domain:philippelemoine.com
2rafa
4m ago
I think Trump and Musk would gladly cut the military but Trump has smart political instincts and knows (a) that many red tribe normal Republican voters like the military, have relatives who serve or have served and enjoy a certain feeling of power that comes from American military supremacy and (b) that a lot of Republican senators and representatives feel the same way and/or represent places that rely in part of DoD spending.
I think Trump is on some level afraid of war, and even though he might stumble into it or be baited into it by real or perceived enemies, he doesn’t relish it.
faceh
10m ago
Ya know, I'd actually agree it would be nice to have clarity as to how these countries can respond to quickly get the tariffs dropped, the attempt at opacity seems odd.
But I ascribe that to the mix of goals Trump is pursuing, which is to say he needs flexibility so tying himself to an algorithm means he can't maneuver much.
That's maybe the concerning part, aside from Trump's temperament. He is trying to optimize along a few different dimensions instead of merely seeking one blunt policy outcome.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
14m ago
Yeah, he was doing good stuff, slashing DEI all the way back to the Johnson administration and killing parts of the government which were Democratic patronage and propaganda machines. I could forgive him some fucking of the economy for that. But not a new Great Depression which will be inevitably be followed by the Democrats bringing back all the DEI stuff AND putting in their own brand of terrible economics.
ajuuiomml
18m ago
If you work for someone else, you will make less money. On the flip side, I’ve dealt with people putting up fences at over $100/hr because they showed up and cut straight lines. I’m not exaggerating, the bar is that low. The default fence contractor is someone who speaks literally no English, using a skill saw to cut hundreds of pickets, measuring every one by hand to the same length on site.
You don’t want to be a contractor, you want to run a business.
erwgv3g34
20m ago
Yeah, both sides were going to fuck up the economy, so I ended up voting on social issues, where Trump was the clear winner.
Quantumfreakonomics
20m ago
No. Less trade means less stuff is available that people want, period. Everything is worth less because there are less things to buy (except food I guess).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23m ago
Happy to be of service!
(It also helped clarify, by showing points of agreement, where both of my differences with you, and those with Hlynka, lie.)
If you want to write up your conclusions some time, I'd love to see them.
Rosencrantz2
26m ago
But neither of these deals actually change the trade deficit, which is about goods flow not investment. My point is that the new tariffs should be based on something countries can correct rather than something orthogonal to what the US's problem with them is.
InsanityCheck
28m ago
Because service exports don't have stickers on them. Or are you not using netflix, amazon, windows etc? And also you can just check what tariffs currently are, according to WTO the EU has an average tariff of 5%. (11.3% for agriculture, lower for rest)
UnopenedEnvilope
30m ago
Poverty is easy to maintain.
YE_GUILTY
31m ago
Absolute madness.
It seems strange that the president has arbitrary tariff powers in the first place: deciding what people pay seems like it really should be a Congress thing, shouldn't it?
What a curse it would be if the only thing the Republican majority in the House could accomplish was "protect disastrous tariffs." I would hope that at least some would know better (as the Democrats will oppose Trump no matter what.)
faceh
33m ago
Or potentially agree to grant access to your country's natural resources, or make investments directly in American manufacturing.
Like Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively.
https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-us-tsmc-chips-investment-71d3aeb2bc403a92ce8eccdd8c51c0c8)
Now I actually would NOT like an overly complex patchwork of trade deals.
I'd prefer the world where everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.
As I intimated upthread, if these countries do NOT come to the table to attempt negotiation, I will have to seriously rethink my model of the world at large.
UnopenedEnvilope
37m ago
And! Vietnam had already made recent cuts to tariffs on U.S. goods (liquefied natural gas cut from 5 percent to 2 percent, automobiles from a range of 45-64 percent to 32 percent, and on ethanol from 10 percent to 5 percent). The carrot they got from this effort? A 46-percent tariff on their goods.
faceh
37m ago
Ultimately, long term is 10+ years out, for me. But even 5 years is a pretty long time horizon given the massive pace of change going on in many sectors. We could have the beginnings of a Mars colony by then.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
40m ago
I suspect this is very much a country-to-country issue. When you live in a small country with a high income that is basically forced to be dependent on trade (not having all that much in the way of natural resource apart from lots of timber and some minerals), anything but basic-level protectionism is a dead issue, perhaps unless it's the whole of EU doing it. France is bigger and has former colonies it can still tap into and a general do-it-yourself culture insofar as political economy goes, it can afford to be protectionist in a way that Finland can't.
roystgnr
42m ago
The top producers in Europe look to be Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and Ireland. Per capita their output compared to the US is about +38%, -18%, -41%, -43%, ... and +379%??!?!?!
Okay, I was looking up numbers to make a joke about how Germany is carrying the EU, but forget what I was intending to say. What the heck is going on in Ireland? They barely made the European top 5 since they've got such a low population, but they're still outproducing Spain with like a tenth of the population. They're even outdoing Switzerland, which I would have thought would be the world leader in the low-population high-value-manufacture combo. Is this just on paper somehow, some remaining accounting artifact of how they used to be incredibly popular for multinational corporate tax avoidance? I suppose their stats office does say their output is 40% "basic pharmaceuticals", plus around 20% "food products" and 10% "chemicals", but there's still ~20% composed of metal/rubber/plastic/wood/silicon stuff that we might call "stereotypical" manufacturing, and it's not like US output is all steel burnished with blood and sweat either.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
43m ago
I was going to make this a top-level, but since it’s apparently topical…I was digging through my post history for something and ran into this based on a different @2rafa comment.
Enlisting is an employer of last resort. There were a lot more people at their last resorts in 2008-2012, a lot of people who really needed a competitive paycheck and a comprehensive insurance policy. In 2024, that’s not necessarily the case. We’re coming off a couple years of COVID distortions and zero-interest-rate phenomena. That has a way of making boot camp less appealing.
So, Conspiracy Theory of the Week: Trump is intentionally trying to trigger a recession to bolster U.S. military recruitment.
If the economy crashes, more young American men will choose the military. If it crashes faster than the housing market, even more so. And if it crashes in the midst of a publicized house-cleaning session, well, the new recruits are more likely to endorse the Trump party line.
HHS has already lost more employees than the DoD despite the latter being 10x larger. (Numbers could be off; it’s hard to find coverage that isn’t hysterical about the whole process.) Meanwhile, USMEPCOM is one of the few exemptions to the DoD hiring freeze. Can’t recruit new troops if there’s no one running the stations!
There’s the whole bit where he’s slashing the VA, but this doesn’t actually disprove anything. After all, who hates the VA more than veterans?
This is stupid and I don’t actually believe it. There’s no advantage over simpler theories which don’t assume a 5D mastermind.
To wit, Trump policy is governed almost exclusively by his aesthetic sensibilities, and he’s mashing whichever buttons look like they might steer us in that direction. Military reform is somewhere in the pile. High enough to give the DoD a better deal than DEd or HHS; not nearly enough to intentionally tank the stock market.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
43m ago
I also makes nannies cheaper, house cleaners, delivery drivers, etc. etc., but those services are definitely more keyed for the upper classes.
I think there's a lot more farm workers than nannies and house cleaners put together. Delivery drivers, like farm workers, are pretty broad-based in their benefit -- even poor people order stuff nowadays. Cheap day laborers are pretty broad-based in their benefit, though my impression is that group is more likely to contain bad eggs than the others. (or maybe the bad egg farm workers mostly affect other migrants)
Migrants aren't buying large mansions in upscale areas, by and large, they're going for the same single-family homes that your average twenty-something couple might want, too. So they place upward pressure specifically on the housing that would be accessible to middle class and down, not the top quarter of the economic stack,
Housing prices have mostly gotten ridiculous in the upscale areas, though.
I agree they probably have tons of them employed in the area, maybe some that even live in it, but that state of affairs persists only if they can control the flow.
Yeah, that's important. The US can (or could before the tariff crap) make good use of a LOT of migrants, provided you make some attempt to keep criminals and people here to milk the system out, but not an unlimited amount.
cjet79
46m ago
Are you sure you'd make more money? @hydroacetylene up above suggested it was less money. And my perfunctory googling all has it at less money.
cjet79
48m ago
I'm in situation with kids and wife's earnings that anything less than 80k will probably lose us money as we would have to hire additional childcare help. And that additional expense would eat all my take home income. Unless I can find something part time or work from home with flexible hours.
But it sounds like tradesman salaries are topping out around where software developer salaries start. Unless just living in an expensive area ups those salaries significantly.
lagrangian
49m ago
I sure hope so, but that's about the size of the 2000 and 2008 crashes, so it's not inconceivable.
That's the beauty of it: they already tried and that's how he got elected.
No, I mean by someone who is actually capable of killing him. Think more the pratorians finally being done with a particularly insane emperor than a random assassin. This is something that is only going to be able to happen once as I imagine the second Trump is dead/out of office, Congress is taking away the president's tariff powers forever.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
53m ago
That's the beauty of it: they already tried and that's how he got elected.
Not saying Trump is immune to bullets from well funded assassins, as opposed to the D team we got last time, but don't underestimate the ideological commitment of a second term president. Trump doesn't need to convince anybody anymore except congress insofar as it matters.
Ah, that explains why Barclay says "installer" with a hard r, and how they manage to install units with casings live at 240v to earth.
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