't this pretty noisy so soon after the last election?

There were a lot of regulatory change projects, that kicked over into technology, but not a lot of other impact (speaking as someone who works in banking).

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 were a lot of regulatory change projects, that kicked over into technology, but not a lot of other impact (speaking as someone who works in banking).

There is a huge impact on people who export things like food to the extent that some of them have given up

It has made it much more complex to operate across borders and may be gradually cooling the economy

Recent estimates put the losses at £100bn/year so far [0].

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/...

I'm in the EU and used to occasionally order stuff from the UK. Haven't since brexit, way too expensive now.

Gerrymandering is at the state level. The electoral college is in the Constitution.

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.

> What does "senate reform" mean other than filibuster reform

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.

>"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.

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 Senate _itself_ is gerrymandering on the national level.

That's mixing up "gerrymandering" with "wildly disproportionate representation to certain states because of a join-up bribe from 237 years ago". Nobody's redrawing the lines, and in a way that's part of the problem.

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.

Both of these comments show a pretty glaring ignorance of how the government worked prior to 17A, when Senators weren't elected by popular vote. Prior to that they were "elected" by state legislatures.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Smaller states were granted disproportionate influence on federal policy

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.

Jeez, what does a normative statement need to do to get a drink around here!?

> 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.

Assuming that voting is still a thing, too many people haven't yet understood where this administration is going.

He won with 49% of the vote. I think there are enough people to prevent him from winning again if there was another election held today, and The Dems didn't completely botch it.

These same people have no object-permanence, and would vote for someone even worse than trump in 4 years though.

The way administration is going there won't be elections, or if they happen, it will be like in any other authoritarian country, he will win even with 0%.

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.

Yeah that's what scares me. They are breaking laws AND lower living standards as if they won't have to run for reelection (or accept electoral loss) ever again.

yeah I thought that back in 2007

I had hoped Trump getting elected the first time would trigger a wave of voter reform. Instead, it just made it trendy to be constantly apoplectic.

Why did you think this?

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.

Everyone who thinks like you needs to watch this:

https://youtu.be/vMm5HfxNXY4?si=u4qVgziq6QRLoyEM

Democracy is the theory that common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. - H L Mencken.

It's not completely up to voters, it also requires credible third party to exist and gain traction. Because both Republicans and Democrats seem incapable of such reforms.

Why should the Democratic party support something that would A) weaken the Democratic party and B) Potentially throw more votes to the Republicans as exactly happened this past cycle?

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.

You believe people don't try to reform dems from within? Of course they do, but it does not work, at least in recent decades.

Democrats have instituted independent redistricting commissions, finance transparency laws, the popular vote compact, and many others.

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.

They are the same on boxing out third parties.

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.

Democrats at state and local levels have implemented ranked choice voting in dozens of municipalities despite it being beneficial for intraparty challengers and 3rd party candidates. Republicans have preemptively banned it in 11 states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...

They are not. Some form of non-first-past-the-post election system is necessary for any third party to become viable. Democrats pushed for Ranked Choice Voting in Maine and Alaska. Republicans have been trying to repeal both since implementation, and now have proposed a federal ban on RCV.

These are not the same.

It doesn't matter. Hare/Instant Runoff voting (deceivingly marketed as "ranked-choice voting" in the US) neither empirically [0] nor theoretically [1] improves the viability of third parties.

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...

I'm not a huge IRV fan or anything but I don't find rangevoting.org to be all that convincing from a US perspective. Most of their references and stats are two decades old or non-existent (e.g. no reference for 80-95% of AUS voters use the NES strategy). Their primary real world evidence is from Australia and Ireland, where independents and third parties currently make up 17% and 47%(!!!) of their parliaments. In the US that number is 0.3% and effectively 0% given how closely Bernie Sanders and Angus King caucus with dems.

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.

Yeah, Ireland doesn’t use IRV for parliament.

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.

That's a good point, I was grouping IRV and PR-STV when proportional representation isn't a guaranteed component of a ranked-choice system (though many of the dem implemented RCV systems do use it for things like county board or city council seats). Australia's House does use IRV and is at 12% (or 15% if you subtract two vacancies from the major parties).

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...

I am a huge fan of proportional representation/multimember districts, but I think there are some valid arguments that they are not constitutional (and a lot of invalid arguments that may nonetheless carry the day—c’est la vie américaine).

Baker vs. Carr and equivalent decisions are a big problem

> Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2].

And probably without even trying. Once it becomes better known, gaming the system like this will happen more often.

I would be happy to support literally any alternative voting scheme, but the context of this thread is actually-existing American democracy.

That's structural. Our system stabilizes at two viable parties. For one of the two to encourage a third party, without changing the system first (which would likely mean constitutional amendments, so, will never happen) would be to invite the imminent destruction of one of the two existing parties—probably their own, if they're promoting parties at-all similar to theirs.

To make third parties viable would require to move away from "First-past-the-post", which is much more heavily opposed by the GOP then vice versa.

Democrats are in no danger of losing to a third party. They are in danger of being spoiled by them. It makes sense to oppose them.

If they don't like it, they should be pushing for ranked-choice voting.

>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.

>They are the same on boxing out third parties.

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.

Maybe the fact that you haven't been exposed to the "good enough" third parties is an indictment of the current system of media gatekeeping.

In the age of the internet, I don't think its the media doing the gatekeeping. Arguably, exploitive social media algorithms have put a serious dampening on surfacing better information to the average citizen, because unfortunately thats were seemingly the majority of folks consume media, and that is optimized for what is effectively outrage, regardless of the platform.

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.

Where are these "good enough" third parties? In my (mostly but it's complicated) Democratic state, there have been third party candidates in various local positions, especially in urban areas, but it's been more a way to thumb their nose at Democrats rather than any political differences. I struggle to see how any left-leaning third-party would have much relevance in any of our bluish states and they are unlikely to get any traction in red states. If we want to talk about a third-party that looks like Eisenhower Republicans, now that might be interesting but thus far the right-wing of the country has shown little appetite.

> If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other

I don't see any reason to think this is accurate.

>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.

How is that an example? That's assuming that the Tea Party has good ideas and that's why it was able to take over the Republicans. It may very well be that the Tea Party's success had nothing to do with the merit of their ideas and more to do with an expression of rage.

The Democratic party does its best to isolate their more "radical" voters and politicians and does whatever it can to try to appeal to whatever their consultants tell them the "median" voter is. The Republican party embraces its most crazy elements from the depths of Twitter and puts them on a national stage.

> 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?

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> There is no party less democratic than the Democratic party

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.

The problem is that their revealed preference is "keep a two party system", when another choice would be "support coalitions in order to broaden the discourse and ensure the most democratic outcome possible".

A private political party does not have to support positions it does not agree with, while simultaneously losing strength to advance their own agenda.

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.

And yet there's multiple areas where Democrats have introduced systems for getting better support for independent and third parties...

Meanwhile Republicans have pre-emptively banned all forms of ranked choice voting at all government levels in eleven states.

But do go on.

What's the preferred world for Republicans?

Dems are the lesser of two evils. As long as we don’t have ranked choice voting, which requires a constitutional amendment, we will continue to vote in the servants of the billionaire class. Next time around, it may be the servants of the liberal billionaires instead. The underlying reality is that wealth inequality is anti-democratic as it concentrates power in the hands of the few.

> As long as we don’t have ranked choice voting

Oops

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3040...

Ranked choice is a bad idea if gaming the system is any possibility. Approval voting gets you all the benefits ranked choice claims to have with none of the downsides, with the bonus that it's easy to explain to people.

> As long as we don’t have ranked choice voting ... we will continue to vote in the servants of the billionaire class.

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.

If a third party ever truly gained traction on the national stage, what makes you think they won't be bought by the billionaire class? Musk basically bought the government purse strings for less than $300 million. That's pocket change for the truly wealthy.

American society is in crisis and this crisis will likely continue to grow economically as well as due to larger effects on the horizon such as global warming. From a practical standpoint if we are serious about unseating the power of the billionaire class (which is highly realistic as society continues to self-destruct over the long horizon) things like ranked choice voting should serve as tactical goals in a broader struggle for democratic process in our country. But yes it would be naive to consider ranked choice voting to be enough on its own to unseat them.

RCV is a weakass attempt to move us in the direction of the Westminster system without actually just fixing the system. You want Westminster just go there and don't fuck around half-assing it with RCV.

>Dems are the lesser of two evils.

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.

Some things we can attribute to the Democrats:

- 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.

> third party

If you had open system (not one or two-party system) there would be more than three parties.

it is an open system; the two-party-in-practice nature of it is a result of optimizing over the ruleset. specifically, you need to get rid of the winner-takes-all vote

> (gerrymandering, electoral college, senate, filibuster, tax law, etc.)

Open a news website. Several news websites. Turn on the TV. Talk to some people about politics. How often do those topics come up?

Yuuuup. About half of voters don't even understand how marginal income tax rates work, that is how little they know what's going on and how anything at all works in the mysterious and confusing world around them, and a lot more are barely better off than that. Worrying about gerrymandering et c. is nerd shit, most people don't know a thing about it. They're more likely to, literally, vote on whether general vibes are currently good or bad than to give any fucks about specific policies like that.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...

/* TV is like twitter: in order to preserve one's sanity, it's best to never use it, except for highly technical things like weather forecast or watching sports live. Despite that, it's the pastime of hundreds of millions. */

I agree. They definitely don't come up (or campaign finance reform). I wouldn't suggest a candidate run on those issues (a better platform would be anti-chaos), but responsible politicians might be able to enact them once elected.

When it all crashes and burns, people would wonder how they got to that point

Good luck. Jan 29th Trump took full credit for a roaring stock market. Today's decline is Biden's fault somehow. 30% of the country (at least) will believe this with not a single thought as to whether it makes sense.

This gives me the thought that maybe some elites who back the current government are looking forward to making changes, but it is too risky for themselves to stand up and make changes, so they push out Trump to make a mess so they can be the hero correcting all of these, with much less resistance.

If we're indulging in conspiracy theories, I can say those elites are Russian oligarchs. Anyone know if Trump watches RT International?

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.

When the voters turn on Trump, they will not adopt the pet causes of either you or me...

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Brexit was similar. What amazed me about Brexit was how nobody that voted for it cheered when it came in.

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.

> Hence the customer is paying 1175 for the 1000 bike, not 2450.

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.

You are correct in that it is all based on margins. I am used to the UK where there is VAT, plus multiple steps in an import chain, from importer, distributor, wholesaler and retailer. With some brands the importer is the distributor, sometimes the distributor is the wholesaler and sometimes the wholesaler is the retailer. Supply chains depend on the product to some extent and if the product is exclusive to a given supplier.

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.

Doesn't this analysis kind of break down if all of a sudden the domestically produced products shoot up in price because all of the components and raw materials are now subject to large tariffs? Suddenly there is a lot more room for profit if the prices of your competition goes up.

Yes, for domestic manufacturers. To go with the bicycle example, you could assemble bicycles in the USA for a specific niche, maybe cargo bikes or tricycles for the mobility impaired. The frame, wheels, tyres, brakes, gears, seats and other parts would be imported with tariffs paid. There would be several suppliers and limited options for Hollywood accounting.

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.

> Brexit was similar. What amazed me about Brexit was how nobody that voted for it cheered when it came in.

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

There were no public celebrations, it was not as if the Berlin Wall had just fallen. The only bubble I was in at the time was the UK, the rest of the world really didn't care.

right, so you've now moved the goalpost from "cheering" onto "public celebrations"

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

Hi, studying economics :)

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.

> 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.

Sorry, to clarify: by "factory worker" I'm referring to the pre-offshoring state of your typical American factory job. A skilled employee who's closer to a plant operator and troubleshooter than an assembly-line drone is, of course, another case and can make very good wages.

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.

Absolutely. A factory worker doing something that a Bangladeshi factory worker is doing (expertly but manually sewing garments or shoes) can only make comparably much to the Bangladeshi worker, and would need to survive in comparable conditions, unable to afford more.

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.

> only possible because most of the rest of the world was devastated by WWII

Maybe this is the situation the Trump administration is striving for

Recombinant insulin is exactly the kind of high value IP the US excels in producing.

Historically, yes. The arson performed on our research funding puts that at risk for anything which isn’t already clearly close to commercially viable.

I generally agree with everything you're positing here, except for this…

> 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.

The data don't bear this out. Insurance companies do represent some level of inefficiency and are easy scapegoats, but saying this only prevents people from better identifying and fixing actual cost centers. Here's a good breakdown of contributions to total national health expenditures by type in 2023: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

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.

If you go to the source of the data linked there -- cms.gov -- you'll see that this is only one side of the equation: health spending by product.

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.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf

That is the dollars spent for insurance plans. Those dollars then reappear in the product spending figures, less some amount of overhead and margin for insurance. Those additional data you provided don't say anything more about exactly what that is, nor do they imply the total overhead and margin of health insurance is $1.5T.

Is it? I know insurance bureaucracy has overhead but is it more than personnel or materials?

Any casual glance at the finances of a health insurance company will quickly throw cold water on the "health insurance companies are greedy scamming dirt bags"

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.

> 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.

Is it?

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-the-...

What is the dollar amount for each component?

To emphasize, there's a massive difference between high-end manufacturing which is important for national security, and manufacturing of toys and t-shirts, especially in an economy with a low 4% unemployment. Those low-end manufacturing jobs can't come back to the US, and nor should any attempt be made to make that happen. Any industrial or trade policy that doesn't factor this in is not pareto optimal.

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.

Well, there are some that absolutely should be done locally. Supply chain risk goes up hugely during time of war. We are very good at protecting shipping lanes but not perfect. Canada is a fine place to leave things as she shares a land border with us; Europe, for some things, is not. Industries needn't be wholly relocated, but at least some level of manufacturing for many of those key areas must remain either in America or very close to us.

>>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.

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.

Perhaps, but I do see this as a mostly-disconnected issue. Companies in China are extremely profit-seeking. We're talking about countries that run literal sweatshops, so let's stipulate worker's rights and living wages aren't high in their considerations.

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.

Never is a long time. The more capital, skill, and energy intensive manufacturing becomes the more likely it will end up in the US. As an example, you don't want your 100 million dollar t-shirt making machine in Bangladesh. You want it in the US where you have 24/7 power, no risk of revolution, cheap capital, access to skilled labor and so on. You can take the $25 an hour hit to pay a US worker because it's practically nothing compared to the machine.

Absolutely. Right now, though, people haven't built nine-figure ultra-robotic t-shirt factories because they can "cheat" around the issue of tech advancement and requisite R&D investment because they can just offshore to avoid spending that money. And, when that happens, it will employ a dozen people rather than hundreds or thousands.

> it's never again going to be profitable to pay American workers to make t-shirts rather than Bangladeshis.

Indeed, America is the world leader in manufacturing Bangladeshis ;)

I agree with almost everything you said except there's one founding assumption that enables offshore manufacturing that you describe.

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.

This is a good point. Rep. Rogers' amendment to DOD for FY25, which just came out, includes:

- $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

My two cents is that if this had been, from the start, a dedicated effort to decouple the US economy from Chinese producers, for national / economic security reasons, then they might have been able to convince me that the short term pain might result in something long-term beneficial.

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.)

Renegotiating trade with Mexico and Canada was one of his most prominent achievements of his first term. Fair to say that deal wasn't substantially different from NAFTA, but it was a deal that he approved. To come back a few years later and blow it up as being completely unfair is just screaming that he is acting on pure emotion and not logic. Even if he were capable of giving a coherent justification for his actions, he's proven himself to be a completely unreliable negotiating partner. Other countries are refusing to deal with any intermediaries like Lutnick or Navarro because they are all pushing separate agendas and Trump has not held to any of them. They're just going to wait for him (or Congress) to break.

Dont forget the dualities of “nato article 5 is for suckers, theyre on their own” followed by “europe needs to pay us for nato protection.” Then “nato needs to increase defense spending and take care of themselves” followed by “you need to buy us defense products!” Believing the stated (“sane washed”) strategic goals only makes the actions more damning as evidence of incompetence.

Yep, the giant Canada tariffs, in particular, as his first act on trade, was probably the most deeply weird and inexplicable thing I've seen a major world leader do in my lifetime.

I've seen lots of policies I've disagreed with or despised, but very few that are just weird.

I certainly would like to see more American made products and manufacturing, unfortunately, making that happen is not just a matter of shuffling money around, capricious tariffs, and the president posturing for "deals" like a real-estate shyster.

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.

>It's our own dumb fault

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 same workers, on the other hand, do enjoy the inexpensive consumer goods (clothes, electronics, home appliances, etc) produced in less expensive places like China or Bangladesh or Vietnam.

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.

Consumer goods that on average are of lower quality and do not last as long, forcing consumers to make more frequent purchases, ultimately costing them more. In the 1950s one could buy a good quality toaster for life. It's very difficult to do so now.

That's a bad comparison.

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.

While not all that is old is great, it's still a solid example.

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.

You are living under a rock if you think consumer demand is for expensive high quality things.

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.

I don't get this though. I had a $10 toaster from Walmart I bought when I went to college. It lasted me over a decade before I gave it away, still working fine. It was a pretty crappy and basic toaster (hot spots), but it was a crappy and basic toaster the day I bought it and was a crappy and basic toaster the day I gave it away. Are you people really destroying your toasters every year or two? How?

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.

> It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day

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.

> shipbuilding

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.

Nope. It was well understood that the American worker was on the chopping block back in the time of Triffin and even Keynes. "Win-win" was always a line sold by people who understood that it would actually be "win-lose" but who expected to be on the winning side (and generally were).

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.

The American worker has gotten continuously richer over that time. Is it so bad to be a nurse rather than feeding widgets into the widget machine?

Adjusted to purchasing power?

Yes, but it could be sold as a "win-win".

For last 20 years, I can agree; but the boom of outsourcung started nearly 40 years ago.

Externalize your costs, internalize your profits, build moats, gain cartel power, seek rent.

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

Paradoxically for some, the state's power is needed to keep the markets free and competitive. An obvious example is the protection of property, hence state-financed police and courts. A slightly less obvious, but as important, are anti-monopoly protections.

Game theory should be taught much wider, I agree.

'Dumb' is probably the right word. That's how a free market works - every actor works in their own interest. If you try to do something moral but it profits less, then you'll be competed to bankruptcy. Just how it works.

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.

Look at the Auto work force in 1960 and in 2025. Wages became so high that it drove automation/robots and created the Japanese/Korean/European auto industries. Had huge tariffs been enacted we would still have some of those jobs in the USA, but those lost to robotics would still be lost due to the basic economics of fabrication. Can this all be rolled back - All the King's men and all the King's horses can not put Humpty Dumpty together again. I can see a possible future where people are all paid the same $$ and you can not 'shop for slaves' as we do in Asia. This level field would take a while to achieve - even now wages in China have risen a lot and they are not the cheapest labor country now, but their assembled physical plant still dominates. China now has excess physical plant and must replace the USA as a large buyer. Other countries feel the same pressures and erect tariffs of their own. I see many years of this levelling to occur. USA will have to reduce these high tariffs because the USA needs many things and it will take 10+ years to create the physical plant that was allowed to rust away over the last 20-30 years - even now a little has returned, but the 'rust belt' has been melted down and it will return slowly.

>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.

How would you reverse it?

Very few and here is why. Making structural changes to an economy requires a lot of investment. But tariffs reduce investment in two ways:

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.

There is also the fact that tariffs are protectionist and reduce competition in the market. It allows lesser products to succeed due to where they're made, rather than on the merit of the product. This inherently makes companies less competitive and less required to respond to consumer demand. That means long-term weakness and even less ability to compete.

Agreed, and tariffs are an impediment to specialization, which is the basis for innovation that drives long-term economic growth.

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.

You should probably tell the Soviet Union that who used to give graduate students at Tashkent State University a cotton picking quota albeit one much more lenient than the undergraduates

It's important to be careful with value judgements like this.

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.

This is the theory behind tariffs when applied to specific industries or products because the tariff amount can be adjusted to suit the dynamics of that market. When applied broadly I can't see how it won't just increase costs and create incentives to not compete on quality when you now are "the cheap option".

3. The net of trade and capital flows is zero. In other words, foreigners who export to America in exchange for dollars have to get rid of those dollars somehow. If they aren’t buying American goods and services, their only option is to save/invest in America. Tariffs cut off this investment stream into America.

America’s trade surplus in services rose to $293 billion in 2024, up 5% from 2023 and up 25% from 2022, according to Commerce Department data.

Yes, factories do not teleport.

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.

I think it is the permanent end of American economic/political/cultural dominance, which is a long-term gain for the world, but it's going to put the hurt on a lot of people (myself included). I am not quite altruistic enough to celebrate being sacrificed in this way, but I can see that when the future history books are written, they may look back at this as the end of a blight.

From an economic standpoint, completely free trade is best. From a national interest standpoint, the more key industries that are local, the better. The more inefficient, the more employment. And yes... that means higher prices for most everything.

This line of thinking IMHO requires strategic tarrifs. I think many people on both sides would (did, under Bidens last term?) support tariff's for national security. The reason blanket tariffs are a bad strategy here, even if they also cover the national security aspects, is because the voting population doesn't like prices to rise across the board, and will nearly 100% vote out whoever implements them, with the aim of supporting someone who claims they will reverse the policy.

So, a reasonable middle ground is what is needed. A country should not have so much outsourced that it is extremely vulnerable to supply chain problems. And a country should also not have so much local production that it is inefficient and poor. I think that tariffs have a role to play here but, obviously, they should not be ridiculous like the Trump tariffs. They should be a lot more predictable and if tariffs are adjusted they should change slowly over time to not cause economic disruptions.