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Well, it's just a little after lunch on February 1st, and Trump's promised 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico have yet to materialize.
Messaging has been disorganized. Trump has said that these tariffs are in response to illegal immigration (i.e. border crossing); Karoline Leavitt, Trump's press secretary, has said they're a response to fentanyl coming into the country from Canada and Mexico. Yesterday, when asked if there's anything either country country can do to prevent or delay the tariffs, Trump said no.
As a Canadian, this has me pretty worried. Here is a report published by the Bank of Canada a couple days ago, detailing the seriousness of a 25% tariff for Canada. Of course, discussions on social media have been less sober. I'm not even remotely an economist, so when I hear people suggesting that this could lead to a recession in Canada on the level of 2009, I'm not really able to contextualize those claims. I was just out of school in 2009, and it was an extremely difficult year – the idea of going through something like that again really frightens me.
Up until now I've been more or less indifferent to Trump. While I find him personally and aesthetically unpleasant, the hysteria surrounding his every move – and especially the mainstream media's tendency to misrepresent him, often flagrantly – has sort of balanced things out for me. I confess I felt some cruel enjoyment watching people on the left (many of whom have done great harm to me and my loved ones) melt down both times he won.
Will he go through with it? What are his actual motivations? What will be the consequences? Curious to hear your thoughts on this.
The most incoherent part of these tariffs is the 25% against Canada. Here's a list of US trade partners by volume including deficits. Why are they getting a harsher treatment than China? The vast majority of illegal immigration + drugs comes from the southern border, not the north. So what the heck is the play here? The only thing I can think of is that Trump genuinely believes he can bully Canada into accepting annexation... which, I mean, I already thought Trump was a total buffoon, but this is 2-3 standard deviations beyond the idiocy he normally does.
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He's in the tank for Xi JinpingThe hysterical critics were correct. Donald Trump is a thug who thinks he can extort concessions from Canada because they are weak and the US is strong. Best case he wants to get some symbolic concession in exchange for dropping the tariffs so he can tout it to his guileless supporters as proof of what a tough negotiator he is. Worst case, he's really serious about trying to use economic coercion to force Canada to accept annexation, which will almost certainly fail, but will have the added side effect of absolutely shredding American international standing. Somewhere in the middle is thinking he can force Canada to equalize the balance of trade between the two countries.
How is forcing the annexation of Canada through economic pressure supposed to work? It would require a constitutional amendment with the agreement of all ten provinces. This would never happen. He'd be lucky to get one, and he is especially not going to get Quebec, which would never want to give up its language laws. Canadians are very proud of not being American. We're the product of 250 years of selection of people who did not move to the U.S. for better weather and better economic opportunity.
I don't know, but Trump seems weirdly persistent about it and I don't think he's overly concerned about legal details.
I'm guessing someone gave him the idea that Canada wasn't a real country and Canadians were really Americans who had been propagandized into believing they were a separate nation.
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We're past the best case scenario already.
Eh, if we can get rid of the current (Canadian) leadership it might be possible to have some productive negotiation in which the chiefs of both sides don't hate each others' guts.
No chance of that until March 24, thanks to Trudeau proroguing parliament, right?
He's trying to play a trick -- he wants to introduce "tariff relief" on the COVID skymoney model; for that he needs to recall parliament.
I'd guess his idea is to put the other parties in a double-bind where if they bring him down (as they've all now promised to do at the first opportunity) they will be (accused of) siding with the Orange Man; if they don't, it will probably not happen until fall.
I maintain that the fucker engineered the whole situation on the Canada side -- Trump probably doesn't really care too much either way.
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I'm not being obtuse when I ask: what value, exactly, does American international standing have?
Being able to get people to cooperate with you on economic, military, and political matters. We have neither the ability nor the interest to obtain everything we want by coercion, and the more we try the worse the case for working with us versus our rivals becomes. If you're going to start mashing the defect button just to prove you can, eventually your partners are going to look for someone more reliable. If you're going to start running around trying annex your neighbors, people are going to start forming alliances against you.
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Having allies do the bleeding and suffering while the US takes the spoils of war. That's the tried and tested American strategy for winning serious wars.
Having other countries comply with US sanctions and generally cooperate.
Avoiding unpleasant situations like having strategic resource imports cut off or sudden price hikes, though Trump doesn't seem to care much about this.
Getting to keep overseas bases in foreign countries.
American companies being allowed to get lucrative overseas contracts, merger approvals, market access.
Getting more generous terms in multilateral free trade agreements.
Diplomatic credibility. It helps diplomacy if its generally thought that America won't renege on agreements, being seen as trustworthy (though this has basically vanished).
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For a thorough economic analysis, I recommend Patrick Boyle. The gist is that tariffs are redistributive: They take income from the household sector and transfer it to protected businesses — both within the US. Whether Canada will be thrown into a recession depends on how badly Canadian goods are demanded by US consumers.
The basic economic incentive for international trade is the same why we have different professions for people: by dividing labor, countries can specialize and be more efficient in producing particular good or service, making it cheaper for everyone. Yes, you can grow bananas in Canada, but it's just way cheaper to do it in warm climate. The flip side is that Canada will never gain the expertise needed to grow bananas, and will not have any bananas if the other countries close down shop. This is fine without bananas, but if you replace "banana" with "weapon", then some people start worrying about "natural security".
This is not directly related to your questions — but I'm genuinely curious. How would you describe the harm that the left has done to you and your loved ones, and how would you say the mainstream media misrepresents Trump?
The reason why I'm asking is that I'm firmly anti-Trump — I have no hate for him, but I do believe that he will make the lives of almost everyone worse, including his own supporters, except for the direct beneficiaries of his authoritarian rule.
And I'm bringing this up with you because I'm curious why his own supporters would support him, even though he will harm them. Obviously, that doesn't make sense to me. 😅
Before I expand on that, I'd like to expound that my core value systems is humanism — essential, every human being is worth caring for. That includes you, every Trump supporter, all leftists, and people of all colors. However, it appears to me that Trump supporters do not necessarily see it the same way, and then it becomes a question of how much care I can afford for a human that is fine with harming me.
Now my quick rundown of Trump: The key tactic of populist figures is to deceive about the actual benefit of their policies. Will Trumps' tarrifs improve the lives of most American consumers? Judging by argument above, the answer is "no". Does Trump care? The answer is — "no". Why would he care? Why would he not lie to everyone? His good character? But he doesn't seem to have a good character? And will people be able to tell the difference? The answer is "no" — that's why the deception works. Most people do not understand well enough what effect tariffs have — and they will harm themselves if they belief they work while the reality is that they don't. It's the discrepancy between belief and reality that is the source of harm. And the populist strategy is to play exactly that: Tell people what they want to believe, reinforce it, throw new beliefs at the wall and see what sticks, without any regard for reality. Everyone who is in on that deception will win, everyone who is not will lose out.
As Henry George put it in his 1879 book "Progress and Poverty":
“A theory that, falling in with the habits of thought of the poorer classes, thus justifies the greed of the rich and the selfishness of the powerful, will spread quickly and strike its roots deep. This has been the case with the theory advanced by Malthus.”
It's pretty simple. Trump will protect the interests of practical social conservatives in the US v institutions seeking to discriminate against us, including currents within the US government.
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I can’t answer for the user you’re replying to, but can for me. The answer is immigration. Until mass immigration ends, immigration is the only issue that matters. Every normal policy can be quickly reversed, but in human history, mass immigration is usually (albeit not always) forever, especially under liberal democracy.
A huge global recession caused by Trump’s tariffs policies would be awful, but the alternative was acquiescing to the most harmful policy of the last 70 years of Western civilization. If my voice is heard (and of course it isn’t really), it must be for that.
Aren't you an immigrant living in London, UK? (Of course, you, individually, are not "mass immigration," but neither is any other individual immigrant.)
She’s from the U.S. it’s different. Culturally and ethnically.
If she's a MAGA-pilled red tribe American living in London, she is around the 95th percentile of non-Muslim immigrants here in terms of how hostile to British values she is and how dangerous she would be as a potential fifth column.
If she is an American who cheerfully voted for Trump as the lesser of two evils despite the obvious red flags, then having her as a citizen would be mildly negative for British culture and society because right-wing populists being useful idiots for bad actors like Johnson have done a lot more damage to the UK than non-Muslim immigrants. But I suspect her economic contribution more than compensates for that.
As a right-wing populist and regretful Johnson voter, I will tell you the same thing I've told others: I will vote for the cleverest, most noble, most honourable man or woman who credibly commits to stopping immigration. When the great and the good, the MPs and the newspapers and Coutts bank and God knows who else collude to prevent any sane man from taking my political position in public, don't come crying because I voted for whoever you left me with.
This is why people vote for Trump, it's why I voted for Johnson and for Farage. And I'll keep voting until I find a politician who does what he promises to do. If you don't want that, break the cordon sanitaire and find a better candidate.
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Yes, the US and UK are famously "two nations separated by a common language." Other former colonies, like India, have much greater cultural ties to the UK. (Cricket, poor production value in movies/tv, cousin marriage, sub-US social mobility, spelling...)
Indian cultural heritage and genetic ‘median personality traits’ for lack of a better word under the layer of Britishness is very different though.
Americans and English are also sometimes much more different than they think, especially the ex-Borderer strain, but often closer in terms of heritage and base understanding.
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I've become a lot more to sympathetic to anti-immigration arguments in the last 6 - 8 years, but it's not the most important issue to me as an American voter.
Are you an American or European? In the US, the next generation of kids are already majority non-white, albeit by a small margin and some self-redefining about who counts as "Hispanic" (which means the "white" proportion is probably a bit higher than stats show). Even if Trump is able to deport something like 5 million people - and that's a big if, which I've seen you allude to - would anything really change demographically? Not to mention that Trump is on record as being pro-immigration.
I still think the US is good at assimilating our immigrants and most differences disappear by the second generation. At least, I think of most of these people as real Americans.
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Thanks!
🤔 But — could you describe how immigration harms you personally?
I'm asking because the general argument against immigration is an indirect economic argument. The argument typically goes like this: The land can support a certain size of population. If more people come in, the land will not be able to produce enough food for everyone.
The trouble is just: This argument is precisely the Malthusean theory that my quote of Henry George refers to. And it is unfortunately not an accurate model of reality — it's not true. And hasn't been since 1879. 😅 After the invention of fertilizers, land size is not a big issue anymore — the economy now runs on goods and services that people produce for each other. Sure, immigrants lead to more consumption of goods and services — but in order to be able to buy these, they also need to work to produce them. In other words, "land" has been replaced by "labor" — and while an immigrant can, by definition, not bring the resource "land" with them, they can and do bring the resource "labor" with them anywhere they go.
You already stung the hornet's nest plenty so this is just me piling on but where if not here.
Man, are you just shitposting? The only reason I'm not 100% convinced is because I'm not bothering to read all the related comments. But in between the smiley faces, the isolated demand for not even rigor but some other ridiculously narrowly defined criterion that attempts to avoid what actually bothers people, the putting-the-conclusion-before-any-argument eh rationalists what do you call that again, the stubborn refusal to even acknowledge other people's points which you just dodge in order to re-route the discussion to your favorite talking points...
I mean, you are being civil, so the bare minimum standards are met, but I'm just reading Trolling Attempt all over this.
That said, let's argue.
Would integration be at all necessary without immigration? Is it wise to have immigration when integration is unreliable or just completely outpaced by the formation of parallel societies? Is it wise to have immigration when you know full well that there are influential forces at work in policymaking that actively aim to use immigration against you? Hell yes it's a consequence of immigration.
Drug dealers should be shot, hanged, and shot again, and illegal immigrants who enter a wealthy country without permission only to proceed to deal drugs should be hanged and shot once more for good measure. What the fuck is the argument here? The refugee one - they had to flee from violence and persecution, that's why we need to accept them in spite of their coming illegally, but as soon as they gain safety they turn into scum? Oh hey, wonder why they needed to GTFO of their home countries then. Or is it actually that immigration is always good regardless of the motivation, and obviously they have a right to expect gainful employment in their target country?
And pray tell, where are those young foreigners coming from?
You're just completely ignoring that to many people, old-fashioned bigots that we are, a country is more than an economic zone with one or two regional dishes as "culture". And I do mean you are actively choosing to ignore it because it makes your arguments go more smoothly. Your ideology is destroying my country, the actual society and culture that make the country what it is, and replacing it with the same easily influenced, easily marketed-to, easily controlled global slurry you can find everywhere else that the third world found a route to. What is our future now? Corrupt shithole, Brazil-style? Or just violent islamized shithole #78? Certainly no gleaming socialist utopia.
No, I'm serious. 😅 I mean, I know that I'm not going to convince anybody, but I want to learn what you think, because of my statement here:
"I do believe that he [Trump] will make the lives of almost everyone worse, including his own supporters, except for the direct beneficiaries of his authoritarian rule."
I genuinely think that Trump's policies are going to harm you, who seems to support him. That is why I can't quite make sense of why you're supporting him. As mentioned, I'm humanist, I do not want you to be harmed, because you are a human being, that's why I'm posting in the first place. Essentially, I'm asking myself "Why are you going to hurt yourself?" 😅 You're probably seeing this differently, and that's fine — all I can hope for here is to gain some more insight into your thoughts.
To pick on this point: The problem is that you can't voluntarily choose to not have immigration — people who are desperate enough will try to come and take very high risks. I mean, seriously, which human being in their right mind wants to risk being shot for walking over a border? You'd only risk that if your current live is worse than this risk. This means that if situation on the other side is terrible enough, you will have immigration — and then it's better policy to invest into integration, because that ameliorates follow-up problems later on. "Nah, I don't want to invest into integration because I don't want immigration in the first place" doesn't work out.
This goes against my core value, humanism. Do not inflict bodily harm other human beings, regardless of whom. (There is a subclause on what happens when other people want to inflict bodily harm on you, which I will not go into here). That is why leftists do not condone attempts at assassinating Trump and there was no Jan 6th equivalent. Do not inflict bodily harm.
Do they become "scum" voluntarily? Or is it because they are not allowed to work? If you can't work legally — you have to work illegally, because you have to buy food. The policy of not allowing immigrants to work is actually causing them to work illegally. Duh.
Genuine question: From this answer, I take it that you are not humanist? That's it's ok to inflict bodily harm on other human beings if they qualify for some criteria? Not sure I'm ok with that, but it seems to me that this a core value that I should check with you.
The thing is this: Whether "my ideology" is destroying your country or not is up to debate. But that's not what I'm really concerned about when posting here — the point that I'm genuinely concerned about that Trumps is destroying your country in a way that you don't realize.
Look, if I wanted to destroy your country, I would do it exactly like Trump — throw random nonsense at the internet, stick to the things that people believe in ("Huh, apparently they care about immigration, sure, let's go with that"), make up some policies that work or do not, I don't care, as long as they are flashy — while enriching myself and those most loyal to me. I would play the difference between what you think is a good idea ("restrict immigration") and what will improve your life in reality ("UBI", universal health care, … — I think so, up to debate), and you would never know the difference. I would use your own beliefs against you.
I'm sorry, are you saying that there is no criteria which justifies bodily harm on another human being?
OF COURSE it's OK to inflict bodily harm on other human beings if they qualify for it! That's what it means to qualify! That's what it means to have criteria!
There's a whole lot else I have problems with in your post, but that part stuck out the worst.
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How authoritarian that will be, as far as I know, remains to be seen. He certainly did not install himself as dictator for life the last time around, and life, for what I know, continued without death camps, monuments to the dictator, the construction of a new palace of Versailles, wars over petty slights, deadly purges or any of the other hallmarks of authoritarian rule. Of course he will work for the benefit of his cronies, he's a democratically elected politican after all and that's what they all do, but I don't see why one should decline to elect the crook who's likely to have desirable side-effects if all the alternatives are liable to get up to the same self-serving shenanigans while offering nothing beneficial in return.
Well, big caveat up front - I'm German, not American, and I favor Trump not as a voter and citizen but purely as a commentator, for his effects on the Culture War. So his negative impact on me is...tariffs? I'll take that. Go Trump. Every since he was elected non-leftist politicians in Germany seem to have found one or two extra vertebrae that were previously thought missing, much appreciated. Would I vote for him if he were running for Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany? Yes actually. He can't do more damage than the decades of leftst control of the narrative have already done, and if it shifts the overton window back towards a more reasonable place, then I'm happy to pay whatever price the Americans are currently about to pay for their electroal misdeed. Why am I going to hurt myself? It's a small sacrifice for a shot at a very necessary change in direction.
Should one stop to enforce the law if only because law-brakers are more persistent than the legally and politically hamstrung enforcers who are being actively sabotage by ideologically motivated agents who desire immigration at any cost? Are you in favor of private gun ownership because people will always find ways to arm themselves? The greedy and the duplicituous will always find ways to enrich themselves at the expensve of the gullible and the shortsighted, so should you make your peace with that? What if I see immigration as something that can absolutely be controlled, provided that there be a will to do it, and not a deeply entrenched culture of sabotage and subversion?
Great. Let's pick them up very gently and also very gently drop them off on the other side of a heavily fortified border. No need to do bodily harm. This is fine. Bodily harm is not my terminal value here. We can reach a practical compromise I'm sure.
There's a huge market for all kinds of under-the-table work that isn't dealing drugs. Someone who deals drugs in a first-world country isn't doing so because it's literally the only thing he can do to avoid starvation. Hell, good luck on managing to literally starve in America or Germany. I doubt you'll find anyone who succeeded at that, unless he's tooo drugged up to drag himself to the closest welfare service point.
Of course I'm not a "humanist". I'd say it's okay to inflict bodily harm for sufficiently good reasons, and outright stupid to bend yourself into a pretzel to avoid it at any cost. I'd say we can do fine without inflicting bodily harm very much most of the time, but a principled refusal to employ violence ist just an open invitation to abuse by others. See exactly what we are discussing - our refusal to enforce our own rules on the people who break them leads to the rules getting broken increasingly fragrantly, because we'd rather make excuses than risk being called "inhumane".
Is that...concern trolling, I think it's called? I strongly doubt that is actually your concern. Trump cannot possibly do more damage to Germany than progressive ideologues have done. There's not enough left by now - even were he to literally nuke it to the ground, he'd have only a small share in the country's demise. I realize very much what is going on in my country, even as I keep being told by media and many endlessly "humane" compatriots that my lying eyes deceive me.
Then you would be a smart self-serving politican and very uninspired and uneffective in destroying my country. My country is not a machine for handing out welfare.
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Be nice to the lefty. “stubbornly refusing to even acknowledge other people's points“ is an accusation leveled at every unpopular opinion on every circlejerk of the internet.
There is nothing troll-y about his counter-argument, it’s eminently sensible, I’ve made it myself many times against doomer/resource depletion types. It just happens to counter an immigration-restrictionist argument that this forum does not use, so it kind of falls flat here, but they can’t know that.
That may be. Maybe everyone does it. But honest-to-God, that's what I see here.
Fair. I say so myself when they're aren't pushing my buttons. Got off on the wrong foot here.
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Thanks for being nice to, uh, the lefty. :D I don't really want to argue about the pros and cons of immigration here, as my main point is about Trump and deception, but in order to argue that deception might be going on here, I can't avoid debating the policy issue.
It’s nothing, I have admiration for people who iceskate uphill.
Arguing Trump’s deception is easy, the man lies constantly, even his supporters will admit that.
As to why his supporters supposedly ‘vote against their interests’, that’s begging the question. Tariffs, climate mitigation, immigration, increasing minimum wage, decreasing taxes, what-have-you, each policy either makes people's lives worse, or better. Which one it is is not obvious to you, me, trump, or the voters. That’s why we discuss and vote on the stuff.
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The issue here is that if you are someone who makes their living providing labour, it's a very bad thing for you to have more labour in the pool.
If a job needs to be done, and I am one of the few people who can do it, I have much better leverage than if I am one of the many people who can. This is a very classic leftist argument (see union shops).
On a personal note, housing is one of the areas where it really affects me. 25 years ago, the house my parents bought was a 5 bed 2 bath with an unfinished basement for $200000. With 2% inflation, it would be around $375000 today. Instead, it's around $3000000. At the same age my parents were moving into a great home in a wonderful neighborhood, I'm moving into a tiny condo in a cheaper city, for over double the cost of the house I grew up in. I am Canadian, as I've mentioned before - so the level of immigration I've seen is way above that of the US. But it's one of those problems that scales linearly over time - the more people you allow in without increasing services (everything from doctors, employees at the local DMV, all the way down to lanes on roads), the more everyone who needs those services has their quality of life decrease.
Edit: A word, I meant "Decrease", not "Improve".
Yes. But the influx of people also means that now two jobs need to be done, and you're no worse off. That's the core of the argument — there is more labor, but there is also more work to be labored on.
Same goes for housing — new people? They are willing to pay for building more houses!
Of course, the time horizons and other restrictions do matter. I'm not saying that the housing market isn't broken, or that sudden shifts in worker availability do not have temporary effects. What I am saying is that blaming it on immigration is not an accurate model of reality — and, even more importantly, Trump is exploiting that for his personal gain.
But I mean, this is not what we actually see; what you are expressing is what we keep getting told will be the case with immigration, but somehow never actually seems to materialize. When I was a child, I had a family doctor; now, I'm part of roughly 20% of my province that does not, and the lineup to get a family doctor is in the range of years. When I was a kid, the weekly grocery bill was around $100 CAD for a 5 person family per week; it's now around $100 CAD for a single person. This is far in excess of nominal inflation.
The time horizons matter too; I'm currently 33, and moving into a place that is not big enough to raise a family. If the immigration jobs end up stabilizing in 5 years, I'll be 38; if I wanted a family with 5 kids, I'm kind of out of time at that point. It doesn't actually matter to me if everything will be better in 5 years; I only have one life.
I think your theories only make sense if the only immigration is net contributors (people who are likely to pay more taxes than they consume); however, Canada supports both spousal unification, as well as family unification (including the extremely elderly). We also have an average wage of $49000 for new immigrants (as opposed to the $55000 for native Canadians). As such, the immigrants are literally making us poorer on a per-person basis, driving up the cost of our resources that cannot grow at the same pace as immigration (housing, health care), and bringing their racial and ethnic tensions to our streets. Our GDP may be higher than it would've without them; but that doesn't help when my wage doesn't go up, and everything is more expensive (and in Canada, our GDP per capita has actually gone down).
You describe genuine issues. But the question is: Are these really caused by immigration? I mean it, for real. You can have the firmest belief in the perception that these issues are causes by immigration. But reality simply does not care what you believe. What if you seriously entertain the possibility that you could be wrong on this? What if stopping immigration simply doesn't do anything on the above issues?
That is the essence of my point: There is a good chance that the issues in housing and health care that you are experiences are not caused by immigration, and — there are people out there who want to profit from your belief on this matter, that's what my quote by Henry George is about. Trump is such a person.
I mean, to turn the question on it's head - is there any evidence that would persuade you that it is caused (or at least, worsened) by immigration? From my perspective, it doesn't have to be caused solely by it in order for it to be aggrevating the situation.
An important thing to remember is that Canada has had approximately 1/8 of its residents added in the last 5 years (2019 census has 37.5 million population, 2024 has 41.8, but there was also a report that approximately 1 million people had overstayed their visas). During that time, I've seen housing prices go up by around 65%. (The place I'm buying was last listed at 315k in 2019, and is 485 today). The housing market began to get out of control with Harper, who dramatically expanded the TFW program; with Trudeau, who went into overdrive with TFW and international students, it became way worse.
Every province in Canada is currently suffering from this, regardless of their provincial leaders. We've had a dramatic increase in coethnic violence, including marches to support Hamas and similar groups.
We had a fairly big outrage recently over Indian international students raiding food banks for meals - this directly reduces the resources available for our population that uses them (which has gone up to about 20% of the population).
Do you think it's possible that immigration could be making things worse for the average person? I can't find you definitive proof that this is the sole cause of every word, because it isn't - all I can do is show you the ways we can see direct negatives from it.
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Put bluntly, the people around me who get busted stealing catalytic converters from cars and stabbing women in the ass with box cutters aren't named McDonald or Orbison.
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If immigrants were coming in across all income levels in proportion to the host country, then it would be economically equal to births. But instead,:
https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/
Yes. The article goes on, and notes
This is not an argument against immigration — it's actually one for controlled immigration. I don't think that this is what Trump's current policies have in mind, though.
By the way, the main issue with high-wage segments is that they have entry control — you (probably, I think) need a degree in law, medicine, from a US school … in order to enter that segment. In other words, these segments have active import restrictions. Likewise, illegal immigration cannot happen into high-wage segments — you may get away with working illegally on a construction site, but as a registered medical doctor? No chance.
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Not the poster you are responding to, but there are some cities in Europe now where, if I go outside, I am mostly among young men who are dressed and act to signal capacity for violence, have strong ingroup bias among themselves, and communicate (often exclusively) in languages that I have little to no knowledge of. I think it is appropriate to be on one's guard in such a situation, and to adjust one's general course of action to take the attendant risks into account; and I think that this adjustment should count as a personal harm.
I do not think this is true at the level of "cities" anywhere in Europe*. There are definitely neighborhoods it applies to - particularly for me in the UK as an RP speaker with no understanding of Geordie, Scouse and other similar languages spoken by violent sub-groups of the indigenous population in the chavlands, which are considerably more dangerous than the so-called "no-go zones" of Tower Hamlets.
I am told that there is a small number of cities in the United States where this phenomenon is true across most of the city - again due to a violent subgroup of the indigenous population that speaks a barely-intercomprehensible dialect. And yes I am talking about Ebonics.
* Malmo is the most Islamised city in Europe, and is roughly 1/3 Muslim, and (separately - there are Swedish-born Muslims and non-Muslim immigrants) 2/3 Swedish-born. I am prepared to defer to anyone who has actually spent more than a few days there as to whether this is enough that a majority of neighbourhoods fit 4bpp's criterion.
This was specifically my experience in the city center of Bochum, Germany, when I went there for a few days last year. Up until then, I also believed that German anti-immigration people were being overly dramatic or duplicitous seeing how it is not like that except in a few known problematic suburbs in other cities I had been to even recently).
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Can't speak on Malmö, but keep in mind that superficial numbers like x/y Muslim only tell part of the tale. Look also at the demographic pyramid, if you want pure statistics, or just go outside and have a look. See who's actually present in the street, who speaks most loudly, who blasts their music out for everyone to hear. It's not the aged, docile native populations. And it's far from being a phenomenon confined to a handful of affected cities. Small towns and even villages in rural Germany see the same rapid development, and simply pointing at statistics does nothing to change what my lying eyes show me.
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I happen to live near a neighborhood with such tendencies. But is that a consequence of immigration for failed policy for integrating immigrants? For example, if these people are not allowed to work legally — they have to resort to criminal work (drugs) to make a living. It looks like the very attempt to actively restrict illegal immigration is making this perceived problem worse.
I can see how "ingroup of young men with foreign language" tends towards harm. But that's not quite the same as "harm of immigration".
I'm not particularly inclined to accept argumentation that amounts to "thing A is negative-value, but if we also did thing B (which, for whatever reason, we are not actually going to do), then the expected value would be positive, so we ought to do thing A". Apart from the circumstance that the case that successful integration is in fact possible has not been made convincingly, this seems like it is prioritising some sort of "fairness" ("it wouldn't be fair if immigration advocates can't get immigration; after all it is not their fault that immigration is bad") over utility. I don't even particularly buy such a "fairness" argument on its own terms, because in the European context I still remember that before the current wave of immigration, either the very same people who are now arguing for more unconditional immigration or their political ancestors were actively agitating against integration measures, which they saw as cultural chauvinism.
(In the countries I have lived, at least, I am not convinced that the young men I have seen were not allowed to work legally. Many of them were likely to be second-generation immigrants and living in neighbourhoods were evident relatives and associates were running physical storefronts, and Europe is not the sort of place where you can do this without the state taking note.)
The argument is that "A non-zero amount of A is happening whether you like it or not, so let's also do B". It's not an argument for unconditional A.
The US in the 19th century looks like a case of successful integration to me.
The level of immigration was much lower, and well, Boston wasn't originally an Irish city.
The 19th century immigration was just as bad as everyone at the time said it was. There was no integration or assimilation, not really, but there was a suppression of language. The Irish are still Irish, the Italians still Italian, and the Germans still German. They still vote in their characteristic manner.
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I'm absolutely for doing more of the B here. The most obvious way to do this is things like mandatory native language classes, breaking up immigrant communities and disincentivising immigrant culture expression. Would we still be on the same page there?
"A non-zero amount of A is happening whether you like it or not" is neither an argument that reducing the amount of A is impossible, nor an argument that reducing the amount of A would be bad.
...of various fairly similar European immigrants, as well as smaller number of Asian ones that come from cultures that did not have a track record of decades to centuries of national dysfunctionality and clan and sectarian warfare. Few people anywhere are complaining about mass European or East Asian immigration. On the other hand, a large portion of the African slaves that were imported and actually basically stripped of their original cultures are still not exactly what one would call integrated.
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Let's say that I have a knife wound on my arm. If I get a hammer and then break my arm in an attempt to treat the knife wound, is this evidence that attempting to treat injuries is a bad idea that just makes injuries worse?
Restricting illegal immigration means that these people are deported or otherwise not in the country. Keeping them in the country but legally prohibiting them from working is the exact situation that most immigration opponents are trying to avoid, because illegal guest workers lack worker protections and violate the society-wide bargain between labour and capital. The best answer is to vigorously enforce laws against employing them and to simultaneously send them home.
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This is generally not the problem in Europe.
"Leftism cannot fail, it can only be failed", and besides, the requirement to do something for integration is a negative consequence.
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We have an extremely large class of laborers in Texas who are not allowed to work legally. They are tilted male and are far from the most overrepresented group in our crime stats(although they do commit more crimes than native whites). As it turns out, high income economies typically have the ability to absorb more labor than they can generate, and where there's a will there's a way.
Few of these people make it into the middle class, but most of them earn a living through day labor, construction, agriculture, or other shit work which is used to employing the underclass- and often finds illegals a refreshing change of pace who steal less and show up for work more reliably and soberly than natives interested in the jobs they actually do.
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I think the general harm is more of a human capital / social capital / cultural capital issue overall.
Mass immigration risks eroding the culture and trust that built so much wealth and dominated the world. That’s a bad thing if it does happen. It’s not guaranteed, but mass immigration of low skill and low IQ people is one way to get there.
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This is clearly an accurate model of reality in theory - a finite amount of land cannot support an infinite amount of people. Malthus was wrong in his concrete predictions about agriculture because he did not take into account technological increases. But as a model of reality, it's correct that the land can only support a certain amount of people through agriculture - it's just that we are tremendously efficient now.
I won't speak for 2rafa as to how immigration harms him/her, but I find it interesting that the general argument against immigration you mention isn't one that I commonly hear. In fact (going to how wrong Malthus in fact was) I don't think I have ever heard anyone argue seriously that the United States can't accept more immigrants because we will run out of food. Housing, maybe, but not food.
But in the most basic sense of the word, a job is a piece of work that needs to be done — and the immigrants bring that in as well, because they also need lettuce and tooth brushes and haircuts. The underlying issue is not that there's isn't enough work that people can do for each other — if anything, it's that creating a job is typically done by an employer, who needs to be reasonably competent and has their own interests.
I would relish the extinction of human labor, because then I don't have to work anymore and could relish my free time will still being provided with all the services that I need. The issue is not that work goes extinct, the issue is that I, as a lowly peasant do not profit from the work saved — but that's a problem of distribution of wealth. And that's what I also find mind-boggling about voting for Trump — he is so rich that he doesn't have to work anymore, yet promises the restricting immigration will solve my, the peasant's problem, rather than redistributing his very own capital? I don't know, but that looks like deception to me.
Sorry to pile on here, as I'm already engaging with you in a different thread; wouldn't your theories only make sense in a hypothetical world where we had an extremely high labour force engagement? Like, if we only have around 65% of the population of working aged individuals engaging in the labour market, doesn't that imply that adding a marginal person does not generate a marginal job (but rather, 65% of one)?
I don't think so? I don't quite understand which theory specifically you mean, my immediately preceding post contains two. On the first one: The marginal person generates demand for labor and adds supply of labor. The 65% figure would be about the supply of labor. If you want to draw conclusions about the demand for labor — which can be entirely different from that figure — you need additional data. For example, you could try to argue that it's a closed system, where labor supply and demand are equal; but with exports, imports, and profit margins, this is not a closed system.
The second theory is about the utilization of the supply of labor. Labor works for some company, which takes a cut of the produced value and pays out the rest as wage. The company could choose to pay higher wages — but they don't.
Perhaps the following calculations illustrates what I mean: A marginal person of working age offers 1 person of labor, but the labor that they demand in order to stay fed and bedded may only be, say, 0.5 persons due to automation. If this single person were a closed loop, there is no good reason for this person to work more than 0.5 persons worth of labor — that will be enough to feed themselves.
If human labor goes extinct, this means that this person would only demand ~0 people worth of labor — nobody has to lift a finger to keep this person well-fed, it's all taken care of by AI growing corn and mowing the lawn.
The trouble is that this person is not a closed loop — they don't have access to that AI growing corn, they have to pay an exorbitant fee. That's the issue about "work saved" that I mean, and the thing that Henry George pointed out in "Progress and Poverty".
The math doesn't pan out exactly in this way, because automation changes what constitutes human labor, so you can get the work of 90 people from year 856 for the price of 1 crane driver and 1 crane in the year 2025. Work saved means that each person can do more, but that in turn may lead to demanding more.
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What is Trump's personal net worth as a proportion of the total resources available to and under the control of the US government?
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Why would something need to harm you personally for you to be justified in being against it?
I'm not particularly aware of any other category of harm that requires that- certainly you can be anti-murder without being murdered, anti-theft if you aren't the one being stolen from, and so on. Nor does your family have to have suffered, or your close friend group, or your extended friend group, or any other varient of increasingly extended relations. Some of the evils of history are stopped not by those who personally suffered, but those who were entirely orthoganal (outside intervention) or even responsible (anti-colonialism movements).
It would seem by plethora of examples that [things that harm others] is also a valid basis of prioritizing issues. At which point, the condition of 'personally' is just semantic gerrymandering.
That's a fair point. But there is a difference between being "anti-murder" and being "anti-immigration", because "murder" is obviously violating the bodily integration of a person, whereas it's more difficult to argue that "immigration" is harmful on a personal level — that's what I wanted to hone in on by using the word "personally", though missed the mark by being too specific on the interlocutor.
It's not more difficult if you don't insist on semantic gerrymandering. It does not matter if it is harmful on a 'personal' level- it matter if it harms, period, because all harms are personal on some level.
Indirect economic harms are still economic harms. Harms to social trust by unilateral disregard of legitimate laws is still harm to social trust. Criminal harms by criminals who partisans protected from deportation because they wanted to spite or defy their outgroup are still harms. Self-righteous support for human trafficking that corresponds with the significant smuggling of addictive and harmful substances that fund violent criminal groups domestically and abroad even as the smuggled migrants compete with citizens for public goods and services while disrupting local social equilibriums is a whole host of harms to be encountered by various people in various ways at various times.
If you want to argue that immigration doesn't harm anyone, then just say immigration doesn't harm anyone. But if you can't do that because it wouldn't be believable, don't try to introduce a qualifier that only serves to disqualify all the types of harm that might be relevant to others.
No. Indirect economic "harms" are trade-offs. For example, if the price of chocolate rises, then some people cannot afford the amount of chocolate they used to buy. That's not a harm — yes, the chocolate buyer is worse off, but there is a chocolate producer on the other end, who would in turn be worse off if the price were lower.
I'm after a precise definition of "harm" here, because that's relevant to my core values, Humanism. Do not harm human beings. One primary source of harm is loss of integrity of your own body (being subject to violence, …). Higher chocolate prices are ok, a threat to your existence is not. Let me call it "bodily harm" for the sake of discussion. (At some point, economic
I would agree that these are either bodily harms or do border on bodily harms, yes. But the point is: Are these caused by immigration — or are these caused by how immigration is handled?
Much of what you are attributing to "immigration" is actually "consequence of current handling of immigration". This is a policy question. The thinking that you can stop people who are very desperate does not work out.
This is not about outgroups, this is about core value, humanism: Do not inflict bodily harm on other people, regardless of whom.
Many economic trade-offs are harmful. You are aware of this, hence why your economic example is of someone not getting a luxury confectionary, as opposed to someone losing their job, losing access to affordable housing, having to live in less-safe / more dangerous neighborhoods, enduring significant stresses and related health and social consequences due to economic consequences that benefit other people.
And this is without further accounting for the not 'just' economic changes that can accompany macroeconomic changes, such as changes to culture, crime rates, and various other things that come with the macroeconomic trends and hurt people.
No, you may not, because the discussion is that you do not get to waive aside harms on the basis of semantic gerrymandering just because you do not want to acknowledge that your policy preferences hurt people, but you don't want outright admit you find that acceptable. You especially don't get to on the basis of a 'core value' that is routinely violated by both any action or inaction at a policy level.
Don't dodge the discussion, make your stand: does mass migration cause no harm, or does it cause harms but you are okay with that?
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Perhaps the clearest case here is animal welfare. I care about the issue a lot, and no-one would normally think it relevant to ask me “How does animal suffering affect you personally?”
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It's already done. happened 2 hours ago
Happy Ozymandias noises.
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AP reporting this hour, 10% duties on all imports from China, 25% from Mexico and Canada, with 10% on Canadian energy imports
Targeted goods:
Over the last several years I've come to believe economics is a more fraudulent field of study than social science. As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory. Meanwhile car manufacturers are shipping car seats "multiple times" across the border before they're actually put in a vehicle. It all feels so incredibly fake.
If you don't know what to say, you can just not say anything. Don't be a conduit from the weighted random text shoggoth to the comment box.
LLMs are convoluted calculators, not demons. Demons, if they ever roamed the earth, haven't since the Harrowing of Hell.
I doubted economics from simple reasoning. How can there be a debate? There should be a right way, or a comparatively optimal way, some country somewhere would have implemented. There's not. Humans can't solve it, humans can't approach solving it, and in support of this I wondered, what has economics actually done for humanity? There I asked GPT not for arguments or numbers, which would be suspect, but a list of its contributions. The list is either a bunch of things people have known for centuries, or things that just helps bankers, pass, or game theory. But by all means, please correct me if you know an area where economics has profoundly improved humanity.
Mu!
I'm not engaging with your argument, I'm criticizing your process of
Notice lack of knowledge -> Consult unvettable bullshit generator -> Present unvettable bullshit generator output. Would you ask a parrot its opinion on the field of economics and place any real weight on its response?More options
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Eh, that's not wholly fair. Plenty of things that just about every economist agrees with, such as rent control being bad in the long term, keep being proved to be true.
The main problem with economics is that you can't run nation-wide, years-long controlled experiments to test theories the same way you can with sciences. That doesn't make the field worthless, just harder to draw conclusions from.
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I hope they do retaliate. This nakedly extortive behavior is supremely off-putting, especially when coupled with Trumps victimhood narrative. "Woe is me, empire expansive, everyone abuses us" is turning me into a Chyna simp.
I'm heavily biased, but I believe this direction is not unique. Back when the Russian invasion on Ukraine was fresh, the 'China or US dominance?' question got me baffled looks across the board from a diverse group of friends/acquaintances (context: Poland). Very different attitudes today, with how Ukraine was treated, with Trump blatantly attempting to cannibalize ally industries, with Chynese hedgies bearing great gifts.
So what's your opinion on the South China Sea?
I know pretty much nothing about it. Chinese claims seem like a bit of a stretch. I hope the sea hosts a US naval humiliation.
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I kind of agree. If it was the US vs Russia or the Arab-Islamic world as second major power, I would much rather Europe throw its lot in with America. After all, those are both major expansionist powers who lay claim to large portions of historic Europe.
But in this conflict, I really have no truck with China haters. China is an increasingly civilised place; street spitting is almost entirely eliminated in the tier 1 cities, streets are clean, the food is good, infrastructure and most services work (reasonably well, given it’s still much poorer than most of the West). China doesn’t seek to rule Europe, Chinese like visiting Paris and buying their little Chanel bags and taking pictures in front of Big Ben. Mostly they are nice; they commit very little violent crime. They have a good sense of humor. They are capable of impressive artistic and architectural achievement.
What’s more, while they consider themselves much better than other third worlders, and dislike the Japanese and to a lesser extent Koreans, the Chinese have no significant ethnic hostility towards white people. Every Chinese child learns that the great Karl Marx invented communism. Chinese don’t even bear a significant grudge toward the British for the opium wars, despite the ‘century of humiliation’ rhetoric.
In sum, the Chinese are capable of operating an advanced civilization in which an increasingly large percentage of citizens have a decent quality of life. I don’t wish to be ruled by them, but I don’t think they want to rule me either. By contrast, Trump’s economic policy seems entirely motivated by capriciousness and greed; Americans of all classes are already richer and have higher QOL than almost anyone else (including all but a handful of European nations, Canada and Mexico); America’s issues with crime, ideology, drug abuse, infrastructure, racial unrest and immigration have little to do with trade policy and almost everything to do with domestic political decision-making by domestic elites.
But that’s the thing, it is the US vs Russia. And if Europe wants the US to continue holding off Russia, they have to be semi-hostile towards China in exchange. Objectively Europe doesn’t have any particular reason to be hostile, but if you have friends sometimes you get roped into their weird grudges.
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See, I'm opposed to China dominance- because they're dirty commies. I don't, on a fundamental level, trust them. But it needs to be said that Chinese allies mostly get to do whatever the hell they want, without the Chinese interfering too much in their politics. The same cannot be said for the USA.
I can understand the 'what's so bad about a Chinese century' argument. If they weren't communists, I might even agree.
Can you elaborate? Is your problem their lack of a democratic process, the CCP itself and how they govern their territory by degree, or something else?
Because if you're on the streets in Shenzhen and talk to people, if you deal with the average company there, they're all incredibly capitalist. People work for the best salary they can get, switch companies often, and found startups that buy parts and sell product directly on the open market. The average Chinese city dweller isn't a communist at all.
And if a government allows its people to get to that state - is the government communist in any meaningful way?
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Chinese people are civilized. The Chinese government isn't.
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Trade policy has changed the composition of the domestic elites who make bad political decisions. It's caused (in part) the specialization of the American economy into one of abstract symbol manipulation. Although it turns out that's probably the highest value thing anyone can do, the winners of a symbolic economy create an unmoored society. And the issues you list are all downstream from that: real physical and safety issues have become secondary to the symbol.
I don't think Trump's tariffs are good or will do much to reverse this trend. They are, however, a strong symbolic strike against the ruling elite, which will have unfortunate side effects on the material wellbeing of Americans.
Trump's tariffs are a tax on Americans who consume imported physical goods, and American manufacturers who use imported intermediate inputs. The class who mostly consume expensive real estate and their own sense of moral superiority will be relative winners.
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Could you elaborate more on the economy turning into one of abstract symbol manipulation?
You're talking about investment and the stock market, right - and the relation between unmoored, placeless capital and a lack of care for even the localized business environment?
That's a big part of it, yes. Finance is about abstracting away all the messy realities of the real world into a single self consistent symbol--money--so that humans can accurately act on knowledge of the real world without having to know any of its concrete details. Software is also a big part of it, as MadMonzer points out. And we are best in the world at both of them: there's no reason for us to make a lot of widgets when we can manipulate symbols to create information that's worth 100x as much. Trade policy has enabled us to make this tradeoff, and we do.
You can also frame higher education, law, and media as symbol manipulation industries, though I see their successes as more downstream of the symbolification of the US than a cause of it.
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America's main source of competitive advantage is software*. Making software is literally symbol manipulation.
Arguably America's second-largest source of competitive advantage is logistics, which is real-world-aligned, but doesn't have the mythopoetic status of manufacturing in real-world-aligned culture, and in any case naturally encourages people towards cosmopolitanism and has done since the Age of Sail, if not earlier. (Walmart and Amazon are the leading examples of American excellence in logistics, as well as notoriously harmful to local communities.)
Compared to resource extraction, manufacturing, or even tourism (where the local sense of place is part of what you are selling), software and logistics are about unmoored, placeless economic activity. This is true both of the doing of the thing, and of the type of financial services that finance the doing of the thing - financialisation is not the problem here. When America was a physical-things country, you had community banks which were as embedded in their community as the general store, and which financed farms and factories and such-like, and you had money-centre banks like JP Morgan which financed railroads and shipping.
* America's trillion-dollar companies and their core competencies are:
None of these are going to promote rooted capitalism, and none of them would promote rooted socialism if State-owned either.
It wouldn't be wrong to say that the entire point of logistics is the abstraction away of place.
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According to what standard?
The standard would be, extortion is when you abuse your power to benefit at the others expense. I do understand you can frame almost anything as merely hardball negotiations.
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The car seats aren’t shipped back and forth over the border because of some theory of economics, but because it’s cheaper.
Trade and banking have always felt fake to people. If you’re not plowing the field behind your house, it must be a fake job, useless shuffling, usury, exploitation.
It's cheaper as the long consequences of economist-influenced policy. They nominally justified this on the idea we could replace millions of outsourced jobs by creating new and "more respectable" jobs, the actual justification, and the reason for its endorsement, was that the very wealthy would become even wealthier. We're about to run headfirst into the consequences of the delusion that we can keep creating more jobs, a delusion that will stand in history as the greatest failure of economics.
Some practices of finance are real and important. Other practices, like billionaires putting in massive shorts on companies before lobbying the government to outlaw the work of those companies, are more fake than those bureaucrats who kept getting paid even when they didn't show up to work for years. I also like banking here; as if because some of what they do has real utility, we have to accept all the lives they destroy and all the times they nearly crash the economy.
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Before there was a good (and widespread) understanding of what determined prices, trade seemed very little different from witchcraft.
How is it possible that a merchant will buy your wheat at a given price, but when he takes it to the city he sells it for three times as much??? What magick spells has he conjured?
This understanding seems no longer widespread, as evidenced by people in this very forum. Now imagine the general population.
Understanding the theory != agreement with it.
If your theory doesn’t allow you to predict (and preferably control) actual results then it’s dubious by default. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but disagreement is inevitable and appropriate. Micro-economics is mostly non-controversial for this reason. Macroeconomics is much more controversial. What inputs and outputs economic analysis should consider is incredibly controversial.
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Are you saying that the economists who advised politicians to implement NAFTA and USMCA are frauds, and in reality there are no economic benefits to free trade?
I think the steelman is that it hurts domestic production, which hurts a lot of the labor market in countries who are losing local jobs.
Do you think the economists did not consider that?
They handwaved it by conjuring up lots of future jobs and pretending that a few online courses would turn steel makers into software engineers.
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Yes to clause one, half-yes to clause two.
If free trade does not produce as necessity holistic benefits, it is not an economic benefit. Policies based on "in benefiting a narrow percent of the population this may incentivize behavior that will yield wide benefits" are not holistic; policies based on "this will yield wide benefits" are holistic. Where FTAs yield the former, yes, where they yield the latter, no.
FTAs do benefit most people. They harm people in industries that are not internationally competitive, but most people don't work in those industries and benefit from e.g. cheaper car prices.
International competitiveness has only rarely been about a country that can deliver a superior product. In all other cases it has meant corporations can spend less and make more by outsourcing labor. Had, for example, it never been legal for Chinese-made products to be sold in this country, or not without tariffs tailored to make it prohibitive for companies to outsource their labor to China, they would have never been competitive. What was the benefit, Walmart? Some benefit.
If your position is that cheaper goods don't benefit Americans, you should just go ahead and lay your cards on the table.
As it is, I pointed out an industry in which imports were so much better than domestic production that they practically killed the domestic industry (cars) and you're bringing up walmart (who mostly makes money from groceries anyway) as a retort. It's a complete non-sequitur.
Cheaper goods are only a benefit if employment/real wages either remain consistent or rise. Cheaper goods don't do anyone any good if it comes at the cost of income.
Fortunately, real median wages have been going up for the past 28 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
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Our best hope is that he's bluffing. I doubt that he really wants to risk being remembered as the guy who caused the great depression of 2025. Maybe within a few days he'll announce that Canada and Mexico made concessions, regardless of whether that's true, and lift the tariffs. And Canada and Mexico will be too scared to contradict him. That would explain him not making concrete demands, as he can now declare victory whenever he wants.
Indeed, I voted against Trump precisely because of the tariff risk, but I was copacetic on his election because I believed that, as in his first term, the bluster about the obviously bad ideas would come to nothing and he would just implement one or two actually good plans (e.g., the replacement of SALT subsidies with a larger standard deducti9n in TJCA).
But... we are just jumping straight into the seriously harmful policy right away with this one.
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Has there ever been a time in history when a superpower as economically huge as the U.S. implemented major tariffs?
Personally my take is that while economists are very intelligent and have put a lot of thought into these things, there really just isn't any way to know exactly what will happen. Tariffs could lead to:
There are just so many possibilities, and even with all the statistics and math in the world I genuinely don't think any economist has a great idea how things will shake out. The global market is one of the most complex systems in existance.
Either way, it's a high variance move and as others have said, it allows Trump a TON of leverage when negotiating with our allies. Personally I'm very curious to see what comes of all this.
If tariffs are supposed to make you stronger because less access to foreign industries will force your own industry to grow stronger, maybe america should tariff trade between states? then each state will become an economic superpower, alone we are strong, together we are weak.
But enough sarcasm, I know there is one benefit to independence, it is that larger economies like China cant just pull the rug away from you (by using tariffs themselves) unless you cave into their demands, so tariffs based on how hostile the other government is make sense, tariffs based on "economic deficits" make no sense, and using it just to be hostile to smaller governments, might get you some concessions, but say goodbye to long term alliances.
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Jacking up the tariffs in 1930 likely caused the Great depression. Other countries retaliated, international trade slowed down, companies reliant on exports for large part of revenue started losing money, market panicked, which led to more interventions in the economy, so on and on...
Didn't the Depression kick off in the late 20's?
One thing that really irritates me and makes me have less regard for economics as a study is that no one can agree on the cause of the great depression. Some people say FDR saved us, some people say he made it worse and was the real reason it went on so long. There are so many theories that completely contradict each other. If economists can't figure that out, I have no faith in their ability to make predictions in our time.
FDR’s real achievement is that he created enough of an appearance of “doing something” to prevent a communist or fascist revolution in the United States.
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Initial stock market crash was in 1929 but it didn't have to cause such a long term disaster by itself.
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Meynard Keynes arguably predicted the Great Depression in 1919 by forecasting the obvious inability of the Germans to pay back their crushing war reparations and the economic fallout that would ensue. Tariffs might have impacted things but I choose to believe that the Depression was mostly baked in since 1919 (since correct predictions are cool).
Germany paid almost none of the reparations. Less than 1/6 of the 130 billion marks were paid by 1930 (after which payments were paused, then indefinitely deferred due to the great depression), almost all by American banks which Germany never paid back. (N.b. only 50B (the A and B bonds) were required to be paid.) If you calculate for inflation etc. the US actually paid Germany significantly more than in the Marshall plan after!
For comparison, after the Franco-Prussian war, France received a similar proportion of GDP, had its banks finance it within a month then paid them off within 3 years. The German Empire (the Weimar state's actual name) via Havenstein instead chose to call a general strike and hyperinflate its currency to erase local war debts the government owed to German citizens and banks.
Also, the great depression started when the US stock market crashed, spreading elsewhere.
Yes this seems Bad For The Economy
Certainly. But am I wrong that Germany rug-pulling US banks and investors (and the European economy performing poorly due to the issues you mention, along with the occupation of the Ruhr) was bad for American speculators? And "overspeculation" was a leading cause of the 1929 stock market crash, wasn't it?
How did this impact the German economy if it never circulated (neither entered nor left it)?
I assume it was bad for the German economy because it made banks less likely to lend to them, drying up credit. (Plus the whole part where the French got irritated by the lack of repayment and seized some of their territory.)
We're literally talking about the opposite situation!
American banks gave Germany perhaps 4x as much as the 20 years later Marshall plan. Some was from the reparations (Dawes and Young plans) they bankrolled, without being paid back, which did not circulate in the German economy, but they loaned and invested even more (about $5 billion/year in the late 1920s, more than Germany (American bankers) paid in reparations in total (for comparison, in dollars, the total original reparation sum was $30 billion) which helped Germany grow production 30% above 1914 levels, with the 2nd largest industry in the world.)
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What percent of American GDP were German war reparations?
It's been a long time since my economics and history courses, but I don't think the United States was owed much if anything by Germany. To the extent that anything in 1919 was causitive [and, to be fair, I don't think most things are monocausal] I think it would have been by American investments in Germany and Europe failing to yield expected returns. Germany had a string of economic problems – hyperinflation, the occupation of the Ruhr – related to its reparations debts, and from what I understand these not only negatively impacted Germany but Europe as a whole. Now, to your question, I don't know what degree of American stock market speculation was actually in Europe, so possibly my cool Keynes myth is bunk, but given that the European markets in the 1930s were sensitive to the American stock market, I imagine the reverse was true as well. But do take the theory with a grain of salt, I gather that the True Causes of the Great Depression are still a cause for debate among actual economists.
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At the very least it would be the honorable thing to do to publish a list of (reasonable) “demands” before implementing tariffs of that magnitude. Right now, as many have said here, it’s unclear what he actually wants Canada and Mexico to give him.
In addition, while Canada and Mexico run a surplus, so do many other places Trump isn’t sanctioning, like the EU, so his targeting seems to go beyond economics. He just doesn’t seem to like these countries.
Not sure he has any demands, I think he just thinks that trade deficits are bad, therefore tariffs.
If he disliked trade deficits, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to tariff Canada given our trade with them is relatively equal. Why not slap a country like Vietnam first? Why tariff China less than Canada?
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Mercantilism. :(
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I think Trump thinks tariffs are good, under which circumstances a list of demands doesn't make sense since the tariffs are the point.
Regaining limited manufacturing autarky is something of a national emergency right now, so I am interested if these tariffs will help out with that at all or nah.
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I mean, I don't like them either.
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What would be a few demands you think Trump should ask for from Canada and Mexico, respectively?
I think for Mexico the obvious answer is to stop the cartel from smuggling drugs over the border. Not as sure on what Trump would want from Canada, besides possibly a regime change to a more conservative government.
I'm only considering Ontario in this analysis, but what if it's the factories? Southern Ontario didn't go full Detroit and is still relatively industrialized; if the US thinks it's going to war, perhaps it's best to bring facilities that are still relatively capable of producing war materiel under the exclusive control of the American government. It's also a province that provides strategically-key resources to Blue states; as I understand it the province of Ontario is a bit more amenable to things like natural gas pipelines that Blue states have banned.
They didn't do that for WW2, but the American strategic position at that time was much more tenuous, being under threat on all sides by two very powerful empires. The Canadian one was stronger at that time, especially considering the British Empire, though a dead man walking, still existed; the US' war plan against Canada at the time specifically mentions they expected reinforcements from them.
Other than that, I've got nothing. I'm not sure what strategic value the Northwest Territories (as in, "everything west of Ottawa") would provide by being conquered that it hasn't already provided at some point in the past other than perhaps a functionally infinite supply of oil too far inland for the Chinese to hit with torpedoes (let alone hypersonics).
As a Canadian I would be more than happy to give Trump everything south of the 49th Parallel -- if we keep Victoria I'd even consider giving him some cash to take Toronto off our hands.
That's where most of the people live.
guy_tapping_forehead.jpg
(or maybe just YesChad.jpg)
It doesn't make much sense to say it "as a Canadian" then. Better to say "as an Albertan" or something.
Toronto is not particularly Canadian anymore -- I'm OK with taking refugees so long as they don't mind moving to Thunder Bay or something.
Looking at the map, 49 degrees loses us some places I'd rather keep though -- I maintain that we are better off without Southern Ontario.
Draw a straight line from Sault St Marie to Kingston or so and we're good.
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As a Michigander, I would be delighted to add another peninsula to my home state!
Realistically I think if Canada was absorbed it wouldn't be a 51st state, but a series of Commonwealths more or less matching current provincial jurisdictions (with the obvious exception of Quebec). That at least solves the free movement problem, since Quebec does divide the country in two, and the provinces, other than Ontario, are smaller than Puerto Rico in population; it also provides ways for some continuity of provincial government. Most social services come from the provinces themselves so this is probably the most natural way not to be too disruptive.
It doesn't grant any province any political representation whatsoever, but realistically, that only affects Ontario
and they fucking deserve it anyway. I think they, and they alone, would have the bargaining power to become an actual state.More options
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The Mexican government is entirely incapable of stopping the cartels from smuggling drugs across the border. I suppose there could be a specific demand like “allow the US military to operate all along the Mexican border, including in Mexican territory, with full operational authority and the ability to arrest, kill and interrogate Mexican citizens at will”, but that would be slightly different and would ultimately be a huge additional expense for the US taxpayer that likely still wouldn’t solve the issue.
The American government is incapable of stopping the flow of drugs. It can dismantle drug cartels given the right resources and parameters. These are not the same thing. The average person can tell it is not the same thing. The same way the average person can tell that America's investment in Afghanistan was a bad one.
Trump can declare war on cartels. He might can bully Mexico into submission until they consent to unrestricted Sicario-esque operations beyond the border. The drugs will flow. Unless he's planning to go to war on Americans with their silly liberties, then mostly what he'll achieve is spending money to make it is easier for people shake their head in 10 years.
People satisfied by "but we destroyed the X cartel" can be satisfied. Everyone else will ask: why?
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Hmmm given how intertwined the cartels and the government are, what if Trump is trying to put economic pressure on the cartels themselves?
What, you think that cartels are going to pay tariffs on imported Fentanyl?
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The current arrangement is fundamentally broken. The US has the dollar as the reserve currency, making the dollar too expensive. This is great for the American finance, real estate and insurance industry that require little labour and are capital intensive. The US as a reserve currency means that the world is subsidizing the financial markets in the US.
This means that the US becomes an incredibly expensive country to do business in. The working poor in the US are well paid. They are just living in a financialized economy with high costs. With an overvalued dollar, real estate in the US is way too expensive which means that American workers have to be well paid. All that money sloshing around the American financial system keeps medical insurance expensive.
This worked in 1960 when the US was so technologically superior that much of the world ended up selling bananas and clothes to the US for dollars that then were used to buy overpriced industrial products from the US. As the world has caught up, much of the US has gotten shafted. They have high costs of living while struggling to compete with cheap foreign products in a globalized economy under pax Americana.
Trump wants to keep the US dollar dominance while having a more normal internal market by having tariffs. Prices will be high within the US while Americans will continue to be relatively rich while going abroad.
For the rest of the world the deal is awful, we will have to sell products to the US in order to get dollars and then pay a 25% tariff in the products we buy. So if we want to buy oil we have to sell 100 dollars worth of goods to get 80 dollars of money post tariffs that the Americans just print so we can get our oil.
This post gets some things wrong about economics.
A strong dollar helps American consumers while hurting American export-facing industries. American consumers get to buy cheap foreign stuff, while export-facing industries become less competitive as their prices implicitly rise. Cost of living doesn't rise for Americans because the US dollar is strong, unless perhaps they get laid off from their export-facing job? That's a small slice of the American economy these days anyways.
A strong dollar doesn't particularly impact insurance or real estate. It seems like you're just listing off sectors you dislike, using words like "financialized", and implying a strong dollar is somehow directly responsible. Housing is expensive because... people aren't building houses. The strong dollar isn't really involved, except indirectly.
Tariffs aren't going to fix much of what you listed, and they're certainly not going to make American consumers better off.
Which disincentivizes buying American. America deindustrializes and you end up with well payed service workers who are chronically broke.
It does, most of the world is doing business in American treasuries and the American financial system becomes the global money hub. The dollar system allows the US financial markets to swell out of proportion. It wouldn't be possible for the US to have this much money printing without hyper inflation if it wasn't for the petrodollar.
This part is correct...
This part isn't. Real incomes are up. If they're broke, it's their own fault for not managing their money. I also haven't seen any evidence that significantly more people are "broke" as you say. The meme recently was that Americans collectively thought the economy was doing poorly, but most individually said they were doing just fine.
You replied to this, but your reply was not pertinent to how a strong dollar specifically directly impacts insurance or real estate, at least to e.g. the degree that NIMBYs blocking housing construction affects real estate prices.
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How does the dollar being the reserve currency make it expensive? What does that even mean? The Federal Reserve can always print more dollars to meet the demand and bring down its value and failing that, prices would simply adjust to whatever they need to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
The US prints money and exports the inflation. The US biggest export product is the dollar, something the US makes for free. The US economy is awash with dollars making real estate and other assets extremely expensive while the dollar is still pricey making the US expensive to manufacture in.
The US has the housing prices of a country that prints wildly while having the currency cost of a country like Switzerland.
This doesn't answer my question about that makes the US dollar expensive. Printing money makes it less expensive, not more expensive.
Printing money doesn't make real estate expensive because it only affects the nominal price, not the real price.
What does that have to do with the US dollar being the reserve currency?
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The US skilled working class (anyone above a call center worker, really) have higher QOL than any comparable workers elsewhere in the world except a handful of small rich European states like Norway, Denmark and Switzerland (Americans often still earn more, but one can reasonably argue the latter countries have superior QOL, are higher trust, have a better safety net, more vacation time etc).
What income do you figure being skilled working class begins at? Moving from the US to Europe in the postdoc bracket (so about $3k/month after tax or a bit more) was an almost straight QoL increase for me - better transport and other public infrastructure, cleaner and safer streets, better food, higher quality housing, better healthcare, more recreation options. The downsides were that housing is smaller by floor area, grocery stores are not open 24/7, and carsharing services are rare and clunky. I live(d) in countries that are not quite in your list of uncommonly rich, but near the top of "normal" Europe.
(If your experience is mostly with the UK, I guess I could see you seeing the US as being vastly superior in QoL? My memory of the UK after doing undergrad there is as a land of a thousand small gratuitous and avoidable inconveniences, like the split hot/cold taps. Do people still have those?)
The going rate for entry-level skilled work right now is around $18/hr in my cheap-by-tier-one-city-standards metro. That's slightly under $3k/mo, which is not enough to rent your own apartment- although you can probably rent a mother in law suite on someone else's house for that, and you can definitely rent a bedroom either in a house or in a larger apartment.
The difference is, people making that in America are starting at the bottom of their chosen profession. They can make significantly more within a few years. In most of Europe I'm given to understand that this is not the case.
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That's what an American makes at McDonalds doing night shift, or the top 25% in Sweden or top 10% in France...
No, thats the top 55% in Sweden and about what you make working in a super market stocking shelves if you pick up a couple of late shifts every week.
You missed the "after tax". The 1/3 municipal tax lowers it a fair bit.
No I didn't, that is after tax. Also, this might not be very clear from the outside but the effective tax rate actually isn't 30%, it's <20% for someone with the median wage due to something called "jobbskatteavdraget" (a universal tax rebate for wages earned from working).
Isn't it only about $200 (5%) at the 45k crowns/month pretax we're talking about (to get ~33k after tax)?
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Maybe I should've just applied at the local ICA after all...
If you wanted zero career progression and like working the occaisonal weekend and evening shift then sure, working at ICA is among the better menial jobs.
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$36k/year post-tax is significantly below the median full time American wage. And that's counting people without college degrees, much less PhDs.
And sure, post-docs are paid little; grad students even less. They are extreme outliers among college educated working Americans.
I would push back against "cleaner safer streets". I live in vastly cleaner, safer streets than the nearest large cities. I live in a suburb. The urban rot in America is real, but it is also hyper-concentrated. You crossed an ocean and correctly notice the improvement. I'm a half hour drive away and also notice a night and day difference.
Yeah, I mean, I'm aware of the numbers. It also seems to be the case that my American acquaintances that took the jump into industry, with their significantly higher salaries, do not seem to be doing particularly much better in terms of creature comforts - I don't know how much this generalises, but my sense was that new social/role expectations ate a lot of the surplus money without delivering much utility for it (living in areas that are more expensive without being better, running fancier dinner parties for their friends, ...).
Right, yeah, but for me it's still been a very comfortable salary. I took over half a year off doing basically nothing at all (well, actually travelling) on excess money saved during grad school (in the US) and still had more than half of the savings (on the order of $20k initially?) left over, and I would hardly consider myself frugal (being the sort of person to eat out all the time). I am honestly not sure what the hell it is that normal people spend all their money on. $1k for rent and utilities, $30*30 ~= $1k for food [I realise this might have to be adjusted upwards for inflation now], and then whatever occasional expenses you have like tickets, travel and replacing clothes from the remaining $1k; what else is there?
In Europe, you can have clean and safe streets and also have worthwhile things to do and go to by just walking out of your door. I understand that this is a cultural difference, but the idea that you would have to get in a car and drive for half an hour for any meaningful interaction with the outside world seems like hell to me. (I've lived in places where the inner city was 20 minutes away by bus, and that was already a chore. At least you can have a drink after going somewhere by bus. Also was marooned in the DC suburbs for a while during COVID, and I only have expletives left for that period.)
I do not drive half an hour to do things. I walk, bike or jog to local parks with my kid. I drive a few minutes to local businesses. Maybe 15 minutes to do something the next town over. 20 minutes to work, a very pleasant 20 minutes listening to music or podcasts. No American public transit schizophrenics allowed in my car.
I'm in a town, not on the middle of nowhere. I walk outside my door and do meaningful things. Mostly with children, since just about everyone with kids and financial means independently decided to move to my neighborhood or equivalent.
Were you living in a closet, Harry Potter style? I kid a bit, but that is less than half the cost of a studio apartment. I checked a bunch of listings and failed to find one under 2k. I'm sure there's some low income housing cheaper than that. Or renting a room in a house. I think this explains your wondering what people spend their money on: a home without flatmates and with multiple rooms so their family can share it with them.
You were the one who said half an hour away. I don't know where you find suburbs like that in the US - I had the misfortune of being marooned in a suburb of DC for about a month during COVID, and the only things that could be reached without a car were a patch of forest full of discarded needles and a Starbucks that could be reached by walking through that forest, another 20 minutes through a sort of industrial/warehouse area and finally crossing a six-lane highway.
Are you talking about something like Manhattan or the Bay Area? I got a place on the ridiculous order of 60m² for that in the small college town where I lived in the US (which locals seemed to believe was unusually expensive), and 30m²+ studio apartments in every European city I have lived (I gather Paris and Munich are more expensive now, but that might be about it?). I even had friends with a 1BR in Brooklyn that was on the same order of magnitude that they only paid 1400 a month for. No roommates in any case cited, and all but the first
I'm a no-traffic half hour away from the nearest major city. I don't generally go there. Not more than once every few months.
I just now checked a few suburbs along the west coast. Not counting the bay area. Typical prices are $2k+ for studio or 1bd. I was able to find sub-2k listing, but those are very few. The suburbs around Portland stand out as strangely cheap with plenty of sub-2k listings. Everywhere else almost every apartment ad is over $2k. I saw one for just over $1k but the size was less than $250 sq ft. "Harry Potter" style.
I've lived in various suburbs across the West coast. I don't know if I have ever lived more than 2 miles from a grocery store and series of large shopping centers. I have never had to cross a freeway to get to a store, unless you mean by biking along a normal road under an overpass.
I never lived outside of DC. Maybe they are particularly shitty.
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I once lived in a duplex with my husband and baby for $500/month including utilities, but it was in a small town, and did feel like a closet. I could walk to work there, which was fairly nice. But I'm more confused about spending $1,000 a month on food for one person. We spend about $800 on food for two adults, two children, a baby, and two cats, and aren't trying all that hard. Like, we just ate salmon sushi with miso soup for dinner.
That's about what it costs to eat out all the time.
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Nice houses, nice neighborhoods, nice cars.
I've only ever lived in nice neighbourhoods, and very few of the people in my cohort (including said normies who earn much more but don't obviously live better) have their own houses or cars either.
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That's in the upper quintile for skilled trades in this part of Northern Europe. The average net salary for electricians is around $2500.
In my metro(towards the lower end of salaries in tier one US metros) an electrical apprenticeship might start at ~$2500/mo, gross, and that's if the young man getting the position doesn't negotiate his salary. It's more likely to start higher. Taxes are also much lower here.
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A problem which affects the Canadian economy significantly more than the American one, though for slightly different reasons.
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While it's entirely possible Trump is absolutely excited to apply tariffs all around, my perception is that for Canada and Mexico his goals are more to use it as a "big stick" to get them in line with his goals: "your entire economy depends on us and I have the power to ruin you, so here's what I want you to do", like how he used it as a threat with the Colombian president refusing deportation flights
Canada's economic interaction with the US doesn't seem to be harmful in terms of the US's long-term economic success: "you send us oil, we refine it and sell it back to you" is actually a pretty good setup for the US. If anything, it seems to paint the Canada-US relationship similarly to the US-China relationship, where not building domestic industrial capacity leaves the former dependent on the latter.
The question then becomes whether Canada will cave sufficiently to Trump's desires, and I can see there being some pain there: Canada's tended to frame itself as "the US, but properly enlightened" and I expect that will lead to some #RESIST and trying to get Trump to cave first, and I'm reasonably confident Trump will actually pull the trigger if it comes to it.
They and what government? Provinces are already conducting foreign diplomacy; that's supposed to be the Federal government's job, but they're too busy waging the Capital's pet culture war against the rest of the country and the PM too busy quiet(ish)-quitting to bother with this.
If the Canadian government was smart they'd put pressure on the foreign workers "on loan" to the US; educated and competent workers are something the US temporarily imports significant numbers of from this country, and they can just as soon be taken away. But again, that would require something resembling a strategy. (I'm half-expecting him to announce a tariff on arms and related equipment and call it a day, since Canadians can't legally buy the guns these days and ammunition getting more expensive is symbolic/a culture war objective.)
What are you suggesting? That Canada make it illegal to work in the US?
Last I counted, roughly 1 in 20 high-skill Canadian workers currently work in the US on non-immigrant visas.
Demanding they return, which could be accomplished in a variety of ways, would be relatively disruptive to the Americans (or force them into a relatively awkward position in granting citizenship to what are supposed to be non-immigrant workers).
NAFTA doesn't just mean a lack of tariffs; that Canada should permit the brain-drain was part of the negotiations.
I understand that, but I'm asking how they would demand that. The Canadian government doesn't control where Canadians live. I doubt our government would be allowed by the Supreme Court to pass a law preventing us from living in the US.
But it does have some laws controlling what they do while living outside the country, including ones that have to do with certain types of commerce.
If they can ban that (and as far as I know the courts are fine with it), they can ban working for American companies. Enforcement is another matter, but since when has that stopped anyone?
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Are you sure it wouldn't be more disruptive to Canada?
First, 5% of Canada's workers is not 5% of America's workers.
Second, American companies can scramble and hire someone from the rest of the world. I don't know what kind of jobs we're talking about, but I imagine at least some of them can be done online, making the replacement process a bit easier. Canada will have 5% of it's workforce pissed off at losing an American salary, and with no guarantee there's any job waiting for them back home.
Also, this move is easily countered by the US, they can literally just say "don't worry, bro, you can stay here as long as you want". How many of these people would rather cut off the US in favor of Canada, rather than the other way around?
I don't think Canada cares nor is in any position to care.
They already have 100% of the workforce pissed off at having their COL jump another 20% overnight. And honestly, they can do business here, and work on making Canada better rather than America. Of course that would require a pro-growth government, which the sitting one is very much not, but one step at a time.
The ones that are worth it- the engineers, the scientists, the programmers. There's a list of occupations subject to this; generally if not exclusively requiring at least a Sciences degree.
I already answered this.
I think Canada does care. Most Canadians have relatives who live in the US and would care that their lives would be disrupted.
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I don't follow. You've proposed this as a move that is supposed to benefit Canada. If it disrupts them more, while it's not hurting America, how are they supposed to benefit from it?
Not only would it require such a government, it would require it to be in power long enough to build infrastructure making such a move possible. There was this old quip from my parent's era: "If we had tin, we'd flood the West with cheap canned food! But alas, we have no meat...", don't know if this was communist-era dark humor or a part of an actual speech (communists had terrible speechwriters), but that's essentially what your argument sounds like to me.
Doesn't do much to answer my question - sounds like part of them could indeed be done online, though probably not all.
That it would be "awkward"? Ok, and? Also, a green card would be more than enough, no need for citizenship.
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Presumably this will also put pressure on Canada as a whole to produce a government that is capable of acceding to Trump's demands, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of his goals. If the current Cathedral bureaucracy churning along in Canada isn't going to deign to respond to someone they see as the next coming of Hitler, they can be presented with an economic collapse and associated angry mobs until they change their mind and/or are replaced.
Honestly, that might be kind of a clever approach to it: present incredibly reasonable demands like coordinating with the US's DEA on whatever fentanyl is flowing over the border, when you're ignored implement the tariffs, then when blamed for the resulting economic collapse point out the incredibly straightforward requests you had that anyone should be fine going along with. Exacerbates existing concerns with the faceless/motionless government, requires your opponents to take a pro-fentanyl stance, and hopefully resolves itself quickly enough to not do major economic damage to the US.
Musing a little further, I wonder if this is why Trump is cutting out government spending early on: he sees tariffs as a temporary financial shock that will cripple the other nations far faster than they'll cripple the US. Cut out a bunch of spending, use the resulting funds to shore up everything until your international counterpart caves, then when you need to re-add all the essential spending that would be an issue to cut out for too long, the tariffs are already back in the toolbox and the resulting economic hit was entirely hidden.
For the US, this is probably just a normal Saturday.
I'm a lot more interested in what those in Southern Ontario will do, which is where the vast majority of Canadian manufacturing lives- this is where the impact will be felt the most, and unlike angry Albertans they're a lot closer to Ottawa. (Interestingly, all of that strategically important industry is within striking distance of American artillery while that artillery sits on their side of the border; nobody who thinks Canada could put up a fight realizes the country is just as vulnerable as South Korea is. Yes, the territory is very defensible- just take the bridges out- but they can just sit back and shell the factories, something that the Americans could not do the last time they invaded.)
For that matter I'm not at all convinced the Liberal government has an effective tit-for-tat tariff plan. I think they'll target something symbolic of the US like, say, guns... but that's about it. It might also not be long-term possible considering this appears to be a treaty violation on its face, but perhaps I don't understand those correctly and as you mention it doesn't necessarily need to be permanent.
And considering it hurts those who voted for him directly the most, probably best to get that one out of the way early (automotive manufacturing in the US is about to take a big hit considering how much they buy from Magna). Kind of like Biden's cancelling that pipeline as a day 1 goal, come to think of it.
Check again. Universal tariffs from Canada just got announced.
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I get what Trump wants from Mexico. I'm not sure what he wants from Canada. Is fentanyl coming in from Canada? I thought it was coming from Mexico.
I mean, He's said that he wants Canada to become part of the US, but that can't be his motivation here, can it?
I don’t think he wants anything from them per se. He wants stuff to be made in the US, by the US, for the US. America has enough raw materials, it can physically do that.
The tariffs are a goal, not a lever to the goal.
It cannot physically do that. Sure, any one specific thing can be made in the US, albeit at greater cost. But it would have to take resources from some other industry. It can't make everything it is making now and make everything it imports, not even if it stopped producing exports. It's not just because of the trade deficit which means it consumes and invests more than it produces, but because it would lose the gains from trade.
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That's Juche.
I’m not sure if you’re providing additional info or criticising by analogy. If the latter, it would be nice if you say so.
Personally I don’t find ‘a tiny, bent state once did this, so if you do it you will turn into a tiny bent state’ hugely convincing. Circumstances matter.
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That's true, but the situation is different. North Korea did Juche out of necessity. They were a small, backwards nation being embargoed by most of the world, and also completely lacking in oil and other key resources. Today they're... still small and backwards... but they've survived, much longer than anyone thought possible (albiet with a lot of help from the USSR and China). The USA is different. We're large, rich, and have basically every kind of natural resource within our border somewhere. There's no particular the USA should have to trade with other countries if it doesn't want to. The usual econ argument is that free trade and specialization of labor makes countries more prosperous, bu the counterargument is that it leads to income inequality, alienation, and fragility as our entire industrial base moves overseas.
We can talk about industry being shipped to countries with lower wages and laxer environmental regulations, but none of that really applies to Canada.
It may not apply to Canada. It does, however, apply to other countries that use Canada as a point of entry into the US economy.
There are a fair number of "made in Canada" products where the final transformation is done in Canada with the rest of the processing chain being overseas.
(Ditto Mexico.)
Trump is putting higher tariffs on Canada than on China (25% vs 10%).
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I dont care about lower wages or environmental rules much. But i do think it its a bad thing when global capitalism concentrates all te production for something critical into a single place. Case in point, some people are joking that we can't oppose Denmark because they control the entire world supply of ozempic.
So long as everyone makes something that everyone else needs, it should be fine, right? Denmark can't oppose Taiwan beacuse both need each other.
Unless the Taiwanese just don't overeat, in which case the Danish have no hold on them.
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What if he is serious about Canada joining the United States, and he wants to use tariffs to force them to either ruin their economy or join the Union?
Then perhaps it is better to induce the population of Canada to hold that referendum now, rather than give them a chance to elect a government likely to be more protective of Canadian interests.
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I think the "annexing canada" and the "tariff canada unless they accede to his demands" might be coming from the same place: "you're entirely dependent on the US, so get in line and work to our benefit, rather than benefiting from our largesse and then stabbing us in the back in every public forum you get into"
I think there are some other similar things in Trump's policies, like asking NATO to pay for its own defense: some of that is just cost-cutting, but some of it is the NATO countries deriding the US for being a warmonger while being completely dependent on its warfighting capability. I suspect if they were praising their benevolent protector instead of claiming they're superior because they don't need to spend money on weapons, it would be a lower priority.
How is NATO dependant on America? European NATO has 400 nukes, 2 million troops, carriers, submarines, aircraft, everything.
European NATO would crush Russia in a conventional war. 500 million Europeans beat 140 million Russians 100% of the time. They're only behind in nuclear weapons but still retain the power to cause Russia a lot of damage.
Everyone points to them not spending as much as the US military but they have everything they need already.
"They're only behind in nuclear weapons" - this is blatantly untrue. Russia has substantial technological advantages in multiple fields, especially hypersonics for which there are only theoretical missile interdiction systems. Additionally, Russia and her allies have an immense military materiel manufacturing advantage - look at the disparity in artillery ammunition supplies in Ukraine. If you cut off foreign aid (so no China/North Korea/Iran for Russia and no US for EU Nato) the disparity becomes overwhelming - it doesn't matter how many warm bodies you can supply if you don't have weapons for them to fire or bullets for them to shoot. If they're telling the truth about the Oreshnik's availability the conflict would be even more one-sided.
If Russia has been struggling to crush Ukraine for the past 3 years even with their munitions advantage, then they can't beat a force vastly larger and stronger than Ukraine.
Europe has large navies that can blockade Russian sea trade. Europe has large air forces that can at least secure air parity, they won't be reduced to sitting around getting glide-bombed to death. They have a massive front with Russia that Russia will struggle to man, stretching from Turkey up to Finland.
Europe produces machine tools domestically. They have Germany for precision engineering. If they're actually at war they'll get serious and start producing ammunition in large quantities. It's really not that hard to produce shells and gun barrels, we know from history that German industry can produce large amounts of munitions, not to mention the other states. They're just trapped in the EU aura of omnishambles and are dragging their feet. Aside from Britain I doubt most of the other NATO countries care that much. This war doesn't really harm their interests enough to make a serious effort to arm Ukraine intensively.
The Russians don't have enough munitions to destroy 2 million professional soldiers, which is what they'd need to do before Europe starts drafting. Europe's sheer size and scale can buy them time to militarize their economy. Russia doesn't seem very good at swift blitzkriegs.
Ukraine has somehow managed to hold this long by throwing warm bodies into the fray, Europe can do that for years and years. Ukraine has no navy and next to no air power, Europe has both.
And this whole discussion is silly because Europe does have nuclear weapons and wouldn't be attacked anyway.
This is because the majority of EU munitions were actually sent to Ukraine, along with a lot of "instructors" and other technical staff who used those weapons. They aren't struggling to crush Ukraine by itself - they're dealing with EU's stocks as well. The EU currently has a massive ammunition shortfall, and according to people who are actually involved in the EU defence industry they need at least 3-4 years to build their stocks back up, and 10 years to be fully prepared. I will freely admit that if you give the EU a decade's warning to prepare in advance that they'd do substantially better, but that's not the situation we're in now.
They currently don't have enough materiel to put up a fight against Russia - it was all shipped to Ukraine. That weakness you're identifying is actually lethal if the conflict took place now as opposed to ten years in the future. It doesn't matter how many warm bodies and soldiers you can produce if you can't actually give them bullets to shoot or guns to shoot them from.
And in this situation (assuming a kindly wizard has disarmed all nuclear weapons) Russia would just threaten EU leaders with Oreshnik strikes and let them know that it isn't just grunts and poor people who would be in danger - and the EU would immediately surrender.
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Are you counting Ukraine as part of Europe? Because right now the rest of Europe doesn't seem to be doing a great job of defending it. They also notably had trouble with Serbia/Bosnia in the 90s and Russia/Georgia in the 2000s. Defense is about more than just "is able to continue to exist." As always, the main problem is that those 500 million Europeans are divided into about 50 different countries that don't agree on much.
Ukraine isn't in the EU or in NATO, tons of european voters dislike Ukraine (illegally flooding markets with their cheaper grain, bombing the oil pipeline with Russia, covering up their own accidents that killed some polish people and trying to blame it on russia) so the motivation to defend it isn't fully there.
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In this context I mean European NATO which was also unthreatened by Serbia or the Russian invasion of Georgia. Georgia would be nigh-impossible to defend even with the US involved, just via geography.
There has to be a limit, NATO countries can't be expected to fight and die for countries that aren't even in the alliance as a reasonable part of their defence.
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Yeah, if it wasn’t for nukes, EU could defeat. The nukes are still not something one can take out of the equation, though.
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I would argue a vast amount of those military resources were researched designed and developed with US IP... decreasing costs for our allies...
And to add to that, if you have XX amounts of jets including however many f-16s, as you can see in ukraine, once you get into a real war, those artillery shells start to deplete quickly. Im aware some european countries produce their own jets but I believe, and am willing to be proved wrong, that despite that much of the equipment is still sold to them by the US. So they get into a war and then you have Macron begging in the house just like zelensky for a loan to buy equipment.
Europe does buy a lot of American equipment but that's fine, many countries do that. They buy it with their own money as opposed to other people's money like Ukraine.
And they have the Eurofighter, Rafale and Tornado that were produced entirely in Europe. They have Leopards, Leclercs, Marders, MLRS and long-range SAMs... Turkey license-builds the F-16 domestically. There is a European version of just about everything except stealth fighters.
Maybe the American stuff is a bit better? American aid would obviously make it much easier to beat Russia. But it's not strictly necessary with over 3:1 population advantage and a much larger industrial base. 1v1 Europe would beat Russia every time in a conventional war. It would be like the Ukraine war but in reverse where sheer size is the most important thing. Broadly speaking, as Russia is to Ukraine, so Europe is to Russia.
If they were actually at war, then they'd start building serious numbers of artillery shells. But there's no reason for them to be at war so they don't bother.
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Cost cutting would involve actually cutting defense spending which they're not going to do. This is pure misplaced populist resentment. Folks intuitively know they're getting screwed by Millitary Industrial Complex but they don't want to be seen as pinko pacifists so they resent Canada or Belgium, or whomever, instead of Lockheed/Boeing lobbyists.
For all the buzz it gets "defense spending" in the for of tanks, ships, jets, missiles, Et Al is effectively pocket change within the context of total US spending.
The DoD's budget accounts for about 700 billion dollars of the Federal government's 6.9 trillion dollar total, in other words somewhere around 10%. Of that 10% somewhere between 1 quarter and 1 third goes to maintenance and procurement. The remaining balance is going to things like food, wages, housing, medical benefits, the GI bill, etc...
Point being that the US could cut 100% of what most people think of when they think of "defense spending" and it wouldn't make much more than a 3% difference overall.
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This is my question. Is he just picking a fight for the sake of it?
I think so. Tariffs are not going to put much of a debt in America's liabilities. America spends too much on domestic programs, not that it imports too much
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It crossed my mind earlier that this is a distraction.
[tinfoil]
Right now DOGE is working around the clock to gain access to government computer systems. Elon is working with Trump to implement the purge as we speak. If the media went full-out covering this the way they reported on Comey in 2017, they likely wouldn't be able to get away with it. If everyone is worried about tariffs and the economy instead, then DOGE can work in the shadows to take control of federal agencies away from the career civil service.
[/tinfoil]
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I'm not convinced even the Canadian government [is in any state to] know the answer to that.
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