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.
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.
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>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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."
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...
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
Trump already agreed to increase military spending by 12%, hitting a trillion dollars a year.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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>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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It might be that his private persona is an act. Why is that not a possibility?
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."
Bill Maher is a coward who is groveling because his personal sense of self-importance makes him believe he will end up in CECOT.
This isn't even about how much of an asshole Trump is. It's about how he literally cannot string a sentence together.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
They’re being fought because many of the things he has done are wildly unconstitutional.
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.
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.
If Trump believes that, it would reflect a complete lack of self-confidence in his negotiating skills.
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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.
> 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.
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.
Then why is he trying to rule 99% solo by executive order instead of working with congress to pass legislation?
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?
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.
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.
Every president has used executive orders.
However congress shouldn't have left something so important as tariffs up for modification by executive order.
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
Covid lab leak theory wasn’t enough?
You’re an optimist. I kind of expect the Trump Administration to roll over when China goes to take Taiwan.
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.
The battle is mostly for getting your base to show up.
Have you checked out the other ample entertainment opportunities in Cleveland lately?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
> 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
I'm in the EU and used to occasionally order stuff from the UK. Haven't since brexit, way too expensive now.
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/...
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.
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.
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.
Everyone who thinks like you needs to watch this:
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
>>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 ;)
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
'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.
There is a reason high tariffs are only implemented after very long, multi-generational intervals, e.g., 1820s, 1890s, 1930s, 2020s.
The consequences are so bad that everyone who remembers the disasters brought on by high tariffs must be dead for anyone to think it is a good idea.
So, even if the purported goals are good, even achieving them will be outweighed by the disaster.
Plus, companies in countries protected by high tariffs inevitably become globally uncompetitive.
Edit, add: Even worse, most high tariff schemes have distinguished between placing the high tariffs on only finished goods and exempting the raw materials or components from the tariffs. This administration makes almost no such distinctions, just sprays tariffs everything, so harms US manufacturers as well. The only exemptions are the ones who pay tribute (e.g., sponsoring inauguration, etc.), so it is almost more of an extortion scheme than a tariff plan. A particularly bad example was revealed as the Japanese delegation came to negotiate, asked what concessions the US wanted, and could get no straight answer [0]. It seems the US group just expects the tariffed nations to supplicate and bring adequate gifts, not make adjustments according to a master plan. Very strong indication there is no plan, which is the worst possible case.
So, while I completely agree with the concept of looking for a silver lining, I'm not seeing any...
[0] https://petapixel.com/2025/04/21/japan-cant-get-an-answer-on...
>There is a reason high tariffs are only implemented after very long, multi-generational intervals, e.g., 1820s, 1890s, 1930s, 2020s.
You need to read more history. The link between tariffs, or any specific federal policy, and how a time period looks to the next generations is iffy at best and probably not really correlated much or at all.
The 1820s-40s were looked upon by following generations the way many look at the 1950s today. From the POV of the mid to late 1800s it was seen as uncomplicated and peaceful because the tension and strife leading up to the civil war and the cultural messiness that followed had yet to build. From the POV of the industrial economy of the late 1800s and early 1900s it was seen the same way but with a heavier emphasis on cleanliness and purity because even if you were nominally poorer and subject to more chance of starvation living and working on a farm you owned was arguably nicer than a tenement and factory you didn't.
The 1890s on through the 1920s were also looked upon fondly by subsequent generations as a time of massive progress. Mechanical power via fossil fuels and steam became the norm, railroads were everywhere, factories sprung up, all manner of goods and services formerly reserved for the wealthy became the domain of the everyman.
Obviously the 1930s don't get looked fondly upon and the jury is still out on the 2020s.
Tay Bridge syndrome.
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.
Since there is no way for the US to compete based on cost or capacity (we just don't have the workforce numbers) with China, then the only other option is to force domestic supply chains to spring up through restrictions.
I think we should do pretty much exactly what China does:
1.) you want to sell a product to the US? You have to produce it here and the facility must be partially owned by a US company. Also you must transfer IP.
2.) Since we can't get away with massive forced and/or slave labor (legally), then create a new visa class for temporary workers that is excluded from minimum wage, worker protections, social security, etc. (yes, basically a slave class)
Once we build capacity and knowledge back, then start shift back to a more domestic workforce.
Very very nasty... but doable. The other option is to just nuke China.
If your only two options are holdings slaves or nuking a significant proportion of the world population some debugging needs to occur in your thinking.
I suppose those U Chicago economists who proposed adopting an immigrant, might be onto something in this climate.
> slave class
> other option is to just nuke
Ah yes the two choices americans have in their lives... enslave someone, or genocide someone. From the 1500s to the 2000s, some things don't change. Some even call it american ingenuity :-)
>> short-term pain / long-term gain for American economic interests
That only works if the policy isnt changing day to day (or across presidential cabinets / administrations.) It takes a lot of capital and time to build local factories, and I would not feel comfortable with that investment w/o assurances there will still be a market for local goods next week, next month, or in 10yrs
Yeah this is the biggest issue. No one is going to make a long-term investment to accommodate such a capricious policy maker. And certainly not with Congress making noises about overriding him. The upfront costs of reshoring manufacturing need to be amortized over many years to make sense and there's no belief these policies will be in place that long.
Here's just one example where I think, "maybe".
I've been shopping for an Airbrush. These were a dream of mine as a kid. Back then the major brands were Made in the USA and were expensive enough that they were out of reach for 14 year old me.
Today the main companies from back then have "Made in the USA" on their websites but Badger (https://badgerairbrush.com) doesn't look like it's been updated since 2018 and Paasche (https://www.paascheairbrush.com) seems only slightly better.
Another popular and slightly newer brand is Iwata from Japan.
I suspect that Chinese imports have been eating these companies lunch for decades. I suspect that the Chinese government is subsidizing the products and their shipping and artificially lowering the cost and that they have been doing this for a very long time.
> I suspect that the Chinese government is subsidizing the products and their shipping and artificially lowering the cost and that they have been doing this for a very long time.
Why would the Chinese government be subsidizing airbrushes of all things? Is that a strategically important industry? Are they planning on capturing the global airbrush market? To what end, exactly?
My first reaction also but think about it. An airbrush isn’t an airbrush but a pneumatic system. An electronic toy isn’t a toy but an electronic system. At a large enough scale and over a long enough time frame.. lots of things are strategically important when you’re talking about the basic ability to manufacture stuff independently
Right? Its like a ballpoint pen. A basic commodity. But there's a lot of challenge in manufacturing the tiny balls and the tips to such a high amount of precision to mass produce quality ones cheaply.
Just looking at the diagram of the airbrush, there's a little bit of complexity there in machining all of that good, quickly, and at scale. Lots of little parts to control it which to work well need to have high quality machining.
> "tariffs imposed during the 19th century spurred industrialization and ultimately positioned America as a global superpower"
it's not "the one thing", which contributed to it. There are multiple factors which spurred industrialization, some of them are:
* Europe and Japan was destroyed and they had other problems to deal with
* Soviet Union was seen as an enemy
* Many US soldiers returned home from war and they needed a job
* When many people started working in manufacturing, they needed different optimizations for their process, which lead to more manufacturing
> Many US soldiers returned home from war and they needed a job
It was a combination of US soldiers returning home after drawing government pay while fighting abroad, rationing limiting what could be purchased by those who remained home, and the one-two-three punch of the GI bill subsidizing land purchases, the interstate highway system effectively creating the American suburb, and process improvements from the war making automobiles drastically cheaper.
From an economic perspective these new blanket import tariffs are a classic own-goal: tariffs are good for developing industries, but these levies hit huge, mature supply chains, so the main outcome is higher consumer prices, squeezed real wages, and slower growth.
A common example is Smoot-Hawley’s tariffs deepening the Great Depression, and early 2025 data already show trade and hiring slipping, but we won't know the full effect for a while.
As for the "bring manufacturing to the US" argument - tariffs often reroute, not reshore. GoPro moved from China to Mexico, Apple from China to India, Hasbro from China to Vietnam, to name a few.
Funny thing about a recession now is you can have standards of living increase for 10s millions of people due to how concentrated consumption and wealth is. Weird times
The problem is the chaos.
No competently run company is going to invest in more-expensive domestic production based on what the administration is doing because there can't be any expectation that policies will remain in place until production can be brought online. It doesn't even make sense to consider planning to onshore production because there's no reasonable expectation that the current policies will be in place in a month, much less in the year or more needed for a production change.
I think that even if tariffs were the solution this administration is not competent enough to make it work.
I think this depends on what you mean by “American economic interests”, ie top-line numbers or the economic future of individual Americans.
I genuinely believe that this will be a decade long struggle to generate a long-term benefit to the American nation (ie, the average person) via tariffs as a tool of class warfare and economic restructuring. If you read around MAGA forums, you’ll see this described as a “Mag7 problem, not a MAGA problem”.
But that may not be what you’re asking.
No. Most of these goods are things like blankets and spoons. Do you really want to manufacture those to be at the lead? Even if you hate China, you can offshore them somewhere else (ie: South of America). Instead, the policy should have been a targeted one: That is target a few key industries that are critical (ie: ship building) and put forward a plan to move capacity back to the US.
The trouble with people who keep trying to show me the potential positives with this administration are that even if they were there, and they often are not, they're an accident if they exist - not an intended result. These guys are just wrecking shit based on their own interests - looking for a silver lining is helping them out.
Yes. China already dropped some of their tariffs today. More to follow.
The goal was never to bring manufacturing back to the US. It's to negotiate new tariffs.
With China specifically, I could also see a deal that included stricter enforcement of US IP laws, which is definitely destroying businesses and the job loss that comes with it.
> The goal was never to bring manufacturing back to the US.
It was or at least it was stated as goal. However the narratives changes quite often with these tariffs.
> China already dropped some of their tariffs today.
Such as?
Very clever 4D chess. But you wouldn't plan to make that come about by repeatedly punching yourself in the face, would you? Oh, and also punching all the allies you'd need to help you in the face too.
This genuinely looks like a real "emperor has no clothes" scenario.
Trump is 100% convinced his (long disproven both theoretically and empirically) trade theory is true, and no one can talk him out of it.
So it has to play out until the effects are unbearable.
Or until congress votes to take his tariff powers away: https://www.kwch.com/2025/04/30/senate-voting-resolution-tha...
>Trump is 100% convinced his (long disproven both theoretically and empirically) trade theory is true, and no one can talk him out of it.
Also nobody tries particularly hard. The secret to longevity in a Trump administration is to effusively praise the boss constantly and minimize direct contradictions. Which turns into "good tzar bad boyars" - the boss is never wrong, only badly advised.
> Curious if there is anyone here who genuinely sees this as short-term pain / long-term gain for American economic interests.
I don't. I see this as the intentional razing of the US economy and interests.
Don't see how this will be short term pain.
Supply chains took a long time to get established again after covid for things coming in.
Do Americans really want to do the manufacturing they don't want to do anymore?
> 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.)
IIRC At the same time (early 20th c.), the US was a major net importer of people. This led to a very low effective tariff rate.
Why is this a “political” angle? If you believe its for a long term gain, then you believe in a certain economic theory that others may not believe. What does politics hace anything to do with that?
Choosing a certain type of economic theory or having certain sectors of the economy do better than others is 100% politics. I don’t think there is an economic theory where everybody benefits equally around the same time without any downsides.
> Why is this a “political” angle? If you believe its for a long term gain, then you believe in a certain economic theory that others may not believe. What does politics hace anything to do with that?
It's a political angle because it's to the responsible politicians' advantage to push that economic theory. I think the claim is not necessarily that economists who believe this theory are acting politically, but that their voices may be amplified by politicians for, let us say, less than scientific reasons.
Let's assume that Trump actually has a point in divesting from China (which, I think, he has - his disastrous approach to it aside).
The Democrats could never do anything against China that imposes short-term economical pain because their own voters would immediately punish them for it and the entire media from left to far-right would put them under fire. Even marginal economical pain has immediate political consequences - I'd argue that Harris' loss was mostly due to rising and unanswered problems about exploding cost of living, chiefly eggs.
The Republicans however? They still have the same constraint from the left to center media and voters - but crucially, their own voter base is so darn high on their own supply (and their media has long since sworn fealty to even the most crackpot people), they are willing to endure anything because their President told them to.
It's "Only Nixon could go to China" all over again, and frankly it's disgusting.
> Curious if there is anyone here who genuinely sees this as short-term pain / long-term gain for American economic interests.
I think at a base level someone must think that isolationism is good. Personally I think the world should be building deeper connections not less in order for humanity to move to the next level. I fear that we'll never reach that level without an existential force (like aliens showing up a la Star Trek). Until then, our petty differences will continue to get in the way.
Tariffs may be helpful for some areas of the economy, but the scorched earth strategy used by this administration is guaranteed to hurt the economy more than it helps. First of all, the US is posing as an enemy for every other nation, including so-called "allies". It is an isolationist program that will inevitably weaken the status of the dollar (no need for dollars is the US is not interested in trading).
There was literally centuries of European history where every European government had massive tariffs on the others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
This era also featured lots of wars between European nations and spurred foreign conquests/colonialism.
Wilson drummed up the idea in the early 1920's, but didn't really follow through putting tariffs in place, Hoover did and combined with the dustbowl, sent America into the Great Depression. This is typical of what tariffs always do, but that little extra disaster almost made it impossible to get out of it
It's a bargaining tactic from a lunatic. Trump thinks countries will call him offering to do things to have the tariffs removed. You are applying reason to someone who has been showing signs of dementia for decades.
No, no one with a brain thinks that. Our economy is built on interconnected trade and cheap crap from developing economies.
The benefits of it are almost entirely “resilience during wartime”. Economists tend not to consider war very much, because it is chaotic, tends to strike at random moments that are only loosely related to economic conditions, and involves people actively destroying productive capacity instead of building it up. But of war is a given, you can see some fairly obvious benefits of having critical supply chains entirely contained within your borders. There’s ample historical data to back that up too: Japan (with its energy supply chain almost entirely outside of its borders) was forced to embark on wars of conquest in the rest of Asia to secure its energy needs, while the U.S. (which at the time was both a large oil producer and a large manufacturer) could sit behind its oceans and only enter the war when Japan’s territorial ambitions collided with it.
Likewise, if you take “WW3 is going to happen in the near future” as a given, almost all of the Trump administration’s actions make sense, from the crackdown on dissent to the effort to deport any foreign nationals to the saber rattling against Greeenland and Panama to “drill baby drill” to appeasement of Russia to the increased defense budget to the tariffs and efforts to bring semiconductor and drone supply chains stateside to the elimination of climate change programs. The strategy is very clearly to hole up between our two oceans and produce everything ourselves while the rest of the world destroys itself.
Of course, you can’t say “WW3 is imminent” without making it significantly more likely and scarring your populace to boot, which creates some very strong information distortions and illogical actions.
After talking to a bunch of Trump voters over the past 8 years, I have heard a common theme. They view the policies of the past 50 years, driven by the 'uniparty', as they say, leading to eminent catastrophic collapse. To them it's existential problem and they only have one choice.
Appealing to economists is the opposite of what they want, because economists look at macroeconomics efficiency which encourages globalism. They would rather be inefficient and hold on to their identity.
If they think both parties are the same or working together why do they exclusively vote Republican?
>They would rather be inefficient and hold on to their identity
What identity?
> If they think both parties are the same or working together why do they exclusively vote Republican?
They don't. A large chunk of them were Bernie Bros before he dropped out of the 2016 election.
The 'uniparty' narrative is straight out of Putin's propaganda playbook.
The 'uniparty' narrative denigrates the Western system of multi-party representative democracy and checks and balances, and equates it with Putin's monstrously corrupt and brutal one-party state.
Unfortunately these fascist narratives are extremely effective on underinformed and unintelligent people -- and our enemies know these people vote.
I don't think a lot of them view that as a bad thing. Some feel that 'American culture' is more closely aligned with 'Russian culture' than it is to 'Western systems culture'. Also, a surprising number describe themselves as 'Lincoln Republicans' and cite how Lincoln had to overstep his reach - to break the short-term rules to ensure survival of the Union.
(Personally, I think they got played.)
> Some feel that 'American culture' is more closely aligned with 'Russian culture' than it is to 'Western systems culture'.
Man, those guys are doomed. This is what they're aspiring to: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/25/michael-alex...
Well, I hope they all discover the wonders of SIZO/pretrial detention very soon for themselves. Maybe we can rename Alaska New Vorkuta before we lease it back to Putin.
Unlike you, I do not have access to that playbook you mention, however I do wonder about:
why are there are a great many democratic nations with (many) more than two parties, even with new parties arising and old parties diminishing. (I have firsthand experience with some of them. I highly recommend the experience.)
Is it wrong to 'intuit' that those nations may have a more vibrant democracy than a system of two parties that are both beholden to corporate capture?
Of course I will not be surprised at how asking this on HN will affect the scrip - oops I meant to say karma of course! - of such an inquirer as myself.
I'll bite.
It's the US electoral system; each seat is individually elected, and the presidency is determined on a state-by-state basis, negating the votes of most of the country.
For contrast, take Germany. Its national parliament, the Bundestag, is the rough equivalent of the House of Representatives. It has 630 seats for 1/4 the US's population. Half of those are directly elected by geographical areas in first past the post voting, but the other half are proportionally assigned to the parties according to the "second vote", on a statewide basis. As a voter, you might or might not vote strategically for your direct representative, but the second vote is where you can vote your heart. The state-level parties come up with ordered lists of potential members to seat, and however many seats they get for that state is how far down their list they count. The caveat is that these proportional seats are only awarded if a party gets more than 5% of the vote nationally. This most recent election, we came within a few thousand votes of another new party getting added to the mix, and the CDU/CSU + SPD coalition not having a majority between them, and that would have been an even bigger mess. The FDP, the party that broke the last coalition and caused this election to happen early did even worse, and lost all of its seats, which I think is hilarious.
This all resulted in the CDU/CSU (center-right/conservative) getting the largest number of seats, the AfD (far right) getting the next (almost all from the former East German states), followed closely by the SPD (center-left), then the Greens and die Linke (leftists). The CDU/CSU has enough people in their leadership who remember what happened the last time conservative and centrist parties played ball with a far-right party (those parties no longer exist), so skipped over the AfD and instead negotiated a coalition contract with the SPD as the junior partner, whose membership recently voted to accept it (we'd have been complete idiots not to, and happily, 85% of the party are not complete idiots). The CDU/CSU and SPD don't love having to be in a coalition together, but have done this before and The Recent Unpleasantness Across The Atlantic has got a lot of people thinking a bit beyond their usual petty concerns.
So German voters appeared, on average, to want a center-right government, and that is essentially what they're getting. I say "they," because I'm not (yet) a German citizen, but the SPD's rules allow me to be a member and vote on things like candidate slates and coalition agreements. The Chancellor will be Friedrich Merz, who is the leader of the party that got the most seats (CDU/CSU). He is very boring, which is delightful.
There is a kind of senate (Bundesrat), directly chosen by the state parliaments (I think), but even that is somewhat related to population - Nordrhein-Westfalen and Bayern have more members than, say, Saarland and Bremen. I don't hear much about them, so I think they're mostly a veto on the Bundestag. Oh, and they pick the President, which is an almost 100% ceremonial position.
This electoral system made being a Green supporter in the 1980s if you were otherwise an unenthusiastic SPD voter who despised the CDU (CSU if you're in Bavaria) something other than a de facto vote for the CDU/CSU. It also let the far right corral itself into the AfD instead of taking over the major conservative party, as happened in the US.
Then why were they promised cheaper eggs in the campaign? And no wars and and and? I'd say identity or not, there was still a serious amount of lying involved, which also tells me the identity gang is actually way smaller.
Honestly, I sense that they believe it's all part of the game. And, if everyone else is doing it, why should they be at a disadvantage? I'm guessing here, though.
If you really want answers, best thing to do is hang out in an area dominated by Trump supporters for a few weeks. Talking to them has changed my perspective on a lot of things. I don't agree with a lot of what they say, but I understand them now. They often aren't great at articulating their thoughts. They think in terms of macro-level complex systems. I shouldn't say 'think' - more like they intuit. They feel something is wrong, and they don't necessarily know why. You have to (kindly and with curiosity) interrogate them a bunch to figure it all out.
I follow a bunch of them on X, and they seem outraged by some of what Trump is doing, particularly the pro-war stance. Hence the low poll numbers?
[Sorry I really geek out on anthropology and understanding cultures.]
Very true. I've found there's not much value in arguing or pointing out flaws anymore—it just leads into a rabbit hole. I used to do it, but over time realized they’re mostly operating from emotion, not logic.
It reminds me of that experiment where a part of the brain gets stimulated and the subject performs an involuntary action—then comes up with a logical explanation for why they did it, even though they didn’t choose it. I think that’s what’s happening with a lot of these Trump supporters. They're reacting to environmental triggers without really understanding why. It’s fair to say they’re being driven by something external—though then you have to ask, what’s driving that? Who's driving us?
In the end, they’re just human, like me or anyone else. We're all playing the Human game. No one’s really 'awake' or enlightened. After talking to enough people, I’m convinced most 'truth' is concocted, and no one’s actually in control. Truth lasts only as long as it’s useful.
I live in Louisiana. This is absolutely cult of personality all the way down. I have no idea what the guy/gal upthread is talking about otherwise.
In 2016 I definitely saw ads from churches in Mississippi on local cable TV that were totally outright political advocacy combined with cult of personality. I was so astonished, I almost filed a complaint with the FEC/IRS. But to top it off, I remember very well an ad of Trump’s that said “I’ll make every dream you ever dreamed come true.”
>just cult of personality
I guess saying you don't understand tariff consequences and the like but you trust Trump to know what he's doing and make things great could be a reasonable position?
I'm hazy on some economics myself but don't especially trust Trump to make thing great. But I did kind of trust some previous presidents to do a decent job without following all the policies. (Clinton and Obama seemed quite good).
I believe tariffs could be helpful in certain areas if done carefully, but don't think the current administration is up to it. Examples of successful use of tariffs might be South Korean industries like car making.
For me I see short term gain long term pain, as volatility pays my account but my local economy is going broke and my account isn't big enough to offset the negative effects of it.
Maybe long-term gain, but it would take a long time. And businesses aren't going to invest if they think policy might completely reverse in 3 years with a new government.
Yeah, what positioned America as a superpower was nuclear weapons and having an infrastructure not reduced to slag by World War 2.
There is an old saying that a man lost his precious sword when sitting on a moving boat. Instead of jumping into the water, he simply left a mark on the side of the boat where presumably the sword slipped into the river. "What are you doing?", his friends asked curiously. The man replies, "Oh, I think it's too dangerous to get into the water right now, so I'll mark the place and get into the water when the boat arrives. It's safer!"
Depends on how long term. A crash of the global economy may be the best way to prevent at least some climate change catastrophe.
If economic activity is linear with co2 production, the crash would need to be the most extreme economic depression in history to have an impact eg 75% reduction in global GDP. A 75% reduction in food production would surely cause the largest global famine yet recorded.
Well yes, but so will climate change itself.
This will never happen willingly. Whenever it does happen it won't be by choice and will be because civilization has run out of material to produce stuff or too much of the Earth has become inhospitable. At least in the extreme long term it is a self correcting problem.
Given the shoddy execution I doubt there will be gain even if there was a hypothetical path in the theory
Kevin O’Leary, Aka Mr Wonderful, has appeared on CNN a number of times defending tariffs.
I think of him more as an FTX Spokesperson and TV talking head who got absolutely wrecked playing Celebrity Jeopardy by... Aaron Rodgers.
Not exactly an economist of note.
I wouldn't measure much by someone's ability at Jeopardy. It's called trivia because it's trivial.
There’s also the boating accident: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6174808
...against China specifically. He appeared to be more anti-China (because of IP theft and so on), than pro-tariffs.
I'm not an economist, but I think the theory has merit. I don't think the execution does, if only because we almost certainly only have 4 years until the tariffs are mostly reversed. The complete lack of long-term planning is a major failure of out political system compared to places like China.
If I were Trump, I instead would have pushed congress to take away the power of tariffs back from the presidency and make something like the Fed to manage them instead, with some checks added in. I normally don't like unelected officials making policy like that but in this case I don't see what else would work. As we've seen, broad tariffs are very unpopular even if they might be necessary, and we'd need them to have the potential to stick around much longer for them to be effective.
That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.
> If I were Trump, I instead would have pushed congress to take away the power of tariffs back from the presidency and make something like the Fed to manage them instead, with some checks added in. I normally don't like unelected officials making policy like that but in this case I don't see what else would work. As we've seen, broad tariffs are very unpopular even if they might be necessary, and we'd need them to have the potential to stick around much longer for them to be effective.
The power of the tariff is typically reserved for Congress; the executive has declared an emergency giving itself that power, while Congress (specifically the House) has abdicated its responsibility by redefining "legislative days" to extend the length of the emergency.
> That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.
Long term, maybe; short term, it'll spike inflation as the price of both raw materials and finished goods will rise to account for the tariffs.
> That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.
Nope. Tariffs are associated with higher inflation, as consumers have to pay more. Over long term, if tariffs depress the economic growth and cause a recession, they indeed _might_ lower the inflation.
There's inflation and there's inflation, and it's unfortunate we don't have separate terms.
If you had inflation typical of what we had during/after COVID with our economy being too hot with too much money floating around, tariffs would absolutely help. Preferably they'd be tariffs just on consumer products, and not things used for manufacturing. You'd raise them for a time and then lower them.
It's essentially the same thing as raising interest rates. You're taking money out of the economy.
You won't find anyone because one of Trump's defining themes is to always do the opposite of what smart people say you should do (and meanwhile denigrate smart people as a class). So by definition whatever he is doing will only be supported by dumb people.
What makes you think economists know everything? How long did doctors lobotomize people? You think economics as a field is more scientific today that medicine was in the mid-20th century?
Economists across the political spectrum also agree that investment taxes and corporate taxes are bad: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Where was the appeal to economists when Trump cut the corporate tax rate during his first term?
"I am not an economist"
But from what I've read/heard/understand tariffs can have the effect of on-shoring but only if they are fixed an unlikely to change/fluctuate. On-shoring production is not quick. Some Trump rep made a comment about how they delayed the tariffs on phones/computers 3 months because "Companies would need time to move production" which is just laughable, as if anyone could move production in 3 months (let alone 3 years).
None of it matters since the Trump admin changes its mind like it changes its socks. No serious company is going to do more that PR about how they are moving production back to the US because they can very easily get burned when Trump changes his mind. Moving production is a massive task and getting caught half-way through with policy changing (making it no longer profitable) could be a death blow to some companies.
Ray Dalio disagrees with the current Trump implementation but does think that a trade rebalance is necessary. I would say he “concurs with that theory” more than most traditional economists, but he thinks there are much better routes we can take to lessen the pain.
The better question to ask is for which American economic interests. What you're witnessing is a form of explicitly non-socialist class warfare led by conflicting groups of elites.
The Trump/Musk administration is a superb example of how big ideas alone aren't enough to accomplish major goals. You could agree with the need to bring back manufacturing jobs. You could agree with wanting to stick it to China. You could agree our federal government is too large and inefficient. You could agree that free speech is under attack or that our borders are insecure. Or that penguins are inherently untrustworthy and should not be engaged with economically. Whatever.
When people actually want to solve large problems they want information and input. They move with deliberation and precision so they can accomplish the goal without creating unnecessary harm or stress. They communicate. I know: Techbro doofuses will be, like, "I know everything already, just do it all right now YOLO!" But that's not how the world works.
There is no evidence that these major actions are being taken with any amount of care. They're erratic. They're often illegal. They're clearly creating destructive side-effects. Instead of engaging with real information, the administration seeks to destroy it. Musk, in my opinion, has big ideas he thinks are good but no mechanism to actually implement them in a good way. Trump is just an ignorant, self-serving man. He neither knows nor cares except to the degree that something can make him feel powerful in the moment.
We could have sensible policies if that's their goal, we are too reliant on our primary adversary for far too many things, but there could have been a controlled separation of economies instead of this slit our own wrists and see what happens policy from the Big Brains who brought us Project 2025. I swear I used to not think that Putin had kompramat on Trump, but every day that theory seems more and more solid rather than whack conspiracy theory.
The one economic theory of trade that seems most solid is competitive advantage but it does rely on trade between independent equal partners, rather than trade between a dominant superpower and a client state run by a puppet government controlled by said superpower.
Fundamentally, the neoliberal project created a lot of billionaires in the USA and associated wealthy enclaves by pushing manufacturing out to US-controlled client state sweatshops while also importing lower-paid workers, from H1B visa holders in tech to undocumented labor in construction and agribusiness. The resulting wealth inequality has led to political instability and unexpected consequences (eg the Rust Belt not backing Democratic candidates who promoted TPP etc.)
The reality is, reversing de-industrialization and abandoning neoliberalism would require a massive state-sponsored effort to update the basic infrastructure - electrical grids, roads, high-speed rail, ports, bridges, fiber-optic networks, schools for engineers and researchers - everything that makes competitive industrial manufacturing possible.
The notion that tariffs alone could accomplish such a massive transition by pressuring private capital to build all that infrastructure is ludicrous. Capital flight from the USA is far more likely - so a massive socialist project would be needed, including high taxes on the wealthy and cross-border capital controls to prevent capital flight (as existed in the USA in the 1960s) - all of which is heresy to the acolytes of Milton Friedman.
Maybe I'm wrong and Apple will open an iPhone factory in the USA this year with entry-level living wages of $35/hr (inflation-adjusted to 1960s factory wages) and the shareholders and executives will take a massive cut in renumeration to avoid iPhone prices spiking to levels where consumers won't touch them. I rather doubt it, though.
The long term gain is an attempt to turn an unsurviveable disaster into a survivable nightmare, economically speaking.
I think it's the other way around.
I know it's not.
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.
I just think of the Indiana Jones scene where the monkey ends up being poisoned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy.
Our tax money hard at work. What a fucking joke.
Do American parties get tax money to spend on strategists?
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?
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.
This might be a crazy idea, but they could also try advancing policies their constituents care about.
Yes but...
> Run ads that are literally just Trump quotes.
TIL cliché "Democrats buy ads, Republicans buy stations."
I mosdef 100% utterly agree Dems should campaign more.
It's just that... Per the entire duration of the Biden Admin and post mortems of 2024 election, voters barely hear any Dem messaging. So I question the ROI on buying ads.
Like most others fretting from the sidelines (I'm still recovering from activist burnout, sorry), I have no idea how Dems, and "The Left" more broadly, can connect with voters.
AOC & Bernie's nationwide tour is doing a good job. A good start.
Insert something here about embracing social media(s).
Insert something here about owning our own media ecosystem.
Insert something here about loudly and proudly pivoting away from neoliberalism into full throated support for our working class(es).
Blah, blah, blah building and nurturing a movement.
Etc.
Please share any tips, ideas you have. TIA.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Checked luggage gets opened legally without the owner present all the time.
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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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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
> 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.
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.
You misunderstood the points I made.
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...
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Lack of imagination.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> "...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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It’s categorized as a need for Consistency with one’s prior self.
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
"EU development fund" I can't imagine there being some North America development fund redistributing wealth to various projects. Sounds obscene lol
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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 ;)
That's representative politics in general, which is why trust is such a valuable commodity for a politician to get.
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.
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”).
True. But given that's true, it would be so much better to be inside the single market or customs union. But apparently those are still 'red lines' ...
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.
There isn't a very high bar to understanding that immigration from "the thirld world" had nothing to do with the EU.
As an immigrant to the UK, I was very acutely aware of the sentiment leading up to, during and after the referendum, but I was mortified by the ignorance displayed by people around the topic.
I'm from one of those third world countries by the way.
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)
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.
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.
None of those things are addressed by blanket tariffs.
You need to define "most of the trade deficits". Start with the island of penguins, and go up.
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.
Why do you think that means anyone actually cares about those other countries? Applying a blanket rule as a starting point avoids having to single out the countries you actually care about at the outset.
Virtually our whole trade deficit is China, the EU, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Canada. Should we have just singled those countries out by name and grouped them together for purposes of imposing tariffs? Don't you think lumping Japan together with China like that would piss them off even more than tariffs would do anyway?
He doesn’t care, about those other countries. It’s just posturing.
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.”
The “imaginary arguments” are the ones about surgical changes to trade policy. They’re imaginary because they have no basis in anything those people have the political will to do.
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I don't think the population at large fully appreciates just how bad things could (and most likely will) get once these pre-tariff stocks are depleted. There is no magic wand to stand up new supply chains for the gazillion products we import from China overnight or even in the next several years. This promises to be more dramatic than the COVID supply shock only this time the damage will be entirely self-inflicted and - maybe - unrecoverable.
Sadly I agree with unrecoverable. Not only China is not stupid and is not waiting around, but also this idea that American people under democratic system can withstand longer oppression than a hard core regime that makes people missing every day, is astonishing. We will have Americans riot on the streets, meanwhile Chinese people will just get a tad smaller rice bowls. And then you have Canada, India and most significant countries there that this Administration continues to offend. Canada is going thru rounds of serious talks to take up large amounts of goods produced in China, so is India. We might be at the point that if/when a new Administration comes and is ready to restart talks, China may say "sorry we don't have anymore hands/factories to produce goods and we are very happy with what we sale to Canada/China/[insert any country name that is not US]".
Side note, how is bringing back manufacturing really what American people want? Do you want to live next to a huge factory polluting air and creating unbearable noise? You think you children can or want to work as hard as Chinese folks doing repetitive tasks in stinky inhumane factories? At what rate? $2 per day? The reason it all got pushed outside of USA is exactly because the level of lifestyle Americans wanted and like. Now apparently we are being told by this Administration that "having cheap goods is not American dream."
God help us all!
I think it'll have to get /really/ bad in the US before anything close to a general strike/popular riot happens. We have plenty of bread and circuses to go around in the meantime.
Get a room full of USA citizens:
"Put your hand up if you want more manufacturing in the USA."
"Ok thanks, hands down. Now put your hand up if you want to work in a factory".
The US unemployment rate was 4% in 2024. Why does America even need manufacturing jobs?
HR departments, hopefully.
The people that want the manufacturing back don't live downwind of the pollution and can't hear the robots screwing together the widgets. They're hanging out in the Hamptons.
I don't think that people realize that this is bigger than just the tariffs now. Even if Trump completely backs down, he's shown himself to be too unstable to do business with. I don't think that I'm exaggerating when I say that American hegemony is in terminal decline because of this. Maybe forcibly removing Trump (which will never happen) can help slow the decline, but the international community is still going to divest from America.
Yeah. Trump 1.0 had a lot of the same mindless flailing but I think a lot of folks were prepared to write it off as an aberration. For him to be reelected after everything (and I mean everything) shows the world that, no, it really is true that a considerable segment of the American populace will gleefully burn it all down as long as they can totally own the libs along the way.
Quite so. JD Vance has shown himself to be at least as xenophobic as Trump, and while one might say it's the job of the VP to help sell the President's ideas it's very obvious that these two individuals are just the incumbent leaders of a much larger American political movement oriented around international isolation and zero-sum transactionalism. The gradual erosion of American supremacy as a safe default assumption in almost every field has led to an intellectual retreat into a geographic fortress mentality which helps to explain the verbal and economic aggression toward Canada and Mexico. It's like a Civ/HOI player cashing in all diplomatic and economic chips in favor of full military mobilization.
The whole Pax Americana/Invisible Empire concept is dead now. Competitive great powers feel liberated from it and erstwhile allies are just never going to believe it again.
I wish they were zero sum. They'll torch trillions to grift millions for themselves.
The markets continue to assume that there won't be any impact. When they do talk honestly you see Bloomberg interview finance leaders saying they aren't making big bets because they have no idea what to expect.
> they have no idea what to expect.
that's the key. "the subprime risk is contained", remember that? Anyone who claims they know what the economy is going to do 6 months from now should prove it with their stock portfolio.
Supply chains are incredibly complex. Even if a supplier is based in the U.S., they might be reselling Chinese-made goods. When tariffs hit or restrictions are imposed, those suppliers may simply stop selling the affected products. That can leave entire factories unable to operate due to missing components, which often take months to redesign or source alternatives for.
In theory, real-time trading systems could reduce the impact of such disruptions. But in practice, global logistics still runs on Excel sheets, emailed quotes, phone calls, and months-long shipping cycles.
If I were a medium to large business (I suppose small businesses will get screwed anyways, they wouldn't have the resources to handle challenges like this) how would I even prepare for such scenarios? Even if we assume I am somehow smart enough to predict something like this a full two years in advance. My employer is doing disaster recovery plans for data/software etc, which seems a million times easier than planning for alternative suppliers etc for manufacturers of physical goods
Well, it's a mirror of the Idiocracy mob's failure to anticipate the existential threat and potential damage caused by climate change. Informed, honest, ethical leadership is the cure but isn't popular enough. An ignorant populace is much easier to manufacture the consent of for cynical manipulation of popularity contests in avoidance of doing what's essential for the selfish, temporary, immediate benefit of a greedy few.
What staple items would it make sense to stock up on now, ahead of the stock depletion?
Pharmaceuticals. Any medicine you or family members need to take. Stuff like ibuprofen and Tylenol. Pet food. Anything with a battery in it.
Add to this the lack of interest of serving others: https://x.com/jasonvonholmes/status/1910643605896908821
TLDW: "Americans are a bunch of babies, they're hard to work with", which basically applies to all developed countries. It's the same in Germany.
Can't watch the video now, but when I worked on a smart home project, they worked with manufacturers in China Shenzhen because they are just that much better, there is an entire industry designing, manufacturing, inspecting, packaging stuff the way you want it, everything done in weeks even for a small company.
European companies, at least in this niche were not only more expensive, but worse quality, slower, more bureaucratic.
Now, how this anecdote translates to other industries, of course I don't know, but Shenzhen, I was told, it's something hard to even imagine as a European.
There sure are a butt load of 'look at how great China is' posts on here lately. Any thread about tariffs has a large number of these kinds of posts.
I want to think it's organic, but the Internet has ruined me. I have to believe they're shills.
> I have to believe they're shills.
I'm sure there are shills here, but the video is reflects my experience. I'm Australian, so for me it's comparing Australian and US companies vs Chinese companies. The broad picture he paints is exactly right.
But he gets the nuance all wrong, particularly when he called Americans "cry babies". To understand why, you have to appreciate just how hard the Chinese fight for business. One example: we were after samples of LPO batteries for a few, contacted a few sites. When they asked why were where hesitant, we told them we needed a slightly different form factor, and different control from the BMS. They said "oh we can do that", sent customized samples to us for same price and said when we wanted real quantities the price would be the same as the unaccustomed ones. To be clear: they had to build a new PCB for the BMS. Some deal with some DC motors: we needed different shafts and current ratings. They created customized for us (with different shafts!) at no extra charge.
The Chinese sales people are not just your typical order takers you deal with in the USA. They have in depth knowledge of the product and how it can be customized. They speak English, and seem to be always contactable regardless of the hour. They seem to have engineering teams on call to back them up. They must have literally a small army of tertiary trained people sitting in rooms with nothing better to do that provide that level of service to every Tom, Dick and Harry who walks in off the street. It would send a Western company broke.
Remember: China has the population of roughly USA and Europe combined. Yet, it still has parts that are very poor, little better than sustenance farming. This produces a steady stream of very bright young adults looking for a possible way out, which the government provides: tertiary education. It doesn't guarantee then a job at the end, it might just be a sales job at these manufacturing companies that pay little better than MacDonald's in the USA. Nonetheless, that's still better than prospects at home. They've been doing this for decades now.
And it's still happening. From https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2024.2... quote "Using data from official statistical sources and a nationally representative survey, we find that since 2001, China’s agricultural labor force has declined by over 50 percent—a loss of over 200 million smallholders, probably the largest in human history. ... The 150 million remaining smallholders". From https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361169258_Reasons_f... quote "Almost a quarter of recent college graduates in China are working in jobs that are not related to their college major".
The narratives you see here imply Chinese engineering talent is better than the USA's, or they work harder or longer, or god help us "American Companies are Cry Babies". Nope, it's nothing like that. It's just a huge education pipeline along with the raw human material to feed it producing very cheap engineering talent. It will end, just like it did in Japan, once that raw material runs out. From that link they are down to just 150 million people working on small farms now - around 10% of their population. The bad news is: 150 million is also about 1/3 of the USA's population.
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The canary should be when the administration starts suggesting any economic indicators for the rest of the year are really due to the last administration and have nothing to do with this administration.
Already happening.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-economy-tariffs-gdp-7494825...
“ Trump was quick to blame his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, for any setbacks while telling his Cabinet that his tariffs meant China was “having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business,” adding that the U.S. did not really need imports from the world’s dominant manufacturer. ”
He also posted on Truth Social today, blaming Biden for the economy.
> Trump was quick to blame his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden
At this point only QAnon/MAGA crowd and possibly Trump himself believes this shit. The rest of the world sees Trump for who he is.
The canary is already dead then, as they've blamed the stock market on Biden several times now.
Truth Social post blamed Biden for the economy today. That's been a consistent drumbeat.
He hasn't just done that that, he is saying that NEXT quarter is also Biden's fault.
I think the biggest damage from all this kerfuffle is this: why would anyone wants to invest the US anymore?
The US have a personality disorder that swings every 4 years.
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7 weeks until this Wile E. Coyote nation realizes there's no ground beneath our feet and it's a long way down.
It's been a long time coming. Sentiments like this in the article highlight why:
> “Nobody wins,” he said. “China is America’s factory.”
China is a sovereign country on the other side of the world. Making the entirety of your supply chain dependent on it is madness. And while the article strains to talk about "blue and purple shirts" you should probably be more concerned about where the pharmaceuticals are made.
This article is writing from the perspective of those who are set to lose money on this horrible system of commerce. From my perspective they failed to read the writing on the wall and ran the system into the ground because it was the only way for them to keep their profit margins juiced.
> “We’re not talking about higher prices and companies figuring out ways to pass that on,” Santos said. “We’re talking about actual disruption to the supply chain.”
They say this as if it could only be a bad thing. What happened to the spirit of innovation and commerce in this country?
Look back at COVID and notice how much innovative and commercial energy went into market-cornering and grift. Chaotic environments like those created by the recent tariff announcements are great for those who want to make a quick buck at others' expense, not so good for those who want to innovate/invest for the long term.
That's a terrible comparison as much of COVID public policy called for a shut down of the economy, offices, and even paid people to sit at home and not work for significant portions of the year. There were also other perverse incentives in place to further this damage.
Our current situation is entirely different and must be viewed using more appropriate comparisons.
>What happened to the spirit of innovation and commerce in this country?
Manufacturing doesn’t have as much space to innovate; we moved on to greener pastures. Decoupling our economy from China somewhat could be an intelligent decision, but there’s absolutely nothing intelligent whatsoever about picking up a fucking hammer and taking it to our economy to spite the rest of the world. We could have acted against US-China trade without simply wiping it out overnight and bringing down economic hell upon the American people. Utterly ridiculous, bad faith horseshit in my opinion.
I went to the dollar store and stocked up on some cheap shampoos and things I like to use.
I'm loaded up on TVs monitors and other stuff already.
We need to do something to shake up global supply chain, we will see what happens because the global system that the US and allies put in is going down the drain unless if we do something.
China being an authoritarian country becoming the center of everything probably won't be good for us.
Easier for us to hurt ourselves now than the Chinese to hurt us more later. We can choose where to stab ourselves instead of someone else stabbing us later on.
We did have sensible measured policy to incentivize high value manufacturing in the US: the CHIPS act and the IRA. They were working, and cost peanuts relative to the damage to the economy this administration's policy has already done.
>Easier for us to hurt ourselves now than the Chinese to hurt us more later. We can choose where to stab ourselves instead of someone else stabbing us later on.
I think most people go their whole lives without ever having to stab themselves or be stabbed. Stabbing yourself, as a human or metaphorically as country, seems like a pretty bad idea, even when you might suspect that someone (or another country) might maybe do it in the future.
this opens a interesting scenario where drug cartels may be the answer to a logistic problem since they already have the infraestructure for drugs. Could they diversify and smuggle tech products given their volume/weight ratio?
Organized crime has a long history of involvement with smuggling other kinds of products. It's common to smuggle electronics to countries with high import taxes (e.g. Brazil) and cartels have been involved with high value produce imports like luxury goods and avocados for years.
Almost funny to imagine the world where cartels will smuggle large quantities of Switch 2's to sell to Americans.
i don't see why not, they sure as hell do it with avocados.
smuggling makes sense for products light in size and value but large in value. it does not make sense for toilet paper.
>>tech products
>toilet paper
Can you imagine empty shelves all summer in America like it's soviet union?
Definitely going to happen because it will take months for shipping to return, just like the pandemic supply-chain disruptions.
And maybe the tariffs stay while manufacturing decides to wait FOUR YEARS instead of changing anything.
It’s not hard to imagine since we’ve had almost 2 years of warnings that the GOP would do this. Of course those warnings were dismissed as hysterical by people who apparently wanted this economic crisis.
Soon: the White House team's going to go to grocery stores stocking up their shelves before Trump visits, Potemkin-village-style...
Makes me think of the anecdote of Yeltsin entering a random grocery store, seeing their shelves full, and being shocked (the stop wasn't scheduled, and he assumed the US would've created a Potemkin grocery store): https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/13/how-a-russians-grocery-...
Wikipedia:
> Following the grocery store visit, Yeltsin and his entourage flew to Miami, their final location before returning to the Soviet Union. During the flight, Yeltsin was in a state of shock regarding the grocery store and remained speechless for a long time. According to Sukhanov, it was during the flight that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside" Yeltsin. Following his silence, Yeltsin asked aloud, "What have they done to our people?", questioning the Soviet Union's struggles with food. In a later biography, Yeltsin commented regarding his grocery store visit,
>> When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.
Heh, perhaps we should compare it to that fucking "useful" idiot Tucker Carlson going to a Russian grocery store...
If the shelves are empty in September, can someone recreate these photos, but with empty shelves: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/Bori... (assuming the press is still free at that point, and there's no risk of being sent to the gulag...).
I’m surprised that 7 weeks of inventory is mentioned as being alarming.
https://retalon.com/blog/inventory-turnover-ratio says
“The average inventory turnover across retail is around 9x”
That means they have about 6 weeks of inventory.
Of course, it varies by industry, but for many, that shouldn’t be alarming.
What do I misunderstand?
In seven weeks, there may be no way to restock. Six weeks inventory probably seems fine when there’s a constant inflow.
I'm kind of lost on why there will be no restock. The price increased, they didn't ban everything.
What am I missing?
Unpredictability. If you restock and the tariffs are eliminated or significantly reduced a couple of weeks/month later, that's a disaster. So the best attitude is to wait and see.
I'm not going to restock at 2.5 times the price and take the risk of being stuck with a warehouse full of unsaleable consumer goods that people have suddenly realized they can't afford.
Right, they don’t know how much smaller the demand will be during an economic crisis. It’s safer to have empty shelves until they can more accurately forecast what’s left of demand.
US ports are quiet and shortages are next, but with that will also come panic buying and hoarding. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/18/nx-s1-5367762/the-busiest-por...
The price increased for sending stuff to the USA. It didn't for every other consumer market in the world.
If you elect a clown _twice_, how can you not expect a huge circus?
I think they want to impose tariffs on everyone and then remove them from all that are willing to sanction china and help isolating it. 7 weeks should be more than enough to pull that off or fail. How beneficial it would be for the american economy either way I don't know. I mean all these people are not intelligent. They are just busy.
Which country has sanctioned China as the result of the tariffs so far?
Most Asia-pacific nations have expanded trade with China, to make up for the shortfall from reduced trade with America.
Sanction China to what ends? For what objective?
BRICS is larger than G7 now by GDP and most of the world has deep trade relations with China.
US bluff is called. They can’t win a war with China, militarily or materially.
US wasted half a century and trillions on lost wars, instead of investing in its citizens. China did the opposite. And those fruits are just beginning to ripen.
> They can’t win a war with China
Nobody wins in that war, that's why either side is so reluctant to start it.
> BRICS is larger than G7 now by GDP
That's BS. Easy to debunk. Try harder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS#/media/File:BRICS_AND_G7...
Current membership of BRICS (BRICS+) is larger GDP than G7.
Either side!? Only the USA speaks of China as having no right to exist and attacks Chinese sovereignty openly at every opportunity.
The USA started the trade war, not China. US leadership and its propaganda news channels constantly speak of war with China. Not as a war to defend US territory but as a war to topple the Chinese government. The current defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote in his book "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free", that if Trump could return to the White House and Republicans could take power, "Communist China will fall—and lick its wounds for another two hundred years".
Hegseth said China “are literally the villains of our generation”, and warned, "If we don’t stand up to communist China now, we will be standing for the Chinese anthem someday".
Relax, that's just words.
Free speech is great and all but a lot of Americans seem to have internalized the idea of just saying whatever you like with no regard for feelings of or impact upon others.
War starts with weapons.
Please read more history.
And I would disagree that the US started the trade war. China has been much more aggressive than any other country when it comes to trade policy [...]
This too is historically illiterate. The US happily ripped off others to build its own industrial base, and arguably still does so, with AI companies training on vast archives of unlicensed content and data brokers laundering personal information with zero regard to consumer privacy. Historically the US forced open markets at gunpoint, most famously by sailing naval vessels into Tokyo harbor to demand the Japanese Shogunate engage in trade relations.
https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...
https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/07/05/americas-industrial-revolu...
https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/05/yes-us-industrial-revolu...
It's not that China doesn't leverage its own economic power in one-sided ways, but this comment reeks of 'it's different when we do it'.
Wars definitely start with words, not weapons.
I've never thought America could ever experience lack of goods. "Deficit" was a very well known term during the Soviet times and it was one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed. If Trump wants to destroy the United States, he is acting very efficiently by repeating the same mistake the Soviet leaders were making.
It's weird to see the party claiming to be for free markets essentially go all-in on central planning. Black is white and up is down, I s'pose.
That party has been gone for awhile. Trump has never shown any affinity for free markets.
How are tariffs (and now basically significant tariffs on only China now) in any way similar to a centrally planned economy? Tariffs have existed in every country capable of enforcing them for all of human history, and they existed in the US prior to Trump, and will continue to exist after Trump. Even countries we have supposed "free trade" agreements with still get tariffed (and impose tariffs on our goods).
They're taxing certain things and then carving out exemptions for other things. Personal favors and political ideology driving the economy instead of market forces.
>I don't like it when Trump does it too, but I don't understand the people acting like this is somehow a new and unprecedented thing.
Sans near-total embargoes on goods from a country, have we ever imposed sweeping tariffs of 145% on all goods coming from one of our most-imported trade partners?
No, no we have not. Certain tariffs were very targeted for specific reasons, you are correct. But those were not blanket-applied haphazardly at such high levels. Hence, "unprecedented".
Many counties manage agriculture by having quotas for farm products and some price regulation. If you don't do that in good years the crop price plummets, farmers go broke and then in poor years there are shortages because of that.
Canada or the EU doing that and sorting their own food isn't the huge conspiracy against America that Trump seems to think it is.
Remember when Trump threatened Amazon for even thinking about showing the tariffs on the payment screen?
Very free market.
> when did he threaten them?
When he called it "a hostile and political act".
Remember when just officially telling people that they are not horses turned out to be a free speech violation?
Others have responded more eloquently than I to this, so I won't. All I will say is I never equated tariffs with central planning, but I can see how from context you drew that conclusion. Tariffs aren't the only thing the republicans are doing under Trump, and taken as a whole the current administration smells – to me at least – a lot more politburo than the free trade champions of yesteryear. (Well, more like decade at this point.)
>Tariffs have existed in every country capable of enforcing them for all of human history, and they existed in the US prior to Trump, and will continue to exist after Trump. Even countries we have supposed "free trade" agreements with still get tariffed (and impose tariffs on our goods).
To what degree relative to what we're seeing now, though?
Apples, meet oranges. Japan outright banning trade with all other countries is different than implementing tariffs.
"How dare you judge me for drinking a case of beer. I know for a fact you had two beers this evening!"
Why do you think he’s bullish on Bitcoin?
Because it's an easy political win among demographics that care about cryptocurrency.
... You don't actually believe he cares about Bitcoin or the technology, right?
He cares about it insofar as it’s a tool he can use and abuse to make money. Obviously he has no interest in or understanding of blockchains.
When the stock market (and confidence in the U.S.) falls, people typically flock to gold and bonds. If the U.S. is seen as unstable and at risk of not making debt payments, bonds are a bad place to move money into. That leaves gold (and to a lesser extent foreign stock markets).
With crypto though- that’s a con man’s wet dream. Volatile. No government oversight. Crypto pump and dumps are literally legal (though come close to being fraud, as people like Du Kwon have learned).
well the goods are there, its not like they stop flowing or something just need 30% tax on top of it
edit: ok, I didnt know that bussiness stop buying, but they must buy somethings in the future right either buy from other tax exempt or buy thing with add value tax
They absolutely do. Tarrifs are paid at point of import not point of sale, and who the heck wants to put something on a container ship for a month of transit not knowing if you can even afford the customs charges at the end before you sell it, or won't take a loss because surprise a week after paying tarrifs are now cancelled.
Underrated comment. People don’t understand global trade and logistics (understandably so- it’s all very complicated and there are multiple middlemen involved between the factory in China and the company in the U.S. buying the goods to resell - they of course being yet another middleman).
"Tarrifs are paid at point of import" are they??? didn't they just taxed at arrival at the port? or something
That's the same thing. When you want to import goods, you provide information to the customs officials at the location those goods enter the country saying:
* Here's what I'm importing
* Here's where I'm importing it from
* Here's the value
Then you pay a bill based on that value and the tariff, and they let your goods clear customs and get loaded onto a truck to go wherever you want them to go in the US.
If you're shipping something by boat (like most goods), the "point of import" is the port.
Note: this is all actually much more complicated and individualized than I described because of networks of middlemen, logistics companies, distributors, manufacturers and lawyers.
Assuming it's not wildly different over there in the US, goods must be declared when the goods is at the border if you wish to use or transfer the goods, and tariffs must be paid. For a ship this will be the port, at least that's how it is here.
Alternatively you can put the goods in a bonded warehouse[1], and leave it there until you wish to use it or transfer it to someone else. It's not free, but it allows you to postpone the declaration, and hence payment of tariffs, until you take the goods out of the bonded warehouse.
Typically a bonded warehouse requires physical security, paperwork and a bank guarantee to prevent goods disappearing, so it isn't free to keep goods there.
Supply and demand shocks echo for a while. How long did it take for toilet paper to be stocked normally during the pandemic in the US?
Edit to add:
Better example for me was the semiconductor industry. It was hard for years to design hardware because key ICs would disappear. You needed to buy the ICs the moment you thought you might use them, a form of stockpiling that had no winner - it's very expensive to buy stock that you potentially never use, and it deprives the rest of the market simultaneously.
The goods are not there. Shipping volumes from China to the US are down I think by 40% right now, and shipping companies are outright canceling berthing in US ports right now due to the low shipping flows.
We're about 1 or 2 months right now from some goods not being available in the US at any price. If people lost their mind over that happening during COVID, well, this is going to be just as bad.
I think the theory is like this:
1. new 30% tax
2. people stop buying so many goods due to (1)
3. due to lack of demand, our shipping industry seizes up and goods stop flowing, at least till (1) goes away
My main source for that theory is https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-...
There’s a bill[1] sitting in the House of Representatives that would abolish the IRS and replace all tax code with a consumption tax. In typical fashion they’ve written it so it seems like the flat consumption tax will be something like 24% but it’s actually 30% (they word it as something like “24% of the total is tax” which really means “the tax is 30%”).
I’m curious when they plan on deploying this. It specifies a 3-year schedule so you think okay is this to be signed into law in 2025 so that the IRS is abolished during the next election year, or are they going to wait a year or two and have the IRS abolishment only “trigger” if Republicans continue to control the government beyond 2028? Or perhaps they will push it through if/when Democrats retake some or all of Congress in 2026?
One thing’s for sure though, the 1% will use cryptocurrency to dodge this consumption tax and it will (as usual) disproportionately affect the lower and middle classes, who aren’t as savvy in tax fraud/evasion/“loopholes”.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/25/t...
From Wikipedia:
> FairTax is a fixed rate sales tax proposal introduced as bill H.R. 25 in the United States Congress every year since 2005.
An R-GA sponsors it every year and it never gets further than "introduced", with fewer co-sponsors on it now than ever AFAIK. Technically, if it did get into law, it could create greater chaos, it has a provision to terminate itself if the 16th Amendment isn't repealed, so enough incompetence could eliminate taxes entirely.
> Either a Democratic Congress or president would prevent such a bill from passing
The Senate still has the filibuster, as well. This will not pass in the current Congress either.
The filibuster rule is vulnerable, but I don't think there's enough support from Senate Republicans to do so. If I'm wrong, it would be an escalation which would add more fuel to the 2026 fire.
It’s optimistic of you to think we’ll have a Democratic anything for the foreseeable future. In 2016 we could say “well a lot of people are tired of the status quo” but after 2024… Nah, this what America wants. This is what the people who couldn’t bother to vote, voted for when they chose to stay home.
Not even Democrats in control, the amount of income tax-related lobbying should prevent it alone.
Given that the lower and middle classes pay a disproportionate amount of income tax…
Not only is that not a “given”, I’d argue that you’re completely wrong. One doesn’t have to look very hard to find out how much income tax is paid by lower class: effectively zero.
A consumption tax would affect the lower class more than the 1% for two main reasons:
1. Non-discretionary spending as a percentage of income is much larger for the lower (and middle) classes, who spend 100% or near 100% of their income on “essentials” like food and shelter.
2. The tax itself is obscene- 30% or thereabouts. As others have pointed out, the poorest of the poor don’t pay any income tax, and many essentials (like unprepared food) are not currently taxed. I don’t recall if the bill would add a tax on unprepared food. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
Bottom half of the population pays ~zero taxes.
Have you seen the news at the ports? less containers coming in. the goods will not necessarily keep flowing if the price goes up and their margin goes away
The tax is 145% on Chinese imports. To preserve relative margins companies need to increase prices by 145%. Obviously, you are not going to buy the extra yard camera that was 100 dollars last week but will soon be 250.
The tariffs are effectively a 30-150% price increase on all retail products, along with some marginal price increase on all manufactured goods. Given the nearly assured recession, it is unclear how willing American consumers and corporations are to eat this tax. Some businesses will take it out of the margin, others will pass it along.
> To preserve relative margins companies need to increase prices by 145%.
Not true. If you have watched Shark Tank you have seen that products cost, as an example, $6 landed, but retail for $24. Tariffs are 145% of $6, so around $9. So they only have to increate the retail price from $24 to $33 to keep the same profit margin. In this example that's a 37% increase, not 145%.
_relative_ margins as in percent, $6 with 145% tariff is $14.7 which means to maintain the 75% margin you'd have to jack the price up to nearly $60. I agree that you don't necessarily need a 75% margin to do business, but it can't stay flat either because you're floating more than double the money on inventory. In reality prices for cheap crap with huge margins will probably only go up let's say 50% but items that have thin margins will definitely more than double.
And tariffs are collected at arrival, so companies can be obligated to pay double to receive goods they already purchased when huge tariffs suddenly appear. That can mean spending a significant amount of extra money on goods they may not be able to sell profitability.
When import taxes reach a certain level, it's effectively an embargo.
If one were to assume there will be shortages in the near term (similar to early COVID), what staple items should one stock up on?
Based on big box retailers in my area this is optimistic as with a keen eye one can already see huge numbers of missing products.
It feels like we are seeing the beginnings of somewhat permanent deglobalization. What happens if the US decides they just want to trade with South America, Canada and Western Europe and stops doing business with the rest (including pulling their navy out of all the places they currently patrol, which I think is maybe the most dramatic thing that could happen)?
I don't think we're seeing deglobalization so much as strategic uncoupling from current and potential future autocrats.
So, instead of relying solely on the best producer of each thing, economies want to also make sure they spend a little bit more to also get products from the second and third best producers to keep them producing just in case the first producer does something like (for lack of a better phase) throwing a firebomb in an apartment to kill a spider.
They then treat the extra cost of products as a risk premium so the risk is already priced in.
Markets hate higher prices, but they hate uncertainty more.
*American retailers
An important detail.
Huawei stuff is on a hot sale in Malaysia. I was looking for laptops the other day and not only they have a 10% discount but they are bundling around 30% of the laptop value in free stuff along with it: https://consumer.huawei.com/my/offer/laptops/matebook-x-pro-...
I'm sure we'll experience shortages of popcorn when things get really hot.
Again, like during COVID, few people will earn gazillions. They will have stock and they will push it slowly into market with extremely high prices accepted by consumers. It is very smart what they are doing, like always - and the only thing that matters is money.
De-coupling from an authoritarian adversary is a worthwhile objective, but there are more competent ways of doing that.
Back in Trump's first term he put up some targeted tariffs. They were reasonable, effective, non-destructive to the economy, and Biden actually kept them. Good trade policy often become bipartisan.
There's a way to repeat that success. To effectively incentivize supply chain re-shoring, without destroying the economy and stock market, and being so effective and smart that the next administration keeps the policy, even a Dem admin. Which is:
1. increase tariffs gradually, stepwise, over the first two years +/- of his admin. Also get the math right, not 4x too high.
2. tariffs only on China and other adversaries, not our democratic friends and allies. China is the main economic problem anyway, not EU, Canada, Mexico, Japan, etc.
3. use other tools in addition to tariffs like tax policy for manufacturers (tax credits, accounting changes around equipment amortization, etc). Don't be that guy with only a hammer for whom everything is a nail, diversify, use all the tools available.
A graduated, predictable, multi-pronged approach confers the policy stability and predictability companies need to forecast, plan, invest, and hire. That makes it more likely the next administration will continue the tariff policy, even a Dem admin.
But Trump and Navarro's ham-fisted approach that tanks the stock market and causes shortages and inflation is not going to last. Companies won't invest and hire under those circumstances. It will implode, potentially discrediting the entire concept in the public's view, making it more difficult to implement an actually effective and sensible policy instead.
Exactly. If this administration were serious about hurting China and re-shoring manufacturing, there are ways to do that correctly so as to cause factories in China to idle, cause capital and technology in China to flow to third countries on which the U.S. imposes no tariffs, cause unemployment in China to rise, and ultimately cause the weakening of China's industrial might. The current administration did nothing like that.
MAGA? How about SUITPA?
Stock up in toilet paper again.
I'd be surprised if the US had enduring toilet paper shortages, given that its domestic supply is quite good.
April 27 2025: Port of Seattle - EMPTY
April 30 2025: Port of Rotterdam - Congesting shipment containers originally inbound towards the United States but halted (by Chinese exporters?). Also risking storage and transhipment of containers inbound to Rotterdam. (Heard on local news a few minutes ago)
If Trump keeps this up, within ~12 weeks he is not going to destroy the economy of the United States but the entire West...
>If Trump keeps this up, within ~12 weeks he is not going to destroy the economy of the United States but the entire West...
He'll find someone to blame for forcing him to change direction.
This all feels very familiar, I stocked up on toilet paper this past weekend just in case.
Why is the president allowed to impose tariffs? Congress should have a say in it.
The president can do whatever they want as long as congress doesn't stop them. And congress...isn't stopping them. Not many lines here to read between.
Exactly. The system of checks and balances, like most things apparently, only works if the people doing the things make it work. And they're refusing to do that.
Our Congress is complicit in this mess.
That's not even close to true, why has hn turned into reddit?
Congress gave the president the power to impose tariffs about 50 years ago because it was too difficult for them to do it themselves without a bunch of horse trading and politics. Congress could in theory pass a new bill taking the power back but they would need a 2/3 majority to overcome Trump's inevitable veto, there simply aren't that many congress people who disagree with Trumps plan to get that to happen.
Congress can stop the president. In your words they were the one to give that power to him originally.
If they cared, they could stop him. OP's point still stands, I think.
Just FYI you’re agreeing with OP despite accusing them of lying and writing like a Reddit comment.
I really appreciated trustinmenow's reply because it added a lot more context for me as a non-American. If your congress offloaded its ability to control tariffs and now requires a supermajority, that's not the same thing as if it requires a simple majority. The in-depth explanation helped me understand the entire chain of comments.
I think that one of the key differences between HN and Reddit is that I can usually rely on HN to give me a lot more of this kind of context, which helps keep arguments specific and interesting.
Cue toilet paper panic Part II. Interesting to see how this plays out.
Big Toilet Paper really doesn’t want Americans to get into using bidets, so they will make sure there is enough supply to feed the panic buying.
I mean, I don't doubt it, but I don't think the US imports much toilet paper. Not that factual basis is required for a panic.
> The U.S.-China trade war fallout has begun. The Port of Los Angeles anticipates plummeting cargo traffic until a deal on tariffs is reached, but the Trump administration has not indicated whether negotiations are happening. Time is running out, a JPMorgan chief market strategist said.
As is so often the case, Fortune is burying the lede here and making the situation look better than it is. The administration _has_ indicated that negotiations are happening, but China has denied that any such negotiations have occurred [0]. Given the trump administration's horrendous track record of blatant lies, there is no reason to believe them.
In the best case, there are quiet negotiations going on, but there's a real chance here that trump is fully losing his mind, his mental state has been on the decline for years and the things he says are becoming more incoherent by the week.
I am more inclined to believe that there are effectively no ongoing negotiations, and our trade policy is being determined largely by whoever gets the last word in with trump before he tweets something idiotic. This is an unsustainable situation.
If you live in the US, now is an excellent time to contact your senators and representatives and demand some accountability.
[0] https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/business/money-report/china-...
Trump is making decisions how Trump has always made decisions; by agreeing with whoever kisses his ass the best and most often
>If you live in the US, now is an excellent time to contact your senators and representatives and demand some accountability.
They. Are. Complicit. At this point, any senator at all is complicit in this nonsense. They hold the checks and balances on the executive wing. They're not even trying to use them, at best, and actively subverting them, in all truth.
It should be very telling that a VERY long term congressman like Dick Durbin is not seeking re-election. That's a bad sign.
So we're recreating the covid supply chain crisis on purpose so Trump can try and build an island, fortress America? Seems like a great idea put forth by great people.
> “Nobody wins,” he said. “China is America’s factory.”
This is the real problem.
What's everyone stocking up on before the shortages begin?
I was looking at that ~5 months ago, but with the eye to also building up savings, so not just spendinding willy-nilly. We ended up deciding not to replace/upgrade an computers or other electronics, my first-gen M1 macbook I was thinking about refreshing but didn't REALLY need it.
Electronic components. In the Trump economic crisis the dollar will be worthless and we will barter with capacitors and IC.
Auto parts.
given how people behaved with toilet paper during covid... I would expect that timeframe to reduce significantly faster than 7 weeks.
With absurd tariffs like Trump's, it would be cheaper to re-export goods through a third country. Why haven't American retailers employed this?
This has been a thing since (at least) 2019, as this article shows:
https://redarrowlogistics.com/international/dodging-tariffs-...
Excerpt:
> Put simply, transshipping is when a country ships product through a third country so that the product will look like it’s coming from the third country, thereby avoiding duties or tariffs. For example, one supplier, Settle Logistics, goes through Malaysia: a 4600 miles diversion compared with sending a container from China straight to the US.
> This is much more expensive: shipping via Malaysia costs $3,000 to $4,000 more per shipping container, at least $2,000 more than shipping direct. Those costs are still worth it in order to avoid tariffs.
Simply making the goods pass through a third country does not change the origin of the goods, and it's the origin which determines the tariff.
So, as the article mentioned, the goods has to be significantly transformed in the third country in order for the goods to have its origin changed. Otherwise you're committing fraud and customs can punish you if they figure it out.
Thus doing this the legal way would indeed involve more than the ship making a simple detour.
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... says Bill Maher.
> While President Donald Trump pressed pause on his sweeping tariff regimen and placed a 10% blanket tax on other countries, he taxed China more. He placed a 145% tariff on China, which retaliated with a 120% duty on American goods. No trade deal has been made, and it is unclear whether there are negotiations happening. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put the onus on China to come to the table and ink a deal. Still, just under half of the port’s business emanates from China, Seroka explained. So things could be bleak until then.
Fundamentally this is a game of chicken, and China will definitely blink first. This will be for a few reasons:
1. Unemployment in China is rocketing. Prior to the trade war in February it was sitting at an estimated 16.9% [1] (although it's difficult to believe the stats). In the US it sits at about 4.2% [2], which feels about right with the UK at 4.4% [3]. China doesn't have the "disadvantage" of a significant welfare system, but these people will become increasingly desperate to survive and burden the system in one way or another.
2. With unemployment so high in China, demand for jobs is increased and the salaries are decreased. With less excess money, domestic spending is largely reduced. With the excess stock produced for the US market no longer being delivered, manufacturers look to dump into the domestic market at below cost just to recoup some of their investment and to pay back the supply chain. Remember that with such low margins, manufacturers often get supplies on the promise of payment upon selling the goods they prepare. You're looking at complete supply chain disruption from top to bottom even if the manufacturer didn't export to the US.
3. The Chinese housing market continues to be an extremely large problem. Housing represents approximately a third of their economy and you have several key problems. Prior to the trade war, Chinese property developers were having customers buy properties (with mortgages) before ground was broken and using this money and borrowing to develop the properties at relatively low margins. Due to corruption and corner cutting, a considerable number of these buildings were "tofu dregs" (meaning poorly constructed). Despite these cost cutting measures, there was still not enough money available to develop the promised properties. This lead to the likes of Evergrande, Country Garden, Zhongzhi, Vanke, etc, to (begin to) fail. The customer's money is gone and the bank paid it out to the developer, so the customer is still on the hook for a property that doesn't exist - the bank tells them to pay up and to take up their issues with the property developer. Even those that managed to get a property found that the developers were desperately liquidating properties at discount rates to cover debt interest, lowering the value of properties in the market. With reduced income, increased mortgage rates due to instability, some look to sell their properties and escape the backlog of missed mortgage payments. Those people may find their property devalued by some 50%, and that they still have an outstanding debt despite selling the property and receiving no equity due to the devaluation of the property.
Although not outwardly said, the Chinese leadership have long considered themselves at war with the US. They have celebrated every issue the US has had, reacted negatively when the US experiences wins, and generally want to see the US fail. We're talking about the same CCP of the Mao Zedong era that considered the UK, US and Japan as enemies to crush. This is why that despite very obvious economic issues being experiences, the CCP refuse to negotiate.
> “What we’re going to see next is retailers have about five to seven weeks of full inventories left, and then the choices will lessen,” Seroka told CNBC. That doesn’t mean shelves will be empty, but in Seroka’s hypothetical, it could mean if you’re out shopping for a blue shirt, you may see 11 purple ones—but only one blue that isn’t your size and is costlier.
Maybe you can't find a blue shirt for a while and have to wear a purple one whilst textile manufacturing is scaled up in other asian/middle-eastern nations, but things could be far worse.
> Earlier Tuesday, Gabriela Santos, JPMorgan Asset Management chief market strategist for the Americas, told CNBC: “Time is running out to see a lessening of the tariffs on China.” Everyone knows the tariffs are unsustainable, she said, but markets need to see them actually drop.
Translation: The tariffs will affect our bottom line. Remember that JPMorgan as an entity do not care if jobs are lost in either the US (historically) or China (currently), as long as it does not affect their margins. The idea that JPMorgan does well and so does the US populace is wishful thinking.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-youth-jobless-rat...
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
You’ve misinterpreted your first source — that’s the _youth_ unemployment rate and not the overall rate. The correct comparison is 5.1% to the US’s 4.2%.
> You’ve misinterpreted your first source — that’s the _youth_ unemployment rate and not the overall rate. The correct comparison is 5.1% to the US’s 4.2%.
You are correct, I cannot edit any more.
In any case it is definitely trending upwards [1], and I'm hearing from people inside China that unemployment is rapidly increasing. A lot of factories are either on pause or shut down until further notice.
That all said, it's unclear how many of those are gainfully employed, or how that would even be measured in China. There are many working in the delivery economy that sleep homeless. I think those working unsustainably is also on the increase.
> China will definitely blink first
There are other countries in the world apart from US and China. US has effectively alienated most of these with tariffs (save for Russia).
So prepare for a lot of friendly blinking between these countries to gang up on the bully.
You might think so, but in reality, what happens is people say this publicly and then try to befriend the bully privately to get favourable treatment.
I'm not saying that it's right, it's just an observation.
> Fundamentally this is a game of chicken, and China will definitely blink first.
China thinks in terms of decades and their population is very culturally disciplined. They will endure years of economic downturns if necessary. Historically they have.
They also have quite a few advantages being a planned economy, with a higher appetite for wealth redistribution than the US and the hability to shift investments very quickly. This quells most internal dissatisfaction that recessions bring.
They merely have to wait it out, as they have. Trump dropped some tariffs without them doing anything.
> China thinks in terms of decades and their population is very culturally disciplined. They will endure years of economic downturns if necessary. Historically they have.
I think this is a lie that somehow gets propagated in the West. They are not somehow smart and forward thinking, they are stuck within a dictatorship.
Over a span of 3 years from 1959 15-55 million people died in China [1]. It wasn't because of a natural disaster. It wasn't because of a war. It's wasn't because of a disease. It was purely because the leadership was trying to achieve the same ambitions as they do today.
Nothing changed, it is still the same party and CCP will go to the same lengths to try to achieve it again. The result in 1961 was a -27.3% growth [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China#Annual...
I don't see how any of this refutes the claim that the Chinese population has a much greater pain threshold than the US. If anything, you're only bolstering the claim.
> I don't see how any of this refutes the claim that the Chinese population has a much greater pain threshold than the US.
I was more combatting the point that China has some super smart decade+ forward thinking leadership. Whereas the reality is that the same political party is still willing to sacrifice tens of millions of Chinese people for negative economic growth.
The resilience of course is another thing. The main reasons they have a higher pain threshold is that for many the quality of living never really changed drastically and there is a heightened sense of nationalism. More generally, on a personal level Asians try to "save face", meaning they could be starving to death and still smiling to not let their enemy see their pain.
I still maintain that they can't hold out, and that the CCP has been very quietly entering into negotiations with the US [1]. There was already an exceptionally difficult property market situation threatening stability, and now their entire supply chain is being disrupted on every level. The pressure they are under is immense.
It's a really shallow analysis to claim nothing has changed in China since Mao, specially politically.
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The Chinese are saying he has already blinked first.
> And it does appear that Trump has blinked first, last week hinting at a potential U-turn on tariffs, saying that the taxes he has so far imposed on Chinese imports would "come down substantially, but it won't be zero". Meanwhile, Chinese social media is back in action. "Trump has chickened out," was one of the top trending search topics on the Chinese social media platform Weibo after the US president softened his approach to tariffs.
China "blinked first" about a week ago. Publicly they assert that they'll never back down, while on the backend they aggressively remove tariffs in an attempt to keep their economy running.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-creates-list-us-ma...
There is no scenario where the trade war ends, without both sides being able to declare victory to their constituents. That's just politics.
> China will definitely blink first.
I'm not sanguine. I think their leadership prides itself on being tougher and smarter than American leaders, and I think when they look at the results Canada and Mexico have gotten, complying with Trump, they're not going to feel like compliance will help.
> The idea that JPMorgan does well and so does the US populace is wishful thinking.
I'm trying to think of a public traded company that could be true for. It just doesn't seem that there is going to be a company that is tied to the fortunes of the US populace. Conagra maybe.
True, but I think it's important to point out that JPMorgan's concerns don't overlap with those of normal working people.
Oh s***it son, muh long-dated puts on retail and calls on gold & silver are gon' print y'all!
American retailers. The rest of the word is only seeing rushes on popcorn, which we're eating as we wait to see the what happens.
Prices are climbing up in Canada. So, no, I don't see Canadians rush on popcorn.
Someone help me figure out: Shouldn’t anti-capitalists be cheering this on? Way less consumption and incentives for businesses.
What do you mean by "anti-capitalists"?
Because today's climate in the US seems, even related to the tariffs, to be heavily weighted towards making those with deep pockets even deeper. The confusion in the markets, for example, have been a perfect opportunity for those properly placed to rake in a ton of money. Ditto with DOGE ending spending on a lot of projects, moving it commercial providers.
Outside of the US? Yes, I've seen some South American leftists saying "good, comeuppance".
But overall? No, extreme shortages will mean people won't be able to receive essential goods. If they're sick, they could die. If their housing is precarious, extra costs of necessities could push them to homelessness. If they've been looking for a job to pay for necessities, good luck because businesses will be closing left and right and everyone will be looking for a job.
This combined with moves to strengthen police aggression and protect police who fall on the wrong side of the law means any protest against these moves will be met with greater violence. We were already seeing people being blinded or killed by riot police during BLM protests.
Imagine what kind of violence will be used against protestors who don't have anything to lose. They'll have lost their jobs, and with it their healthcare. They won't be able to afford housing, food, household objects, entertainment, etc. People in the US don't protest because we don't have social safety nets to fall back on. Now protestors wont have to worry about falling any deeper.
So no, being anti-capitalist doesn't mean being pro a hyper-capitalist sabotaging the system people rely on to survive without any meaningful plan to fix or replace it. This is just chaos.
Capitalism =/= trade. Non-capitalist =/= not trading.
Weird gotcha attempt. Who are you even speaking to? Are these "anti-capitalists" in the room with us right now?
Next week's volume will be down, but the next next week is back up to last year's volume...?
Politics aside. American big box stores are full of so much junk no one actually needs. It is good for there to be a tax on it. Reducing consumption is great for the environment and our sanity.
This seems to imply that the only thing we import from China is junk. That hasn't been the case for decades. Beyond the junk we have pretty much the entire consumer electronic market, and beyond that the equipment running the infrastructure required for many of those electronics to operate. Beyond that, we have equipment for communication and navigation networks for government and first responders, and the countless components required for their vehicles or an effective response to crisis. Then we have the vast variety of equipment required for modern farming, each piece containing countless Chinese components, even if it's an American made tractor.
There is no possible way for anyone to foresee the totality of effects from a serious trade war with China, but I can assure you, it will be far worse than a lack of junk on store shelves.
>American big box stores are full of so much junk no one actually needs. It is good for there to be a tax on it.
Seems pretty paternalistic to me. Why not let people decide for themselves whether they "actually need" the $5 plastic trinket from china? Do you not trust adults to make informed decisions on what they're buying?
The argument is that $5 retail price comes nowhere close to capturing the true cost of the item. If the items were priced to have all their negative externalities included, such as loss of American jobs, fair labor, slave labor, environmental damage, shipping subsidies, etc, the bill would be much more than $5 and far fewer people would rationally buy them.
The free rational market has no way to price these in.
We've been using "sin taxes" for a very long time, especially on tobacco and alcohol. Nothing new there, really.
This is a bad comparison.
Tobacco and alcohol, both of which have objective, measurable negative health outcomes supported by decades of research, versus some vague notion of "junk products" as defined by... who? And this is without even getting into the fact that the tariffs will raise the price of everything, not just these supposed "junk products."
And they have been a regressive tax on the poor since day one and not helped anybody.
No I don't. The only thing consumers care about is price. They don't consider pollution, waste, labor conditions.
So if the only lever you have to affect consumers is price, then you must factor in the negative factors with higher prices.
Why not tax the negative factors then, rather than the country of origin?
i.e. If the price is supposed to be a lever for labor conditions, why just tax China heavily and not Bangladesh?
Why tax more fuel-efficient European cars instead of American-Built Jeep Grand Cherokees?
And if reducing plastic waste is the priority, why would Trump's day include unbanning plastic straws?
Answer: It's not actually about reducing negative externalities, it's about geopolitics, otherwise it wouldn't be so negatively weighted towards a single actor.
Do you think people should be allowed to buy a new car that gets like 5 mpg or should we restrict environmentally unfriendly products?
In theory we already penalize 5mpg cars with gas guzzler taxes, CAFE penalties and gas taxes. I think CAFE should be reworked to not penalize smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles i.e. no more light-duty truck bs.
Yes, but the person I was responding to was against taxes?
I'm reminded of all those pictures of Soviet leaders who were used to empty stores wandering into an ordinary US supermarket and having their minds blown by the abundance. Every now and again an American tries to suggest that actually the empty supermarkets are better.
We don't produce products on someone needing it, but someone buying it. If there are these products then people buy them and seemingly want them.
The US does not tax trash, it taxes the origin of products. That applies regardless of if it's good or bad.
Nothing says free-market small-government conservatism quite like telling people what they do and don't need!
Consumption can have bad effects on health and the environment. But those effects are from particular kinds of consumption.
For example, buying solar panels is probably good for the environment and public health. On the other hand, buying sugary sodas is probably not so good for your health and maybe has some minor negative environmental impact. Most things are more complicated; running shoes might be good for your health and bad for the environment.
The tarrifs are just a blanket tax on all consumption, so I imagine the effects will be a wash. We’re getting rid of the good and bad.
thank you for stating what - based on the comments that have not been killed in this thread - very few here want to hear.
In defense of those who may sincerely disagree, they may frequent higher quality retail than the bulk of U.S. shoppers.
You do you think ordered the junk? Do you think all the junk is Chinese, because that's all they know how to make, or because the US business who ordered it wanted it to be as cheap as possible?
I don't as such disagree with you that the junk needs to go, but there's also a big difference between a $2000 Lenovo laptop, made in China, and a $0.50 gadget, sold for $10, also made in China. You'd need to disincentivize companies from sell these products to consumers, then the flow of Chinese junk will stop.
This is plain bad economic policy disguised as a moral crusade against hyper consumption.
If this administration cared at all about the environment, they wouldn't be opening up public land for oil drilling or firing hundreds of scientists working on climate reports as mandated by Congress [1].
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-climate-assessment-rep...
Is everything in the store junk? This is ultimately a non-sequitur -- the tariffs are not targeting junk, and not everything made in China is junk. Prices across the board will go up, a tax on everything.
It's funny that the same party that likes to warn of "you will own nothing and be happy" is now defending economic policy that will decrease material wealth, but it's ok because it is "good for you" to practice having less.
Why then is this only applied to "junk" from overseas?
I somewhat agree with you. But let's consider a normal supermarket (in almost any country in the world) 80% of the aisles are full of junk and literal poison: Sugared cereal, soda, low quality beer, hyper-processed snacks and cookies, frozen slop food, etc.
Then furthest in the back you have the fresh produce: Eggs, vegetables, meat and chicken, fish sometimes, dairy and bread. The good stuff.
Now look down the shopping carts of your fellow shoppers: Filled to the brim with big boxes of the most unhealthy sewage on offer. They are subsidizing your shopping for quality ingredients from near and far.
I think it's the same with other stores. The low quality junk that appeals to the average shopper is subsidizing the quality niche item that you need to buy.
> Eggs, vegetables, meat and chicken, fish sometimes, dairy and bread.
Thank you. I didn't realize until now that some cultures/regions distinguish between meat and chicken. Had to turn 41 for learning this.
There’s meat, game, and chicken.
> Politics aside. American big box stores are full of so much junk no one actually needs
How dare you question the free hand of the market!
Can we NOT start another fake scarcity scare? Businesses are importing less (from China, in this case) due to tariffs because they expect demand to drop due to the increased prices that would be passed down to consumers. They are not going to stop importing goods that have inelastic demand, where everyone will just have to absorb the higher prices. PLEASE do not start panic buying, which does create [temporary] shortages and generally causes unnecessary harm :/
A huge percentage (35%-65% depending on what source you believe) of American families are living paycheck to paycheck are are therefore extremely price sensitive. They are the ones buying cheap stuff in Walmart.
Not everyone will be buying expensive hothouse tomatoes come winter. People who can no longer afford to buy imported produce will change their habits and just buy more unhealthy stuff that they can afford.
Do we import much food from China? Real question. South America, yes. But China?
No, Mexico mostly, but still tariffs there of course.
I agree we won't see empty shelves, excepting maybe some food items, as if people don't buy things due to the higher price, they'll just sit on the shelves.
I'd caution that no demand is totally inelastic though. The classic example is people not reducing their insulin use if the price goes up, but in actual practice, people absolutely do just that.
Why are you dismissing legitimate concerns of ordinary Americans here? For a family that lives paycheck to paycheck, even a 10% increase in cost of an essential item (like baby formula) can be catastrophic. If you are able to absorb the increased costs or give up basic items, good for you. Not everyone can.
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that's basically the goal here, getting people to panic spend to squeeze the last little bit out of the COVID debacle before things return to normal.
We are at an inflection point in manufacturing. The next industrial revolution will combine AI and robots.
Manufacturing jobs of the future will be fewer and higher in the value chain, requiring technical abilities. Workers won't be mindless stamping parts over and over.
Now, the question is, do you want our adversaries to develop and own this new era or do you want the US to lead this next generation of industrialization?
Finally, if you don't think China is our adversary, then we're not living in the same reality.
> or do you want the US to lead this next generation of industrialization?
The current administration's actions are not meaningfully helping push us towards that. There are plenty of things they could do to help motivate that, but what they've done so far isn't really in that direction.
The USA has sleep walked into an awkward position:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-21/-chine... https://militarnyi.com/en/news/usa-unable-to-make-drones-wit...
Owning automation and high tech manufacture is likely important for the country. It’s too bad we have the absolute least qualified person and party to pull it off in charge
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AGI which will lead to ASI is going to happen before 2030, and the US is going to lose because of tariffs. Thinking in terms of decades rather than years will be a fatal mistake.
