Plenty of videos around, default rethoric is to 'give them time, they said it would hurt at first' which sounds awfully close what people in abusive relationships would say now that I think about it.
There's already talk about the tariffs being curtailed tomorrow. Which got the stock market all hopeful at end of day.
Which I'm sure if this happens, will be accompanied by some bullshit claims of some concessions he supposedly obtained.
And a lot of people in-the-know who made easy coin on the stock market today.
And his followers will eat it up. Last month there was all sorts of blather on social media about how "Trudeau caved" because "Trump strong" etc. despite Canada simply re-iterating the same position it had had since December.
It's hard to overstate how pissed off Canadians are about Trump's threats to annex Canada through economic bullying. People I know who have never boycotted anything are now boycotting US goods and services. There will be long-term consequences even if it's walked back tomorrow.
Yeah I am generally not a nationalist by conviction or intellect but this stuff has me tearing up to the national anthem and putting stuff back on the shelf at the grocery store.
No, it will be Biden’s fault for ruining the economy and causing inflation. Trump didn’t have a choice, just trying to save the economy really. Doing what’s best for the people.
"These are external taxes paid by the exporting countries. Beautiful tariffs will allow the US to eliminate the IRS and replace it with an ERS".
Basically no point in even having a conversation about it. The same way you don't discuss evolution with someone who thinks the universe is 6000 years old.
Is your reasoning that the supplier has the option of eating the tariff by cutting prices, such that the price paid by the purchaser remains the same?
If they had that much margin headroom available to cut prices by 20% and remain profitable, wouldn't that basically prove that they weren't dumping product in the first place?
For suppliers with fixed costs there are strong incentives to lower prices to stimulate demand sufficient to maintain utilization where possible. The commodity NAND market is an example of this. The fabs are extremely sensitive to utilization which leads to wild profit and loss swings.
It is extremely rare for manufacturers to absorb the tariffs.
Profit margins in most industries simply aren't high enough to cover it. A business can't absorb 20-25% tariffs if its profit margin is only 5%.
And manufacturing is particularly known for its low profit margins.
So no. I mean, in theory you are technically correct. But the way elasticity works in practice is that the buyer is who pays the tariffs in virtually all circumstances.
sure, and a good baseline assumption for most consumer goods is that price elasticity of demand is pretty low in the short term, so consumers pay most of the tariff. then in the long run perhaps things change and more non-tariffed substitutes become available resulting in maybe a 50/50 split of "who pays" (after all, the substitutes didn't have comparative advantage before, so are probably a bit more costly to produce). in any case, total quantity sold will be less, consumers benefit less, and suppliers benefit less... but the government does get revenue.
This is so frustrating, because of course manufacturing countries aren't going to operate at a loss, so whatever price increase that happens will be paid for by the consumer eventually.
And if they eliminated the IRS because the ERS covers all our expenses, that would effectively mean that we have shifted all of our income tax revenue away from relatively wealthy high-earners to the poor (who currently pay little to no income tax), since the poor have to buy items at the price they're listed.
Oh, we've already seen it. I believe Fox News has already come out and said it's "patriotic" to pay higher egg prices.
We live in a post-fact world. There are no principles in play. The key organizing principle of this society is cruelty. Truth is simply what powerful people say it is.
And there's no opposition to any of it. Our supposed political opposition is way more interested in crushing progressive sentiment and voices within their party. They are completely complicit in what's now going on.
Fox - remarkably - were explaining that it would in fact make most things much, much more expensive.
I think support is ambivalent, at best.
A few people are going to short hard and make out like bandits. But all-party social unrest on a huge scale is going to kick off long before they can fulfil their dream of buying up the entire country for pennies.
Its very very stupid. Tariffs can work but not like this. A good tariff policy would be targeted at a strategic industry, have a long phase in period, and have a guarantee that it won't be removed quickly. Businesses don't like risk, especially if you want them to commit to building a new factory in the US with a decade long payback period.
I did start wondering what Trump (or any leader with loyal supporters) would have to do, or what outcomes supporters would have to see, to lose support.
I never particularly thought of "free trade" as a conservative policy. I thought it was fairly bipartisan that large corporations want to get the cheapest prices for stuff (which often is not within the US).
As far as I am aware, Free Trade was a clinton era policy, which sparked globalization. Yes it cost American industry jobs, but gave rise to a significant boom in non manufacturing jobs.
The FTA was Reagan/Mulroney era policy. It was enacted by conservatives on both sides of the border, and the liberals on both sides "opposed" it (and then had a religious conversion once they took power again, and supported its successor, NAFTA).
The 88 election debate in Canada is famous for the confrontations around this topic. I was in my early teens it was the first election debate I remember watching and having strong opinions about.
Clinton wasn't able to get a significant number of his own party to vote for it while significant numbers of republicans supported it. At the time free trade was a rebuplican talking point and many democrats opposed it.
Because NAFTA is the brainchild of Reagan. Bush Sr worked out most of the policy with CA/MX. Finally, Clinton signed it into law, with little influence on the policies overall.
Clinton pushed congress to pass it. He may not have had influence to the content (this is false - he added two amendments and had opportunity to restart talks on anything he cared about, though he may have decided some things were not worth bothering with it was still his choice) but he used his influence to get it passed in congress. It was his right to refuse to send it to congress.
r/conservative is a bad litmus test. Between AI-driven bots (read comment histories!), flair-only posts, and chronically online users it's a terrible reflection of the average American who identifies as conservative.
We need to stop reaching for the easiest data source just because we're desperate for a data source. There's a reason great research is hard - mostly because it requires stupendous effort (and funding!) to get reliable results.
>We need to stop reaching for the easiest data source just because we're desperate for a data source.
I agree. Pretty much all internet sources are inherently biased due to response bias, so there's no fixing that without talking to such people face to face (which is a bit hard in my area).
But if you aggregate enough data you can at least start to see some sort of prevailing trends and sentiments. So I am open to better sources and some biased/compromised forums are still better that choosing to be trapped in an echo chamber. I have browsed around on other comments sections from news sources and the results unfortunately make Reddit look like a think-tank.
> r/conservative is a bad litmus test. Between AI-driven bots (read comment histories!), flair-only posts, and chronically online users it's a terrible reflection of the average American who identifies as conservative
Sure, the average American who identifies as conservative just shows up every 4 years and hits the R without giving it much though. Thinking about them doesn't really give us much either.
I think /r/conservative tells us a lot, even if it's not representative of the constituency. The President is driven by memes and is extremely online. The "vibes" in /r/conservative (and on X, The Everything App) are extremely relevant, because these are the audiences Trump plays to.
I didn't formally verify it, but during the Russian internet blackout, r/conservative was very quiet. I assume that the responses you read on that forum are not from actual US conservatives. After reddit purged most conservative subs (in 2 waves, when Trump 1 began and when Trump 1 ended), I don't think you'll find any conservative subreddits.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a forum that's accessible and with lots of conservatives. You have some on X and you have YouTube channels. Both are harder to engage with.
I haven’t paid attention to the politics here much, but isn’t driving up the price the point?
If you charge Canada a 25% tariff then products sold in the U.S. and shipped from Canada should cost U.S. consumers about 25% more. That, in turn, makes U.S. products look more attractive. A U.S. business pays taxes at the federal and state levels. A U.S. business also hires U.S. employees, who pay taxes as well and spend into the economy.
I’m sure I’m way over simplifying this, to the point of stupidity, but tariffs raise prices on foreign goods to encourage the sale and/or development of local goods, don’t they?
That is the theory. But there is no incentive for US manufacturers to compete on price. If the product from China costs $100 (including the tariff), the same product from US will be $99.99. Selling it any cheaper would be stupid.
That's interesting, so, prices might not drop to pre-tariff levels, until not just one, but many, manufacturers appear in the US, and start competing on price (well, obviously, I guess some would say)
That would only be conceivable if there was a single domestic manufacturer. You don't need a foreign product to keep prices honest in a competitive domestic market.
You do, actually. Countries that have succeeded with tariffs to "build an industry" eventually forced their companies to compete in the foreign market (look at Japan and South Korea) so that they would not be fake leaders.
These markets produced actually competitive businesses that thrived and outcompeted the market leaders (US and European companies) in multiple industries. So if you keep tariffs forever you end up with Russia or some other backwater where people are forced to buy shitty goods because you have no access to external markets.
The computer market in Brazil, for instance, was like that. Most of what we had were pirated hardware, because there was never an effort to create a real industry in the country, they would just copy and paste whatever was available out there and "launch" in the local market, so even with years of tariffs and protectionism the country did not produce any player in the computer manufacturing market.
See the Soviet and East German automobile industries, and to a large extent the British one pre-European accession. Hideously outdated and uncompetitive, years behind the rest of the world, and both vanished practically completely when the protectionist systems which kept them alive collapsed. When the government more or less makes people buy your shit no matter how bad it is, on the basis that it is the only option that isn't taxed into oblivion, there is little incentive to make it good, and in practice this does seem to hold up to a large extent even when there are a few local competitors.
The time and expense to set up a manufacturing line for anything nontrivial is large. And Trump's policy volatility makes the risk completely not worth it.
Depending on elasticity of demand and supply it will drive up the US made products (if they exist) at the same time.
Also encouraging people to produce the stuff locally only works if they can rely on the stability of the market.
Plus there's an intrinsic advantage that exporters in lower wage zones have over the domestic market. US workers are paid more than Canadian, and certainly paid a hell of a lot more than Chinese ones. So whatever is made domestically is just intrinsically more expensive.
You can make an argument for protectionism and self-sufficiency on various basis. But you can't make a good argument for erratic and sudden and unreliable protectionism.
Yes, but with Trump you have to wonder if the tariffs will be reversed in three weeks when he has a change of mood. So it may not drive long-term investment in factories and supply chains, just a short term advantage for companies that already have local product.
> I’m sure I’m way over simplifying this, to the point of stupidity, but tariffs raise prices on foreign goods to encourage the sale and/or development of local goods, don’t they?
What about all the businesses that export products or the ones that rely on imports. Businesses go bankrupt, prices go up for everyone and less people have jobs.
"Trump’s last trade war, with China in 2018...led to $27bn in losses for US agriculture, according to estimates by farming groups..farms received as much as $23bn in compensation from the federal government"
A study was done on washing machine prices during tariffs of the previous Trump administration. Rather than undercutting foreign goods on price, local manufacturing raised their prices to absorb extra profit. As a kicker, the price of dryers also went up even though they were not subject to tariffs.
The US and Canadian economies have become deeply intermingled over generations. Many materials cross the border multiple times on the way to becoming finished goods and will be subject to tariff each time. There will be 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects for a long time even if these tariffs go away quickly, not to mention the poisoning of the closest relationship between nations the world has ever seen.
My fellow Canadians are horrified and enraged at the tariffs that amount to economic warfare and the continuous violations of our sovereignty. I have never seen the whole country this united on anything before. Canadians are furious and every grocery store has American produce rotting on shelves. We will not forgive and forget quickly.
>Rather than undercutting foreign goods on price, local manufacturing raised their prices to absorb extra profit.
For another source on this point quoted above- (and for people that prefer video explainers) the wall street journal covered how domestically produced washers/dryers went up in price after those tariffs: https://youtu.be/_-eHOSq3oqI?t=102
It's stupider than that - a lot of people believe that the manufacturer will just eat a 25% hike in tax. Build a tariff wall and make China pay, as it were.
> I’m sure I’m way over simplifying this, to the point of stupidity
This is, to an extent, the problem, yes.
There are plenty of problems, but here's one very obvious one; your own industry almost certainly depends heavily on imports, particularly if you're a developed country. If you basically only have primary industry, then this sort of protectionism can _theoretically_ work and allow development of secondary industry (though in practice there aren't many examples of this), but for a developed country it really makes very little sense.
You're also assuming that local industry _will_ compete on price, versus just accepting the newly-set tariff-induced base price. That will happen in some cases, but not all; in particular for near-monopolistic industries (cars, a lot of heavy consumer goods like kitchen appliances), really, it makes a lot of sense for them to raise their prices under such circumstances.
> That, in turn, makes U.S. products look more attractive.
Unless they raise prices to get better margins since their competition has higher prices now. This is exactly what happened with Trump 1.0 tariffs: foreign product prices went up and so did domestic ones.
> A U.S. business also hires U.S. employees, who pay taxes as well and spend into the economy.
It takes time to on-shore, and until that happens the public is paying higher prices, potentially for a few years. So you take the total higher prices, and divide by the number of jobs created, and you can get the price per job. For washing machines it was $800K/job:
The other replies missed a big issue with the tariffs - which is that you're not wrong, but tariffs basically guarantee counter-tariffs, which means that while you're no longer buying imports, you're also no longer able to competitively export. In the case of Canada, if you don't include raw resources, the US has a trade surplus, so tariffs make the inputs of your value-added-over-raw-resources local goods more expensive while also cutting down the export market.
I read an article, can’t find it now, that the Christian right believes Trump is basically a biblical messiah like Cyrus the Great from Isaiah 45. Basically a nonbeliever who God controls to help his people.
How would you actually go about doing that? Like if the US economy implodes because enough of this malarkey breaks it, what/where is safe? In terms of your personal wealth/residence, I mean.
The only thing I can kind of think of is maybe some land or housing in Europe or New Zealand or somewhere kind of out of the way; perhaps something that you can rent out. Might not make you a ton of money, but it would hopefully hold its value over time?
We own a modest flat in Spain. I’ve moved a year’s worth of living expenses to EUR. I can have my family out of the country in 72 hours. Total cost was under $300k USD.
The best time to have a plan is before you need it. If you wait until you need it, you’re too late.
Who did you use to make the international purchase? I have a friend that used the lady from house hunters international but she’s French focused and that’s not for us
Figure out your residency (digital nomad, non lucrative visa from passive income, etc). Find where you want to live. Find a property within that area. Use word of mouth, find someone locals trust, have them help you with maintenance and pay them for that help. I use both Wise and Santander. Idealista is, by far, the biggest real estate website in Spain. Use this to start your search. Some properties are going to be held by local agencies, and you're going to have to talk to folks on the ground to see those listings (wildly different market than Zillow and Redfin in the states). There is an annual wealth tax on globally held assets >€2M, if this potentially applies to you, seek assistance from a Spanish tax advisor. I strongly advise not buying over the Internet and buying in person to avoid scams and fraud. Use a legal advisor to facilitate your purchase as you would with an attorney in the states.
> I can have my family out of the country in 72 hours.
I was thinking out loud about this on a reddit thread, kind of going through my idea of different scenarios. "Maslow's hierarchy of GTFO".
As in... if you're in 1930ies Germany, you get out with whatever you can take, but you get out ASAP.
If you're in, say, Hungary... you don't really need to rush your exit. You might find the politics unpleasant, but you can leave whenever and take the time to take your stuff with you.
I work in risk management. If I overestimate this risk, the cost is very low. If I underestimate the risk and am suddenly exposed to it unexpectedly, the cost is exceptionally high. This leads me to action accordingly.
I've left Hungary ~10 years ago, partially because of the politics. Hungary is essentially a failed state, people just don't know yet. Like ~100 years ago, poor hungarian leadership managed to position itself on the wrong side of history, and once the phase transition comes and passes, and the better part of the world gets back on track towards more liberalism and democracy, like it always does, nobody will be doing Hungary any favors.. same as after WW2.
Makes sense. Hope you landed somewhere where you are happy and doing well.
I guess my point is that most people aren't in imminent physical danger in Hungary right now and could just leave and that'd be fine for them and the regime.
That's a better situation to be in than "leave in 72 hours" for most people.
Note that the "might walk it back" thing hasn't come out of Trump, but out of one of his stooges. So more than likely it was either an attempt to pump the stock market back up (so some people can make more coin on trades), or a way to float a trial balloon to gauge reactions from Trump's base etc. Or both.
> The deal is off! No, it's back on! It's tiresome.
On that much, we agree. Perhaps he should stop attempting to govern like the tragic parody of a business man he is and just be a normal fucking president then, with the added benefit of not being a worldwide embarrassment every.. what, 4 hours?
It isn't sustainable though. People are making consequential business decisions based on the tariff announcements, even if they get walked back last minute those choices have still been made.
> All these stupid sky-is-falling headlines
I mean, what can be done here really? They're reporting on things Trump is doing. They can't not do that.
I don't personally blame the media here, and it is tiring keeping up with it. There's no real solution to it outside of the circus ending one way or another.
You know what's so interesting? If I had known he was going to threaten tariffs, I might have considered shorting a lot of stocks. And well, if I knew he was going to then quickly walk them back the next day, I probably would have bought those same stocks. If only I had known he was going to do this!
Now that I think about it, if he had told me about these things in advance, I could probably make a LOT of money. I mean sure, it's illegal, but we could always gut the SEC[1]!
You can bet your right ass cheek there are all kinds of shenanigans going on right now. The president himself has broad immunity and is a known grifter, and for his lackeys of course there’s the pardon power.
"It used to be simple: vote for the guy you liked the most. Then it became vote against the guy you disliked the most. Now it's vote for who you dislike the least." --A Whitney Brown
I remember seeing that on SNL in the 80s; it has always stuck with me.
1) They can't vote, either because of local politicians meddling in their election process/with their polling places, being convicted of bullshit non-crimes, or simply being unable to get to a polling place. Shock of shocks, majority of political fuckery involved in taking away people's right to vote is brought about by conservatives. Even more shocking, the groups that tend to be disenfranchised trend progressive in their voting habits, wow, such a weird coincidence.
2) They have no desire to vote, because as much as I understand voting for the lesser of two evils (and doing it with regularity) that just isn't motivating, and neither is choosing which party you want to join that's going to leave you for dead the second the election is over. To be clear: this is not "both sides are bad." Both sides are bad, but one is just useless bad, and the other is actively tearing down the state to sow chaos that it can use to consolidate power and bring about a theocracy. And while both of those are bad, they are not even remotely comparable.
>To be clear: this is not "both sides are bad." Both sides are bad, but one is just useless bad, and the other is actively tearing down the state to sow chaos
Nope, that's just more uninformed "both sides are the same" nonsense.
The Democrat and Republican voting record proves you wrong.
And one side is only "useless" because the other side are obstructionists, and that side can only obstruct because too many people with low IQs believed lies and voted against their best interests.
This could be an interesting topic, but inevitably these posts devolve into politics and it’s always about the same thing. Yet this is the type of comment at the top. Why bother leaving a comment like this?
You don't, you just don't understand how they're intrinsically linked to politics. That's not me being mean, because a lot of the time it isn't obvious. But, you would be shocked how often you can trace an exact bill or executive order that is causing the thing people are thinking about.
I mean, you can trace various seemingly random effects today to Reagan policies.
Essentially, yes those other comments are linked to politics. All things could be extrapolated to politics. That doesn't mean we should directly talk about the political aspects, otherwise it drowns out curious discussion
There rarely seem to be any substantive discussion in these types of threads, beyond vibes or repeating tautologies and talking points.
Over the past few months I doubt there have even been 10 discussions total with some non-circular, credible, arguments along with some coherent logic backing them…
Both right wing economists like Friedman and Mises, and left wing, understand initiating tariff wars against friendly neighbors is economically illiterate. No persons of educated thinking have anything fundamental to add.
There is nothing to discuss. What we are witnessing is, to be crass, an exercise of pure idiocy.
That trump's narrative of what tariffs are is a lie and that these do not in fact help the economy. They can help, but not the way trump is using the tools.
>There’s not a widely agreed upon definition of intelligence last time I checked.
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It’s clearly possible for people to have ulterior goals and motives… so assessments based on outward usages, of anything, seem irrelevant to determining intelligence, or the lack of it.
This is my first reply to you, AFAIK. So I'm not sure what the thoughts are of the claim up the chain.
I'm not interested in this tangent here that you keep trying to veer on. Point it many economists know this trade war is not good for the economy. The history of this is as recent as Trump 45.
I'm not a mind reader and my question was never focused on that part of the conversation. I have no opinion on the aforementionedtamgent. What are you asking me about (since you won't engage in the original conversation)
For what it’s worth it wasn’t me that flagged your reply.
All I’m saying is that politics is as intertwined with technology news as much as economics or religion or pop culture or anything else, and imho should be considered as equally valid sidebar conversations as the others.
If we can’t talk about things that make people uncomfortable, sicko people will take control of those very things and we will all suffer down the road. Better to just bite the bullet and let it all hang out.
It's alright, I'm not shy to the flagging and downvotes. I appreciate your thoughtful response
From my understanding, your argument is a variation of "many/all things are politics and therefore politics cannot be disentangled from the topic" which I've seen others mention before. Sure, you can find ways to connect things to certain policies and politicians and then talk about that solely. Yes, economics becomes politics and recent tariffs are certainly policy-related. That doesn't mean we must discuss the political aspects of it.
The problem becomes that jumping to politics is very polarizing, identity-driven, and quickly drowns out curious discussion. The OP made a political statement, which won him easy points to push his comment to the top since there are so many who share the mindset of OP's comment. Any discussion about things not directly related to politics was pushed down. The effect happens across threads so frequently that no other conversation is left but politics. Those who don't want to talk politics spend time elsewhere, creating a feedback loop.
I mean, I see where you’re coming from. In a direct democracy system like HN or Reddit, this is indeed a problem.
I was approaching the topic with a smidge of nuance and perhaps that was not clear, and I’m sorry.
Identity is definitely an issue in modern political culture, but I don’t know if PG can solve it anymore than you and I can. I think people just need to recognize and appreciate conjunctive nuances in their own opinions. Politics is identity AND culture AND religion etc etc. that’s my contention anyways.
Have people not noticed that Trump seems to habitually make hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements?
Like it’s not doing him any favors, I tend to feel it’s some kind of personality defect.
Though it did get him a lot of attention in the past, which substantially led to him becoming president.
Either he can’t turn it off, or the decade plus of increasingly internet centric media exposure among the general population just selected for a guy who had obvious populist but not too radical views and also makes ridiculous statements to get attention.
Greenland will not be taken by force. The reminder of a possibility of force may be used as leverage in the negotiation. The messaging is kind of whacky, but it would make sense to broadcast the threat widely to achieve credibility. Like “he’s so crazy he might just pull the trigger”.
I have a lot of experience with this kind of person. I personally will bet real money that the US has troops in Greenland within a year, and is claiming it as US territory.
In my experience, the ‘personality defect’ you are thinking of is what many folks would call ‘malignant narcissistic personality disorder’. He only wants Greenland because someone once told him he couldn’t have it, and it gets him attention every time he brings it up.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he has no actual idea what Greenland actually is like, and has never visited it. He might even be confused between Iceland and Greenland, if you asked him to point to Greenland on an unlabeled map.
Plenty of other people though would benefit from the strife created by him actually taking it, or from him being happy with them by actually getting it for him, so I expect there are active plans in motion right now to invade Greenland.
He’s telling everyone what he wants to do, no one is delivering real consequences to stop him, and he is in charge. Listen to what he’s saying.
Refusing to take him ‘seriously’ and actually act against him, is exactly what normalizes his actions when he later does the thing that seemed crazy a month or a year ago.
Look at what he was saying that seemed crazy and hyperbolic a year or two ago. Look at what he is doing now, and no one is stopping him.
Yes, I agree that the personality defect is a form of narcissism.
I think, though, that the narcissism mechanism acts a bit differently than you say.
I think he sees himself as a great man, a man who can see further than others, a man who gets things done and above all a man who makes deals. I’m not saying his is any those things, he’s not, just that this is how he narcissistically sees himself.
Interestingly, I think this disordered thinking is probably what makes him not give any shits about what other people think. Like, from his perspective he’s going to do a thing that will be unpopular because people are myopic, but eventually his results will be too obvious to ignore. Picture a narcissistic software engineer, they do the same thing. He does this very clumsily, because he is not actually a great man in the way he sees himself, and he has never made any attempt to work on his personality shortcomings, because narcissism.
To be absolutely clear, this is what I think is occurring in his mind, I am not personally saying that he is a great man etc. His self perception as that is just what drives how he acts.
Anyway, he does want Greenland. Taking Greenland would make him a major historical figure, from the perspective of a man (himself) who developed his sense of historical significance from literal school history books, not from any deep thinking. Physics phds want to be the guy in the physics textbook. He wants to be the guy in the history textbook. Annexing Greenland would give him that.
However, he will not use physical force to achieve that. I would put big money on that prediction. It doesn’t fit with his m/o. He is bluffing about using physical force, in order to strong arm Denmark into a purchase deal. Because, you know, he sees himself as a master deal maker. Doing a deal on Greenland would be a massive win for that aspect of his persona, in terms of that self belief being supported in the narcissistic sense.
Using physical force on Greenland would be literally insane, and if you listen to the man talk for a long enough time, as I have, he has shown signs of being many, many things, but being literally insane is not one of them. Nothing he has done so far has surprised me (with the exception of the Gulf of America, he did catch me off guard with that one).
His supporters don’t really care about Greenland. I think from their perspective, Trump does some pretty goofy stuff, but if he’s the guy who will do something about 1) the Mexicans and 2) the trade policies that created the rust belt, then he’s their guy.
> and if you listen to the man talk for a long enough time, as I have, he has shown signs of being many, many things, but being literally insane is not one of them
I guess the disconnect comes from the fact that for many people including myself, the perception has always been of the exact opposite.
It depends entirely on the definition of insanity, eh?
I don’t think he is clinically insane, or incompetent in a court of law insane. Deep down he knows what the truth is, or he couldn’t do what he is doing. You can’t go in the opposite direction of something if part of you doesn’t know where it actually is.
NPD is a disorder, which isn’t the psychological definition of insanity either.
He just refuses to believe or acknowledge anything that doesn’t reinforce his world view, regularly preferring (and enforcing on others) his delusional world view instead, which has him as a strong man, excellent deal maker, etc.
He also goes out of his way to destroy anyone who disagrees with his delusional world view, to the point of committing what appears to be clear criminal acts to do so, and prefers coercive control over any sort of mutually beneficial bargaining.
It all fits.
Look at the consistent outcome for people who are around or under the control of malignant narcissists, and you’ll see why this is a big problem. He is going to end up destroying everything valuable or real in everything he has control over in his attempt to make it fit his world view, and destroy anyone he can who attempts to stop it.
If economic means don’t work, he has assassinated folks before, and while yes it doesn’t fit his MO to start wars directly - at some point it’s going to happen.
All it takes is for someone to stand up to him in the right circumstances.
If he can take Greenland, and sees no real consequences (he certainly didn’t get any for taking out the Iranian general, despite hundreds of service member injuries), even if it involves force - seriously, why wouldn’t he in your world view?
And do you think the cowards currently in power elsewhere are going to risk starting WW3 for a bunch of ice? Greenland only has 56k people in the whole country, and most of them are rural farmers who will never have to care what gov’t is actually running the country.
The problem comes when he thinks about making a deal that can't be made. Denmark can't sell Greenland. It's just not possible within their framework of relationship with the citizens of Greenland. So what will he do when it doesn't pan out? I don't know. We're seeing the same thing with Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are not yet in a position where peace is possible. He wants to be seen making the peace. It can't happen, so he's going to punish Ukraine because they lost the blame game.
No, they won't go to war over it. But it'll be the end of the post war consensus, probably the end of NATO. It's a cliff, once you go over it there's no coming back.
Yeah I know. Not arguing, just pointing out it's not a small move. He's said a lot of stuff, but hasn't yet put the US in a position with it's allies that can't be rowed back.
Saying crazy things like implementing general tariffs?
Or wanting to create "camps" to hold immigrants, and then sending them to Guantanamo?
Things like threatening retaliations against perceived enemies?
Withdrawing support from Ukraine and groveling to Putin?
I'm pretty tired of people dismissing his crazy outbursts as something he just says because he's not just all talk, he (too) often does the crazy things.
I like that you did a full 180 between your two comments in this thread.
First it was "Trump seems to habitually make hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements" to pretend it's all talk and not representative of actual policy.
And then a complete switch to supporting all of the policies which started as "hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements" on tariffs, immigration and Russian imperialism.
Also, it seems your worldview is straight out of a fairy tale from Fox News and/or Russian propaganda. Maybe reading some more diverse and less biased news sources would help you (AP News, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, Al Jazeera, Reuters, etc)
It’s not a full 180, you are just viewing a flattened lower dimensional version of what I am saying (I can speculate on the reasons).
Hyperbolic and ridiculous statements include: annexing Greenland by force, annexing Canada at all, permanent significantly higher tariffs on Canada and Mexico
Actual goals: maybe annexing Greenland through pressure tactics, making Canada stop expecting special treatment (the whole annexation thing is just “if you want special treatment, you’re welcome to become a state, otherwise gtfo”), temporary tariffs as a pressure tactic on allies, permanent protectionist tariffs against China and places that launder Chinese goods, America stops interfering in extended family disputes internationally.
For the record I think Trump as a person is a clown and I wish we had serious people as politicians, but it is annoying to see everyone being hysterical all the time over the guy.
I am calling your worldview fairy tale because it moralizes political and international matters. Russia is not evil. America is not good. America is not evil. Russia is not good. These are massive oversimplifications, and it is worryingly reminiscent of war propaganda from old newspapers.
TSMC announced investments in the US in 2020 and 2022.
It later came out that the DOGE numbers are innacurate. Even if they were accurate, the US budget is 7 Trillion. The tax cuts that Trump is proposing is much more than all of the cuts.
There is no way that conservatives are going to let DOGE touch Medicare that and social security are the third rail and he can’t cut either one without Congress. What is he going to do? Not send checks to senior citizens?
The minute you cut military spending - again you can’t do it without Congress - Republicans are going to grow a spine.
Do you remember the FoxConn investment that never happened?
The minute that Republicans allow one penny of cuts to social security, senior citizens - the most active voters - are going to abandon the Republican Party in droves. It might even turn Florida Blue again.
If they cut Medicare reimbursements or force senior citizens to pay more, it will have the same affect.
Modifying health care benefits that people already have has hurt Democrats in 2010 with the ACA and Republicans in 2018 trying to repeal it.
> What is he going to do? Not send checks to senior citizens?
Yes, he's going to do precisely that. Musk will identify that some segment of the recipients is "fraud", or identify some employees who play a critical role in the processing pipeline as "waste". Then when the first senior citizens stop getting their checks, he'll call the reporters who talk about it liars or blame the Social Security Administration for "malicious compliance".
I don't necessarily expect you to believe me, even though he's already run this playbook in multiple other agencies. I'm just some guy on the Internet. But when you read the headlines in a couple months about missed Social Security payments, I hope you'll remember this comment, and adjust accordingly for your future predictions about what the administration wouldn't dare touch.
>There is no way that conservatives are going to let DOGE touch Medicare that and social security are the third rail and he can’t cut either one without Congress. What is he going to do?
I've been highly disappointed everytime I said this year "there's no was X". I heard Medicaid was the same but look what's happening as we speak.
He'll break something, bad. Maybe then people will wake up. He's already starting the astroturfing over "dead people collecting social security" because the programmers don't understand the code they are reading. That's how it starts, eroding trust in the system.
> Illegal crossings at U.S.-Mexico border down 94% from last year, Border Patrol chief says
Economic migrants stop appearing when the future of the economy starts looking bleak. You can also make housing affordable by encouraging murders on the street.
The One, The Original, The Prophetic (July 1990), The Authentic “Evil Empires: One down, one to go…” bumper sticker, anticipating the obsolescence of railroad era continental-scale empires in the information age.
I don't know if tariffs are the right answer but I want so much less Chinese junk in this country. We are absolutely overflowing with low quality junk.
Best of luck. Companies want lower costs to make stuff, customers want lower costs. We did indeed fall from being a superpower when we outsourced all out labor overseas.
Consumers in the US constantly complain of inflation and things becoming unaffordable, so much that it's become both a GOP and dem talking point. They definitely want to encourage US-made goods, but that would mean prices go up. and realistically consumers buy the cheap stuff from china en masse, knowing it's low quality, just because they want to save money. Or at least that's my 0.02 on the situation. I don't know how we solve it either.
other thing which may happen is that businesses would start to behave like the ones in say Russia and the likes - utilizing long opaque subsidiaries and shell corp chains, some being just a paperwork, to "manage" the tariffs . The double Dutch would look like a child play. Once such [quasi]corruption starts it would be pretty hard to wean companies off it if/when things get back normal.
Nah, you just pay the powers that be to exclude you from the tariffs, Apple has been excluded from the current ones. So only those that are not friends with the kleptocracy are really at risk.
As for the rest of the population, it's the usual FAFO, not much to do.
Near term inflation but more broadly increasing paralysis of business investment of all stripes in the fact of a wildly unpredictable political landscape.
The general path of the country is fairly clear at this point - business that manufacture closer to consumers will have fewer issues with the government. Even Biden kept a bunch of Trump1 anti-China policies in place.
If I was directing investment at a large business, onshoring manufacturing would be a no brainer in many businesses. Mexico might be the happy medium, but I’d really push for US manufacturing facilities with high automation levels to hedge against labor cost.
Your phone was made in the US. They’re all black rectangles. The reason you picked the phone you use is because of the software, written here. All the LTV is tied up in software and services. Almost all made by Americans. To me, the status quo is very good - there can be unlimited valuable software written but people only need one phone. A policy of pro manufacturing doesn’t necessarily make sense in each specific.
>the reason you picked the phone you use is because of the software, written here
No, I picked it because of hardware too. You can't just say "your sandwich was made in america because the bread was made here". I didn't order bread, I ordered a whole sandwich.
And honestly, the sentiment of the software being American made is also more suspect by the day.
If it is half the cost to produce it over seas, 25% more is still much less than on shoring. On shoring is more than just the CoG, it requires capital investment which may no longer be needed in a year or four. It's not a simple or no brainer decision for most of the tariff targets with them being so broad
Massive wealth redistribution to the ultra-wealthy over the next 4 years. The ultra wealthy will need to find new places to invest their capital, so some form of startup funding will remain available even as research funding dries up.
Creating startups will be easier as more Americans will be looking for work, leading to depressed salaries.
Honest question - can you not get these products from other stores or do all of them source products from Mexico and China? If so, it does seem like DOGE and other price saving initiatives will be closer to a net 0.
Or could be net negative if there are a bunch of wrongly termination suits and settlements, or it actually costs the govt more because they now have to outsource work to private companies be wise they fired too many people who were in fact doing useful work
You cannot go into a large org and understand what is and is not working in a few weeks. DOGE has been sloppy and largely more political theater this far
The supply chain has been global for decades, especially with the countries he targeted. It’s really messy with the North American free trade area since parts are shipped around a lot as they get made and assembled and all of those supply chains break in odd ways if there are customs delays. People are predicting that will add something like $3-10k to the price of a new car:
In many cases, the U.S. no longer has manufacturing capacity in certain markets so the most likely outcome is simply that prices go up or manufacturing shifts to other countries like Vietnam, especially in an uncertain economic climate where companies aren’t jumping to take on debt chasing demand which could disappear at any time.
One other area where we don’t have alternatives: Mexican agriculture - their growing season is longer and that means American consumers either aren’t getting things out of season or are paying more for things like greenhouse crops.
They're clearly thinking much bigger, like returning to a model where tariffs are the primary mode of funding the government, and nuking whole sectors/devaluing the dollar to make US exports more competitive with a desperate potential workforce. Not a particularly compelling plan in my view but it has its own internal logic.
Import substitution industrialization is a pretty well established method to foster industries and frankly works really well for developing states (or did until the entire international system started conspiring to turn you into a pariah state for trying it). You can't export something you're not making in the first place. But it is quite unusual for a fully developed, post-industrial economy to try and move back down the value chain and manufacture more stuff again so who knows what happens when we try that.
But a 25% tariff isnt going to do that, its just going to make things much more expensive - its another thing if you're trying to do cost adjustment tariffs - and just price in all the externalities (labor cost, regulatory regime, environmental rules, and human rights costs) that US manufacturing must bear - and make it a level playing field - thats not what this is.
> labor cost, regulatory regime, environmental rules, and human rights costs
These don't strike you as themes they're interested in? They're kneecapping or eliminating regulators and driving up unemployment. Their deportation drives, it's true, are a bit contradictory here, but those have other motivations.
The opposite is true. The highest-margin stuff is services (like, to choose the obvious one, software). Frankly it seems pretty obvious to me why margins would tend to be lower for manufactured goods, especially commodity ones — you have more inputs besides labor, the primary one a service-oriented business has to worry about. There is a fairly sensible reason we don’t have those jobs.
I suppose you have in mind jobs like home health aides. But 1) we really do need a lot of them with an aging population 2) I’m not sure their lives would be improved by working in a textile mill instead.
I’m curious - I wouldn’t describe myself as “pro tariff” at all, but I can see a good case for them in a couple circumstances; 1) in cases where production is important for national security - e.g. sufficient production of Calories and 2) in cases where off-shored production isn’t meeting standards around human rights, environmental protection, etc.
You use tariffs to equalize actual costs plus a little (environmental/climate rules, labor costs, regulatory environment, human rights, etc) between the US and a foreign country. It doesn't have to be a huge amount of increase either, 5-12% - and probably wouldn't apply to most developed countries, because it is based on that matrix of total cost of doing business.
As far as rationale here - I personally want to onshore as much production as I can - but you can't start with finished goods necessarily, you often have to start with the base supportive industries needed - but even I acknowledge that may not be practical for everything.
But, to do what I want to do is a decades long process and must be done strategically and carefully - blanket tariffs dont do that, and are just a blowtorch to the delicate interconnections of a modern economy. Like targeting agricultural goods is absurd, for example - and will just raise prices for no tangible good.
> I personally want to onshore as much production as I can
What's the rationale for this? Like if you're already close to full employment, this isn't even zero-sum, you're throwing away your comparative advantage and spending part of your economy on production rather than higher-value services.
I'm willing to spend part of my country's wealth to counteract, say, other countries' lack of environmental protections, but if you're spending that wealth on counteracting lower offshore labour costs... in effect, the net impact is that you're just reducing the value of your own labour to match the offshore labour. (ergo, tariffs are a real clunky way to support local labour that isn't competitive with offshore labour costs... you could achieve the same ends more efficiently via income taxes and UBI.)
I want a better quality of jobs, in my experience service oriented industry often have a thinner margin than hardware.
Like walmart is the largest private employer in the US, the working conditions, pay and benefits one gets from working at walmart isnt comparable to what we used to give what was the largest private employer 50 years ago (which was AT&T) - nor can the margins that walmart generates support those kinds of generous pay and benefits either.
This story is repeated a 100 times over thruout the US - while yes we have full employment, its in service jobs (retail, food service, hospitality) and not in manufacturing or other high paying jobs.
The second thing I'm trying to deal with, for lack of a more polite way (without lapsing too far into euphemism) to put it is "jobs for stupid people" (edit, in hindsight the best way to put this is "good jobs for everyone") - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for in terms of wages and benefits is working on a production line in a factory, while you and I (presumably) work in some sort of information job - thats just not an option for a significant portion of the population, and until we solve that we're going to keep having an issue with a K-shaped economy.
I get what you're saying, but I'm not getting any way that the economics here work. Expanding (rather than shrinking) the economy that way only works if you can export some of your production, which you won't be able to do if the production only exists because of tariffs. (Because other countries will enact counter-tarrifs.)
If you move Walmart employees to building widgets at a somewhat higher wage and that shrinks your economy, you'd have better overall results if you just raised taxes and gave the money to Walmart employees directly.
If every high wage country did the same thing - and specifically targeted low regulation places - it would. I'm certain that the US can build something that is competitive in Europe, and most of the Americas.
Also flatly, people cannot pay their rent, or eat GDP, its possible to have lower GDP growth and still be more prosperous country, most of the GDP loss will be to upper income earners.
> Also flatly, people cannot pay their rent, or eat GDP, its possible to have lower GDP growth and still be more prosperous country, most of the GDP loss will be to upper income earners.
Right, but then you’re working with a smaller pie than if you just skipped tariffs, taxed the upper income earners, and redistributed that.
And tariffs are particularly regressive - mostly resulting in higher costs for your low income earners, since tariffed goods are a relatively higher part of their expenses than they are for the wealthy.
Tariffs are an economically inefficient way to get a bigger pie slice for the median earner.
I'm no fan of tariffs, but oh please. Last time their prices went up because of COVID and because of supply chain disruptions. Now they are going up because of tariffs. All of their earnings calls are filled with analyses of their "pricing power" i.e. the degree to which they can pass on these costs to customers. But when the costs decline, they are happy to keep the prices inflated and pocket the profits.
low net profits margins are simply how retail works, it's not news that retail requires scale. and in fact both target and best buy did see record profits shortly after the pandemic started.
Consumer spending was shattering records during the pandemic.
If consumer spending was dropping as prices were going up, then sure, greed. But prices were rising and consumers were relentless. Which is totally logical. Even more logical when the "spending class" was getting massive raises/offers and rock bottom credit.
I wish humans were better at coordination, or instead of "social media" people got addicted to social bargaining: because this would be the perfect time for a united consumer front, demanding that that big companies take more of a hit from their profit margin than from employee wages or raised prices. Threatening to starve out a company if it doesn't implement these tariff increases in a more reasonable way than the entirety of capitalism history would be the only way to turn around the avalanche it has been
> Threatening to starve out a company if it doesn't implement these tariff increases in a more reasonable way than the entirety of capitalism history would be the only way to turn around the avalanche it has been
I mean, depends on the industry, but for instance take Target. Its profit margin is 3-4%, and that was in 2024, which was, really, pretty good times, all things considered. It doesn't have much room to absorb source price increases. Few industries dependent on imports do.
Right, like they are not going to take the opportunity to raise margins.
I recall seeing the exact same windshield mounted phone holder for 25 USD at Best Buy and 1 USD at the dollar store.
Prices are not only set based on percentual margins, they are also set based on what the consumer is ready to pay for perceived value.
Yep. "Translation: CEOs see opportunity to raise prices and blame it on someone else, figuring consumers don't understand how prices work." And they're mostly right.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadI'm thinking at first it'll be 'playing hardball negotiating tactic' and when it looks like the tariffs are here to stay 'paying more is patriotic'.
Which I'm sure if this happens, will be accompanied by some bullshit claims of some concessions he supposedly obtained.
And a lot of people in-the-know who made easy coin on the stock market today.
And his followers will eat it up. Last month there was all sorts of blather on social media about how "Trudeau caved" because "Trump strong" etc. despite Canada simply re-iterating the same position it had had since December.
> Any bets on how this will be justified by Trump voters?
This is not what I believe
> Any bets on how this will be justified by Trump voters?
This is not what I believe
Basically no point in even having a conversation about it. The same way you don't discuss evolution with someone who thinks the universe is 6000 years old.
If they had that much margin headroom available to cut prices by 20% and remain profitable, wouldn't that basically prove that they weren't dumping product in the first place?
For suppliers with fixed costs there are strong incentives to lower prices to stimulate demand sufficient to maintain utilization where possible. The commodity NAND market is an example of this. The fabs are extremely sensitive to utilization which leads to wild profit and loss swings.
Profit margins in most industries simply aren't high enough to cover it. A business can't absorb 20-25% tariffs if its profit margin is only 5%.
And manufacturing is particularly known for its low profit margins.
So no. I mean, in theory you are technically correct. But the way elasticity works in practice is that the buyer is who pays the tariffs in virtually all circumstances.
And if they eliminated the IRS because the ERS covers all our expenses, that would effectively mean that we have shifted all of our income tax revenue away from relatively wealthy high-earners to the poor (who currently pay little to no income tax), since the poor have to buy items at the price they're listed.
We live in a post-fact world. There are no principles in play. The key organizing principle of this society is cruelty. Truth is simply what powerful people say it is.
And there's no opposition to any of it. Our supposed political opposition is way more interested in crushing progressive sentiment and voices within their party. They are completely complicit in what's now going on.
I think support is ambivalent, at best.
A few people are going to short hard and make out like bandits. But all-party social unrest on a huge scale is going to kick off long before they can fulfil their dream of buying up the entire country for pennies.
Cooler heads understand this.
My irl interactions make it seem like they're not even aware of what's been happening
>To influence companies to produce their goods domestically instead of internationally. What is so hard to understand about this?
So they are stuck in Just World Land.
another top comment linked this: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...
So they more or less buy into "The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl"
P.S. more than happy to take suggestions of a better forum representing conservative opinion
"A Trump never keeps his word"
"A Trump never pays his debts"
I don't know if it's dementia or if Putin has compromising info on him, but he seems intent on speed running the tearing apart of the west.
Pre-Trump the 2nd, it seemed to me that conservative view-points were being “shouted down.”
Anecdotally I recall even on HN conservative views weren’t looked too kindly.
Remember that Google engineer who had an odd-take about less qualified Googlers, and getting ostracized for it?
It has been a rising tide that lifts all boats on our blue marble
The 88 election debate in Canada is famous for the confrontations around this topic. I was in my early teens it was the first election debate I remember watching and having strong opinions about.
In particular it was a major political controversy in the UK for most of the 19th century.
We need to stop reaching for the easiest data source just because we're desperate for a data source. There's a reason great research is hard - mostly because it requires stupendous effort (and funding!) to get reliable results.
I agree. Pretty much all internet sources are inherently biased due to response bias, so there's no fixing that without talking to such people face to face (which is a bit hard in my area).
But if you aggregate enough data you can at least start to see some sort of prevailing trends and sentiments. So I am open to better sources and some biased/compromised forums are still better that choosing to be trapped in an echo chamber. I have browsed around on other comments sections from news sources and the results unfortunately make Reddit look like a think-tank.
Sure, the average American who identifies as conservative just shows up every 4 years and hits the R without giving it much though. Thinking about them doesn't really give us much either.
I think /r/conservative tells us a lot, even if it's not representative of the constituency. The President is driven by memes and is extremely online. The "vibes" in /r/conservative (and on X, The Everything App) are extremely relevant, because these are the audiences Trump plays to.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a forum that's accessible and with lots of conservatives. You have some on X and you have YouTube channels. Both are harder to engage with.
If you charge Canada a 25% tariff then products sold in the U.S. and shipped from Canada should cost U.S. consumers about 25% more. That, in turn, makes U.S. products look more attractive. A U.S. business pays taxes at the federal and state levels. A U.S. business also hires U.S. employees, who pay taxes as well and spend into the economy.
I’m sure I’m way over simplifying this, to the point of stupidity, but tariffs raise prices on foreign goods to encourage the sale and/or development of local goods, don’t they?
These markets produced actually competitive businesses that thrived and outcompeted the market leaders (US and European companies) in multiple industries. So if you keep tariffs forever you end up with Russia or some other backwater where people are forced to buy shitty goods because you have no access to external markets.
The computer market in Brazil, for instance, was like that. Most of what we had were pirated hardware, because there was never an effort to create a real industry in the country, they would just copy and paste whatever was available out there and "launch" in the local market, so even with years of tariffs and protectionism the country did not produce any player in the computer manufacturing market.
Also encouraging people to produce the stuff locally only works if they can rely on the stability of the market.
Plus there's an intrinsic advantage that exporters in lower wage zones have over the domestic market. US workers are paid more than Canadian, and certainly paid a hell of a lot more than Chinese ones. So whatever is made domestically is just intrinsically more expensive.
You can make an argument for protectionism and self-sufficiency on various basis. But you can't make a good argument for erratic and sudden and unreliable protectionism.
What about all the businesses that export products or the ones that rely on imports. Businesses go bankrupt, prices go up for everyone and less people have jobs.
From "Donald Trump’s tariffs will bring ‘nothing but pain’ to rural America, farmers say - " https://www.ft.com/content/ba4569d3-3c54-47d9-90af-125751434...
"Trump’s last trade war, with China in 2018...led to $27bn in losses for US agriculture, according to estimates by farming groups..farms received as much as $23bn in compensation from the federal government"
A study was done on washing machine prices during tariffs of the previous Trump administration. Rather than undercutting foreign goods on price, local manufacturing raised their prices to absorb extra profit. As a kicker, the price of dryers also went up even though they were not subject to tariffs.
The US and Canadian economies have become deeply intermingled over generations. Many materials cross the border multiple times on the way to becoming finished goods and will be subject to tariff each time. There will be 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects for a long time even if these tariffs go away quickly, not to mention the poisoning of the closest relationship between nations the world has ever seen.
My fellow Canadians are horrified and enraged at the tariffs that amount to economic warfare and the continuous violations of our sovereignty. I have never seen the whole country this united on anything before. Canadians are furious and every grocery store has American produce rotting on shelves. We will not forgive and forget quickly.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190611
For another source on this point quoted above- (and for people that prefer video explainers) the wall street journal covered how domestically produced washers/dryers went up in price after those tariffs: https://youtu.be/_-eHOSq3oqI?t=102
This is, to an extent, the problem, yes.
There are plenty of problems, but here's one very obvious one; your own industry almost certainly depends heavily on imports, particularly if you're a developed country. If you basically only have primary industry, then this sort of protectionism can _theoretically_ work and allow development of secondary industry (though in practice there aren't many examples of this), but for a developed country it really makes very little sense.
You're also assuming that local industry _will_ compete on price, versus just accepting the newly-set tariff-induced base price. That will happen in some cases, but not all; in particular for near-monopolistic industries (cars, a lot of heavy consumer goods like kitchen appliances), really, it makes a lot of sense for them to raise their prices under such circumstances.
Unless they raise prices to get better margins since their competition has higher prices now. This is exactly what happened with Trump 1.0 tariffs: foreign product prices went up and so did domestic ones.
> A U.S. business also hires U.S. employees, who pay taxes as well and spend into the economy.
It takes time to on-shore, and until that happens the public is paying higher prices, potentially for a few years. So you take the total higher prices, and divide by the number of jobs created, and you can get the price per job. For washing machines it was $800K/job:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w25767
There is an argument to be made that production capacity is strategic asset of course:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
People believe what they want to believe.
The only thing I can kind of think of is maybe some land or housing in Europe or New Zealand or somewhere kind of out of the way; perhaps something that you can rent out. Might not make you a ton of money, but it would hopefully hold its value over time?
The best time to have a plan is before you need it. If you wait until you need it, you’re too late.
(n=1, ymmv)
Also, did you go for a big bank (Santander BBVA etc) or smaller one?
Gracias!
https://old.reddit.com/r/GoingToSpain/ helped me, I hope it helps you. Safe travels, wishing you the best.
I was thinking out loud about this on a reddit thread, kind of going through my idea of different scenarios. "Maslow's hierarchy of GTFO".
As in... if you're in 1930ies Germany, you get out with whatever you can take, but you get out ASAP.
If you're in, say, Hungary... you don't really need to rush your exit. You might find the politics unpleasant, but you can leave whenever and take the time to take your stuff with you.
I guess my point is that most people aren't in imminent physical danger in Hungary right now and could just leave and that'd be fine for them and the regime.
That's a better situation to be in than "leave in 72 hours" for most people.
All these stupid sky-is-falling headlines that become forgotten in a couple days when it's on to the next outrage moment.
Like the whole Zelensky/Trump white house blow up is like sitting in on couples therapy. The deal is off! No, it's back on! It's tiresome.
Edit: I'm not pro Trump or trying to defend the fuckery. I'm just sick of Trump headlines every day. But pls, do continue the down votes.
"He's just trolling"
etc
On that much, we agree. Perhaps he should stop attempting to govern like the tragic parody of a business man he is and just be a normal fucking president then, with the added benefit of not being a worldwide embarrassment every.. what, 4 hours?
> All these stupid sky-is-falling headlines
I mean, what can be done here really? They're reporting on things Trump is doing. They can't not do that.
Now that I think about it, if he had told me about these things in advance, I could probably make a LOT of money. I mean sure, it's illegal, but we could always gut the SEC[1]!
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/doge-targets-sec-next-for-...
I remember seeing that on SNL in the 80s; it has always stuck with me.
For 1/3 of eligible voters, it's "I don't care about voting".
1) They can't vote, either because of local politicians meddling in their election process/with their polling places, being convicted of bullshit non-crimes, or simply being unable to get to a polling place. Shock of shocks, majority of political fuckery involved in taking away people's right to vote is brought about by conservatives. Even more shocking, the groups that tend to be disenfranchised trend progressive in their voting habits, wow, such a weird coincidence.
2) They have no desire to vote, because as much as I understand voting for the lesser of two evils (and doing it with regularity) that just isn't motivating, and neither is choosing which party you want to join that's going to leave you for dead the second the election is over. To be clear: this is not "both sides are bad." Both sides are bad, but one is just useless bad, and the other is actively tearing down the state to sow chaos that it can use to consolidate power and bring about a theocracy. And while both of those are bad, they are not even remotely comparable.
Nope, that's just more uninformed "both sides are the same" nonsense.
The Democrat and Republican voting record proves you wrong.
And one side is only "useless" because the other side are obstructionists, and that side can only obstruct because too many people with low IQs believed lies and voted against their best interests.
I mean, you can trace various seemingly random effects today to Reagan policies.
Essentially, yes those other comments are linked to politics. All things could be extrapolated to politics. That doesn't mean we should directly talk about the political aspects, otherwise it drowns out curious discussion
Over the past few months I doubt there have even been 10 discussions total with some non-circular, credible, arguments along with some coherent logic backing them…
There is nothing to discuss. What we are witnessing is, to be crass, an exercise of pure idiocy.
There’s not a widely agreed upon definition of intelligence last time I checked. So it seems impossible for “idiocy” to be any better defined.
There’s not even such an agreement that all human adults are even sentient in the first place, or what the critical threshold is.
That trump's narrative of what tariffs are is a lie and that these do not in fact help the economy. They can help, but not the way trump is using the tools.
>There’s not a widely agreed upon definition of intelligence last time I checked.
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s clearly possible for people to have ulterior goals and motives… so assessments based on outward usages, of anything, seem irrelevant to determining intelligence, or the lack of it.
I'm not interested in this tangent here that you keep trying to veer on. Point it many economists know this trade war is not good for the economy. The history of this is as recent as Trump 45.
I interpreated as such here:
>inevitably these posts devolve into politics
All I’m saying is that politics is as intertwined with technology news as much as economics or religion or pop culture or anything else, and imho should be considered as equally valid sidebar conversations as the others.
If we can’t talk about things that make people uncomfortable, sicko people will take control of those very things and we will all suffer down the road. Better to just bite the bullet and let it all hang out.
From my understanding, your argument is a variation of "many/all things are politics and therefore politics cannot be disentangled from the topic" which I've seen others mention before. Sure, you can find ways to connect things to certain policies and politicians and then talk about that solely. Yes, economics becomes politics and recent tariffs are certainly policy-related. That doesn't mean we must discuss the political aspects of it.
The problem becomes that jumping to politics is very polarizing, identity-driven, and quickly drowns out curious discussion. The OP made a political statement, which won him easy points to push his comment to the top since there are so many who share the mindset of OP's comment. Any discussion about things not directly related to politics was pushed down. The effect happens across threads so frequently that no other conversation is left but politics. Those who don't want to talk politics spend time elsewhere, creating a feedback loop.
PG has a great essay about this here: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I was approaching the topic with a smidge of nuance and perhaps that was not clear, and I’m sorry.
Identity is definitely an issue in modern political culture, but I don’t know if PG can solve it anymore than you and I can. I think people just need to recognize and appreciate conjunctive nuances in their own opinions. Politics is identity AND culture AND religion etc etc. that’s my contention anyways.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply yourself!
Like it’s not doing him any favors, I tend to feel it’s some kind of personality defect.
Though it did get him a lot of attention in the past, which substantially led to him becoming president.
Either he can’t turn it off, or the decade plus of increasingly internet centric media exposure among the general population just selected for a guy who had obvious populist but not too radical views and also makes ridiculous statements to get attention.
Greenland will not be taken by force. The reminder of a possibility of force may be used as leverage in the negotiation. The messaging is kind of whacky, but it would make sense to broadcast the threat widely to achieve credibility. Like “he’s so crazy he might just pull the trigger”.
In my experience, the ‘personality defect’ you are thinking of is what many folks would call ‘malignant narcissistic personality disorder’. He only wants Greenland because someone once told him he couldn’t have it, and it gets him attention every time he brings it up.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he has no actual idea what Greenland actually is like, and has never visited it. He might even be confused between Iceland and Greenland, if you asked him to point to Greenland on an unlabeled map.
Plenty of other people though would benefit from the strife created by him actually taking it, or from him being happy with them by actually getting it for him, so I expect there are active plans in motion right now to invade Greenland.
He’s telling everyone what he wants to do, no one is delivering real consequences to stop him, and he is in charge. Listen to what he’s saying.
Refusing to take him ‘seriously’ and actually act against him, is exactly what normalizes his actions when he later does the thing that seemed crazy a month or a year ago.
Look at what he was saying that seemed crazy and hyperbolic a year or two ago. Look at what he is doing now, and no one is stopping him.
I think, though, that the narcissism mechanism acts a bit differently than you say.
I think he sees himself as a great man, a man who can see further than others, a man who gets things done and above all a man who makes deals. I’m not saying his is any those things, he’s not, just that this is how he narcissistically sees himself.
Interestingly, I think this disordered thinking is probably what makes him not give any shits about what other people think. Like, from his perspective he’s going to do a thing that will be unpopular because people are myopic, but eventually his results will be too obvious to ignore. Picture a narcissistic software engineer, they do the same thing. He does this very clumsily, because he is not actually a great man in the way he sees himself, and he has never made any attempt to work on his personality shortcomings, because narcissism.
To be absolutely clear, this is what I think is occurring in his mind, I am not personally saying that he is a great man etc. His self perception as that is just what drives how he acts.
Anyway, he does want Greenland. Taking Greenland would make him a major historical figure, from the perspective of a man (himself) who developed his sense of historical significance from literal school history books, not from any deep thinking. Physics phds want to be the guy in the physics textbook. He wants to be the guy in the history textbook. Annexing Greenland would give him that.
However, he will not use physical force to achieve that. I would put big money on that prediction. It doesn’t fit with his m/o. He is bluffing about using physical force, in order to strong arm Denmark into a purchase deal. Because, you know, he sees himself as a master deal maker. Doing a deal on Greenland would be a massive win for that aspect of his persona, in terms of that self belief being supported in the narcissistic sense.
Using physical force on Greenland would be literally insane, and if you listen to the man talk for a long enough time, as I have, he has shown signs of being many, many things, but being literally insane is not one of them. Nothing he has done so far has surprised me (with the exception of the Gulf of America, he did catch me off guard with that one).
His supporters don’t really care about Greenland. I think from their perspective, Trump does some pretty goofy stuff, but if he’s the guy who will do something about 1) the Mexicans and 2) the trade policies that created the rust belt, then he’s their guy.
I guess the disconnect comes from the fact that for many people including myself, the perception has always been of the exact opposite.
I don’t think he is clinically insane, or incompetent in a court of law insane. Deep down he knows what the truth is, or he couldn’t do what he is doing. You can’t go in the opposite direction of something if part of you doesn’t know where it actually is.
NPD is a disorder, which isn’t the psychological definition of insanity either.
He just refuses to believe or acknowledge anything that doesn’t reinforce his world view, regularly preferring (and enforcing on others) his delusional world view instead, which has him as a strong man, excellent deal maker, etc.
He also goes out of his way to destroy anyone who disagrees with his delusional world view, to the point of committing what appears to be clear criminal acts to do so, and prefers coercive control over any sort of mutually beneficial bargaining.
It all fits.
Look at the consistent outcome for people who are around or under the control of malignant narcissists, and you’ll see why this is a big problem. He is going to end up destroying everything valuable or real in everything he has control over in his attempt to make it fit his world view, and destroy anyone he can who attempts to stop it.
If economic means don’t work, he has assassinated folks before, and while yes it doesn’t fit his MO to start wars directly - at some point it’s going to happen.
All it takes is for someone to stand up to him in the right circumstances.
If he can take Greenland, and sees no real consequences (he certainly didn’t get any for taking out the Iranian general, despite hundreds of service member injuries), even if it involves force - seriously, why wouldn’t he in your world view?
And do you think the cowards currently in power elsewhere are going to risk starting WW3 for a bunch of ice? Greenland only has 56k people in the whole country, and most of them are rural farmers who will never have to care what gov’t is actually running the country.
Oh, and here it is again today - he’s going to ‘make them rich’ [https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-people-greenland-we-will...].
That answer is why he’ll almost certainly end up ‘taking’ Greenland.
Personally, I figure a month or less.
Or wanting to create "camps" to hold immigrants, and then sending them to Guantanamo?
Things like threatening retaliations against perceived enemies?
Withdrawing support from Ukraine and groveling to Putin?
I'm pretty tired of people dismissing his crazy outbursts as something he just says because he's not just all talk, he (too) often does the crazy things.
First it was "Trump seems to habitually make hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements" to pretend it's all talk and not representative of actual policy.
And then a complete switch to supporting all of the policies which started as "hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements" on tariffs, immigration and Russian imperialism.
Also, it seems your worldview is straight out of a fairy tale from Fox News and/or Russian propaganda. Maybe reading some more diverse and less biased news sources would help you (AP News, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, Al Jazeera, Reuters, etc)
Hyperbolic and ridiculous statements include: annexing Greenland by force, annexing Canada at all, permanent significantly higher tariffs on Canada and Mexico
Actual goals: maybe annexing Greenland through pressure tactics, making Canada stop expecting special treatment (the whole annexation thing is just “if you want special treatment, you’re welcome to become a state, otherwise gtfo”), temporary tariffs as a pressure tactic on allies, permanent protectionist tariffs against China and places that launder Chinese goods, America stops interfering in extended family disputes internationally.
For the record I think Trump as a person is a clown and I wish we had serious people as politicians, but it is annoying to see everyone being hysterical all the time over the guy.
I am calling your worldview fairy tale because it moralizes political and international matters. Russia is not evil. America is not good. America is not evil. Russia is not good. These are massive oversimplifications, and it is worryingly reminiscent of war propaganda from old newspapers.
>DOGE says it's saved $105 billion, though it's backtracked on some of its earlier claims
It later came out that the DOGE numbers are innacurate. Even if they were accurate, the US budget is 7 Trillion. The tax cuts that Trump is proposing is much more than all of the cuts.
doge has only been at work for 45 days, give it time. it's starting to look into military and medicare already.
The minute you cut military spending - again you can’t do it without Congress - Republicans are going to grow a spine.
Do you remember the FoxConn investment that never happened?
https://www.reuters.com/business/foxconn-sharply-scales-back...
cut it anyway then deal with the 'consequences' in court. obviously.
If they cut Medicare reimbursements or force senior citizens to pay more, it will have the same affect.
Modifying health care benefits that people already have has hurt Democrats in 2010 with the ACA and Republicans in 2018 trying to repeal it.
Yes, he's going to do precisely that. Musk will identify that some segment of the recipients is "fraud", or identify some employees who play a critical role in the processing pipeline as "waste". Then when the first senior citizens stop getting their checks, he'll call the reporters who talk about it liars or blame the Social Security Administration for "malicious compliance".
I don't necessarily expect you to believe me, even though he's already run this playbook in multiple other agencies. I'm just some guy on the Internet. But when you read the headlines in a couple months about missed Social Security payments, I hope you'll remember this comment, and adjust accordingly for your future predictions about what the administration wouldn't dare touch.
I've been highly disappointed everytime I said this year "there's no was X". I heard Medicaid was the same but look what's happening as we speak.
He'll break something, bad. Maybe then people will wake up. He's already starting the astroturfing over "dead people collecting social security" because the programmers don't understand the code they are reading. That's how it starts, eroding trust in the system.
Economic migrants stop appearing when the future of the economy starts looking bleak. You can also make housing affordable by encouraging murders on the street.
Or are Wall Street actors gaming the volatility for further profit?
Or both?
Just learned from Twitter tariffs will be rolled back in a day or two.
Too soon?
As for the rest of the population, it's the usual FAFO, not much to do.
If I was directing investment at a large business, onshoring manufacturing would be a no brainer in many businesses. Mexico might be the happy medium, but I’d really push for US manufacturing facilities with high automation levels to hedge against labor cost.
No, I picked it because of hardware too. You can't just say "your sandwich was made in america because the bread was made here". I didn't order bread, I ordered a whole sandwich.
And honestly, the sentiment of the software being American made is also more suspect by the day.
Creating startups will be easier as more Americans will be looking for work, leading to depressed salaries.
You cannot go into a large org and understand what is and is not working in a few weeks. DOGE has been sloppy and largely more political theater this far
https://apnews.com/article/tariffs-cars-automakers-trump-can...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/04/business/econ...
In many cases, the U.S. no longer has manufacturing capacity in certain markets so the most likely outcome is simply that prices go up or manufacturing shifts to other countries like Vietnam, especially in an uncertain economic climate where companies aren’t jumping to take on debt chasing demand which could disappear at any time.
One other area where we don’t have alternatives: Mexican agriculture - their growing season is longer and that means American consumers either aren’t getting things out of season or are paying more for things like greenhouse crops.
I'm not necessarily against tariffs, but I think it's idiotic to think that raising the price is going to somehow lower grocery prices.
Unless, of course, the US has some sort of monopoly on an export that others have no choice but to take. I dont think the US has such a resource.
These don't strike you as themes they're interested in? They're kneecapping or eliminating regulators and driving up unemployment. Their deportation drives, it's true, are a bit contradictory here, but those have other motivations.
I do think they want to create more manufacturing jobs, which in general are a better quality than service ones however.
manufacturing jobs outsourced to low cost countries begs to differ.
Now of course, you'd argue that those are the bad ones, and the good ones are what you'd want to keep (like semiconductor manufacturing).
I suppose you have in mind jobs like home health aides. But 1) we really do need a lot of them with an aging population 2) I’m not sure their lives would be improved by working in a textile mill instead.
It'd be one thing if we were combining tariffs with a UBI - that can balance out most of the regressive effects of it, but we're not doing that.
Do you see a case for tariffs otherwise?
You use tariffs to equalize actual costs plus a little (environmental/climate rules, labor costs, regulatory environment, human rights, etc) between the US and a foreign country. It doesn't have to be a huge amount of increase either, 5-12% - and probably wouldn't apply to most developed countries, because it is based on that matrix of total cost of doing business.
As far as rationale here - I personally want to onshore as much production as I can - but you can't start with finished goods necessarily, you often have to start with the base supportive industries needed - but even I acknowledge that may not be practical for everything.
But, to do what I want to do is a decades long process and must be done strategically and carefully - blanket tariffs dont do that, and are just a blowtorch to the delicate interconnections of a modern economy. Like targeting agricultural goods is absurd, for example - and will just raise prices for no tangible good.
What's the rationale for this? Like if you're already close to full employment, this isn't even zero-sum, you're throwing away your comparative advantage and spending part of your economy on production rather than higher-value services.
I'm willing to spend part of my country's wealth to counteract, say, other countries' lack of environmental protections, but if you're spending that wealth on counteracting lower offshore labour costs... in effect, the net impact is that you're just reducing the value of your own labour to match the offshore labour. (ergo, tariffs are a real clunky way to support local labour that isn't competitive with offshore labour costs... you could achieve the same ends more efficiently via income taxes and UBI.)
Like walmart is the largest private employer in the US, the working conditions, pay and benefits one gets from working at walmart isnt comparable to what we used to give what was the largest private employer 50 years ago (which was AT&T) - nor can the margins that walmart generates support those kinds of generous pay and benefits either.
This story is repeated a 100 times over thruout the US - while yes we have full employment, its in service jobs (retail, food service, hospitality) and not in manufacturing or other high paying jobs.
The second thing I'm trying to deal with, for lack of a more polite way (without lapsing too far into euphemism) to put it is "jobs for stupid people" (edit, in hindsight the best way to put this is "good jobs for everyone") - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for in terms of wages and benefits is working on a production line in a factory, while you and I (presumably) work in some sort of information job - thats just not an option for a significant portion of the population, and until we solve that we're going to keep having an issue with a K-shaped economy.
If you move Walmart employees to building widgets at a somewhat higher wage and that shrinks your economy, you'd have better overall results if you just raised taxes and gave the money to Walmart employees directly.
Also flatly, people cannot pay their rent, or eat GDP, its possible to have lower GDP growth and still be more prosperous country, most of the GDP loss will be to upper income earners.
Right, but then you’re working with a smaller pie than if you just skipped tariffs, taxed the upper income earners, and redistributed that.
And tariffs are particularly regressive - mostly resulting in higher costs for your low income earners, since tariffed goods are a relatively higher part of their expenses than they are for the wealthy.
Tariffs are an economically inefficient way to get a bigger pie slice for the median earner.
I'm a big fan of UBI - love it, make all my librarian bits very happy! - but I also acknowledge the political reality of it.
I also do see the value in work, people derive significant mental health benefits from meaningful work too, that shouldn't be discounted.
If consumer spending was dropping as prices were going up, then sure, greed. But prices were rising and consumers were relentless. Which is totally logical. Even more logical when the "spending class" was getting massive raises/offers and rock bottom credit.
If you want that, you need deflation. And I'm not sure at this point if that's a better move than what's going on now.
I mean, depends on the industry, but for instance take Target. Its profit margin is 3-4%, and that was in 2024, which was, really, pretty good times, all things considered. It doesn't have much room to absorb source price increases. Few industries dependent on imports do.
Price gouging COVID style is going to happen as well. The White House has screwed us.