HaroldWilson
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
16hr 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
17hr 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
8d 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
15d 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
15d 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.
HaroldWilson
15d ago
Sure, but these practical problems are actually utterly irrelevant to the question of who is a woman. Trans women are women but shouldn't be allowed in female changing rooms is a perfectly coherent position. So the teacher or whoever doesn't need to take a position on the nature of womanhood at all.
HaroldWilson
15d ago
Yes but I don't think the author of that article would subscribe to the initial assumption that the reason some defend trans-inclusive schemes is because they are 'entirely disconnected from reality'.
HaroldWilson
15d ago
The problem though, especially on a forum as partisan as this one, is that things descend very quickly into Bulverism, and more time is spent psychoanalysing your opponents than engaging with them.
HaroldWilson
15d ago
and the inability to write definitions of ‘woman’ that are both meaningful and trans-inclusive is the reason why.
This is itself a position. When I said 'scheme' I didn't mean a literal definition of woman, I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games. 'Female' and 'adult' themselves have context dependent clusters of meanings, and are not 0/1 binaries. Efforts to nail it down are always doomed.
HaroldWilson
15d ago
Well personally I think the whole question is a little silly - a la Wittgenstein, policing the boundaries of words is a context-dependent exercise, a language game which is usually directed at some other end. When we say 'woman', sometimes we're gesturing at features which don't include trans women - ability to bear children, say - and sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.
That is to say, I don't think there's any reason to suggest that it is the criteria of one game in particular that should be held up as the final and definite boundary to 'woman' in the abstract.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
Is the economy good?
This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.
My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe.
In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?
If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.
Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.
Here, the aggregate measure of GDP has hidden the reality that a more modest societal split has grown into an economic chasm. Since 2013, Americans with bachelor’s or more advanced degrees have, in the aggregate, seen their material well-being improve — by the Federal Reserve’s estimate, an additional tenth of adults have risen to comfort. Those without high school degrees, by contrast, have seen no real improvement. And geographic disparities have widened along similar lines, with places ranging from San Francisco to Boston seeing big jumps in income and prosperity, but places ranging from Youngstown, Ohio, to Port Arthur, Texas, falling further behind. The crucial point, even before digging into the nuances, is clear: America’s GDP has grown, and yet we remain largely blind to these disparities.
This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.
This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.
What is a woman?
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X
Fine, but wasn't Elon's whole motivation for buying X to improve or level in some way the social media information space? With which the link de-boosting works at total cross-purposes.
HaroldWilson
29d ago
I love the attempt to actually contain spending
There is no attempt to contain spending. The savings from DOGE/'efficiency' are trivial and will be destroyed and then some by the inevitable Republican budget-busting tax cut.
HaroldWilson
29d ago
I hate Putin, so I'm perfectly OK with all of you dying to achieve this goal
This is highly uncharitable. It's not just about hating Putin, the point is that the worse the war is for Russia the greater deterrent it stands as against wars of aggression. And of course it's not as if the US is forcing Ukraine to fight, just furnishing them some weapons to do so.
HaroldWilson
30d ago
not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney
I think this is a little silly. Without wishing to start the endless and pointless 'who started it' conversations, the idea that the Romney 'smear' campaign was some turning point in the breakdown of partisan relations is I think not very likely. After all Republicans ran their own set of vituperative ads in the 2012, including 'small business owners' getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation and that work/welfare ad making a bare-faced lie about welfare reform. At least Bain actually did close that factory in that Obama ad.
I don't think there was ever a realistic off-ramp from where America is now, but it isn't that bad, all things considered. At least Senators don't beat each other near to death these days. Trump is pretty unique and when he sees out his term of dies I think the populist right probably loses its momentum and things start to cool down again, especially when it becomes apparent that all he will have achieved is some tax cuts which outweigh by a factor of a zillion any savings from cutting 'bureaucracy'.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Libya and Syria
These were pretty marginal 'interventions'. In the case of Libya it was a no-fly zone and some sporadic airstrikes, and for all Hillary bloviated I doubt that the outcome of the Libyan Civil War would have been any less disastrous if the West did nothing except maybe Gaddafi kills a few more rebels on his way out. Post-Gaddafi the West has done almost nothing. While there has been slightly more involvement in Syria, this has been mostly fighting ISIS and didn't really start until the civil war was well underway - again, it's hardly as if absent US action Assad would have regained control over Syria. Occasionally airstriking an airfield hardly changed the course of the war. Objectively, in terms of actual action taken by the West, Kosovo and Sierra Leone were far more 'major' interventions and were successes.
Iraq was obviously a total disaster, but it was preceded by totally disastrous non-interventions and some successful interventions - this is precisely the point I'm making about over-learning lessons - not every intervention is another Iraq.
After all, Ukraine or most other contemporary foreign policy problems are not analogous in any meaningful way to Iraq or Afghanistan. The west should take some lessons from those two disasters, but the ghosts of the past can't dictate foreign policy forever.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
And every time a simple moral fairy tale that tries to copy WW2 narratives was used to justify the destruction of various countries. It is actually the moral and better path for this kind of agenda to stop.
I'm no neocon, but successful interventions are easily forgotten, botched ones never area. How many lives did intervention save in Sierra Leone? In Kosovo? Operation Barkhane (until Mali kicked them out)? How many might have been saved if the West have been more active in Rwanda or Bosnia?
Foreign policy decisions seem to often suffer from the lessons of over-learning from the past. True, this does indeed mean that not every dictator is a Hitler. But equally not every plausible intervention is another Iraq.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Or mexican cartells, or CHAZ?
These aren't analogous because the US doesn't recognise them as sovereign states - they have no state for which to act in an official capacity, and are therefore just regular criminals in a way invading soldiers are not.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
quite sensible that someone refused entry is also refused jurisdiction
Well we know this isn't true because illegal immigrants are still often prosecuted for other non-immigration crimes in ordinary American courts. POWs are subject to a distinct legal regime, and are in that sense at the very least not fully subject to the same jurisdiction as ordinary persons in the United States. Think of when Lincoln reclassified confederate sailors from criminal pirates to POWs - they were no longer tried and sentenced in US civilian courts, because in some very important sense they were not subject to the jurisdiction of civilian American law insofar as they were acting as part of an opposing navy - and not even one that Lincoln considered the navy of a legitimate foreign state! If an illegal immigrant started attempting to capture ships in US waters, they would very much be prosecuted for piracy.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
coming to a country where the people do not want you there?
Who are the people? Realistically, the vast majority of skilled migrants to the US are going to be living in areas where most of their neighbours are pro-immigration.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Why does it need to be an EO?
Is it your position that the President can make law by vague implication? That Musk has the full authority of the Presidency vested within him and his department when he does things like this because Trump likes him? I mean Trump appointed Patel too. How do we know he is not also acting with the authority of the President when he told his staff to ignore the email?
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.
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.
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