Since last night, anyway. The people who make shipping work are frantically trying to keep up. One of the biggest customs brokers posts updates twice a day on weekdays. Last update 4 PM Friday, so they haven't caught the biggest reversal. If tariff rates change while in transit, the bond paid before the item was shipped may now be insufficient. So the container goes into storage (where?) until Customs and Border Protection gets paid. Some recipients don't have the cash to pay. Low-end resellers who order on Alibaba and sell on Amazon, for example.
Port operators hate this. Unwanted containers clog up the portside sorting and storage systems. Eventually the containers are either sent back or auctioned off by CBP, like this stuff.[1]
Some shippers outside the US have stopped shipping to the US until this settles. This includes all the major laptop makers - Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc.[2] Nobody wants to be caught with a container in transit, a big customs bill due on receipt, and storage charges. That will recover once the rates are stable for a few weeks. Probably.
Customs and Border Protection is trying to keep up. Sometimes you have to pay more because Trump raised tariffs. Sometimes you can get a credit back because Trump dropped tariffs. Those are all exception transactions, with extra paperwork and delays.
Where's the Flexport guy from YC? He should be able to explain all this.
Consumer version: expect to see some empty shelves, rejected orders, and higher prices for the next few weeks.
I love that I can buy a pallet of miscellaneous medical supplies, and also that someone who specifically wanted them but now can't pay for them has to go without.
The point is to inflict cost to create incentive for domestic production. Obviously the inconsistency on tariffs undermines this position but the pandemic made it very clear that there are domestic security implications for not having important products produced state side. Its not like the $500 cost of a saline bag has anything to do with its production cost. It seems credit liquidity and confidence in long term protectionism are needed for this scheme to work. This requires unity, which we lack.
> Domestic production is "desired" but this is not how to rebuild domestic production capability
No need to be handwavy. It can be part of a strategy. A painful and ultimately less effective way than another, sure. There will be a lot of factors at play beyond these controls. This administration lacks the ability to focus for very long in any competent sense. I'm not sure there is a strategy that will work, at this time.
I’ve ran the numbers in a bunch of ways and I don’t think they’re much if any more regressive than current income tax, given the rich avoid income past a point and spend a lot more on goods in the middle band, even percentage based. If you want a better progressive tax you’d need to focus on capital or spending on luxury goods and services.
As you say, the inconsistency on tariffs completely undermines this position, because it's widely known that tariffs which change radically from day to day don't incentivize domestic production (and indeed disincentivize all domestic investment). Doesn't this prove that creating incentives for domestic production is not the point, and either there's no clever scheme or the real goal of the scheme is something else?
Update: Possible pending reversal today (Sunday) on temporary exemption to emergency China tariff for computers and smartphones.[1][2] Trump and the Secretary of Commerce are saying different things on social media. Trump says he will look at the "whole electronic supply chain." The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are trying to keep up with the announcements.
Hang on are tarriffs not effective on date of purchase? I'm not American but it seems madness to apply them at any other time as then no one knows what will actually need paid if you've someone like Trump changing them frequently.
More typical policy would give 90 days notice so businesses could plan ahead. This policy was implemented far too fast with far too high of numbers and now it’s also changing rapidly. It doesn’t make sense.
> I'm not American but it seems madness to apply them at any other time
I’m American and I fully agree it’s madness. This administration clearly doesn’t understand or even care how businesses work. They just thought this was going to be a chest-thumping bargaining chip that caused other countries to come begging at the negotiation table.
It’s not working and now they’re panicking. They don’t want to look weak by backing down so we’re suffering.
Right. The normal way this works is that when you buy something to be imported into the US, you compute the tariffs and post a "customs bond" with CBP at the same time you pay for the product. When the shipment arrives in the US, the customs bond is used to pay the tariff, and the shipment is released by CBP. Shipping companies such as DHL integrate this into their systems so the end user doesn't have to deal with it directly. To the purchaser, it looks like tariffs are paid when the product is ordered. That's the happy path, taken by most imports.
But when tariffs change faster than it takes to get the shipment from source to destination, the bond won't be for the right amount. You then enter the wonderful world of "insufficient bonds". Here's "Understanding Insufficient Customs Bonds in Nine Easy Steps", which outlines the process and tries to sell you on a service that deals with the problem.[1]
Coming May 2: the end of "de miniumus" customs exemptions for small packages under $800 value. Goodbye, Shein, Ali Express, and dropshippers. Unless, of course, the rules are changed again.
Trump has been spouting the same shit about trade deficits and the US getting ripped off for several decades. I think he legitimately believes high tariffs are a good idea to "fix" trade deficits.
It’s not about trade deficits-it’s about becoming an independent manufacturer again. Whether or not anyone international buys what we make is secondary. Wealth is disproportionately allocated to those that benefit from globalization but the vast majority of Americans are hurting from it, even if a OLED TV costs nickels.
How do these tariffs help the vast majority of Americans? Maybe in a half a decade-decade time they can get a job in some factory as a tech??? Except there's so much uncertainty and so much tariffs even on raw material that it doesn't even make sense from that perspective.
Raising prices on everything is not going to help the majority of Americans. Taxing the rich might have but half the rationale for these tariffs is tax cuts for the rich.
That is a valid use case for tariffs. I'm not convinced the evidence supports that being the reasoning in this case though.
Development of manufacturing takes time. If that were truly the logic behind the tariffs, wouldn't it make more sense to slowly ramp up tariffs on particular categories of goods with a long notice period to allow time for industries to develop?
Also why all the talk about "punishing" other countries for "taking advantage" if the real goal is to bring manufacturing home?
The infrastructure for handling all the tarrif payments and rebates etc simply can't change as fast as these announcements and as a result there will be a whole mass of incorrect charges being applied or not applied that could takes years to sort through. The chaos is the point, or so it would seem.
I’m not seeing anyone discuss this here, so I figured I’d raise an important point: this style of tariffs is crushing for US manufacturing. While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing, a selective tariff with specific industry exceptions is absolute poison.
You might think, as the authors of this exemption did, “well then we will exempt computer parts.” Then people will simply import the parts. But if you manufacture those parts in the US, you are suddenly at a massive disadvantage. Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed. Oftentimes there is no reasonable domestic substitute. You will go out of business in favor of someone importing the parts, which now happens tariff-free under an exemption. That’s why, generally speaking, tariff exemptions are deadly to domestic manufacturing.
It's the opposite! A universal tariff is a tariff on all inputs that manufacturers need to be competitive. How will Ford or Tesla ever be competitive if all their inputs are 24% more expensive than Toyota's inputs?
Autarky doesn't work. Juche doesn't work. Comparative advantage works, both theoretically and in practice if we study economic history.
IMO your logic is all wrong. Comparative Advantage ist just applied "opportunity cost" of time. Humans and resources are unique, everyone has their theoretically "optimal" use of time in terms of economic output.
The invisible hand of the market will let you know what aspect of your output is most valuable for others.
The benefit of this invisible hand is that the "economy" as a whole does not need to know how good they are at producing everything. People just need to know if what they are producing now is more valuable than the next best alternative. Everything else will be sorted out with market forces.
In university lectures we were given the famous argument about olive oil from Greece and that it would never make sense to do our own olive oil because we both lack the natural resources (unique soil + sunshine) which allow olive trees to grow easily and we'd also have much better yields growing other things on the fields.
So to me, both opportunity cost and comparative advantage are really basic building blocks of economic understanding and I'm a bit dumbfounded that someone wouldn't understand these concepts.
It is good that you paid attention to economics 101 but we don't live in the 19th century anymore and economic theory has progressed a bit since Ricardo.
We don't have pure free market economies. Neither in China nor in the USA nor anywhere else. The see big monopolistic companies dominating most markets. We see an closer interlink between state and private corporations.
Even just with the currency manipulation that China engages in, things get screwed a lot. Or the special status the US has with the dollar. Real world is more complicated.
But even if we assume free markets, you misunderstood what the previous poster said. The problem with Ricardo's comparative advantages is that is assumes fixed advantages. It is like optimizing for a local optimum. You might be super inefficient in producing X because you have never done it but if you actually invested in learning how to produce X you might discover that you are really good at it and the comparative advantages would go in your favor.
I do still believe that trading with each others can lead to more net wealth in most cases and obviously full autarky is not realistic these days but like anything in economics, it shouldn't be taken as a dogma.
Absolutely agree. It's ridiculous that low wage labor is considered a "comparative advantage". It's an advantage to capital owners perhaps, but certainly not to workers. And like you said, advantages are not static.
In my opinion it's intrinsically valuable to have a diverse regional economy. Culture and economy are fundamentally inseparable, imagine a society where everyone is doing the same thing because of "comparative advantage" making them 10% more efficient than the other country... What poverty!
This aestheticization of factory jobs is something I've noticed to be driving the New Right's worldview. It's not dissimilar to and no less dangerous than the aesthetic fixation on the agrarian economy of Mao and Pol Pot.
Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.
The US has problems with housing affordability, with medical costs, and with service sector costs emerging from Baumol's cost disease, which are all things that will get worse with tariffs, ranging from higher construction costs, to higher pharmaceutical prices, to less service employees making the cost disease worse.
It's also untrue that comparative advantage only benefits capital. Consumers are hurt by higher prices and less job opportunities driving down demand on the labor market. This worldview of a zero sum contest between capital and labor is a populist fiction.
Manufacturing doesn’t have to equate to sweat shops. It’s hard to take your argument seriously when your judgement is undermined by such fallacy.
We have problems with housing affordability because asset values inflate inverse to the devaluation of the dollar. The dollar is deflating because a service economy is not as sustainable as a manufacturing economy. This is particularly pronounced when we all see the labor value of intelligent workers decreasing at a precipitous rate due to AI.
Sure, anyone not agreeing perfectly with the current system of global trade is part of the "new right"... Another way to look at it: globalisation weakens democratic control over the economy and undermines unions. Is that not a problem in your opinion?
That's a strawman. What I was doing was pointing out the appeal to the aesthetics of work and associated buzzwords ("capital"), noting the absence of any actual economy policy that will deliver tangible benefits to existing people. It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority, in the pursuit of a subjective notion of pure work. The giveaway is the attempted justification of an economic policy in service of a nebulous "cultural" impact.
> It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority
> Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.
Tech bros who are frustrated with their job fantasizing about doing "real work".
An entire generation has grown up without assembly lines so it is easy to mystify it.
People in Vietnam don't enjoy making Nikes but it is better than what came before: subsistence farming.
But the Vietnamese factory worker trying to send their kids to university too.
Perhaps this is the inevitable cycle of prosperity? We see this in so many facets now as generations progress - your comment reminds me of antivax social media people who haven't ever seen anyone more sick than a cold or tech bros thinking a trade job would be better since it might magically be "more rewarding" (I'm guilty of this!) with no regard for how much privilege is inherent in sitting at a desk all day and getting paid to think.
Like the stereotypical kid who grew up rich not understanding the value of hard work maybe the inevitable result of easy and safe living is a blind spot so big we're doomed to fall back down as a society and start over again and again.
Lots of people remember the 80s and 90s being better times with quality manufacturing employment without romanticizing the past. To this day multiples of the “information” sector are employed in US manufacturing.
We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries. If you have free trade and zero Republicans the same thing happens. If the jobs go away the union doesn’t matter. That’s why the unions consistently lobbied against NAFTA, the WTO, etc.
I’m actually not even sure what specific labor law changes you could blame that on. Clinton was running the show in the 90s, and I don’t recall any big union busting under Bush, whatever else might be said of him.
The alternative to comparative advantage is that there exist countries where it's economically optimal for them to produce every single possible good with finite resources taking into account the opportunity cost of producing one good over another. Or to put it another way, in a world where comparative advantage doesn't exist, the country in question must have the same economic outcome for any good they produce, and that seems ludicrously implausible to me.
> And surely in order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
Comparative advantage is an emergent property of trade that occurs naturally, it is the default state of being and can only be undermined by government policy.
You benefit from comparative advantage when you buy bread from the bakery instead of spending 2 hours a day baking your own bread.
Imagine how much poorer you'd be if the government put a large tax on you buying bread to force you to bake it yourself, in the name of self-sufficiency.
That's what's happening with these blanket tariffs, instead of targeting only critical defense manufacturing, Trump also wants t-shirt sweatshops to magically come back to the US despite only 4% unemployment. It's rank foolishness.
It's even simpler than that. Ecuador doesn't even need to be better than the US at growing bananas, they just need to be better at growing bananas than the US is at developing software relative to their banana growing abilities.
My favorite example is from an economics class quite a few years ago now. Michael Jordon is super efficient at making money playing basketball (told you it was a while ago). But he's also pretty good at mowing his lawn, since he's tall and athletic. But since he's way better at playing basketball, it makes sense for him to focus on basketball and paying some kid to mow his lawn, even though the kid is way less efficient at mowing lawns.
The US is way more advanced than Ecuador, and could presumably develop some hyper efficient banana greenhouse using genetic engineering and AI or whatever. But Ecuador is still pretty good at growing bananas and the US is much better at developing software, so buying bananas from Ecuador and putting the AI greenhouse resources into developing software instead makes way more sense.
Comparative advantage makes sense, with a national security overlay. That’s where I’ve landed anyway, and is a very simple explanation for all the more complex perspectives out there.
> In order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
Maybe I'm not getting what you're saying, but I don't think so. The point of comparative advantage is that even if country A is better at making guns and butter than B, A is better off only making guns or butter and trading to B for the other.
A key assumption being: "Factors of production are fully employed in both the countries. ... The theory assumes full employment. However, every economy has an existence of underemployment."
Another key assumption is "The labor cost determines the price of the two commodities. ... The theory only considers labor costs and neglects all non-labor costs involved in the production of the commodities."
One assumption not listed there is an implicit assumption as in much of economics of infinite demand for anything and no law of diminishing-to-negative returns when considering the environmental and psychological costs of consumption.
So, if you have unemployment in the producer country like China (meaning, there is no reason for them to limit their production) along with a significant capital investment in production infrastructure (like in the Shenzhen region for electronics), and you have limited demand in the consumer country like the USA (meaning, only so much can be sold there at any specific time), then the country which can produce stuff more cheaply will just flood the market of the other country for all goods in question -- even if the consumer country could in theory produce one of the goods at higher costs (or lower quality). Of course, there may eventually be macroeconomic issues like balance of trade issues and countries unable to pay for more goods (which the USA has avoided to date because the US dollar is the refactor global currency backed by the USA's global policing role for decades as a defacto empire). But even if labor in the consumer country like the USA is free, given realistically a lot of cost related to equipment and energy (and increasingly AI and robotics) and more nebulous things like supply chain integration and a can-do attitude, the consumer country may not be able to compete on price and quality of finished products from the more materially productive economy.
Tangential, but "Humans Need Not Apply" makes a good argument when they suggest that horses are essentially obsolete in modern industry (in the same way people may be soon). It's not that you sometimes use horses to any great degree in modern manufacturing (whereas before they pulled carts and turned machines) -- it is that for almost any industrial task horses are more trouble than they are worth now in terms of cost and reliability compared to electric motors or diesel engines and so on.
An economic theory like "Comparative Advantage" that entirely emphasizes labor costs is increasingly obsolete if human labor is less and less a major factor of production. The theory assumes a country will always have people doing something productive, but that is like saying we should bring horses back into factories when robots are generally more reliable. If people are not skillful with access to tools and capital and don't have a can-do attitude, then they will just suffer economically (unless protected somehow) No doubt there are special cases where horses are still useful in production or transport like how mules were used recently to get supplies into hurricane damaged North Carolina, but they are rare as long as the modern industrial system and its surrounding infrastructure functions well. Similarly, there may still be human roles in production, but they will continue to diminish. In 2010, I put together some options for dealing with this situation, available here:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
> While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing
Not really. Efficient manufacturing requires access to a lot of different inputs from all over, from the machines that make things to the raw materials.
Putting tariffs on everything only incentivizes companies to move to a location where they can freely buy what they need and manufacture it for the world.
The US is not the only consumer of most manufactured goods. Making them in a country with cheap labor and no extra import tariffs makes more sense than in a country where everything is under tariffs
Universal import taxes on everything make no sense.
If you want to protect strategic production, you apply selective tariffs to support that local production while ensuring it can ramp up and import what it needs until it becomes self-sufficient.
Most countries, the US included, have used selective tariffs for this purpose. Applying a blanket tax on every type of import just increases inflation, as you can't possibly manufacture everything locally. For many products—especially cheap ones that were outsourced to China—there's no way to produce them cheaply enough for your internal market to absorb all production.
And you can't export them either, because their higher production cost makes them uncompetitive compared to cheaper alternatives from low-cost countries.
The secondary effects of import taxes are wide-ranging: they help when applied selectively and carefully; they don’t when applied capriciously and without thought.
The mere fact that high taxes were slapped on phone imports so "phones could be made in the US," only to backtrack mere days later, demonstrates that this is either the work of an insanely bright economist nobody understands, the scheme of a grifter aiming to benefit personally, or the capriciousness of a borderline dementia patient who cannot act rationally.
Really the way to do it, AFAIK (say, per How Asia Works), is to apply selective subsidies, not tariffs, and to subject the subsidized industries to substantial export discipline. That's what gets you South Korean world-beaters. Autarkic tariffs just get you Indian industry, where consumers have learned that the few goods marked "export quality" are superior.
And, I don't want to be partisan about this stuff, but, that's basically what "Bidenonics" was trying to do, in a small way: Subsidize a few industries like semiconductors and batteries and solar panels, that were deemed strategically important.
Whether the US was ever going to be as serious as South Korea or Japan about this remained to be seen. Frequently the subsidies seem to be handed out and then nothing happens (e.g., "Gigafactory" in Buffalo, NY).
Universal tariffs with no exception don't even incentivize domestic manufacturing when it cuts local manufacturers off from an outside market that's bigger than the domestic one.
My company manufactures equipment in North America, with the most expensive input coming domestically from Ohio. Guess what though? Retaliatory tariffs from the global community means that the most rational course of action is now to move that manufacturing *out of the US* so that we can sell to the global market without penalty.
Sorry Ohio, but Mexico is currently *not* engaged in a trade war with Canada and half the EU so the rational decision for a company who wants to sell in those markets is to divest from the US.
That is generally not possible. All EU countries share a common trade policy. Another country can either be in a trade war with the entire EU or with none of the EU.
According to the Wikipedia [0], The EU member states delegate authority to the European Commission to negotiate their external trade relations.
Factories, tooling, machinery, etc. must be amortized over a market and production run. If you're making toilet paper, the cost is relatively low and the market is huge. The TP you make today will still be good TP in a decade. No one toilet paper factory can serve the world, so you'll need many of them in many markets. The inputs can be found within the U.S.. Why not build one in the U.S.?
A factory that produces a specific model of phone is only going to be able to run for a few years before it needs to retool for a newer model. That means a huge investment goes into such a factory on a continual basis. If one factory can serve the entire world demand for that model, why build two?
If you're going to build just one factory, are you going to build it in a market that's walled off behind trade barriers, both for outputs and inputs? Only if that market is significantly bigger than the rest of the world combined. If the rest of the world is bigger, than you build outside the trade barriers and people inside of them will just have to pay more.
Tariff's might bring low-end, high-volume manufacturing back to the U.S.. Chip fabs, phone factories, or anything so high-end/low-volume that it must be amortized over a global market is not going to return to the U.S. because of tariff's. An administration that changes their minds every few hours only makes matters worse. Whether Trump has recognized this and is conceding defeat or he's bowing to pressure from companies like Apple is immaterial. That kind of factory is not coming to the U.S. anytime soon.
I agree with your general point, but I just read the book "Your life is manufactured" by Tim Minshall, in which he describes the production of toilet paper in detail and it's a surprising global industry. Wood pulp with the correct density comes from a few specific places on the globe (Scandinavia and South America apparently).
Those are big markets, but there are a lot of suitable softwoods for pulp production, farmed around the globe. Ideally, you want to use ones with good natural ratios of lignin to cellulose and hemicellulose (that's just to say, the constituents of biomass) to minimize processing and chemistry costs.
Even universal tariffs with no exceptions is a problem.
Many things cross US/Canada/Mexico border in the process being manufactured. And tariffs will stack up.
Many advanced products (tech/chip, etc) are not entirely made in any single place. Some stuff is imported, and some is exported again, and tariffing the world, will also make the world tariff you.
I think this is all around bad. Best case scenario the US has elected a president who decided to burn all political capital, alliances and credibility in search of a slightly better deal.
Doing this sort maximum pressure economic extortion style policies, *might* getter you a slightly better deal. But at what cost?
Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Trump may get a win in the headlines, because everyone thinks he'll go away if he get a win.
> Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Why would anyone buy US military equipment that's either "10%" handicapped on purpose, or remotely disabled whenever the US changes its feelings about the users of said military equipment?
He's already gotten what he wanted from it and bragged about it: so many leaders of different countries calling up and kissing his ass. He's certainly not going to give any of them what they wanted, and now they all have the taste of his ass in their mouths. At least they have something in common with Elon Musk, now.
There's many sayings about diplomacy, though I understand the reality is much more mundane.
One that comes to mind is "a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip" — like all good quotes, attributed to a wide variety of famous people.
Competent governments send arse kissers to those who need pampering, and send blunt to those who need to see bluntness. But (in a competent government) these things are uncorrelated with the actual negotiation position — "speak softly and carry a big stick" etc.
Trump being bellicose to everyone at the same time is a sign of his own incompetence.
Worth looking at the actual deals. The initial talks with Canada and Mexico resulted in reported "deals" and "wins" that were actually just confirmations that the deals negotiated under previous administration are in fact happening.
I belief his story about dozens of countries calling him about as much as his story of him taking a cognitive test and having every single answer correct. Or his doctors statement that said that there has never been a healthier president than Trump.
Yeah, this is a man who literally says he has the greatest memory in human history but then constantly says he can't remember stuff a day or two later or coincidentally was living under a rock and has no idea what's going on in his cabinet.
> Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed.
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local 24/7 news feed for more than eight years, so there’s no point in acting surprised about it. You’ve had plenty of time to lodge any bribe worth the president's time and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Americans, President Trump did a crypto scam on his supporters before being sworn in, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout.
The speed with which we went from “out-of-context recording of a ‘yeaaaaaah!’ can end your presidential campaign” to “suggesting your supporters shoot your opponent if she wins doesn’t mean you can’t be president… twice” was incredibly quick.
I honestly have a hard time coping with it. No joke. It's revolting, how that wasn't the end. Right after the Hawk Tuah girl was burnt at the stakes for the same stunt, too.
It's not even that it is pure evil and predatory, it's the aesthetics of it... It tainted civilization, at the very least America! It's so, so pathetic and cringe. Unbearably distasteful and undignified. Too much cringe.
The only thing topping this, was the president of the United States selling cars in front of the white house, a few weeks later. I can't.
Man, imagine an alien patrol passing that Tesla (a billionaire's fucking car in space as a beacon of Earth life's legacy, honestly makes wanna puke) and then learning about the state of things here. I feel embarrassed to the core living in this period of time. I'd rather shit my pants on live TV.
I crave the cleansing heat and certainty of thermonuclear warheads. Shoot these fucker with a bullet of frozen sewage and then sterilize this place for we all sinned collectively. Send some tardigrades to Mars and hope for something better, but turn off the lights on Earth.
> It tainted civilization, at the very least America!
I regret to inform you that america is not and has never been a unique snowflake. An important player in the world, sure, but one that has long been obsessed with the notion that it is special in some way, and it's just not true.
Every country is at risk of going batshit crazy, and it's always been disturbing how americans seem the truly believe they are immune, because when that belief gets challenged…
FYI: I am not American. I feel Fremdscham, but the transitive relation is implied in my comment. Politicians in my country are just as corrupt (e.g. Friedrich Merz doing marketing and legislative favors for McDonalds), but for the plurality of our political system, they still have to act decent to some degree. For now.
There is another quality to what's happening in America right now. I can only explain the things Trump did as sadistic demonstrations of power. I bet he actually gets hard knowing half the country will literally eat his shit, that he actually can do anything he wants. It's a theme, it's the grab 'em by the pussy mentality. I mean, let's go back: After winning the election, he showed his gratitude by humiliating (this is important) and exploiting his most loyal followers for everyone to see - and they took it, they danced, they remained at his side, they doubled down.
But whatever enabled his cult, this cancer is growing everywhere. You can't get through to significant portions of the population. Same in Germany. They've become immune to arguments, every opposition is anticipated by their conspiracies. They vote against their economic and social interests, they have detached from common ground. It's not protest, it's all got a fucked up life of its own. Brain worms, social contagion.
I think, if we want to survive this, short-lived social media has to go, and we have to take care of the boomer issue.
I want to be careful about how I frame this, because I don't want to make it sound like Trump or AfD don't have agency and can't be held responsible for their own actions. But if you're curious what it is that enabled both cults, the answer is pretty clear: there's significant popular demand for harsh immigration restrictions, and in much of the West only crazy far-right parties are willing to listen to it. The Danish political establishment successfully defused the far right by moderating heavily on immigration, and I don't think it's too late for other countries to accomplish the same.
Can't speak for the US, but in Germany immigration is not the problem they make it out to be, but one that is propped up as a scapegoat. You presume the people's demand here are based in reasonable distress, when really it's not. Or rather it's not attributed correctly. Stats don't support it, proposed solutions are not able to resolve it. In particular the AfD has no actual answers for anything. Their "politics" is arbitrary outrage and evidently they get sponsored by Russia, favored by platform owners and spin doctors like Musk. German intelligence agencies are investigating Russia's involvement in recent attacks in Germany. The AfD's role is destabilization and it's working.
The topic is not driven by actual exposure. This is clearly evident when you look at voting patterns. In places where you are the most likely to have contact with immigrants right-wing populists are the least successful and vice versa. Compare recent car attacks by islamist and neonazi motivated perpetrators. There is a massive distortion in media coverage.
I absolutely do not accept throwing anyone under the bus just to make the mob happy. Not immigrants, not women, not trans people. Sorry, but it's fucking degenerated and vile to suggest this as acceptable sacrifice. Every human deserves basic rights, due process and life in dignity. Look what they are cheering for in the US at the moment. Disinformation fueled hatred is not something to make compromises with as a civilized person.
The actual, but occult distress all people feel comes from economic erosion and ideological decay. Don't get me wrong, immigration isn't all bueno, but it's blown out of proportion. Rent, financial security, food, prosperity and self-efficacy. No politician is addressing that. We are by far not out of options to address the real issues of the country.
I do advocate for addressing those, and I don't support throwing anyone under the bus. That's why I support moderating on immigration!
I agree with you that the anti-immigration movement doesn't make much sense to me, and I'm pretty confident that restricting immigration won't have the benefits its proponents claim. But the people who support it are genuine, as far as I can tell, and aren't going to just evaporate if rent decreases 10%. You can restrict immigration in a humane and respectful way, or you can follow the US and wait for xenophobic politicians to restrict immigration in an inhumane and disrespectful way; I don't think there's a third option.
> You can restrict immigration in a humane and respectful way
But this won't change anything, if their demand is not reasonable, or founded in truth to begin with. As I said, the AfD is most popular where there are no migrants at all. Lots of them feel their narrative validated when they see a brown person existing, see "Turkish" people living here for generations. The goalpost will always shift. You will never satisfy them, if their demands aren't anchored in reality. Again, this isn't fueled by exposure, but guided media outrage. There is a lot of conspiracy narratives mixed in as well. Talk to them, poke deeper than the concern trolling surface. You will encounter actual loony talk quite soon.
Apart from that, the biggest problems with these ideas are factors outside of Germany's control. E.g. if the origin country won't accept those immigrants back, you can't just air drop them there. Constitution, European law, human rights, Schengen... it's not really possible/worth it to do anything significant. It's all ever going to be for show.
On the contrary, demands that aren't founded in reality are often easier to satisfy, because pure rhetoric can shift the narrative much more easily than it can shift reality. Going back to Denmark again, if you pulled out charts and tried to track the objective quantity of immigration, you'd have a hard time identifying any policy shift. But as you say, immigration restrictionists were never looking at these charts in the first place. What matters politically is that the center-left PM goes around talking about how mass migration can be dangerous and the preservation of Danish culture is valuable.
Keep your sympathies, it's a narrow-minded view to assume all Americans wanted this. We didn't. And it's not like we had a real, ethical choice. The runner-up was going to be business as usual with foreign politics, enabling genocides and engaging in proxy wars and regime changes for the control of energy and resources. Many people did not believe either candidate was legitimate or shouldn't be in prison.
I caught the initial reference, it's one of my favorite books, it just sounded less and less sarcastic by the end of it, to me it came off as "The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 for all to see months before you voted in the guy who put it into action". I apologize for assuming incorrectly.
People don't want incentivization of American domestic manufacturing. That's where the fundamental disagreement is, after all. People don't have confidence in American products built on US soil by upper middle class Americans. It's going to take long to (re?)build trust to reverse that.
That’s ridiculous, there is plenty of confidence in US manufactured goods, the problem is that US manufacturers have impossible economics for anything that isn’t boutique or super high margin.
Need an impedance controlled 16 layer board for your fancy new military radar? No problem.
Need a basic 2 layer PCB for mass manufacture? No one in the US will make it at the price you need to be competitive.
"No problem"? It's not just that the prices are high; I can hardly get those guys to even answer the phone and give me a quote. I can get that board from China before I've gotten through to a local sales rep. Then when they do finally check their messages they want to fly out, meet me at my office, size up my operation and my budget, have a nice chat over dinner, and spend a few weeks pestering me with phone calls without ever getting down to business.
When the only market you ever had was high touch high cost low volume production then that is your default business model.
The biggest issue is that Trump is pushing tariffs without first ramping up local manufacturing, the type of manufacturing you are looking for isn't _currently_ being catered for in the US. It may in the future depending on how things pan out, the bet Trump is making is that it can happen, time will tell whether he is true.
I don't think it will generate jobs for local US manufacturing since the only way to compete with low cost of labour markets is to automate more than the low cost of labour country.
Business is reasonably good at filling whatever niche is willing to pay. So far the evidence is that Trump is willing to over commit and then backtrack. Having a negative outlook doesn't help anyone, think positive about your country and shift with the times.
> think positive about your country and shift with the times
You know I tried to think positively about the United States; but darned if they don't keep doing negative things. Like appointing grossly incompetent people to head Federal departments. Like unlawfully and arbitrarily abducting people from the streets. Like extorting universities - ideally centres of free thought - over non-complying ideological positions. Like appearing to wreck the economy; but in ways that might just advantage himself and others in his circle. And the list goes on...
Some of us aren't "shifting with the times" because of an ethical line we won't cross. I grew up in the United States in the 1960's and had the constant drumbeat of "We're the world's melting pot," "We're the most benevolent spreader of democracy," "We're practically the only free country on the planet," "We are a country of laws." beat into us in public school. So it's a little jarring to see the wholesale abandonment of these values at the hands of someone who can barely string together a cogent sentence of more than, say, 4-5 non-repeating words and for whom "negotiating" means "win/lose", instead of "how can we meet our needs _and_ your needs, while creating more value in the process?"
Personally, I tried having a positive outlook; but saw this coming and left the U.S. just ahead of Trump 1.0.
This rant aside, it's incredibly wishful thinking to assume that one can undo in weeks or months, the complex web of international trade that has developed over decades because of the much-vaunted invisible hand of the market.
>“The Witch Hunt continues, and after 6 years and millions of pages of documents, they’ve got nothing. If I had what Hunter and Joe had, it would be the Electric Chair. Our Country is Rigged, Crooked, and Evil — We must bring it back, and FAST. Next stop, Communism!”
So do you have any shred of evidence he's backtracking on all the racism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and cruelty and corruption he overcommitted on?
And it's not just (or even mostly) costs. Nowhere in the world has supply chains anything like the Pearl River Delta. Need the most esoteric component imaginable? There's probably a factory down the road that can supply it, MOQ 1 or millions. It probably has a booth or distributor in Huaqiangbei where you can grab a few hundred today. The US has nothing to compare. US manufacturers can't build those sort of domestic supply chains at any cost.
I'm not sure I believe that, considering Schiit manages to do it for virtually every component of their product line other than wall warts. Are they two layer boards? Nah, I suspect they're 4 layer...but the prices aren't such that you can't survive on domestic manufacture. The prices are just higher than overseas - meaning that your profits are slightly lower, a situation current markets are not willing to accept.
Every time I've looked at local manufacturing, whether machine shops or anything else, the prices are higher than Ali but not unreasonable.
For those who think this is ridiculous, this happens already on a regular basis with batteries to get around the regulations and fees around shipping them. Instead of getting the battery in the mail you’ll get a cheap flashlight in the mail with a battery inside it.
Sort of the inverse, but didn’t Ford import Turkish-built Transit Connect vans with full interiors, only to strip those out upon arrival in Baltimore, as a means of skirting the Chicken Tax?
Seems something like that. I googled it to see what chickens had to do with transits.
>The "Chicken Tax" is a 25% tariff on light trucks imported to the United States, established in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. This tariff was a retaliatory measure against European countries, including France and West Germany, which had imposed tariffs on U.S. chicken exports.
This whole business gets rather silly. Viva free trade.
Why is no one highlighting how this is repeating history 8 years ago? I don’t get it, there’s this magical reporting gap where all of this is new strategy but it’s the exact same strategy. Why don’t we acknowledge this instead of searching for some new angle?
> Why is no one highlighting how this is repeating history 8 years ago?
Because it’s not? The tariffs which are currently in effect or soon to go into effect are so far out of line with anything in modern history that there is no comparison.
The reason everyone is panicking is because people expected more of the same as 8 years ago but instead we got something massively worse, without a hint of cohesive strategy, and that has gone into effect rapidly and on the whims of one person who can’t even appear to get on the same page as his advisors.
Everyone knows there’s some element of bluffing going on, but that’s also the problem; This administration knows their bluffs would be transparent this time so they decided to go extra big to make a point. This becomes a problem for all of the people and companies whose business was suddenly upended by out of control tariffs with little time to prepare (compared to the smaller tariffs everyone was preparing for)
They’re banking on the damage either not being directly noticed by their voter base, or being able to convince their voter base that the damage is actually a good thing. I’m already seeing people applaud these actions as if they were narrowly targeted at cheap Chinese goods on Amazon or fast fashion, without realizing how much of the inputs to our economy go through one of the countries with tariffs ranging from 25-145%.
Some people are determined to adopt contrarian positions and act like they’re above it all, but the people who have to deal with the consequences of this stuff (myself included) are taking a lot of damage from these supposedly no big deal negotiations. It’s not being handled well. Even if they were to disappear tomorrow, a lot of damage has been done and they’re hoping people like you will find a way to rationalize it away as not a big deal
> They’re banking on the damage either not being directly noticed by their voter base, or being able to convince their voter base that the damage is actually a good thing.
Are we really still at the stage where we seriously think this is how people vote? Its not. You just need to energize enough people in your sufficiently big enough bubble to believe in a cause and make sure that the other side thinks "both sides are bad".
It's all quite cohesive once one stops the futile search for an underlying strategy that enriches america, and instead looks for evidence of a strategy that enriches Trump.
"These insects infected with cordyceps show no hint of a cohesive strategy for staying alive..."
Only ignorant close minded gullible people who refused to listen to all the experts and intelligent people paying attention, who have all now been totally vindicated, after warning about it at the top of their lungs, and who are now fully entitled to say "I TOLD YOU SO".
Expert Comment: What might President Trump’s second term mean for the world?
Why the worst president ever will be even worse in a second term:
I suppose some observers might think Donald Trump’s first term represented rock bottom. My advice for those thinking along those lines: Just wait:
Trump presidency could damage economy if he weakens democracy, experts say:
Trump has threatened to prosecute political rivals, including Kamala Harris:
Trump’s economic plans would worsen inflation, experts say:
They fear that Trump's proposals would “reignite’’ inflation, which has plummeted since peaking at 9.1% in 2022 and is nearly back to the Fed’s 2% target:
Thank you it seems everyone has already forgotten project 2025.
Look I don't want to be too harsh on Americans nobody took the Nazis seriously when they had already written a book about how they saw the world...
But none of this is shocking.
There is an ideology behind what Trump is doing and he never hid it from the world.
As an American please be careful blaming all of us for this. Less than 1 in 4 Americans voted for Trump. It doesn’t mean you need to buy an F-150 but please separate the concept of the American people from the GOP voter base. The complexities of our electoral system and our unique racist history made this very hard to avoid. Please don’t assume Americans in general wanted this or are ok with it.
> nobody took the Nazis seriously when they had already written a book about how they saw the world.
This is completely false. A cursory internet search will find many examples. Churchill was a vocal opponent of the Nazis in the 1930s.
> But none of this is shocking.
Right. Nobody who was paying attention is shocked. This includes many Americans.
Lol there was no 'cohesive strategy' 8 years ago, what the heck you wtite about. You suffer some memory loss?
He was chaotic, he was doing ego polishing reality show from day 1. The only difference was a 'barrier of sanity' that people around him formed, dampening his bipolar outbursts into more reasonable actions (or lack of thereof, often without his knowledge). He eventually fired all of them, forgot that part?
Now he has just pure yes men around him, licking his ass and patiently waiting for him to die or get killed (vance has a look and behavior of patient calculating sociopath for example, he may be much worse if given chance)
I think you misunderstood my comment as being pro-Trump in some way, but it absolutely was not. I was explaining why this round of tariffs is not a repeat of 8 years ago, it’s much worse. That’s it.
> what the heck you wtite about. You suffer some memory loss?
> licking his ass and patiently waiting for him to die or
I can see why political threads on HN are flagged away so aggressively. It’s hard to want to even try to have a conversation when this is the level of discourse getting upvoted.
“Trump’s first term would probably have seen a version of this week’s debacle if he had chosen different advisers, and if he had not later been knocked off course by Covid.
For the first two years of his first term, in 2017-18, his instincts were largely kept in check by his economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs, who dampened Trump’s determination to use tariffs to end trade deficits.“
The tariffs from 8 years ago were a seemingly rational policy and were largely upheld by the Biden administration.
These tariffs look designed to rapidly eject the US from the global economic order and hand over the reins to China. Though saying they were "designed" at all seems extravagantly generous.
Another reason why tariffs are upheld is that its very hard to remove them. The moment you add them, you now creates industries and jobs that assume those tariffs existed.
Which is to say, if this ridiculous tariffs goes on for long enough, its going to be there forever. So you guys are, ehem, fucked.
No they weren't. They were changed to 10%. Prior to all of this the average was 2.5%. So that's not a removal at all, but a rather large average increase even if you exclude the omglol China rate.
Because last time the US government required alliances to participate in the trade war. Maybe it is not rational, but the US is the leader, so most countries just thought, 'Ok, if you really need it...'. But this time, the trade war is against the whole world. Everyone is confused.
The articles you've linked are about threats of 10% to 25% tariffs in the context of active trade negotiations between the US and China. Here, there's an actually imposed tariff of 145% and no talks at all as far as has been reported. It's not the same situation.
The outcomes are not the same because the numbers are not the same. A few days ago some Chinese journalists interviewed analysts familiar with CATL on batteries. At that time the tariff was 125%, and the analysts thought CATL could still eke out some profits: it's one of the very few Chinese businesses that can profit despite the 125% tariffs because China controls 75% of the world's battery anodes, 90% of cathodes and electrolytes. At 145% tariff CATL will be taking a loss and won't supply batteries at all.
I'm not sure what you could possibly mean by "outcome" that doesn't include a 145% tax as an outcome. Perhaps you've fallen victim to the misinformation that the exporting country pays tariffs? That's not so; a 145% tariff on imports from China means that an American business importing $10,000 of stuff from China is required to pay the US government $14,500 on top. (Or they can not do the import and lay off everyone who was involved in processing and selling the stuff, as many China-dependent businesses will likely do over the next few weeks.)
Still have another 90+ days to figure this out. Perhaps you have fallen victim to believing each move is a different game than last time. To me it appears all someone did was shuffle the pieces.
We don't have another 90+ days. The 145% tariff is in effect right now. Whoever told you about the 90 days was intentionally trying to trick you; there are other tariffs that were delayed for 90 days, but the announcement delaying those tariffs made it extremely clear that this one was not delayed.
Wow you had these at-the-ready, didn't you. Thanks.
*I've read through a few of these and it seems like perhaps Trump still thinks it's 2018/19, but China's position has only gotten stronger.
It seems the attempt to jack up tariffs so high this time was a bluff to "show" how strong we can be, but he miscalculated on how shaky the stock/bond markets actually currently are and the financial players know we're not in a position to go it alone.
And China knows this and they know they can wait us out. I believe it will be considered a misstep, at best and a catastrophe at worst.
> Apple already pays tariffs on products including the Apple Watch and AirPods, but hasn't raised its prices in the United States.
so, they fear tariffs because their price is already at the highest their products would sell? that's an interesting point most people don't understand. the tariffs were only 15% then, but still interesting to see how it played out.
Is nice that my family's small business is set to get absolutely crushed by tariffs at the end of the month while large tech companies are exempt. Thank goodness for America first policies. So cool. Very cool.
This whole thing has multiple layers of annoying to even a slightly reasonable person. Naturally, further consolidating strength of the existing major behemoths is among those as well.
8471 ADP (Automatic Data Processing) Machines: PCs, servers, terminals.
8473.30 Parts for ADPs: keyboards, peripherals, printers.
8486 Machines for producing semiconductors & ICs: wafer fab, lithography.
8517.13 Mobile phones and smartphones.
8517.62 Radios, router, modems.
8523.51 Radio/TV broadcasting equipment.
8524 2-way radios.
8528.52 Computer monitors and projectors (no TVs).
8541.10 Diodes, transistors and similar electronic components
8541.21 LEDs
8541.29 Photodiodes and non-LED diodes
8541.30 Transistors
8541.49.10 Other semiconductors that emit light
8541.49.70 Optoelectronics: light sensors, solar cells
8541.49.80 Photoresistors
8541.49.95 Other semiconductor devices
8541.51.00 LEDs for displays
8541.59.00 Other specialized semiconductor devices
8541.90.00 Semiconductor parts: interconnects, packaging, assembly
8542 Electronic ICs
Industrial-scale workarounds were developed for previous tariffs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652823. Such loopholes will need to be addressed in any new trade agreements.
Not sure specifically, but most common chips aren’t fabbed on processes that require cutting edge machines like you hear about for nVidia or iPhone chips.
All of the little chips in everything else are fabricated on much simpler processes that require much less complex machinery.
Reciprocal is inaccurate, you should stop using that term - this label was chosen to obfuscate what is going on and confuse those who don't know better.
The 8541.* category exclusions are interesting. Does the US self-produce all required quantities of LEDs and piezoelectric crystals and doesn't need to import those? Is the exception on photovoltaic components to discourage American companies from producing solar panels?
I suspect it would be a good idea if the US abolished the presidency and moved to a parliamentary system. Turns out that concentrating so much power in a single position is a bad idea.
The president has all the power that the congress and the senate gives him. Previous presidents were not given this much power. The bad guys are in the congress and the senate for not upholding the constitution.
I think the current state of affair has exposed a fundamental bug in the consitution. Sure, the US has three branches of government that are supposed to be checks and balances on each other. Which has, mostly, worked really great.
But turns out there is no way to enforce this. If we get a president that doesn't care about any of this and is happy to ignore everyone else, there isn't actually any way to enforce the separation of duties of the three branches.
The problem we have today is that the one runaway branch has support from at least one of the branches meant to act as a check on power (the legislative).
Congress should be stepping in if the president is overstepping his legal authority, or if they wish to reduce his legal authority. The Republican party has control of Congress and our political system has devolved into a game of blind faith in your team, neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.
We need principled leaders who care to run an effective government based on our constitution. We have few, if any, of those people in charge.
>neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.
So, what's going on is that Donny himself has all the money. Not personally, but his various election funds have more than than the rest of the Republicans combined. Obama has a similar set-up back in 2012, but not nearly as disproportionate as Donny has.
Republicans can't go against Donny without risking a primary opponent funded by Donny that will oust them.
The Democrats do not have this funding problem to the same degree.
What this means is that the Republican party is only going to go against Donny (impeachment) when they figure that the average Republican Primary voter in deeply red districts will have a 50/50 chance of voting (actual polling, not vibes) the way Donny tells them too. And that reassessment is not going to happen until at least late summer 2026.
I don't know enough about the republican party's campaign finances to know whether Trump controls most or all of it. Even if he does, though, it doesn't have to work that way.
Congress has a duty to uphold the constitution, not to play political money games. The fact that they aren't willing to is a large part of why we're in this mess.
What we need are leaders that actually have principles they're willing to fight for, and ultimately that still rolls further down hill to the voters who have collectively created these incentives.
When Ron Paul was still in office lobbyists learned to not even bother talking to him. Agree or disagree with him, the man had strong views of how governments should work, was clear about those views to his electorate, and stood by them consistently. We need more of that.
Their point is that without concerted effort the elected officials will follow Trump as long as elections in red states align with Trump's political funding
> Congress has a duty to uphold the constitution, not to play political money games
Those political money games will filter out opposition in congress as long as Trump is able to have yes men elected into congress
Sure, and if both of those problems are fundamentally just how politics is going to work now we'd be better off throwing out the system entirely and starting fresh.
Short of that, we need voters electing based on ideals and principles and we need those elected to actually follow the ideals and principles that got them elected.
For all politicians, their incentive is to get (re)elected. That's pretty much part of the definition. The ones that follow that incentive are going to be (re)elected, those that don't aren't going to get into office.
But, if you really do believe in democracy, then you have to actually trust the voters here. If you're thinking that they are just rubes and are easily lead around, then well, you don't really believe in democracy, I think [0]. Whatever you think about Donny and his methods and ideas, we've had 10 years of the guy in politics. The voters (in the system we have) were as well informed as you could possibly expect them to be. They wanted him and everything about him, the results were very clear.
Ancient Greece is a good model here with it's many cities and systems. Democracies will often choose the wolf to escape the vultures. It's just part of how humans work. We can all wish that we live in a different place and a different time with different people, but we don't. We're here and now. And our fellow voters in the system we have, they want all of this.
Look, I'm with you, I think that the voters were very dumb here. But they have to find out one way or another and get their comeuppance. There is no feasible other way. We're going to get Donny in all his glory, good and hard.
[0] yes yes, we don't have a democracy, we have a constitutional republic and blah blah blah. We've all heard it a hundred times.
I agree with you here. I do personally believe in democracy, though for a slightly different reason.
I believe in democracy because I think the public should be able to collectively pick their fate and then own the outcome. I don't want an elite class doing what they think is best for the rest of us, and I don't want to own the result of their decisions if I had no say in the decisions.
I live in a very red state. Though I didn't vote for Trump I am surrounded by a strong majority of people that did. I've viewed it the way you're describing from the beginning - we made this bed, now we get to see what the result is and decide what to do next.
I don't think this is a problem with the constitution as it was actually written, this is just the cumulative effect of states, congress, and the judicial branch ceding power to the executive for decade after decade, with a decent dose of political corruption, because both parties thought it was convenient for when they are in power. People had been warning about it the whole time and every time it happened they were either ignored as paranoid or grouped up as conspiracy theorists.
you seem to ignore or not know about how recently deputized private security guards went to a federal judge to press him on a decision for the insurrectionists.
We don't need to abolish the presidency or entirely change our system for a parliamentary model. We do need to drastically shrink the executive branch and its powers though.
I've found it interesting that so many are seriously concerned with what Trump is doing but not why the executive branch has the authority to do it in the first place.
I was thinking that the US marshals need to be the enforcement arm of the courts. But I am not sure if that would help much in the current situation.
Maybe police and federal enforcement agencies should be solely under Congress? At least then senior people can actually get fired for obeying unlawful orders from the executive.
The judicial branch is meant only to provide clarify of laws on the books. I'm not sure what they would do with an enforcement agency, and I'd be worried about what that would do with regards to the types of people attracted to those judicial positions.
The legislative branch already has a lot of power. I'd be very concerned giving them the direct control, or even shared control, over enforcement. They should be controlling enforcement through legislation.
That leaves the executive, and personally I don't see a problem with enforcement living there. That is a very good reason to otherwise limit the authority of the executive branch though, and why executive orders as used today shouldn't be legal (they effectively are a legislative branch with the enforcement agencies).
The legislative branch can pass a law requiring enforcement, likely within some specified parameters or timeline. If that passes and is constitutional, the courts could be tested and uphold the law.
Ok, but (a) they won't, and (b) if they do, who carries out the actual removal of the president from power? ... oh, right, the executive branch, again. Oops.
If your concerns are only procedural, surely congress could fix that if they cared. If they actually had the vote to impeach they could likely have the voter to either pass new law or amend the constitution to ensure the removal is enforced.
Congress already have the Capitol police which they could have arrest anyone they think committed a felony in any jurisdiction and have top jurisdiction in DC and any government building within it.
And I'm of the opinion that the capitol police should be limited only to acting as a security force for the Capitol itself. They shouldn't be enforcing anything beyond building security.
Our current system should allow Congress to control this.
They’re not. That’s the problem.
You could swap it out for a parliamentary structure with the same characters and you’d get the same result. There’s a weird personality cult thing going on and everyone is waiting to see who will break ranks first, lest they get crushed by the retaliatory wrath of Trump calling his followers to oppose a person and Elon Musk dumping a mega war chest on them.
There are signs that people are starting to break ranks, but it looks like they want to see him have to face the consequences of his decisions before they jump in to save him.
This current policy is so bad that they’d be doing him a political favor by jumping in to disallow it. The problem for them is that he would be guaranteed to turn around and blame it on Congress. “My tariff plan was going to work, but Congress interfered!”
If you are persuaded by "The Goodness Paradox" (Richard Wrangham) then you are probably going to think like I do Congress and the Senate acting almost inevitable if Trump does enough damage. The book is speculation/theory on how/why the low level of intra-tribe violence in humans could have evolved. It is literally an order of magnitude less than other species. His theory is in small tribes small men routinely band together to kill an oppressive leader. The result is leaders evolved to be less violent over time. Most of the violence in other species happens because it is the primary tool leaders use to extract resourced from others, so when they do this total in-tribe violence was reduced. It had no effect on the violence between tribes, which is anything has increased in humans. If he's right this behaviour is fairly ingrained in all human males now.
Wrangham's thesis is this behaviour is built on language. In order to kill the biggest and most powerful with little risk, the group had to coordinate and perhaps more importantly a level of trust had to be build up, because if one broke ranks and spilled the beans before the deed was done, the leader could pick off the insurrectionists one by one. The most startling example of this is the men who killed Caesar (some 60 to 70 of them) all sank a knife into his body. Only humans had the tool needed to build up the level of in-group trust: language.
The relevance to overthrowing is Trump needs a concerted whispering campaign that takes months to to create the bonds between the "small men". We've had less than 100 days to enjoy the fruits of Trump's blessings. They've only just become aware of what he is doing to their electoral prospects. Hell, I suspect Trumps big donors like Musk have only woken up to the fact in the last couple of days that they've funded a huge threat to their personal fortunes and the businesses that create and sustain those fortunes. But they are aware now, and as you say the white anting has begun. May it continue post haste.
You still often have one man with all the power in a parliamentary system. The Prime Minister. Take Canada as an example. JT had basically complete power over government. It's as rate for the prime minister party or coalition to go against him as it is for a president in the US to be impeached.
I think the trick has to be to just get better people into those positions. Which means better people need to have some incentive to get into politics. It's a tough one for sure.
The prime minister in the UK is regularly kicked out by their party, and it's the same in most parliamentary systems. Liz Truss introduced ridiculous ideological economic policies that caused a bond market revolt. Her party kicked her out within the lifetime of a lettuce. This is only possible in a parliamentary system. Most of her recent predecessors were similarly if less rapidly removed. In the past 40 years, only three prime ministers lost their job at an election. Six were either forced out or resigned. Of those, arguably only Tony Blair left through choice.
The UK is not Canada though. You have the House of Lords, we have a Senate. We are a (con)federation, and that adds a whole new political overlay that the UK doesn’t have.
The executive power of our PM relative to the body politik is much higher. We don’t have a tradition of backbench rebellion, and the PMO often wields more power than the cabinet.
Australia's favourite spectator sport is not, in fact, cricket or AFL, but rather watching government knife their PM whenever the political winds change direction. In the last 8 years, 4 PMs have been rolled before they've reached an election, because the party loses confidence in them.
Many parliamentary systems wherein a PM is elected by the cabinet routinely demonstrate that they will use their power to remove a leader in whom they've lost confidence.
The notion that JT had complete control is just utter nonsense. Federal jurisdiction is sharply limited, the opposition party is expected to be able to introduce and pass legislation during a minority government (the ppc has just been acting incompetent; the NDP managed to pass national dental care despite only hold 16% of the seats), and provincial governments have been largely doing their own thing despite federal funding initiatives.
There may be some parliamentary country where what you say is correct, but in general, yeah, no, that’s not how it works.
Remember Liz Truss, all 49 days of her? A PM who fucks up on a Truss/Trump scale generally finds themselves very rapidly seeking alternative employment. Truss was forced to appoint a borderline sane chancellor about two weeks after causing the bond yield to go crazy, and was gone within another couple of weeks.
I wasn't really going after a political angle or the elections.
PMs in Canada wield a ton of power and AFAIK are rarely removed. I'm not sure what exactly you consider to be misinformation here. It's extremely rare for members of parliament to vote against their party.
Another example I can think of is Israel where the prime minister yields a ton of power.
I might be wrong but I think the use of the Emergencies Act was not approved in Parliament? How about the weapons embargo on Israel?
The thing that’s really been getting to me, is that, I’m liberal, not pro-Trump, but the MAGA American heartland story has been really getting to me. I want to see small business, manufacturing, small town American succeed. And there’s some part of me that thought maybe Trump, as much as I don’t like him, is the thing that is needed to make that happen, but man it seems like he’s really fucking over the people who supported him the most.
> small business, manufacturing, small town American succeed
That can only happen if you ban all imports of anything those small business manufacturers would made, and be content with the prices going up so those Americans can really be paid who make those products.
If that is not possible, then it is either slavery, poorly paid illegal immigrants or back to some other low-wage country like we’ve done for the past decades.
> That can only happen if you ban all imports of anything those small business manufacturers would made, and be content with the prices going up so those Americans can really be paid who make those products. ... then it is either slavery, poorly paid illegal immigrants or back to some other low-wage country like we’ve done for the past decades.
Counterpoint: About 1/3 of Australia's GDP is small business. We have very few tariffs. We have a high minimum wage (about USD$16/hr) and it's enforced, so slavery yada, yada isn't a factor.
What you said sounds like it might be true, but in reality it ain't so.
> That can only happen if you ban all imports of anything those small business manufacturers would made
Consumers could always make this decision for themselves and pick domestic over foreign. It seems extremely unlikely, but I also see bringing back manufacturing without massive economic shock as extremely unlikely. If I want a pipe dream, it be for manufacturing to come back because consumers actually care that it comes back.
> Consumers could always make this decision for themselves and pick domestic over foreign.
In a free market, consumers _do_ decide for themselves. It is simply so, that price is the primary factor for many consumers. Especially in a society where living paycheck to paycheck is normal - but really in any society.
Price doesn't have to be the primary factor though, that was my point. People can choose for whatever reasons they want, we just don't currently seem to care where manufacturing is being done.
Price does have to be the primary factor if you need something and can only afford the cheapest option. And this is the unfortunate reality for most people in the world, including those in first-world societies.
If we are, in fact, at the point where people are only buying the necessities and we still can't afford the cheapest options the game is kind if already lost.
Some of the biggest boons to small business would be universal healthcare and that's just ... you know, never going to happen under a Republican president (or a Democrat, for that matter).
It would greatly ease the burden of employing others in small businesses and it would greatly increase the safety net of would-be entrepreneurs.
It would also improve works-rights-as-capitalism because you could more easily quit abusive employers and make employers more merit-based as well.
Addendum:
The $450 I spend every month on health insurance is a meaningful part of my monthly spend as I'm trying to start my business.
It’s a common misconception that Republicans are pro-business. They loathe small business and love big business. If everyone could just be indentured to one of a dozen mega-conglomerates, that would be their perfect world.
That’s the same thing as being pro-business. Big business out-competes small businesses again and again. The idea of smol business being viable (see: this whole thread) is just the marketing front.
Well, it's also a US- vs the rest of the world thing. Big businesses destroying local economies, local health, local taxes, etc, is a very American problem. See [0] for a study on the topic.
Small business is viable. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses successfully running throughout the country. Maybe I'm missing your point but this seems like a dumb thing to say.
Sorry, it would have been more correct to say that while smol businesses are viable, Republicans and other corrupt politicians siding with big business is just them siding with the winning side.
Why does it deserve to succeed, especially if it results in everyone paying more for things, and if they’re of worse quality to boot?
Labor and industries are specialized just like agriculture is. Fighting to redomesticate labor is a bit like fighting to produce bananas at scale in the USA: It’s just not practical and will cause harm to the broader economy.
This critique seems to miss that Trump is putting his thumb on the scales against small business, and in favor of big business. There are macroeconomic and antitrust policies one could put in place to level the playing field and Trump seems insistent not only on not preferencing small town America, but actively opposing it.
A pony is a very realistic desire. Horse property is cheap and horses themselves aren't too expensive provided you have time. Don't let your dreams be dreams.
What a surprise. Trump fucking over people. He has a history, it's not some mysterious hero who just arrived to town. Why's anybody surprised given the things he's done in past.
>NOBODY is getting “off the hook” for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers, that other Countries have used against us, especially not China which, by far, treats us the worst! There was no Tariff “exception” announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff “bucket.” The Fake News knows this, but refuses to report it. We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations...
(truth social Apr 13, 2025, 8:36 PM. You need the day and time to see what the tariffs are that particular hour really)
I'm not economist. Maybe tariffs could work. (It seems like most of the experts say they don't. And how they were determined certainly seems especially dumb) However, it doesn't take a genius to see that enacting them without advance notice to prepare for them is the worst way to do it. Give companies time to prepare. Give countries time to negotiate. The result would be the same without the uncertainty and chaos. Unless this really is some plan for the rich to short stocks and make a killing in the market, I don't see how this implementation would be a good idea to anyone.
Time to just call these tariffs: sales tax. Extra money for the government on all goods imported are taxes. The rest of the complexity distracts from the basic cash flow and the inevitable results. More money spent and consumed by the government.
Right, but the goal is to solve a marketing issue. The Trump base is resistent to criticisms of dear leader and the mechanisms behind tariffs raising all prices can be misunderstood (and let's be honest, who really trusts economists). Call it a sales tax, they know what that is. The mechanism doesn't matter.
I listened the book "Lucky Loser" (Craig/Buettner) a few months back. It's a well-researched timeline of how the Trump fortune was made, and to be really kind, how monumentally terrible DJT is at business on a fundamental level. The shady deals and repulsive ethics are not exceptions but the status quo. The only reason he's in the situation he's in is because the guy who created Survivor saw an opportunity. Now the whole world is paying the price.
I listened because I thought it would be funny, but the shitty behaviour and unapologetic corruption is just so naked that it actually left me feeling pretty upset for all of the obvious reasons.
I'd say that I don't understand how anyone can be charmed by this con artist, but the truth is that I have simply lost a ton of faith in the "average" person.
> I'd say that I don't understand how anyone can be charmed by this con artist, but the truth is that I have simply lost a ton of faith in the "average" person.
the same could probably be said about the "average" person with regards to buttoned-up polished politicians with which trump contrasts himself to; he looks authentic to many people....
From what I am hearing, he seems to have appealed on culture war issues. On economic issues, it was assumed that Biden had been doing something bad and Trump would end it, but they didn't much care past that.
There is still a halo of "Democrats are bad at the economy" dating from the 1970s and rooted in the New Deal.
Yeah, the New Deal. That terrible disaster that turned America into a temporary economic powerhouse until their kids decided no further investment was necessary to keep the good times rolling.
Seems a bit anti-business to have an unequal playing field just for the star-bellied sneetches. Also silly that those with the biggest piles of capital are getting exemptions when the whole purpose of this exercise is to spur local investment in manufacturing. If anything, small businesses below some threshold of revenue/staff should be getting exemptions.
Do you think all the tech CEO’s attended his inauguration for nothing?
I never imagined I would see such public corruption in any western country. I am saying this as someone who supported some the current administrations agenda
Jared Trump’s business getting two billion dollar investment from
Saudi Arabia and the Secret Service paying Trump millions for various services like staying at his hotels happened during his first term.
It’s total bullshit. Part of my business involves direct import and that’s now impacted by tariffs. The cherry on top is that what I import is not and cannot be produced in the U.S. I source a number of other products from suppliers in the U.S. and literally every single one of them is impacted by tariffs somehow, whether it’s ingredients, packaging, etc. that comes from somewhere else. Some of my materials originate in the Dominican Republic, which is now subject to a 10% tariff, although it’s more common for others in my industry to source those same materials from China. Now that China is prohibitively expensive, they will be quickly pivoting to other suppliers, which will further drive up prices. Supply chains are in chaos right now.
It burns me up that massive companies like Apple and Nvidia get a free pass while everyone else is subject to the most brain dead economic policy anyone alive today has ever lived through.
The whole thing strikes me as a bunch of nepobaby/fake academic/banker bro advisors who have no idea how the physical world works. As much as I think Musk is a bad actor at this point, talking to him about supply chains would have highlighted how insane this whole plan was from day 1.
My dad is a retired EE who dealt with the 90s offshoring wave and described the process of spinning up offshore production with a new supplier/factor/product as a 1-2 year process.
Now imagine every producer with China exposure trying to do this at the same time dealing with the same limited ex-China options? Nothing was happening in the 90 day pause, let alone before the 2026 midterms or before the end of his reign in 2028.
Complete chaos for American companies who are left with no good options other than try to wait it out, and pass on excess cost to consumers in interim.
It’s pure stupidity and most people don’t even realize it. Last night I met a couple at a country club where I was a guest - one of those $100k/yr places - and they asked me if my trade partners are charging me more with the tariffs. I told them the U.S. government is charging me more with the tariffs and my trade partners are charging me more because the value of the dollar is down. This was the first time anyone told them it’s the importer who pays the tariff and that it will be passed to the customer in multiples to maintain the same profit margin. Man, to be wealthy enough to be a member at a place like that and to be able to live in ignorant bliss… What a life.
Whilst the reason may be singularly obvious to those who consume various forms and sources of media, there's likely enough people that only consume re-published whitehouse press releases and the trump administration probably already has an alternative explanation that they'll use for these increased prices.
And their target market will eat it up and ask for seconds.
Like a doomsday cult, with each failed prediction they will just keep pushing back the ostensible payoff. So far, we've seen "I will end inflation on day one" -> "this is still Biden's inflation" -> "there will be a little bit of pain" -> "the system has been broken for decades and it will take years to fix".
> The country went insane when inflation crossed 5%
This is actually one of the few reasons I'm hopeful for the next election (assuming we still get one) - last time, regardless of the root cause, the country blamed those in power right then.
It’s not like Caddyshack. At least not this one. There’s golf, tennis, pools, a restaurant, bars, etc. It’s the kind of place where you will see PGA Tour guys hanging around and a few other high profile people. A lot of people are driving cars that cost more than my house. Everyone is pretty chill, but it’s top 1% kind of people in their natural habitat. It’s like a little bubble detached from reality.
I really do sympathize with you, given how much small businesses are often reliant on imports and often don't have enough money in reserve to wait out this chaos. There are going to be a LOT of small businesses going bankrupt over the next few months, while these big companies have much deeper pockets and can weather this storm.
That's a funny way of looking at it because the banana republics weren't called that because they were "bananas" or something. They were called that to identify which of those countries had had state and megacorp interference and government toplings, by mostly the United Fruit Company - an American company.
Whatever the banana republics were they were turned into that by the US's doing, so it's funny that now the term comes back home.
People commenting here about Trump corruption are correct, but it's also not new. This is regression to the mean. America has historically been a highly corrupt nation with extreme wealth inequality that occasionally has shocks (e.g. Abolitionism, the Progressive movement, WWII) that allow liberals to take over and purge the system of corruption. If anything, we've had to deal with and defeat (or at least, outlive) smarter and more well-connected fascists than Trump.
I agree and my rationale of it is that it's related to the US dedication to capitalism and thus aversion to any form of socialism (even small pockets that, in my opinion, are evidently positive for society as a whole) as some kind of governmental totalitarianism.
not just a bit, this is so unfair and smells of corruption, only the richest companies getting exemptions, give me a break. this is what organized crime looks like.
Apple has already "committed" to investing in US manufacturing. Also, many companies have committed to AI investments on US soil which would be heavily NVIDIA dependent. Could be a justification for the exemption.
Companies aren’t getting exemptions. The product categories are. The headline is misleading. And while you might already be aware of that, most the people responding to you clearly aren’t.
The result is still that certain companies are getting exemptions for their products while others aren't. And there is no real rhyme or reason behind these decisions
True, yet irrelevant. If Apple imports garlic for it's cafeteria, that will be tariffed. But those commodity categories represent the business of the named companies, and those companies represent the majority of the value of imports to the US in those categories.
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
> you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms.
The analysis is reasonable, but let's just replace "defending your freedoms" with "reaping the benefits of being the biggest bully in town". This is what China's competition means, not the risk of being attacked and losing your freedoms, but that of losing the power you got used to and profited from.
> The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future
People were worrying about this as early as the 1970s when Japan started importing cars, and in the 1990s when Chinese markets started to open up under the condition that the Western companies partner with Chinese ones and effectuate technology transfers to them. These folks foresaw the future, but politicians and corporate managers didn’t care; they were focused on expansion at all costs.
Now that the future is today, all they can say is “I told you so,” which isn’t much comfort to anyone.
Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
And tarriffing imports doesn't make a difference in the case of something like shipbuilding where the real problem is the government hasn't got a consistent order-book to keep factories staffed, operating and training - nor a plan to allow that capacity to leverage into being self supporting.
Like a much better plan has always been defence exports: increase your customer base to spread risk and reduce per unit prices. The F-35 and it's adoption was a great idea in this regard...right up till the US started threatening NATO allies and cutting off avionics support to partner nations (Ukraine) in the middle of a war.
You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry. The whole "bring manufacturing back" idea is almost wholly disconnected from it: a ton of factories extruding plastic childrens roys aren't suddenly going to start making anti-shipping missiles - in fact this is related to a secondary problem which is that it's not remotely clear that a peer/near-peer conflict would look anything like the long wars that WW2 represented due tot he delivery timelines on advanced weapons systems. You basically go to war with the military you have.
> Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
This is too limited in thinking. It's not just about "defence critical components", but the know-how and having the production workflow knowledge. It's all well and good to have rules on what goes into frigate, but if you don't have the shipyards to build things then it's a bit of a moot point:
> You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry.
It's not just about industry but about capacity as well: if you have (in this example) only (say) 4 shipyards you're going to have a tough time beating someone who has 40.
This is presuming you get to keep the shipyards. They're no use to you if they're all blown to hell in the first 48 hours - ships take months to build at minimum. If you lose your navy in the mean time, you won't be building anything.
This is the problem with these assumptions: they're all rooted in the industrial warfare the US won in WW2 but are not contextually accurate to today. WW2 wasn't fought with satellite targeting and precision cruise missiles which could be fired from half the planet away. Ukraine is currently hitting targets on the other side of Russia - "behind the lines" doesn't really exist for strategic assets anymore.
Giving up your economy for a future war with China that may or may not happen is frankly idiotic. The US already has thousands of nuclear warheads in storage so what are you afraid of?
This is basically how the USSR collapsed.
> You basically go to war with the military you have.
The war in Ukraine shows what a current-day war looks like: You rapidly expend stockpiled traditional weapons, and then rapidly ramp up low-cost drone manufacturing.
Currently, the #1 drone manufacturer in the world is probably Ukraine, with Russia and China somewhere in the #2 and #3 spots. The United States is somewhere on the bottom of that list.
Subsidising civilian drone manufacturing alone would catch up the United States dual-use manufacturing capability for any potential future war for the next half-a-decade or so. After that...? Something-something-AI-murder-bots.
But Ukraine built that industry after the war started. And the Ukranian conflict is uniquely well suited to drones because of numerous factors which wouldn't apply in say, a fight over Taiwan - where the outcome would more or less be determined by who still had a floating Navy at the end of the day.
No amount of 3D printed FPVs is going to bring down a modern warship - they're unlikely to even get near it (conversely the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets in anyway, but can be as cheap as "brick on a speed boat throttle").
"the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets"
Absolutely. Ukraine was able to push Russian surface fleet into Russian ports using sea drones. If Taiwan builds a fleet thereof, the Chinese blockade fleet will face Armageddon.
I saw an interview with a former naval radar guy, who claimed that the natural state of the sea produces so many small false blips that a smartly built sea drone of certain size is basically impossible to distinguish from those.
Because for the first year of the war was the "burn down existing cold war era stocks" phase. More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have.
Now that every military has seen years of video clips on Telegram of tank after tank being blown up by $500 drones, the next war is going start with swarms of drones on day 1, not day 400.
"More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have."
The Ukrainians absolutely realized that, and I saw a lot of reports about Ukrainian drone operators in 2022 already. It was just after the Nagorno-Karabakh war, where Turkish-made drones were a significant factor in Azeri victory.
There was something else at play. The supply chain had to be built up, plus the Russians were/are quite strong at radioelectronic warfare. Overcoming Russian jamming was a serious uphill battle.
I think we need to also consider that "conventional economic thinking" got us into this mess (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit).
There never seems to be any accountability for this though. I suspect it's because a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo.
> (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit).
The debt/deficit is on politicians (and the public who votes them in). See also issues with US Social Security (Canada was on a similar path, but the government(s) sorted things out in the 1990s).
At least for the US, it has not de-industrialized, as exports have never been higher. It makes a smaller portion of total GDP, but that's because of growth of other sectors; and a smaller portion of the workforce, but that's because of automation:
The largest problem nowadays is probably housing costs, and that has nothing to do with trade, but is about things like NIMBY and zoning.
If you want more than "a particular section of society" and more folks to benefit look into redistribution, which plenty of conventional economists will happily agree with.
> a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo
Name me a country where this is not the case. The only thing we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation. That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think we've promoted little else besides de-industrialized degrees. That's why it's going to be so hard to ramp up again. How many kids think it's cool to get a textile engineering or materials science degree vs marketing or software engineering?
> we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation
What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation? It seems to me that the population was able to discover that and benefit from it entirely on their own. Why do they need "education" to "prosper" in current conditions?
Aren't we currently living in the most educated time already? That is we have more people going to and graduating from college than ever before. What is currently missing? Do we need to force everyone to go to college? What about those who don't graduate? They just won't ever be able to prosper?
> That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think a little more than half the country would disagree with this assessment.
The model and the curriculum are two separate things and our schools never included industrial education. That and our higher education is far less "vocational" than the countries that more strictly adhered to the system.
There's nothing odd about the question. What's odd is that you assert that conditions 200 years ago are relevant to it.
The US didn't have a de-industrialized or vulnerable economy before Trump. And by the extent it was hollowed out, it's because of blatant corruption, not "conventional economic thinking".
You don't even have a point about the deficit. While there are plenty of economic schools that will give you high deficits, the US didn't get his by following any of those either.
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists. One day it’s a 145% tariff on China. The next, it’s “Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.” Then comes a 90-day pause, adding to the confusion.
It’s not clear whether Jamieson Greer is actually steering this, or if any of it was thoroughly thought through.
This is Senator Chris Murphy explaining it’s not economic policy, it’s an attempt to blackmail corporations into submission by making a deal with him in return for sanctions relief.
Keep an eye out for what Apple and nvidia might have agreed to give.
The last time tariffs were this high, it led to rampant corruption as companies would pay off customs officers. This was one of the reasons for switching to an income tax. For the current administration this possibility counts as a major opportunity to generate personal wealth.
But this isn't the only reason for the policy. For someone who is at heart a coward, bullying and brandishing raw power over others is its own reward. That reason enough for the policy, and damn the consequences for the nation.
I guess for a change Americans will experience what Indians have been subjected to since forever.
Just about anything useful and high quality has been tariffed out of existence in India. It is done in the name of protecting our industry while they catch up with rest of the world.
Exactly backwards has happened. The cars we get here are so bad they are sometimes called tin cans on wheels. Without competitors from across the world Indian auto makers have absolutely no motivation to build world class cars. And it shows on the road.
There is also a reason tariffs only get raised on a multi-generational time scale, e.g., 1820s, 1890s, 1930s, 2020s.
The effects are so bad that nearly everyone who remembers the disaster must have died off for anyone to think it is a good idea.
At this point, it is obvious that there is no geo-political or geo-strategic plan of any type. The administration is just winging it, and Sen Murphy's explanation is the only one available.
It was also noted that the person occupying the president's chair said "they must be forced to negotiate". When someone is forced to negotiate, that is not a negotiation, that is extortion. Welcome to another nation run like a mob office.
> This is Senator Chris Murphy explaining it’s not economic policy, it’s an attempt to blackmail corporations into submission by making a deal with him in return for sanctions relief.
Weirdly the same explanation works if you're being less uncharitable, i.e. Apple agreed to invest $500B in the US but everybody knows new factories aren't going to be built overnight, so they get a reprieve from the tariffs for now provided they continue to go through with the investment. Which in turn makes them immune from future tariffs once they're actually making iPhones in the US, while allowing the tariffs to be reinstituted against anyone who didn't do likewise.
Apple can agree to invest 500B to build a factory, but they don't have to actually do it.
Building a factory takes years, and a big chunk of that happens long before you actually start work on site.
You gotta find a site, work with local govt to negotiate servicing, environmental report (there's a couple years, and potentially a couple go-arounds right there.)
So there can be lots of activity, lots of progress reports, lots of optimism, for a decade or more before any real money has to be spent.
Ultimately Apple et al can "agree" to anything, the president can have his "big win" and things can carry on just as before.
provided they continue to go through with the investment
I recall the Foxconn Wisconsin situation, and I have no doubt Apple et al are well aware of it. String out a pretense of building factories in the US for the next three and a half years? Easy peasy. President Trump will soon get bored of this game anyway and move on to the next one; he already looks like he's bored of it and it didn't bring him universal acclaim and admiration.
Just a good time to remember that the same guy who thinks tariffs are a good idea is the guy who stood at a podium during Covid next to the world’s leading expert and suggested injecting bleach into Covid patients was a good idea.
And was caught on mic saying he likes to grope women.
I would not say anyone is ‘automatically’ questioning Trump’s character or intelligence.
Never mentioned bleach. Mentioned UV disinfection right before that quote.
Never suggested it or said it's a good idea. Just said it's interesting, worth checking out, and has to be done by medical doctors.
Completely manipulating and twisting what Trump said to further your agenda - again proving the user above right. Is what Trump said stupid? Yeah. Did he suggest to inject bleach? No
You're proving that user right. Taking one minor quibble about what this other poster said, which was obviously not a full recitation of all of Trump's highly questionable conduct over the years (as opposed his less questionable conduct) isn't the slam dunk you're making it. It's more like nitpicking that goes well beyond the point and only serves to demonstrate you interest in arguing small details and not anyone's actual points.
Truth is, Trump never said anything particularly intelligent or insightful. I think most commenters in this thread would make smarter decisions and would give better answers to tough questions without resorting to deflections and personal attacks . He always needs someone around to explain his boasting comments to make it seems logical, but this term, he’s not even surrounded by smart people anymore. It’s frightening.
This dumb bothsiderism take is exactly the reason for the shitstorm hitting US right now. People really need to stop sane washing everything he says and try to actually have an objective glance at him and take him for who he is: a con man. He made a majority of conservatives as goddamn fools, voting against their own best interests because he said he'll punish the right people. Spoiler alert: he instead concentrated power in his own hands, dismantled research and social nets and is well on his way to wrecking middle class and the rights of the workers. Until this simple fact is acknowledged, every Trump voter is complicit in making this happen.
Similarly, democrats need to acknowledge that they are responsible for Trump getting elected. Immigration was one of the biggest issues for voters and it went rampant under the democrats.
If every major law firm in the country is required to stroke Trump's ego, where should people get lawyers for cases Trump doesn't think they should win?
I keep seeing these explanations of “4D chess”. It’s Donald Trump. He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing when it comes to economic policies. Unless you believe he can see into the future of how other world leaders would react and consistently outsmart everyone else, there’s no 4D chess being played.
This isn’t advanced negotiation tactics, it’s mafia style negotiation tactics, which are 100% in character. See the law firms now providing him with 100s of millions in pro bono work to avoid punitive executive orders.
I learned that "4D chess" just means, "I see the 3 dimensions, I can't explain what's happening, but I guess they can, because they have that extra dimension.".
At this point it's something like 100D chess, because 99 levels of "Why?" have been explained by "because they're morons" but the defenders keep believing there's an extra dimension...
What about believing that he's a particularly-easily-manipulated patse (esp. when it comes to things he doesn't care about), and so this is someone else playing 4D chess through him?
For all the accusations of fascism, nobody seems to remember that a key feature of fascism is a corporate-cabal shadow government that legitimizes its activities/policies by puppeteering the "real" government to both execute and justify them.
That was more or less the case during Trump's first administration. I think a lot of normie Republicans were hoping for a repeat of that. The ones that aren't in denial are being gravely disappointed.
hard to attribute to competence what you can attribute to malice. just as law firms are being squeezed for $600 million of services through extortion, this is Mafia mentality as well where first something is held hostage and then negotiated for. given the parties involved, I would even assume that there is personal benefits staked in this, and lots of insider trading of course
Completely agree no 4D chess here. Just a guy that wants to keep the attention on him, one day is kissing Russia's ass, the next day when "peace" is failing, it's tariffs, etc etc no strategy at all, just a show to stay on first page day after day.
It's more than that. What you say is true about his character, but there is also a playbook to keep power. The autocrats copy one another. And he has people like Steven Bannon who are strategizing how he can serve a third term.
No, it's not 4D chess, and neither is extorting companies with tariffs, extorting law firms with threats of executive orders, or hammering universities by withholding funds.
It's all blunt-force checkers that any simpleton with power can easily understand.
How can somebody even entertain the idea is able the hold the concept of Chess, much less 4D, while at the same time being aware he nominated Matt Gaetz for Attorney General...Let that sink in for a while...
"In 2020, Gaetz was accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape. After an investigation, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) decided not to charge him. In December 2024, the House Ethics Committee released a report which found evidence that Gaetz paid for sex—including with a 17-year-old—and abused illegal drugs during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives."
The worse they are, the worse their other prospects are, and so the less power they have that wasn't granted by Donald Trump. It looks to me like this is about loyalty, which is about Donald Trump gaining more personal power.
What matters is loyalty. The chess being played is for full unitary executive power, essentially making Trump an autocrat. Everyone bends the knee to him, or is too powerless or afraid to oppose. Like what has happened with Putin in Russia.
Yeah he’s obviously in no state to decide on policy. We don’t know who is running things but it’s not him, a number of factions moving the direction a little bit in their favor whenever they get the opportunity. And of course there is massive insider trading going on too.
My take is Biden sounds old. The sitting president sounds brain-damaged and unquestionably is in no condition to be making such impactful decisions. The wavering we see right now is because the different factions making the decisions are struggling against each other.
What I don’t understand is why Scott Bessent is going along with these harebrained schemes. He supposedly was the big brain genius who devised the trading scheme that George Soros used to break the pound. Surely he anticipated the outcome of Trump’s plan.
If I was charitable to Trump, I would think that he genuinely wants to move manufacturing back to the US, and is likely being supported by the military faction of the government. There is a decent chance of a hot war with China in the future, and you really can’t win wars if you can’t build stuff at home quickly. As things currently stand, China can vastly out produce America in the event of a war
Occams razor. It's Donald Trump, I've known he was a joke since the late 80s. In middle school. Baffling to see millions of people think reality TV is real and give him nuke codes.
It's infuriating to rational thought but watching videos of Trump supporters talking about why they support Trump in spite of him hurting them makes it clear where his support comes from - it's a rainbow coalition of the discontented. Obviously the editors will pick the most provocative videos/sound bites but it's a pretty consistent picture.
Trump is determined to be remembered by history for his bold moves and "greatness". There is no 4D chess here. There is no such thing as 4D chess.
At best, he's using these tariffs as a temporary means to exert pressure and watching how others respond to them, almost like acting like the crazy man with a gun to make people a little more willing to negotiate terms more favorable for the gunman. At least as a matter of intent, anyway. The actual effect is another matter.
> Regulations require a bureaucracy in order to be effective.
That's a very European point of view (though not uniquely European, it's also shared across many other cultures, e.g. in East Asia). The US has done pretty well with private rights of action. In fact, because our culture is so conservative and anti-authoritarian, centralized bureaucracies are rather quickly defanged or grossly underfunded. The most recent example is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more quietly the FTC. Democrats would have done much better to roll back judicial expansion of the Federal Arbitration Act and devolve "regulation" back to states and private class actions, rather than to create the CFPB and elsewhere double-down on anemic, extremely inconsistent, and often highly partisan agency regulators.
Where private rights of action tend to fail is when they concern inchoate or non-individualized harms, like you often see in environmental protection law. Then what you get is complete paralysis, such as with real estate development; largely because its the process, not the end-state determination of rights, that private actors weaponize. But when they're firmly anchored to property rights, personal injury or loss (including fraud), etc, they seem to do as well as centralized regulation. And in the US, they arguably do better, because of our political dynamics.
USA is not anti authoritarian. It is pro-authoritarian and consistently so.
Conservatives are dismantling environmental protection, but it has nothing tondo with freedom or being anto authoritarian. They just dont care about consequences as long as their donors can earn more money in the short term.
Yet also, US seems to be crumbling and rhe source of instability. They may succeed in exporting their dysfunction to Europe, but it did not happened yet.
True, but everything should be done in moderation. We could definitely do without ESG mandates and such, and even the European Commission has publicly recognized the need to debloat the European Union a bit.
> Europe to be able to make business again freely.
I mean… Europe isn’t particularly well-known for being particularly business friendly. There’s a lot of good there for sure but there’s also a lot of barriers. And I say this as a Canadian who is also disappointed by the overall business environment at home.
co-sign, it's the King's Tax (as Murphy had explained in a different video I watched of his). it's that simple. also it was a giant elephant to make everyone forget that they just exposed an entire military action over Signal in a completely illegal and extremely incompetent way.
About as well known as a politically active Lord would be in the UK. The general public probably doesn't recognize his name, anyone interested in politics does.
He's getting more well known pretty fast, over all this. His explainer videos of what's going on and why it's so dangerous are often kinda boring and basic if you're a politics nerd–but that's great, because we don't need to be told, it's the folks who aren't politics nerds who need to be educated on this stuff.
He's the senator from the state I live in, so I know him and think he's excellent.
> much more electable than Biden or harris.
He represents a northeast blue state. It's difficult for those types of Democrats to carry non-coastal states in a presidential election, no matter how good they may be.
I suspect Bill Clinton tacked rightward to carry some southern states in 1992 and 1996, which led to his election.
Christ, Al Gore (2000 election) couldn't even carry his home state of Tennessee, so you can see how difficult it is to elect a Democrat to the presidency.
John Kerry (Dem from a northeast blue state) got smoked by George Bush in 2004.
I'm still trying to understand how Obama won twice, but I think it boils down to the fact that he invigorated the African-American vote in some key southern states.
tldr: Chris Murphy is great--unfortunately, he's the kind of Democratic presidential candidate who'd probably lose outside of the coastal states.
* edit: I would have been 'happy' with either outcome in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. McCain and Romney are/were decent and serious people. In fact, Romney was roundly mocked by the Dems in 2012 for saying that Russia was the US's greatest external threat. In retrospect ...
I think Bernie Sanders is the only current senator I'd expect a random American to know. Murphy might make the top 5 highest profile senators but you wouldn't know him if you don't pay attention to politics at all.
These companies could choose to invest in the US instead and not have to worry about any of this.
Tariffs are only usable as extortion if the companies have outsourced the manufacturing that gutted our middle-class.
Externalizing variables comes with risk. This risk should be factored into planning in the future. Just because a politician in the 90s promised cheap labor through globalization, a president 30 years later can flip the script
I'm not downvoting you, because I think you make an argument that many would make.
"Tariffs apply to imports, so produce locally instead".
The argument unfortunately has 2 flaws;
A) local production is expensive (which is why manufacturers fled decades ago.) If it is reintroduced here those goods remain expensive.
B) most things are not made in one place. Steel comes from here, electronics from there, energy from somewhere else, and so on. Even farmers use imported fertilizer, machinery and so on. Since the Tariffs are on "everything" (not just finished goods) they drive up the cost of local manufacturing even more.
A long-term strategy to increase local production makes sense. But it has to be done in a targeted way so as not to harm everything else. Typically it starts with finished goods, then slowly working down the food chain to improve the supply of parts making up those goods.
Exemptions on finished goods (like electronics) kills any gain. He might have, for example, exempted electronic parts. Which would then incentivize assembly to be local. Once you have local assembly you could look at say packaging, and so on.
The approach taken though doesn't lead to the outcomes being touted. Tariffs at country level are dumb. Excempting finished goods is dumb. Tariffs on things that can't be made locally (like coffee) is dumb.
That's before we talk about stability and certainty. For Tariffs to work you need both, and neither are in play here.
What’s interesting to me is that in this horribly corrupt state of affairs we find ourselves in, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses that are not able to seek redress the way a megacorp like Apple or Nvidia can. Your run-of-the-mill office furniture importer doesn’t have the same ability to book up a dinner and pay the requisite multi-million dollar lobbying fee as a Silicon Valley magnate. In the before times, these folks would form interest groups and lobby Congress as a unified front, but at the moment it seems as though that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t take imagination to see a highly noncompetitive, post-capitalist future where only the goods from megacorps are exempted, and the goods from medium sized businesses are taxed to oblivion, destroying any semblance of free markets.
I think it's good to consider what the implications are if Hanlon's razor fails... but I'm not giving up hope that this is all just a result of the incompetence of Trump and his administration either.
Hanlon's Razor is worse than useless if the target is aware of the principle. Then they can be malicious and play it off as incompetence. Which works especially well when they are also surrounded by genuine incompetents. They can also be, and often are, malicious and incompetent.
It's like saying "if it's white, fluffy and has four legs, never assume it is anything but a sheep". If the wolf knows you're applying that logic, what happens next?
Hanlon's razor is a great counterbalance to peoples' natural inclination of assuming people aren't dumb. The problem is when people divorce it from that context and assume it applies in general.
If this is an attempt at blackmail it appears to be failing. It's only been a few days and Trump has already unilaterally capitulated on several major positions. Unless he's blackmailing himself, the 'plan' is backfiring.
No, so far we only see the very public capitulations coming from the Trump administration. We're also seeing a lot of signaling, also very public, from every other major economy that they are prepared to move on without the US.
If we translate this into negotiating at a used car dealership, I don’t think it would look that different. Of course everyone is going to project strength in public communications. Doing otherwise would put them in a worse negotiating position. You have to make your opponent think you’ll do something drastic, or else they won’t budge. So you have everyone yelling about how they’re doing something drastic. Just like the first salvos at a used car dealership - dealer sets a ridiculous price, buyer declares they are going to walk away.
By the way I don’t think this is 4D chess. More like basic classical international relations. It just looks more like the 1800s than the 2020s, which makes people confused. It doesn’t take any particular cleverness to enact basic negotiating strategies. It just takes a lack of caring about collateral damage.
Can you tell me more about what you mean here? I feel like world wars were the transition point between realism and “liberal order” ideology. I’m curious what change you see happening where the transition point is 1970s.
There could have been deals/agreements behind the scenes. This is not a republican "first". The democrats did the same to get Facebook and other social media to censor news. Trump is literally playing their book but with his style.
Anyone who can not see the obvious difference in substance, intent, scope, and scale is either willfully ignorant or seriously lacking in reading comprehension and reasoning skills.
Requesting curbs on rampant disinformation is not even close to the same thing as crashing the economy to extort our closest allies and major business and industry players.
Who are you to decide what is or isn't disinformation?
You can ask this question about any belief or position on a topic. We each decide for ourselves the answer and society decides this through its elected leaders and the judiciary. All societies regulate speech.
A request to not amplify disinformation is NOT censorship. A threat of legal or military action is.
Of course there are edge cases, but blatant and hard-debunked falsehoods such as "The earth is flat", "Contrails are chemical spraying", Russia did not attack Ukraine", "Vaccines cause autism", "Auschwitz and Dachau were not concentration camps where people were killed" are all disinformation, and they are disseminated for the very specific purpose of undermining trust and the capability of western societies to survive, for the purpose of implementing authoritarianism.
If you evidently expect a society to unilaterally disarm and do nothing, you are part of the problem.
Which didn't really work since what exactly are US tech companies giving Trump in exchange for eliminating tariffs?
And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
> And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
You'll eventually be buying them, for more than you pay now but less than the imported price, from a large US company that bribed whoever Dear Leader is at the time, for exemptions.
Bribes. Obvious bribes. Over and over. How many millions do you spend on your Mar-a-Lago memberships? How many nights do you pay for empty rooms in Trump hotels?
Sorry, but what would have been the consequences of the tariffs on Chinese imports? Do you imagine American citizens having to pay twice or more for an iPhone (or not getting one at all) because of Trump? Not being able to afford a new laptop, because of Trump? Not being able to buy all the cheap consumer electronics, because of Trump? The "blackmail" (except it's simply the consequences of his own actions) goes two ways here- see also the TikTok debacle: or how to explain to hundreds of millions of enraged Americans that they cannot use their favourite social network because of Trump.
It's theoretically possible that the Republicans will also want him removed from office. Right now it feels unlikely. If he had kept the random crazy tariffs high and that resulted in some financial disaster that was more likely. But he changed his mind and the markets seem to be recovering (so much for we lost trust and it'll never be the same again).
The rich have always blamed others for the growing wealth gap.
Americans often point to outside forces instead of holding the government accountable.
Years of messaging have trained people to support tariffs, spending cuts, and even anti-immigrant policies—despite the need for labor.
The real issue isn't spending, it's taxation. And we've let China ignore WTO rules for too long. Trump should've targeted tariffs at China alone—but he is the president, not me.
China's WTO compliance record is often criticized for several reasons, including violations of market orientation principles, state-led industrial planning, excessive subsidies, and non-transparency regarding subsidies. Furthermore, China's policies on forced technology transfers, intellectual property protection, and governmental procurement have also faced scrutiny.
Here's a more detailed look at the specific WTO rules China has been criticized for ignoring:
Market Orientation and State-Led Industrial Policies:
China's approach to economic development, characterized by state-led industrial planning, is seen as inconsistent with the WTO's principles of market orientation and non-discrimination.
Subsidies and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs):
China's extensive use of subsidies for domestic industries, including SOEs, and its failure to make timely and transparent notifications of these subsidies, are major points of contention.
Forced Technology Transfers and Joint Venture Requirements:
China has been criticized for requiring foreign companies to transfer technology to Chinese firms as a condition for market access, which violates WTO principles of fair trade and market competition.
Intellectual Property Protection:
China's record on protecting foreign intellectual property rights, including trade secrets, has been a long-standing issue, with concerns about theft and lack of enforcement.
Discriminatory Trade Practices:
China's policies on governmental procurement, discriminatory standards for technology, and restrictions on market access in services sectors have been criticized for hindering fair competition and market access for foreign companies.
Failure to Reciprocally Open Government Procurement:
China has been criticized for not fully reciprocating the government procurement concessions it pledged as part of its WTO accession agreement.
Retaliatory Use of Trade Remedies:
China's use of trade remedies, such as anti-dumping and safeguard measures, has sometimes been seen as retaliatory and inconsistent with WTO princip
(They were also supposed to let Visa and Mastercard in)
Also Capital Controls are a big one. You can't get your money out and I have read several times people are forced to spend more money in China to get part of their money out.
More Google AI
China maintains strict capital controls, limiting the flow of money in and out of the country. These controls affect both individuals and companies, with restrictions on repatriating profits and capital. While there are annual limits for individuals, businesses also face specific procedures and conditions before they can repatriate profits, according to INS Global Consulting.
Elaboration:
For Individuals:
Annual Limits:
Chinese residents have an annual limit of $50,000 USD equivalent for transferring money out of the country, says Wise.
Currency Exchange:
RMB cannot be transferred directly; it must be converted to foreign currency, notes INS Global Consulting.
Work Permit:
Individuals must have a work permit and be employed in China to be eligible for repatriation, according to INS Global Consulting.
Required Documents:
Applications for repatriation require documents like passports, employment contracts, and tax bills, says INS Global Consulting.
Exchanges and Fees:
Individuals can use banks or exchange agencies (like Western Union and MoneyGram), but fees will vary, says INS Global Consulting.
For Companies (FIEs - Foreign Invested Enterprises):
Capital Account Regulations:
China's "closed" capital account means companies must comply with strict rules when moving money in or out, according to CNN.
Profits Repatriation:
Companies can only repatriate profits after specific conditions are met, including tax compliance and a company's annual audit.
Surplus Reserve Fund:
Companies must allocate a portion of their after-tax profits to a mandatory surplus reserve fund, which can impact the amount available for repatriation, notes China Briefing.
Withholding Tax:
Dividends repatriated to foreign investors are subject to a 10% withholding tax, says China Briefing.
State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE):
The SAFE regulates capital account transactions and requires foreign investors to open separate accounts for current and capital accounts, notes China Briefing.
New Controls:
Increased government oversight and security measures have been introduced to scrutinize outbound investments, according to China Briefing.
In Summary:
China's capital controls are a complex system that limits both individual and corporate capital movements. While there are some recent efforts to relax controls, they remain a significant factor for businesses and individuals operating in China, requiring careful planning and compliance with regulations before any money can be moved out of the country.
About 30-40% of the country will stand behind the cult of Trump no matter what he does. With that power, almost every single Republican politician is afraid of getting primaried. Trump has already been impeached twice and it went nowhere.
It's crazy that the election hinged on such small proportions of the population, that the result for Trump was prison or wealth (through further lawlessness) and the result for USA was a chance for middle-of-the-road socialism vs a rapid descent into being a fascist regime.
You're kidding yourself (or you've been misled) if you think there was a chance of anything approaching socialism from a Harris administration. Even granting the benefit of the doubt that "middle-of-the-road socialism" was what she meant by "opportunity economy", there still stands the fact that construction is complex, and takes coordination between interests at scale where destruction is simple and can be done (apparently) unilaterally.
Per Churchill, “To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.” .
This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies on the everyday life and I wonder if that is really the case. As I'm not located in the states, I'm very much interested to hear from a US resident if that is really the case.
The biggest mistake tech companies have done over the past 2 decades is not spending enough money lobbying. Every other industry manages to stay under the radar by continuing to pay both sides. Tech industry never got involved in politics so they were easy targets for politicians on minor issues.
I mean given that they are in tech, the biggest mistake was being located in a city or state. I can understand that they have to deal with the US government (any company anywhere in the world have to deal with it) but they don't have to deal with San Francisco/California. They choose that position and they don't deserve sympathy for being passive about it.
From the perspective of a citizen’s everyday life who sees that their life is getting more expensive and consumes information from a curated essentially list - eg. Instagram, fb etc - from the operator of that platform. I don’t think that the average person in the states - like in my European country - watches tv or buys a newspaper. In this context is the PR and hence effect from the government more than that of the tech companies ?
A tech company can’t shoot me with impunity under “qualified immunity”. Put me in jail, harass me because I don’t look like a belong in my own neighborhood, take my property under civil forfeiture without a trial…
You're right about these most serious adverse outcomes, but don't forget what could happen if you (say) randomly get your Big Tech account locked/suspended/banned for some reason that was ultimately erroneously flagged by an AI, and then cheerfully executed at scale.
The examples you provided are more fundamental and I won't trivialize them, but making you lose your "keys to your own digital space" is a very real power they have over you.
As an American, I regret to inform you that you're trying to use logic to understand a situation where it seems like logic wasn't used (in terms of the economic impact). These are the same fuckwits that tried to claim a trade deficit is the same as a tariff.
I am unsure why anyone would want to change the trade imbalance when you are arguably the richest country on earth. You have a trade imbalance because you are rich and can buy everything you want.
Nobody in onshoring manufacturing with this level of instability in the finances of this country at this time. Trump changes his mind too often to build billions of dollars worth of factories.
The budget deficit is not the trade deficit. You are not taking on debt when you purchase a foreign good, just like you as an individual don't take on debt when you go to Walmart and exchange money for goods but Walmart doesn't buy anything from you.
The US domestic economy is vastly larger than its foreign trade (which is only 20% of America's GDP), so you can in fact run a persistent trade deficit and a budget surplus at the same time, which the US actually did for a while during the 90s and early 2000s. We need to teach more economics honestly.
Sure, but pointing a financial gun at the heads of your creditors will cause them to immediately cease giving you further loans and start selling off the debt they already hold.
This isn’t some analogy.
This is precisely what just happened!
The bond market imploded and less stupid people forced Trump to backpedal.
He’s a child playing with many-trillion-dollar matters. I wouldn’t trust Trump to split a dinner cheque.
You are assuming manufacturing trade as only income. Services export and IP export are other where USA leads. When Apple sells iPhone in India and China, it gets to bring back the profits to the USA. Same goes for EU paying for Netflix and Disney movies and Google services. Same for McDonalds, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Collectively, US companies make 100s of billions of profits from outside USA. Another perk is being the reserve currency, you print bonds for free, get clothes/toys for that and rest of the world is just holding onto that IOU. Again, trillions of dollars.
Are you confusing the budget deficit with the trade deficit? Is that what all this is about?
I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
But that has nothing to do with whether my household budget is balanced.
Do people really think that making goods more expensive for consumers will somehow produce the funds to support even greater tax cuts for billionaires?
> I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
And if, for example, a sales tax was increased this would motivate you to buy less services, make food at home and learn how to fix your car.
Sure. But at the cost of the time that I currently use to do other things.
Are you moving the argument from conflating budget and trade deficits to saying the United States’ multi-century economic focus on consumer spending is a mistake, and we need to shift to a savings-focused economy like China used to be? I also think that’s wrong, but it has nothing at all to do with the federal government’s budget deficit.
Or are you under the mistaken impression that trade income is the only income the country has?
The "smart trumpers" I know have already staked out the entire range of possible outcomes:
1) He is completely restructuring global trade and decoupling us from China which is tough but necessary medicine because our biggest geopolitical adversary cannot be our largest trading partner
2) You can't believe half of what he says, he's all bluster, he's addicted to deals and will sign some fake deals to score a domestic win and we will resume status quo
Thinking the status quo will return so easily is like Putin pulling out of Ukraine and saying "So we're back to 23rd January (Edit/Correction: February) 2022, right, friends?".
The trust in the US (dollar) hegemony has now been eroded, and will probably continue until a purge of the regime of idiots (not just the oust of one idiot...).
No president is going to ride out a self-imposed multi-year global trade reconfiguration triggering inflation, shortages and unemployment.
Nor is putting the genie back in the bottle possible now and so even if you return to status quo trade policy, you've now spooked the world re: reliability of US as partners, US dollar, US debt, etc.
Worst of both worlds really. Incredible self owns over and over.
The goals are petty profit, some extortion, some illegal trading. Destroying 80% of the value of the US isn't meaningful if he gets to own a lot more of the remainder. Everything is profit for the broke real estate conman of 2015.
3) It's a plan for him to (unconstitutionally without Congress) create such enormous Import Taxes on the American people that they replace the eeeevilll federal Income Tax. This situation will magically persist indefinitely as people continue to buy and produce in the same pattern as before for no reason.
Right so nothing he is doing is smart or makes sense, and the "smart" people who try to put intellectual scaffolding around his actions get repeatedly disproven by his subsequent actions...
Neither. They're unwilling to concede he's run out of the Kremlin and the chaos and damage is the only purpose. The only reason he backs down on any of it is because he can't afford not to, so he's doing the usual brinksmanship, instructed by whoever's telling him to axe those obscure aviation safety committees (someone has detailed info), and probably hoping he can flee to Moscow at some point.
I don't think he'll be let off the hook, though. He's tasked to ruin us well below 'status quo', even for people diligently not paying attention.
He has a plan, it is called Project 2025. Trump appointed the authors of the Project 2025 plan and they are executing it. Here is the chapter on trade and tariffs, authored by Peter Navarro who is currently Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
I'd nominate Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. As authoritarian "president for life" since 1986, he's demonstrated some savvy statecrafting amid Africa's resource wars and ethnic violence, making the country a point of stability and economic growth on the continent.
(Of course, he's got plenty of negatives on the record too. But I think in the game of "Great Man History", he's already left a big legacy.)
I'm curious as to why you chose Napoleon III. The context under which he rose to power seem quite different from Trump's. America isn't in the middle of a 60-years long revolution/counter-revolution cycle. What are the similarities?
The plan is to make every country and CEO grovel at the feet of the boss to be exempted from the tariffs. I’d say it’s corruption, but it’s more like a protection racket.
It's far from the only place the policy is incoherent. They fired the top ranking officer at the US base in Greenland for having the temerity to tell their host nation "I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice-President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base."
The evidence is "incoherent" because the hypothesis is wrong. A policy for America isn't there.
In contrast, everything becomes exceptionally coherent if you instead ask what the policy is for Trump's personal goals: punishing disagreement, amassing wealth, rewarding apparatchiks, and always being in a room full of flattery.
There is no planned strategy. Planning requires learning about entire systems, and Trump isn't smart enough to do that. He can only act on things placed before him. If he sees foreigners making money by selling into the US, he has to raise tariffs on it. There is no second order, third order, or any deeper level of understanding of what's going on. It's purely superficial action, on things Trumps eyes sees, not what his brain sees. There is no brain in there that can predict what would happen if tariffs were raised. He can only raise tariffs.
To be smart is to have systemic understanding, and Trump & the Republicans are incapable of that.
It's exactly what happened in his first term, when he got rid of the nation's pandemic preparedness because why would anyone ever need that, right?
> it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists
Not sure why there is a presumption that one exists or that its coherent. With even the slightest critical eye its easy enough to discern that this isn't about economic policy or trade and that the proposed "policy" doesn't make any sense. The guy in charge of this stuff is either seeing what he can get away with, fucking with people, or building a narrative...
that is to say what you are watching isn't "real".
It feels like we just hired a recent graduate, who is an egotistical know-nothing, to manage our databases. And he just decided to migrate all of the DBs to the cloud in the middle of the day without testing it, or checking any metrics. Now he wants to fail some of them back and thinks that should be "a cinch" but doesn't actually understand how anything works under the hood.
The factories will be disassembling the laptops, taking out the batteries. Then the empty laptops will be sent back to China. That will increase exports to China as well.
That's another patronage angle. When the feds buy Lenovo laptops, they have to comply with TAA. So they ship the laptops to Texas, "materially transform" them, package and ship to the customer.
You can be sure some crony owns the company that screws the display and puts stickers on the laptop with minimum wage workers.
I don't know why people keep expecting Trump to be different than what he has consistently shown us for all these years. There's no subtle plan. There's no long-term plan. He's cranking the levers immediately available to him for the drama, as he has always done.
People around him may have ideas and plans. They can sometimes get him to agree to one of these, but it never lasts long.
I mean, his rich friends made 340 billion in the stock market chaos. So I suspect there is at least a vague plan, but it has nothing to do with anyone but himself and those who support him getting richer. But that's the only plan I think Trump has ever had in his entire life, or will ever have.
Like he's just not that deep. He's an incredibly shallow, inexperienced, dim, incurious old man who has never worked a job in his life, never built anything, never did anything. He arrived on top and his greatest achievement in life was managing to not lose it, in a country where it is specifically very hard to do that.
And hearing his supporters talk about how strong he is is just objectively hilarious. Man looks like 4 steepish flights of stairs would kill him stone dead.
(It appears to be a promotional piece for a "CNBC Titans" episode featuring Trump.)
I try to assume good intent, which includes not writing off the odd things people post as bot-generated, but in this case, attributing this to a bot is quite a positive spin.
Maybe it's a puff piece, but it contains examples of what he did with his life and businesses. You couldn't write an article like that after 2015 or so without it being influenced by his disaster of a political career.
My point is, he didn't just sit on daddy's money, he actually pulled off a couple of savvy moves. There are plenty of other things to criticize him for.
Why would you want an article on someone that excludes context from their most impactful and most visible decade? It's true that an author today, who knows about his 2024 conviction for fraudulently overstating the value of his properties, would bring a much more skeptical eye to claims about what a success they were. Did he seem to be making better deals in 2010 because he was better at it then, or because nobody was looking as closely at whether they were really good?
Because the first guy I replied to claimed Trump never did anything earlier in his life but inherit money, and I wanted to provide examples of how that isn't true.
The Tiffany's transaction definitely happened, and no landowner in Manhattan has left money on the table like that since. As scummy and self-promoting as he is, he changed the real estate market in NY and made some investments that paid off in the 70s and 80s.
I think that puts to rest this idea that he just rested on daddy's money and then lost money on his Atlantic City casinos, or whatever.
(Standard disclaimer that he has always sucked, and maybe he never made a good business move after the 80s.)
Did the Tiffany's transaction definitely happen? Is there any independent verification of Trump's claims that he obtained their air rights under favorable terms because other developers were leaving money on the table?
When it comes to global impact, can you even confidently say you're being strategic? It almost feels like staying tactical is the only viable strategy - there are simply too many variables. The chances are high that any strategy you come up with is doomed to fail.
Much like Russia's overnight transition to a market economy in 1991, which opened the door to oligarch pillaging of national resources, 2 successive economic crises and a bond default, and 2 brutal wars in Chechnya.
Something tells me Trump's top economic advisers aren't based in the US, just as Yeltsin's strings weren't being pulled from Moscow.
That's how corruption works in a banana republic. Good things for my friends, hell for everyone else. It is the furthest you can be from free trading capitalism that the US was preaching while it was good for them.
So firstly if this is the theoretical underpinning the White House should be messaging that instead of what they've been saying. Also I've read that report before (this and some other reports have been referenced in media I have listened to) and I wouldn't say they are following it closely, if this was their plan it's already gone well off the rails laid out here.
Edit: to be more specific it literally talks about the potential pitfalls of unilateral tariffs, suggests imposing them over time, etc. There's a lot of stuff in there the US did so but also a lot that they did not follow (and also there's just stuff that is outside the scope of this fairly short document). I think part of the reason the tariffs caught people so flat footed is even well informed people assumed this would be how they were implemented and got the rug pulled out from under them on "Liberation Day"
It makes sense if you understand how Trump became president. He'll test something (through a tweet) to his audience and then amplify or kill it based on the response. It worked great with 50% of the US population or so; it doesn't seem to be working at all with the Chinese political elite.
Things like threatening Canada and Greenland's sovereignty, unilaterally tanking stock markets and levying huge tariffs on western trading partners are not popular with his voters.
What they want doesn't matter anymore, these moves are about splitting the western economic and military alliances, a goal Russia has had since the 1960s.
> It’s not clear whether Jamieson Greer is actually steering this, or if any of it was thoroughly thought through.
We know for sure that Greer isn't steering this. Greer was testifying before a congressional committee when Trump announced huge changes to tariffs on China. Greer hadn't even been told.
“Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.”
That's a massive misread. You are confusing the direction of influence between secondary public stock markets and federal executive orders.
The tariffs are supposed to strengthen self sufficiency, and discourage imports of stuff the US can do on their own.
Chip manufacturing, (which by the way is often only the manufacturing and not the design or IP of the chips), is an exception for whatever reason, may be labour costs, but it may also be that chips are a mineral heavy and diverse product, so it's one of the few products where autarky isn't feasible or very rewarding.
And there would be situations without exemptions where the US may have been incentivized to import the raw materials and rebuild megachip factories, of which there are only like a dozen in the world, creating a huge output inefficiency due to political reasons on two fronts.
it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists
The strategy is to keep everyone unsure what might come next.
It's like in boxing. When you hit your opponent and leave them confused and uncertain what you might do next, you use that to your advantage and keep on hitting. It's how you "win."
>The strategy is to keep everyone unsure what might come next.
If the goal is to encourage investment into US manufacturing, then that's the exact opposite to the strategy he needs - investment requires stability and confidence that the N-year investment will eventually pay off. Nobody will invest due to tariffs if the tariffs might disappear tomorrow.
If Trump has learned anything, it is that the US is a lot easier to bully than others. He is convicted of a felony, he talks down to his own voters, abandons his biggest promises (repealing ACA and building a wall) and they still let him lead the country!
No, other autocrats have instituted chaos to grab power before. Too many people underestimate Trump and his allies. They are going to grab as much power as they can for as long as they can.
To understand this, I think you have to neither overestimate or underestimate Trump and Musk.
Both Trump and Musk seem be to essentially ideologues, visionary tough-talkers, who have actually succeed (or appeared to succeed) to various endeavors through having underling who work to shape their bluffs into coherent plans. This works well for various as long as the delicate balance of competent handlers and loud-mouthed visionaries is maintained.
The problem is the process of Trump winning, losing and then winning again all him to craft an organization and legal framework to put forth he vision uncorrected, unbalanced and lacking all guardrails.
The strategy is to sow fear and uncertainty to drive capital from stocks to government bonds and drive down the bond yield. Bessant is pretty clear about this. Once they get the bond yields down and refinance a lot of the short term debt into longer term debt they free up operating budget. Combine with Elon’s DOGE cutting costs and Lutnick raising some capital from tariffs, and it is a pretty good strategy. I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
It's not a good short term strategy at all. If that's really the goal, their left and right hands need to have a chat because one of them's going to make the deficit way worse, so if the other's goal is to "free up operating budget" by reducing debt service they really ought to get on the same page, because anything "freed up" is going to be eaten by the other bullshit they're doing.
Besides, this is a wildly expensive way to go about it. The harm to receipts from the economic uncertainty will blow a hole in the federal budget and leave states reeling (to say nothing of the "other hand" making cuts at the IRS, which will also be a net cost)
Great strategy, except its not working. Bond yields are up (probably because foreigners and foreign countries are selling US bonds). DOGE cost cuts are insignificant. Raising capital from tariffs doesn't seem to be working because they're really taxes, and Americans don't like taxes.
This is exactly the strategy but it is failing miserably.
The reason for the pivot was because the 10-30 year yields didn't come down, the price on the 30 year got crushed. The 30 year almost went back to the lows.
There was literally no flight to safety. Completely the opposite.
> I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
This strategy has failed spectacularly, as bond yields are still up and treasuries are sold like crazy. US treasuries are no longer seen as safe havens. People rather invest in gold or treasuries from other countries which are not led by a corrupt government. Buying US treasuries is now seen as "lending Trump money", and since Trump runs the US economy exactly like he ran his companies, where IIRC he defaulted on debt at least six times, US treasuries are now a rather risky investment.
Can we use Occam's Razor and assume that nobody knows what would be the optimal tariff rates and if you don't have a reliable mathematical model the only choice you are left with is experimentation and A/B tests.
I manufacture a small open source product in China, I also warehouse there (because shipping is so much cheaper). About 1/3 of my customers live in the US, other customers live in countries that charge tariffs, they have to deal with local customs or post offices to pay what they owe, it's not something that's really an issue for me (except for occasionally helping people track down missing packages).
Currently shipping out of China seems disrupted, more because the shipping companies are leary about getting stuck with the tariffs, the US doesn't have the infrastructure to collect them, Post Offices don't have the bandwidth, people can't take time off work etc etc - that may change, but it's not something that can change overnight
Trump's exemption for computer stuff will likely mean that my packages will eventually sail through, but I'm about to do another build, China's reciprocal tariffs will affect my cost of parts and it's a bit unfair making my non-US customers pay for this silly pointless trade war, since the silliness changes every day I think I;m just going to wait this out for a month or two
One of the most surprising things about this announcement is that it didn't happen during business hours where the insiders could buy call options before hand.
My cynical read is that there will eventually be complete corporate capture of these tariffs. Then firms will try to protect their carveouts that make unfair advantages.
Its about their corporate supporters choosing winners and losers. Its the only reason I can conjure that corporate America has otherwise been silent.
Auto parts come to mind. Also there are plenty of products on shelves at big box retailers like Walmart that are made in China and won’t fall into the exempted categories.
It is a huge amount of various goods. So much so that even if you look up a breakdown, 25% will be in other.
Chemicals, base metals, stone, glass, etc etc.
What doesn't China export? Basically everything. So everything minus these exemptions.
They're called reciprocal but the Chinese tariffs on US goods looks like they're gonna stay. That and dumping our bonds doesn't bode well for the rest of us.
He really seems delighted when foreign countries reach out to him and to his friends for "making deals". It's all about personal connections with his big supporters and donors, who are all apparently part of the greater government now. It should be called the "recorruption" of the US.
The US is about to find out that the rest of the world is much more adelt dealing with a corrupt government because they have more experience with it
This is pretty much how I expected this to play out, at least for now. Trump acts all tough and doesn't back down publicly, but China actually doesn't back down. So what happens is that some businesses get exemptions to mitigate the impact. Then some fine print gets changed about how the rules are enforced. Like, suddenly it turns out that Kiribati is a major electronics supplier to the US :)
End result - US economy takes a hit, China takes a smaller hit. Trade balance widens further, most likely. The rich get richer, while many small companies struggle to survive.
Maybe publicly was not the right word. What I really meant is that the nominal 145% rate will remain in effect, so he can continue to pretend that the tariffs are still there and still hurting China, while he makes "minor adjustments" to protect American businesses.
This is a massive sign that Trump's double down strategy is failing badly. He only has one play: Be a bully and double down any time someone fights back. It works when you have the leverage but as soon as you don't anymore you loose, big. The US just ran out of leverage. I don't know about everyone else but I just started looking into how to move money and investments outside the US.
It's so painful watching this administration be forced to react to their preventable mistakes in-real-time with no repercussions.
One thing is throwing and seeing what sticks, but at the seat of the presidency, it seems like such an antipattern for leadership. And yet, the support is unwavering. It's exhausting.
My partner just canceled her trip where she'd have easily spent 4-5k in the US economy due to uncertainty in the border governance.
A lot of my friends are rethinking sending their children to US for college education while Trump is in power and are considering European schools. That's probably a few million dollars over next 2-3 years potentially lost from the US economy from just people i personally know. And no one is coming from China.
The media coverage seems a bit weird to me. The primary source was released 12 hours ago, but when I did a bit of research 4 hours ago I only saw a few reports from dubious Chinese sources like this: https://www.zhitongcaijing.com/content/detail/1277768.html
Then about 2 hours ago all major media outlets were covering it.
It's funny, (well, not funny) because the social issues are the ones where the toothpaste doesn't go back in the bottle. Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
So the top 1% will benefit economically from the right being in power, but the rest will spend the rest of their lives mad about whatever the current social change is, regardless of who's in power.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is 100% false and naive. History is profoundly reversible. There is no such thing as guaranteed progress.
So-called "acceptance" of homosexuality is a very recent phenomenon but in no way mainstream. Even in the liberal progressive Bay Area you can get gay bashed quite easily (including in the Castro!).
Voting rights for women? Basically just turned 100 years old in the United States and already in the process of getting rolled back via the SAVE act.
Don't assume that any of the liberal trends we've seen in the last 150 years are here to stay. America is an interesting historical exception and anomaly -- by no means how humanity has done business for the majority of its existence.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is remarkably naive. I wish you were right, but this sentiment isn't optimism; it's complacency.
Progress seems to only go in the right direction on social issues, because people are very good at developing reasons why the social views they happen to hold are the objectively correct ones. As any advocate will talk your ears off about, open borders used to be the consensus position, until 150 years of immigration restrictions convinced people that it's not realistic to just let anyone move wherever they'd like.
I think with these erratic changes, the US government is paralyzing the economy. How are businesses supposed to restructure their supply lines if policy changes every 48h?
Behind the apparent waffling, the one constant is the administration’s effort to direct hatred towards China. You have American military leaders predicting an invasion of Taiwan in a specific time window. It’s all a circus.
So a 145% tariff on high tech goods will hurt the US too much? China should ban high tech exports to the US. That's gonna hurt both sides but the war was already started by Trump.
Slightly off-topic, but is the result of the USA tariff "trade-war" mean that we get to trade at a discount with China in Europe? What I mean is, since it's cheaper for China to trade with us in Europe now, does that mean we gain some bargaining power?
One danger is that all the cheap Chinese crap will be redirected at Europe. It does have to upside of cheaper goods for Europe overall, which is fine for everything we don't make and which is overall adding value. The risk is that we also get all cheap plastic junk, unless EU regulations can keep it out environmental concerns.
This reads to me as "we're doubling-down on 145%+ tariffs for everyone else".
This is getting frighteningly close to a Russian-style economy. As in, a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government. The furthest system possible from the free-market paradigm that built the American economy as it stands today.
> a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government
Note that this is not an exemption for companies, but an exemption for goods:
> A new list of goods to be exempted from the latest round of tariffs on U.S. importers was released, and it includes smartphones, PCs, servers, and other technology goods, many of which are assembled in China.
So all anyone has to do to qualify is produce some of the most complicated electronic devices and components in the history of the world at the largest scale possible, without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive, and then they can benefit from the gifts to the established giants?
What a gift. What a great idea. That'll surely spur innovation and domestic production and have no effect to further insulate the giants from competition.
> without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive
It seems like some of these comments are missing how competition works.
Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
That is, the companies making the goods still affected by tariffs aren’t in competition with the companies making goods now exempt by tariffs.
Yes, its true that they will have a better chance at thriving under these exemptions, but whether they thrive or not should have little impact on the other companies.
To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of this decision — or any of the tariffs, for that matter.
I’m just simply arguing that competition isn’t really the angle to use to argue against this particular decision.
> Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
Not true, for example smart phones replaced home computers for most people. Those are two very different goods, but since they can accomplish the same thing for the average person they end up competing.
It is incentive to somewhere you can get Chinese components without massive Chinese tariffs, can sell to the US without massive tariffs, and has cheap labour or tax incentives. Several countries will be sticking up their hand, if manufacturers take the gamble that the tariffs will remain for a long enough period.
No. This reads as capitulation by Trump who is now finding out his long held, half-baked economic theories are wrong. Trump got spanked by the bond market and realized how weak his position was. He can't walk it all back overnight without appearing even weaker than he already is. He's going to slowly roll back most consequential tariffs to try to escape blame for damaging the economy.
I’m completely over the tech industry falling over itself to bootlick and apologize away everything we’ve seen play out recently. The Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, recently posted on X trying to explain the strategy and likely calm investors fears: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1909822463707652192
“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”
“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”
TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.
These excerpts and especially your TLDR doesn’t fairly digest his thesis and is a disingenuous and skewed read. Encourage others to read the whole tweet and form their own opinion instead.
It opens up avenues to all sorts off oligarchy style bribery and lack of market competition. ultimately, the country will be looted, since the most successful businesses will not thrive on its merits
The US economy was not built on a free-market. US private capitalists have been built on a free market; now that their profits are under attack because they are being outcompeted by China, so they are running away with the ball. American economy real growth, where most white Americans gained wealth, came after World War II, where it was government led and controlled. It was the same for Europe, where they had to rebuild all that was destroyed after the war. It was all mostly government controlled and financed.
The problem today is that US and European capitalists are in power and do not want to admit that the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few. As China becomes the dominant economy, the rest of the world has to follow to stay competitive. So these are the death knell of a dying economic and government system. The US had the chance to bring real change for the people with Bernie Sanders, but that was scuttled by the capitalist non-democratic forces, allowing for the rise of Trump. US citizens have been hoodwinked by linking socialist thought, where caring about your fellow man is undemocratic, i.e., socialism.
>>Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few
Is it better? For some reason average European lives better then Chinese, inequality is also not so huge
The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.
Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.
>the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better
You want the US government to provide more subsidies to US tech companies so they can stay competitive? Because that is what China is doing for its tech sector.
You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten
>You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].
The US already subsidizes these companies, sometimes more severely.
The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.
And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.
US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.
We're building a hybrid of Italian Fascist and a Argentinian Peronist like state.
The desire for transactional wins and power overshadows all. Trump will unironically ally himself with a turd like Elon, or a turd like the UAW dude who glazed him on "Liberation Day". The state control of business is missing... perhaps we'll see that develop with Tesla.
It's a weird movement, because the baseline assumption is that the country is ruined. So any marginal win is celebrated, any loss is "priced in" politically.
This reeks "pay to play" very typical for banana republics.
Donations to presidential inauguration fund to get access to the president was already tradition in the US. Trump government just exploits it without shame.
This is a populism move, not pay-to-play. The imminent reality would have been this: many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
The exclusion is by category: Smartphones, laptop computers, memory chips, machines used to create semiconductors, flat screen TVs, tablets and desktop computers. Apple, NVidia, and Dell are simply examples of some companies that will “benefit” (be harmed less).
Let me explain how that works in the real world — you drop all the tags/boxes/receipts for the merchandise, maybe apply some dirt, then you can claim that it's not new and you brought it with you from your home country originally. Also in the airport there is a rather high chance you get to go through the green lane where your bags aren't checked. There are certain manners that help with not being singled out for the bag check. How do regular people learn these? When you live in the corrupt country, you quickly learn how to look ordinary and not interesting to the authorities.
> then you can claim that it's not new and you brought it with you from your home country originally.
And then they can ask you for your Form 4457 that you filled out and presented to CBP before you left the country. Don't know what that is? Oops. Full duties owed on that iPhone then, thanks.
Yes, but people don’t always follow the law. CBP reported a spike in people smuggling eggs last month, and the margin on iPhones is a lot more tempting.
It's very clear that the system of Constitutional governance has been intentionally broken. It is very common for authoritarian regimes to have compliant judiciaries and broad legislative control.
Effective restoration and reconstruction of Constitutional governance will necessarily be dramatic. It's still doable, but optimism is more of a survival strategy than an obvious conclusion at this stage.
It’s not “insider” trading if you post about it publicly on Truth Social, the same way it’s not “insider” trading if you took out an ad in the New York Times.
The government is allowed to announce policy before doing it! Even if it affects stock prices!
Too bad! Insider trading, as a crime, requires that the information be nonpublic material information. You can join Truth Social and follow Donald Trump, so that makes the information public.
It actually is that broad. Futures traders often rely on industry-specific periodicals, which are “public”. Same for anything in the (high monthly cost!) Bloomberg terminal. So posting on a specific social media platform, where subscribing is free? That’s 100% public.
… are you hearing yourself? “It’s a good time to buy!” has the plain english meaning “you should buy stock”. Everyone, you included, understood he was talking about US company stocks. Which, if you did, you would have profited. This theoretical code would be “when i say it’s a good time to buy stock, we should all buy stock!”. That is, well, not a code.
He should have announced the policy, and said something like "we will pause the tariffs". But instead, he said something vague, which can be interpreted as a hint, and which will open the road for investigations.
It's not vague. I'm not a lawyer but usually cases of trading with insider information are taken very seriously. It's theft, basically. And the scale here is enormous.
He won by a single point, when 30% of the population didn’t vote. It’s not good for the future of the country that he got anywhere as many votes as he did but we should remember that an emboldened minority is still a minority.
Because of the way that the Electoral College works, it doesn’t matter if 2 million more people voted in California or everyone voted in Texas. It wouldn’t change anything. Only the swing states mattered
Sure, and in the swing states he won by small margins. I’m not saying it’s good by any means – much of the damage internationally seems irrecoverable – but anyone opposing him should remember that they have a lot of allies.
Tinfoil hat time, I don't think the man claiming everyone else cheated and who got caught cheating in a previous election got all his votes in a legal manner
All the data suggests the opposite. He wasn't in a position of power at the time; the federal government was controlled by the democrats. Elections are run at the state level and are so disparate procedurally that Russia gave up trying to flip them directly. There has been no discrepancy between exit polls and the results. We have to face the fact that this is who the United States chose, and this is who a significant portion of the electorate is ok with.
Elections are, in many if not most states, run electronically.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?
Voting machine integrity was litigated in the election trump lost. Fox, trump's propaganda organ, had to pay $781 million because they could not substantiate claims of electronic fraud. There are adversarial reviews of voting data at all levels, and audits done at the physical and electronic level. 60 lawsuits found no evidence of fraud. You can't just say, "I think this might have happened because it sounds sinister." There is a ton of legal, procedural, monitored, and reviewed data that overwhemingly makes the case that electronic voting fraud did not happen. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. Otherwise, its just vibes.
It's a winner take all two-party election where a 3% swing in sentiment results in a complete blowout.
Generally one of the two participants wins those.
There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.
He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.
It's not the furthest thing from the American economy as it stands today, but the inevitable conclusion of the "free-market" capitalism we've been practicing over the past number of decades.
Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right, he's an aspiration for wealthy capitalists across the nation. Generally people have felt that if only we could get an American businessman like Trump in charge of the country, running things the way a true capitalist would (as opposed to how those dirty awful communists/socialists tend to run things), then the country would start going right for a change.
Well now we have that, and in short order the country has Russian-style crony capitalism from the top. This would not happen in a country that actually cares about free markets. But we don't. Everything we consume is owned by like 10 companies. If you want to get a start in the market you have to get access to capital they control, or meet regulations they set, because they've captured the government regulators through bribes.
Trump is just taking this whole system of favoritism we've been living under and making it official. I for one am for it because honestly people pretending there is no corruption is worse than the corruption at this point.
The prevailing school of economic thought in America, until Nixon, is actually what Trump idealizes. Protectionism from outside “threats”, on the basis of security and sufficiency, and a loosely regulated internal market. In comparison, Russia has a lot of regulatory capture and straight up corruption that stifles the internal market.
I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries. For comparison, Putin unilaterally nationalizes and sells off companies to benefit his inner circle. The US isn’t nationalizing AMD and selling it to Nvidia at the behest of Jensen.
> I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries.
Same thing, these companies essentially run these industries and nobody else can get in.
If you want to make a competitor to Nvidia it would take you 20 years if you started RIGHT NOW. Hope you have a few hundred billion dollars lying around :P
The distinction between domains and companies fully disappears in an oligarchy.
Yet. They are still in the process of consolidating control over the government, the law, and universities. Once that's done, they will move on to corporations. It's been 2 months and change, give them time.
Pointed it out in the other thread, but this is a capitulation. China imposed retaliatory tariffs that remain in effect! There are a handful of businesses that do indeed export to China, and the net effect here is that they've all been thrown under the bus. China gets to kill/pick/control them at will now.
As a result of that, they got into some really successful negotiations with a lot of countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and America. I think they want to keep the subject on the news for as long as possible.
And then I imagine they'll probably silently drop the tariffs, because those are harmful for them.
The horrifying thing is that they don't have to. They hold all the cards now. They can drop their new trade barriers at will. Maybe they'll ask for concessions. Maybe they'll leave them in place to kill off troublesome competitors. Maybe they'll coerce the affected companies into selling to Chinese-owned interests at a steep discount. Maybe they'll just take a bunch of bribes.
This is how a trade war looks. And we're losing. Badly.
What do you mean "now?" With the amount of trade imbalance they had the ability to simply block exports at any time. It perhaps only works once but it's a very powerful lever.
It's not even a week since Secretary of Commerce Lutnick was explaining how he wants to bring back millions of jobs 'screwing the little screws in iPhones' to Amercia ?
There is really a good chance that we will develop a deep understanding of how the French Revolution happened and why they went straight to guillotines.
I cannot tell either. It seems to be a potentially well-intended remark about correcting an inaccurate historical analogy to the current U.S. national leadership. It may be important to remark upon potentially inaccurate information, even if in the comments section of an Internet forum, because otherwise more people will have a wrong impression of the French Revolution and the role of guillotines. When they go to watch Les Miserables they will also be surprised. This last remark was unimportant and for that, I deeply apologize.
Sorry for being vague. I was trying to point out that the first phase of the revolution (“the Revolution of 1789”) was basically a liberal aristocratic revolution not unlike the American Revolution. The radical egalitarians that orchestrated the Terror didn’t seize power until a few years later.
I stand corrected - thanks to pointing this out. Got to go back to some history books ! While I was aware that the Terror took some years to seize power, I always thought that guillotine usage started much sooner.
There were indeed quite a few informal lynchings in the early days, but not the organized mass executions of 1793-94 (which were largely provoked by war hysteria).
The original comment was based on a popular but wildly inaccurate summary of the French Revolution, where the average Joes got increasingly fed up with their rich oppressors and eventually decided to execute them. The revolutionaries never adopted a general policy that rich oppressors should face death, and most people who got guillotined were average Joes who ended up on the wrong side of some political dispute or another.
Nothing about the tariffs make any sense. The want to use the tariffs to negotiate with countries but also say they want to use tariffs to bring back manufacturing. If you are using tariffs to negotiate then once the country gives you what you want, you have to lift the tariff thus the free market keeping manufacturing overseas. If you want to bring back manufacturing then you can't use the tariff to negotiate.
I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
> I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
His supporters value blind loyalty and obedience, not logic. They don’t stand for themselves, they stand against others. They’ll gladly suffer if they think the other side is getting it worse. They’re the perfect target to be exploited.
Do you have a source for that? I hear that sentiment expressed often by Americans I meet here, but I never saw anyone explicitly saying "yes, I/we value blind loyalty". Is blind loyalty something Trump followers officially identify with?
> I hear that sentiment expressed often by Americans I meet here
I am not American.
> but I never saw anyone explicitly saying "yes, I/we value blind loyalty".
Not only do they show it through actions, they talk about it constantly. All you need are the keywords “Trump loyalty” and you get more examples than you know what to do with.
> “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy,” Trump once said. […]
> According to people who know him well, Trump’s definition of loyalty is blunt. “Support Donald Trump in anything he says and does,” […] “No matter what,” […] “Or else,” […] “I think he defines it as allegiance,” […] “And it’s not allegiance to the flag or allegiance to the country—it’s allegiance to Trump.”
The finer points don't matter. If it did, they'd be wondering why the nation is not awash in coal jobs and why Obamacare wasn't repealed. Both of those were supposed to have happened by 2020.
Tariffs are sold to them as "hitting back" against countries "exploiting America". They don't know what they are or how they work, and they definitely do not think of it as a tax, which is the definition you'd see in any AP Macroeconomics textbook.
All that matters is maintaining the illusion that "he's fighting for people like me".
Which is the biggest flaw in all this. If the goal was to bring consumer electronics manufacturing back to the US, adding a tariff that goes up every quarter would make sense. People could make plans and build factories. YC might even fund something.
Trump doesn't have the authority to set permanent tariffs. All this is being done as a temporary measure under the Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is for wars.
These backdoor tariffs are being challenged in court, and there's a good chance of the plaintiffs winning.[1]
For tariffs to stick, Congress has to do it. The Constitution gives Congress sole power over tariffs. There's a long-term track on this, going through the US Trade Representative's office, with Federal Register notices and public comments. Last week Greer was up on Capitol Hill testifying before a congressional committee. That's the normal path by which tariff changes are made. Greer is so out of the loop that he hadn't been told about the big tariff on China. That change came out while he was in front of the committee. He was publicly humiliated. Which means he can't do his job of negotiating with other countries on behalf of the US. Greer may quit.
When you dig into this, you don't find "4D chess".
That's what you get for electing a president with the intelectual and emotional maturity of a 5 year old.
Oh, oh, also, electing a felon, you get a lot of grifring, including, but not limited to the trump crypto scam, the insider trading Trump boasted about on video (about his friends making billions in the stock market).
This guy is not playing 5d chess guys, he's just a clown surrounded by yes men.
Maybe Trump genuienly wants to disrupt neoliberalism?
Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA. Maybe he wants to roll trade back to before 1968, the Hakone Maru, and the TEU container, to when he was in his 20s (a lot of people think that their formative years were the best, since that's when they were made, and I doubt Trump is an exception). I'm not saying Trump isn't a hypocrite, but is it slightly possible that some of what he says is actually what he intends to do, e.g. "making America great again" meaning in part a disruption to the globalised world order that the online left always seems to think is evil?
Maybe maybe maybe. These excuses are a fantasy. Have you considered maybe he really likes money and himself and anything outside of that doesn't fire any neurons?
Have you heard the engineering adage "the purpose of a system is what it does"?
Second-guessing the motivations of the Trump administration is tiresome. Let's just judge it by what it does and its effects, both speak for themselves.
> Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA.
As I said, what he is doing is not going to get stuff made in the US. Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't), the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub. That is the missing piece to all of these conversations. So we don't have the materials, we don't have the skills, and we seem to be attacking education so it doesn't look training people to do these things is in the cards? How is this plan meant to work?
The only lifeline I can throw your comment is that he wants to invade Canada and Greenland to steal their raw materials which at least lines up with the idea of getting raw materials to build up manufacturing.
> Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't),
What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
> the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub.
I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
> What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways. We also don't have the facilities to process these materials.
> I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
> Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways.
I've got news for you, that ship sailed a hundred, two hundred years ago. Most of the eastern seaboard of the US was clearcut of old growth forest. What we have now on the east coast is new growth. Still, the number of acres of old growth remaining is staggering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests#Uni... And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
If you're asking for no resource extraction, then you're asking either for negative economic growth or exploitation of someone else somewhere else. Far more responsible to regulate the industry here, where we have jurisdiction to ensure it is done sustainably, safely, and equitably. And far better for economic integrity in cases of pandemic or war.
> And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
I don't have a problem with most things when done sustainably. What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably? Gas companies still publicly deny or downplay climate change.
> What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably?
Unions, labor law, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_sit-down_strike in which the national guard and police used automatic weapons against striking workers, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster immortalized in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz7oguguIZE the winning of the work week, overtime pay, healthcare of any kind, holidays, payment in legal tender, existence of the country in the first place... so much more. I won't sugar coat it, no human endeavor is ever perfect, but I find the attitude that we can't do it, or we don't want to do it here as backwards and regressive. Worthy of rebuke. If our society depends on something, we should have no shame in doing it here. And if we can't figure out how to do it here safely, then we definitely shouldn't be doing it elsewhere.
These are all great accomplishments for labor law but they have nothing to do with sustainability. Maybe I'm not being clear, when I say sustainably, I mean for the environment. Most energy companies won't even admit climate change is real or severely downplay it. So no, I still don't think it will be done sustainably.
> Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
economics is a lot of made up theory and not hard science. you won't get any of his smarter supporters replying because even if they did you're showing an inability to model best-case. i mean you're personally at a loss?
if you took the average supporter of both sides neither seem smart. the clips they have of both sides is shameful. but those aren't the people implementing the policy, but they both support their tribes.
if you really are interested in understanding how they think you couldn't do worse than this:
It's not that they are managing it badly that I'm talking about.
It's that they manage it in a way to maximize their personal profits, with an absolute disregard of the ordinary folks.
Tariffs are one example - none of it makes sense, but companies still pay millions for a 'dinner at Mar-a-Lago' to get a favorable treatment.
What's hapening with law firms is even more disgusting.
I get the feeling that a lot of Democrats and 'real' Republicans thinks that he will get what he wants and then they just wait out 4 years. It's an almost 80 years narcissist, who doesn't care about people nor law, and who dreams about becoming a King. It only gets worse from here, not better.
If that was the case there'd be more coherency. There's these days where multiple people are asked a question, each answer is a shocking departure from policy and they all contradict and then an administrator comes out and is like "you're going to bring mining the global supply for rare earth minerals to Ohio?! Geology does not support you my good man".
So not even cynicism is supported by the evidence.
I mean they're also pillaging of course. Incompetent And malice. Both are possible
They just spouted two different justifications, jobs will come back to America, and robots will do the jobs. I guess the most generous explanation is jobs for people making robots in America by combining the two separate statements, but that's not even close to what they said.
they're manoeuvring to win the vote of American manufacturing robots for 2028. suffrage for manufacturing robots is something the far left & far right could both support, although there may be some disagreement over if the robots themselves or their owners should be allocated the votes.
The idea that you could "bring industry back" into the US with blanket tariffs is delusional and demonstrates a complete ignorance of the complexity of economic ecosystems and industrial culture. It takes a long time for sustained expertise and the needed supply chains to grow and form and mature in an economy.
You could argue that perhaps a selective application of tariffs might help the formation of such domestic industry, but tariffs are not something to wield lightly.
So we are going to… uhh… tariff and try to repatriate a lot of lower value less strategically important manufacturing while giving up on higher value strategic stuff like chips?
if they had planned all the tariff rates and things that get tariffed so well, why the see-saw? they are making up as they go along. this is worse than an incompetent biden!
>This latest round of tariff rates is currently set at 125% for Chinese goods and a 10% tax on imports from other trading partners. China also had an additional 20% tax on its goods that began in March, bringing its total to 145%.
Importers of these electronics will no longer face the newest taxes, and it cuts the Chinese rate down to 20% for them. The exceptions cover $385 billion worth of 2024 imports, 12% of the total. It includes $100 billion from China, 23% of 2024 imports from there. For these electronics, the average tax rate went from 45% to 5% with this rule.
The biggest global exemption is the import category that includes PCs and servers, with $140 billion in 2024 imports, 26% of it from China. Circumstances may change again, but this benefits AI king Nvidia, server-makers like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
HPE
+2.91%
, and Super Micro, and PC makers like Dell and HP
HPQ
+2.49%
. The average tax rate went from 45% to 5% here, according to Barron’s calculations.
The biggest newly exempt category for Chinese goods is smartphones, with $41 billion in 2024 U.S. imports, 81% of all smartphone imports. A 145% tax on that would be $60 billion, but even the new 20% tax is a hefty $8 billion.
Nothing means anything anymore. This of course will change completely on monday, then again on tuesday. Of course in the spirit of insider plundering. This circus will go on until we hear the magic words "the chocolate rations have been increased by 20g".
Things started to make more sense to me once I realized that human beings hate freedom and love tyranny. Once you accept this, it all falls in place. Deporting citizens to foreign prisons? Sounds great. Incoherent foreign and economic policy? Love it. Freedom of the press? Who needs it! Destruction of democracy? Own the libs! Legalize bribery of foreign officials? Even the playing field! And finally, words don’t need to mean anything because they are simply evocations intended to stir up certain emotions. They are more akin to a hunter’s duck call. The hunter doesn’t speak duck and doesn’t care whether that sounds he’s making have any meaning, he simply makes noise and looks for a result. Not getting the desired result? Just change the noise a little.
This is why democracy will eventually fail and autocracy will rise in its place. And no one will ever learn.
So the broligarchs get an escape hatch and everyone else (particularly the middle class) has to pay up to appease the ego of the worst president in US history? This seems like a bad economic and very undemocratic plan that we're getting here.
So now the finished products are tariff free, but the input costs when bought into America are tariffed. The exact opposite of what you would want to do to bring manufacturing back to America.
Wasn’t Howard Lutnick on TV recently explicitly saying they wanted to bring iPhone assembly here? How is one to understand the union of these two perspectives?
Howard Lutnick got pulled from the TV sidelines over stuff like this apparently. Bessent is running the show now which is probably why they’re actually responding to the bond market punching them in the face this week
It would be karmically appropriate, but I'd guess nobody has an actual interest in doing so. Export restrictions are also easier to circumvent than import restrictions by routing through third countries. Unless, of course, you apply the export tariff to everyone, which again nobody has an interest in doing.
The corruption is the plan. The tariffs are the boot on everyone's neck. Carve outs based on friend, foe, and bribes adjust the pressure. This will be on-going and capricious.
Other businesses not exempt from these tariffs should sue for violation of equal protection. Equal protection under the law means equal treatment under the law and this absolutely is not equal treatment at all.
For my next computer, e.g., for a Web server, considering an AMD processor, Gigabyte mother board, Western Digital disks (rotating and/or solid state), main memory, video display, etc.
Just checked, none of that comes from China!!! The businesses are in Taiwan, South Korea, the US. Manufacturing is in Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea. The processor design, the US. The equipment for manufacturing the chips, Holland.
Trump's unpredictable tariff decisions challenged long-standing investment assumptions, even shaking confidence in U.S. Treasury bills, assets once considered the safest in the world. It showed how a handful of people can make global markets, and people's lives tremble.
I was following HN guidelines and trying to come up with the most charitable interpretation. However, try a I might, I can't come up with anything better than 'sheer incompetence'
Tariffs can work, but they need to be paired with sound industrial policy and careful, strategic implementation. At the best of times, it takes a decade plus for the results to start showing.
Instead of that, so far we have seen
* Tariffs imposed as executive orders under a dubious exercise of the National Emergencies Act. This alone pretty much guarantees that they will be rolled back by the next president
* Zero participation from Congress and not even a pretense of attempting to build a bipartisan consensus
* Haphazard implementation with rates and countries affected whiplashing wildly from day to day
* Immediate capitulation at the first sign of trouble.
At this point we have shown the world that
* There is no real plan and probably never was a plan
* Trump has no actual stomach for a fight. Big economies like China can just wait for Trump to fold completely
* No one should be rushing to invest in the US given the shaky legal and political foundations of the tariffs
We brought our economy to the brink of a financial crisis, alienated all of our long standing allies, destroyed confidence in the US Dollar and economy, eased off tariffs on China while China has done no such thing and our exports to them are still tariffed at over 100%.
All of this for no real policy gains. It would be laughable if the consequences to us and future generations weren't so dire.
Ugh. Note that this is a capitulation. China's retaliatory import tariff rate remains in effect, and they get to decide which industries to relax, if any. The net effect is that if you're in one of the handful of businesses that export to China, the Trump administration threw you under the proverbial bus.
It actually feels nice to see US people having a taste of the kind of government their intelligence service force other nations to have by coups, except that it does not feel nice at all. I'm sorry guys.
I am among the few who think it might eventually prove itself a good idea.
To start with, Europe has no good cards to play. Ultimately, Europe will side with the United States while it builds self-sufficiency on several fronts, especially defense. Europe also recognizes that the complete relocation of production capacity into China wasn't good in the long run; it's just that they had no ability to act on their own.
The US has repeatedly suggested publicly that it's not entirely about tariffs, and more might have been said privately. The tariffs the EU and Britain will drop are probably not what the US is after; what the US wants is to reduce global demand for Chinese manufacturing. Europe will find it easier to sell this—bringing manufacturing back and protectionism even at the cost of say, welfare and environment—to the public due to the violent shakedown over the past two weeks, as well as what happened with Ukraine and Russia. Ongoing European emergency measures to increase defense spending will be followed by incentives to rebuild strategic industry—like how China supported civilian–military partnership with policy.
Meanwhile the Indian government is already looking for ways to replace Chinese imports with US imports, where it can [1]. Japan and North Korea will follow suit; Trump is already saying that Korea needs to pay for US troops.
The US is (in my view) on solid footing here. At the very least, they get better trade deals from everyone else—Europe, India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. A number of companies will move production back into the US, and the government can prioritize those with more military value (chip-making, batteries, cars, shipbuilding [2] , etc.). And if the US can convince others to start decoupling from China, this will weaken Chinese manufacturing capacity.
Given the pain it's going to inflict in the short term, Trump is the only person who could have started this trade war. There might have been ways to do this without such a shake-up, but I am not convinced that this was a stupid move.
This was an anti-China move right from the beginning, disguised as an outrage against everyone's tariffs.
I think EU will be fine, it really depends on how much the US cares about advancing Russian interests.
Long game, the UK may transform into being a sort of vassal of the US, assuming it survives as an entity. The EU interest may align more with China. If the US is de-empathizing NATO, they need a counterweight to the Russia/US axis.
It's the end of pax americana, and the future is more uncertain.
Disrupting global alignment creates risks and unpredictability. Especially when driven by a cult of personality. Things that had 1% probabilities in 2010 will have 25% probabilities on 2030.
Zeihan lives in a 1960 worldview - oceans are not a meaningful barrier now as space and nuclear technology proliferates.
Withdrawal from the world was stupid in 1920 and doubly so now. There’s a lot of magical thinking that humans who live in places that aren’t in North America lack the ability to think or plan.
I also imagine this is maximum negative sentiment.
I follow the Chinese economy pretty closely and I just can't imagine 2025 passes without a deal.
Of course, neither Trump or Xi were going to back down here before a big meeting. I don't see how this is sustainable on any real time frame though for either economy.
Some people seem to be framing this as some kind of win for China. That is crazy. Chinese stocks had been in the toilet for a while, got a slight bump and that was mostly erased last week. I am far more confident in my US bets than China bets here.
I have the complete opposite opinion. The US has no cards to play in the EU and is screwed in the medium and long term.
The only reason the EU was tolerating those massive tech companies which contribute close to nothing in the EU was because the US was pulling its weight in EU defense.
Now that Trump openly sided with Putin, that's gone. Trump has no card to play in the EU anymore. He could even insult EU leaders publicly if he wanted to but pushing out Zelensky like he did was the only thing he could not afford to do.
Then on the investment side, the EU will now seen as a more stable and better environment than the US which changes policies every Tuesdays. The US will be experiencing a similar effect to brexit but longer and more severe.
The status of the dollar is clearly questioned as well. Will the US remain the top economic power with those tech companies atrophied and a local recession? I'm not so sure.
I'm enjoying reading all the salty comments. They're meaningless and futile. This is really over for anyone who opposes us. The Lord saved Donald Trump from assassination and is using him as His instrument. The cognitive dissonance to continue to resist the Will of God and will of the people which are united, is just pure bitterness of loss and defeat.
Beyond his glorious rise from the ashes of defeat, one bullet and two assassination attempts (that we know of), only made possible through his submission before Our God Jesus Christ, the changes he has made to this country are already done. There's no coming back from the tariffs now. Even at 10% worldwide, and 145% on China with temporary exemptions so our companies can get out, everyone knows the score.
It's this simple: get out of China. Trump has made that clear enough. China has made their hostility to us clear. And if you want zero tariffs guaranteed, you better come home.
So it's a huge leap back to the future for corporate policy, but on a personal level it's even more advantageous. How anyone can oppose replacing the income tax with tariffs is beyond me. At least with tariffs they have trade implications if they want to "just raise taxes". On me, I'm their slave. I stand by the original intent of taxation that direct taxes must be apportioned anyway. Anything else is one step closer to a socialist wealth redistribution scheme, with unconsenting participants born into it with no way to avoid it, short of starvation, destitution or death.
And the amazing part to it all is the resistance of the left. It's almost like they never cared about those indentured servants throwing themselves out of those Foxconn windows to end their own lives, after all. They want the system to continue. They don't want opportunities for your children in the US. They want more slave labor, because for Trump to be taken down (too late), Chinese people must die in factories for cheap goods.
Smartphones getting exemptions? Didn't the administration talk about how American's would be tightening screws on iPhones as they brought back these jobs? I'm starting to think they don't know what they are doing.... /s
May I propose a tinfoil hat perspective on tariffing China: America is prepping the ground for a full war with China. That's the only position that make sense to me other than the obvious "these guys are all corrupt idiots". I don't know which is which but at least the war perspective makes more sense to me. I believe we are at the propaganda stage where allies will be 'encouraged' into adopting similar positions and portraying China as a global threat. Nations such as India, Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and Australia are already encouraged to act highly aggressively towards China whenever possible. Given most of those countries political elite worship America and long to send their kids to Harvard they will comply and willingly allow their countries to be used as cannon fodder to maintain Western hegemony. The sweet-talking of Russia is an attempt to recreate the Sino-Russian split during the cold war and at least ensure Russia doesn't fight alongside China in a war. None of this is related to bringing jobs back, nation building or caring one bit about blue collar workers. its an attempt to maintain the American global hegemony that China very clearly threatens. If Trump and his close supporters can get filthy rich from this then all the better.
There is no grand geopolitical strategy here. Trump and his advisors really are this stupid and think that huge worldwide tariffs are a good idea. That they have kept 10% worldwide tariffs (also insane) shows they still think they are a good idea that will bring back manufacturing to the US. The damage to US soft power is irreversible unfortunately and the trust of former allies will never return. I suspect you’ll find as the empire declines people no longer aspire to send their kids - would you if they might be detained for weeks in inhumane conditions and deported for having opinions or a skin colour the regime doesn’t like?
Yes China is the current rival and thus was hit hardest, but they’ve already had to retract a lot of tariffs days after introduction simply because they had no idea what impact it would cause on borrowing costs.
Yes if Trump sees an opportunity to demand fealty from anyone with power or money he will take it, and enjoy it, but he genuinely thinks that is his due anyway.
You could say they have a plan in project 2025, but that’s more about destroying the US government and retaining power. If it were a functioning democracy he’d be removed after the damage he’s done.
My view is a more charitable one assuming there is some grand strategy going on but I think you are more on the money. It's just hard to accept that the administration really is so comically corrupt and incompetent
Unfortunately if this was the plan it massively backfired.
By imposing a global tariff the US also hit its allies in the region.
This in turn causes these allies to look for trade deals with others in the region, like China.
We have already seen South Korea and Japan announce new trade deals with China.
So the US is actually pushing away its allies in the region (which doesn't sound ideal when trying to start a war).
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
https://archive.ph/xQGXr
Since last night, anyway. The people who make shipping work are frantically trying to keep up. One of the biggest customs brokers posts updates twice a day on weekdays. Last update 4 PM Friday, so they haven't caught the biggest reversal. If tariff rates change while in transit, the bond paid before the item was shipped may now be insufficient. So the container goes into storage (where?) until Customs and Border Protection gets paid. Some recipients don't have the cash to pay. Low-end resellers who order on Alibaba and sell on Amazon, for example.
Port operators hate this. Unwanted containers clog up the portside sorting and storage systems. Eventually the containers are either sent back or auctioned off by CBP, like this stuff.[1]
Some shippers outside the US have stopped shipping to the US until this settles. This includes all the major laptop makers - Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc.[2] Nobody wants to be caught with a container in transit, a big customs bill due on receipt, and storage charges. That will recover once the rates are stable for a few weeks. Probably.
Customs and Border Protection is trying to keep up. Sometimes you have to pay more because Trump raised tariffs. Sometimes you can get a credit back because Trump dropped tariffs. Those are all exception transactions, with extra paperwork and delays.
Where's the Flexport guy from YC? He should be able to explain all this.
Consumer version: expect to see some empty shelves, rejected orders, and higher prices for the next few weeks.
[1] https://bid.cwsmarketing.com/auctions/catalog/id/167
[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/107504-trump-tariffs-force-maj...
Somebody lost a ton of Bitcoin miner system motherboards [0][1].
[0]: https://bid.cwsmarketing.com/lot-details/index/catalog/167/l..., https://bid.cwsmarketing.com/lot-details/index/catalog/167/l..., https://bid.cwsmarketing.com/lot-details/index/catalog/167/l...
[1]: https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=1...
Bitcoin miners tend to be ASICs nowadays. Based on the PCIe lanes I would assume that is for some GPU-mining mobo for equihash or scrypt
https://bid.cwsmarketing.com/lot-details/index/catalog/167/l...
I love that I can buy a pallet of miscellaneous medical supplies, and also that someone who specifically wanted them but now can't pay for them has to go without.
The point is to inflict cost to create incentive for domestic production. Obviously the inconsistency on tariffs undermines this position but the pandemic made it very clear that there are domestic security implications for not having important products produced state side. Its not like the $500 cost of a saline bag has anything to do with its production cost. It seems credit liquidity and confidence in long term protectionism are needed for this scheme to work. This requires unity, which we lack.
The point is to replace income taxes with tariffs. Domestic production is "desired" but this is not how to rebuild domestic production capability.
> Domestic production is "desired" but this is not how to rebuild domestic production capability
No need to be handwavy. It can be part of a strategy. A painful and ultimately less effective way than another, sure. There will be a lot of factors at play beyond these controls. This administration lacks the ability to focus for very long in any competent sense. I'm not sure there is a strategy that will work, at this time.
So we’d replace income tax with a regressive tax on consumption
I’ve ran the numbers in a bunch of ways and I don’t think they’re much if any more regressive than current income tax, given the rich avoid income past a point and spend a lot more on goods in the middle band, even percentage based. If you want a better progressive tax you’d need to focus on capital or spending on luxury goods and services.
As you say, the inconsistency on tariffs completely undermines this position, because it's widely known that tariffs which change radically from day to day don't incentivize domestic production (and indeed disincentivize all domestic investment). Doesn't this prove that creating incentives for domestic production is not the point, and either there's no clever scheme or the real goal of the scheme is something else?
Ryan Petersen was on the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast a few days ago.
Nice.
Not much optimism for domestic manufacturing or US exports.
Update: Possible pending reversal today (Sunday) on temporary exemption to emergency China tariff for computers and smartphones.[1][2] Trump and the Secretary of Commerce are saying different things on social media. Trump says he will look at the "whole electronic supply chain." The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are trying to keep up with the announcements.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-13/trump-say...
Hang on are tarriffs not effective on date of purchase? I'm not American but it seems madness to apply them at any other time as then no one knows what will actually need paid if you've someone like Trump changing them frequently.
Applied at time of passing through customs.
More typical policy would give 90 days notice so businesses could plan ahead. This policy was implemented far too fast with far too high of numbers and now it’s also changing rapidly. It doesn’t make sense.
> I'm not American but it seems madness to apply them at any other time
I’m American and I fully agree it’s madness. This administration clearly doesn’t understand or even care how businesses work. They just thought this was going to be a chest-thumping bargaining chip that caused other countries to come begging at the negotiation table.
It’s not working and now they’re panicking. They don’t want to look weak by backing down so we’re suffering.
Right. The normal way this works is that when you buy something to be imported into the US, you compute the tariffs and post a "customs bond" with CBP at the same time you pay for the product. When the shipment arrives in the US, the customs bond is used to pay the tariff, and the shipment is released by CBP. Shipping companies such as DHL integrate this into their systems so the end user doesn't have to deal with it directly. To the purchaser, it looks like tariffs are paid when the product is ordered. That's the happy path, taken by most imports.
But when tariffs change faster than it takes to get the shipment from source to destination, the bond won't be for the right amount. You then enter the wonderful world of "insufficient bonds". Here's "Understanding Insufficient Customs Bonds in Nine Easy Steps", which outlines the process and tries to sell you on a service that deals with the problem.[1]
Coming May 2: the end of "de miniumus" customs exemptions for small packages under $800 value. Goodbye, Shein, Ali Express, and dropshippers. Unless, of course, the rules are changed again.
[1] https://www.afcinternationalllc.com/customs-brokerage-news/u...
Trump has been spouting the same shit about trade deficits and the US getting ripped off for several decades. I think he legitimately believes high tariffs are a good idea to "fix" trade deficits.
It’s not about trade deficits-it’s about becoming an independent manufacturer again. Whether or not anyone international buys what we make is secondary. Wealth is disproportionately allocated to those that benefit from globalization but the vast majority of Americans are hurting from it, even if a OLED TV costs nickels.
How do these tariffs help the vast majority of Americans? Maybe in a half a decade-decade time they can get a job in some factory as a tech??? Except there's so much uncertainty and so much tariffs even on raw material that it doesn't even make sense from that perspective.
Raising prices on everything is not going to help the majority of Americans. Taxing the rich might have but half the rationale for these tariffs is tax cuts for the rich.
There is no plan or logic to this.
That is a valid use case for tariffs. I'm not convinced the evidence supports that being the reasoning in this case though.
Development of manufacturing takes time. If that were truly the logic behind the tariffs, wouldn't it make more sense to slowly ramp up tariffs on particular categories of goods with a long notice period to allow time for industries to develop?
Also why all the talk about "punishing" other countries for "taking advantage" if the real goal is to bring manufacturing home?
Development of manufacturing also means not tariffing the steel that's required to make the machines to make the things.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...
If you think that Trump's goal is to help the average person at the expense of the capital class, I have a few bridges to sell you.
The infrastructure for handling all the tarrif payments and rebates etc simply can't change as fast as these announcements and as a result there will be a whole mass of incorrect charges being applied or not applied that could takes years to sort through. The chaos is the point, or so it would seem.
They are effective on the day of passing customs to the US
So does the trump tarif noise average out to something you can plan with ?
No
> Consumer version: expect to see some empty shelves, rejected orders, and higher prices for the next few weeks.
Make that the next few years at this rate.
> Customs and Border Protection is trying to keep up.
There are still people there? DOGE hasn't hit them up?
Why would they? If there’s one agency that’s spiritually aligned with DOGE — in terms of incompetence, malice, and sheer cruelty — it’s ICE/CBP.
I’m not seeing anyone discuss this here, so I figured I’d raise an important point: this style of tariffs is crushing for US manufacturing. While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing, a selective tariff with specific industry exceptions is absolute poison.
You might think, as the authors of this exemption did, “well then we will exempt computer parts.” Then people will simply import the parts. But if you manufacture those parts in the US, you are suddenly at a massive disadvantage. Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed. Oftentimes there is no reasonable domestic substitute. You will go out of business in favor of someone importing the parts, which now happens tariff-free under an exemption. That’s why, generally speaking, tariff exemptions are deadly to domestic manufacturing.
It's the opposite! A universal tariff is a tariff on all inputs that manufacturers need to be competitive. How will Ford or Tesla ever be competitive if all their inputs are 24% more expensive than Toyota's inputs?
Autarky doesn't work. Juche doesn't work. Comparative advantage works, both theoretically and in practice if we study economic history.
Do you really believe in the comparative advantage argument though? Surely it’s only true if comparative advantage is fixed over time.
And surely in order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
There are good reasons to trade, but comparative advantage doesn’t feel like the correct theoretical underpinning to me.
IMO your logic is all wrong. Comparative Advantage ist just applied "opportunity cost" of time. Humans and resources are unique, everyone has their theoretically "optimal" use of time in terms of economic output.
The invisible hand of the market will let you know what aspect of your output is most valuable for others.
The benefit of this invisible hand is that the "economy" as a whole does not need to know how good they are at producing everything. People just need to know if what they are producing now is more valuable than the next best alternative. Everything else will be sorted out with market forces.
In university lectures we were given the famous argument about olive oil from Greece and that it would never make sense to do our own olive oil because we both lack the natural resources (unique soil + sunshine) which allow olive trees to grow easily and we'd also have much better yields growing other things on the fields.
So to me, both opportunity cost and comparative advantage are really basic building blocks of economic understanding and I'm a bit dumbfounded that someone wouldn't understand these concepts.
It is good that you paid attention to economics 101 but we don't live in the 19th century anymore and economic theory has progressed a bit since Ricardo.
We don't have pure free market economies. Neither in China nor in the USA nor anywhere else. The see big monopolistic companies dominating most markets. We see an closer interlink between state and private corporations.
Even just with the currency manipulation that China engages in, things get screwed a lot. Or the special status the US has with the dollar. Real world is more complicated.
But even if we assume free markets, you misunderstood what the previous poster said. The problem with Ricardo's comparative advantages is that is assumes fixed advantages. It is like optimizing for a local optimum. You might be super inefficient in producing X because you have never done it but if you actually invested in learning how to produce X you might discover that you are really good at it and the comparative advantages would go in your favor.
I do still believe that trading with each others can lead to more net wealth in most cases and obviously full autarky is not realistic these days but like anything in economics, it shouldn't be taken as a dogma.
Absolutely agree. It's ridiculous that low wage labor is considered a "comparative advantage". It's an advantage to capital owners perhaps, but certainly not to workers. And like you said, advantages are not static.
In my opinion it's intrinsically valuable to have a diverse regional economy. Culture and economy are fundamentally inseparable, imagine a society where everyone is doing the same thing because of "comparative advantage" making them 10% more efficient than the other country... What poverty!
This aestheticization of factory jobs is something I've noticed to be driving the New Right's worldview. It's not dissimilar to and no less dangerous than the aesthetic fixation on the agrarian economy of Mao and Pol Pot.
Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.
The US has problems with housing affordability, with medical costs, and with service sector costs emerging from Baumol's cost disease, which are all things that will get worse with tariffs, ranging from higher construction costs, to higher pharmaceutical prices, to less service employees making the cost disease worse.
It's also untrue that comparative advantage only benefits capital. Consumers are hurt by higher prices and less job opportunities driving down demand on the labor market. This worldview of a zero sum contest between capital and labor is a populist fiction.
Manufacturing doesn’t have to equate to sweat shops. It’s hard to take your argument seriously when your judgement is undermined by such fallacy.
We have problems with housing affordability because asset values inflate inverse to the devaluation of the dollar. The dollar is deflating because a service economy is not as sustainable as a manufacturing economy. This is particularly pronounced when we all see the labor value of intelligent workers decreasing at a precipitous rate due to AI.
Sure, anyone not agreeing perfectly with the current system of global trade is part of the "new right"... Another way to look at it: globalisation weakens democratic control over the economy and undermines unions. Is that not a problem in your opinion?
That's a strawman. What I was doing was pointing out the appeal to the aesthetics of work and associated buzzwords ("capital"), noting the absence of any actual economy policy that will deliver tangible benefits to existing people. It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority, in the pursuit of a subjective notion of pure work. The giveaway is the attempted justification of an economic policy in service of a nebulous "cultural" impact.
> It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority
> Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.
And that's not a strawman?
Tech bros who are frustrated with their job fantasizing about doing "real work".
An entire generation has grown up without assembly lines so it is easy to mystify it. People in Vietnam don't enjoy making Nikes but it is better than what came before: subsistence farming. But the Vietnamese factory worker trying to send their kids to university too.
Perhaps this is the inevitable cycle of prosperity? We see this in so many facets now as generations progress - your comment reminds me of antivax social media people who haven't ever seen anyone more sick than a cold or tech bros thinking a trade job would be better since it might magically be "more rewarding" (I'm guilty of this!) with no regard for how much privilege is inherent in sitting at a desk all day and getting paid to think.
Like the stereotypical kid who grew up rich not understanding the value of hard work maybe the inevitable result of easy and safe living is a blind spot so big we're doomed to fall back down as a society and start over again and again.
Manufacturing employment plummeted in the US after the 90s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp
Lots of people remember the 80s and 90s being better times with quality manufacturing employment without romanticizing the past. To this day multiples of the “information” sector are employed in US manufacturing.
People remember those days because the Republicans hadn't destroyed trade unions and the pension system yet.
We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries. If you have free trade and zero Republicans the same thing happens. If the jobs go away the union doesn’t matter. That’s why the unions consistently lobbied against NAFTA, the WTO, etc.
I’m actually not even sure what specific labor law changes you could blame that on. Clinton was running the show in the 90s, and I don’t recall any big union busting under Bush, whatever else might be said of him.
The alternative to comparative advantage is that there exist countries where it's economically optimal for them to produce every single possible good with finite resources taking into account the opportunity cost of producing one good over another. Or to put it another way, in a world where comparative advantage doesn't exist, the country in question must have the same economic outcome for any good they produce, and that seems ludicrously implausible to me.
> And surely in order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
Comparative advantage is an emergent property of trade that occurs naturally, it is the default state of being and can only be undermined by government policy.
You benefit from comparative advantage when you buy bread from the bakery instead of spending 2 hours a day baking your own bread.
Imagine how much poorer you'd be if the government put a large tax on you buying bread to force you to bake it yourself, in the name of self-sufficiency.
That's what's happening with these blanket tariffs, instead of targeting only critical defense manufacturing, Trump also wants t-shirt sweatshops to magically come back to the US despite only 4% unemployment. It's rank foolishness.
>Do you really believe in the comparative advantage argument though? Surely it’s only true if comparative advantage is fixed over time.
It's mostly not that complicated. Ecuador is better at bananas, the US is better at software so they trade. And similar stuff.
It's even simpler than that. Ecuador doesn't even need to be better than the US at growing bananas, they just need to be better at growing bananas than the US is at developing software relative to their banana growing abilities.
My favorite example is from an economics class quite a few years ago now. Michael Jordon is super efficient at making money playing basketball (told you it was a while ago). But he's also pretty good at mowing his lawn, since he's tall and athletic. But since he's way better at playing basketball, it makes sense for him to focus on basketball and paying some kid to mow his lawn, even though the kid is way less efficient at mowing lawns.
The US is way more advanced than Ecuador, and could presumably develop some hyper efficient banana greenhouse using genetic engineering and AI or whatever. But Ecuador is still pretty good at growing bananas and the US is much better at developing software, so buying bananas from Ecuador and putting the AI greenhouse resources into developing software instead makes way more sense.
Comparative advantage makes sense, with a national security overlay. That’s where I’ve landed anyway, and is a very simple explanation for all the more complex perspectives out there.
> In order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
Maybe I'm not getting what you're saying, but I don't think so. The point of comparative advantage is that even if country A is better at making guns and butter than B, A is better off only making guns or butter and trading to B for the other.
To support your point, consider the long list of assumptions underlying "Comparative Advantage", such as at: https://efinancemanagement.com/international-financial-manag...
A key assumption being: "Factors of production are fully employed in both the countries. ... The theory assumes full employment. However, every economy has an existence of underemployment."
Another key assumption is "The labor cost determines the price of the two commodities. ... The theory only considers labor costs and neglects all non-labor costs involved in the production of the commodities."
One assumption not listed there is an implicit assumption as in much of economics of infinite demand for anything and no law of diminishing-to-negative returns when considering the environmental and psychological costs of consumption.
So, if you have unemployment in the producer country like China (meaning, there is no reason for them to limit their production) along with a significant capital investment in production infrastructure (like in the Shenzhen region for electronics), and you have limited demand in the consumer country like the USA (meaning, only so much can be sold there at any specific time), then the country which can produce stuff more cheaply will just flood the market of the other country for all goods in question -- even if the consumer country could in theory produce one of the goods at higher costs (or lower quality). Of course, there may eventually be macroeconomic issues like balance of trade issues and countries unable to pay for more goods (which the USA has avoided to date because the US dollar is the refactor global currency backed by the USA's global policing role for decades as a defacto empire). But even if labor in the consumer country like the USA is free, given realistically a lot of cost related to equipment and energy (and increasingly AI and robotics) and more nebulous things like supply chain integration and a can-do attitude, the consumer country may not be able to compete on price and quality of finished products from the more materially productive economy.
Tangential, but "Humans Need Not Apply" makes a good argument when they suggest that horses are essentially obsolete in modern industry (in the same way people may be soon). It's not that you sometimes use horses to any great degree in modern manufacturing (whereas before they pulled carts and turned machines) -- it is that for almost any industrial task horses are more trouble than they are worth now in terms of cost and reliability compared to electric motors or diesel engines and so on.
An economic theory like "Comparative Advantage" that entirely emphasizes labor costs is increasingly obsolete if human labor is less and less a major factor of production. The theory assumes a country will always have people doing something productive, but that is like saying we should bring horses back into factories when robots are generally more reliable. If people are not skillful with access to tools and capital and don't have a can-do attitude, then they will just suffer economically (unless protected somehow) No doubt there are special cases where horses are still useful in production or transport like how mules were used recently to get supplies into hurricane damaged North Carolina, but they are rare as long as the modern industrial system and its surrounding infrastructure functions well. Similarly, there may still be human roles in production, but they will continue to diminish. In 2010, I put together some options for dealing with this situation, available here: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
> While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing
Not really. Efficient manufacturing requires access to a lot of different inputs from all over, from the machines that make things to the raw materials.
Putting tariffs on everything only incentivizes companies to move to a location where they can freely buy what they need and manufacture it for the world.
The US is not the only consumer of most manufactured goods. Making them in a country with cheap labor and no extra import tariffs makes more sense than in a country where everything is under tariffs
Universal import taxes on everything make no sense.
If you want to protect strategic production, you apply selective tariffs to support that local production while ensuring it can ramp up and import what it needs until it becomes self-sufficient.
Most countries, the US included, have used selective tariffs for this purpose. Applying a blanket tax on every type of import just increases inflation, as you can't possibly manufacture everything locally. For many products—especially cheap ones that were outsourced to China—there's no way to produce them cheaply enough for your internal market to absorb all production.
And you can't export them either, because their higher production cost makes them uncompetitive compared to cheaper alternatives from low-cost countries.
The secondary effects of import taxes are wide-ranging: they help when applied selectively and carefully; they don’t when applied capriciously and without thought.
The mere fact that high taxes were slapped on phone imports so "phones could be made in the US," only to backtrack mere days later, demonstrates that this is either the work of an insanely bright economist nobody understands, the scheme of a grifter aiming to benefit personally, or the capriciousness of a borderline dementia patient who cannot act rationally.
Would it make sense if you wanted to engage in some insider trading and short everything?
Really the way to do it, AFAIK (say, per How Asia Works), is to apply selective subsidies, not tariffs, and to subject the subsidized industries to substantial export discipline. That's what gets you South Korean world-beaters. Autarkic tariffs just get you Indian industry, where consumers have learned that the few goods marked "export quality" are superior.
And, I don't want to be partisan about this stuff, but, that's basically what "Bidenonics" was trying to do, in a small way: Subsidize a few industries like semiconductors and batteries and solar panels, that were deemed strategically important.
Whether the US was ever going to be as serious as South Korea or Japan about this remained to be seen. Frequently the subsidies seem to be handed out and then nothing happens (e.g., "Gigafactory" in Buffalo, NY).
Korea used to have substantial auto tariffs. Every nation with an auto industry does.
Tariffs are/can be effective, you're just not supposed to tariffs everything on a whim.
You are advocating a stronger government when the GOP basically wants to eliminate it...
Why not two out of three?
Universal tariffs with no exception don't even incentivize domestic manufacturing when it cuts local manufacturers off from an outside market that's bigger than the domestic one.
My company manufactures equipment in North America, with the most expensive input coming domestically from Ohio. Guess what though? Retaliatory tariffs from the global community means that the most rational course of action is now to move that manufacturing *out of the US* so that we can sell to the global market without penalty.
Sorry Ohio, but Mexico is currently *not* engaged in a trade war with Canada and half the EU so the rational decision for a company who wants to sell in those markets is to divest from the US.
> engaged in a trade war with ... half the EU
That is generally not possible. All EU countries share a common trade policy. Another country can either be in a trade war with the entire EU or with none of the EU.
According to the Wikipedia [0], The EU member states delegate authority to the European Commission to negotiate their external trade relations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Commercial_Policy_(EU)
Factories, tooling, machinery, etc. must be amortized over a market and production run. If you're making toilet paper, the cost is relatively low and the market is huge. The TP you make today will still be good TP in a decade. No one toilet paper factory can serve the world, so you'll need many of them in many markets. The inputs can be found within the U.S.. Why not build one in the U.S.?
A factory that produces a specific model of phone is only going to be able to run for a few years before it needs to retool for a newer model. That means a huge investment goes into such a factory on a continual basis. If one factory can serve the entire world demand for that model, why build two?
If you're going to build just one factory, are you going to build it in a market that's walled off behind trade barriers, both for outputs and inputs? Only if that market is significantly bigger than the rest of the world combined. If the rest of the world is bigger, than you build outside the trade barriers and people inside of them will just have to pay more.
Tariff's might bring low-end, high-volume manufacturing back to the U.S.. Chip fabs, phone factories, or anything so high-end/low-volume that it must be amortized over a global market is not going to return to the U.S. because of tariff's. An administration that changes their minds every few hours only makes matters worse. Whether Trump has recognized this and is conceding defeat or he's bowing to pressure from companies like Apple is immaterial. That kind of factory is not coming to the U.S. anytime soon.
I agree with your general point, but I just read the book "Your life is manufactured" by Tim Minshall, in which he describes the production of toilet paper in detail and it's a surprising global industry. Wood pulp with the correct density comes from a few specific places on the globe (Scandinavia and South America apparently).
Those are big markets, but there are a lot of suitable softwoods for pulp production, farmed around the globe. Ideally, you want to use ones with good natural ratios of lignin to cellulose and hemicellulose (that's just to say, the constituents of biomass) to minimize processing and chemistry costs.
Even universal tariffs with no exceptions is a problem.
Many things cross US/Canada/Mexico border in the process being manufactured. And tariffs will stack up.
Many advanced products (tech/chip, etc) are not entirely made in any single place. Some stuff is imported, and some is exported again, and tariffing the world, will also make the world tariff you.
I think this is all around bad. Best case scenario the US has elected a president who decided to burn all political capital, alliances and credibility in search of a slightly better deal.
Doing this sort maximum pressure economic extortion style policies, *might* getter you a slightly better deal. But at what cost?
Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Trump may get a win in the headlines, because everyone thinks he'll go away if he get a win.
> Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Why would anyone buy US military equipment that's either "10%" handicapped on purpose, or remotely disabled whenever the US changes its feelings about the users of said military equipment?
There have been many headlines/stories about this in Australia where we have a submarine deal within the AUKUS alliance.
"“We like to tone them down about 10 percent, which probably makes sense because someday maybe they’re not our allies, right?”"
He's already gotten what he wanted from it and bragged about it: so many leaders of different countries calling up and kissing his ass. He's certainly not going to give any of them what they wanted, and now they all have the taste of his ass in their mouths. At least they have something in common with Elon Musk, now.
There's many sayings about diplomacy, though I understand the reality is much more mundane.
One that comes to mind is "a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip" — like all good quotes, attributed to a wide variety of famous people.
Competent governments send arse kissers to those who need pampering, and send blunt to those who need to see bluntness. But (in a competent government) these things are uncorrelated with the actual negotiation position — "speak softly and carry a big stick" etc.
Trump being bellicose to everyone at the same time is a sign of his own incompetence.
Worth looking at the actual deals. The initial talks with Canada and Mexico resulted in reported "deals" and "wins" that were actually just confirmations that the deals negotiated under previous administration are in fact happening.
I belief his story about dozens of countries calling him about as much as his story of him taking a cognitive test and having every single answer correct. Or his doctors statement that said that there has never been a healthier president than Trump.
Yeah, this is a man who literally says he has the greatest memory in human history but then constantly says he can't remember stuff a day or two later or coincidentally was living under a rock and has no idea what's going on in his cabinet.
> Men came to me with tears in their eyes, big men, and said "sir..."
> Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed.
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local 24/7 news feed for more than eight years, so there’s no point in acting surprised about it. You’ve had plenty of time to lodge any bribe worth the president's time and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Americans, President Trump did a crypto scam on his supporters before being sworn in, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout.
I've no sympathy at all.
> crypto scam on his supporters
It absolutely blow my mind that that was just "Friday", and not the biggest scandal in Western political history.
"It's just Trump being Trump, move on, move on, nothing to see here, no consequences for anyone..."
The speed with which we went from “out-of-context recording of a ‘yeaaaaaah!’ can end your presidential campaign” to “suggesting your supporters shoot your opponent if she wins doesn’t mean you can’t be president… twice” was incredibly quick.
Thought I'd check to see how his memecoin is currently doing. It's exactly as expected.
I wonder how many of his supporters bought at $70 ...
I honestly have a hard time coping with it. No joke. It's revolting, how that wasn't the end. Right after the Hawk Tuah girl was burnt at the stakes for the same stunt, too.
It's not even that it is pure evil and predatory, it's the aesthetics of it... It tainted civilization, at the very least America! It's so, so pathetic and cringe. Unbearably distasteful and undignified. Too much cringe.
The only thing topping this, was the president of the United States selling cars in front of the white house, a few weeks later. I can't.
Man, imagine an alien patrol passing that Tesla (a billionaire's fucking car in space as a beacon of Earth life's legacy, honestly makes wanna puke) and then learning about the state of things here. I feel embarrassed to the core living in this period of time. I'd rather shit my pants on live TV.
I crave the cleansing heat and certainty of thermonuclear warheads. Shoot these fucker with a bullet of frozen sewage and then sterilize this place for we all sinned collectively. Send some tardigrades to Mars and hope for something better, but turn off the lights on Earth.
Tainted.
> It tainted civilization, at the very least America!
I regret to inform you that america is not and has never been a unique snowflake. An important player in the world, sure, but one that has long been obsessed with the notion that it is special in some way, and it's just not true.
Every country is at risk of going batshit crazy, and it's always been disturbing how americans seem the truly believe they are immune, because when that belief gets challenged…
FYI: I am not American. I feel Fremdscham, but the transitive relation is implied in my comment. Politicians in my country are just as corrupt (e.g. Friedrich Merz doing marketing and legislative favors for McDonalds), but for the plurality of our political system, they still have to act decent to some degree. For now.
There is another quality to what's happening in America right now. I can only explain the things Trump did as sadistic demonstrations of power. I bet he actually gets hard knowing half the country will literally eat his shit, that he actually can do anything he wants. It's a theme, it's the grab 'em by the pussy mentality. I mean, let's go back: After winning the election, he showed his gratitude by humiliating (this is important) and exploiting his most loyal followers for everyone to see - and they took it, they danced, they remained at his side, they doubled down.
But whatever enabled his cult, this cancer is growing everywhere. You can't get through to significant portions of the population. Same in Germany. They've become immune to arguments, every opposition is anticipated by their conspiracies. They vote against their economic and social interests, they have detached from common ground. It's not protest, it's all got a fucked up life of its own. Brain worms, social contagion.
I think, if we want to survive this, short-lived social media has to go, and we have to take care of the boomer issue.
I want to be careful about how I frame this, because I don't want to make it sound like Trump or AfD don't have agency and can't be held responsible for their own actions. But if you're curious what it is that enabled both cults, the answer is pretty clear: there's significant popular demand for harsh immigration restrictions, and in much of the West only crazy far-right parties are willing to listen to it. The Danish political establishment successfully defused the far right by moderating heavily on immigration, and I don't think it's too late for other countries to accomplish the same.
No.
Can't speak for the US, but in Germany immigration is not the problem they make it out to be, but one that is propped up as a scapegoat. You presume the people's demand here are based in reasonable distress, when really it's not. Or rather it's not attributed correctly. Stats don't support it, proposed solutions are not able to resolve it. In particular the AfD has no actual answers for anything. Their "politics" is arbitrary outrage and evidently they get sponsored by Russia, favored by platform owners and spin doctors like Musk. German intelligence agencies are investigating Russia's involvement in recent attacks in Germany. The AfD's role is destabilization and it's working.
The topic is not driven by actual exposure. This is clearly evident when you look at voting patterns. In places where you are the most likely to have contact with immigrants right-wing populists are the least successful and vice versa. Compare recent car attacks by islamist and neonazi motivated perpetrators. There is a massive distortion in media coverage.
I absolutely do not accept throwing anyone under the bus just to make the mob happy. Not immigrants, not women, not trans people. Sorry, but it's fucking degenerated and vile to suggest this as acceptable sacrifice. Every human deserves basic rights, due process and life in dignity. Look what they are cheering for in the US at the moment. Disinformation fueled hatred is not something to make compromises with as a civilized person.
The actual, but occult distress all people feel comes from economic erosion and ideological decay. Don't get me wrong, immigration isn't all bueno, but it's blown out of proportion. Rent, financial security, food, prosperity and self-efficacy. No politician is addressing that. We are by far not out of options to address the real issues of the country.
Why are you not advocating for addressing those?
I do advocate for addressing those, and I don't support throwing anyone under the bus. That's why I support moderating on immigration!
I agree with you that the anti-immigration movement doesn't make much sense to me, and I'm pretty confident that restricting immigration won't have the benefits its proponents claim. But the people who support it are genuine, as far as I can tell, and aren't going to just evaporate if rent decreases 10%. You can restrict immigration in a humane and respectful way, or you can follow the US and wait for xenophobic politicians to restrict immigration in an inhumane and disrespectful way; I don't think there's a third option.
> You can restrict immigration in a humane and respectful way
But this won't change anything, if their demand is not reasonable, or founded in truth to begin with. As I said, the AfD is most popular where there are no migrants at all. Lots of them feel their narrative validated when they see a brown person existing, see "Turkish" people living here for generations. The goalpost will always shift. You will never satisfy them, if their demands aren't anchored in reality. Again, this isn't fueled by exposure, but guided media outrage. There is a lot of conspiracy narratives mixed in as well. Talk to them, poke deeper than the concern trolling surface. You will encounter actual loony talk quite soon.
Apart from that, the biggest problems with these ideas are factors outside of Germany's control. E.g. if the origin country won't accept those immigrants back, you can't just air drop them there. Constitution, European law, human rights, Schengen... it's not really possible/worth it to do anything significant. It's all ever going to be for show.
On the contrary, demands that aren't founded in reality are often easier to satisfy, because pure rhetoric can shift the narrative much more easily than it can shift reality. Going back to Denmark again, if you pulled out charts and tried to track the objective quantity of immigration, you'd have a hard time identifying any policy shift. But as you say, immigration restrictionists were never looking at these charts in the first place. What matters politically is that the center-left PM goes around talking about how mass migration can be dangerous and the preservation of Danish culture is valuable.
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Keep your sympathies, it's a narrow-minded view to assume all Americans wanted this. We didn't. And it's not like we had a real, ethical choice. The runner-up was going to be business as usual with foreign politics, enabling genocides and engaging in proxy wars and regime changes for the control of energy and resources. Many people did not believe either candidate was legitimate or shouldn't be in prison.
You missed the sarcasm, no worries. It's also referencing a scene in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
I caught the initial reference, it's one of my favorite books, it just sounded less and less sarcastic by the end of it, to me it came off as "The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 for all to see months before you voted in the guy who put it into action". I apologize for assuming incorrectly.
People don't want incentivization of American domestic manufacturing. That's where the fundamental disagreement is, after all. People don't have confidence in American products built on US soil by upper middle class Americans. It's going to take long to (re?)build trust to reverse that.
That’s ridiculous, there is plenty of confidence in US manufactured goods, the problem is that US manufacturers have impossible economics for anything that isn’t boutique or super high margin.
Need an impedance controlled 16 layer board for your fancy new military radar? No problem.
Need a basic 2 layer PCB for mass manufacture? No one in the US will make it at the price you need to be competitive.
"No problem"? It's not just that the prices are high; I can hardly get those guys to even answer the phone and give me a quote. I can get that board from China before I've gotten through to a local sales rep. Then when they do finally check their messages they want to fly out, meet me at my office, size up my operation and my budget, have a nice chat over dinner, and spend a few weeks pestering me with phone calls without ever getting down to business.
You are pretty confused about why this is.
When the only market you ever had was high touch high cost low volume production then that is your default business model.
The biggest issue is that Trump is pushing tariffs without first ramping up local manufacturing, the type of manufacturing you are looking for isn't _currently_ being catered for in the US. It may in the future depending on how things pan out, the bet Trump is making is that it can happen, time will tell whether he is true.
I don't think it will generate jobs for local US manufacturing since the only way to compete with low cost of labour markets is to automate more than the low cost of labour country.
Business is reasonably good at filling whatever niche is willing to pay. So far the evidence is that Trump is willing to over commit and then backtrack. Having a negative outlook doesn't help anyone, think positive about your country and shift with the times.
> think positive about your country and shift with the times
You know I tried to think positively about the United States; but darned if they don't keep doing negative things. Like appointing grossly incompetent people to head Federal departments. Like unlawfully and arbitrarily abducting people from the streets. Like extorting universities - ideally centres of free thought - over non-complying ideological positions. Like appearing to wreck the economy; but in ways that might just advantage himself and others in his circle. And the list goes on...
Some of us aren't "shifting with the times" because of an ethical line we won't cross. I grew up in the United States in the 1960's and had the constant drumbeat of "We're the world's melting pot," "We're the most benevolent spreader of democracy," "We're practically the only free country on the planet," "We are a country of laws." beat into us in public school. So it's a little jarring to see the wholesale abandonment of these values at the hands of someone who can barely string together a cogent sentence of more than, say, 4-5 non-repeating words and for whom "negotiating" means "win/lose", instead of "how can we meet our needs _and_ your needs, while creating more value in the process?"
Personally, I tried having a positive outlook; but saw this coming and left the U.S. just ahead of Trump 1.0.
This rant aside, it's incredibly wishful thinking to assume that one can undo in weeks or months, the complex web of international trade that has developed over decades because of the much-vaunted invisible hand of the market.
> think positive about your country
Like insisting the United States is 'rigged, crooked and evil'?
Trump insists the United States is 'rigged, crooked and evil':
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-in...
>“The Witch Hunt continues, and after 6 years and millions of pages of documents, they’ve got nothing. If I had what Hunter and Joe had, it would be the Electric Chair. Our Country is Rigged, Crooked, and Evil — We must bring it back, and FAST. Next stop, Communism!”
So do you have any shred of evidence he's backtracking on all the racism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and cruelty and corruption he overcommitted on?
And it's not just (or even mostly) costs. Nowhere in the world has supply chains anything like the Pearl River Delta. Need the most esoteric component imaginable? There's probably a factory down the road that can supply it, MOQ 1 or millions. It probably has a booth or distributor in Huaqiangbei where you can grab a few hundred today. The US has nothing to compare. US manufacturers can't build those sort of domestic supply chains at any cost.
I'm not sure I believe that, considering Schiit manages to do it for virtually every component of their product line other than wall warts. Are they two layer boards? Nah, I suspect they're 4 layer...but the prices aren't such that you can't survive on domestic manufacture. The prices are just higher than overseas - meaning that your profits are slightly lower, a situation current markets are not willing to accept.
Every time I've looked at local manufacturing, whether machine shops or anything else, the prices are higher than Ali but not unreasonable.
The 145% tariff is so absurd I wouldn't be surprised to see cheap chips glued to the item to exploit the exceptions.
"Oh yeah, that's not a shoe: it's the protective case for an ESP32 WiFi router".
For those who think this is ridiculous, this happens already on a regular basis with batteries to get around the regulations and fees around shipping them. Instead of getting the battery in the mail you’ll get a cheap flashlight in the mail with a battery inside it.
Famously, people got in trouble for importing "ice tea mix" to get around sugar tariffs.
> Instead of getting the battery in the mail you'll get a cheap flashlight in the mail with a battery inside it.
Much like those Wrapper upstarts, then?
Perhaps one could say they are "Smart shoes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DonAdams.jpg
IoT to make a comeback?
Sort of the inverse, but didn’t Ford import Turkish-built Transit Connect vans with full interiors, only to strip those out upon arrival in Baltimore, as a means of skirting the Chicken Tax?
Seems something like that. I googled it to see what chickens had to do with transits.
>The "Chicken Tax" is a 25% tariff on light trucks imported to the United States, established in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. This tariff was a retaliatory measure against European countries, including France and West Germany, which had imposed tariffs on U.S. chicken exports.
This whole business gets rather silly. Viva free trade.
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/03/ford-pays-u-s-365-million-...
Nathan Fielder was ahead of things calling smoke detectors instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x87jemLFyo
The moment they put tariffs I was thinking they just supercharged smuggling and illegal border crossing with multi trillion dollar market.
Why is no one highlighting how this is repeating history 8 years ago? I don’t get it, there’s this magical reporting gap where all of this is new strategy but it’s the exact same strategy. Why don’t we acknowledge this instead of searching for some new angle?
Here are a bunch of links from 2018/2019:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/apple-dodges-iphone-tariff-a...
https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/t052-s001-14-s...
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/06/07/trump-tariff-threat-...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-to-delay-tariff-increases...
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/19/hundreds-of-chines...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/china-threatens-retalia...
https://www.cfr.org/blog/trumps-tariffs-are-killing-american...
> Why is no one highlighting how this is repeating history 8 years ago?
Because it’s not? The tariffs which are currently in effect or soon to go into effect are so far out of line with anything in modern history that there is no comparison.
The reason everyone is panicking is because people expected more of the same as 8 years ago but instead we got something massively worse, without a hint of cohesive strategy, and that has gone into effect rapidly and on the whims of one person who can’t even appear to get on the same page as his advisors.
Everyone knows there’s some element of bluffing going on, but that’s also the problem; This administration knows their bluffs would be transparent this time so they decided to go extra big to make a point. This becomes a problem for all of the people and companies whose business was suddenly upended by out of control tariffs with little time to prepare (compared to the smaller tariffs everyone was preparing for)
They’re banking on the damage either not being directly noticed by their voter base, or being able to convince their voter base that the damage is actually a good thing. I’m already seeing people applaud these actions as if they were narrowly targeted at cheap Chinese goods on Amazon or fast fashion, without realizing how much of the inputs to our economy go through one of the countries with tariffs ranging from 25-145%.
Some people are determined to adopt contrarian positions and act like they’re above it all, but the people who have to deal with the consequences of this stuff (myself included) are taking a lot of damage from these supposedly no big deal negotiations. It’s not being handled well. Even if they were to disappear tomorrow, a lot of damage has been done and they’re hoping people like you will find a way to rationalize it away as not a big deal
> They’re banking on the damage either not being directly noticed by their voter base, or being able to convince their voter base that the damage is actually a good thing.
Are we really still at the stage where we seriously think this is how people vote? Its not. You just need to energize enough people in your sufficiently big enough bubble to believe in a cause and make sure that the other side thinks "both sides are bad".
For some reason, it stinks of a none too smart AI making economic decisions without taking psychology or a bunch of real life costs into account.
It is a losing strategy.
> without a hint of cohesive strategy
It's all quite cohesive once one stops the futile search for an underlying strategy that enriches america, and instead looks for evidence of a strategy that enriches Trump.
"These insects infected with cordyceps show no hint of a cohesive strategy for staying alive..."
> people expected more of the same as 8 years ago
Only ignorant close minded gullible people who refused to listen to all the experts and intelligent people paying attention, who have all now been totally vindicated, after warning about it at the top of their lungs, and who are now fully entitled to say "I TOLD YOU SO".
Expert Comment: What might President Trump’s second term mean for the world?
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-02-05-expert-comment-what-mig...
What to expect from Trump’s second term: more erratic, darker, and more dangerous:
https://thebulletin.org/2024/11/what-to-expect-from-trumps-s...
Accelerated transgressions in the second Trump presidency:
https://brightlinewatch.org/accelerated-transgressions-in-th...
Trump’s second term could bring chaos around the world. Will it work?
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/09/world/analysis-trump-seco...
Donald Trump’s Revenge: The former President will return to the White House older, less inhibited, and far more dangerous than ever before:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/donald-trump-wins-a-...
Why the worst president ever will be even worse in a second term: I suppose some observers might think Donald Trump’s first term represented rock bottom. My advice for those thinking along those lines: Just wait:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/worst-pr...
What the world thinks of Trump’s return to the US presidency:
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-t...
How bad could a second Trump presidency get? The damage to America’s economy, institutions and the world would be huge:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/10/31/how-bad-could-...
What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/10/country-a...
Trump presidency could damage economy if he weakens democracy, experts say: Trump has threatened to prosecute political rivals, including Kamala Harris:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-presidency-damage-econ...
What could Trump's second term bring? Deportations, tariffs, Jan. 6 pardons and more:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/second-trump-presidency-implica...
I’m an Economist: Here Are My Predictions for Inflation If Trump Wins:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/m-economist-predictions-infla...
Trump’s economic plans would worsen inflation, experts say: They fear that Trump's proposals would “reignite’’ inflation, which has plummeted since peaking at 9.1% in 2022 and is nearly back to the Fed’s 2% target:
https://whyy.org/articles/trump-economic-plan-worsen-inflati...
Thank you it seems everyone has already forgotten project 2025.
Look I don't want to be too harsh on Americans nobody took the Nazis seriously when they had already written a book about how they saw the world... But none of this is shocking.
There is an ideology behind what Trump is doing and he never hid it from the world.
As an American please be careful blaming all of us for this. Less than 1 in 4 Americans voted for Trump. It doesn’t mean you need to buy an F-150 but please separate the concept of the American people from the GOP voter base. The complexities of our electoral system and our unique racist history made this very hard to avoid. Please don’t assume Americans in general wanted this or are ok with it.
> nobody took the Nazis seriously when they had already written a book about how they saw the world.
This is completely false. A cursory internet search will find many examples. Churchill was a vocal opponent of the Nazis in the 1930s.
> But none of this is shocking.
Right. Nobody who was paying attention is shocked. This includes many Americans.
Lol there was no 'cohesive strategy' 8 years ago, what the heck you wtite about. You suffer some memory loss?
He was chaotic, he was doing ego polishing reality show from day 1. The only difference was a 'barrier of sanity' that people around him formed, dampening his bipolar outbursts into more reasonable actions (or lack of thereof, often without his knowledge). He eventually fired all of them, forgot that part?
Now he has just pure yes men around him, licking his ass and patiently waiting for him to die or get killed (vance has a look and behavior of patient calculating sociopath for example, he may be much worse if given chance)
I think you misunderstood my comment as being pro-Trump in some way, but it absolutely was not. I was explaining why this round of tariffs is not a repeat of 8 years ago, it’s much worse. That’s it.
> what the heck you wtite about. You suffer some memory loss?
> licking his ass and patiently waiting for him to die or
I can see why political threads on HN are flagged away so aggressively. It’s hard to want to even try to have a conversation when this is the level of discourse getting upvoted.
“Trump’s first term would probably have seen a version of this week’s debacle if he had chosen different advisers, and if he had not later been knocked off course by Covid.
For the first two years of his first term, in 2017-18, his instincts were largely kept in check by his economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs, who dampened Trump’s determination to use tariffs to end trade deficits.“
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/12/did-trump-tari...
The tariffs from 8 years ago were a seemingly rational policy and were largely upheld by the Biden administration.
These tariffs look designed to rapidly eject the US from the global economic order and hand over the reins to China. Though saying they were "designed" at all seems extravagantly generous.
Another reason why tariffs are upheld is that its very hard to remove them. The moment you add them, you now creates industries and jobs that assume those tariffs existed.
Which is to say, if this ridiculous tariffs goes on for long enough, its going to be there forever. So you guys are, ehem, fucked.
I will be surprised if the dollar retains its status as the world’s reserve currency by the end of this administration.
Only on China, the rest were largely removed.
> Only on China, the rest were largely removed.
No they weren't. They were changed to 10%. Prior to all of this the average was 2.5%. So that's not a removal at all, but a rather large average increase even if you exclude the omglol China rate.
> No they weren't. They were changed to 10%
Sadly that’s not even true. We still have excessively high tariffs on many shipments from Mexico and Canada. 25% for non-USMCA goods.
China, Canada, and Mexico are our 3 largest trading partners. The tariffs levied on them have an outsized effect on net tariff rates.
Also suspended is not removed.
I assume there is some kind of divide and conquer going on.
Because last time the US government required alliances to participate in the trade war. Maybe it is not rational, but the US is the leader, so most countries just thought, 'Ok, if you really need it...'. But this time, the trade war is against the whole world. Everyone is confused.
> But this time, the trade war is against the whole world.
Reminds me of this excellent Norm Macdonald sketch [1] on Germany of which I've learned only recently.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXdtafGdIVM
The articles you've linked are about threats of 10% to 25% tariffs in the context of active trade negotiations between the US and China. Here, there's an actually imposed tariff of 145% and no talks at all as far as has been reported. It's not the same situation.
Exactly. Anyone claiming it’s a repeat of history either doesn’t understand the history or doesn’t understand the current tariff proposal.
Order of magnitude difference. Hence the panic.
It’s a different situation because the numbers are different even though so far the outcomes are the same. Am I reading that right?
The outcomes are not the same because the numbers are not the same. A few days ago some Chinese journalists interviewed analysts familiar with CATL on batteries. At that time the tariff was 125%, and the analysts thought CATL could still eke out some profits: it's one of the very few Chinese businesses that can profit despite the 125% tariffs because China controls 75% of the world's battery anodes, 90% of cathodes and electrolytes. At 145% tariff CATL will be taking a loss and won't supply batteries at all.
How do you know the outcome? It’s not over yet.
No it’s different because threats to get concessions, and actually enacting them to self sabotage your economy, it’s entirely different.
I'm not sure what you could possibly mean by "outcome" that doesn't include a 145% tax as an outcome. Perhaps you've fallen victim to the misinformation that the exporting country pays tariffs? That's not so; a 145% tariff on imports from China means that an American business importing $10,000 of stuff from China is required to pay the US government $14,500 on top. (Or they can not do the import and lay off everyone who was involved in processing and selling the stuff, as many China-dependent businesses will likely do over the next few weeks.)
Still have another 90+ days to figure this out. Perhaps you have fallen victim to believing each move is a different game than last time. To me it appears all someone did was shuffle the pieces.
We don't have another 90+ days. The 145% tariff is in effect right now. Whoever told you about the 90 days was intentionally trying to trick you; there are other tariffs that were delayed for 90 days, but the announcement delaying those tariffs made it extremely clear that this one was not delayed.
Wow you had these at-the-ready, didn't you. Thanks.
*I've read through a few of these and it seems like perhaps Trump still thinks it's 2018/19, but China's position has only gotten stronger.
It seems the attempt to jack up tariffs so high this time was a bluff to "show" how strong we can be, but he miscalculated on how shaky the stock/bond markets actually currently are and the financial players know we're not in a position to go it alone.
And China knows this and they know they can wait us out. I believe it will be considered a misstep, at best and a catastrophe at worst.
I did not have them at the ready but a Kagi News search with a date range allowed me to pull from quite a selection that seemed relevant to my point.
the most important tidbit
> Apple already pays tariffs on products including the Apple Watch and AirPods, but hasn't raised its prices in the United States.
so, they fear tariffs because their price is already at the highest their products would sell? that's an interesting point most people don't understand. the tariffs were only 15% then, but still interesting to see how it played out.
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Is nice that my family's small business is set to get absolutely crushed by tariffs at the end of the month while large tech companies are exempt. Thank goodness for America first policies. So cool. Very cool.
This whole thing has multiple layers of annoying to even a slightly reasonable person. Naturally, further consolidating strength of the existing major behemoths is among those as well.
You should go to one of the million dollar dinners at Mar-a-Lago.
Per Bloomberg, 20% fentanyl tariff on China still applies and these categories may yet receive their own unique tariff, https://archive.is/jKupW
The exemption categories include components and assembled products, https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3db9e5...
Industrial-scale workarounds were developed for previous tariffs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652823. Such loopholes will need to be addressed in any new trade agreements.> 8486 Machines for producing semiconductors & ICs: wafer fab, lithography.
Does US buy them from China too?
Not sure specifically, but most common chips aren’t fabbed on processes that require cutting edge machines like you hear about for nVidia or iPhone chips.
All of the little chips in everything else are fabricated on much simpler processes that require much less complex machinery.
Unlikely. The exclusions above are for reciprocal tariffs from all countries, i.e.
Reciprocal is inaccurate, you should stop using that term - this label was chosen to obfuscate what is going on and confuse those who don't know better.
I'm told it was chosen because the executive only has the power to impose tariffs without legislative approval if they're reciprocal.
Exempt items are:
8471: Computers.
8473.30: Computer parts.
8486: Semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
8517.13.00: Smartphones.
8517.62.00: Network equipment.
8523.51.00: Solid state media.
8524 and 8528.52.00: Computer displays.
8541.* (with some subheadings excluded): Semiconductor components EXCEPT LEDs, photovoltaic components, piezoelectric crystals).
8542: Integrated circuits.
The 8541.* category exclusions are interesting. Does the US self-produce all required quantities of LEDs and piezoelectric crystals and doesn't need to import those? Is the exception on photovoltaic components to discourage American companies from producing solar panels?
[1] https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=[INSERT HEADING CODE HERE. EXAMPLE: 8471]
I suspect it would be a good idea if the US abolished the presidency and moved to a parliamentary system. Turns out that concentrating so much power in a single position is a bad idea.
The president has all the power that the congress and the senate gives him. Previous presidents were not given this much power. The bad guys are in the congress and the senate for not upholding the constitution.
I think the current state of affair has exposed a fundamental bug in the consitution. Sure, the US has three branches of government that are supposed to be checks and balances on each other. Which has, mostly, worked really great.
But turns out there is no way to enforce this. If we get a president that doesn't care about any of this and is happy to ignore everyone else, there isn't actually any way to enforce the separation of duties of the three branches.
The problem we have today is that the one runaway branch has support from at least one of the branches meant to act as a check on power (the legislative).
Congress should be stepping in if the president is overstepping his legal authority, or if they wish to reduce his legal authority. The Republican party has control of Congress and our political system has devolved into a game of blind faith in your team, neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.
We need principled leaders who care to run an effective government based on our constitution. We have few, if any, of those people in charge.
>neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.
So, what's going on is that Donny himself has all the money. Not personally, but his various election funds have more than than the rest of the Republicans combined. Obama has a similar set-up back in 2012, but not nearly as disproportionate as Donny has.
Republicans can't go against Donny without risking a primary opponent funded by Donny that will oust them.
The Democrats do not have this funding problem to the same degree.
What this means is that the Republican party is only going to go against Donny (impeachment) when they figure that the average Republican Primary voter in deeply red districts will have a 50/50 chance of voting (actual polling, not vibes) the way Donny tells them too. And that reassessment is not going to happen until at least late summer 2026.
I don't know enough about the republican party's campaign finances to know whether Trump controls most or all of it. Even if he does, though, it doesn't have to work that way.
Congress has a duty to uphold the constitution, not to play political money games. The fact that they aren't willing to is a large part of why we're in this mess.
What we need are leaders that actually have principles they're willing to fight for, and ultimately that still rolls further down hill to the voters who have collectively created these incentives.
When Ron Paul was still in office lobbyists learned to not even bother talking to him. Agree or disagree with him, the man had strong views of how governments should work, was clear about those views to his electorate, and stood by them consistently. We need more of that.
Their point is that without concerted effort the elected officials will follow Trump as long as elections in red states align with Trump's political funding
> Congress has a duty to uphold the constitution, not to play political money games
Those political money games will filter out opposition in congress as long as Trump is able to have yes men elected into congress
Sure, and if both of those problems are fundamentally just how politics is going to work now we'd be better off throwing out the system entirely and starting fresh.
Short of that, we need voters electing based on ideals and principles and we need those elected to actually follow the ideals and principles that got them elected.
Yeah, the issue is one of incentives.
For all politicians, their incentive is to get (re)elected. That's pretty much part of the definition. The ones that follow that incentive are going to be (re)elected, those that don't aren't going to get into office.
But, if you really do believe in democracy, then you have to actually trust the voters here. If you're thinking that they are just rubes and are easily lead around, then well, you don't really believe in democracy, I think [0]. Whatever you think about Donny and his methods and ideas, we've had 10 years of the guy in politics. The voters (in the system we have) were as well informed as you could possibly expect them to be. They wanted him and everything about him, the results were very clear.
Ancient Greece is a good model here with it's many cities and systems. Democracies will often choose the wolf to escape the vultures. It's just part of how humans work. We can all wish that we live in a different place and a different time with different people, but we don't. We're here and now. And our fellow voters in the system we have, they want all of this.
Look, I'm with you, I think that the voters were very dumb here. But they have to find out one way or another and get their comeuppance. There is no feasible other way. We're going to get Donny in all his glory, good and hard.
[0] yes yes, we don't have a democracy, we have a constitutional republic and blah blah blah. We've all heard it a hundred times.
I agree with you here. I do personally believe in democracy, though for a slightly different reason.
I believe in democracy because I think the public should be able to collectively pick their fate and then own the outcome. I don't want an elite class doing what they think is best for the rest of us, and I don't want to own the result of their decisions if I had no say in the decisions.
I live in a very red state. Though I didn't vote for Trump I am surrounded by a strong majority of people that did. I've viewed it the way you're describing from the beginning - we made this bed, now we get to see what the result is and decide what to do next.
I don't think this is a problem with the constitution as it was actually written, this is just the cumulative effect of states, congress, and the judicial branch ceding power to the executive for decade after decade, with a decent dose of political corruption, because both parties thought it was convenient for when they are in power. People had been warning about it the whole time and every time it happened they were either ignored as paranoid or grouped up as conspiracy theorists.
They are enabling him because his grass roots supporters threaten anyone who "steps out of line" with oligarch-funded primary challenges.
I was surprised to learn that there doesn't seem to be a way for people to recall congresspeople or senators.
There needs to be a patch for the constitution of the USA to fix the vulnerabilities/bugs exposed by trump and his supporters.
you seem to ignore or not know about how recently deputized private security guards went to a federal judge to press him on a decision for the insurrectionists.
We don't need to abolish the presidency or entirely change our system for a parliamentary model. We do need to drastically shrink the executive branch and its powers though.
I've found it interesting that so many are seriously concerned with what Trump is doing but not why the executive branch has the authority to do it in the first place.
I was thinking that the US marshals need to be the enforcement arm of the courts. But I am not sure if that would help much in the current situation.
Maybe police and federal enforcement agencies should be solely under Congress? At least then senior people can actually get fired for obeying unlawful orders from the executive.
The judicial branch is meant only to provide clarify of laws on the books. I'm not sure what they would do with an enforcement agency, and I'd be worried about what that would do with regards to the types of people attracted to those judicial positions.
The legislative branch already has a lot of power. I'd be very concerned giving them the direct control, or even shared control, over enforcement. They should be controlling enforcement through legislation.
That leaves the executive, and personally I don't see a problem with enforcement living there. That is a very good reason to otherwise limit the authority of the executive branch though, and why executive orders as used today shouldn't be legal (they effectively are a legislative branch with the enforcement agencies).
> That leaves the executive, and personally I don't see a problem with enforcement living there.
What if the executive just decides not to enforce the decisions of the legislative and judicial branches?
The legislative branch can pass a law requiring enforcement, likely within some specified parameters or timeline. If that passes and is constitutional, the courts could be tested and uphold the law.
Uphold the law ... how? Who actually does it? The courts can write as many orders as they want, but if they're ignored, they're powerless.
And that would be the point when congress impeaches the president for dereliction of duty.
The system is surprisingly simple, it just requires leaders willing to actually uphold it.
Ok, but (a) they won't, and (b) if they do, who carries out the actual removal of the president from power? ... oh, right, the executive branch, again. Oops.
If your concerns are only procedural, surely congress could fix that if they cared. If they actually had the vote to impeach they could likely have the voter to either pass new law or amend the constitution to ensure the removal is enforced.
Congress already have the Capitol police which they could have arrest anyone they think committed a felony in any jurisdiction and have top jurisdiction in DC and any government building within it.
And I'm of the opinion that the capitol police should be limited only to acting as a security force for the Capitol itself. They shouldn't be enforcing anything beyond building security.
Our current system should allow Congress to control this.
They’re not. That’s the problem.
You could swap it out for a parliamentary structure with the same characters and you’d get the same result. There’s a weird personality cult thing going on and everyone is waiting to see who will break ranks first, lest they get crushed by the retaliatory wrath of Trump calling his followers to oppose a person and Elon Musk dumping a mega war chest on them.
There are signs that people are starting to break ranks, but it looks like they want to see him have to face the consequences of his decisions before they jump in to save him.
This current policy is so bad that they’d be doing him a political favor by jumping in to disallow it. The problem for them is that he would be guaranteed to turn around and blame it on Congress. “My tariff plan was going to work, but Congress interfered!”
If you are persuaded by "The Goodness Paradox" (Richard Wrangham) then you are probably going to think like I do Congress and the Senate acting almost inevitable if Trump does enough damage. The book is speculation/theory on how/why the low level of intra-tribe violence in humans could have evolved. It is literally an order of magnitude less than other species. His theory is in small tribes small men routinely band together to kill an oppressive leader. The result is leaders evolved to be less violent over time. Most of the violence in other species happens because it is the primary tool leaders use to extract resourced from others, so when they do this total in-tribe violence was reduced. It had no effect on the violence between tribes, which is anything has increased in humans. If he's right this behaviour is fairly ingrained in all human males now.
Wrangham's thesis is this behaviour is built on language. In order to kill the biggest and most powerful with little risk, the group had to coordinate and perhaps more importantly a level of trust had to be build up, because if one broke ranks and spilled the beans before the deed was done, the leader could pick off the insurrectionists one by one. The most startling example of this is the men who killed Caesar (some 60 to 70 of them) all sank a knife into his body. Only humans had the tool needed to build up the level of in-group trust: language.
The relevance to overthrowing is Trump needs a concerted whispering campaign that takes months to to create the bonds between the "small men". We've had less than 100 days to enjoy the fruits of Trump's blessings. They've only just become aware of what he is doing to their electoral prospects. Hell, I suspect Trumps big donors like Musk have only woken up to the fact in the last couple of days that they've funded a huge threat to their personal fortunes and the businesses that create and sustain those fortunes. But they are aware now, and as you say the white anting has begun. May it continue post haste.
You still often have one man with all the power in a parliamentary system. The Prime Minister. Take Canada as an example. JT had basically complete power over government. It's as rate for the prime minister party or coalition to go against him as it is for a president in the US to be impeached.
I think the trick has to be to just get better people into those positions. Which means better people need to have some incentive to get into politics. It's a tough one for sure.
The prime minister in the UK is regularly kicked out by their party, and it's the same in most parliamentary systems. Liz Truss introduced ridiculous ideological economic policies that caused a bond market revolt. Her party kicked her out within the lifetime of a lettuce. This is only possible in a parliamentary system. Most of her recent predecessors were similarly if less rapidly removed. In the past 40 years, only three prime ministers lost their job at an election. Six were either forced out or resigned. Of those, arguably only Tony Blair left through choice.
The UK is not Canada though. You have the House of Lords, we have a Senate. We are a (con)federation, and that adds a whole new political overlay that the UK doesn’t have.
The executive power of our PM relative to the body politik is much higher. We don’t have a tradition of backbench rebellion, and the PMO often wields more power than the cabinet.
Australia's favourite spectator sport is not, in fact, cricket or AFL, but rather watching government knife their PM whenever the political winds change direction. In the last 8 years, 4 PMs have been rolled before they've reached an election, because the party loses confidence in them.
Many parliamentary systems wherein a PM is elected by the cabinet routinely demonstrate that they will use their power to remove a leader in whom they've lost confidence.
The notion that JT had complete control is just utter nonsense. Federal jurisdiction is sharply limited, the opposition party is expected to be able to introduce and pass legislation during a minority government (the ppc has just been acting incompetent; the NDP managed to pass national dental care despite only hold 16% of the seats), and provincial governments have been largely doing their own thing despite federal funding initiatives.
In Sweden our "prime minister" does not have all the power, not even close.
Any time the trick is to get humans "to just do" $thing, that $thing wont happen. Because humans.
There may be some parliamentary country where what you say is correct, but in general, yeah, no, that’s not how it works.
Remember Liz Truss, all 49 days of her? A PM who fucks up on a Truss/Trump scale generally finds themselves very rapidly seeking alternative employment. Truss was forced to appoint a borderline sane chancellor about two weeks after causing the bond yield to go crazy, and was gone within another couple of weeks.
Unlike UK, US has only impeachment and 25th as procedures. Perhaps a convention. There is no vote of no confidence.
There really isn't need to share misinformation on HN.
The PM has slight larger responsibility the a regular MP.
I'm not a big fan of JTs policies over the years but they were done via parliamentary support.
I wasn't really going after a political angle or the elections.
PMs in Canada wield a ton of power and AFAIK are rarely removed. I'm not sure what exactly you consider to be misinformation here. It's extremely rare for members of parliament to vote against their party.
Another example I can think of is Israel where the prime minister yields a ton of power.
I might be wrong but I think the use of the Emergencies Act was not approved in Parliament? How about the weapons embargo on Israel?
Has the Proton CEO acknowledged just how farcically off base he was when he said the GOP was the party of small businesses?
Demand for Proton services is probably up.
I was thinking about this yesterday and how stupid a comment it was to make.
The thing that’s really been getting to me, is that, I’m liberal, not pro-Trump, but the MAGA American heartland story has been really getting to me. I want to see small business, manufacturing, small town American succeed. And there’s some part of me that thought maybe Trump, as much as I don’t like him, is the thing that is needed to make that happen, but man it seems like he’s really fucking over the people who supported him the most.
> small business, manufacturing, small town American succeed
That can only happen if you ban all imports of anything those small business manufacturers would made, and be content with the prices going up so those Americans can really be paid who make those products.
If that is not possible, then it is either slavery, poorly paid illegal immigrants or back to some other low-wage country like we’ve done for the past decades.
> That can only happen if you ban all imports of anything those small business manufacturers would made, and be content with the prices going up so those Americans can really be paid who make those products. ... then it is either slavery, poorly paid illegal immigrants or back to some other low-wage country like we’ve done for the past decades.
Counterpoint: About 1/3 of Australia's GDP is small business. We have very few tariffs. We have a high minimum wage (about USD$16/hr) and it's enforced, so slavery yada, yada isn't a factor.
What you said sounds like it might be true, but in reality it ain't so.
> That can only happen if you ban all imports of anything those small business manufacturers would made
Consumers could always make this decision for themselves and pick domestic over foreign. It seems extremely unlikely, but I also see bringing back manufacturing without massive economic shock as extremely unlikely. If I want a pipe dream, it be for manufacturing to come back because consumers actually care that it comes back.
> Consumers could always make this decision for themselves and pick domestic over foreign.
In a free market, consumers _do_ decide for themselves. It is simply so, that price is the primary factor for many consumers. Especially in a society where living paycheck to paycheck is normal - but really in any society.
Price doesn't have to be the primary factor though, that was my point. People can choose for whatever reasons they want, we just don't currently seem to care where manufacturing is being done.
Price does have to be the primary factor if you need something and can only afford the cheapest option. And this is the unfortunate reality for most people in the world, including those in first-world societies.
If we are, in fact, at the point where people are only buying the necessities and we still can't afford the cheapest options the game is kind if already lost.
Quality is actually a primary factor for me, which means for any important purchases (cars especially) I choose foreign-made products.
Some of the biggest boons to small business would be universal healthcare and that's just ... you know, never going to happen under a Republican president (or a Democrat, for that matter).
It would greatly ease the burden of employing others in small businesses and it would greatly increase the safety net of would-be entrepreneurs.
It would also improve works-rights-as-capitalism because you could more easily quit abusive employers and make employers more merit-based as well.
Addendum: The $450 I spend every month on health insurance is a meaningful part of my monthly spend as I'm trying to start my business.
I've always disagreed with single-payer/universal/govt-supplied healthcare for various reasons, but hadn't thought about this angle.
Thank you for bringing this up
I'm happy to help someone see a different perspective on things!
It’s a common misconception that Republicans are pro-business. They loathe small business and love big business. If everyone could just be indentured to one of a dozen mega-conglomerates, that would be their perfect world.
Its probably outdated rather than a misconception, there was a time when the republican party did actually push policies that helped small businesses.
That’s the same thing as being pro-business. Big business out-competes small businesses again and again. The idea of smol business being viable (see: this whole thread) is just the marketing front.
Well, it's also a US- vs the rest of the world thing. Big businesses destroying local economies, local health, local taxes, etc, is a very American problem. See [0] for a study on the topic.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-e_yhEzIw "These Ugly Big Box Stores are Literally Bankrupting Cities" - Not Just Bikes
Small business is viable. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses successfully running throughout the country. Maybe I'm missing your point but this seems like a dumb thing to say.
Sorry, it would have been more correct to say that while smol businesses are viable, Republicans and other corrupt politicians siding with big business is just them siding with the winning side.
Ok I agree with this but I would add that they are only winning because Republicans side with them.
Why does it deserve to succeed, especially if it results in everyone paying more for things, and if they’re of worse quality to boot?
Labor and industries are specialized just like agriculture is. Fighting to redomesticate labor is a bit like fighting to produce bananas at scale in the USA: It’s just not practical and will cause harm to the broader economy.
This critique seems to miss that Trump is putting his thumb on the scales against small business, and in favor of big business. There are macroeconomic and antitrust policies one could put in place to level the playing field and Trump seems insistent not only on not preferencing small town America, but actively opposing it.
They said nothing about deserve. They said they want it to succeed.
And I want a pony. But one should be realistic in their desires.
A pony is a very realistic desire. Horse property is cheap and horses themselves aren't too expensive provided you have time. Don't let your dreams be dreams.
This reads like a AI response. What world do you live in?
Sorry my data cutoff is October 2024, please prompt again. :P
What a surprise. Trump fucking over people. He has a history, it's not some mysterious hero who just arrived to town. Why's anybody surprised given the things he's done in past.
Nobody in Beijing or Brussels was surprised they had plans. Observe how neither of them is kissing his ass at the moment.
This link is better:
https://wccftech.com/trumps-reciprocal-tariffs-have-reported...
Or, the primary source seems to be:
https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3db9e5...
But you'd have to look up those codes to know they're for PCs, smartphones
Thanks for a great free article.
The title is sensationalism when it should be phone and computer associated parts are exempted from tariffs or something like that.
So we are exempting all the tech transfer & natsec risk items but maintaining new embargo-level tariffs on cameras, children's toys, and t-shirts.
Makes a lot of sense if you don't think about it.
American children yearn to work in a sock factory.
Florida is passing laws to make that easier, yes
And they're back(?):
>NOBODY is getting “off the hook” for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers, that other Countries have used against us, especially not China which, by far, treats us the worst! There was no Tariff “exception” announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff “bucket.” The Fake News knows this, but refuses to report it. We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations...
(truth social Apr 13, 2025, 8:36 PM. You need the day and time to see what the tariffs are that particular hour really)
In a dark sense this is probably perfect for him.
He announces big tough tariffs on China, his base claps, hoots and hollers. He quietly walks it back via internal memo to CBP on a Friday night.
His base gets to see him be tough on China, without actually suffering any consequences of goods shortages or price increases.
I'm not economist. Maybe tariffs could work. (It seems like most of the experts say they don't. And how they were determined certainly seems especially dumb) However, it doesn't take a genius to see that enacting them without advance notice to prepare for them is the worst way to do it. Give companies time to prepare. Give countries time to negotiate. The result would be the same without the uncertainty and chaos. Unless this really is some plan for the rich to short stocks and make a killing in the market, I don't see how this implementation would be a good idea to anyone.
Time to just call these tariffs: sales tax. Extra money for the government on all goods imported are taxes. The rest of the complexity distracts from the basic cash flow and the inevitable results. More money spent and consumed by the government.
They’re worse than sales taxes, because the goods imported are subject to levies even if they’re unsold and eventually destroyed.
Right, but the goal is to solve a marketing issue. The Trump base is resistent to criticisms of dear leader and the mechanisms behind tariffs raising all prices can be misunderstood (and let's be honest, who really trusts economists). Call it a sales tax, they know what that is. The mechanism doesn't matter.
I listened the book "Lucky Loser" (Craig/Buettner) a few months back. It's a well-researched timeline of how the Trump fortune was made, and to be really kind, how monumentally terrible DJT is at business on a fundamental level. The shady deals and repulsive ethics are not exceptions but the status quo. The only reason he's in the situation he's in is because the guy who created Survivor saw an opportunity. Now the whole world is paying the price.
I listened because I thought it would be funny, but the shitty behaviour and unapologetic corruption is just so naked that it actually left me feeling pretty upset for all of the obvious reasons.
I'd say that I don't understand how anyone can be charmed by this con artist, but the truth is that I have simply lost a ton of faith in the "average" person.
From what I am hearing, he seems to have appealed on culture war issues. On economic issues, it was assumed that Biden had been doing something bad and Trump would end it, but they didn't much care past that.
There is still a halo of "Democrats are bad at the economy" dating from the 1970s and rooted in the New Deal.
Yeah, the New Deal. That terrible disaster that turned America into a temporary economic powerhouse until their kids decided no further investment was necessary to keep the good times rolling.
Enjoy your bridges.
Seems a bit anti-business to have an unequal playing field just for the star-bellied sneetches. Also silly that those with the biggest piles of capital are getting exemptions when the whole purpose of this exercise is to spur local investment in manufacturing. If anything, small businesses below some threshold of revenue/staff should be getting exemptions.
Wdym? It's entirely merit-based, with the 'merit' being $1 million dollar totally-not-a-bribe dinner with the president: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
That's definitely how it looks like
You are right.
Do you think all the tech CEO’s attended his inauguration for nothing?
I never imagined I would see such public corruption in any western country. I am saying this as someone who supported some the current administrations agenda
Jared Trump’s business getting two billion dollar investment from Saudi Arabia and the Secret Service paying Trump millions for various services like staying at his hotels happened during his first term.
The inauguration donations are pretty common across all parties, I think the Trump coin launching the day prior was the most corrupt.
The whole idea of an inauguration donation is gross. No president should accept, and no one should offer.
> The inauguration donations are pretty common across all parties
Which is still corruption.
It’s total bullshit. Part of my business involves direct import and that’s now impacted by tariffs. The cherry on top is that what I import is not and cannot be produced in the U.S. I source a number of other products from suppliers in the U.S. and literally every single one of them is impacted by tariffs somehow, whether it’s ingredients, packaging, etc. that comes from somewhere else. Some of my materials originate in the Dominican Republic, which is now subject to a 10% tariff, although it’s more common for others in my industry to source those same materials from China. Now that China is prohibitively expensive, they will be quickly pivoting to other suppliers, which will further drive up prices. Supply chains are in chaos right now.
It burns me up that massive companies like Apple and Nvidia get a free pass while everyone else is subject to the most brain dead economic policy anyone alive today has ever lived through.
The whole thing strikes me as a bunch of nepobaby/fake academic/banker bro advisors who have no idea how the physical world works. As much as I think Musk is a bad actor at this point, talking to him about supply chains would have highlighted how insane this whole plan was from day 1.
My dad is a retired EE who dealt with the 90s offshoring wave and described the process of spinning up offshore production with a new supplier/factor/product as a 1-2 year process.
Now imagine every producer with China exposure trying to do this at the same time dealing with the same limited ex-China options? Nothing was happening in the 90 day pause, let alone before the 2026 midterms or before the end of his reign in 2028.
Complete chaos for American companies who are left with no good options other than try to wait it out, and pass on excess cost to consumers in interim.
It’s pure stupidity and most people don’t even realize it. Last night I met a couple at a country club where I was a guest - one of those $100k/yr places - and they asked me if my trade partners are charging me more with the tariffs. I told them the U.S. government is charging me more with the tariffs and my trade partners are charging me more because the value of the dollar is down. This was the first time anyone told them it’s the importer who pays the tariff and that it will be passed to the customer in multiples to maintain the same profit margin. Man, to be wealthy enough to be a member at a place like that and to be able to live in ignorant bliss… What a life.
This is why I don't know if he will/would actually hold fast through the turbulence of actually implementing anything he's threatened.
Once we eat through inventories and stuff that left the ports & currently on the water, prices will go up.
The country went insane when inflation crossed 5%, are we really going to do it again.. when the reason for it will be so singularly obvious?
Whilst the reason may be singularly obvious to those who consume various forms and sources of media, there's likely enough people that only consume re-published whitehouse press releases and the trump administration probably already has an alternative explanation that they'll use for these increased prices.
And their target market will eat it up and ask for seconds.
Like a doomsday cult, with each failed prediction they will just keep pushing back the ostensible payoff. So far, we've seen "I will end inflation on day one" -> "this is still Biden's inflation" -> "there will be a little bit of pain" -> "the system has been broken for decades and it will take years to fix".
> The country went insane when inflation crossed 5%
This is actually one of the few reasons I'm hopeful for the next election (assuming we still get one) - last time, regardless of the root cause, the country blamed those in power right then.
I have seen country clubs only in movies. Do those places really exist and are they as stereotypical as one might expect?
It’s not like Caddyshack. At least not this one. There’s golf, tennis, pools, a restaurant, bars, etc. It’s the kind of place where you will see PGA Tour guys hanging around and a few other high profile people. A lot of people are driving cars that cost more than my house. Everyone is pretty chill, but it’s top 1% kind of people in their natural habitat. It’s like a little bubble detached from reality.
They really exist. There are lots. I went to one in Dallas as a guest once. Sure as hell not my scene.
Country clubs aren't terribly different than a Manhattan co-op..
I really do sympathize with you, given how much small businesses are often reliant on imports and often don't have enough money in reserve to wait out this chaos. There are going to be a LOT of small businesses going bankrupt over the next few months, while these big companies have much deeper pockets and can weather this storm.
Trump is pro business in the same way Putin is. It's not good to be in the Russian oil business, unless you are Putin's chosen friend.
America has finally become the banana republic it has accused others of being.
That's a funny way of looking at it because the banana republics weren't called that because they were "bananas" or something. They were called that to identify which of those countries had had state and megacorp interference and government toplings, by mostly the United Fruit Company - an American company.
Whatever the banana republics were they were turned into that by the US's doing, so it's funny that now the term comes back home.
It bears some resemblance to the Imperial Boomerang.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
This has been the best TIL moment for me on HN.
Thanks, man, I am now in the rabbit hole of reading up.
In that same context, did you read the article about how diplomats were "convincing" the Mexican government to not use open source over Microsoft?
It sure sounds like the same strategy.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776/
People commenting here about Trump corruption are correct, but it's also not new. This is regression to the mean. America has historically been a highly corrupt nation with extreme wealth inequality that occasionally has shocks (e.g. Abolitionism, the Progressive movement, WWII) that allow liberals to take over and purge the system of corruption. If anything, we've had to deal with and defeat (or at least, outlive) smarter and more well-connected fascists than Trump.
I agree and my rationale of it is that it's related to the US dedication to capitalism and thus aversion to any form of socialism (even small pockets that, in my opinion, are evidently positive for society as a whole) as some kind of governmental totalitarianism.
This is probably the most corrupt, pay to play government in the history of the US. Merit has no place here.
not just a bit, this is so unfair and smells of corruption, only the richest companies getting exemptions, give me a break. this is what organized crime looks like.
[flagged]
if it is not, what is your interpretation of it then?
It is all companies in the categories of phones, computers, and chips.
so what difference does that make, my interpretation still holds :)
False, you said:
> only the richest companies getting exemptions
…when the reality is that certain classes of goods were exempted. You reiterated the clickbaity headline.
Products like the Librem phone have exceptions. Is Purism one of the richest companies?
It applies to huawei as much as Apple.
"Star-bellied sneetches" maybe, but it's not about "biggest piles of capital" as much as about importing things with the following codes:
8471 8473.30 8486 8517.13.00 8517.62.00 8523.51.00 8524 8528.52.00 8541.10.00 8541.21.00 8541.29.00 8541.30.00 8541.49.10 8541.49.70 8541.49.80 8541.49.95 8541.51.00 8541.59.00 8541.90.00 8542
It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to:
| Code | Description |
|--------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 8471 | Automatic data processing machines (e.g., computers, servers, laptops) |
| 8473.30 | Parts/accessories for machines of 8471 (e.g., computer parts) |
| 8486 | Machines for manufacturing semiconductors or ICs |
| 8517.13.00 | Smartphones |
| 8517.62.00 | Data transmission machines (e.g., routers, modems) |
| 8523.51.00 | Solid-state storage (e.g., USB drives, flash memory) |
| 8524 | Recorded media (e.g., tapes, disks — mostly obsolete) |
| 8528.52.00 | LCD/LED monitors for computers |
| 8541.10.00 | Diodes (not including LEDs) |
| 8541.21.00 | Transistors (<1 W dissipation) |
| 8541.29.00 | Other transistors |
| 8541.30.00 | Thyristors, diacs, triacs |
| 8541.49.10 | Gallium arsenide LEDs |
| 8541.49.70 | Other LEDs (not GaAs) |
| 8541.49.80 | Other photosensitive semiconductors |
| 8541.49.95 | Other semiconductors not elsewhere specified |
| 8541.51.00 | Unassembled photovoltaic cells |
| 8541.59.00 | Other photovoltaic cells/modules |
| 8541.90.00 | Parts for items in 8541 |
| 8542 | Electronic integrated circuits (e.g., microprocessors, memory chips) |
I copied the codes from the actual government communication: https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3db9e5...
As other commenter says, it’s interesting that there are also exceptions within the exceptions.
I'm reaching here but....
Apple has already "committed" to investing in US manufacturing. Also, many companies have committed to AI investments on US soil which would be heavily NVIDIA dependent. Could be a justification for the exemption.
That’s how oligarchies work.
Eastern Europe and large part of Asia to US citizens: "First time?"
We are returning champs of the Oligarchy World Tour at this point.
[dead]
[flagged]
Companies aren’t getting exemptions. The product categories are. The headline is misleading. And while you might already be aware of that, most the people responding to you clearly aren’t.
The result is still that certain companies are getting exemptions for their products while others aren't. And there is no real rhyme or reason behind these decisions
K. We aren’t in disagreement there. Not sure if you’re giving pushback on something I said.
True, yet irrelevant. If Apple imports garlic for it's cafeteria, that will be tariffed. But those commodity categories represent the business of the named companies, and those companies represent the majority of the value of imports to the US in those categories.
It’s not irrelevant at all when the headline implies that companies were singled out by name. Details matter.
Because they can’t do it, and will be sued, to my understanding. I think you’re trying to make the admins look good.
There are valid reasons for tariffs:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
But none of the current "reasons"—which may simply be rationalizations / retcons by underlings for one man's fickle will—really make much sense:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-for-tariffs-...
> you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms.
The analysis is reasonable, but let's just replace "defending your freedoms" with "reaping the benefits of being the biggest bully in town". This is what China's competition means, not the risk of being attacked and losing your freedoms, but that of losing the power you got used to and profited from.
> The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future
People were worrying about this as early as the 1970s when Japan started importing cars, and in the 1990s when Chinese markets started to open up under the condition that the Western companies partner with Chinese ones and effectuate technology transfers to them. These folks foresaw the future, but politicians and corporate managers didn’t care; they were focused on expansion at all costs.
Now that the future is today, all they can say is “I told you so,” which isn’t much comfort to anyone.
Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
And tarriffing imports doesn't make a difference in the case of something like shipbuilding where the real problem is the government hasn't got a consistent order-book to keep factories staffed, operating and training - nor a plan to allow that capacity to leverage into being self supporting.
Like a much better plan has always been defence exports: increase your customer base to spread risk and reduce per unit prices. The F-35 and it's adoption was a great idea in this regard...right up till the US started threatening NATO allies and cutting off avionics support to partner nations (Ukraine) in the middle of a war.
You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry. The whole "bring manufacturing back" idea is almost wholly disconnected from it: a ton of factories extruding plastic childrens roys aren't suddenly going to start making anti-shipping missiles - in fact this is related to a secondary problem which is that it's not remotely clear that a peer/near-peer conflict would look anything like the long wars that WW2 represented due tot he delivery timelines on advanced weapons systems. You basically go to war with the military you have.
> Except tarrifs rarely help any of that: there's already extensive regulations in place to require local sourcing for defence critical components, all the way down the supply chain.
This is too limited in thinking. It's not just about "defence critical components", but the know-how and having the production workflow knowledge. It's all well and good to have rules on what goes into frigate, but if you don't have the shipyards to build things then it's a bit of a moot point:
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
> You don't get a defence manufacturing industry without actually paying for a defence manufacturing industry.
It's not just about industry but about capacity as well: if you have (in this example) only (say) 4 shipyards you're going to have a tough time beating someone who has 40.
This is presuming you get to keep the shipyards. They're no use to you if they're all blown to hell in the first 48 hours - ships take months to build at minimum. If you lose your navy in the mean time, you won't be building anything.
This is the problem with these assumptions: they're all rooted in the industrial warfare the US won in WW2 but are not contextually accurate to today. WW2 wasn't fought with satellite targeting and precision cruise missiles which could be fired from half the planet away. Ukraine is currently hitting targets on the other side of Russia - "behind the lines" doesn't really exist for strategic assets anymore.
Giving up your economy for a future war with China that may or may not happen is frankly idiotic. The US already has thousands of nuclear warheads in storage so what are you afraid of? This is basically how the USSR collapsed.
> You basically go to war with the military you have.
The war in Ukraine shows what a current-day war looks like: You rapidly expend stockpiled traditional weapons, and then rapidly ramp up low-cost drone manufacturing.
Currently, the #1 drone manufacturer in the world is probably Ukraine, with Russia and China somewhere in the #2 and #3 spots. The United States is somewhere on the bottom of that list.
Subsidising civilian drone manufacturing alone would catch up the United States dual-use manufacturing capability for any potential future war for the next half-a-decade or so. After that...? Something-something-AI-murder-bots.
But Ukraine built that industry after the war started. And the Ukranian conflict is uniquely well suited to drones because of numerous factors which wouldn't apply in say, a fight over Taiwan - where the outcome would more or less be determined by who still had a floating Navy at the end of the day.
No amount of 3D printed FPVs is going to bring down a modern warship - they're unlikely to even get near it (conversely the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets in anyway, but can be as cheap as "brick on a speed boat throttle").
"the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets"
Absolutely. Ukraine was able to push Russian surface fleet into Russian ports using sea drones. If Taiwan builds a fleet thereof, the Chinese blockade fleet will face Armageddon.
I saw an interview with a former naval radar guy, who claimed that the natural state of the sea produces so many small false blips that a smartly built sea drone of certain size is basically impossible to distinguish from those.
> built that industry after the war started.
Because for the first year of the war was the "burn down existing cold war era stocks" phase. More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have.
Now that every military has seen years of video clips on Telegram of tank after tank being blown up by $500 drones, the next war is going start with swarms of drones on day 1, not day 400.
"More importantly, neither side realised the impact that drones would have."
The Ukrainians absolutely realized that, and I saw a lot of reports about Ukrainian drone operators in 2022 already. It was just after the Nagorno-Karabakh war, where Turkish-made drones were a significant factor in Azeri victory.
There was something else at play. The supply chain had to be built up, plus the Russians were/are quite strong at radioelectronic warfare. Overcoming Russian jamming was a serious uphill battle.
I think we need to also consider that "conventional economic thinking" got us into this mess (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit). There never seems to be any accountability for this though. I suspect it's because a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo.
> (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit).
The debt/deficit is on politicians (and the public who votes them in). See also issues with US Social Security (Canada was on a similar path, but the government(s) sorted things out in the 1990s).
At least for the US, it has not de-industrialized, as exports have never been higher. It makes a smaller portion of total GDP, but that's because of growth of other sectors; and a smaller portion of the workforce, but that's because of automation:
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/do-not-blame-trade-decline-man...
The largest problem nowadays is probably housing costs, and that has nothing to do with trade, but is about things like NIMBY and zoning.
If you want more than "a particular section of society" and more folks to benefit look into redistribution, which plenty of conventional economists will happily agree with.
> a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo
Name me a country where this is not the case. The only thing we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation. That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think we've promoted little else besides de-industrialized degrees. That's why it's going to be so hard to ramp up again. How many kids think it's cool to get a textile engineering or materials science degree vs marketing or software engineering?
> we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation
What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation? It seems to me that the population was able to discover that and benefit from it entirely on their own. Why do they need "education" to "prosper" in current conditions?
Aren't we currently living in the most educated time already? That is we have more people going to and graduating from college than ever before. What is currently missing? Do we need to force everyone to go to college? What about those who don't graduate? They just won't ever be able to prosper?
> That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think a little more than half the country would disagree with this assessment.
> What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation?
That's an odd question, given that Prussian schooling was invented to turn children into productive factory workers.
The model and the curriculum are two separate things and our schools never included industrial education. That and our higher education is far less "vocational" than the countries that more strictly adhered to the system.
There's nothing odd about the question. What's odd is that you assert that conditions 200 years ago are relevant to it.
The US didn't have a de-industrialized or vulnerable economy before Trump. And by the extent it was hollowed out, it's because of blatant corruption, not "conventional economic thinking".
You don't even have a point about the deficit. While there are plenty of economic schools that will give you high deficits, the US didn't get his by following any of those either.
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists. One day it’s a 145% tariff on China. The next, it’s “Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.” Then comes a 90-day pause, adding to the confusion.
It’s not clear whether Jamieson Greer is actually steering this, or if any of it was thoroughly thought through.
This is the only explanation that has made sense to me so far. And it makes even more sense based on these exemptions.
https://www.instagram.com/share/_jW_V1hwM
This is Senator Chris Murphy explaining it’s not economic policy, it’s an attempt to blackmail corporations into submission by making a deal with him in return for sanctions relief.
Keep an eye out for what Apple and nvidia might have agreed to give.
The term for this is extortion.
The last time tariffs were this high, it led to rampant corruption as companies would pay off customs officers. This was one of the reasons for switching to an income tax. For the current administration this possibility counts as a major opportunity to generate personal wealth.
But this isn't the only reason for the policy. For someone who is at heart a coward, bullying and brandishing raw power over others is its own reward. That reason enough for the policy, and damn the consequences for the nation.
I guess for a change Americans will experience what Indians have been subjected to since forever.
Just about anything useful and high quality has been tariffed out of existence in India. It is done in the name of protecting our industry while they catch up with rest of the world.
Exactly backwards has happened. The cars we get here are so bad they are sometimes called tin cans on wheels. Without competitors from across the world Indian auto makers have absolutely no motivation to build world class cars. And it shows on the road.
Heck yea.
I expect lower tariffs in India to cause harm while also forcing economic activity.
What about Tata Motors? They own jaguar & Range Rover as well? They have zero good cars? Perhaps Chinese EV will enter into India.
Tata Motors have really good cars. But they suck big time at Quality Control and after sales service.
Yes they do own Jaguar and Range Rovers but it’s not meant for the Indian market. They do sell them here but not many takers.
You are 100% spot on in this analysis. Thank you for summarizing it so well.
There is also a reason tariffs only get raised on a multi-generational time scale, e.g., 1820s, 1890s, 1930s, 2020s.
The effects are so bad that nearly everyone who remembers the disaster must have died off for anyone to think it is a good idea.
At this point, it is obvious that there is no geo-political or geo-strategic plan of any type. The administration is just winging it, and Sen Murphy's explanation is the only one available.
It was also noted that the person occupying the president's chair said "they must be forced to negotiate". When someone is forced to negotiate, that is not a negotiation, that is extortion. Welcome to another nation run like a mob office.
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> This is Senator Chris Murphy explaining it’s not economic policy, it’s an attempt to blackmail corporations into submission by making a deal with him in return for sanctions relief.
Weirdly the same explanation works if you're being less uncharitable, i.e. Apple agreed to invest $500B in the US but everybody knows new factories aren't going to be built overnight, so they get a reprieve from the tariffs for now provided they continue to go through with the investment. Which in turn makes them immune from future tariffs once they're actually making iPhones in the US, while allowing the tariffs to be reinstituted against anyone who didn't do likewise.
Apple can agree to invest 500B to build a factory, but they don't have to actually do it.
Building a factory takes years, and a big chunk of that happens long before you actually start work on site.
You gotta find a site, work with local govt to negotiate servicing, environmental report (there's a couple years, and potentially a couple go-arounds right there.)
So there can be lots of activity, lots of progress reports, lots of optimism, for a decade or more before any real money has to be spent.
Ultimately Apple et al can "agree" to anything, the president can have his "big win" and things can carry on just as before.
More likely they bought Trump’s crypto coin to increase Trump’s wealth.
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Why did he implement the tariffs in the first place?
The $500b was announced more than a month ago
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...
> Why did he implement the tariffs in the first place
It's easy to forget that for a day or two they said it was because of fentanyl.
Isn't most fentanyl made in the US?
He's been talking about tariffs since before the election, so they likely were anticipating it.
My comment is a reply to the parent implying he paused the tariffs due to Apple's investment
provided they continue to go through with the investment
I recall the Foxconn Wisconsin situation, and I have no doubt Apple et al are well aware of it. String out a pretense of building factories in the US for the next three and a half years? Easy peasy. President Trump will soon get bored of this game anyway and move on to the next one; he already looks like he's bored of it and it didn't bring him universal acclaim and admiration.
It's not like they're building an iPhone factory, anyway.
The $500b investment is going towards a bunch of things, including a factory to build servers for their AI services.
> Weirdly the same explanation works if you're being less uncharitable
Annoyingly, "assume the worst about people, especially those on the opposite side of the political spectrum" seems to be the norm these days.
Well if Trump wants it to not seem back-handed to create a scheme to force companies to come to him to negotiate, he should be open about it then
I wasn't talking about Trump specifically, or even conservatives.
Everyone on both sides automatically thinks the worst about everyone on the other side these days, usually just to score some internet points.
It's a terrible way to go through life. We should show a little grace sometimes.
Just a good time to remember that the same guy who thinks tariffs are a good idea is the guy who stood at a podium during Covid next to the world’s leading expert and suggested injecting bleach into Covid patients was a good idea.
And was caught on mic saying he likes to grope women.
I would not say anyone is ‘automatically’ questioning Trump’s character or intelligence.
There is plenty of evidence he has neither.
You really are proving that user right, considering Trump never suggested injecting bleach.
I beg to differ. Quote from Trump:
“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute ... is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?"
"Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that”
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/26/birx-calls-trump-disinfecta...
Edit: found the actual video. Enjoy!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5t...
The guy is a full on moron who thinks he is a full on genius.
Never mentioned bleach. Mentioned UV disinfection right before that quote.
Never suggested it or said it's a good idea. Just said it's interesting, worth checking out, and has to be done by medical doctors.
Completely manipulating and twisting what Trump said to further your agenda - again proving the user above right. Is what Trump said stupid? Yeah. Did he suggest to inject bleach? No
You're proving that user right. Taking one minor quibble about what this other poster said, which was obviously not a full recitation of all of Trump's highly questionable conduct over the years (as opposed his less questionable conduct) isn't the slam dunk you're making it. It's more like nitpicking that goes well beyond the point and only serves to demonstrate you interest in arguing small details and not anyone's actual points.
Truth is, Trump never said anything particularly intelligent or insightful. I think most commenters in this thread would make smarter decisions and would give better answers to tough questions without resorting to deflections and personal attacks . He always needs someone around to explain his boasting comments to make it seems logical, but this term, he’s not even surrounded by smart people anymore. It’s frightening.
This dumb bothsiderism take is exactly the reason for the shitstorm hitting US right now. People really need to stop sane washing everything he says and try to actually have an objective glance at him and take him for who he is: a con man. He made a majority of conservatives as goddamn fools, voting against their own best interests because he said he'll punish the right people. Spoiler alert: he instead concentrated power in his own hands, dismantled research and social nets and is well on his way to wrecking middle class and the rights of the workers. Until this simple fact is acknowledged, every Trump voter is complicit in making this happen.
hey now, the non-voters and the terrible decision makers in the democrats also share in this blame
What social nets did he dismantle?
Similarly, democrats need to acknowledge that they are responsible for Trump getting elected. Immigration was one of the biggest issues for voters and it went rampant under the democrats.
Apple will not be making iPhones in the US. Labor costs would be too high, the supply chain for the raw materials and the parts is non existent, etc.
It’s a sop to Trump just like when Cook did the dog and pony show and bragged about making the 10 Mac Pros that they ship in a year in the US.
It's exactly what it is. And, the seemingly haphazard, unpredictable nature of it is a feature, serving as perfect cover:
"Why these exemptions?"
"Who knows? None of it makes sense."
But, of course, it does.
It's also consistent with other, publicly-wielded cudgels, like the law-firm extortions under threat of executive orders.
People should be more alarmed of these law firms, they will be used as his private army.
I think his private armies are going to be his private armies. Think Wagner group, to be deployed domestically and in central/South America.
As opposed to his public army, which he actually does control as President of the United States. I’m alarmed of that.
People should be more alarmed, the bar does not expel the lawyers at those firms from the profession. They must be breaking every misconduct rule.
"The ABA rejects efforts to undermine the courts and the legal profession" - https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...
Rule 8.4: Misconduct: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
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If every major law firm in the country is required to stroke Trump's ego, where should people get lawyers for cases Trump doesn't think they should win?
I’m sure the richest corporations are rushing to retain these firms in an attempt to be on the winning side.
"Nice smartphone business you have here..."
I keep seeing these explanations of “4D chess”. It’s Donald Trump. He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing when it comes to economic policies. Unless you believe he can see into the future of how other world leaders would react and consistently outsmart everyone else, there’s no 4D chess being played.
This isn’t advanced negotiation tactics, it’s mafia style negotiation tactics, which are 100% in character. See the law firms now providing him with 100s of millions in pro bono work to avoid punitive executive orders.
Imagine a mob trying to extort you while also stabbing himself and having a beef with the whole city at the same time.
Trump didn’t learn like he should’ve when he was under the thumb of Sammy the Bull
They never mentioned if they are providing "him" - as in the US government, or "him" as in Donald Trump, 100s of millions in pro Bono work ...
Articles said causes supported by Trump.
I learned that "4D chess" just means, "I see the 3 dimensions, I can't explain what's happening, but I guess they can, because they have that extra dimension.".
At this point it's something like 100D chess, because 99 levels of "Why?" have been explained by "because they're morons" but the defenders keep believing there's an extra dimension...
What about believing that he's a particularly-easily-manipulated patse (esp. when it comes to things he doesn't care about), and so this is someone else playing 4D chess through him?
For all the accusations of fascism, nobody seems to remember that a key feature of fascism is a corporate-cabal shadow government that legitimizes its activities/policies by puppeteering the "real" government to both execute and justify them.
That's what German industrialists were hoping to achieve through Hitler, but they didn't end up with anything like it.
Such as Elon Musk repeating the path and mistakes of Alfred Hugenberg.
Apart from what happened after war, some of them did as they got lot of slave labor during holocaust.
That was more or less the case during Trump's first administration. I think a lot of normie Republicans were hoping for a repeat of that. The ones that aren't in denial are being gravely disappointed.
hard to attribute to competence what you can attribute to malice. just as law firms are being squeezed for $600 million of services through extortion, this is Mafia mentality as well where first something is held hostage and then negotiated for. given the parties involved, I would even assume that there is personal benefits staked in this, and lots of insider trading of course
Completely agree no 4D chess here. Just a guy that wants to keep the attention on him, one day is kissing Russia's ass, the next day when "peace" is failing, it's tariffs, etc etc no strategy at all, just a show to stay on first page day after day.
It's more than that. What you say is true about his character, but there is also a playbook to keep power. The autocrats copy one another. And he has people like Steven Bannon who are strategizing how he can serve a third term.
No, it's not 4D chess, and neither is extorting companies with tariffs, extorting law firms with threats of executive orders, or hammering universities by withholding funds.
It's all blunt-force checkers that any simpleton with power can easily understand.
How can somebody even entertain the idea is able the hold the concept of Chess, much less 4D, while at the same time being aware he nominated Matt Gaetz for Attorney General...Let that sink in for a while...
"In 2020, Gaetz was accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape. After an investigation, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) decided not to charge him. In December 2024, the House Ethics Committee released a report which found evidence that Gaetz paid for sex—including with a 17-year-old—and abused illegal drugs during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives."
The worse they are, the worse their other prospects are, and so the less power they have that wasn't granted by Donald Trump. It looks to me like this is about loyalty, which is about Donald Trump gaining more personal power.
What matters is loyalty. The chess being played is for full unitary executive power, essentially making Trump an autocrat. Everyone bends the knee to him, or is too powerless or afraid to oppose. Like what has happened with Putin in Russia.
> It’s Donald Trump. He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing
He knows exactly what he is doing[0], and the rest is designed to distract voters from noticing
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661680
[0] https://www.dataandpolitics.net/70-million-in-60-seconds-how...
Exactly but this is NOT economic policy
Yeah he’s obviously in no state to decide on policy. We don’t know who is running things but it’s not him, a number of factions moving the direction a little bit in their favor whenever they get the opportunity. And of course there is massive insider trading going on too.
Genuinely curious what your take is on Biden's competency during his presidency.
Waay better.
My take is Biden sounds old. The sitting president sounds brain-damaged and unquestionably is in no condition to be making such impactful decisions. The wavering we see right now is because the different factions making the decisions are struggling against each other.
What I don’t understand is why Scott Bessent is going along with these harebrained schemes. He supposedly was the big brain genius who devised the trading scheme that George Soros used to break the pound. Surely he anticipated the outcome of Trump’s plan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
If I was charitable to Trump, I would think that he genuinely wants to move manufacturing back to the US, and is likely being supported by the military faction of the government. There is a decent chance of a hot war with China in the future, and you really can’t win wars if you can’t build stuff at home quickly. As things currently stand, China can vastly out produce America in the event of a war
A war with China would be over in about 15 min with both sides utterly destroyed
Occams razor. It's Donald Trump, I've known he was a joke since the late 80s. In middle school. Baffling to see millions of people think reality TV is real and give him nuke codes.
I knew he was a joke in the lates eighties at middle school - in the UK. Baffling indeed. I am US citizen now - equally baffling on some days...
It's infuriating to rational thought but watching videos of Trump supporters talking about why they support Trump in spite of him hurting them makes it clear where his support comes from - it's a rainbow coalition of the discontented. Obviously the editors will pick the most provocative videos/sound bites but it's a pretty consistent picture.
Trump is determined to be remembered by history for his bold moves and "greatness". There is no 4D chess here. There is no such thing as 4D chess.
At best, he's using these tariffs as a temporary means to exert pressure and watching how others respond to them, almost like acting like the crazy man with a gun to make people a little more willing to negotiate terms more favorable for the gunman. At least as a matter of intent, anyway. The actual effect is another matter.
Instead of coming to Trump for pledges of political loyalty those companies should instead come to Europe to be able to make business again freely.
I wouldn’t count Europe as a reference of a free market at all. Regulations and bureaucracy are rampant.
A free market requires regulations in order to operate. Regulations require a bureaucracy in order to be effective.
> Regulations require a bureaucracy in order to be effective.
That's a very European point of view (though not uniquely European, it's also shared across many other cultures, e.g. in East Asia). The US has done pretty well with private rights of action. In fact, because our culture is so conservative and anti-authoritarian, centralized bureaucracies are rather quickly defanged or grossly underfunded. The most recent example is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more quietly the FTC. Democrats would have done much better to roll back judicial expansion of the Federal Arbitration Act and devolve "regulation" back to states and private class actions, rather than to create the CFPB and elsewhere double-down on anemic, extremely inconsistent, and often highly partisan agency regulators.
Where private rights of action tend to fail is when they concern inchoate or non-individualized harms, like you often see in environmental protection law. Then what you get is complete paralysis, such as with real estate development; largely because its the process, not the end-state determination of rights, that private actors weaponize. But when they're firmly anchored to property rights, personal injury or loss (including fraud), etc, they seem to do as well as centralized regulation. And in the US, they arguably do better, because of our political dynamics.
> That's a very European point of view (though not uniquely European, it's also shared across many other cultures, e.g. in East Asia).
No, that's a very Smithian Economics point of view, an economic philosophy which underpinned most of American capitalism's history.
USA is not anti authoritarian. It is pro-authoritarian and consistently so.
Conservatives are dismantling environmental protection, but it has nothing tondo with freedom or being anto authoritarian. They just dont care about consequences as long as their donors can earn more money in the short term.
Yet also, US seems to be crumbling and rhe source of instability. They may succeed in exporting their dysfunction to Europe, but it did not happened yet.
True, but everything should be done in moderation. We could definitely do without ESG mandates and such, and even the European Commission has publicly recognized the need to debloat the European Union a bit.
> Europe to be able to make business again freely.
I mean… Europe isn’t particularly well-known for being particularly business friendly. There’s a lot of good there for sure but there’s also a lot of barriers. And I say this as a Canadian who is also disappointed by the overall business environment at home.
If you don’t want to deal with a capricious regulatory environment, Europe is not the place you want to go.
co-sign, it's the King's Tax (as Murphy had explained in a different video I watched of his). it's that simple. also it was a giant elephant to make everyone forget that they just exposed an entire military action over Signal in a completely illegal and extremely incompetent way.
I’m British so not that knowledgeable about us politics beyond the big players.
How well known is Murphy? I’d never heard of him until I saw this video but he seems very impressive and much more electable than Biden or harris.
About as well known as a politically active Lord would be in the UK. The general public probably doesn't recognize his name, anyone interested in politics does.
Murphy isn't well known.
He's getting more well known pretty fast, over all this. His explainer videos of what's going on and why it's so dangerous are often kinda boring and basic if you're a politics nerd–but that's great, because we don't need to be told, it's the folks who aren't politics nerds who need to be educated on this stuff.
> How well known is Murphy?
He's the senator from the state I live in, so I know him and think he's excellent.
> much more electable than Biden or harris.
He represents a northeast blue state. It's difficult for those types of Democrats to carry non-coastal states in a presidential election, no matter how good they may be.
I suspect Bill Clinton tacked rightward to carry some southern states in 1992 and 1996, which led to his election.
Christ, Al Gore (2000 election) couldn't even carry his home state of Tennessee, so you can see how difficult it is to elect a Democrat to the presidency.
John Kerry (Dem from a northeast blue state) got smoked by George Bush in 2004.
I'm still trying to understand how Obama won twice, but I think it boils down to the fact that he invigorated the African-American vote in some key southern states.
tldr: Chris Murphy is great--unfortunately, he's the kind of Democratic presidential candidate who'd probably lose outside of the coastal states.
* edit: I would have been 'happy' with either outcome in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. McCain and Romney are/were decent and serious people. In fact, Romney was roundly mocked by the Dems in 2012 for saying that Russia was the US's greatest external threat. In retrospect ...
he's a US Senator. Senators are very important here
Yeah I get that he’s a senator! I mean how much in the public eye is he. Would a random person know who he is?
We have hundreds of Members of Parliament here in the UK, but probably only 10 that most people could name.
I wondered how big his public profile is.
Most Senators are not well known nationally (sadly) unless they’ve either:
- done a non-negligible Presidential campaign
- been born from a famous family
- the press either love them or love to hate them
- have a leadership position and/or are conspicuously ancient
Relentless self-promotors are a superset of 3, the ones who succeed
Unfortunately being sensible, cooperative, or good with policy isn’t on the list
It can occasionally work for state Governors
I think Bernie Sanders is the only current senator I'd expect a random American to know. Murphy might make the top 5 highest profile senators but you wouldn't know him if you don't pay attention to politics at all.
These companies could choose to invest in the US instead and not have to worry about any of this.
Tariffs are only usable as extortion if the companies have outsourced the manufacturing that gutted our middle-class.
Externalizing variables comes with risk. This risk should be factored into planning in the future. Just because a politician in the 90s promised cheap labor through globalization, a president 30 years later can flip the script
I'm not downvoting you, because I think you make an argument that many would make.
"Tariffs apply to imports, so produce locally instead".
The argument unfortunately has 2 flaws;
A) local production is expensive (which is why manufacturers fled decades ago.) If it is reintroduced here those goods remain expensive.
B) most things are not made in one place. Steel comes from here, electronics from there, energy from somewhere else, and so on. Even farmers use imported fertilizer, machinery and so on. Since the Tariffs are on "everything" (not just finished goods) they drive up the cost of local manufacturing even more.
A long-term strategy to increase local production makes sense. But it has to be done in a targeted way so as not to harm everything else. Typically it starts with finished goods, then slowly working down the food chain to improve the supply of parts making up those goods.
Exemptions on finished goods (like electronics) kills any gain. He might have, for example, exempted electronic parts. Which would then incentivize assembly to be local. Once you have local assembly you could look at say packaging, and so on.
The approach taken though doesn't lead to the outcomes being touted. Tariffs at country level are dumb. Excempting finished goods is dumb. Tariffs on things that can't be made locally (like coffee) is dumb.
That's before we talk about stability and certainty. For Tariffs to work you need both, and neither are in play here.
What’s interesting to me is that in this horribly corrupt state of affairs we find ourselves in, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses that are not able to seek redress the way a megacorp like Apple or Nvidia can. Your run-of-the-mill office furniture importer doesn’t have the same ability to book up a dinner and pay the requisite multi-million dollar lobbying fee as a Silicon Valley magnate. In the before times, these folks would form interest groups and lobby Congress as a unified front, but at the moment it seems as though that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t take imagination to see a highly noncompetitive, post-capitalist future where only the goods from megacorps are exempted, and the goods from medium sized businesses are taxed to oblivion, destroying any semblance of free markets.
Mid-cap stocks peaked two days after the election and have been free falling every since. [0]
[0]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWM/
Most of small businesses supported Trump.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/small-business-owners-voted...
They are getting exactly what they voted for. I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for anyone who is being hurt by Trump who voted for him.
> Keep an eye out for what Apple and nvidia might have agreed to give.
Well we know Nvidia did give a million dollars already:
"A $1M-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago is how you get AI chips to China" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652504
I think it's good to consider what the implications are if Hanlon's razor fails... but I'm not giving up hope that this is all just a result of the incompetence of Trump and his administration either.
Hanlon's Razor is worse than useless if the target is aware of the principle. Then they can be malicious and play it off as incompetence. Which works especially well when they are also surrounded by genuine incompetents. They can also be, and often are, malicious and incompetent.
It's like saying "if it's white, fluffy and has four legs, never assume it is anything but a sheep". If the wolf knows you're applying that logic, what happens next?
Hanlon's razor is a great counterbalance to peoples' natural inclination of assuming people aren't dumb. The problem is when people divorce it from that context and assume it applies in general.
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If this is an attempt at blackmail it appears to be failing. It's only been a few days and Trump has already unilaterally capitulated on several major positions. Unless he's blackmailing himself, the 'plan' is backfiring.
You don't know what capitulations are happening behind the scenes
Given Trump's persona would you expect him to be hush hush about capitulations to him?
I would expect him to post "Tim Apple came to kiss my ass great guy I will allow him to make great computers in America!"
No, so far we only see the very public capitulations coming from the Trump administration. We're also seeing a lot of signaling, also very public, from every other major economy that they are prepared to move on without the US.
If we translate this into negotiating at a used car dealership, I don’t think it would look that different. Of course everyone is going to project strength in public communications. Doing otherwise would put them in a worse negotiating position. You have to make your opponent think you’ll do something drastic, or else they won’t budge. So you have everyone yelling about how they’re doing something drastic. Just like the first salvos at a used car dealership - dealer sets a ridiculous price, buyer declares they are going to walk away.
By the way I don’t think this is 4D chess. More like basic classical international relations. It just looks more like the 1800s than the 2020s, which makes people confused. It doesn’t take any particular cleverness to enact basic negotiating strategies. It just takes a lack of caring about collateral damage.
> more like the 1800s than the 2020s
No need to go that far. 1970s would suffice.
Can you tell me more about what you mean here? I feel like world wars were the transition point between realism and “liberal order” ideology. I’m curious what change you see happening where the transition point is 1970s.
Some of it maybe straight up bribes, aided by Trump's crypto-stuff.
What worries me more is a promise of cooperation helping Trump identify people to put into concentration camps.
"Trump to investors: My policies will never change" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-investors-my-policies...
There could have been deals/agreements behind the scenes. This is not a republican "first". The democrats did the same to get Facebook and other social media to censor news. Trump is literally playing their book but with his style.
Anyone who can not see the obvious difference in substance, intent, scope, and scale is either willfully ignorant or seriously lacking in reading comprehension and reasoning skills.
Requesting curbs on rampant disinformation is not even close to the same thing as crashing the economy to extort our closest allies and major business and industry players.
Yikes
Censorship is censorship.
Who are you to decide what is or isn't disinformation?
Who is anyone?
I prefer to do my own critical thinking.
It is also well documented that Meta's rampant censorship extends far beyond "disinformation".
https://web.archive.org/web/20250411170102/https://www.drops...
Who are you to decide what is or isn't disinformation?
You can ask this question about any belief or position on a topic. We each decide for ourselves the answer and society decides this through its elected leaders and the judiciary. All societies regulate speech.
A request to not amplify disinformation is NOT censorship. A threat of legal or military action is.
Of course there are edge cases, but blatant and hard-debunked falsehoods such as "The earth is flat", "Contrails are chemical spraying", Russia did not attack Ukraine", "Vaccines cause autism", "Auschwitz and Dachau were not concentration camps where people were killed" are all disinformation, and they are disseminated for the very specific purpose of undermining trust and the capability of western societies to survive, for the purpose of implementing authoritarianism.
If you evidently expect a society to unilaterally disarm and do nothing, you are part of the problem.
Tracking-free link: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIALTQjMKma
Which didn't really work since what exactly are US tech companies giving Trump in exchange for eliminating tariffs?
And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
Buy a meal at Mar-A-Lago, $5mil a plate.
The second worst part is the actual food on the plate is just a dumped out bag from McDonalds.
> And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
You'll eventually be buying them, for more than you pay now but less than the imported price, from a large US company that bribed whoever Dear Leader is at the time, for exemptions.
Bribes
Bribes. Obvious bribes. Over and over. How many millions do you spend on your Mar-a-Lago memberships? How many nights do you pay for empty rooms in Trump hotels?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Sorry, but what would have been the consequences of the tariffs on Chinese imports? Do you imagine American citizens having to pay twice or more for an iPhone (or not getting one at all) because of Trump? Not being able to afford a new laptop, because of Trump? Not being able to buy all the cheap consumer electronics, because of Trump? The "blackmail" (except it's simply the consequences of his own actions) goes two ways here- see also the TikTok debacle: or how to explain to hundreds of millions of enraged Americans that they cannot use their favourite social network because of Trump.
I think the most probable outcome is that Trump causes enough trouble to incite the whole country against him.
I don't see him completing his term. He's going to be impeached.
If he's impeached, it will be after midterms change the composition of the house. He will be acquitted in the Senate though
It's theoretically possible that the Republicans will also want him removed from office. Right now it feels unlikely. If he had kept the random crazy tariffs high and that resulted in some financial disaster that was more likely. But he changed his mind and the markets seem to be recovering (so much for we lost trust and it'll never be the same again).
He was impeached twice already with zero impact. No one is forcing him to leave office.
The rich have always blamed others for the growing wealth gap.
Americans often point to outside forces instead of holding the government accountable.
Years of messaging have trained people to support tariffs, spending cuts, and even anti-immigrant policies—despite the need for labor.
The real issue isn't spending, it's taxation. And we've let China ignore WTO rules for too long. Trump should've targeted tariffs at China alone—but he is the president, not me.
Specifically, what WTO rules are your saying China has ignored?
I am just going to go with Google AI on that one
China's WTO compliance record is often criticized for several reasons, including violations of market orientation principles, state-led industrial planning, excessive subsidies, and non-transparency regarding subsidies. Furthermore, China's policies on forced technology transfers, intellectual property protection, and governmental procurement have also faced scrutiny. Here's a more detailed look at the specific WTO rules China has been criticized for ignoring:
Market Orientation and State-Led Industrial Policies: China's approach to economic development, characterized by state-led industrial planning, is seen as inconsistent with the WTO's principles of market orientation and non-discrimination.
Subsidies and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs): China's extensive use of subsidies for domestic industries, including SOEs, and its failure to make timely and transparent notifications of these subsidies, are major points of contention.
Forced Technology Transfers and Joint Venture Requirements: China has been criticized for requiring foreign companies to transfer technology to Chinese firms as a condition for market access, which violates WTO principles of fair trade and market competition.
Intellectual Property Protection: China's record on protecting foreign intellectual property rights, including trade secrets, has been a long-standing issue, with concerns about theft and lack of enforcement.
Discriminatory Trade Practices: China's policies on governmental procurement, discriminatory standards for technology, and restrictions on market access in services sectors have been criticized for hindering fair competition and market access for foreign companies.
Failure to Reciprocally Open Government Procurement: China has been criticized for not fully reciprocating the government procurement concessions it pledged as part of its WTO accession agreement. Retaliatory Use of Trade Remedies:
China's use of trade remedies, such as anti-dumping and safeguard measures, has sometimes been seen as retaliatory and inconsistent with WTO princip
(They were also supposed to let Visa and Mastercard in)
Also Capital Controls are a big one. You can't get your money out and I have read several times people are forced to spend more money in China to get part of their money out.
More Google AI
China maintains strict capital controls, limiting the flow of money in and out of the country. These controls affect both individuals and companies, with restrictions on repatriating profits and capital. While there are annual limits for individuals, businesses also face specific procedures and conditions before they can repatriate profits, according to INS Global Consulting. Elaboration: For Individuals:
Currency Exchange: RMB cannot be transferred directly; it must be converted to foreign currency, notes INS Global Consulting. Work Permit: Individuals must have a work permit and be employed in China to be eligible for repatriation, according to INS Global Consulting. Required Documents: Applications for repatriation require documents like passports, employment contracts, and tax bills, says INS Global Consulting. Exchanges and Fees: Individuals can use banks or exchange agencies (like Western Union and MoneyGram), but fees will vary, says INS Global Consulting.For Companies (FIEs - Foreign Invested Enterprises):
Profits Repatriation: Companies can only repatriate profits after specific conditions are met, including tax compliance and a company's annual audit. Surplus Reserve Fund: Companies must allocate a portion of their after-tax profits to a mandatory surplus reserve fund, which can impact the amount available for repatriation, notes China Briefing. Withholding Tax: Dividends repatriated to foreign investors are subject to a 10% withholding tax, says China Briefing. State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE): The SAFE regulates capital account transactions and requires foreign investors to open separate accounts for current and capital accounts, notes China Briefing. New Controls: Increased government oversight and security measures have been introduced to scrutinize outbound investments, according to China Briefing.In Summary: China's capital controls are a complex system that limits both individual and corporate capital movements. While there are some recent efforts to relax controls, they remain a significant factor for businesses and individuals operating in China, requiring careful planning and compliance with regulations before any money can be moved out of the country.
https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/chinas-use-unoff...
Targeted tariffs don’t have an effect because products are reimported from china via other countries like Mexico.
About 30-40% of the country will stand behind the cult of Trump no matter what he does. With that power, almost every single Republican politician is afraid of getting primaried. Trump has already been impeached twice and it went nowhere.
It's crazy that the election hinged on such small proportions of the population, that the result for Trump was prison or wealth (through further lawlessness) and the result for USA was a chance for middle-of-the-road socialism vs a rapid descent into being a fascist regime.
Crazy knife edge.
You're kidding yourself (or you've been misled) if you think there was a chance of anything approaching socialism from a Harris administration. Even granting the benefit of the doubt that "middle-of-the-road socialism" was what she meant by "opportunity economy", there still stands the fact that construction is complex, and takes coordination between interests at scale where destruction is simple and can be done (apparently) unilaterally.
Per Churchill, “To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.” .
So exactly what “socialist” policies would you have gotten under Kamala?
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This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies on the everyday life and I wonder if that is really the case. As I'm not located in the states, I'm very much interested to hear from a US resident if that is really the case.
>This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies
lol
Even the San Francisco city council is bullying American tech companies and tech executives.
The power of US tech companies is vastly overstated.
The biggest mistake tech companies have done over the past 2 decades is not spending enough money lobbying. Every other industry manages to stay under the radar by continuing to pay both sides. Tech industry never got involved in politics so they were easy targets for politicians on minor issues.
> The biggest mistake tech companies have done over the past 2 decades is not spending enough money lobbying.
What does "enough" look like?
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Ldiwf/
I mean given that they are in tech, the biggest mistake was being located in a city or state. I can understand that they have to deal with the US government (any company anywhere in the world have to deal with it) but they don't have to deal with San Francisco/California. They choose that position and they don't deserve sympathy for being passive about it.
> This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies on the everyday life
How?
From the perspective of a citizen’s everyday life who sees that their life is getting more expensive and consumes information from a curated essentially list - eg. Instagram, fb etc - from the operator of that platform. I don’t think that the average person in the states - like in my European country - watches tv or buys a newspaper. In this context is the PR and hence effect from the government more than that of the tech companies ?
A tech company can’t shoot me with impunity under “qualified immunity”. Put me in jail, harass me because I don’t look like a belong in my own neighborhood, take my property under civil forfeiture without a trial…
You're right about these most serious adverse outcomes, but don't forget what could happen if you (say) randomly get your Big Tech account locked/suspended/banned for some reason that was ultimately erroneously flagged by an AI, and then cheerfully executed at scale.
The examples you provided are more fundamental and I won't trivialize them, but making you lose your "keys to your own digital space" is a very real power they have over you.
They can permanently ban you from the economy though.
As an American, I regret to inform you that you're trying to use logic to understand a situation where it seems like logic wasn't used (in terms of the economic impact). These are the same fuckwits that tried to claim a trade deficit is the same as a tariff.
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I am unsure why anyone would want to change the trade imbalance when you are arguably the richest country on earth. You have a trade imbalance because you are rich and can buy everything you want.
Nobody in onshoring manufacturing with this level of instability in the finances of this country at this time. Trump changes his mind too often to build billions of dollars worth of factories.
Trade imbalance causes debt. Debt causes payments. As debt grows, payment grow. Eventually it causes default.
It's OK to have trade imbalance for some time. It can't last forever.
Current account deficits cause debt, not trade imbalances. Imports and exports factor in, sure, but they are far from the only determinants.
I'm pretty sure it can last indefinitely as long as you keep growing and don't sabotage yourself with massive tarrifs
US debt grows not linearly. Kind of exponentially or something like that. Economy growth does not match that.
The budget deficit is not the trade deficit. You are not taking on debt when you purchase a foreign good, just like you as an individual don't take on debt when you go to Walmart and exchange money for goods but Walmart doesn't buy anything from you.
The US domestic economy is vastly larger than its foreign trade (which is only 20% of America's GDP), so you can in fact run a persistent trade deficit and a budget surplus at the same time, which the US actually did for a while during the 90s and early 2000s. We need to teach more economics honestly.
Sure, but pointing a financial gun at the heads of your creditors will cause them to immediately cease giving you further loans and start selling off the debt they already hold.
This isn’t some analogy.
This is precisely what just happened!
The bond market imploded and less stupid people forced Trump to backpedal.
He’s a child playing with many-trillion-dollar matters. I wouldn’t trust Trump to split a dinner cheque.
The US was rich before there was a trade imbalance and remains rich in spite of it, not because of it.
“Fix” implies it’s broken. This is like saying it’s one way to fix America’s relative wealth.
If you spend more money than you make, then yes it's broken. And no printing money is not a solution, it's just a different form of taxation.
You are assuming manufacturing trade as only income. Services export and IP export are other where USA leads. When Apple sells iPhone in India and China, it gets to bring back the profits to the USA. Same goes for EU paying for Netflix and Disney movies and Google services. Same for McDonalds, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Collectively, US companies make 100s of billions of profits from outside USA. Another perk is being the reserve currency, you print bonds for free, get clothes/toys for that and rest of the world is just holding onto that IOU. Again, trillions of dollars.
Are you confusing the budget deficit with the trade deficit? Is that what all this is about?
I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
But that has nothing to do with whether my household budget is balanced.
Do people really think that making goods more expensive for consumers will somehow produce the funds to support even greater tax cuts for billionaires?
> I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
And if, for example, a sales tax was increased this would motivate you to buy less services, make food at home and learn how to fix your car.
Sure. But at the cost of the time that I currently use to do other things.
Are you moving the argument from conflating budget and trade deficits to saying the United States’ multi-century economic focus on consumer spending is a mistake, and we need to shift to a savings-focused economy like China used to be? I also think that’s wrong, but it has nothing at all to do with the federal government’s budget deficit.
Or are you under the mistaken impression that trade income is the only income the country has?
This is all very confused and nonsensical.
There is no plan. Talk tough, reverse under pressure, rinse repeat. Anyone surprised must not have watched season one which aired in 2019.
The "smart trumpers" I know have already staked out the entire range of possible outcomes:
1) He is completely restructuring global trade and decoupling us from China which is tough but necessary medicine because our biggest geopolitical adversary cannot be our largest trading partner
2) You can't believe half of what he says, he's all bluster, he's addicted to deals and will sign some fake deals to score a domestic win and we will resume status quo
Like yeah - sounds smart, but which is it?
Thinking the status quo will return so easily is like Putin pulling out of Ukraine and saying "So we're back to 23rd January (Edit/Correction: February) 2022, right, friends?".
The trust in the US (dollar) hegemony has now been eroded, and will probably continue until a purge of the regime of idiots (not just the oust of one idiot...).
Well yes, either position was dismissibly stupid.
No president is going to ride out a self-imposed multi-year global trade reconfiguration triggering inflation, shortages and unemployment.
Nor is putting the genie back in the bottle possible now and so even if you return to status quo trade policy, you've now spooked the world re: reliability of US as partners, US dollar, US debt, etc.
Worst of both worlds really. Incredible self owns over and over.
The goals are petty profit, some extortion, some illegal trading. Destroying 80% of the value of the US isn't meaningful if he gets to own a lot more of the remainder. Everything is profit for the broke real estate conman of 2015.
3) It's a plan for him to (unconstitutionally without Congress) create such enormous Import Taxes on the American people that they replace the eeeevilll federal Income Tax. This situation will magically persist indefinitely as people continue to buy and produce in the same pattern as before for no reason.
2 ignores all the damage caused in the meanwhile
1 is wrong because if he wanted to decouple us from China he'd lower tarrifs on other countries especially close allies
Right so nothing he is doing is smart or makes sense, and the "smart" people who try to put intellectual scaffolding around his actions get repeatedly disproven by his subsequent actions...
Neither. They're unwilling to concede he's run out of the Kremlin and the chaos and damage is the only purpose. The only reason he backs down on any of it is because he can't afford not to, so he's doing the usual brinksmanship, instructed by whoever's telling him to axe those obscure aviation safety committees (someone has detailed info), and probably hoping he can flee to Moscow at some point.
I don't think he'll be let off the hook, though. He's tasked to ruin us well below 'status quo', even for people diligently not paying attention.
He has a plan, it is called Project 2025. Trump appointed the authors of the Project 2025 plan and they are executing it. Here is the chapter on trade and tariffs, authored by Peter Navarro who is currently Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...
If Trump is America's Napoleon III, who is the world's modern Otto von Bismark?
I'd nominate Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. As authoritarian "president for life" since 1986, he's demonstrated some savvy statecrafting amid Africa's resource wars and ethnic violence, making the country a point of stability and economic growth on the continent.
(Of course, he's got plenty of negatives on the record too. But I think in the game of "Great Man History", he's already left a big legacy.)
Hate to say it, but perhaps it is Putin. Not a perfect parallel but he seems to be playing Trump skillfully.
I'm curious as to why you chose Napoleon III. The context under which he rose to power seem quite different from Trump's. America isn't in the middle of a 60-years long revolution/counter-revolution cycle. What are the similarities?
Thin-skinned, seeks popular acclaim as a substitute for respect from the old money he despises, erratic and contradictory policy strategies.
Conservatives think so.
Probably Putin.
Million dollar "dinners' seem to help.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
The plan is to make every country and CEO grovel at the feet of the boss to be exempted from the tariffs. I’d say it’s corruption, but it’s more like a protection racket.
I wonder what these companies had to offer?
It's far from the only place the policy is incoherent. They fired the top ranking officer at the US base in Greenland for having the temerity to tell their host nation "I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice-President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/creq99l218do
> the policy
The evidence is "incoherent" because the hypothesis is wrong. A policy for America isn't there.
In contrast, everything becomes exceptionally coherent if you instead ask what the policy is for Trump's personal goals: punishing disagreement, amassing wealth, rewarding apparatchiks, and always being in a room full of flattery.
There is no planned strategy. Planning requires learning about entire systems, and Trump isn't smart enough to do that. He can only act on things placed before him. If he sees foreigners making money by selling into the US, he has to raise tariffs on it. There is no second order, third order, or any deeper level of understanding of what's going on. It's purely superficial action, on things Trumps eyes sees, not what his brain sees. There is no brain in there that can predict what would happen if tariffs were raised. He can only raise tariffs.
To be smart is to have systemic understanding, and Trump & the Republicans are incapable of that.
It's exactly what happened in his first term, when he got rid of the nation's pandemic preparedness because why would anyone ever need that, right?
The plan: What if we ran the richest, more powerful country on history as if it were a giant meme stock geared to benefit those in charge?
> "assuming one even exists"
I actually doubt it does. Everyting is just too chaotic to be a strategy.
Agreed. I think at this point we can discard the assumption of 4D chess.
(This is not to say that there aren't some Project 2025 plans in the background that parts of the administration are aiming to push through.)
Every company that wants an exemption has to pay. It's a personal tax system.
> it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists
Not sure why there is a presumption that one exists or that its coherent. With even the slightest critical eye its easy enough to discern that this isn't about economic policy or trade and that the proposed "policy" doesn't make any sense. The guy in charge of this stuff is either seeing what he can get away with, fucking with people, or building a narrative...
that is to say what you are watching isn't "real".
It feels like we just hired a recent graduate, who is an egotistical know-nothing, to manage our databases. And he just decided to migrate all of the DBs to the cloud in the middle of the day without testing it, or checking any metrics. Now he wants to fail some of them back and thinks that should be "a cinch" but doesn't actually understand how anything works under the hood.
Import Chinese battery: 145% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Chinese laptop: 20% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Vietnamese laptop: 0% tariff
Truly this will bring back American manufacturing!
The factories will be disassembling the laptops, taking out the batteries. Then the empty laptops will be sent back to China. That will increase exports to China as well.
That's another patronage angle. When the feds buy Lenovo laptops, they have to comply with TAA. So they ship the laptops to Texas, "materially transform" them, package and ship to the customer.
You can be sure some crony owns the company that screws the display and puts stickers on the laptop with minimum wage workers.
> assuming one even exists
Why would you assume that?
I don't know why people keep expecting Trump to be different than what he has consistently shown us for all these years. There's no subtle plan. There's no long-term plan. He's cranking the levers immediately available to him for the drama, as he has always done.
People around him may have ideas and plans. They can sometimes get him to agree to one of these, but it never lasts long.
I mean, his rich friends made 340 billion in the stock market chaos. So I suspect there is at least a vague plan, but it has nothing to do with anyone but himself and those who support him getting richer. But that's the only plan I think Trump has ever had in his entire life, or will ever have.
Like he's just not that deep. He's an incredibly shallow, inexperienced, dim, incurious old man who has never worked a job in his life, never built anything, never did anything. He arrived on top and his greatest achievement in life was managing to not lose it, in a country where it is specifically very hard to do that.
And hearing his supporters talk about how strong he is is just objectively hilarious. Man looks like 4 steepish flights of stairs would kill him stone dead.
I don't like him either, but it's not like accomplished nothing: https://www.cnbc.com/2010/11/09/Donald-Trumps-Best-and-Worst...
There are some failures in there but also some wins, like buying air rights for. Heap and making effective use of them.
You found a puff piece from 2010 to extoll Trump?
(It appears to be a promotional piece for a "CNBC Titans" episode featuring Trump.)
I try to assume good intent, which includes not writing off the odd things people post as bot-generated, but in this case, attributing this to a bot is quite a positive spin.
Maybe it's a puff piece, but it contains examples of what he did with his life and businesses. You couldn't write an article like that after 2015 or so without it being influenced by his disaster of a political career.
My point is, he didn't just sit on daddy's money, he actually pulled off a couple of savvy moves. There are plenty of other things to criticize him for.
> his disaster of a political career.
45th and 47th president of the USA as a disaster seems to be setting the bar unbelievably high for failure.
Why would you want an article on someone that excludes context from their most impactful and most visible decade? It's true that an author today, who knows about his 2024 conviction for fraudulently overstating the value of his properties, would bring a much more skeptical eye to claims about what a success they were. Did he seem to be making better deals in 2010 because he was better at it then, or because nobody was looking as closely at whether they were really good?
Because the first guy I replied to claimed Trump never did anything earlier in his life but inherit money, and I wanted to provide examples of how that isn't true.
The Tiffany's transaction definitely happened, and no landowner in Manhattan has left money on the table like that since. As scummy and self-promoting as he is, he changed the real estate market in NY and made some investments that paid off in the 70s and 80s.
I think that puts to rest this idea that he just rested on daddy's money and then lost money on his Atlantic City casinos, or whatever.
(Standard disclaimer that he has always sucked, and maybe he never made a good business move after the 80s.)
Did the Tiffany's transaction definitely happen? Is there any independent verification of Trump's claims that he obtained their air rights under favorable terms because other developers were leaving money on the table?
It's vibe governing, just like any other populist government
His goal is to create confusion; to "flood the zone".
Him and his cronies know when that flood is coming and can profit from it.
It's only confusing if there is any expectation that he is working for the good of anyone else.
I'd say it's clear that none of it was thoroughly thought through at the least.
When it comes to global impact, can you even confidently say you're being strategic? It almost feels like staying tactical is the only viable strategy - there are simply too many variables. The chances are high that any strategy you come up with is doomed to fail.
I think its crystal clear there is no actual plan.
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
Did you link this implying "this is the plan?"
Cause this talks of a gradual implementation of tariff to avoid scaring the markets, which is as far from what happened as it's possible.
Much like Russia's overnight transition to a market economy in 1991, which opened the door to oligarch pillaging of national resources, 2 successive economic crises and a bond default, and 2 brutal wars in Chechnya.
Something tells me Trump's top economic advisers aren't based in the US, just as Yeltsin's strings weren't being pulled from Moscow.
Many people in trump's circle might have one or more plans but that is not the same thing as trump having or there being "a plan."
That's how corruption works in a banana republic. Good things for my friends, hell for everyone else. It is the furthest you can be from free trading capitalism that the US was preaching while it was good for them.
they thought it up and published a report back on it in nov 2024.
here's the plan, you can use it to advise your investments:
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
the media is garbage and they can't cover anything well enough to inform. but i bet clicks are up!
So firstly if this is the theoretical underpinning the White House should be messaging that instead of what they've been saying. Also I've read that report before (this and some other reports have been referenced in media I have listened to) and I wouldn't say they are following it closely, if this was their plan it's already gone well off the rails laid out here.
Edit: to be more specific it literally talks about the potential pitfalls of unilateral tariffs, suggests imposing them over time, etc. There's a lot of stuff in there the US did so but also a lot that they did not follow (and also there's just stuff that is outside the scope of this fairly short document). I think part of the reason the tariffs caught people so flat footed is even well informed people assumed this would be how they were implemented and got the rug pulled out from under them on "Liberation Day"
It makes sense if you understand how Trump became president. He'll test something (through a tweet) to his audience and then amplify or kill it based on the response. It worked great with 50% of the US population or so; it doesn't seem to be working at all with the Chinese political elite.
Things like threatening Canada and Greenland's sovereignty, unilaterally tanking stock markets and levying huge tariffs on western trading partners are not popular with his voters.
What they want doesn't matter anymore, these moves are about splitting the western economic and military alliances, a goal Russia has had since the 1960s.
As a thoughtful person, you've got to learn to curb your instinct to make sense out of things like this. It's a waste of calories.
> but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit
They already took a hit - which they monetized by both ways
Feels like they are just winging it based on public response.
> It’s not clear whether Jamieson Greer is actually steering this, or if any of it was thoroughly thought through.
We know for sure that Greer isn't steering this. Greer was testifying before a congressional committee when Trump announced huge changes to tariffs on China. Greer hadn't even been told.
If there is a strategy it is probably dominating the news cycle with this chaotic bullshit, while they navigate towards the real goal in the shadows.
It's not in the shadows, they're breaking everything that can oppose them to try to make the US an autocracy. It's right out in the open.
“Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.”
That's a massive misread. You are confusing the direction of influence between secondary public stock markets and federal executive orders.
The tariffs are supposed to strengthen self sufficiency, and discourage imports of stuff the US can do on their own.
Chip manufacturing, (which by the way is often only the manufacturing and not the design or IP of the chips), is an exception for whatever reason, may be labour costs, but it may also be that chips are a mineral heavy and diverse product, so it's one of the few products where autarky isn't feasible or very rewarding.
And there would be situations without exemptions where the US may have been incentivized to import the raw materials and rebuild megachip factories, of which there are only like a dozen in the world, creating a huge output inefficiency due to political reasons on two fronts.
Exceptions are reasonable.
> Exceptions are reasonable.
If there were an actual strategy, exceptions would have been clear from the start.
it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists
The strategy is to keep everyone unsure what might come next.
It's like in boxing. When you hit your opponent and leave them confused and uncertain what you might do next, you use that to your advantage and keep on hitting. It's how you "win."
As if there are any winners here.
>The strategy is to keep everyone unsure what might come next.
If the goal is to encourage investment into US manufacturing, then that's the exact opposite to the strategy he needs - investment requires stability and confidence that the N-year investment will eventually pay off. Nobody will invest due to tariffs if the tariffs might disappear tomorrow.
He isn't really hitting an opponent though, he is mainly hitting the U.S.
The US is what needs beaten into submission so he can rule over the ruins.
If Trump has learned anything, it is that the US is a lot easier to bully than others. He is convicted of a felony, he talks down to his own voters, abandons his biggest promises (repealing ACA and building a wall) and they still let him lead the country!
chaos is the strategy
Chaos is a strategy but in this case it's just chaos.
No, other autocrats have instituted chaos to grab power before. Too many people underestimate Trump and his allies. They are going to grab as much power as they can for as long as they can.
Destruction is the goal.
To understand this, I think you have to neither overestimate or underestimate Trump and Musk.
Both Trump and Musk seem be to essentially ideologues, visionary tough-talkers, who have actually succeed (or appeared to succeed) to various endeavors through having underling who work to shape their bluffs into coherent plans. This works well for various as long as the delicate balance of competent handlers and loud-mouthed visionaries is maintained.
The problem is the process of Trump winning, losing and then winning again all him to craft an organization and legal framework to put forth he vision uncorrected, unbalanced and lacking all guardrails.
And that's where we are.
[dead]
The strategy is to sow fear and uncertainty to drive capital from stocks to government bonds and drive down the bond yield. Bessant is pretty clear about this. Once they get the bond yields down and refinance a lot of the short term debt into longer term debt they free up operating budget. Combine with Elon’s DOGE cutting costs and Lutnick raising some capital from tariffs, and it is a pretty good strategy. I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
It's not a good short term strategy at all. If that's really the goal, their left and right hands need to have a chat because one of them's going to make the deficit way worse, so if the other's goal is to "free up operating budget" by reducing debt service they really ought to get on the same page, because anything "freed up" is going to be eaten by the other bullshit they're doing.
Besides, this is a wildly expensive way to go about it. The harm to receipts from the economic uncertainty will blow a hole in the federal budget and leave states reeling (to say nothing of the "other hand" making cuts at the IRS, which will also be a net cost)
Great strategy, except its not working. Bond yields are up (probably because foreigners and foreign countries are selling US bonds). DOGE cost cuts are insignificant. Raising capital from tariffs doesn't seem to be working because they're really taxes, and Americans don't like taxes.
This is exactly the strategy but it is failing miserably.
The reason for the pivot was because the 10-30 year yields didn't come down, the price on the 30 year got crushed. The 30 year almost went back to the lows.
There was literally no flight to safety. Completely the opposite.
It seems like there was a flight to safety but then China started dumping bonds. I think we are witnessing the ‘war’ in trade war!
> I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
This strategy has failed spectacularly, as bond yields are still up and treasuries are sold like crazy. US treasuries are no longer seen as safe havens. People rather invest in gold or treasuries from other countries which are not led by a corrupt government. Buying US treasuries is now seen as "lending Trump money", and since Trump runs the US economy exactly like he ran his companies, where IIRC he defaulted on debt at least six times, US treasuries are now a rather risky investment.
Can we use Occam's Razor and assume that nobody knows what would be the optimal tariff rates and if you don't have a reliable mathematical model the only choice you are left with is experimentation and A/B tests.
I cannot read it, but didn't China restrict the export of some tech related items as part of their tariffs ?
I remember hearing those items are need to make assemble some components needed for some boards.
I hope Wall Street is still hammering this admin. on why these tariffs are bad.
You're thinking of rare elements.
And in ~24hr policy will zigzag again
It's not like businesses need to plan or anything so this is great
The question that is in everybody's head: How long until he changes his mind on that too?
I manufacture a small open source product in China, I also warehouse there (because shipping is so much cheaper). About 1/3 of my customers live in the US, other customers live in countries that charge tariffs, they have to deal with local customs or post offices to pay what they owe, it's not something that's really an issue for me (except for occasionally helping people track down missing packages).
Currently shipping out of China seems disrupted, more because the shipping companies are leary about getting stuck with the tariffs, the US doesn't have the infrastructure to collect them, Post Offices don't have the bandwidth, people can't take time off work etc etc - that may change, but it's not something that can change overnight
Trump's exemption for computer stuff will likely mean that my packages will eventually sail through, but I'm about to do another build, China's reciprocal tariffs will affect my cost of parts and it's a bit unfair making my non-US customers pay for this silly pointless trade war, since the silliness changes every day I think I;m just going to wait this out for a month or two
Here's the set of categories exempted from the tariffs (via perplexity) Original source: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCBP/bulletins/... Backup: https://archive.is/el9Mz
via Perplexity:
8471: Automatic data-processing machines and units thereof, including computers, laptops, disc drives, and other data processing equipment.
8473.30: Parts and accessories for automatic data-processing machines, such as components used in computers.
8486: Machines and apparatus for the manufacture of semiconductor devices or electronic integrated circuits.
8517.13.00: Mobile phones (cellular telephones) or other wireless network devices.
8517.62.00: Communication apparatus capable of connecting to a network, such as routers and modems.
8523.51.00: Solid-state storage devices (e.g., flash drives) used for recording data.
8524: Recorded media, such as DVDs, CDs, and other optical discs.
8528.52.00: Flat-panel displays capable of video playback, including monitors and televisions.
8541.10.00: Diodes, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
8541.21.00: Transistors with a dissipation rate of less than 1 watt.
8541.29.00: Other transistors not specified elsewhere.
8541.30.00: Thyristors, diacs, and triacs used in electronics.
8541.49.10 to 8541.49.95: Semiconductor devices such as integrated circuits (ICs) categorized by specific types or functions.
8541.51.00: Semiconductor devices designed for photovoltaic applications (solar cells).
8541.59.00: Other semiconductor devices not elsewhere classified.
8541.90.00: Parts of semiconductor devices or electronic integrated circuits.
8542: Electronic integrated circuits, including microprocessors and memory chips.
One of the most surprising things about this announcement is that it didn't happen during business hours where the insiders could buy call options before hand.
Insiders already bought call before market close on the previous day.
He definitely blinked. Also illegal immigrants who work in hotels and on farms won’t be deported. Weird.
My cynical read is that there will eventually be complete corporate capture of these tariffs. Then firms will try to protect their carveouts that make unfair advantages.
Its about their corporate supporters choosing winners and losers. Its the only reason I can conjure that corporate America has otherwise been silent.
Will be? Seems like it already happened! All for a low price of a $1M dinner.
What imports of size from China are then under full tariffs?
Seems silly just to mess up a few toy importers.
Clothing. A lot of apparel and accessory retailers have significant portions of their items produced in China.
I'm sure middle-class Americans will be lining up around the blocks to take $3/hr sweatshop jobs to sew t-shirts for China.
Maybe not the manufacturing that they were hoping for...
Board games; medium-tier manufacturing; non-computer, intermediate parts manufacture
Auto parts come to mind. Also there are plenty of products on shelves at big box retailers like Walmart that are made in China and won’t fall into the exempted categories.
It is a huge amount of various goods. So much so that even if you look up a breakdown, 25% will be in other. Chemicals, base metals, stone, glass, etc etc.
What doesn't China export? Basically everything. So everything minus these exemptions.
Auto parts, but also autos.
So Tesla gets a handwave against world conquering BYDs.
Sextoys...
They're called reciprocal but the Chinese tariffs on US goods looks like they're gonna stay. That and dumping our bonds doesn't bode well for the rest of us.
Actual source: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCBP/bulletins/...
He really seems delighted when foreign countries reach out to him and to his friends for "making deals". It's all about personal connections with his big supporters and donors, who are all apparently part of the greater government now. It should be called the "recorruption" of the US.
The US is about to find out that the rest of the world is much more adelt dealing with a corrupt government because they have more experience with it
I'm not buying anything except essential items (mostly just food) for the foreseeable future.
I imagine lots of people will do the same.
Surely this will cause a recession.
MAGA!
I’m not from the US, after news like this I’m more likely to perceive US as unreliable - and more likely to buy Chinese alternatives too.
This is pretty much how I expected this to play out, at least for now. Trump acts all tough and doesn't back down publicly, but China actually doesn't back down. So what happens is that some businesses get exemptions to mitigate the impact. Then some fine print gets changed about how the rules are enforced. Like, suddenly it turns out that Kiribati is a major electronics supplier to the US :)
End result - US economy takes a hit, China takes a smaller hit. Trade balance widens further, most likely. The rich get richer, while many small companies struggle to survive.
> doesn't back down publicly
Seems like he has been backing down publicly all week. Quickly too.
This has been a massive catastrophe, though I suspect you're right about the end result.
Maybe publicly was not the right word. What I really meant is that the nominal 145% rate will remain in effect, so he can continue to pretend that the tariffs are still there and still hurting China, while he makes "minor adjustments" to protect American businesses.
This is a massive sign that Trump's double down strategy is failing badly. He only has one play: Be a bully and double down any time someone fights back. It works when you have the leverage but as soon as you don't anymore you loose, big. The US just ran out of leverage. I don't know about everyone else but I just started looking into how to move money and investments outside the US.
> I don't know about everyone else but I just started looking into how to move money and investments outside the US.
Based on tweets I've seen, you are not the only one engaging in "capital flight". Not great for the US.
One would like to think this will be a good lesson for the administration. But I'm worried that they are not acting completely rationally.
he only has the one play so there is really only one outcome.
It's so painful watching this administration be forced to react to their preventable mistakes in-real-time with no repercussions.
One thing is throwing and seeing what sticks, but at the seat of the presidency, it seems like such an antipattern for leadership. And yet, the support is unwavering. It's exhausting.
oh, they'll be repercussions. We, as a nation, will be paying for this for years and years to come.
My partner just canceled her trip where she'd have easily spent 4-5k in the US economy due to uncertainty in the border governance.
A lot of my friends are rethinking sending their children to US for college education while Trump is in power and are considering European schools. That's probably a few million dollars over next 2-3 years potentially lost from the US economy from just people i personally know. And no one is coming from China.
Who would have guessed.
Yeah, they're really exemplifying the "shoot first and ask questions later" model.
Not something you would do if there was any chance of a larger deal near term
That might explain why Apple's stock was leading the rally yesterday...
The media coverage seems a bit weird to me. The primary source was released 12 hours ago, but when I did a bit of research 4 hours ago I only saw a few reports from dubious Chinese sources like this: https://www.zhitongcaijing.com/content/detail/1277768.html
Then about 2 hours ago all major media outlets were covering it.
You're likely seeing the effect of timezones.
It was announced at 11pm and American news companies didn't feel it urgent enough to report before their usual morning weekend staff's shift.
Love the timing.
I’ve noticed that the pro-trump posters have been quiet on this site recently, pretty funny.
Because, in reality, they voted for his regressive cultural policies, not his regressive economic policies.
Though in November I'm sure they were telling us how good he would be on the economic front.
It's funny, (well, not funny) because the social issues are the ones where the toothpaste doesn't go back in the bottle. Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
So the top 1% will benefit economically from the right being in power, but the rest will spend the rest of their lives mad about whatever the current social change is, regardless of who's in power.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is 100% false and naive. History is profoundly reversible. There is no such thing as guaranteed progress.
So-called "acceptance" of homosexuality is a very recent phenomenon but in no way mainstream. Even in the liberal progressive Bay Area you can get gay bashed quite easily (including in the Castro!).
Voting rights for women? Basically just turned 100 years old in the United States and already in the process of getting rolled back via the SAVE act.
Don't assume that any of the liberal trends we've seen in the last 150 years are here to stay. America is an interesting historical exception and anomaly -- by no means how humanity has done business for the majority of its existence.
Iran would like a word.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is remarkably naive. I wish you were right, but this sentiment isn't optimism; it's complacency.
Progress seems to only go in the right direction on social issues, because people are very good at developing reasons why the social views they happen to hold are the objectively correct ones. As any advocate will talk your ears off about, open borders used to be the consensus position, until 150 years of immigration restrictions convinced people that it's not realistic to just let anyone move wherever they'd like.
I think with these erratic changes, the US government is paralyzing the economy. How are businesses supposed to restructure their supply lines if policy changes every 48h?
Behind the apparent waffling, the one constant is the administration’s effort to direct hatred towards China. You have American military leaders predicting an invasion of Taiwan in a specific time window. It’s all a circus.
So a 145% tariff on high tech goods will hurt the US too much? China should ban high tech exports to the US. That's gonna hurt both sides but the war was already started by Trump.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/apple-nvidia-dell...
Slightly off-topic, but is the result of the USA tariff "trade-war" mean that we get to trade at a discount with China in Europe? What I mean is, since it's cheaper for China to trade with us in Europe now, does that mean we gain some bargaining power?
One danger is that all the cheap Chinese crap will be redirected at Europe. It does have to upside of cheaper goods for Europe overall, which is fine for everything we don't make and which is overall adding value. The risk is that we also get all cheap plastic junk, unless EU regulations can keep it out environmental concerns.
I suspect that trade policy is one of the core competences of the EU.
And countries arguing for particular tariff policies and getting cutouts is widespread EU past time.
This reads to me as "we're doubling-down on 145%+ tariffs for everyone else".
This is getting frighteningly close to a Russian-style economy. As in, a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government. The furthest system possible from the free-market paradigm that built the American economy as it stands today.
Russia is not a prosperous nation.
> a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government
Note that this is not an exemption for companies, but an exemption for goods:
> A new list of goods to be exempted from the latest round of tariffs on U.S. importers was released, and it includes smartphones, PCs, servers, and other technology goods, many of which are assembled in China.
So all anyone has to do to qualify is produce some of the most complicated electronic devices and components in the history of the world at the largest scale possible, without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive, and then they can benefit from the gifts to the established giants?
What a gift. What a great idea. That'll surely spur innovation and domestic production and have no effect to further insulate the giants from competition.
> without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive
It seems like some of these comments are missing how competition works.
Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
That is, the companies making the goods still affected by tariffs aren’t in competition with the companies making goods now exempt by tariffs.
Yes, its true that they will have a better chance at thriving under these exemptions, but whether they thrive or not should have little impact on the other companies.
To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of this decision — or any of the tariffs, for that matter.
I’m just simply arguing that competition isn’t really the angle to use to argue against this particular decision.
> Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
Not true, for example smart phones replaced home computers for most people. Those are two very different goods, but since they can accomplish the same thing for the average person they end up competing.
And if you build your tech in US, well, you are disadvantaged because you have to pay the tariffs on every component you import from China.
So it’s actually an incentive to build in China.
It is incentive to somewhere you can get Chinese components without massive Chinese tariffs, can sell to the US without massive tariffs, and has cheap labour or tax incentives. Several countries will be sticking up their hand, if manufacturers take the gamble that the tariffs will remain for a long enough period.
So is your component in the list from a comment below -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665766
Then you don't pay the tariff.
Aluminum isn’t a component, but you would pay a tariff on importing it to build with it.
The other benefit of building in China is that you will get unrestricted access to Europe and other markets
Why is this downvoted? This is factual.
Electronic imports, no/low tariffs.
Import material to produce electronics, high imports.
It isn’t really cheap or easy to build a PC or smartphone business with name recognition…
Nor is it cheap or easy to build a company that would likely be able to appeal tariff exemptions…
It’s exactly as easy or cheap to build a smartphone or PC business as it was a month ago. The headline is misleading.
I like the way that you phrased “I agree with you, it is not cheap or easy” here
Speaking of which, what are the tariffs for Russia?
Oh, we don't need tariffs for Russia. But we put them in for Ukraine. - the Republican administration
What about penguins? Are they going to get a tariff exemption?
They need to call Marco: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PGnx_ij8XOE
No. This reads as capitulation by Trump who is now finding out his long held, half-baked economic theories are wrong. Trump got spanked by the bond market and realized how weak his position was. He can't walk it all back overnight without appearing even weaker than he already is. He's going to slowly roll back most consequential tariffs to try to escape blame for damaging the economy.
This is it exactly. And all the people who are calling Trump a 4cd chess master and a genius are in my opinion highly influenced by his propaganda.
They have a Trump Derangement Syndrome in a worship sense.
It's called a cult of personality.
Trump's Reality Distortion Field.
I’m completely over the tech industry falling over itself to bootlick and apologize away everything we’ve seen play out recently. The Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, recently posted on X trying to explain the strategy and likely calm investors fears: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1909822463707652192
“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”
“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”
TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.
These excerpts and especially your TLDR doesn’t fairly digest his thesis and is a disingenuous and skewed read. Encourage others to read the whole tweet and form their own opinion instead.
I would hope anyone would do the same and not just take my word for it. That’s why I provided the link. I stand by my reading.
Trump’s next book: “The Art of the Fold”.
“Gambling with your savings”
You don't send 6 casinos broken and remain solvent by gambling with your savings.
He is, and always has, gambled with other people's savings.
I thought this is what happened during covid already. We wiped out a large number of small businesses.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
Small businesses die and start all the time.
It's unsurprising that more of them would die during a massive recession and a global pandemic.
Those numbers are meaningless without a similar count of small businesses opening.
I gather you haven't started your own business, or did yours start and die repeatedly?
People die all the time, and every year, more people are dying than any prior year in history.
Without context for how many people are born every year, one might read that and conclude that we're about to all die out.
It opens up avenues to all sorts off oligarchy style bribery and lack of market competition. ultimately, the country will be looted, since the most successful businesses will not thrive on its merits
His crypto coin also allows anyone to bribe him anonymously. It's incredibly corrupt.
The US economy was not built on a free-market. US private capitalists have been built on a free market; now that their profits are under attack because they are being outcompeted by China, so they are running away with the ball. American economy real growth, where most white Americans gained wealth, came after World War II, where it was government led and controlled. It was the same for Europe, where they had to rebuild all that was destroyed after the war. It was all mostly government controlled and financed.
The problem today is that US and European capitalists are in power and do not want to admit that the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few. As China becomes the dominant economy, the rest of the world has to follow to stay competitive. So these are the death knell of a dying economic and government system. The US had the chance to bring real change for the people with Bernie Sanders, but that was scuttled by the capitalist non-democratic forces, allowing for the rise of Trump. US citizens have been hoodwinked by linking socialist thought, where caring about your fellow man is undemocratic, i.e., socialism.
>>Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few
Is it better? For some reason average European lives better then Chinese, inequality is also not so huge
"For some reason", really?
The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.
Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.
>the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better
You want the US government to provide more subsidies to US tech companies so they can stay competitive? Because that is what China is doing for its tech sector.
You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten
>You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].
[1] like this one: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/202501/content_6997459.htm
The US already subsidizes these companies, sometimes more severely.
The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.
And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.
US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.
Why not if it brings long term benefits to the country?
Better than putting that money in the military, isn't it?
There will be a new aristocracy. The aristocracy of pull. #iykyk
We're building a hybrid of Italian Fascist and a Argentinian Peronist like state.
The desire for transactional wins and power overshadows all. Trump will unironically ally himself with a turd like Elon, or a turd like the UAW dude who glazed him on "Liberation Day". The state control of business is missing... perhaps we'll see that develop with Tesla.
It's a weird movement, because the baseline assumption is that the country is ruined. So any marginal win is celebrated, any loss is "priced in" politically.
Well these tariffs are a great opportunity for state control and corruption, companies are bribing him already.
Every dictatorship is unhappy in its own way but they all involve:
Myth of the strong man dictator
Erosion of rule of law
Undermining independent judiciary
Arbitrary detention and arbitrary enforcement of laws
Separate paramilitary groups
There are signs of all of this in the US just now.
* stood yesterday
This reeks "pay to play" very typical for banana republics.
Donations to presidential inauguration fund to get access to the president was already tradition in the US. Trump government just exploits it without shame.
This is a populism move, not pay-to-play. The imminent reality would have been this: many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
Where do you see the populism in favoring Apple, Nvidia, Dell ?
The exclusion is by category: Smartphones, laptop computers, memory chips, machines used to create semiconductors, flat screen TVs, tablets and desktop computers. Apple, NVidia, and Dell are simply examples of some companies that will “benefit” (be harmed less).
There is no favoring of Apple, Nvidia or Dell. The headline is misleading. “and others” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Those companies do benefit from not having to pay the import tax.
This being favored by the decision
> many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
If they’re following the law they’d have to declare the purchase when they come home.
Let me explain how that works in the real world — you drop all the tags/boxes/receipts for the merchandise, maybe apply some dirt, then you can claim that it's not new and you brought it with you from your home country originally. Also in the airport there is a rather high chance you get to go through the green lane where your bags aren't checked. There are certain manners that help with not being singled out for the bag check. How do regular people learn these? When you live in the corrupt country, you quickly learn how to look ordinary and not interesting to the authorities.
> then you can claim that it's not new and you brought it with you from your home country originally.
And then they can ask you for your Form 4457 that you filled out and presented to CBP before you left the country. Don't know what that is? Oops. Full duties owed on that iPhone then, thanks.
Yes, but people don’t always follow the law. CBP reported a spike in people smuggling eggs last month, and the margin on iPhones is a lot more tempting.
Of course, I would declare the purchase, but I imagine not everyone would.
Exactly. I hope our government can survive the next 4 years for criminal investigations into this era. We can't become Russia.
What crimes were committed and could be prosecuted under the Supreme Court's immunity ruling?
It's very clear that the system of Constitutional governance has been intentionally broken. It is very common for authoritarian regimes to have compliant judiciaries and broad legislative control.
Effective restoration and reconstruction of Constitutional governance will necessarily be dramatic. It's still doable, but optimism is more of a survival strategy than an obvious conclusion at this stage.
Market manipulation?
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/well-timed-options-...
(Besides, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's Russian oligarch friends were among these traders.)
Pausing tariffs was an official act. The Supreme Court ruled courts could not consider presidents' motives for official acts.
But what about leaking information about it?
It’s not “insider” trading if you post about it publicly on Truth Social, the same way it’s not “insider” trading if you took out an ad in the New York Times.
The government is allowed to announce policy before doing it! Even if it affects stock prices!
Yeah, I'm not on that social media, nor do I read NYT. The same holds for millions of others.
Too bad! Insider trading, as a crime, requires that the information be nonpublic material information. You can join Truth Social and follow Donald Trump, so that makes the information public.
It actually is that broad. Futures traders often rely on industry-specific periodicals, which are “public”. Same for anything in the (high monthly cost!) Bloomberg terminal. So posting on a specific social media platform, where subscribing is free? That’s 100% public.
Except he didn't announce anything. He said "a good time to buy" which may be code language that his friends understand.
… are you hearing yourself? “It’s a good time to buy!” has the plain english meaning “you should buy stock”. Everyone, you included, understood he was talking about US company stocks. Which, if you did, you would have profited. This theoretical code would be “when i say it’s a good time to buy stock, we should all buy stock!”. That is, well, not a code.
He should have announced the policy, and said something like "we will pause the tariffs". But instead, he said something vague, which can be interpreted as a hint, and which will open the road for investigations.
“Now is a good time to buy” isn’t vague.
The point is that this text is not the official policy. It is a hint to investors.
A public hint to investors.
A hint to those who know the code.
Leaking is vague. What part of what law?
It's not vague. I'm not a lawyer but usually cases of trading with insider information are taken very seriously. It's theft, basically. And the scale here is enormous.
Leaking, insider trading, and theft are different. And laws contain specific definitions.
There is evidence of him tweeting insider information.
Again I'm not a lawyer, and I don't care what law is applicable here. But surely this warrants further investigation.
Trump won the popular vote. I don't think this is going away without a major demographic shift, time probably measured in decades.
He won by a single point, when 30% of the population didn’t vote. It’s not good for the future of the country that he got anywhere as many votes as he did but we should remember that an emboldened minority is still a minority.
A large minority is still large. And not voting is a signal of apathy. Not opposition.
Might be true, but a president is a president for all, not just those who voted for him.
How would this platitude apply to this discussion even if Trump believed it?
Because of the way that the Electoral College works, it doesn’t matter if 2 million more people voted in California or everyone voted in Texas. It wouldn’t change anything. Only the swing states mattered
Sure, and in the swing states he won by small margins. I’m not saying it’s good by any means – much of the damage internationally seems irrecoverable – but anyone opposing him should remember that they have a lot of allies.
Tinfoil hat time, I don't think the man claiming everyone else cheated and who got caught cheating in a previous election got all his votes in a legal manner
All the data suggests the opposite. He wasn't in a position of power at the time; the federal government was controlled by the democrats. Elections are run at the state level and are so disparate procedurally that Russia gave up trying to flip them directly. There has been no discrepancy between exit polls and the results. We have to face the fact that this is who the United States chose, and this is who a significant portion of the electorate is ok with.
Elections are, in many if not most states, run electronically.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?
Conflicts of interest are not evidence of fraud.[1]
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/mattblaze.org/post/3lmgt4ufllc26
Voting machine integrity was litigated in the election trump lost. Fox, trump's propaganda organ, had to pay $781 million because they could not substantiate claims of electronic fraud. There are adversarial reviews of voting data at all levels, and audits done at the physical and electronic level. 60 lawsuits found no evidence of fraud. You can't just say, "I think this might have happened because it sounds sinister." There is a ton of legal, procedural, monitored, and reviewed data that overwhemingly makes the case that electronic voting fraud did not happen. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. Otherwise, its just vibes.
Wait, do you also think Biden won because of voter fraud?
He won the popular vote in a year when incumbents across the world ate shit at the polls because of COVID inflation.
The US had the smallest drop in support for an incumbent party.
And yet he still won
It's a winner take all two-party election where a 3% swing in sentiment results in a complete blowout.
Generally one of the two participants wins those.
There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.
He got 49.8% of the popular vote.
> Trump won the popular vote.
He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.
The person who received the most votes is the popular vote winner.
74,749,891 v 77,168,458 for Trump. Last time I checked, thats winning the popular vote
It's not the furthest thing from the American economy as it stands today, but the inevitable conclusion of the "free-market" capitalism we've been practicing over the past number of decades.
Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right, he's an aspiration for wealthy capitalists across the nation. Generally people have felt that if only we could get an American businessman like Trump in charge of the country, running things the way a true capitalist would (as opposed to how those dirty awful communists/socialists tend to run things), then the country would start going right for a change.
Well now we have that, and in short order the country has Russian-style crony capitalism from the top. This would not happen in a country that actually cares about free markets. But we don't. Everything we consume is owned by like 10 companies. If you want to get a start in the market you have to get access to capital they control, or meet regulations they set, because they've captured the government regulators through bribes.
Trump is just taking this whole system of favoritism we've been living under and making it official. I for one am for it because honestly people pretending there is no corruption is worse than the corruption at this point.
> Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right
This is the same guy who went bankrupt 3 times, including a casino?
The same guy who'd be as rich as he is today if he had invested the funds bequeathed by his father?
The one who had a TV show based on him that was incredibly manipulated to make him appear richer and wiser than he really is?
They don't put the reality on the poster.
The prevailing school of economic thought in America, until Nixon, is actually what Trump idealizes. Protectionism from outside “threats”, on the basis of security and sufficiency, and a loosely regulated internal market. In comparison, Russia has a lot of regulatory capture and straight up corruption that stifles the internal market.
The Russia comparison is the corruption, not the protectionism.
I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries. For comparison, Putin unilaterally nationalizes and sells off companies to benefit his inner circle. The US isn’t nationalizing AMD and selling it to Nvidia at the behest of Jensen.
> I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries.
Same thing, these companies essentially run these industries and nobody else can get in.
If you want to make a competitor to Nvidia it would take you 20 years if you started RIGHT NOW. Hope you have a few hundred billion dollars lying around :P
The distinction between domains and companies fully disappears in an oligarchy.
Yet. They are still in the process of consolidating control over the government, the law, and universities. Once that's done, they will move on to corporations. It's been 2 months and change, give them time.
There's no "regulatory capture and straight up corruption" in the US, that's for sure /s
I didn’t know HN was coming around to how regulation and bureaucracy are anti-competitive.
Pointed it out in the other thread, but this is a capitulation. China imposed retaliatory tariffs that remain in effect! There are a handful of businesses that do indeed export to China, and the net effect here is that they've all been thrown under the bus. China gets to kill/pick/control them at will now.
How will China react to this, I wonder.
As a result of that, they got into some really successful negotiations with a lot of countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and America. I think they want to keep the subject on the news for as long as possible.
And then I imagine they'll probably silently drop the tariffs, because those are harmful for them.
They will either ignore it or double down with an export tax on items in that class.
China waits paitiently for the big BOOM of US treasury bond in June.
The horrifying thing is that they don't have to. They hold all the cards now. They can drop their new trade barriers at will. Maybe they'll ask for concessions. Maybe they'll leave them in place to kill off troublesome competitors. Maybe they'll coerce the affected companies into selling to Chinese-owned interests at a steep discount. Maybe they'll just take a bunch of bribes.
This is how a trade war looks. And we're losing. Badly.
> They hold all the cards now
What do you mean "now?" With the amount of trade imbalance they had the ability to simply block exports at any time. It perhaps only works once but it's a very powerful lever.
Isn’t that the lever that we pulled on ourselves?
Isn't this the same scam that Yelp pulls?
It's not even a week since Secretary of Commerce Lutnick was explaining how he wants to bring back millions of jobs 'screwing the little screws in iPhones' to Amercia ?
There is really a good chance that we will develop a deep understanding of how the French Revolution happened and why they went straight to guillotines.
The French Revolution didn’t go “straight to guillotines”, not even close.
Had to lynch a lot of people first!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_la_lanterne
I cannot tell what point you're making here. Why is this important to say?
I cannot tell either. It seems to be a potentially well-intended remark about correcting an inaccurate historical analogy to the current U.S. national leadership. It may be important to remark upon potentially inaccurate information, even if in the comments section of an Internet forum, because otherwise more people will have a wrong impression of the French Revolution and the role of guillotines. When they go to watch Les Miserables they will also be surprised. This last remark was unimportant and for that, I deeply apologize.
Sorry for being vague. I was trying to point out that the first phase of the revolution (“the Revolution of 1789”) was basically a liberal aristocratic revolution not unlike the American Revolution. The radical egalitarians that orchestrated the Terror didn’t seize power until a few years later.
I stand corrected - thanks to pointing this out. Got to go back to some history books ! While I was aware that the Terror took some years to seize power, I always thought that guillotine usage started much sooner.
There were indeed quite a few informal lynchings in the early days, but not the organized mass executions of 1793-94 (which were largely provoked by war hysteria).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking
The original comment was based on a popular but wildly inaccurate summary of the French Revolution, where the average Joes got increasingly fed up with their rich oppressors and eventually decided to execute them. The revolutionaries never adopted a general policy that rich oppressors should face death, and most people who got guillotined were average Joes who ended up on the wrong side of some political dispute or another.
Nothing about the tariffs make any sense. The want to use the tariffs to negotiate with countries but also say they want to use tariffs to bring back manufacturing. If you are using tariffs to negotiate then once the country gives you what you want, you have to lift the tariff thus the free market keeping manufacturing overseas. If you want to bring back manufacturing then you can't use the tariff to negotiate.
I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
> I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
His supporters value blind loyalty and obedience, not logic. They don’t stand for themselves, they stand against others. They’ll gladly suffer if they think the other side is getting it worse. They’re the perfect target to be exploited.
Do you have a source for that? I hear that sentiment expressed often by Americans I meet here, but I never saw anyone explicitly saying "yes, I/we value blind loyalty". Is blind loyalty something Trump followers officially identify with?
Can you provide any source in history where someone said they identified with being a blind follower?
> I hear that sentiment expressed often by Americans I meet here
I am not American.
> but I never saw anyone explicitly saying "yes, I/we value blind loyalty".
Not only do they show it through actions, they talk about it constantly. All you need are the keywords “Trump loyalty” and you get more examples than you know what to do with.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/06/donald-tr...
> “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy,” Trump once said. […]
> According to people who know him well, Trump’s definition of loyalty is blunt. “Support Donald Trump in anything he says and does,” […] “No matter what,” […] “Or else,” […] “I think he defines it as allegiance,” […] “And it’s not allegiance to the flag or allegiance to the country—it’s allegiance to Trump.”
The evidence comes in the form of continued support after each incident of hypocrisy, lying, etc
Why would someone say they blindly follow someone when that's bad?
The finer points don't matter. If it did, they'd be wondering why the nation is not awash in coal jobs and why Obamacare wasn't repealed. Both of those were supposed to have happened by 2020.
Tariffs are sold to them as "hitting back" against countries "exploiting America". They don't know what they are or how they work, and they definitely do not think of it as a tax, which is the definition you'd see in any AP Macroeconomics textbook.
All that matters is maintaining the illusion that "he's fighting for people like me".
> maintaining the illusion that "he's fighting for people like me"
There is no illusion - if Trump was a profesional working in any trade, the plebs wouldn't hire him, yet they elected him president.
It's just that the plebs think Trumps is the aristocrat most like them, and by electing him they somehow screw the arisrocrats over.
Not to mention no one is investing in manufacturing if the economic conditions to support it get changed every day or two.
Which is the biggest flaw in all this. If the goal was to bring consumer electronics manufacturing back to the US, adding a tariff that goes up every quarter would make sense. People could make plans and build factories. YC might even fund something.
Trump doesn't have the authority to set permanent tariffs. All this is being done as a temporary measure under the Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is for wars. These backdoor tariffs are being challenged in court, and there's a good chance of the plaintiffs winning.[1]
For tariffs to stick, Congress has to do it. The Constitution gives Congress sole power over tariffs. There's a long-term track on this, going through the US Trade Representative's office, with Federal Register notices and public comments. Last week Greer was up on Capitol Hill testifying before a congressional committee. That's the normal path by which tariff changes are made. Greer is so out of the loop that he hadn't been told about the big tariff on China. That change came out while he was in front of the committee. He was publicly humiliated. Which means he can't do his job of negotiating with other countries on behalf of the US. Greer may quit.
When you dig into this, you don't find "4D chess".
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/04/10/can-tru...
Typical cult leader stuff: say and do increasingly indefensible and nonsensical stuff to isolate your true believers even more.
That's what you get for electing a president with the intelectual and emotional maturity of a 5 year old.
Oh, oh, also, electing a felon, you get a lot of grifring, including, but not limited to the trump crypto scam, the insider trading Trump boasted about on video (about his friends making billions in the stock market).
This guy is not playing 5d chess guys, he's just a clown surrounded by yes men.
Maybe Trump genuienly wants to disrupt neoliberalism?
Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA. Maybe he wants to roll trade back to before 1968, the Hakone Maru, and the TEU container, to when he was in his 20s (a lot of people think that their formative years were the best, since that's when they were made, and I doubt Trump is an exception). I'm not saying Trump isn't a hypocrite, but is it slightly possible that some of what he says is actually what he intends to do, e.g. "making America great again" meaning in part a disruption to the globalised world order that the online left always seems to think is evil?
Maybe maybe maybe. These excuses are a fantasy. Have you considered maybe he really likes money and himself and anything outside of that doesn't fire any neurons?
Have you heard the engineering adage "the purpose of a system is what it does"?
Second-guessing the motivations of the Trump administration is tiresome. Let's just judge it by what it does and its effects, both speak for themselves.
>Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation,
Strange of him to renegotiate NAFTA in his first term then
> Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA.
As I said, what he is doing is not going to get stuff made in the US. Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't), the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub. That is the missing piece to all of these conversations. So we don't have the materials, we don't have the skills, and we seem to be attacking education so it doesn't look training people to do these things is in the cards? How is this plan meant to work?
The only lifeline I can throw your comment is that he wants to invade Canada and Greenland to steal their raw materials which at least lines up with the idea of getting raw materials to build up manufacturing.
> Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't),
What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
> the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub.
I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
> What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways. We also don't have the facilities to process these materials.
> I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
This link says 2026 not 2025.
> Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways.
I've got news for you, that ship sailed a hundred, two hundred years ago. Most of the eastern seaboard of the US was clearcut of old growth forest. What we have now on the east coast is new growth. Still, the number of acres of old growth remaining is staggering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests#Uni... And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
If you're asking for no resource extraction, then you're asking either for negative economic growth or exploitation of someone else somewhere else. Far more responsible to regulate the industry here, where we have jurisdiction to ensure it is done sustainably, safely, and equitably. And far better for economic integrity in cases of pandemic or war.
> And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
I don't have a problem with most things when done sustainably. What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably? Gas companies still publicly deny or downplay climate change.
> What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably?
Unions, labor law, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_sit-down_strike in which the national guard and police used automatic weapons against striking workers, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster immortalized in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz7oguguIZE the winning of the work week, overtime pay, healthcare of any kind, holidays, payment in legal tender, existence of the country in the first place... so much more. I won't sugar coat it, no human endeavor is ever perfect, but I find the attitude that we can't do it, or we don't want to do it here as backwards and regressive. Worthy of rebuke. If our society depends on something, we should have no shame in doing it here. And if we can't figure out how to do it here safely, then we definitely shouldn't be doing it elsewhere.
These are all great accomplishments for labor law but they have nothing to do with sustainability. Maybe I'm not being clear, when I say sustainably, I mean for the environment. Most energy companies won't even admit climate change is real or severely downplay it. So no, I still don't think it will be done sustainably.
> These are all great accomplishments for labor law
You asked me about what inspired me. I told you. If you need environmental wins, there's:
- Erin Brockovich vs. Pacific Gas & Electric (1993 Settlement)
- Dewayne Johnson vs. Monsanto (2018)
- Robert Bilott vs. DuPont (PFOA Contamination Cases, 1990s–2017)
- Roundup Litigation Beyond Johnson (2019–2020s)
- Founding of the EPA
- Passage of the clean water act
Just for a start.
Feel free to snatch defeat from the jaws of success before ever trying, though. Much easier that way. And probably someone else's fault.
> Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
... That's how it's used on the left
economics is a lot of made up theory and not hard science. you won't get any of his smarter supporters replying because even if they did you're showing an inability to model best-case. i mean you're personally at a loss?
if you took the average supporter of both sides neither seem smart. the clips they have of both sides is shameful. but those aren't the people implementing the policy, but they both support their tribes.
if you really are interested in understanding how they think you couldn't do worse than this:
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
They gave every strong indication of their incompetence possible - over years. A bunch of people said "yay for incompetence" and here we are.
These are the people who score in the bottom 20% and make up conspiracy theories on how they were right and it's the establishment who's wrong.
Any random person waiting at a bus stop would likely have managed things better.
It's not that they are managing it badly that I'm talking about.
It's that they manage it in a way to maximize their personal profits, with an absolute disregard of the ordinary folks.
Tariffs are one example - none of it makes sense, but companies still pay millions for a 'dinner at Mar-a-Lago' to get a favorable treatment.
What's hapening with law firms is even more disgusting.
I get the feeling that a lot of Democrats and 'real' Republicans thinks that he will get what he wants and then they just wait out 4 years. It's an almost 80 years narcissist, who doesn't care about people nor law, and who dreams about becoming a King. It only gets worse from here, not better.
If that was the case there'd be more coherency. There's these days where multiple people are asked a question, each answer is a shocking departure from policy and they all contradict and then an administrator comes out and is like "you're going to bring mining the global supply for rare earth minerals to Ohio?! Geology does not support you my good man".
So not even cynicism is supported by the evidence.
I mean they're also pillaging of course. Incompetent And malice. Both are possible
They just spouted two different justifications, jobs will come back to America, and robots will do the jobs. I guess the most generous explanation is jobs for people making robots in America by combining the two separate statements, but that's not even close to what they said.
they're manoeuvring to win the vote of American manufacturing robots for 2028. suffrage for manufacturing robots is something the far left & far right could both support, although there may be some disagreement over if the robots themselves or their owners should be allocated the votes.
It’s the looting of America while they use the same old racial ideologies so their supporters don’t break rank even under abuse.
Racism is a tool wielded by the owner class to divide workers as they wage class warfare against them.
The grassroots development of class consciousness and a united working class is our only way out of this.
if you were in Russia in the late XIX century then yes
but history learns (this is also why we cannot ever have another revolutionary hero, nor another french revolution) so no.
class consciousness and a united "working class" will not help us anymore. a lot has changed since those ideas made sense
Like what?
The idea that you could "bring industry back" into the US with blanket tariffs is delusional and demonstrates a complete ignorance of the complexity of economic ecosystems and industrial culture. It takes a long time for sustained expertise and the needed supply chains to grow and form and mature in an economy.
You could argue that perhaps a selective application of tariffs might help the formation of such domestic industry, but tariffs are not something to wield lightly.
“I don’t know how you can be that stupid. How do you get to be president and then you’re stupid?”
The French Revolution was against the establishment.
I wouldn’t argue Trump represents the establishment.
Art of the deal.
Art of the bribe, actually.
Seems like the tariffs are becoming a lot more complicated, and it is possible that it is happening by design
Tariffs can be very expensive to enforce, so you want to keep it as simple as possible.
95+% of his tariffs will be walked back within a year.
But travel (to the us) income will forever be lost.
As if the US would make the propaganda machine / spy device / tracker more expensive
So we are going to… uhh… tariff and try to repatriate a lot of lower value less strategically important manufacturing while giving up on higher value strategic stuff like chips?
So now it just sounds like my favorite imported soy sauce will be more expensive.
Can't wait for the Pittsburgh soy sauce brewery industry to be onshored again!
So is china also giving an exemption?
if they had planned all the tariff rates and things that get tariffed so well, why the see-saw? they are making up as they go along. this is worse than an incompetent biden!
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/tariffs-exclusions-exem...
>This latest round of tariff rates is currently set at 125% for Chinese goods and a 10% tax on imports from other trading partners. China also had an additional 20% tax on its goods that began in March, bringing its total to 145%.
Importers of these electronics will no longer face the newest taxes, and it cuts the Chinese rate down to 20% for them. The exceptions cover $385 billion worth of 2024 imports, 12% of the total. It includes $100 billion from China, 23% of 2024 imports from there. For these electronics, the average tax rate went from 45% to 5% with this rule.
The biggest global exemption is the import category that includes PCs and servers, with $140 billion in 2024 imports, 26% of it from China. Circumstances may change again, but this benefits AI king Nvidia, server-makers like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
HPE
+2.91% , and Super Micro, and PC makers like Dell and HP
HPQ
+2.49% . The average tax rate went from 45% to 5% here, according to Barron’s calculations.
The biggest newly exempt category for Chinese goods is smartphones, with $41 billion in 2024 U.S. imports, 81% of all smartphone imports. A 145% tax on that would be $60 billion, but even the new 20% tax is a hefty $8 billion.
Nothing means anything anymore. This of course will change completely on monday, then again on tuesday. Of course in the spirit of insider plundering. This circus will go on until we hear the magic words "the chocolate rations have been increased by 20g".
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Things started to make more sense to me once I realized that human beings hate freedom and love tyranny. Once you accept this, it all falls in place. Deporting citizens to foreign prisons? Sounds great. Incoherent foreign and economic policy? Love it. Freedom of the press? Who needs it! Destruction of democracy? Own the libs! Legalize bribery of foreign officials? Even the playing field! And finally, words don’t need to mean anything because they are simply evocations intended to stir up certain emotions. They are more akin to a hunter’s duck call. The hunter doesn’t speak duck and doesn’t care whether that sounds he’s making have any meaning, he simply makes noise and looks for a result. Not getting the desired result? Just change the noise a little.
This is why democracy will eventually fail and autocracy will rise in its place. And no one will ever learn.
Perhaps the task of rewriting history needs to start right away.
So the broligarchs get an escape hatch and everyone else (particularly the middle class) has to pay up to appease the ego of the worst president in US history? This seems like a bad economic and very undemocratic plan that we're getting here.
So now the finished products are tariff free, but the input costs when bought into America are tariffed. The exact opposite of what you would want to do to bring manufacturing back to America.
Bond yields are king
So, Tim Cooks donations and genuflections, paid off?
Wasn’t Howard Lutnick on TV recently explicitly saying they wanted to bring iPhone assembly here? How is one to understand the union of these two perspectives?
https://fortune.com/2025/04/07/howard-lutnick-iphones-americ...
Howard Lutnick got pulled from the TV sidelines over stuff like this apparently. Bessent is running the show now which is probably why they’re actually responding to the bond market punching them in the face this week
> How is one to understand the union of these two perspectives?
Only one perspective actually matters right now, and it's notoriously mercurial.
Administration officials often have about as much knowledge of what's to come as we do.
Can the other countries implement “export tariffs” on said goods? Would be a nice move to mess with Trump.
It would be karmically appropriate, but I'd guess nobody has an actual interest in doing so. Export restrictions are also easier to circumvent than import restrictions by routing through third countries. Unless, of course, you apply the export tariff to everyone, which again nobody has an interest in doing.
Trump's implementation of tariffs seems to be taking 4 chess boards and smashing them together.
Welcome to technofeudalism.
The corruption is the plan. The tariffs are the boot on everyone's neck. Carve outs based on friend, foe, and bribes adjust the pressure. This will be on-going and capricious.
How bananas is it that Trump ran against big tech and now big tech is the winner while mom and pop shops are the losers.
Other businesses not exempt from these tariffs should sue for violation of equal protection. Equal protection under the law means equal treatment under the law and this absolutely is not equal treatment at all.
Anyone have a readable mirror that contains text?
Not full exemption. They're still subject to the 20% tariff (instead of the ridiculous 145%) so Trump can save his face.
I was trying to find out of this is still the case.
How did you reach that conclusion?
Computers and China? Hmm ....
For my next computer, e.g., for a Web server, considering an AMD processor, Gigabyte mother board, Western Digital disks (rotating and/or solid state), main memory, video display, etc.
Just checked, none of that comes from China!!! The businesses are in Taiwan, South Korea, the US. Manufacturing is in Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea. The processor design, the US. The equipment for manufacturing the chips, Holland.
So, for my startup, I'm happy!
For a smart phone -- not much interested.
Realize the administration is not competent or ethical. It fits their behavior and has predictive value.
So, America decided not to "reshore" that from China, but textile and plastic slop from AliExpress, right?
Trump's unpredictable tariff decisions challenged long-standing investment assumptions, even shaking confidence in U.S. Treasury bills, assets once considered the safest in the world. It showed how a handful of people can make global markets, and people's lives tremble.
I was following HN guidelines and trying to come up with the most charitable interpretation. However, try a I might, I can't come up with anything better than 'sheer incompetence'
Tariffs can work, but they need to be paired with sound industrial policy and careful, strategic implementation. At the best of times, it takes a decade plus for the results to start showing.
Instead of that, so far we have seen
* Tariffs imposed as executive orders under a dubious exercise of the National Emergencies Act. This alone pretty much guarantees that they will be rolled back by the next president
* Zero participation from Congress and not even a pretense of attempting to build a bipartisan consensus
* Haphazard implementation with rates and countries affected whiplashing wildly from day to day
* Immediate capitulation at the first sign of trouble.
At this point we have shown the world that
* There is no real plan and probably never was a plan
* Trump has no actual stomach for a fight. Big economies like China can just wait for Trump to fold completely
* No one should be rushing to invest in the US given the shaky legal and political foundations of the tariffs
We brought our economy to the brink of a financial crisis, alienated all of our long standing allies, destroyed confidence in the US Dollar and economy, eased off tariffs on China while China has done no such thing and our exports to them are still tariffed at over 100%.
All of this for no real policy gains. It would be laughable if the consequences to us and future generations weren't so dire.
Ugh. Note that this is a capitulation. China's retaliatory import tariff rate remains in effect, and they get to decide which industries to relax, if any. The net effect is that if you're in one of the handful of businesses that export to China, the Trump administration threw you under the proverbial bus.
While we're at it, China might as well impose a 145% export tax on phones, computers and chips, just to taunt.
It actually feels nice to see US people having a taste of the kind of government their intelligence service force other nations to have by coups, except that it does not feel nice at all. I'm sorry guys.
Fascism is when colonialism comes home.
This certainly is a surprise. :eyeroll:
I am among the few who think it might eventually prove itself a good idea.
To start with, Europe has no good cards to play. Ultimately, Europe will side with the United States while it builds self-sufficiency on several fronts, especially defense. Europe also recognizes that the complete relocation of production capacity into China wasn't good in the long run; it's just that they had no ability to act on their own.
The US has repeatedly suggested publicly that it's not entirely about tariffs, and more might have been said privately. The tariffs the EU and Britain will drop are probably not what the US is after; what the US wants is to reduce global demand for Chinese manufacturing. Europe will find it easier to sell this—bringing manufacturing back and protectionism even at the cost of say, welfare and environment—to the public due to the violent shakedown over the past two weeks, as well as what happened with Ukraine and Russia. Ongoing European emergency measures to increase defense spending will be followed by incentives to rebuild strategic industry—like how China supported civilian–military partnership with policy.
Meanwhile the Indian government is already looking for ways to replace Chinese imports with US imports, where it can [1]. Japan and North Korea will follow suit; Trump is already saying that Korea needs to pay for US troops.
The US is (in my view) on solid footing here. At the very least, they get better trade deals from everyone else—Europe, India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. A number of companies will move production back into the US, and the government can prioritize those with more military value (chip-making, batteries, cars, shipbuilding [2] , etc.). And if the US can convince others to start decoupling from China, this will weaken Chinese manufacturing capacity.
Given the pain it's going to inflict in the short term, Trump is the only person who could have started this trade war. There might have been ways to do this without such a shake-up, but I am not convinced that this was a stupid move.
This was an anti-China move right from the beginning, disguised as an outrage against everyone's tariffs.
[1]: https://www.financialexpress.com/business/industry/replace-c...
[2]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3306177/u...
To clarify: none of this is China's fault. They did a fantastic job for their country, pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
I think EU will be fine, it really depends on how much the US cares about advancing Russian interests.
Long game, the UK may transform into being a sort of vassal of the US, assuming it survives as an entity. The EU interest may align more with China. If the US is de-empathizing NATO, they need a counterweight to the Russia/US axis.
It's the end of pax americana, and the future is more uncertain.
Or this is maximum negative emotionally charged sentiment and 5 years from now won't look all that much different.
It is really that you should just read what Peter Zeihan says and know that is exactly what is not going to happen.
Disrupting global alignment creates risks and unpredictability. Especially when driven by a cult of personality. Things that had 1% probabilities in 2010 will have 25% probabilities on 2030.
Zeihan lives in a 1960 worldview - oceans are not a meaningful barrier now as space and nuclear technology proliferates.
Withdrawal from the world was stupid in 1920 and doubly so now. There’s a lot of magical thinking that humans who live in places that aren’t in North America lack the ability to think or plan.
China is the EUs largest export market. I’m not so sure the EU will align with the US here.
> at the cost of... welfare
If politicians no longer care about winning elections, then they might campaign on this.
I also imagine this is maximum negative sentiment.
I follow the Chinese economy pretty closely and I just can't imagine 2025 passes without a deal.
Of course, neither Trump or Xi were going to back down here before a big meeting. I don't see how this is sustainable on any real time frame though for either economy.
Some people seem to be framing this as some kind of win for China. That is crazy. Chinese stocks had been in the toilet for a while, got a slight bump and that was mostly erased last week. I am far more confident in my US bets than China bets here.
I have the complete opposite opinion. The US has no cards to play in the EU and is screwed in the medium and long term.
The only reason the EU was tolerating those massive tech companies which contribute close to nothing in the EU was because the US was pulling its weight in EU defense.
Now that Trump openly sided with Putin, that's gone. Trump has no card to play in the EU anymore. He could even insult EU leaders publicly if he wanted to but pushing out Zelensky like he did was the only thing he could not afford to do.
Then on the investment side, the EU will now seen as a more stable and better environment than the US which changes policies every Tuesdays. The US will be experiencing a similar effect to brexit but longer and more severe.
The status of the dollar is clearly questioned as well. Will the US remain the top economic power with those tech companies atrophied and a local recession? I'm not so sure.
I'm enjoying reading all the salty comments. They're meaningless and futile. This is really over for anyone who opposes us. The Lord saved Donald Trump from assassination and is using him as His instrument. The cognitive dissonance to continue to resist the Will of God and will of the people which are united, is just pure bitterness of loss and defeat.
Beyond his glorious rise from the ashes of defeat, one bullet and two assassination attempts (that we know of), only made possible through his submission before Our God Jesus Christ, the changes he has made to this country are already done. There's no coming back from the tariffs now. Even at 10% worldwide, and 145% on China with temporary exemptions so our companies can get out, everyone knows the score.
It's this simple: get out of China. Trump has made that clear enough. China has made their hostility to us clear. And if you want zero tariffs guaranteed, you better come home.
So it's a huge leap back to the future for corporate policy, but on a personal level it's even more advantageous. How anyone can oppose replacing the income tax with tariffs is beyond me. At least with tariffs they have trade implications if they want to "just raise taxes". On me, I'm their slave. I stand by the original intent of taxation that direct taxes must be apportioned anyway. Anything else is one step closer to a socialist wealth redistribution scheme, with unconsenting participants born into it with no way to avoid it, short of starvation, destitution or death.
And the amazing part to it all is the resistance of the left. It's almost like they never cared about those indentured servants throwing themselves out of those Foxconn windows to end their own lives, after all. They want the system to continue. They don't want opportunities for your children in the US. They want more slave labor, because for Trump to be taken down (too late), Chinese people must die in factories for cheap goods.
Smartphones getting exemptions? Didn't the administration talk about how American's would be tightening screws on iPhones as they brought back these jobs? I'm starting to think they don't know what they are doing.... /s
Are the tariffs good or bad?
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May I propose a tinfoil hat perspective on tariffing China: America is prepping the ground for a full war with China. That's the only position that make sense to me other than the obvious "these guys are all corrupt idiots". I don't know which is which but at least the war perspective makes more sense to me. I believe we are at the propaganda stage where allies will be 'encouraged' into adopting similar positions and portraying China as a global threat. Nations such as India, Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and Australia are already encouraged to act highly aggressively towards China whenever possible. Given most of those countries political elite worship America and long to send their kids to Harvard they will comply and willingly allow their countries to be used as cannon fodder to maintain Western hegemony. The sweet-talking of Russia is an attempt to recreate the Sino-Russian split during the cold war and at least ensure Russia doesn't fight alongside China in a war. None of this is related to bringing jobs back, nation building or caring one bit about blue collar workers. its an attempt to maintain the American global hegemony that China very clearly threatens. If Trump and his close supporters can get filthy rich from this then all the better.
There is no grand geopolitical strategy here. Trump and his advisors really are this stupid and think that huge worldwide tariffs are a good idea. That they have kept 10% worldwide tariffs (also insane) shows they still think they are a good idea that will bring back manufacturing to the US. The damage to US soft power is irreversible unfortunately and the trust of former allies will never return. I suspect you’ll find as the empire declines people no longer aspire to send their kids - would you if they might be detained for weeks in inhumane conditions and deported for having opinions or a skin colour the regime doesn’t like?
Yes China is the current rival and thus was hit hardest, but they’ve already had to retract a lot of tariffs days after introduction simply because they had no idea what impact it would cause on borrowing costs.
Yes if Trump sees an opportunity to demand fealty from anyone with power or money he will take it, and enjoy it, but he genuinely thinks that is his due anyway.
You could say they have a plan in project 2025, but that’s more about destroying the US government and retaining power. If it were a functioning democracy he’d be removed after the damage he’s done.
My view is a more charitable one assuming there is some grand strategy going on but I think you are more on the money. It's just hard to accept that the administration really is so comically corrupt and incompetent
Unfortunately if this was the plan it massively backfired. By imposing a global tariff the US also hit its allies in the region. This in turn causes these allies to look for trade deals with others in the region, like China.
We have already seen South Korea and Japan announce new trade deals with China. So the US is actually pushing away its allies in the region (which doesn't sound ideal when trying to start a war).
From my conversations with Europeeps...we'll side with China.
There are valid reasons for tariffs:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
But none of the current "reasons"—which may simply be rationalizations / retcons by underlings for one man's fickle will—really make much sense:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-for-tariffs-...