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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   32937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I think MattyY has a pretty decently evidenced take on this. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1907764231484686635#m

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-tariffs-mean-big-opportunities

Tariffs are bad for many industries due to increasing their import costs and trade, so you can use the exemption process to pick economic Winners and Losers which even assuming there's no corruption whatsoever is still prone to mishap. And assuming no corruption in the Trump admin is a pretty hard sell.

This policy essentially forces the Commerce Department to turn itself into a little central planning office for the American economy. And even if you assume perfect good faith on the part of all the political appointees and career staff,2 it’s not reasonable to expect them to do a good job making all of these technical decisions.

One good example goes to Apple in the previous admin.

But it’s a high-profile company, and as Republicans know, middle class people don’t like to pay higher taxes. During Trump’s first term, he initially vowed that Apple would get no exemptions in the spring of 2019, but then in the fall, there were a lot of stories about how prices on Apple products might go up. By September, Apple was winning limited exemptions. Then, in December, Trump reached a “Phase 1” trade deal with China, which was used as a pretext to exempt iPhones, and in March 2020, Apple won an exemption for Apple Watches, too.

Any highly discretionary process becomes political.

Theoretically, the waivers are granted on a technical basis. But there’s only so much capacity to do technical and legal analysis from scratch. In practice, agencies are relying in part on the strength of the cases that are submitted to them by the people making the requests. Some of that is the actual strength on the merits, but some of it is the quality of the lawyers and lobbyists these companies can afford to hire. And, of course, if your company is in a swing state or has close ties to a member of Congress the White House cares about or (like Apple) is salient in the media, other people start getting involved in the meetings to decide what should happen. You can be optimistic that a well-run administration won’t let political considerations run roughshod over everything else. But realistically, you can’t take the politics out of politics. In a discretionary process, the interests of companies with political clout will be weighted more heavily than those of outsiders or startups. And companies will need, at the margin, to shift their time and attention to the process of getting waivers and away from making good products.

Essentially risks standardizing widespread corruption, and becomes what is essentially a planned economy based off personal favors and ties to powerful politicians. Something that already happens to some degree but on overdrive like what happened to ruin Argentina.

Noah Smith has written similarly about a "cryptocurrency reserve" as a means of corruption: reward political favors by raising the value of whatever your loyalists own.

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