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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things.

In what sense did he actually achieve - or even try to achieve - any of this?

There was minimal change in the trajectory of the manufacturing sector under Trump - there was a period of reasonable growth about the same as periods of growth under Obama in length and magnitude, stagnating in early 2019 before Covid made the numbers meaningless - and even after Covid corrections Biden also had a similar period of growth - slightly shorter but slightly faster - before stagnating similarly to Trump. What policy of Trump's was even supposed to achieve this? Tariffs is the only obvious candidate, but they came only in fits and starts and provoked a wide range of retaliatory tariffs. It doesn't matter though because clearly it didn't affect much either way.

If the answer to all this is that he wanted to achieve more but was thwarted by Congress/the Judiciary/Democrats/Republicans/the Deep State, then sorry but that's politics, maybe he isn't very good at it. Everyone agrees when Freddie De Boer says this to the left, but it's equally true for the right.

Shifting the vibes is by far the most important economic contributor. Talking about lower taxes and then not lowering them will likely bring in far more revenue than talking about raising taxes and then not raising them.