HaroldWilson
7hr ago
It is supposed to prove that the economy under biden was not all sunshine and cute woodland creatures
I didn't say it was. The economy does not have only two states of 'good' and 'recession'. Nobody considers any of the years of 1975-1980 as recessionary even though everyone agrees the economy was in the shitter.
That the official definition of recession used by NBER, the FED, Et Al. was revised from "more than three consecutive months of negative growth" to "more than one full calandar quarter" the same week Biden would've crossed the old three month threshold.
This is false (and if not do please provide a source), but it couldn't even possibly be true because there is no 'official' definition of recession in the US, recessions are determined by the NBER business cycle dating committee who don't follow any strict set of rules. Even here, there was never ever any kind of rule of thumb of three months of consecutive negative growth - the only widely accepted definition (to the extent that people accepted that there was one at all) was two consecutive quarters of negative growth, though there are good reasons for the NBER not to strictly stick to this (the 2001 recession saw three non-consecutive quarters of growth, but nobody doubts that as a genuine recession). So the question then is, should the dating committee have declared a recession based on past behaviour? Well, no. If 2022 were a recession it would be the first one in American history to consist of a single quarter of negative growth, and not even a particularly severe quarter of contraction either at -0.25%. It would have been completely at odds with past practice to declare 2022 a recession - there were single quarters of greater or roughly equal contraction not declared a recession in 1947, 1956 and again in 1957, since when there hasn't been an isolated quarter of contraction, until 2022.
HaroldWilson
23hr ago
What is this article supposed to prove exactly?
HaroldWilson
1d ago
In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.
If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well? Of course, day trading usually doesn't (and for the purposes of the entire economy the number of people who support themselves off of it is a rounding error to zero), and yes maybe the Iphone designer produces value only by harnessing pointless fashion cycles, but a) this is a symptom of a wealthy society that there is enough excess productive value to be poured into what is fashion, and b) the average white collar American is not a DEI officer or Iphone designer, they are in prosaic but necessary fields like logistics or accounts.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
I can see them keeping the tariffs
Biden, who is probably the most protection-friendly figure in the entire Democratic establishment, had a whole four years and didn't do anything significant. Any of the plausible 2028 Democrats at the moment it is hard to see continuing with this policy.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
If the US goes to war with China it will have to be over Taiwan. Now, given that the American right has spent the last year + in outrage at the notion of sending military aid to help a foreign nation, what do you think the reaction would be if Trump declared war in a situation where the Chinese claims are way more credible than any of the Russian bullshit. I know MAGA world hates China, but after spending years positioning itself as the remedy to failed interventionist establishment foreign policy, declaring war on China seems difficult to square with that.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
But it can also be true that reading the New York Times buisiness section makes one more informed about the state of the national economy than not doing that.
Yes and when people say that reading the MSM makes you less informed I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are. Obviously ok you could do better than the MSM if you started pouring time into critically reading academic, industry or legal sources, but most Americans don't even understand how marginal tax rates work. You would probably be in the top 5% (or better) of well-informed voters if you read the NYT (or indeed, so as not to appear partisan, the WSJ) and nothing else cover to cover every day.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.
The scales here are totally different. There is no policy from the Biden administration that even comes close to the destructive idiocy of these tariffs, and more saliently for Hanania's point, no policy more ill-thought through. He couldn't even be bothered to properly calculate a reciprocal tariff!
HaroldWilson
2d ago
It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.
Don't be facetious. The proportion of money redistributed via welfare which goes to administration of that welfare is pretty low, and that mostly consists of ordinary administrative workers not high-level policy wonks.
Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.
Lol. To the extent that 'learn to code' was ever a real policy, which it never really was, the vast vast majority of the funding changes downstream of that discourse didn't go to non-profits. In any case what I meant by redistribution was, well, redistribution.
It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?
Lazy and trite. There are problems with left-wing non-profits, especially in the post-Floyd period, but that has nothing to do with genuine government redistributive programmes which do a lot of good and have relatively low overheads.
HaroldWilson
2d ago
just as they did to protect Biden
This is simply not true. Under Biden the US only had one quarter of negative real GDP growth, which is not famously less than two quarters, which not only is conventional definition but pre-Covid there is no recession typically considered so which was less than six months. The 'Covid recession' was obviously a special case because of the scale of the decline in a single quarter - 19% decline versus around 0.25% for the single quarter of 2022 contraction. If you consider 2022 a recession then you also have to include patently non-recessionary years a recessions including 2014 and 1956.
HaroldWilson
2d ago
doing ok
And by doing ok, you mean nearing all-time highs?
Let's delve into the cross tabs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300025
When you take out retirees and students it looks much less dramatic, and even in the 25-54 bracket per some mercatus paper I can't find now even a substantial portion thereof is early retirees. Especially given that the figures for men have been stable post-GFC, it hardly seems like something worth crashing the economy over.
HaroldWilson
2d ago
Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).
These are not contradictory because immigrant (especially illegal immigrant) and native pools of labour are not easy substitutes, they have very different skill mixes - and when I say 'skills', I don't mean that American citizens are all accountants or nuclear engineers, I mean in the most basic sense. Hence because of complementary task specialisation it is possible for new illegal immigrants to, on average, depress the wages of other illegal immigrants but not, on average, natives, and for such influxes to improve native productivity. It's a bit of a waste of a median American to be working in the fields, but in a constricted labour market wages in non-skilled fields get pushed up until people are pulled out into those fields, which is bad for productivity and standards of living in the long run. In a way it's the logic of automation.
Of course, there will be some in the American citizen labour pool (especially, ironically, recent legal immigrants) who are similarly unskilled to the average illegal immigrant, but the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.
HaroldWilson
2d ago
Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations
Sorry, is the theory here that inducing a recession will increase labour force participation? That is very observably not what has happened in every previous recession. If the theory is that mass deportations will mean this time is different and the reverse will happen because there will be millions of new vacancies opened up, well there are demand side effects too. Obviously no-one knows precisely, but estimates of illegal immigrant remittances tend not to be above 20% of total earnings, so even before considering any other mechanisms you'd need to deport at the very least four illegal immigrants to create one vacancy in an equivalent role on average, and this is before one even begins to consider things like complementary task specialisation. This means that any increase in unemployment downstream of a recession will be extraordinarily difficult. Given that the US labour force is something like 170 million+ people, if a Trump recession produces just a 1% increase in unemployment, you'd need to deport over 6 millions illegal immigrants just to get back to where you started. This isn't just a question of, as you say, 'he won't deport enough illegals to make a difference'. It's that even a small recession would wipe out any possible labour market improvements from even the most thoroughly pursued program of deportations.
The fact is that being able to coast by on gig economy money, for instance, is a symptom of a society becoming wealthier. It might be bad from a social cohesion and personal fulfilment perspective, but 'make society poorer so people have to work harder' seems like a pretty silly experiment to carry out, and rather unfair on everyone else who doesn't fall into that category and whose lives will become a whole lot harder.
I'm also not convinced this is a major problem. U-6 unemployment is below 8% at the moment, which is only marginally above the lows it reached prior to the early 2000s recession, GFC and Covid.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
Yeah but there was nothing anyone could do to stop those once it became clear what was happening, whereas if there's a recession now it will be blindingly obvious what is going on.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
stocks could drop 50%+.
As much as I hate the tariffs, this is surely unlikely because if this looked like happening at all enough Congressional Republicans would turn on Trump to step in. I mean that would be 1932 levels of political disaster for the Republican party if this actually happened.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
On this basis literally anything Trump does can be explained as a brilliant negotiating tactic. If your aim is just to induce lower tariffs from foreign nations, why not actually base your tariffs on the real rates of other nations and not this balance of trade nonsense? There are plenty of countries with lower average tariff rates than the US who have nevertheless been hit - what precisely is Trump trying to achieve there if his aim is reciprocal reductions?
HaroldWilson
3d ago
But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons.
Well unless you believe the stock market doesn't follow economic signals but instead is in on an elaborate ruse to discredit tariffs, the disaster predicted by the experts is already underway. You also have to engage with the object-level arguments and evidence against tariffs, especially of this extreme nature - it's utterly pathetic to say, well I don't trust experts so I will merely act at random.
If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.
I doubt this will be a persuasive argument to consumers when everything goes up in price. If what you do is a complete fuck-up, surely it will only increase the dominance of the status quo. The tariffs will be a disaster and every economist will rightly say I told you so. Pol Pot proved that 'alternatives are possible' too.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
razor-thin profit margins
Well I never knew 'more excess profits for producers and higher prices for consumers' was high on the list of Trump priorities. Surprised that slogan never made it on the campaign trail.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
you may be overestimating what the median person directly has to lose in a crash.
Their job? Clearly America forgot their lesson from Smoot-Hawley and people will have to endure double digit unemployment again to remember it. If we're lucky this one might put Republicans out of power for twenty years again.
Well that probably won't happen but largely because Trump will probably climb part way down at some stage.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
The US has rising income inequality and the fracture between wall street and average Joe has become way too large
This might be more credible if Trump were not also planning to reinstate his wildly lop-sided tax cuts. Inequality is mostly downstream of fiscal policy, not trade policy - the period of major growth in inequality came in the 80s, then it stagnated in the 90s and 2000s which doesn't really match up with free trade/decline of manufacturing timelines, what it very obviously matches up with is 12 years of Republican control of the Presidency up to 1993. Inequality at the moment is roughly where it was in the early-mid 1990s.
The world risks a bronze age style collapse if global supply chains break down
This makes no sense as rationale for the tariffs when one looks at where and how they have been applied. I think chips have even been exempted from Taiwan's tariff rates!
Makes domestic manufacturing more competitive
As @The_Nybbler said, this makes no sense at all. How could insulating domestic manufacturers from foreign competition make them more efficient and dynamic? The very reverse process is part of what destroyed British industry. Higher tariffs barriers in the post-war period meant that, because they were not exposed to global competitive forces, British companies never kept up with the technologies and efficiencies developing all over the world, and so when firms like British Leyland arrived in the 70s and 80s they were still producing cars at the speed and quality of decades prior and were inevitably destroyed. For a developing country this logic is more reasonable because pure Geschenkron-style copying is enough for domestic industry to grow fast from a very low base, but in the position of a first-world nation this stops working because you're at the forefront of technologies and efficiencies. Hence why Chinese tariffs have come down every year for decades, because they're slowly wearing out the possibilities of copying manufacturing techniques from the rest of the world and the competitive advantage offered by low wages.
At the end of the day you have to believe Trump when he speaks. He is simply an idiot who thinks that the US should not run a trade deficit with literally any country in the world and doesn't understand anything about anything. This is not a piece of masterful grand strategy to reduce inequality and strengthen the resilience of American supply chains, Trump is just thick.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
Why should my state put the interest of someone who has zero right to be here above mine?
The point is that the same logic which is being applied here could be used to deport and abandon citizens. Just ignore due process, do what you want and then, oops, looks like you're in a tinpot dictatorship now so nothing we can do because there's no way to redress your grievance.
'I don't care about due process because this guy was guilty anyway' is not a very coherent position.
HaroldWilson
3d ago
I fail to see how their admin can get even close to balancing the budget.
What makes you think Trump cares at all about this? Nothing he has ever done indicates any kind of concern for the deficit - even the DOGE spree ended up targeting 'woke' spending specifically rather than 'waste' writ large. And of course he's lining up for the usual Republican budget-busting tax cut.
HaroldWilson
11d ago
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
I'm not sure this is so much 'believing false things' as 'being unable to intuit the scale of numbers'. In both these cases these numbers are nothing more than shorthand for 'lots'. They haven't deliberately discarded lower or higher numbers, just plumped for something that seems like lots. It's like when there was that poll suggesting that the average American thought 10% of the country was trans and 20% Asian or whatever it was. People aren't 'believing' that figure is true in the sense that they actively don't believe in possible lower figures, they just know it's more than zero and grasp at some likely sounding round number.
HaroldWilson
18d ago
Not a single woke activist judge ever told Biden he must stop welcoming 13 million illegals into our country.
Not sure I understand the logic. Obviously it's easier for the courts to stop you doing something than to stop you doing nothing.
HaroldWilson
18d ago
I think the problem is just elite (or aspirant-upper-middle-class) overproduction. Gen Z'ers could actually have a material life better than their past equivalents by working a menial or unskilled job, the problem is that such a high proportion of the youth would find that insultingly low-status. That's not to assign blame, the decline of towns and cultural messaging has produced this state of affairs, but it's also worth noting that the internet makes discontent more visible and self-sustaining.
In the world of the modern scale of government the revenue raised by tariffs is pretty meagre in comparison to the scale of the economic disruption. Even Iran, which is one of the most protectionist nations in the world, receives something like 5% of total revenues from tariffs.
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