In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created.
Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.
NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.
I’m curious whether it’s more the tariffs, or the uncertainty. No one knows what will happen on a day-to-day basis: the chaotic (and illegal) decision-making leaves everyone wondering what’s next.
I live in such country, local currency volatile, laws are changing. There is no long term planning, projects should span 1-2 years and if they bring income, then you are lucky. In long term the situation is no good
The hiring slowdown predates tariffs. For various reasons CEOs either believe they can do more with less people, or that they can hire cheaper people in other geographies, or both. Businesses (tech or financials) don't seem to be telegraphing uncertainty, S&P 500 revenue is at all times high and trending up, earnings/profit all time highs and trending up, valuations all times high and trending up.
That was the entire point of hiking interest rates, to slow down the economy and stop inflation. Tariffs are universally acknowledged to cause inflation, and we would be in a recovery path if it weren't for the delays that tariffs are causing right now.
It is rather interesting to see the difference in standards of accountability for different presidents. Some are responsible for the economy even if its behavior is not sure to their actions. Others are not responsible for poor economic performance even when taking actions universally agreed to harm the economy.
Before tariffs, in the post-pandemic recovery, we also didn't see hiring go back to pre-pandemic levels. There are other forces like AI adoption.
I don't have good intuition around the connection between tariffs and jobs. Yes, higher inflation may require cooling down the economy. But right now it looks like rates will be going down and anyways rates haven't really slowed down the economy that much. Inflation did come down. Inflation can have some benefits too for employers, it erodes the employee's salaries (and potentially other costs). If companies can raise prices and not pass that on to employees or to their suppliers (as they've seemingly done during this last inflation cycle) then it can be a win for them. A weaker dollar can also help US companies compete globally.
If companies are doing well and growing, and they seem to be, why aren't they hiring more? The largest US tech companies are sitting on piles of cash and making huge profits, for some time now. Is it just that they've become more productive and need less people? Maybe they don't have anywhere to put more people towards? Maybe they're hiring outside the US (this one is not a maybe- they are). Is the uncertainty related to progress in AI? to other macro factors?
But the change in hiring trends goes back to the beginning of the pandemic. This can't all be explained by tariffs. There is always uncertainty about the future but it seems there's been a shift in behavior across the board (CEOs copying each other is also a problem) that has been lasting many years. I guess you could blame it on Trump's first presidency if you really want to make this political.
How do you bid on a big project if you don't know what materials will cost next month, or 6 months, or a year from now? It's fucking impossible. And with inflation, labor cost is spiking. It's hard for people to get buy, so they're asking for more. It has investors and banks spooked to loan money for projects, because they could easily fail with so much volatility.
Looking at the 30 year chart YTD there is no indication that rates come down. The short side may be under control of Trump - who's bullying of the Fed raises the prospect of them coming down but the long end of the curve is under the control of market forces and it does not look like going down at all. Real estate market effectively frozen with sales down and for sale up in the realm of decade highs.
Nobody mentioned yet the drop of the dollar making every single import 10% more expensive since the start of the year. That is on top of every tariff and is inflationary.
Government spending went up by a surprising amount while tariff revenue rolls in. I suspect one reason there is no detailed budget is to create the space to move things around without much notice. If a large swath of the tariffs would be ruled illegal (already happened twice, one step to final) the situation could become interesting.
It will take years to make America an exporting nation. In the meantime many many businesses will go bankrupt. This administration doesn't care as they just see it as a cost of fulfilling their longer term plan to make America an exporting nation.
Nearly 10% of the s&p 500 value is one company- nvidia. The mag 7 make up a significant portion. Prosperity isn’t distributed, it’s concentrated and the stock market is not even close to the only measure of the health of the American economy.
There are other options, it’s not that simple. They may foresee an economic slowdown (they certainly say they do at every opportunity), they feel they are currently overstaffed, the ETF and hedge fund managers who own most of their stock are pressuring them to save money because they don’t like what they’re reading in the tea leaves, etc.
That's true, but it didn't predate the election of a man who has made his understanding of tariffs and economics crystal clear in the months and years leading up to January 2025.
The tariffs this time are far in excess of anything he did previously or promised to do while running for office again and took nearly everyone by surprise though.
> Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.
It also disrupts JIT supply chains. Companies make decisions with certain variables not being volatile.
You now have a situation where one week the cost of a commodity is X and the following week it could be 2X. The butterfly effect across industries also cannot be predicted.
Many industries also seem to be still recovering from the pandemic period with supply of spare parts still being de-prioritised over making parts available for new units. :/
I don't think there's that much surprise at the tariffs on China; it's the tariffs on the rest of the world, especially friendly countries like Canada that are the big surprises.
Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
>and he knows the legal peril he faces if the White House isn’t GOP-held for the rest of his life.
This combined with the utter self-emasculation of the Republican Party to Trump's incoherent, or at best self-serving, garbage is the most worrisome thing of all.
She did, everyone just sort of... pretended she didn't. So they could have plausible deniability for voting for Trump.
See also: Harris is an elite! (Trump is more elite), Trump knows business (he's a pretty bad business man), Harris did nothing in office! (She was VP), Trump is the underdog! (He's literally already been president)
Speaking as someone who despises Ted Cruz to the bottom of my soul, I decided in 2016 that if Trump had decided to run as a Democrat, I would have voted for Cruz. At least he has some sincerely held beliefs that do not involve his own wallet and cruelty towards the entire world outside his inner circle.
My point being: at some point the American electorate has to take responsibility for picking the worst available person. The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
≥The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
Perhaps i didn't make my point clear. Indeed ur statement is true. I was referring to those who hated Trump but also hated Harris and so DIDNT VOTE. My point being that if the Democrats had fielded a compelling candidate many of those who didn't vote may have voted for them. Enough to win. The Democrats learned nothing when they fielded Hilary Clinton and lost. Joe Biden barely won. And only because they were sick of Trump and also how he handled Covid. Also don't forget the Democrats tried to run with Joe for a second term when he was clearly unfit. Huge turn off.
So yes, my argument is the Democrat Party is partly at fault for Trump 2.0. They did not field a worthy candidate.
"Vote Blue no matter who" is a failed strategy. And rightly so.
That's slightly revisionist. He won the popular vote by almost 5 percentage points. That's a lot. He also got more electoral college votes than GWB (both times) and Trump in 2016. His victories in the battleground states were also by a higher margin than Trump's in 2016, though still close. "Barely won" is a shade of true.
I honestly don't blame the guy for believing it was his responsibility to the country to run for re-election and keep Trump out of office. His heart was in the right place, even if the rest of him wasn't up to the task anymore.
> Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
People who actually understand politics and who realize that the extent to which politicians keep their campaign pledges is usually related to how their parties end up performing in the legislature, rather than just being dishonest.
It didn't take informed people by surprise. We still see people denying that Trump had anything to do with Project 2025, whereas honest informed people knew that he very much did.
Nobody informed saw massive tariffs on India, Brazil, etc. If you were right the stock market wouldn’t have tanked because the smart money would have priced it in.
Maybe the smart money shorted on the tank. After all, if you know there's going to be a downturn in a known time period that's a smart move. I believe it's worth analyzing who sold what and when, if not for insider trading, then at least for historical knowledge.
Trump’s style of governing is patrimonialism. Mafia. It’s how he ran his businesses, and Trump 1.0. It’s entirely predictable that he’d go much further this time around as he claimed DOJ should act as his personal law firm.
Modi pissed Trump off by refusing to support a nomination for him to get the Nobel. And Trump hit India with tariffs. Unsurprising to anyone paying attention.
No one is so stupid they can’t follow this, and predict the aggregate consequence well in advance.
It’s only by willfully suspending rationality, that people convinced themselves the obvious wouldn’t happen. And one of those is an insistence that the only valid form of prediction is at an absurd level of prediction granularity, rather than the inevitable storyline as a consequence of Trump’s intrinsic corruption and ability to corrupt everyone around him (or else they discarded and flung far away).
Trump is famously a racist, a rapist, a felon, and a vile insurrectionist. Nothing good could possibly have followed his election. Indeed, we’re really lucky so far. It’s going to get much worse.
If I had to guess - "political bubble (bursts)" is when an extremely incompetent and/or radical politician suddenly is elected to one of the top posts in a country. So it's like a closed off boiling pot - incompetent radical has 5% of the electoral base and nothing happens, then 10%, then 20%, 30%, 40%, still nothing, and then one day he "suddenly" crosses 50% threshold and bubble bursts, he is now in charge for real.
For example in France their own Le-Trump aka Marine Le Pen had 41% votes last election cycle, so nothing really happened and system centrists won again, politics remained moderate and predictable. But if she or her ideological successor even takes 50%... hooboy, EU will see some Orbanification just like USA does today.
My guess is just, well, a guess, but the real impact of tariffs will take some time to hit. For now it is a turbulence of the uncertainty, but as people understand how to work on this situation we'll see numbers getting more stable.
My second guess is that inflation will grow as other markets will learn to deal with the situation.
It is taking some time, but other economic blocks might make strong moves altogether causing at least a bruise in the metrics.
Also we need to remember that the guy responsible for the numbers was fired for allegedly political reason and that could have been political and no one will ever be sure.
So how can one trust the numbers in that situation?
It has been... Weird
You can't write a business plans/proposals and get loans/management approval on these kinds of tariffs.
Imagine trying to get a loan from a bank to make a USA manufacturing plant, pointing to the 150% Chinese tariff. A week later the tariff is 25%. Does your math still work? Probably not. Will that bank continue the loan? Nope. Will the bank even entertain a similar proposal from someone else right now? Nope.
If you want to grow USA manufacturing you need to subsidize it, or give private industry confidence it's not going to lose them money. If you can't do that, your relying on charity / non-profit / philanthropy... And I don't see many of those in manufacturing.
I would say more about general uncertainty than volatility but similar thought. Disagree on the reason though, tariffs like we are experiencing have not been in our existence for a couple generations. And especially not in the modern connected global market.
I don’t believe most if not all of us have experienced such an immature and erratic administration. We are taxing trade partners, flip flopping on rules and nobody knows what to make of it.
This is different -- the tariffs are being applied and changed chaotically, with no direction on actually serving the point of protecting native industry. The goal of the tariffs is to replace income tax, everything else is a smokescreen.
Would note that the data the New York Times cited are seasonally adjusted [1]. The assumptions of those adjustment models may not currently apply.
It’s going to be difficult to suss out a signal from employment data until October or November, by when we should have about half a year of post-tariff data [2] to compare with ‘24. (We may not know anything surely for a year.)
Whatever mayor they're 'under threat of' can't be much worse than the one who's currently in place who is under threat of indictment from the federal government over bribery, fraud, and illegal foreign finance contributions, who has has eight of his staff resign in the last year under federal investigations, and lost multiple other staff resigning on principle.
People are already acting like Mamdani is responsible for everything that happens in NYC; they should pay more attention to the guy who's been in charge the past 3 years.
Weren't the charges against Eric Adams dismissed with prejudice? [1] They shouldn't have been dismissed at all, but the judge didn't want the president to be able to directly control the major of NYC.
I personally think he should at least be impeached because I have the woke liberal opinion that people in power taking bribes is bad.
Mamdani advocating that the state gov tax millionaires 2% more is not the same as having the power to tax millionaires. You should look up what a mayor actually does (hint: balance budgets with city council and strike new initiatives and work with the police department).
Both the NYC Employment Data the New York Times cites [1] and these Fed data [2] are seasonally adjusted. Would take them with a shaker of salt given the assumptions in those adjustment models are likely currently under assault. (Hehe.)
Normally I'd be quippy about the plural of anecdote not being "data", but this isn't even plural. This is a single anecdote. The claim you have made is "I have encountered fraud, personally, so the system is a disaster."
Well run systems experience fraud. It's something you generally want to minimize, but like, it's not necessarily an indicator that the system is broken. Like... AWS has tons of fraud. AWS is still very much not a disaster. (Well, it kind of is a disaster, but mostly because it's a machine that chews up humans via oncall, which is unrelated to their fraud.)
It looks like fraud rate was typically 5-10%, which might be high, might be "fine". In 2020-21 and 21-22 fraud rate jumped way up to 20%, which is obviously way too high.
But in 2023-24 fraud rate is back down below 10%. We don't have 24-25 data yet, but it looks to me like we had a couple of unusual years during the pandemic, but audit controls seem to have reigned a lot of that back in.
I'd say, evaluate this year's data and then decide if this was a blip or not, then revise your mental model with data.
Unemployment numbers will never work for counting the number of people actually unemployed. They do work for seeing unemployment trends. A ton of people suddenly applying for unemployment is a pretty clear signal.
Depends what if anything is being done to combat it.
One of the following is true:
- The numbers somewhat-accurately reflect the trend of employment
- Fraud levels were reduced 66x in one year
If it was the second one, that's a sufficiently massive reduction that news stories would be written about it. There would be stories about this great victory over fraud.
A quick search showed no particular anti-fraud measures or claims of effectiveness unique to that time period.
That has me shaking my head. He fired the BLS person claiming they were reporting inaccurate stats to make him look bad. A claim of partisan bias - could maybe be some truth to that. But to fire them and replace them? Then it will certainly be biased reporting. I suppose that makes sense if all you care about is image and not actually making things better.
I question the president’s cognitive state if he openly stated there would be some “pain” and then when the statistics show he was correct, he attacks the BLA director and claims the economy is booming.
The president and his defenders are playing us when they appear to want a growing economy. They don’t.
She is presenting numbers. A bad job might be using black font on a black background not the numbers are not what I want or businesses are not answering surveys quick enough.
I know that this is the result of summing a much larger gain + a slightly smaller loss, but it's weird reading this number in isolation and knowing that my company is responsible for roughly 5% of this gain.
If you are looking at tarrifs to explain NY small business market collapse, you clearly have not followed Louis Rossmann's struggles to keep his business in NY over the years.
rental prices are driven by P/E redirecting funds to the purchase of housing stock, which they then use to jack up the rent. Fuedalism is returning by stealth.
that is also assuming the demand is atomic when that isn't necessarily the case. A lot of that pooled demand can come from singular sources. in other words, not all demand is created equal
New York is teeming with what appear to be newly arrived "immigrants" who do no speak a word of English (and frankly are rather aggressive about their refusal to do so) yet are employed in various crafts. We had fairly substantial renovation recently in our building. Every single worker was clearly a recent arrival. How do we know how many jobs were actually created if so many of them are not "officially recorded"?
(I am an immigrant myself (via the legal means) lest you take my observation as a xenophobic expression.)
The U.S. has no official language, and no one who moves here is required to learn English. Especially in NYC, where so many neighborhoods predominantly speak a language that is not English (Brighton Beach, Sunset Park, Flushing, Chinatown, etc.)
Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
There are and have been pockets in immigrant communities where e.g. older members would live their entire lives in US and never speak a word of English. But conversely, no one expected the rest of us to know Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, ..., etc. But somehow now we are supposed to accept a sizeable subset of our nation to only speak Spanish.
> Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
I do not care if it is not a "good look" by some standard. What I care about is cultural and value system continuity and national cohesion.
Does the New York Times (which is a national paper) have a section in German language? Does it have one in any other non-English language besides Spanish?
Why is Spanish singled out? Why was "bilingualism" being promoted so heavily? Meaning no offense, wtf has the Spanish speaking community contributed to American history to get this special perch? So yeah, there are all sorts of little pockets here and there, and grandpas and grandmas of various flavor speaking the old country's tongue but only one was promoted.
The phenomena is obviously political in nature and to construe is as anything else, including "prejudice" or "xenophobia", is disengenuous.
The people who are most xenophobic/against immigrant communities are recent immigrants who pull the latter up for their compatriots right after they ascend.
Latino voters swung 20 points towards trump from 2020-2024 after being told that Trump would deport all of their illegal family members. A majority of latino men straight up voted for Trump and Latino women was like 47-53.
Legal immigrants hate illegal immigrants. Most legal immigrants are wealthy and well connected and have never had to do the shit jobs that their illegal brothers do. It's pretty hard to legally immigrate without lots of money/skills or at minimum beauty (i.e. for green card marriage). Illegals are usually dirt poor and will do anything for a better life.
I'm getting far more willing to defend making English the official language of the USA for this reason. You want to pretend like you're a WASP legal immigrants? Act like one then!
BTW - Americans don't see the distinction between "european latino" and "Mestizo". You're all Latinos and are treated the same way by WASPs.
Even assuming that there were no other federal, state or local YoY differences [1] that could explain this change (and that the numbers are right as presented in the first place), New York City private sector employment is nothing like most other parts of the US: it's the largest city in the US by a large margin, it has a concentration of employment in a few major industries (finance, fashion, publishing, software) that aren't represented elsewhere, and...it hasn't been a manufacturing center since the victorian era.
You can't wave this away with "NYC is a leading indicator for the US economy". To the extent that it's true at all, you could say it about any large city in the US.
[1] Like, say: interest rates, the business cycle, AI, the slowdown in software hiring, or the minimum wage increase that NYC implemented on January 1, 2025.
It's true that NYC private sector employment is different from the US labor market as a whole, but NYC private sector employment is better representative of what readers of this site care about than overall US employment. Readers are much more likely to be affected by changes in the professional services and information sectors than, say, agriculture.
The agricultural section indicators are that there's about to be a big, expensive bailout for ag:
> “Right now, we have zero bushels of soybeans on the books with China for this fall harvest that has begun in the Deep South,” Ragland said. “Normally by this time, close to 40% of our sales for the marketing year are on the books. And with zero on the books right now, it is alarming for American soybean farmers.”
It's part of the plan. Small farms will be the ones to go bankrupt. The large corporate, black rock et al owned, "farms" (read businesses) will be bailed out and allowed to scoop up the little ones for pennies onto the dollar.
Yes, a tariff can be a good measure. But for that the tariffed goods need to be selected carefully and rationally und not whatever the heck the Trump administration is doing.
For example you can tariff bananas all you like, that won't spark widespread banana production in a climate that can't grow them.
Hawaii produces 6.3 million lbs per year of bananas which is a tiny fraction of the 8 million metric tons per year Ecuador produces. Labor and land cost is the primary reason Hawaii can't compete with Latin America, but long-standing tariffs could change that.
About 2m people are employed directly or indirectly in the Ecuadorean banana industry. The total population of Hawaii is only 1.5m. Also you could fit Hawaii in a corner of Ecuador.
Unless you turned over all the islands exclusively to bananas, and forget about tourism, pineapples or anything else, you’re not even going to get close.
Hawaii is already heavily agricultural. Most of the non-agricultural land is reserved for conservation. Banana production would likely replace other production, and then we've got less of that stuff.
Also, shipping to continental US is limited by the Jones Act and the lack of capacity in US built, owned, and crewed shipping lines. Assuming a desire to produce things in the US, I don't think it's sensible to tarrif bananas to grow them in Hawaii, and then relax the Jones act so they can be shipped to the continental US on foreign carriers.
In the end it's the biggest leopard ate my face moment ever:
China has very high growth momentum that surpasses American living standards soon, and not long before it will surpass American security standards too. China's purchasing power is probably more comfortable than most western countries, with extensive housing and high speed rail and electric cars etc. When a country becomes rich, inevitably other countries ask for their help. That's why China's growth must be curbed, fast > tariff them to their death or so. But I really don't think it will work at all. And personally I don't even think it's a good idea at all to begin with.
See this is what I don't understand. Everything you just said about China is a positive. Everything you said about China is achievable in the USA, and we at least HAD a head start on soft-power influence.
Instead we should just have tariffs instead of actually making the lives of Americans better while FIGHTING affordable housing, high speed rail, and EVs.
We've got an entire team of goons who would rather rack up penalty minutes than score goals. These freaks think we are competing with China in an MMA fight instead of a Hockey game.
I do think the state of progress in China is vastly underestimated by the west. It has been fast and messy, not evenly distributed, but it is staggering. The rhetoric around them is changing too, I think they are making significant soft power gains. I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
China has been making soft power gains for a decade. They are everywhere in Africa. When I went to Macedonia five years ago, there was a giant screen in the main square explaining how their medical cooperation with China was such a boon for the country. China already is a diplomatic giant.
I think American are partially blinded by the crazy negative propaganda against China you see all the time in the US. They significantly underestimate where China stands and overestimate the impact American tariffs can have.
> I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
More than that, I think China would be mad not to step into the vacuum the US is creating with it's isolationist policies. For years US aid has been extremely influential around the world, doing a huge amount of good (e.g. USAID) and buying relatively cheap influence in many countries. Countries that were reliant on that aid are going to be understandably jaded by their experience with the US and looking for more reliable allies.
> The rhetoric around them is changing too, I think they are making significant soft power gains. I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
As long as they are cooperating with Russia at least European countries will have a hard time to accept China's advances.
When people see everything as an ego-based competition, they lose track entirely of the fact that trade is not zero-sum: both parties (or nations) benefit from increased trade.
It’s the zero-sum mindset of leadership that only ever learned to excel by cheating and stealing, not cooperating, building, or synergizing.
And unfortunately, it is exactly the Gorilla chest-pounding politicians “we are #1” that attract particular large swaths of the voting population who tend to see everything as a “me first” zero-sum competition.
A socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.
I think you're ignoring some of the poetic intention of those words, the idea is that the Marxist collective is the dictator. It's turning the concept on its head to put the people at the forefront.
In other contexts such as casual conversation here in the West the term dictatorship means something quite different and you seem to understand that too because you say they're "on the road towards having a dictator" which is surely an admission that they currently do not have a dictator and are ergo but currently a dictatorship.
I'll certainly grant you that Xi has made moves to consolidate power in the individual but that's a separate discussion.
They’ve fallen into the trap Bakunin warned against, that the Party vanguardism and dictatorship of the proletariat model Marx was advocating for would lead to catastrophically authoritarian regimes. Marx eventually had him kicked out of the International. He was saying this around the time Lenin and Stalin were being born.
Dictatorships have dictators. The power flows from that one person (think Hitler or Stalin), the military is probably loyal to them rather than other state apparatus and there tends to be no codified route to succession in the event of their death.
China is different in all these cases, even after the significant moves by Xi to consolidate power. You could argue that I'm the days of Mao there was a dictatorship in place but things have radically changed since Deng Xiaoping took the helm.
The ironic thing is that tariffs are the right tool to reindustrialize America (over the period of ~a decade) but theyre being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret by somebody who thinks it's a magic wand.
I never thought America was this fragile, or should i say the governmental mindset was, to just change things are essentially the backbone of what made America "America" in the first place. Changing policies that otherwise should not be changed is dangerous. When in doubt and there needs to be change then make the changes around the preexisting guidelines/settings, not change those first. Whether we like it or not enemies and competitive economies are reliant on our policies and , therefor vice versa. Changing big things first will make you the outcast, especially to our rich economy--relatively moderate population. Vs other economies of much larger population. There is fragile silver lining there to pay attention too IMO.
There was the pre-existing constitutional authority that congress had to regulate trade, and that was only supposed to be usurped by the president in limited circumstances...
Im with you on that. But strategically retargeting the economy towards manual labor when you're big on services and digital innovation? That makes no sense. Being entirely self-sufficient is just not a good strategy in a highly competitive world connected by trade relations. Instead, tending to alliances and partnerships, assuring mutual interests and interlinked dependencies would be a lot smarter.
It all comes down to a lot of people in other parts of the world being willing to work for far less, for far longer hours, under far worse conditions, than Americans. Anything you can make in the USA will thus be more expensive, and until you’ve re-acquired all the domain knowledge lost to other nations, these quality will also be worse. As most people don’t want to buy something worse for more, you’ll need to force them to by making it unreasonable to import foreign goods (which is already happening), but that also means you limit the market to domestic. I fail to see how that is a viable strategy, unless you aim to wage war on the rest of the world and can’t trust anyone.
In my experience, most US tech workers see the non-tech US like most of the US sees the rest of the world: they intellectually understand that they’re a small piece of the pie, but living within an attention and influence bubble subconsciously makes people feel like the center of the universe. This can make average people feel superior and above average people feel exceptional.
Like in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all of the children are above average.
And we're decimating retail through tariffs, we're cutting as many people as we can out of food service, and we're ending much federal funding around education. Doesn't seem great.
There is evidence they are trying it just isnt particularly effective.
Part of the problem is that it runs up against the corporate lobbies who would rather take a higher short term profit margin, let American industry hollow out and buy gold + a luxury bunker in New Zealand to prep for the worst case scenario.
Tariffs are protectionist, does not boost competitiveness. Tends to be the wrong tool, there are better.
Tax breaks, grants, physical infrastructure, creation of entire markets - those are better tools.
The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.
I mean consider it, a tariff is a tax on those buying a specific competitors goods. Even if tariffs were done surgically, still it seams like a tax benefit is a better tool
Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. Take car manufacturing in the US. The country doesn’t make enough steel, copper, etc to supply the industry, so domestic production depends on tariffed imports of these and various specialist components. Plus many parts cross the borders to and from Canada and Mexico for various stages of the manufacturing and testing process, incurring a tariff every time.
This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup on a large proportion of their parts anyway. In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.
In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening and there’s no sign it will happen. The administration doesn’t seem to be aware this is even an option.
>Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. Take car manufacturing in the US. The country doesn’t make enough steel, copper, etc to supply the industry, so domestic production depends on tariffed imports
No, it's not. The US making not enough steel is not an immutable law of the universe. It is a result of the same kind of industrial decline which tariffs would reverse by making it more economic to produce steel locally.
It only wouldn't work on products which the US has no fundamental ability to make like bananas (which yes, Trump did...).
>This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup
Yeah, that's kind of how tariffs work - there's always a markup.
>In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.
That depends entirely on how you structure your tariffs. If it is the case you've structured them incredibly poorly.
>In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening
I believe I covered that when I said that the tariffs were "being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret".
Hockey games are often AS violent as MMA fights with less regulation and more equipment which can cause injury. People really watch Hockey cus they want to see the guys beat each other up - not because they care about the puck.
Yeah it's a crab mentality. I'm ideologically opposed to communism, but I'm happy for the Chinese people. I don't understand why our response is to tear them down, instead of building ourselves up. Seems backwards.
When you even mention building ourself, you are accused of being anti American simply because you point out a deficiency in our current development.
> It's not achievable in the USA because a very large chunk of our population is literally retarded. 70 mil voted for Trump for some reason.
I am not an American citizen so I cannot feel offended by this sentence, but I think it doesn't help to call people stupid.
What you describe looks like a failure of the education system, which have been defective for decades in the US, from what I've heard. This may very well take 100 years (4 generations is even slightly optimistic) to escape this downward spiral.
Meanwhile, a possible strategy is to do like the others: get a popular politician who makes empty promises, while doing the opposite, or whatever they want actually, when in charge. They can inject massive amounts of money in the public school system even though they promised to make private schools more accessible in their programme, and distract people's from this obvious lie with a wrestling showmatch against Putin.
Certainly, if you are smarter than them, you can trick them.
Measured by international tests, USA was somewhere in the middle of OECD. Not the top, not terrible.
What he describes is result of different value system, intentional radicalisation and propaganda. Education won't counteract it and especially not since above people are in charge of it.
Yes, it is a failure of the education system, by design, for decades.
The way they are trying to takeover the public school system is by "vouchers" where private schools end up getting funded by tax dollars to create a regime sanctioned and funded private school system.
I’m still not sure what the misuse is. “Literally” is now commonly used as an intensifier, like how “awesome “ used to mean inspiring awe, including if you were scared of something, and now is mostly an intensifier. Awesome, dude!
If you're not from here, I don't think you understand how completely wrong the right is about literally everything. The president and his staff lie to the country every day and his base eat it up. I'm not taking about misrepresenting facts or misleading graphs. Flat out, easily debunked, fabricated lies, 24/7.
What numbers are you seeing for the surpassing living standards? Their gpd per capita flatlined in 2024 at $13k. That's with only 80M of their citizens making above $2000/month. The bulk of their citizens make less than $100/month, and there's a declining middle class of around 200M that makes around $800/month. But they have high youth unemployment rate (>40%), there's a massive layoff wave coming in September with the mandatory social security payment from companies, and their recent factory wages have plummeted to $2/hour, barely survivable in first tier cities.
Before everyone jumps in with GDP per capital with PPP, what quality at that low price means is tofu dreg buildings, cancerous food items, waist high flooding every summer in cities, ghost buildings, and unsafe water (recently one of the most prosperous city, Hangzhou, had sewage seeped into the water for weeks, which the local government denied responsibility).
China’s ‘25 GDP per capita on a purchasing-power parity basis is $29k to America’s $90k [1]. American real GDP per capita grew at 1.7% a year from 2015 to 2025 [2]. (American PPP GDP/c grew 4.5% a year from 2014 to 2024 [3].)
From 2004 to 2024, Chinese PPP GDP/c grew 7.4% a year [4]. If China and America keep growing at their respective rates, we wouldn’t expect convergence for 20+ (40, using America’s PPP GDP/c) years. That’s too long for our if condition to be expected to hold.
There is not a strong argument for Chinese GDP/capita, PPP-adjusted or not, approaching America’s within a generation. There is a risk China’s economy becomes bigger than ours in aggregate.
> what quality at that low price means is tofu dreg buildings, cancerous food items, waist high flooding every summer in cities, ghost buildings, and unsafe water (recently one of the most prosperous city, Hangzhou, had sewage seeped into the water for weeks, which the local government denied responsibility)
> Comparing a 10 year US period to a 20 year period? Seems awfully selective
Yes, I chose the strongest form of the other side’s argument to show that even then, it’s difficult to argue that Chinese PPP GDP/c is approaching American levels within a generation. (Though China’s numbers don’t vary much between 10 and 20 years, America’s do since we had a lot of war and then economic stimulus in the 2000s.)
> 2018 to 2023?
You want to make multi-decade projections off a pandemic baseline?
> 4x the number of people, but 0.5x the GDP growth
Per capita means per person. Purchasing power means real production. The question was about potential living standards, not aggregate might.
Sure, you are. You created this account 2 hours ago, all comments anti China, perfect english and you write about China as "their" country in one of the comments.
FWIW, I do the same thing when referring to the US if my being American is immaterial to the point or observation. It is a way of intentionally not privileging your opinion.
Propaganda can only work for so much. At some point, what you see and experience with your own eyes beats what you can convince me of what the truth is. If China is “collapsing” while producing all these EVs, Solar and high tech stuff then what would it do in a “healthy” economy? Colonize the moon?
I'm from the US. I have no idea what numbers or news are real anymore (if I ever did). I'm impressed by either your ability to discern this for China or by your confidence that you can.
The craziest thing about all this is that Chinese exports to the US aren't even that big a part of the Chinese economy (3% or so). Sure, it'll hurt and there's multiplier effects, but the entire rest of the world is more than happy to take up the slack. So the tariffs really are the US cutting its own nose off to spite its face.
You're assuming US citizens stop buying Chinese goods, just because they got more expensive.
That's unlikely to be true. They might buy less, but the numbers won't fall to zero.
It also overlooks the detail that the component parts of items "made in the usa" also come from other places. Clothing made in the US, doesn't necessarily use fabric made in the US.
In the short to medium term, the increased cash-flow requirements (tarrifs are paid before sales) will favor large importers with access to abundant cash over smaller importers.
Yes, the purchasing power of US consumers will go down as retail prices of goods go up. Yes global producers will seek out alternate markets.
The current uncertainty causes US purchasing to prefer not to commit to long-term orders. Global suppliers will prefer orders from stable customers, even at somewhat lower prices. Once those long-term contracts are in place, it may be hard to reenter the global marketplace, especially on the currently favorable terms.
In other words tarifs are doing long-term reputational damage that will not be easily undone in a few years time.
On the up side the world is about to observe, for the first time in a couple generations, the effects of an isolationist policy. It is a valuable lesson that needs to be reinforced from time to time.
We're on the same side of the argument here? Obviously that 3% is not going to go down to 0%, which means that the US has even less leverage against the Chinese than it looks.
I agree. Plus, as alternate markets are developed, so that leverage drops even more.
The US has made friends with a lot of countries based on the goodwill generated by strong trade ties. That goodwill is being eroded in the short term, and will linger as a reputation for "unreliability". 80 years of work is being undone in months.
And unfortunately it won't be as simple as "in 4 years we can go back to normal ". It's obvious that congress supports this, and the American people voted for it, so it's not just one man's policy.
Besides, I don't see how a $20 shirt becoming a $30 shirt is going to make a difference for American manufacturing. It's simply a sales tax (maybe even the greatest in the world). And on top of that you have all inputs for American manufactures getting more expensive.
If China stops exporting to the US, and instead exports to somewhere else, this will crash American living standards. It will lift the living standards of the new recipient.
As an example, I'm pretty sure I just took up some of the slack here in NZ. I've been looking at installing solar for a while, and a particularly good quote for a Chinese system (Sigen) recently made me go ahead. I strongly suspect the unusually good price and fast delivery were due to cancelled US demand.
OT: Solar is awesome! 18 panels are generating 2/3 of our load, despite it being late winter. And a 16kWh battery means the grid power we import is all off-peak. In summer we're going to be exporting enough that we may even cover our winter grid import. Plus it gives us the best UPS system we've ever had, including zero-second cut-over (c.f. Tesla's half-second glitch).
When demand is reduced, you lower prices. Rest of the world suddenly are buyers. Governments can throw subsidies at impacted sectors too to cover the price difference while supply chains adjust. With growing trade relations, economies of scale and transition costs become factors. The cost of trade with the new trade relationships become cheaper and so does the reluctance to change (for example with a 3 year production pipeline baked, you don't walk away easily).
The “over time” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It won’t happen on anything remotely resembling a time horizon that matters for these purposes. Factories will be closed and gone by then.
If the US buys less, there will be unsold inventory and a temporary glut in supply, which will lead to the Chinese dropping prices and exporting elsewhere. This is already happening in SE Asia:
Obviously the profit margin will be less than selling to the US, but it does mean that the 3% of GDP mentioned above is not going away entirely, just shrinking to (say) 2 or 2.5%.
The article also mentions transshipment, where Chinese goods get routed to the US via a third country. Although Trump's strategy of "tariff everybody for all the things" is putting a damper on this too.
China exported something like 525 billion worth of goods last year to the US. Not all good can be replaced but let’s say something like 350 billion worth of goods are unmarketable because of the tariffs. Do you really think the whole world can’t swallow 350 billion of imports?
China’s GDP growth is no longer in double digits; it’s in the 4–5% range, and many analysts expect it to fall further due to demographic decline and low productivity growth due to capital investments in infrastructure not needed but politically necessary due to city politics.
U.S. per-capita income is roughly $80,000, while China’s is about $13,000. Adjusted for purchasing power it would take decades (at current trajectories, which may be slowing due to EU backlash etc.) to converge.
China leads in high-speed rail and EV adoption. These don’t automatically translate into higher overall living standards — healthcare, wages, pensions, and social safety nets matter more.
China’s lending practices have also led to accusations of “debt-trap diplomacy,” and some countries are now cautious about overreliance on Chinese help. This is why China negativity amongst all of their immediate neighbors is so high.
Debt trap diplomacy is nicely covered in a fun read called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Was the standard approach from the US for a while during the Cold War
Why does China's growth need to be curbed or opposed in any way? What does that accomplish? The only thing we need to be doing is ensuring our own stability, be decently self reliant, and improve the lives of our citizens. It is in inevitable fact that China will eventually surpass us economically, they have far more people, fighting that is just crabs in a bucket fighting over who gets to stand on top of the others.
The US has been working with China for decades economically. The rhetoric around them being an enemy is very peculiar, since the US and China have been tightly coupled economic partners for decades now.
That said however, the US economy relies quite heavily on the international USD hegemony, and China being a bigger economy does threaten that quite directly. It would be surprising for them to drop the USD, but it is a significant risk.
You’re not “tariffing them to death”, you’re hurting yourself. This would only work if the USA was the main importer of goods from China, which it is not - only about 14%.
"Growth momentum" isn't a thing, and more over China's growth is slowing. This would be wholly expected under normal circumstances because it's no longer a developing economy, it's a developed economy - the absurd GDP growth rates it had are won off the fact that industrialization is an enormous, enormous change in productivity but you only get to do it once.
So industrialization is a binary bit? You just “do” it and it’s over? Not a very convincing take imo.
Industrialization, like deindustrialization, is a continuous process. Every industry suffers from depreciation and decay which means that pace of industrialization per unit time matters.
It’s statements like these that remind me to not take social media so seriously.
China does not have “very high grow momentum”, in fact growth has been seriously slowing since Covid
I’m not sure sure what “growth momentum” is what it has to do with living standards.
China’s PPP is not more comfortable than the US because it’s still 1/4th that of the US.
China has very serious growth problems, a massive debt overhang from real estate (that is still slowing the economy), a supply planning model that is leaving it with an oversupply of things like cars and batteries.
Well, at least Trump is working hard on implementing an American supply planning model as well, so the damn Chinese won’t be leading on oversupply much longer!
By making the imports needed for domestic production and infrastructure development more expensive through tariffs, before there are domestic alternatives available, and expelling large swathes of the labour force necessary for such construction, no he really isn’t.
It would be possible to develop domestic supply capacity, starting with the inputs necessary to feed that development, and then nurture and encourage the process with a targeted ramp up of tariffs. That’s not happening though, instead domestic investment is collapsing.
When you look at things per Capita in China things look very different from what you describe. Sure, you have pockets of very affluent societies (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and more) but the majority of the country is not there.
FWIW, we’ve been affected by the tariffs (10% for now; we import mainly from Vietnam and Thailand at this point). Did our second price increase a few weeks ago. We’ll probably test out how much the market will bear because operating in this market really demands a risk premium. So far it’s not as crazy as the pandemic supply chain crisis, but it’s close. The most insane ending to all of this that I can imagine is that the tariffs get conclusively ruled unconstitutional and all the tariffs payed get returned. Would be a huge wealth transfer from consumers to businesses.
Depends on the market. Markets with lots of competition will have to lower prices. With only 1 or 2 major players? They'll keep prices high based on backroom handshake deals or "i'm not moving till he moves"
The 20% tariff from Vietnam has been announced by Trump, but unless I’ve missed something in the past week or so, it’s not official. There was a news piece I read a few days after he announced the 20% number that said the Vietnamese side had actually agreed to 11% and were surprised when he injected himself into the process at the end and announced a different number. So it sounds like it’s a WIP. I believe the only country that actually has a signed deal at this point is the UK.
That being said, the copper, steel, and aluminum tariffs announced recently are real and have been assigned import classification codes by US Customs (which is when new tariffs to become real).
I'm really hoping the SCOTUS wrecks his whole plan on this. We've had enough kings down through history. We'll know once and for all if they are truly sold out or not when they make this decision because clearly he has been violating the Constitution for months now with these executive orders
I don't understand why there isn't a market or company that develop already to move all items to low tariff area before sending to US.
I know that manufacturing things here in Europe, there already used to be round trip by airplane and co to try to lower VAT paid on purchases to the maximum.
Vietnam is partly that. Production virtually "moved" from China to Vietnam pretty fast with various degrees of fakery. Not every company can pull it up, Nintendo for instance if probably more legitimate than others, but that's a thing.
That's covered, if you try to go to an intermediary county and they find out they will raise your tariffs back up to 150% for breaking the deal, it's built in to the agreements
That doesn’t really make sense… essentially the choice to do this isn’t in the hands of any nation, rather any business in the nation could try to do this and the government has no real way to know.
You could try to raise tariffs on a whole country because one company in that country was falsifying country of origin… but it’s inevitable
This is the intuition for tariffs for countries like Vietnam (where China used to send a lot of goods to for repackaging). Not a new idea, and one that customs will aggressively police.
> Repricing, though, isn’t as easy as changing a tag—in part because suppliers and big-box stores are engaged in an epic tussle over who will pay what.
> Retailers, including Lowe’s and Home Depot, buy Thompson Traders’ wares and set the retail price themselves. And they have been reluctant to pay Thompson Traders more.
It seems like this sort of scenario would benefit from some kind of risk protection, like insurance, or a futures market
Consumers will pay more regardless in this type of circumstance. But they will pay less if businesses don’t suddenly start going out of business, eliminating competition and jobs
A sudden claim against many should be priced into the cost of the insurance, offset by some risk adjustment. The goal is ultimately price stability, if the price is not too high (that’s the unknown)
Or in many of these scenarios, can’t pay out, because they’re bankrupt. The biggest issue with black swan events (in the proper usage) is everyone is screwed because no one saw it coming and/or it’s so widespread no one can do anything about it for individuals.
It’s the difference between getting cancer (calculable, but perhaps not high probability), and getting hit by a meteorite (not actually calculable, very severe consequence).
> would be a claim by a large amount of insurance clients at once
You’d insure against a specific product from a specific country being hit with a tariff. Tariffs are going up and down, sometimes in a way that may as well be random. (India not recommending Trump for a Nobel prize.) On its face, this doesn’t seem uninsurable.
My assumption is that businesses that are negotiating their prices between retailers are not experts in geopolitics and what the next move will be from the government and courts. Someone may study this more or have connections to know that better, and therefore are more willing to take bets
I don't think it's an insurable risk. If you were trying to underwrite some "adverse effects of government regulation" policy in 2024, would a surprise 50% tariff on Indian exports have even entered your calculation?
Maybe not insurable, but there are firms buying and selling tariff and affiliated refund risk. Howard Lutnick's former firm is brokering such deals, in fact.
Perhaps in the short term but I wonder if that calculus changes as more time goes on with erratic tariff changes (which has technically been going on for years, just to a much lesser degree).
Is there a market need great enough for price stability to offset the risk? It seems tariff whiplash will be an ongoing problem
Think about the fact that inflation was effectively killed and rates were set to come down by 2%. Then this clown comes in and does this. Inexcusable. Biggest economic policy blunder in history. Don’t let sky high stock market fool you.
As well as big business, this is just shutting down or radically altering many small industries. FIlmmakers, authors/book publishers, musicians etc. are negatively incentivized to ship product to the US, so good luck if you are an American consumer with niche cultural hobbies or a specialized importer who does a lot of small-batch orders.
That's good, but do you think you'll be able to ship to the US without restriction? I don't see post office counter workers working their way through the official list of exemptions published by the WH
Trump is even using Tariff threats to strong-arm other countries to retreat on their climate goals [1]. If the Supreme Court agrees that the Trump can do this then that means we have a dictator — one that will do way more harm than the one in North Korea.
Don't forget tariffs in response to countries enforcing their own laws against an attempted military coup. We're paying higher prices on coffee because President Trump's friend is being charged with trying to overthrow the Brazilian government.
He's a very simple-minded person with a hammer that up til now (court case) seemed to be working. He doesn't understand nuance or negotiation or any of that, he understands having the upper hand (military, economic power) and how to bludgeon people with it. That's why when he comes up against similar sized bullies (Putin/Xi) he is flummoxed and beaten every single time because they're much more cunning than him. Sure, he can bully Laos or Thailand and get deals, but the big dogs beat him every time.
The Paris agreement was very important when renewable energy required state subsidies, but it is no longer necessary. Fossil-fuel power is no longer economically competitive without subsidies thanks to (largely Chinese) improvements in the costs of solar panels and the necessary power electronics. Over a few decades, solar-powered energy superabundance will reduce the costs of atmospheric carbon capture to the point where even private charity can handle it.
On https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you can see that mainstream solar panels have returned to their all-time low price of €0.100 per peak watt from November, while low-cost solar panels have fallen to a new all-time low of €0.055 per peak watt, an all-time low first achieved last month, and a 21% decline from a year ago. The "mainstream" category price is down 17% from a year ago. This is driving down the prices of complementary products and enabling new low-cost installation methods that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
This is one of the most historically important things happening in the world today, but it's surprisingly little known even among people who are otherwise well informed.
Even if Trump could strong-arm other rich countries into imposing US-style prohibitive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, he certainly won't strong-arm China, so the cat is out of the bag; that would just make those countries economically uncompetitive with Chinese products produced with superabundant solar energy. And panels are already being mass-produced overseas with Chinese technology at prices fossil fuels can't compete with.
Ironically, the Chinese seem to disagree, as they bring online new Coal-powered power plants every other week, with 94.5 GW of new capacity having started construction in the first half of 2024 and another 66.7 GW approved. And that's 'permanently available', not (p) = peak.
"Solar is cheaper than fossil" does not look at the whole picture, it completely ignores that solar is not scalable quickly enough to meet rising energy demands. It also is a dark laugh towards consumers, who do not see prices lowering, but exponentially rising, ironically while the so-called cheap power sources are being rolled out.
> Note: In 2024, 66.7 GW of new coal power capacity was permitted, a decline from previous years but still above the subdued pace seen earlier in the year. New and revived coal power proposals totaled 68.9 GW, down from 117 GW in 2023 and 146 GW in 2022, indicating a potential slowdown in project initiation. Meanwhile, construction started on 94.5 GW of new coal capacity — the highest since 2015 — suggesting continued momentum in project development. However, the pace of new coal plants entering operation has been more moderate, with 30.5 GW commissioned so far in 2024, down from 49.8 GW last year but in line with 2021 and 2022 levels.
China is well positioned to do solar + storage, but a lot of that coal is probably (a) for base load, (b) for steel production and (c) to keep the coal miners in business. From the same write up:
> In 2024, more than 75% of newly approved coal power capacity was backed by coal mining companies or energy groups with coal mining operations, artificially driving up coal demand even when market fundamentals do not justify it.
> Hey n00bs: the up‑and‑to‑the‑right charts people fling around about China’s coal tell you almost nothing you think they do. Here's what actually matters:
> 1/ China’s electricity supply exploded over the last decade (versus stagnant for US)
> 2/ new growth is now being met mostly by clean power, coal is at all time low % of total
> 3/ grid delivery got a lot better (bigger and more efficient)
> 4/ China’s power‑sector emissions look like they peaked or are peaking, like 5 years ahead of its official deadline
> So if you reply with “BUT COAL PLANTS!!1!” without talking about utilization, per‑capita numbers, or the grid, you’re, uh, auditioning for the quote‑tweet (thx ChatGPT for this insult).
> More details below for those who have more than half a brain cell available: ...
Contrary to your assertion, that is the peak ("(p)") or nameplate capacity of the coal plants in question. However, coal plants do have a higher capacity factor than solar plants, which may have been what you were trying to say. In the US, which has the best data available, coal plants are operated with an average capacity factor of 42% (much lower than historical averages around 75%) while PV is down at 23%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci... but I think that in China the gap is wider. From memory, I think I worked out that China's average solar capacity factor has been around 10%, while coal is nearly 50%.
So 62GW(p) of coal capacity built would be about 30GW 'permanently available'. Moreover, However, not all of those regulatorily approved projects will actually come to fruition. You can see from boulos's numbers that only about half of approved plants ever get built. So 62GW approved is more like an average of 15GW actually produced—for the few short years before the plants are shut down.
I'm not sure what you mean by "not scalable quickly enough to meet rising energy demands". China was indeed having a hard time scaling electrical generation quickly enough to meet rising energy demands, back when they were more heavily coal-dependent. They had a full-blown crisis in 02021 with widespread blackouts. But that's because fossil fuels aren't scalable. That's why they installed 500 GW (half a terawatt) of new electrical generation capacity last year, half of which is solar and 80% of which is renewables. As Lauri Myllyvirta says in https://xcancel.com/laurimyllyvirta/status/19603213250099530..., it's probably also why they're still building even the small amount of coal-fired generation capacity they are:
> Permitting of a massive wave of new coal plants was a knee-jerk response to early-2020s power shortages and grid challenges from rapid wind and solar growth. The coal industry marketed itself as the solution, showing its entrenched influence. Since then, better grid operation and storage have largely addressed those issues, while the coal projects approved at the time are still under construction. A huge pipeline of already permitted projects remains.
I don't have a good handle on consumer electricity prices in China, but from Rui Ma's figures in https://xcancel.com/ruima/status/1960397673921699955, they don't seem to be exponentially rising; the average residential rate she gives is 0.542 RMB/kWh, which is US$0.076/kWh. That was for 02019. According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e..., in 02024, Chinese consumers were paying US$0.08/kWh for their electricity, so they basically haven't seen a price increase in five years. And they're paying less than half the average in the US, where solar deployment is so much less advanced.
By the way, my comment you were replying to cited 5 sources of reliable information. This comment, in reply to yours, cites two reliable sources, plus Statista, World Population Review, and two people on Twitter. Your comment disagreeing with mine cites zero sources, and unsurprisingly virtually every assertion in it is wrong. I corrected five factual errors in your four-sentence comment, and I suspect there are more. Don't you have any information to contribute? Do you just not care whether what you're saying is true or not? Do you think that insufficient ignorance is a big problem in the world, so you'd like to create additional ignorance?
Actually, that’s what called an evidence-based conclusion. I know evidence and science have really taken a plunge in our federal government these past few months, but we can still use them on HN.
So how come "half the country" (millions of people) support and appreciate the tariff ordeal due to its positive economic impact in their personal lives? They're not Trump's friends or family.
The one in NK is doing that only to his own country. Trump is destroying the whole planet by withdrawing from the Paris agreement and then by strong-arming other countries to do the same. If we haven't already passed the tipping point Trump's actions will make sure we do, destroying all hope.
Bah, India and China are pumping out way more pollutants than the USA. If you're going to bring the USA up, bring them all up. They all need to get their act together. Europe to a lesser extent but at least they're trying.
No one cares about "fascism" or "communism"; these labels distract from the root of the problem: authoritarianism. Mind you, without excessive power and authority, neither hardcore fascists nor hardcore communists can do that much.
At this stage communism has been tried and failed so many times that it's silly to conclude that it isn't inherently evil. It's just hubris to think you could do it better yourself.
My point of view , from Europe, is that political violence is already there in the US. As well as state violence (not just on political opponents, but also on all minorities and "people who have a different opinion").
The next step is indeed a second civil war, with 21st century characteristics (hybrid war, etc...)
I am not enthusiastic about the near future for the US nor for the world.
If you fully understand the disbelief, you'd understand why you, being the one advancing the claim, should provide the source(s) you are using for your Bayesian priors so that, assuming those information sources are of sufficient quality, we can also have the benefit of your knowledge. Until then, it is only rational that people reject your claim.
I'm not sure what all that sophistry is about seeing as this is easily available information that anyone can find out about with literally 2 seconds of googling. Anyway heres a report from the bbc https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2r2ejlvm1o .
Ironically, if a civil war was going to happen it will be because Trump's overuse of the military. It is such an newbie African dictator mistake. Every time you use the military to put down civil unrest you give them an inch of your power and before you know it, they figure they don't need the regime anymore.
You will never see Putin outsourcing civilian tasks to the military.
If those things are true they all are seen small peanuts compared to the police state that is being developed in the U.S. with masked men pulling brown people of the street without identifying themselves and without due process.
Get your priorities straight.
To quote Niemöller:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
That seems extremely unlikely given the significant global economic impact of tariffs, and the comparatively microscopic effect of transgender athletic participation in the United States.
For example, when Kentucky passed their trans sports ban in 2022, there was a grand total of one (1) transgender high school athlete in the state[0].
I mean, it's almost laughable to suggest that any of those things are even near comparable to the potential long-term impact of historically unprecedented tariffs being thoughtlessly tossed around on a whim.
They are related in the sense that stuff like violent crime by ethnic gangs and transgender affirmation of children easily rile up people to Trump or others who will bluntly oppose it, and then you end up with poorly designed tariffs.
It was largely a failure of anti tariff other candidates to capture these other 'easy wins' needed to get to the point of implementing sane economic policy.
Some of them yes, some of them no. There are now several thousand different "tax brackets" for imported items and the apparent rates on them fluctuate by the day.
The best data I could find* was that tariffs Jan - Jun raised 93b in revenue (or 180b / year if it were constant- unlikely but who knows). For comparison, the 2025 deficit is $1865b, so tariffs could take a bite out of the deficit, but never come close to balancing the budget.
The most positive argument I have heard is that it would be a small consumption tax that is regressive. Small because the US doesn't really import that much compared to most global economies. It's just things we fixate on like cars or steel, which actually aren't that economically important anymore. Maybe strategically? I feel like people are trying to make economic sense of an emotional / populist policy.
this isn't true, tariffs are assessed within the US by the receiving firm, not on the sender's side. We run a business with a foreign supply chain and our suppliers have changed nothing, we just get an extra bill to pay to the government when our inventory arrives.
This is related to the removal of 'de minimis' rule that exempts parcels under $800 to ship duty free. This has caused some European postal services to stop/delay shipping some packages to the US [0]. The Dutch postal service for instance has stopped shipping to the US [1]
It's more the public postal services with very cheap international shipping, they typically can't or won't handle import customs/tariffs and operate under the assumption that the packages aren't valuable enough. Many of them don't even have tracking.
The originally announced tariff rates have been “paused” (in reality they were never implemented), but in their place has been a 10% global tariff. China already had tariffs of 25% from the 1st Trump admin, plus 20% from February, so tariffs on goods from China are currently at 55%. But the rest of the world is at 10% right now (only the UK has actually signed a trade deal).
If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.
Why? Because policy was stable during Obama. Whatever the policy is, if it's predictable, businesses can work around that. This was a real problem during the Biden term when there was constant policy shifts.
We're seeing that now with the tariffs. The problem isn't the tariffs so much as it is the uncertainty. They change from day to day.
One might be tempted to think the administration is intentionally trying to crash the economy. No, they just have absolutely no idea what they're doing and there's a dementia patient in charge nobody can so no to.
> If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.
Hmm, it's not that I couldn't believe it was Obama, but this is like a 2nd-hand appeal to authority. I would be interested in a bit more data to see why this is.
> Why? Because policy was stable during Obama.
Now of course we can see there was a record period of near all-time high high oil prices from 2011 to 2014 which corresponds to US employment boom in the sector. Was that the Obama good times that oil and gas experts would refer to? That started to crash in 2015 though, and petroleum industry employment with it. Was that crash due to Obama policy or just global drop in oil prices behind taht?
Some might argue the high oil prices of 2011-2014 years are related to Obama's presidency, but it would probably be less about stable trade policy and more like references to the Arab Spring, peak of ISIS, capitulation to Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.
Now the 2015 oil crash is something I could talk a lot about. I'll try not to turn this into a wall of text.
In Obama's last term he faced a hostile Congress and wanted to pass some wind and solar rebates [2]. The deal he made with the Republican controlled Congress was to lift the ban on exporting crude oil in exchange for the renewable subsidies. This happened in 2015.
So why were crude oil exports banned? This happened about 40 years earlier during the OPEC oil crisis. As an aside, net crude oil exports stand at about ~3M barrels per day. Pretty much all production increases since have been for the export market. US domestic oil consumption has remained relatively stable, despite population increases.
In 2015, OPEC in general and Saudi Arabia in particular crashed the oil market by ramping up production. You can see this here [3]. Saudi Arabia in particular increased production by ~1M bpd in a short period of time. A lot of people think this was to crush the fracking industry, which was heavily in debt. I personally don't buy this explanation because as soon as the price recovers, someone else will buy their assets out of bankruptcy and you're back when you started.
I think it was punishment for lifting the crude oil export ban.
A whole bunch of oil producers and services companies did file for bankruptcy [4] and this whole incident set the stage for what later happened in 2017-2018 and 2020 where Trump basically screwed the energy sector multiple times.
Because the cost of goods continues to fluctuate wildly due to ongoing tariff wrangling that nobody asked for or needed.
Also farmers can’t sell anything because retaliation has destroyed international demand (I’d say decimated but it’s way worse than reduction by a tenth)
I don’t know if you can factually back up your claims but I applaud your proper use of decimate. It is a rare thing. One might even say it happens less than 10% of the time.
Decimation was way worse than reduction by a tenth. It was a punishment in the Roman army where the offending unit was divided into groups of 10 and each group had to draw straws. Whoever drew the short straw must be stoned or clubbed to death by the other 9.
If you threatened me with death if I didn't cut off my feet, I wouldn't consider that "reduction by 10%" even if mathematically it might be.
Hmm.. Is this my brain inference or the parent comment author' too: "Bright side of life" -> "Always look at the bright side of life" from "Monty Python's Life of Brian" -> plot was taking place during Roman times (mentioned in the GP comment)
I wouldn’t say archaic or historical definitions are improper, but you’re right - the primary meaning of decimate in English changed and now means to destroy the majority of. Maybe this is because decimate was always very damaging; threat of death is very serious, regardless of the numbers.
That said, I had sweet breads recently. And a cat being a deer sounds strange in English now, but deer is still the word for animal in other Germanic languages today, even if it faded in English, so it doesn’t sound completely archaic.
Leverage? Soybeans are the number one US food export (historically mostly to China). To date, China has purchased zero bushels this year. This is with US soy being cheaper than the competition. Maybe China cannot replace 100% of their demand today, but they are showing a united front that their import numbers will be kept as low as possible.
…Basse says soybean importers aren’t just snubbing U.S. soybeans. They are specifically being told by the Chinese government to not buy U.S. beans.
“So, if you’re a Chinese importer or a Chinese crusher, you’ve been told by the government not to buy U.S. soybeans until they tell you to. This is how China works. Today the Chinese have a stronghold on buying United States soybeans, even though our prices are nearly $1 a bushel cheaper than what they’re buying in Brazil. This is the pressure that I believe the Chinese government is trying to apply on the Trump administration during a trade negotiation,”…
80% of soy is destined for animal feed. While there is undoubtedly some reason why chicken and pigs have historically been fed soy meal ($/kg, nutritional profile, speed of animal growth, etc) -animal feed seems very fungible. If there is a soybean deficit, seems plausible to swap to some other abundant crop.
Those crops would need to have been planted at scale months ago, with the full supply chain build-out leading up to that beforehand. The history of agricultural supply chains demonstrates that it is not nearly as agile as laypeople assume due to a long chain of sequential dependencies.
You either have to find a way to consume what is already in the pipeline or go without. Governments are very sensitive to the food security implications because there isn’t much slack politically to “go without”.
Loud and clear? Trump didn't even get half of the votes (49.8%) and almost 36% of eligible voters didn't vote, meaning that not even one third of the American public voted for this.
Popular vote does not matter to americans, otherwise they would have changed the voting system.
36% of voters said: I support every outcome of the election, no matter what.
And we are now about half a year into his term and I see some complaining, but not one single person seriously opposing him and his politics. If the things he does were really that unpopular, he would not be able to do them. To me it seems like he has the full support of the american public.
The question is whether and how much these policies are supported, and the popular vote is obviously relevant in this regard.
> 36% of voters said: I support every outcome of the election, no matter what
That's not really true, for all you know those voters didn't support either outcome. You would expect a "loud and clear" victory not to leave one third of people unconvinced enough to avoid voting altogether.
> but not one single person seriously opposing him and his politics
Almost four hundred lawsuits have been filed against his administration, thousands of public protest events are happening, and the tariffs themselves were just ruled illegal. What does "serious" opposition look like to you? In any case, this is certainly not what "full support" looks like.
> The question is whether and how much these policies are supported, and the popular vote is obviously relevant in this regard.
They are supported by the election. The american puplic accepted the result. Popular vote is not relevant for Trump.
> That's not really true, for all you know those voters didn't support either outcome. You would expect a "loud and clear" victory not to leave one third of people unconvinced enough to avoid voting altogether.
Maybe they had different reasons, but unfortunately thats not how not casting a vote works in a democracy. If you do not vote, you support the winner, no matter your intentions.
> Almost four hundred lawsuits have been filed against his administration
Trump has every branch of the government in his hand, law does not matter to him. Besides, he is a convicted criminal already. A few more lost lawsuits don't matter.
> Thousands of public protest events are happening
And millions of americans are not attending. Feels more like a vocal minority to me than a real movement.
> the tariffs themselves were just ruled illegal
I have not followed closely, but someday it gets to the supreme court and they will say "the president can do whatever he want", like they have said in the past.
> What does "serious" opposition look like to you?
Something that prevents Trump from executing his plans. Something that prevents Trump from just doing whatever he wants.
> time.com: "...thousands of protesters attended demonstrations on Independence Day..."
Thousands? Thats a fraction of a fraction of the american population. I am sorry, but I fail to see how that supports your point.
I will have to admit I am a little jaded when it comes to the US, but you must forgive me: when the US threatens your country with war, a lot of nuance goes out of the window. If an american clusterbomb kills me and my family tomorrow, I won't care that it has been ruled illegal by some lower court (Trump won't either).
I keep a list of every time I change one of my work passwords with the date it would have expired, and it seems to fluctuate between 2.5 and 3.5 months with little consistency. Some of us used to have it locked so we didn't need to keep changing it, but they reenabled it some time ago and we got confirmation it was for some sort of external security requirements.
People think cyber insurance requirements are hard rules, but they aren't. For the most part, you just need to show effort as it's completely impossible to be 100% compliant with all standards. For example, if you weren't rotating passwords but had proper MFA on your accounts, you're fine. Hell they even have conflicting standards sometimes. I've been through this multiple times when I worked at an MSP. For the most part, leadership just pushes to meet those standards to cya, which makes sense, but as long as you don't demonstrate gross negligence, they'll pay out.
I think this is Ccjaas2004. I'm not 100% sure on the letters, but the year is easy to see. Hopefully, they've changed their password sometime in the past 21 years.
I think you're correct. They probably use it as the password "format" and haven't updated the post-it in order to trick anyone trying to steal the password! What could go wrong?
Sorta how those Fox Raw livestreams on YouTube Live consistently show the inner workings of room-to-room shuffles and background whispers INSIDE the White House for the entire online world to dissect; it's definitely a security flaw but maybe not considered so by either Fox or the admin.
You'd be surprised (or probably not) how much incredibly critical infrastructure has one ancient lynchpin PC doing some weird essential thing with a post-it note password like NameOfCompanyYear! where it's clear based on the year that the password hasn't been reset in a quarter century
I think they will. If they don't see this as gross breakage of the Constitution, then we're cooked no matter what. Clearly there is no "national emergency" like a war or economic depression, so he's breaking the law, either that or the law doesn't mean anything in a legal or common sense interpretation, just the imaginings of a tinpot orange dictator.
I think this won't be the last thing up Krasnov's (well the Project 2025 lawyers anyway) sleeve, I do think the SCOTUS will shoot down the tariffs though.
"Swimming naked," "bent... over the barrel," "supporting actors."
Do you always speak in grotesque metaphor, or are you capable of referring to concrete phenomena? Congratulations, there is a part of my mind that finds your vague idiom disconcerting. Moreso I am resigned to take your entire cadre less seriously—if such a downgrade is possible.
> In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him.
That is measurably untrue and it took me about ten seconds of searching to find it. https://www.billmeridian.com/articles-files/inflation.htm and many others. Historically I know you tend to argue pretty dishonestly but this was pretty easy to find and so either you're lying or didn't bother doing any research past reading Ayn Rand.
Also, prices spiking up from incompetent threats of tariffs and not coming down are categorically different than regular inflation. This is obvious and shouldn't need to be explained to you.
I think you might have been a little harsh on Walter. Perhaps the answer is more of a "yes and no" depending on your point of view. It does seem like inflation/deflation kind of canceled each other out before moving off the gold standard.
> It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the founders of the Fed as a relatively rare phenomenon associated with wars and their immediate aftermath. Figure 1 plots the US price level from 1775 (set equal to one) until 2012. In 1913 prices were only about 20 percent higher than in 1775 and around 40 percent lower than in 1813, during the War of 1812. Whatever the mandates of the Federal Reserve, it is clear that the evolution of the price level in the United States is dominated by the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 and the adoption of fiat money subsequently. One hundred years after its creation, consumer prices are about 30 times higher than what they were in 1913. This pattern, in varying orders of magnitudes, repeats itself across nearly all countries.
Not my area of expertise and no skin in the game, just wanted to point this out.
I am harsh on Walter because he tends to argue in bad faith in order to support some weird pro-business libertarian world view. He's super active on HN (as am I) so I have argued with him and there are multiple times he has said things that are outright dishonest (like once claiming that incompetent workers immediately get fired from corporations, a post I can't find quickly but is in my history somewhere, or trying to paint me as some alien-believing UFO fanboy which I am not).
So when he makes absolutist statements like "there was no inflation in the US before 1914", which is a typical springboard for libertarians to start complaining about the federal reserve and propose some idiotic Ayn Rand nonsense, I have trouble not being literal here.
There is nothing wrong with being a UFO fanboy - anyone that is not these days is psychotic. There have been so many leaks at this point, if you don't believe that's dangerous.
You're all waiting for Trump to claim it or something? It's already been announced.
Kind of off course for this convo, but no I do not think that recent "evidence" of UFOs is very compelling. Feel free to believe what you'd like but I do not think it's extra-terrestrials.
Even if we do some phenomena that we cannot explain as of right now, that does not imply aliens, it only implies that there's something we can't (yet) explain. A lot of the videos that were being hailed as smoking guns seemed to be a combination of camera artifacts and just optical parallax and stuff like that. It doesn't pass my metric for aliens yet.
The thing is, I would absolutely love to be wrong on this. It would be insanely cool to be part of the first humans who found extra-terrestrial life, so if anything I'm biased in favor of these things being aliens, but as of right now I am not convinced.
Can you quote where Friedman says “inflation [in America] started the year after the Fed was created”?
What you may be trying to say is until about 1900 there was little secular (i.e. fundamental long-term) inflation, given price levels oscillated more than they moved [1]. But the change to steady inflation pre-dates the Fed. And the secular shift to constant inflation starts in WWII, not 1914 or 1976.
The chart I showed did not show "steady inflation" before the Fed. The Depression is a bit of a special case, the deflation there was also caused by the Fed and their misunderstanding of how to adapt to changing conditions.
"The Federal Reserve System therefore began operations with no
effectiye legislative criterion for determining the total stock of money.
The discretionary judgment of a group of men was inevitably substituted
for the quasi-automatic discipline of the gold Standard." pg 193
"The stock of money, which had been rising at a moderaterate through-out 1914, started to rise at an increasing rate in early 1915, rose
most rapidly, as prices did, from late 1915 to mid-1917, and then resumed
its rapid rise before the end of 1918, rather sooner than prices did.
At its peak, in June 1920, the stock of money was roughly double its
September 1915 level and more than double the level of November 1914,
when the Federal Reserve Banks opened for business." pg 198
"The Reserve System was thus in an asymmetrical position. It had the
power to create high-powered money and to put it in the hands of the
public or the banks by rediscounting paper or by purchasing bonds or
other financial assets. It could therefore exert an expansionary influence
on the money stock." pg 213
"The large federal government deficits, totaling in all some $23 billion,
or nearly three-quarters of total expenditures of $32 billion from April
1917 to June 1919, were financed by explicit borrowing and by money
creation.30 The Federal Reserve became to all intents and purposes the
bond-selling window of the Treasury, using its monetary powers almost
exclusively to that end. Although no "greenbacks" were printed, the
same result was achieved by more indirect methods using Federal Re
serve notes and Federal Reserve deposits. At the beginning of U.S.
participation in the war, Federal Reserve notes accounted for 7 per cent
of high-powered money and bank deposits at Federal Reserve Banks for 14
per cent" pg 217
"The Reserve Board was aware that Bank discount rates were below
current market rates throughout 1919, that this was contributing to
monetary expansion, and that monetary expansion was contributing to
the inflation." pg 222
> Friedman quotes attributed inflation to the actions of the Fed
Then this is a lie:
“Inflation started the year after the Fed was created.
See ‘Monetary History of the United States’ by Milton Friedman” [1].
> for inflation through the history of the US, see
I’ve already pointed out how that source lies about the data it cites [2].
I will assume you’re misunderstanding what you’re reading. But it’s too close to willful dishonesty for me to continue to engage if you’re just going to double down.
Sorry, didn’t mean to convey that. Just perhaps mild frustration.
I don’t believe you meant to speak inaccurately. But the chart clearly misquotes its source data. That was pointed out and yet we couldn’t get past it across multiple threads.
I pulled the source data and recompiled the true rates; they partly support your hypothesis (but not the chart’s). There was inflation before the Fed but, if those data are to be believed, very little of it was secular. The balance of inter- versus intragenerational stability (and how that may have changed with industrialization and computers) is a genuinely interesting question, and not one I’d have stumbled across in this context were it not for you.
Visualizing Economics cites this source [1]. VE seem to lie about what it says.
Measuring Worth shows 1774 CPI at 7.8; by 1912 it is 9.4 [2]. That’s a low, low inflation rate of 0.1% per year, 20% over 138 years. But it’s not zero and it’s certainly not negative.
If we take 1790 (8.86) to 1914 (9.69), MW shows 0.07% annual inflation. That is the statistic you should be pointing to.
But! Within the 1790 to 1914 era we see inflation from 1790 to 1814 (2.75% annually; prices doubled over 20 years). During the Civil War, prices doubled in just five years; inflation 1860 to 1865 was over 14% annually. (CPI inflation goes to 2% annually between 1914 and 1944, 3.7% ‘44 to ‘76, 4.2% ‘76 to ‘08 and 2.4% from ‘08 to ‘24.)
We had inflation in America before the Federal Reserve. It was lower, long term, than it has been post Fed. But the common factor to our inflation is war. To the extent there is a link in these data, and I’m saying this having not noticed this before, it’s between inflation and war.
> That’s a low, low inflation rate of 0.1% per year,
See where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
BTW, inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912? Not only are records poor, but the goods being compared are wildly different.
I.e. I don't know what the error bars are on the aggregate statistics, and neither do you. 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars. In fact, even today, 0.1% is likely within the error bars, as measuring inflation is fairly difficult, and there's always going to be noise as market prices are a chaotic system.
> where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
You quoted VE. They misquoted MW. If VE is adding error bars to MW’s data, they—one—should not. But if they do, they should show how they manipulated the data.
There is no legitimate source showing negative annual inflation between 1774 and 1912; your source’s own sole citation disagrees with its claim.
> 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars
What error bars?! They’re the same data!
Your chart on VE says it is showing data from MW. I took those same data and calculated the same number your chart claims to calculate with the same data they link to. The answer is different. And this isn’t, like, I used CAGR and they did simple growth because the sign flipped!
> inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912?
You really can’t. Not meaningfully. You’re integrating data covering the pound sterling, Continental Congress, eras with no federal currency, eras with state and wildcat currency, and a civil war to boot. You’re also trying to compare a basket of wooden teeth and suet with one holding smartphones, gasoline and antibiotics.
But you brought the data and made the claim, and while VE is lying about what their source says, the actual data at MW is actually a legitimate attempt at the problem.
There are many concurrents? How do you figure? There has never been as little choice and alternatives, let alone actual competition than today.
A few corporations control most of the food you eat, even less control the food you eat in restaurants. Very few media companies control the "content" you can consume and you cannot even own it, let alone sell or even trade it, and it seems everyone just pays more whether they keep raising their prices.
While there are industries where that might be the case (and, if and when the Trump tariffs are removed, companies will absolutely take advantage for a bit), most industries are actually pretty low-margin, due to competition. If you're a supermarket chain, say, your net profit margin is probably under 5%.
Reality is simply that industries are locking in tariff increase price expectations because they can (Wal Mart is even already increasing prices and the tariffs may not and have not yet even started impacting prices).
It's just like how everyone started expecting a tip everywhere at all times at 25%, 35% rates during COVID and that not only has not disappear, it got even worse for a while before leveling off and the tip expectation is now north of 20% on average.
It's a common human behavior, a kind of ladder, the realization that "wow, I got away with all the previous increase rates, let's keep up the price increase rates since everyone has come to expect them".
Another example, car dealership premiums; they're still trying to push those and there is clearly a limited market and an unspoken agreement to keep them going across the dealerships. If people expect certain price increase rates, they have normalized those increases in their minds.
It's also why the fed has always "targeted 2% inflation" because it's a small amount that can be normalized over 12 months and you don't even notice it. But it's a steady rate that can be siphoned off the whole economy without people noticing the theft by fraud. You didn't complain about the fed stealing 2% of your wealth every single year, compounded all your life before they started stealing 5-12% for the last 5 years, did you? Sure, they can't get away with increased rates forever, lest the whole system collapse, but without someone/something forcing the hand, why should they stop. We are STILL hearing how the consumer is strong, while various revolving credit balances are increasing and people are just squandering future/other people's money, why would they care if they have to pay more, so why would sellers care not to increase prices if people are just willing and able to charge more.
As a wealthier person (income of ~1m/year, give or take), I could not more strongly support Mamdani (no 'h' in Zohran's last name afaik). I want a candidate like him in my city to vote for.
If you're still measuring wealth by income, you're probably not in the bracket that is being discussed here. $1 million per year is an extremely comfortable income, but it would take 30 years of saving that, post tax, before you hit $30 million in net worth, which is the entry point for UHNW status.
I do see your point, but it's highly unlikely that they are putting their wealth into a HISA for 30 years. There is likely 0 people who got to UHNW through saving money.
Totally. I'm someone who could choose to enter the capital class via purchasing rental properties or investing heavily in stocks, but I deliberately do not.
Capital class wildly different than wealthier working class. But in all honesty, bring the taxes all the way down to me at least. Anyone making a million a year could be taxed a lot more and still live comfortably. The capital class above me could afford a LOT more taxation and still live lives of unbridled luxury.
"very wealthy" is heavily understating just how ludicrously wealthy some of these people are compared to the vast majority, and it's reflected in historical numbers.
I am wondering why "very wealthy" would be so stressed by increased taxes. Don't they have ludicrous wealth, shouldn't it have almost no material impact for them?
Are there money games I am unaware of that means they are running brittle houses of cards and marginal percentage increases in taxes would topple their empires?
I just don't understand the fear or concern, but I am not ludicrously wealthy so I suppose I wouldn't.
If someone is truly strong then they have strength to spare for others. I guess I assume the same would be true of wealth, but perhaps you don't get ludicrously wealthy by being proportionally generous.
They are so ludicrously wealthy that even a very small increase in percentage points of tax ends up being a very large number, and no one likes to see a very large number of their “hard-earned” dollars get “taken away”. The marginal value of each dollar to them I don’t think is a calculation that is very accessible to our emotional human minds.
The maximum effective rate on long-term capital gains was 45.5% but the top marginal rate on ordinary income was 91%.
In any case, this is all a major deflection resulting from the lie that the low job creation rate is due to "the threat" of a possible future mayor rather than tariffs.
This statement is also supported by the fact that despite the relatively high taxes in NYC billionaires will jump through all loops necessary to effectively still live there just not on paper
If a nation's fortune hinges on permitting a handful of extremely rich individuals to extract wealth with impunity, wield their immense hoard to buy up major media organizations and communication platforms, use those assets to continually suppress labor and consumer protections, and fix political elections by way of SuperPACs and other dark-money slush funds... well, that isn't my idea of a robust society or economy.
We've done fine without them in the past, and we'd be better off without them now. At the end of the day, labor and its fruits are the primary origin of value in an economy, not the handful of individuals that have had the immense luck and/or dubious ethics required to capture that value for their personal gain.
1) That we're at the threshold for taxes that the wealthy will accept. I would bet many wealthy folks feel attached to their homes as their identity, and it would take some amount to price them out. Like, clearly a billionaire would leave if the cost to stay was a 100% of their wealth, but would probably stay if it was $10 more in taxes. So there's a very nebulous line somewhere in between. I suspect we are not close to that line.
2) That wealthy people living in an area are storing their wealth or declaring that area as their home. Plenty of ways to shield wealth from local taxes, and plenty of ways to claim a place as your home without being taxed by it.
3) That having wealthy people in your community is a net positive for the community. Wealthy people tend to use a lot more resources and distort local politics for their personal gain rather than the gain of the community. Maybe we'd be better off if they weren't around, and several families moved in to take their place. Wealthy people don't ride public transit, normal folks do. Wealthy people can push city council positions to reduce transit, normal folks don't have that influence. Maybe we need more normal folks around.
4) That businesses owned by the wealthy are a net positive compared to, e.g., workers co-ops. Maybe we could be a bit more collective in our approaches and a bit less lionizing towards the wealthy person who got lucky. Maybe we need more community oriented businesses run by members of the community they live in and fewer wealthy business owners racing to the bottom.
If they want to sell off all their assets and leave, then lets see them do it. If they don't want to sell their assets, I don't see why it can't be seized if they leave.
It is, probably because it has a 39% tax rate on income over $180k, and no capital gains (stock sales are considered income and taxed at income tax rates).
Just one more follow up, the US is 27th on social mobility, behind most EU countries, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries which are consider "western"
Nah… UK’s economy is broken due to the fact we’ve never recovered from the financial crisis
It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs
Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject
You are thinking of “social mobility”, which is a term of art that doesn’t mean what people assume it means. It is essentially a zero-sum rank of your income compare to your neighbor. You can become poorer and still be “socially mobile” or much richer and not be “socially mobile”.
Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.
AFAIK the stats do show Europe passing the US in class mobility as of about 20 years ago. It is notable as Europe of course had low class mobility and the US just dominated class mobility.
AFAIK class mobility is measured by class at birth compared to adulthood (i believe as measured by net household wealth)
Economic, class, social mobility classically means ability for an individual to attain significantly more wealth than they were born with and ability to change their and their family's lifestyle. In which case it's not zero sum.
But yeah, some statistics indeed are just likelihood that the ranking order changes, or even self-reported...
It's like the definition of "middle class". Everyone thinks they're middle class. The OECD calls anyone with 75% to 200% of the average income "middle class". Classically the term means you are above the labour class but not noble.
Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.
This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.
A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.
Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...
Certainly from an entrepreneurial stand point it's beneficial. On the other side, it's current descent in to an authoritarian police state is kinda hard to ignore.
Anyone who took macroeconomics knows that stratifying an economy of ~370 million people by ambition ends with the most ambitious employees working the behind-the-counter at McDonalds. None of them ever end up at the fed, or filling white-collar corporate seats, that's been an open secret since the '80s. By the sound of it, you're just regurgitating Tweets you read in 202X while VCs were insecure about China whooping their ass in natsec, AI and robotics.
Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.
> The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state
Mississippi has a GDP per capita of $53k.
11% of Mississippi's population has no health insurance.
Mississippi is one of the highest inequality states in the US. Its median income is $30k. It's Gini Index is 49%.
It has poor physical and social infrastructure by advanced country standards.
Spain has a GDP per capita of $35k. Its median income is $20k.
Everyone in Spain is covered with modern healthcare.
Spain has a nationwide high speed rail network. A lot of its infrastructure is top-notch compared to Mississippi and even wealthy parts of the US.
This is despite Spain having some of the highest inequality in Europe, and undoubtedly a host of other problems, including decreasing affordability for average people. Yet it's inequality is far lower than Mississippi, with a 31% Gini Index.
So perhaps GDP per capita doesn't tell the full story. Also, I'm being fair by comparing Mississippi to one of the poorer countries in Europe, not one of the middle or wealthier countries.
I'm Spanish. I make about 40k/yr. I wouldn't move to the US for, say, 200k.
I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.
> I know several Spaniards who emigrated to the US,
As do I. They all seem to have moved to cosmopolitan places with advanced economies, not Mississippi. I also have friends and relatives that have migrated to Spain. Overall, there is no mass migration in either direction.
> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
A high speed rail network and universal healthcare are not statistics, they are as real as it gets.
But I definitely agree that Spain is probably not a good place if you want to make an absolute shitload of money.
"Poorer" in what aspect(s), exactly? Because not everything is about gross monetary amounts when it comes to a good life. Even the poorest of the European nations (never mind that EU !== Europe, and that by invoking Europe you're also talking about the countries with the highest QoLs in the entire world like the Scandinavians) still have superior worker protections & medical infrastructure that doesn't leave the poor in generational debt than the US, which for me both rank infinitely higher than earning more money. I'm sure the poor Mississippians wouldn't mind some of those 30+ paid vacation days my Spanish friends get in exchange for earning a bit less.
This is an incredibly naive take in trying to postulate the US as a better place to live, and genuinely makes me curious how much you’ve actually seen of EU.
Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.
Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.
And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.
You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.
I don't know how you came up with that statement. It certainly does not reflect reality unless you don't count Sweden, Germany, Canada as part of the western world.
>Individual studies have estimated absolute mobility rates for recent cohorts of roughly 50% in the US (Chetty et al. 2017), 53% in Canada (Ostrovsky 2017), 70% in Germany (Bönke, Harnack, and Luthen 2019; Stockhausen 2018), and 77% in Sweden (Liss, Korpi, and Wennberg 2019).
The US used to have to class mobility. The completely disproportionate wealth of the current crop of billionaires is evidence instead that that mobility has disappeared, and that the accrual of wealth by the already wealthy is the dominant class "mobility" pattern today.
The globe can collaborate to make sure capital has nowhere to fly to. Form the USSA and get china onboard and let the USSR come back (they’re still the loyal opposition in today’s Russia) and capital will just fucking take it like they deserve to. What, you gonna go to the moon now?
The fundamental question is who gets to start, control, own and grow businesses. Who makes those decisions? If it’s not private citizens, it is government functionaries. The latter has been tried many times. It can just about work, but only barely, and it has all the same problems of patronage, cronyism, monopolisation and labour abuse as capitalism but x10.
We also tried the 'let the market do whatever it wants' method and it ended up with babies being fed milk with formaldehyde in it, pharmaceuticals that were mostly opiates or ethanol, and entire industries owned by single families.
For many of our current societies I would say that we have failed to distribute the available resources. And even more so if we look at how we have failed distributing resources between societies and countries.
> Capitalism is a morally reprehensible way to distribute resources
It seems reasonable at first glance, but I’ve seen no proof of it. California, usually mentioned as having high taxes, still has a large percentage of the ultra-wealthy in the USA. Same with NYC. Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
> Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.
NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.
NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.
That is one of those questions where if you're asking it, I do question how serous you are in seeking out answers. It is mathematically guaranteed that an optimal rate exists, the topic has been an ongoing research question for several centuries and it is hard to avoid if you spend time arguing economics. Wikipedia points out [0] that scholars dating back to Ibn Khaldun have been working on the topic of pinpointing an optimal tax rate for maximising income.
So while I admit to not providing you with a study in this comment [1], it is pretty obvious they have been done and I don't see what there is to challenge on the topic. Obviously there is an optimal tax rate for maximising revenue, this is an area where there has been a huge amount of research done and if a municipality pushes their rates beyond that point (which will happen with some regularity) it'll see its tax take go down. There isn't much to document, anywhere with taxing authority would be feeling out limits experimentally all the time.
> Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
They moved states for tax reasons, so yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved. If notable people are starting to move then the system sounds like it is very close to the critical point.
So just to be clear: there is some undetermined optimal number, but so far no place has determined it and no place gone on the other side of it such that the ultra-wealthy left any particular area of note, causing a decrease in tax revenue. Got it. Thanks for the info!
> ...but so far no place has determined it and no place gone on the other side of it...
This is what I mean when I say I'm not sure if you're actually interested in the answer. The Wikipedia article is a pretty thorough treatment. This isn't some new or unexplored area, it is about as well trodden ground as the economists have. There isn't any need to gather more evidence to retest it yet again, the numbers are well known.
The income-maximising tax rate is between 60 and 75% and depends a bit on local conditions (probably mostly migration and language barriers). Lots of places have gone beyond it, happens all the time, and they generally lower their tax rates when someone points out they could make more money that way. You'd probably find the California tax people do studies on this sort of thing fairly regularly; not that anyone particularly cares or that I'm going to try and look it up. The real question is whether the government should even be trying to maximise the tax take.
That’s kind of the sad thing with this tariffs stuff, isn’t it? That it can actually be a sharp and effective weapon to set some things straight that badly need to be set straight, but this whole execution feels… suboptimal.
I don't understand the point of this comment. If you consider the most important target to be China, so important that it's worth a 10,000% tariff unless certain demands are met, shouldn't you be furious that the tariffs the source article describes on copper and India and Turkey are distracting from the important things?
The entire post-WWII world order was deliberately designed by clever Americans who knew how to use the situation to its full advantage. Enshrining the USD as the world's reserve currency, a network of military bases around the world to protect trade lanes, a combination of propaganda and economic incentive to bring the best and brightest to work in the US, while deliberately transforming the economy from a manufacturing economy to a service and finance economy, always putting itself in a position to be able to extract rent from everyone else.
The last vestiges of this world order was the TPP. The US negotiated a trade deal that would cement its top position in the Pacific region, while curbing China's growing economy and influence.
And then Trump axed it, because he didn't understand it.
China understood perfectly what an opportunity that was for them, and they have been quietly become less and less reliant on trade with the US since.
The current US regime is now hell-bent on dismantling the remaining alliances, relationships, and trade agreements that actually kept the US on top, the ones that actually kept the US powerful.
...while baselessly claiming that the existing world order was somehow "unfair" or "a bad deal", and that whatever the hell they're doing now is restoring some kind of lost power. They clearly have no clue what the source of America's power really is.
And here you are repeating their talking points.
What do you mean, exactly, when you're saying that the US shouldn't "let the world do whatever they want" ? What specific trade policies do you think are unfavourable to the US?
Yes, Trump is destroying it. But this order was crumbling already. The reason is that the "smart" people from the past believed they could always count on being the middlemen of the world. They believed that other countries would always be happy to send their best people and products to the US so that American companies would trade their branded versions around the world for a high markup. The reality is that other countries slowly understood that they had everything they needed to start trading among themselves without the need of a middleman. And once this realization sinks in it is difficult to go back to the status quo of depending on a single country.
Chest thumping false bravado will mislead you every time.
If I go to a restaurant, wait an hour for a table, get very hungry, and then see on the menu that the restaurant has tripled prices, is the restaurant "negotiating from a position of power" ? Sure, once.
What exactly do you think happens to our power after Trump squanders it to extract one-time concessions that mostly flow into his own pockets?
Sorry, I'm imposing my personal tariff on this conversation. You obviously don't have enough leverage to be worth my time, you'll need to pay me $100 or accept my general boycott of Trump supporters.
Putting aside the idea that American companies can hold their own and China doesn't pay the tariffs, it really wasn't necessary to tank the entire economy and kick off a depression to do this.
I guess they can't steal IP if we have no IP to steal, so there is that.
I kind of welcome this. Corporations panicking and being afraid to raise prices too much, and perhaps having to take a loss because they're essentially giving away product, is the LEAST that could happen to them after their naked and abusive COVID-era gouging.
EDIT: You had years of corporate stimulus and ZIRP expanding M2, but the inflation floodgates only opened after a paltry return of a small fraction of the real wage losses the middle class and lower sustained over that period? Live by the macro grift, die by the macro grift. And I wrote-in Bernie both times.
Their workers and vendors only suffer if their owners and executives decide to pass the buck of 1) poor management (not being able to set prices adequately), and 2) being in the socioeconomic class with the most influence on the most recent election. That class has expanded their wealth ludicrously during the last 3 presidential administrations, while most Americans have suffered. Any hits they take now are completely deserved, and nobly so if accepted willingly, in order to spare those lower on the ladder even more pain. (I am, of course, not holding my breath.)
"The workers only suffer if the owners deliberately act against their own short-term self-interest in order to secure their workforce, their industry, and, ultimately, the economy, over the long term," is the more correct characterization, and accurately portrays the behavior as misanthropic and illogical for anyone expecting to live beyond the next handful of quarters.
Iwata took a paycut. The least our guys could do is take responsibility.
This is how you know most economic theory is a total lie, if it wasn't they would just "price what people are willing to pay" and be forced to eat the loss. Is that cause copper bathtubs are a special item or are you just making up more rules after the fact to patch holes in your leaky theory.
It's because basic economic theory makes some really bad assumptions. It assumes everyone has the information they need, and sellers can instantaneously change prices in response to changes in demand or cost of production.
I don't think you've successfully demonstrated that those assumptions are bad. They're simplifying assumptions that are necessary to have a "basic" economic theory in the first place—one with tractable and understandable mathematics that can produce an answer without immediately dumping you into partial differential equations or requiring impossibly detailed input data.
The assumptions are only bad if they prevent the simple models from being useful, and the existence of a scenario where a model's simplifying assumptions prevent it from being useful does not prove that the model is worthless.
I don't think the model is worthless. But there also going to be many real world scenarios where they aren't good enough.
It's like doing physics where you assume perfectly uniform spherical objects in a vacuum. It isn't worthless just because that isn't how the real world works, but depending on the circumstance it can also give you incorrect results, and sometimes even be way off.
It's not so much that theory makes these assumptions, as that they describe the simplest economic models. You can make your models as detailed or not as you'd like, but the more work to construct/operate/understand them, the lower your likely return on that effort. It's just like how some people want simplistic games like Candy Crush, others want high investment ones like Dwarf Fortress.
> basic economic theory makes some really bad assumptions. It assumes everyone has the information they need, and sellers can instantaneously change prices in response to changes in demand or cost of production
This…is not true. What theory are you referring to?
Its a long time known flaw in economics. Im sure there are better models but i still agree with GP, the scientific field of economics is still a joke on par with psychology.
Economic theory makes some unsubstantiated assumptions, like consumers have information needed to make decisions, and those decisions are rational. In the real world the market is determined by external events that consumers have no way to know.
Things like credit scores, which are a systematic way to evaluate risk. The higher the credit score, the lower the interest rate you get charged. It's all about the risk.
Insurance companies totally operate on evaluating and quantifying risk.
.I’m not sure about economics Our complex supply chain has created an environment where the cost of something is tied to externalities. I think not knowing the cost of the various steps of production is a problem.
Most economic theory is good, but most theory salespeople are flogging a simplistic version of it. 'Pure' price theory demands perfect market information and zero costs to enter/exit the market - that's why it's easiest to study on extremely fungible commodities.
In real world markets economics considers elasticity, arbitrage, and distribution of market information between producers, wholesalers, retailers, buyers etc. But very little of that finds its way into op-eds or blogs aimed at a non-academic audience.
> This is how you know most economic theory is a total lie, if it wasn't they would just "price what people are willing to pay" and be forced to eat the loss
... Wait, why on earth would businesses do that? "Yeah, we're in the business of buying X for a dollar and selling it for 90 cents". What economic theory are you referring to that makes that in any way plausible?
When input prices go up, output prices go up, and usually consumption falls.
> if it wasn't they would just "price what people are willing to pay" and be forced to eat the loss
Classical economic theory predicts literally the opposite. It predicts the prices will go up exactly as if the base materials became more expensive. Classical economic theory predicts that free market produces lowest possible prices and thus any tarif means price up.
Economic theory covers what happens when the cost of goods goes up for suppliers. Prices go up for consumers. But the costs haven’t stopped fluctuating.
Now that I think about it, creating confusion and uncertainty is actually a pretty effective move if you want to play protectionism.
Any "known" tariff would just be paid as far as still profitable.
If you want companies to invest in your country, the tariff has to make doing so make financial sense, and for the long term.
A lot of these tariffs are going on things that would require a whole factory to be built in the USA which doesn’t currently exist at all, and has no supporting infrastructure or workforce.
Companies can’t just decide right now, “oh shit there’s a tariff. Better but it in the USA right away!”
Right, and if you're a non-American producer do you want to make massive forced investments to sell into the US market, or put less money into developing your presence in other markets that are not as hostile/unpredictable.
Maybe. But if your goal is to incentivize more domestic manufacturing, putting tariffs on the raw materials to do that manufacturing and build new factories is pretty counterproductive.
Clutching at straws but one silver lining from the accelerationist perspective is that the global economic damage of US Tariff War 2.0. will speed up the adoption of AI / automation. Payroll is one of the most expensive, high risk and illiquid commitments to the organisational budget, so the idea of replacing it with dial up / dial down Saas subscriptions will move from 'good idea' to 'business critical'
The effect will probably be similar to Covid / Remote Work - marginal idea until an externality made it essential. Does mean sh1t tons more unemployment though, so like I said, straws being clutched
The cloud being moving away from the "you must work to eat" economy and into the "you can work if you want nice stuff" economy. Getting there won't be fun but a lot of us would like that for our grandchildren.
I’d like to lay out an argument about why tariffs are good.
The only businesses that are derailing with tariffs issues are those that import goods to sell. The argument against tariffs is that they make goods more expensive.
Of course, this argument is true. But that’s not the end of the story.
Because prices are higher for imported goods, demand for domestically produced goods increases. This increase in demand leads to increased demand for labor, which can increase wages. Additionally, the money multiplier effect is higher when money is kept domestically vs paid to offshore parties.
Finally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that this nation can maintain its wealth without producing anything. We act as if the producers of food are fungible cogs that businesses can swap out. But I think we’ll find that management is the fungible part. Anyone can sell a quality good. Knowing how to make it is what’s important. I’m surprised that mindset doesn’t resonate more with software engineers.
Except for one little thing: countries have comparative advantage in the production of different goods and services. Boeing is great at turning aluminum and steel (low in the value chain) into jetliners (at the top of the value chain).
Because of this, Boeing gets to make thousands of jetliners and sell them all across the world and America gets to be one of very few places that can do this.
I think you'll find that steel and aluminum are a lot more fungible than jetliner factories. Why are we kneecapping what we're good at for the sake of things that China will ALWAYS be better than us at?
> Finally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that this nation can maintain its wealth without producing anything.
The total value of US exports has only ever gone up (see above).
I do get the argument for moving manufacturing expertise back onshore, I really do. But tariffs are not gonna lower the minimum wage and if manufacturing is gonna come back to the US, it'll come back in a highly automated form with a boatload of government support.
Comparative advantage is not innate. China was a rural country and didn't have a comparative advantage in manufacturing, they developed it and are now a powerhouse.
Nothing worth doing is easy. I don't know why Americans think that if its not easy, it's not worth doing. Americans 80 years ago would hate us for what we have become today.
In some sense of the word “manufacturing” china has several thousand years of experience in silk production. It also has - and had for much of it’s history - a stable government overseeing a high order society. The situation makes a lot more sense if we stop thinking about “the rise” of china and more “return to the historical norm”. There are a lot of other countries with cheap labour and governments desiring to industrialise that have achieved nothing like china did.
China had a comparative advantage in labor costs that they have turned into an advantage in manufacturing.
Plenty of Americans want factory jobs to exist - almost no Americans want to work them. Sure, nothing worth doing is easy, but not everything hard is a good use of time and resources.
I’m sure plenty of Americans would love to work a factory job if it meant they could provide a comfortable life for their family. Unfortunately, due to decades of anti-labor practices, that isn’t possible anymore. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to rectify the situation.
It's not possible because you simply cannot afford to pay manual factory workers a competitive wage AND sell the goods from the factory for competitive prices.
Factory work coming back to America would have to look like car factories do right now: highly automated, highly skilled work that takes full advantage of cheap inputs and advanced technology. It will not be helped by raising the price of inputs, deporting engineers, and defunding research.
Its not “due to decades of abti-labor practices" but “due to a century of economic progress driving higher expectations”.
Now, its true that there have, within that, been a few decades of regression in tax and other policy effecting a worsening of the distributional situation, such that labor gets a smaller share of the returns that are returned. But even with that, basically every segment of society is better off in absolute terms than when manufacturing was more dominant: working against comparative advantage and regressing on the US’s industrial mix would only reduce aggrgeate output and do nothing to improve distribution. And that's the point, because its a policy proposed by those who don't want to deal with distribution, and in fact want to take further steps to worsen it, because they expect the benefit their narrow group will receive from that will outweigh, for them, the impact of shrinking the total output.
The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem. Productivity is increasing faster than wages. That means labor is losing out on economic gains. Your argument is that labor should just accept this because “at least they’re better off than before.”
Imagine you invest $1000 in the stock market and the market is growing at 10%. But when you open your brokerage account, you see only 5% growth, and it turns out someone has been pocketing the difference. When you confront this person, they say: don’t be angry, you’re still better off than you were before. You would be right to be angry and you would be right to demand policies that force this person to give you your fair share.
> The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem.
That's literally what I said, and why the solution is to undo the things that produced that instead of undoing the things that fueled the aggregated growth while doubling down on the sources of inequality.
Tariffs decrease that utility by decreasing the utility of all imports, even the ones that were supporting domestic employment.
It's not 1910 anymore. The US is integrated into the global economy and many if not most jobs export to a global audience. Do you want to hurt the labor arbitrage that allows us to support advanced manufacturing?
I agree with you. Reading the comments here, it’s clear that many people lack the “fighting spirit” for competition and improvement.
Honestly, I’m surprised by this, especially here on HN. This is/was a place where builders congregate. Building new things is never easy. Sometimes all you have is a belief that you can do it. It’s sad to see that go.
Boeing is going to be the first company to feel the pain of Trump’s tariffs.
The govt of India has already put one small order on hold and the word in aviation circles is to switch to Airbus as far as possible.
Military purchases now also won’t happen.
Peter Navarro in one of his rants inadvertently leaked this out on TV: his specific issue was a demand for mandatory tech transfer and manufacturing in India.
Perhaps if tariffs were implemented in a somewhat sane way, your argument might have more merit. Today, we are also tariffing the raw materials needed for domestic production, including many that have zero or insufficient local production. so it actually makes it harder and more expensive to meet demand domestically.
Plus, with the fickle and chaotic application of trumps tariffs, you’d be insane to invest in domestic production.
If you're interested in a detailed discussion of what a "cogent, long range tariff and industrial policy" might actually look like, you could do worse than my new book on this subject. The website is at IndustrialPolicy.US.
Sure, a cogent policy would be ideal. But you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. America was getting their lunch eaten well before Trump. At least the tariff policy is an attempt at rectifying the situation.
You can let bad be the enemy of both good and perfect.
Investment in manufacturing structures is down in ‘25 [1]. Manufacturing activity in the northeast is down, with “the new orders index dip[ping] into negative territory” [2].
Tariffs can reduce trade imbalances and incentivize domestic production. We’re not doing that. Our tariffs are too volatile. They tax manufacturing inputs. Tweets grasping for the straws of a Nobel prize cede prized export markets like India to China [3]. Cancelled licenses for nearly-complete projects add risk [4].
The policies of a degrowth leftist who wanted to reduce our industrial output and pivot to manufacturing would be virtually identical.
From your first link, investment in manufacturing is lower than in 2024 (by like 3%), but both 2024 and 2025 (Trump’s presidency) are the highest datapoints in that dataset.
Also, your second link generally paints a mixed picture, not an outright negative one:
> On balance, the firms indicated an increase in employment, and the price indexes rose further above their long-run averages. The survey’s broad indicators for future activity suggest that firms continue to expect growth over the next six months.
I think it’s misguided to interpret current data as evidence either for or against the current policies. This is something that’s going to take a decade plus to play out. Trying to use data to call winners 6 months in isn’t really possible.
Your argument ignores that Trump is using tariffs for non-economic reasons. You are arguing a weird straw man that isn't reality.
Trump has used tariffs as leverage against India for buying Russian oil, as leverage against Brazil for domestic politics he dislikes, against Mexico to pressure actions against drug cartels, and against Canada and others for recognizing a Palestinian state.
There is no sound economic logic to these schemes. The rates change as Trump likes or dislikes the praise he hears; deals are announced without signed agreements or details; rates, justified by "returning manufacturing" are changed faster than you could dig a foundation for a new factory, let alone actually make anything; industries are targeted for political reasons (like climate change denialism) and not economic reasons; deals are reached to exchange dollars for US-based manufacturing (like the china chip buying kickbacks).
The only logical consistent aspect of the tariff scheme is as unrestrained (and likely illegal) power play for Trump to get what Trump wants.
Lunch eaten by whom? Who was eating the world's richest country's lunch? The only lunch eating going on is the American rich eating the poors', something that's only accelerated under Trump. The tariffs are a tax that is most disproportionate on the poor. And they are in no way, shape or form actually intelligently designed to help them. It's just stupid madness.
It's actually pretty amazing that the current regime has managed to get people to believe that the current world order, where the US has been sitting on top for decades and managed to extract the largest piece of the growing world trade cake, somehow means that the US is being taken advantage of.
There's more than one commenter in this post that talks about "other countries walking all over the US", or claiming that capitalist free trade allowing American consumers to purchase ridiculous amounts of stuff is somehow a scam?
It's as infuriating as it is mindboggling how people can fall for it. It's completely baseless.
The American worker has had their lunch eaten by the American capitalist class in conjunction with countries providing cheaper labor. By allowing unfettered labor arbitrage (i.e. tariff-free trade) the US has allowed their working class to be completely gutted. Combined with with unfettered illegal immigration (another Democratic Party position), the assault on the American worker is immense.
Unfettered illegal immigration is not a Democratic Party position.
Both Obama & Biden deported more illegal immigrants than Trump.
Due Process is a Democratic Party position that Republicans don't value.
Actually, considering the lack of real penalties for employers of illegal aliens, I'd say that the acceptance by both parties of white-collar crime is the real problem.
Properly prosecute rich criminals & illegal immigration will dry up real fast.
I agree more could be done in prosecuting employers. But supporting illegal immigrants absolutely was a part of the democrat platform. Sanctuary cities are not about supporting “due process.”
Also, the number of deportations does not tell the whole story. The number of illegal crossings under Biden was astronomical compared to both Obama and Trump.
> Sanctuary cities are not about supporting “due process.”
I thought it was about keeping local law enforcement out of immigration matters. Because otherwise undocumented people would be afraid to report crimes or be witnesses, and that's worse for local crime. Which is what city governments care about.
"Demand for domestic goods" includes a lot of exports. And when the foreign policy is explicitly "the US vs everyone else", it's obviously the US businesses that will have nowhere else to go as the retaliatory tariffs hit the businesses/industries that were previously strong.
How do businesses hire local labor for non-existent manufacturing facilities? Why would anyone spend the massive amounts of money over years required to make new factories when people expect that eventually sanity and rule of law will return to the White House?
Incentives work better than tariffs. Tariffs are less effective due to their uncertainty (why would I build a factory if the next admin removes the tariffs?)
The problem with incentives is that they need to be ongoing. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is to build a factory in the US if foreign competition can still bring comparable products to market for cheaper. Because then you won’t sell anything, so your ROI is zero.
the real problem is that sudden tariff changes are one of the worst tools imaginable. building large scale factories requires spending billions that will only pay off over decades. if the tariff changes every month that's one of the worst things you can do to build confidence in long term bets.
Sure, I get your point. It all comes down to the pros and cons of each on the rest of the economic system. The goal isn’t to get industry onshore at the expense of the economy. If you have a better tool, use that instead
Do you think you just have to flip a switch somewhere in buttfuck nowhere Wisconsin and all of a sudden you get a full fledged factory and the trained workers needed to compete with China on low quality/high volume products?
Even with triple digit tarrifs Chinese goods would still be cheaper.
No, I don’t think there is a switch. It will be a long and difficult process. But your argument seems to be that, just because it’s difficult, we should just give up. I don’t believe in that argument. Building things is always hard.
Is the argument here what we should forgo important things because they’re difficult? As far as I can tell, the difficulty will only increase as time goes on.
no. the argument is that show deliberate policy is how you fix long term systematic problems. flash grenades thrown by toddlers just make everything worse.
It is neither in our best interests to continue this, because I can't give you the level of detail this can. It would be a pale imitation of the reasons in front of you.
Basically, there is no way we "win" this economically through tariffs. Nor can we power through it by trying to throw labor at the problem, because the labor cost is cheaper everywhere else.
This is one of the most surface-level understandings of national economics that I have seen. Sure, all of that would be great, if not for two things a) these tariffs are not targeted and b) your country could produce everything that it is tariffing. What is the plan for cocoa beans? bananas? aluminum and steel?
These thinly veiled pro-trump people are much too common the internet and I'm getting tired of it.
They sure do, but not enough to be self sustaining, and tariffs aren't going to magically produce more aluminum and steel. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47294. Canadian aluminum is critical to the US supply.
Bananas may not matter (to you), but coffee certainly will.
How about direct orders from retailers in foreign countries of products that aren’t made domestically (and are so specialized and small market in the US that there’s no world where they manufacture here)? I’ve already been burned on specialty products just suspending shipping here due to tariff uncertainty in addition to the various postal services suspending to the US, like JP Post.
American companies will move manufacturing offshore long before they’ll open factories in the U.S. The economics of using domestic labor for cheap goods don’t add up.
How does this argument apply to a good like coffee? We drink a lot of coffee, and it makes us more productive, but we produce very little of it. Maybe we could increase coffee production in Hawaii, but since we can use the land and the labor for more high-value purposes, it would cost a lot more than importing it from Brazil or Colombia. So when we slap a 50% tariff on Brazil, the average American ends up consuming less of something that they enjoy and find valuable, or paying more to consume the same amount. Maybe some land owners and agricultural workers in Hawaii benefit. Doesn't seem like a worthwhile trade-off.
I think there are some categories of goods where protectionism makes sense for national security reasons, but for most goods, I don't really see the value of propping up less productive domestic production and causing increased prices for consumers. Do we need to make underwear in America? Or toys?
And of course tariffs are not one-sided, so retaliatory tariffs hurt the domestic industries where our exports are competitive, which tend to be high-value.
They also grow coffee in Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, these few small islands have much less area available for coffee growing than Brazil. And coffee is grown in many other countries than Brazil, all of which are under Trump's trade assault. There is no way to substitute US-grown coffee for foreign-grown coffee.
This would make sense if there were a single labor market. There isn’t, so this simply increases prices (even for domestic goods, as raw materials are frequently imported).
There is no meaningful path to restoring much of the US’s lost manufacturing capacity. The rent is too damn high, and the cost of goods is rising quickly as well. Labor is expensive and becoming moreso daily. Manufacturing in the US can never compete with SE asia even with 50% tariffs due to the gigantic disparity in the cost of labor.
It’s not going to increase wages, it may even result in even more offshoring due to the increases in cost for raw materials.
Low labor costs are not why goods are produced in China. That viewpoint is outdated. Goods are produced in China because they have the most capacity and expertise. Don’t believe me. Believe Tim Cook: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2wacXUrONUY
Oh, that too. China is the best place to manufacture most precision goods today, period, independent of labor costs.
But even if you could wave a magic wand and put the USA on equal footing in terms of skills and experience and capability, it would still cost several times more to
make the same goods in the USA due to the labor costs (and labor-adjacent overhead costs like workplace safety).
Both would need to be solved, and I think that solving either one alone is already basically impossible on any short- or medium-term timescale. A tiny bandaid like tariffs isn’t going to move the needle.
He’s giving that speech in China. It’s impossible to know if he’s glazing or not. Either way, I would want to hear him commit to building those factories in the US if education was not a factor. I suspect real estate costs, unions, OSHA, and US wages are bigger factors than he’s letting on. Still, I’m not going to fault the man for complimenting China while speaking to a Chinese audience.
https://archive.is/Q2lLE
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In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created.
Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.
NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html
I’m curious whether it’s more the tariffs, or the uncertainty. No one knows what will happen on a day-to-day basis: the chaotic (and illegal) decision-making leaves everyone wondering what’s next.
I live in such country, local currency volatile, laws are changing. There is no long term planning, projects should span 1-2 years and if they bring income, then you are lucky. In long term the situation is no good
The hiring slowdown predates tariffs. For various reasons CEOs either believe they can do more with less people, or that they can hire cheaper people in other geographies, or both. Businesses (tech or financials) don't seem to be telegraphing uncertainty, S&P 500 revenue is at all times high and trending up, earnings/profit all time highs and trending up, valuations all times high and trending up.
That was the entire point of hiking interest rates, to slow down the economy and stop inflation. Tariffs are universally acknowledged to cause inflation, and we would be in a recovery path if it weren't for the delays that tariffs are causing right now.
It is rather interesting to see the difference in standards of accountability for different presidents. Some are responsible for the economy even if its behavior is not sure to their actions. Others are not responsible for poor economic performance even when taking actions universally agreed to harm the economy.
Let's be clear on who has these different standards: primarily Republicans, members of the party whose lifeblood is hypocrisy.
They sold us out in the name of holy apocalyptic chaos and destruction
All they had to do was prey on fragile white grievances, and it worked.
Remember what straws they had to grasp at to critique obama?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
Remember the "terrorist fist jab?"
GDP is still growing and inflation has come down. I agree tariffs contribute to inflation: https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco...
Before tariffs, in the post-pandemic recovery, we also didn't see hiring go back to pre-pandemic levels. There are other forces like AI adoption.
I don't have good intuition around the connection between tariffs and jobs. Yes, higher inflation may require cooling down the economy. But right now it looks like rates will be going down and anyways rates haven't really slowed down the economy that much. Inflation did come down. Inflation can have some benefits too for employers, it erodes the employee's salaries (and potentially other costs). If companies can raise prices and not pass that on to employees or to their suppliers (as they've seemingly done during this last inflation cycle) then it can be a win for them. A weaker dollar can also help US companies compete globally.
If companies are doing well and growing, and they seem to be, why aren't they hiring more? The largest US tech companies are sitting on piles of cash and making huge profits, for some time now. Is it just that they've become more productive and need less people? Maybe they don't have anywhere to put more people towards? Maybe they're hiring outside the US (this one is not a maybe- they are). Is the uncertainty related to progress in AI? to other macro factors?
Because they're terrified of the uncertainty of the long tail of the tariffs. It takes months and months to see the products of those.
But the change in hiring trends goes back to the beginning of the pandemic. This can't all be explained by tariffs. There is always uncertainty about the future but it seems there's been a shift in behavior across the board (CEOs copying each other is also a problem) that has been lasting many years. I guess you could blame it on Trump's first presidency if you really want to make this political.
Terrified billionaires, lol
No, terrified people that do actual work.
How do you bid on a big project if you don't know what materials will cost next month, or 6 months, or a year from now? It's fucking impossible. And with inflation, labor cost is spiking. It's hard for people to get buy, so they're asking for more. It has investors and banks spooked to loan money for projects, because they could easily fail with so much volatility.
Looking at the 30 year chart YTD there is no indication that rates come down. The short side may be under control of Trump - who's bullying of the Fed raises the prospect of them coming down but the long end of the curve is under the control of market forces and it does not look like going down at all. Real estate market effectively frozen with sales down and for sale up in the realm of decade highs.
Nobody mentioned yet the drop of the dollar making every single import 10% more expensive since the start of the year. That is on top of every tariff and is inflationary.
Government spending went up by a surprising amount while tariff revenue rolls in. I suspect one reason there is no detailed budget is to create the space to move things around without much notice. If a large swath of the tariffs would be ruled illegal (already happened twice, one step to final) the situation could become interesting.
The goal of this administration is a low $US.
I imagine to make American exports cheaper.
It will take years to make America an exporting nation. In the meantime many many businesses will go bankrupt. This administration doesn't care as they just see it as a cost of fulfilling their longer term plan to make America an exporting nation.
Nearly 10% of the s&p 500 value is one company- nvidia. The mag 7 make up a significant portion. Prosperity isn’t distributed, it’s concentrated and the stock market is not even close to the only measure of the health of the American economy.
There are other options, it’s not that simple. They may foresee an economic slowdown (they certainly say they do at every opportunity), they feel they are currently overstaffed, the ETF and hedge fund managers who own most of their stock are pressuring them to save money because they don’t like what they’re reading in the tea leaves, etc.
S&P 500 or S&P 10, tho?
> The hiring slowdown predates tariffs.
That's true, but it didn't predate the election of a man who has made his understanding of tariffs and economics crystal clear in the months and years leading up to January 2025.
The tariffs this time are far in excess of anything he did previously or promised to do while running for office again and took nearly everyone by surprise though.
This pre-election BBC summary - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy343z53l1o - pretty clearly spells out what has eventuated, describing it as a "central campaign pledge":
> Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.
That is not the 40-60-200% tariffs he has placed on things, depending on the day of the week.
That uncertainty makes it very hard to manufacture goods or buy raw materials.
It also disrupts JIT supply chains. Companies make decisions with certain variables not being volatile.
You now have a situation where one week the cost of a commodity is X and the following week it could be 2X. The butterfly effect across industries also cannot be predicted.
Many industries also seem to be still recovering from the pandemic period with supply of spare parts still being de-prioritised over making parts available for new units. :/
I don't think there's that much surprise at the tariffs on China; it's the tariffs on the rest of the world, especially friendly countries like Canada that are the big surprises. Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
Why on Earth not? Didn't people pay attention during his first term? This was 100% predictable.
The key difference seems to be that this time:
* Groups like Project 2025 spent years preparing an assault on our legal system
* This time Trump populated his administration with sycophants from day 1, instead of starting out with establishment figures
* The GOP has spent the last 8 years reconfiguring themselves into supplication
This time, Trump is fully unhinged and unfettered, and he knows the legal peril he faces if the White House isn’t GOP-held for the rest of his life.
>and he knows the legal peril he faces if the White House isn’t GOP-held for the rest of his life.
This combined with the utter self-emasculation of the Republican Party to Trump's incoherent, or at best self-serving, garbage is the most worrisome thing of all.
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> Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
Only all the people who voted for them and all the people who voted against them?
US elections have a shockingly low turnout compared to other countries so not the affirmative you were hoping for
Maybe if Harris had made a few she would have won…
She did, everyone just sort of... pretended she didn't. So they could have plausible deniability for voting for Trump.
See also: Harris is an elite! (Trump is more elite), Trump knows business (he's a pretty bad business man), Harris did nothing in office! (She was VP), Trump is the underdog! (He's literally already been president)
She did? What was her platform? I never did figure it out.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/08/politics/kamala-harr...
https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/09/09/harris-policy-pl...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-harris-campaign-promises-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
All of the above were posted prior to the 2024 election.
Harris was a terrible candidate. And not chosen by the delegates. The Democrats have to take some of the blame for Trump 2.0, surely?
Trump was a terrible candidate and could've been beaten if a good candidate running against him.
Speaking as someone who despises Ted Cruz to the bottom of my soul, I decided in 2016 that if Trump had decided to run as a Democrat, I would have voted for Cruz. At least he has some sincerely held beliefs that do not involve his own wallet and cruelty towards the entire world outside his inner circle.
My point being: at some point the American electorate has to take responsibility for picking the worst available person. The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
≥The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
Perhaps i didn't make my point clear. Indeed ur statement is true. I was referring to those who hated Trump but also hated Harris and so DIDNT VOTE. My point being that if the Democrats had fielded a compelling candidate many of those who didn't vote may have voted for them. Enough to win. The Democrats learned nothing when they fielded Hilary Clinton and lost. Joe Biden barely won. And only because they were sick of Trump and also how he handled Covid. Also don't forget the Democrats tried to run with Joe for a second term when he was clearly unfit. Huge turn off.
So yes, my argument is the Democrat Party is partly at fault for Trump 2.0. They did not field a worthy candidate.
"Vote Blue no matter who" is a failed strategy. And rightly so.
> Joe Biden barely won
That's slightly revisionist. He won the popular vote by almost 5 percentage points. That's a lot. He also got more electoral college votes than GWB (both times) and Trump in 2016. His victories in the battleground states were also by a higher margin than Trump's in 2016, though still close. "Barely won" is a shade of true.
I honestly don't blame the guy for believing it was his responsibility to the country to run for re-election and keep Trump out of office. His heart was in the right place, even if the rest of him wasn't up to the task anymore.
I love how people are blaming democrats for electing trump. Its just such a dystopian timeline lol
> Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
People who actually understand politics and who realize that the extent to which politicians keep their campaign pledges is usually related to how their parties end up performing in the legislature, rather than just being dishonest.
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It didn't take informed people by surprise. We still see people denying that Trump had anything to do with Project 2025, whereas honest informed people knew that he very much did.
Nobody informed saw massive tariffs on India, Brazil, etc. If you were right the stock market wouldn’t have tanked because the smart money would have priced it in.
Maybe the smart money shorted on the tank. After all, if you know there's going to be a downturn in a known time period that's a smart move. I believe it's worth analyzing who sold what and when, if not for insider trading, then at least for historical knowledge.
Trump’s style of governing is patrimonialism. Mafia. It’s how he ran his businesses, and Trump 1.0. It’s entirely predictable that he’d go much further this time around as he claimed DOJ should act as his personal law firm.
Modi pissed Trump off by refusing to support a nomination for him to get the Nobel. And Trump hit India with tariffs. Unsurprising to anyone paying attention.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/trump-modi-in...
No one is so stupid they can’t follow this, and predict the aggregate consequence well in advance.
It’s only by willfully suspending rationality, that people convinced themselves the obvious wouldn’t happen. And one of those is an insistence that the only valid form of prediction is at an absurd level of prediction granularity, rather than the inevitable storyline as a consequence of Trump’s intrinsic corruption and ability to corrupt everyone around him (or else they discarded and flung far away).
Trump is famously a racist, a rapist, a felon, and a vile insurrectionist. Nothing good could possibly have followed his election. Indeed, we’re really lucky so far. It’s going to get much worse.
tl;dr Elect an abuser, get abused.
Market bubbles combined with parallel political bubbles are probably the real black swan event coming down the pike
What is a political bubble? I googled it, but I'm getting definitions closer to "my news feed only shows me what I want to see"
If I had to guess - "political bubble (bursts)" is when an extremely incompetent and/or radical politician suddenly is elected to one of the top posts in a country. So it's like a closed off boiling pot - incompetent radical has 5% of the electoral base and nothing happens, then 10%, then 20%, 30%, 40%, still nothing, and then one day he "suddenly" crosses 50% threshold and bubble bursts, he is now in charge for real.
For example in France their own Le-Trump aka Marine Le Pen had 41% votes last election cycle, so nothing really happened and system centrists won again, politics remained moderate and predictable. But if she or her ideological successor even takes 50%... hooboy, EU will see some Orbanification just like USA does today.
My guess is just, well, a guess, but the real impact of tariffs will take some time to hit. For now it is a turbulence of the uncertainty, but as people understand how to work on this situation we'll see numbers getting more stable. My second guess is that inflation will grow as other markets will learn to deal with the situation. It is taking some time, but other economic blocks might make strong moves altogether causing at least a bruise in the metrics.
Also we need to remember that the guy responsible for the numbers was fired for allegedly political reason and that could have been political and no one will ever be sure. So how can one trust the numbers in that situation? It has been... Weird
It is more the volatility for sure. Tarrifs have existed forever and business has always coped with them.
You can't write a business plans/proposals and get loans/management approval on these kinds of tariffs.
Imagine trying to get a loan from a bank to make a USA manufacturing plant, pointing to the 150% Chinese tariff. A week later the tariff is 25%. Does your math still work? Probably not. Will that bank continue the loan? Nope. Will the bank even entertain a similar proposal from someone else right now? Nope.
If you want to grow USA manufacturing you need to subsidize it, or give private industry confidence it's not going to lose them money. If you can't do that, your relying on charity / non-profit / philanthropy... And I don't see many of those in manufacturing.
I would say more about general uncertainty than volatility but similar thought. Disagree on the reason though, tariffs like we are experiencing have not been in our existence for a couple generations. And especially not in the modern connected global market.
I don’t believe most if not all of us have experienced such an immature and erratic administration. We are taxing trade partners, flip flopping on rules and nobody knows what to make of it.
They didn't change monthly.
This is different -- the tariffs are being applied and changed chaotically, with no direction on actually serving the point of protecting native industry. The goal of the tariffs is to replace income tax, everything else is a smokescreen.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/22/trump-tariffs-replace-income...
Would note that the data the New York Times cited are seasonally adjusted [1]. The assumptions of those adjustment models may not currently apply.
It’s going to be difficult to suss out a signal from employment data until October or November, by when we should have about half a year of post-tariff data [2] to compare with ‘24. (We may not know anything surely for a year.)
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/sa-methodology-...
[2] https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff...
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Whatever mayor they're 'under threat of' can't be much worse than the one who's currently in place who is under threat of indictment from the federal government over bribery, fraud, and illegal foreign finance contributions, who has has eight of his staff resign in the last year under federal investigations, and lost multiple other staff resigning on principle.
People are already acting like Mamdani is responsible for everything that happens in NYC; they should pay more attention to the guy who's been in charge the past 3 years.
Weren't the charges against Eric Adams dismissed with prejudice? [1] They shouldn't have been dismissed at all, but the judge didn't want the president to be able to directly control the major of NYC.
I personally think he should at least be impeached because I have the woke liberal opinion that people in power taking bribes is bad.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mayor-eric-adams-case-dismis...
Mamdani advocating that the state gov tax millionaires 2% more is not the same as having the power to tax millionaires. You should look up what a mayor actually does (hint: balance budgets with city council and strike new initiatives and work with the police department).
2% is hardly worth fleeing.
And Mamdani hasn’t even been elected yet.
Looking at total private jobs over time, growth slowed after the post covid bump, but 2025 doesn't look all that different from 2024: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU36935610500000001SA#
Both the NYC Employment Data the New York Times cites [1] and these Fed data [2] are seasonally adjusted. Would take them with a shaker of salt given the assumptions in those adjustment models are likely currently under assault. (Hehe.)
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/sa-methodology-...
[2] https://www.census.gov/data/software/x13as.html
I do not trust NY job numbers. Their unemployment system remains a disaster from the Covid years.
Source: Me trying to use it and encountering prior fraud. Light reading suggests many have experienced it.
Normally I'd be quippy about the plural of anecdote not being "data", but this isn't even plural. This is a single anecdote. The claim you have made is "I have encountered fraud, personally, so the system is a disaster."
Well run systems experience fraud. It's something you generally want to minimize, but like, it's not necessarily an indicator that the system is broken. Like... AWS has tons of fraud. AWS is still very much not a disaster. (Well, it kind of is a disaster, but mostly because it's a machine that chews up humans via oncall, which is unrelated to their fraud.)
As claimed, light reading confirms this observation to be data not anecdata.
"NY's COVID unemployment fraud topped $11B, partly due to system failures..."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nys-covid-unemployment-fraud-topp...
Look at more recent data. https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/state-agencies/audits/pdf/sga-2...
It looks like fraud rate was typically 5-10%, which might be high, might be "fine". In 2020-21 and 21-22 fraud rate jumped way up to 20%, which is obviously way too high.
But in 2023-24 fraud rate is back down below 10%. We don't have 24-25 data yet, but it looks to me like we had a couple of unusual years during the pandemic, but audit controls seem to have reigned a lot of that back in.
I'd say, evaluate this year's data and then decide if this was a blip or not, then revise your mental model with data.
Unemployment numbers will never work for counting the number of people actually unemployed. They do work for seeing unemployment trends. A ton of people suddenly applying for unemployment is a pretty clear signal.
Edit: typo
Shouldn't that be roughly constant across the year though? We don't need to trust the numbers to be exact, to observe a precipitous drop.
Should fraud rates in public taxpayer-funded systems stay constant or go down over time, assuming no new fraud type is invented?
Depends what if anything is being done to combat it.
One of the following is true:
- The numbers somewhat-accurately reflect the trend of employment
- Fraud levels were reduced 66x in one year
If it was the second one, that's a sufficiently massive reduction that news stories would be written about it. There would be stories about this great victory over fraud.
A quick search showed no particular anti-fraud measures or claims of effectiveness unique to that time period.
Don’t worry, Trump can just keep firing the people who make the statistics until he’s proven right :-/
That has me shaking my head. He fired the BLS person claiming they were reporting inaccurate stats to make him look bad. A claim of partisan bias - could maybe be some truth to that. But to fire them and replace them? Then it will certainly be biased reporting. I suppose that makes sense if all you care about is image and not actually making things better.
I question the president’s cognitive state if he openly stated there would be some “pain” and then when the statistics show he was correct, he attacks the BLA director and claims the economy is booming.
The president and his defenders are playing us when they appear to want a growing economy. They don’t.
Thankfully, the president doesn't need to be fully cognitive to be president, they just need to win an election every 4 years.
She had been doing crap job going back to Biden. I don't think she was fired for optics.
She is presenting numbers. A bad job might be using black font on a black background not the numbers are not what I want or businesses are not answering surveys quick enough.
"She had been doing crap job" with all due respect, citation needed.
I know that this is the result of summing a much larger gain + a slightly smaller loss, but it's weird reading this number in isolation and knowing that my company is responsible for roughly 5% of this gain.
This is, in some sense, exactly what Trump wants -- to hurt the cities/liberal regions that oppose him. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
The problem is those liberal cities and regions pretty much prop up the entire US economy.
When you look at GDP, it's coming from California, NYC, etc. Even in red states, like Texas, it's Dallas and Austin carrying everyone else.
If you are looking at tarrifs to explain NY small business market collapse, you clearly have not followed Louis Rossmann's struggles to keep his business in NY over the years.
https://youtube.com/@rossmanngroup
And yet the rent in NYC just seems to go up and up.
rental prices are driven by P/E redirecting funds to the purchase of housing stock, which they then use to jack up the rent. Fuedalism is returning by stealth.
If there’s demand for 5 million units and supply of 6 million prices will go down as 1 million units will be empty
If there’s demand for 5 million units and supply of 4 million, prices will go up and 1 million will move out of the city
In your first case they increase rent as a group and have 80+% occupancy.
In your second case they increase rent and people are forced into having roommates.
that is also assuming the demand is atomic when that isn't necessarily the case. A lot of that pooled demand can come from singular sources. in other words, not all demand is created equal
You conveniently left out the part where many large corporate landlords collude by using software like RealPage to enable widescale price fixing.
As do small landlords. they can only do this because supply is so constrained.
It looks to me like we hit the end of the debt cycle. The market was predicting this by the end of the fall last year before Trump was even elected.
I don't think not doing tariffs would have had much of an effect.
Real jobs or government jobs?
New York is teeming with what appear to be newly arrived "immigrants" who do no speak a word of English (and frankly are rather aggressive about their refusal to do so) yet are employed in various crafts. We had fairly substantial renovation recently in our building. Every single worker was clearly a recent arrival. How do we know how many jobs were actually created if so many of them are not "officially recorded"?
(I am an immigrant myself (via the legal means) lest you take my observation as a xenophobic expression.)
You can be an immigrant and xenophobic, they aren’t mutually exclusive.
Immigrants are more likely to be xenophobic as they move to a less xenophobic place.
The U.S. has no official language, and no one who moves here is required to learn English. Especially in NYC, where so many neighborhoods predominantly speak a language that is not English (Brighton Beach, Sunset Park, Flushing, Chinatown, etc.)
Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
There are and have been pockets in immigrant communities where e.g. older members would live their entire lives in US and never speak a word of English. But conversely, no one expected the rest of us to know Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, ..., etc. But somehow now we are supposed to accept a sizeable subset of our nation to only speak Spanish.
> Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
I do not care if it is not a "good look" by some standard. What I care about is cultural and value system continuity and national cohesion.
>What I care about is cultural and value system continuity and national cohesion.
Good news! We share the value of "be cool about it, we're all just trying our best"
That seems to have changed in March 2025 via executive order, with English now being the official language of the US
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Stat...
https://www.usa.gov/official-language-of-us
There are communities of non-English speaking people here in Montana. They speak a form of German. Hutterites (kind of like Amish).
Does the New York Times (which is a national paper) have a section in German language? Does it have one in any other non-English language besides Spanish?
Why is Spanish singled out? Why was "bilingualism" being promoted so heavily? Meaning no offense, wtf has the Spanish speaking community contributed to American history to get this special perch? So yeah, there are all sorts of little pockets here and there, and grandpas and grandmas of various flavor speaking the old country's tongue but only one was promoted.
The phenomena is obviously political in nature and to construe is as anything else, including "prejudice" or "xenophobia", is disengenuous.
The people who are most xenophobic/against immigrant communities are recent immigrants who pull the latter up for their compatriots right after they ascend.
Latino voters swung 20 points towards trump from 2020-2024 after being told that Trump would deport all of their illegal family members. A majority of latino men straight up voted for Trump and Latino women was like 47-53.
Legal immigrants hate illegal immigrants. Most legal immigrants are wealthy and well connected and have never had to do the shit jobs that their illegal brothers do. It's pretty hard to legally immigrate without lots of money/skills or at minimum beauty (i.e. for green card marriage). Illegals are usually dirt poor and will do anything for a better life.
I'm getting far more willing to defend making English the official language of the USA for this reason. You want to pretend like you're a WASP legal immigrants? Act like one then!
BTW - Americans don't see the distinction between "european latino" and "Mestizo". You're all Latinos and are treated the same way by WASPs.
Even assuming that there were no other federal, state or local YoY differences [1] that could explain this change (and that the numbers are right as presented in the first place), New York City private sector employment is nothing like most other parts of the US: it's the largest city in the US by a large margin, it has a concentration of employment in a few major industries (finance, fashion, publishing, software) that aren't represented elsewhere, and...it hasn't been a manufacturing center since the victorian era.
You can't wave this away with "NYC is a leading indicator for the US economy". To the extent that it's true at all, you could say it about any large city in the US.
[1] Like, say: interest rates, the business cycle, AI, the slowdown in software hiring, or the minimum wage increase that NYC implemented on January 1, 2025.
This dismissal of a massive drop in hiring (literally 1.5% of the previous half year’s reported hiring) is wishful thinking.
“Ignore this data point, NYC is special.” Color me skeptical.
I'm not ignoring it, but I’m not falling into a post hoc fallacy, either.
I'll put it this way: if I were ignoring it, I'd be ignoring one more data point than you are in cherry-picking a single example.
I'd be ignoring one more data point
whoops. fixed.
It's true that NYC private sector employment is different from the US labor market as a whole, but NYC private sector employment is better representative of what readers of this site care about than overall US employment. Readers are much more likely to be affected by changes in the professional services and information sectors than, say, agriculture.
The agricultural section indicators are that there's about to be a big, expensive bailout for ag:
> “Right now, we have zero bushels of soybeans on the books with China for this fall harvest that has begun in the Deep South,” Ragland said. “Normally by this time, close to 40% of our sales for the marketing year are on the books. And with zero on the books right now, it is alarming for American soybean farmers.”
https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/us-soybean-exports-to-c...
The first time that Trump screwed over with tariffs, they got tons of bailout money that we all paid for.
Not all sectors of the economy are so lucky. The big man at the top must be paid with either bribes or allegiance or both.
It's part of the plan. Small farms will be the ones to go bankrupt. The large corporate, black rock et al owned, "farms" (read businesses) will be bailed out and allowed to scoop up the little ones for pennies onto the dollar.
ICE raids are freeing up a lot of spots in the agri sector.
And again, even if you assume that all of that is true, you're still making a leap of logic that these changes are because of the tariffs.
What else changed?
I named several in my original comment.
The big, blinking, obvious YoY change for anyone here is tech employment.
As a result of tariffs
No, that was R&D deduction changes.
Yes, a tariff can be a good measure. But for that the tariffed goods need to be selected carefully and rationally und not whatever the heck the Trump administration is doing.
For example you can tariff bananas all you like, that won't spark widespread banana production in a climate that can't grow them.
No but it could shift consumer demand a bit to favor apples, for example, which largely come from domestic sources.
Not arguing one way or another, but your reduction isn’t quite accurate with the affects tariffs can have
Hawaii produces 6.3 million lbs per year of bananas which is a tiny fraction of the 8 million metric tons per year Ecuador produces. Labor and land cost is the primary reason Hawaii can't compete with Latin America, but long-standing tariffs could change that.
About 2m people are employed directly or indirectly in the Ecuadorean banana industry. The total population of Hawaii is only 1.5m. Also you could fit Hawaii in a corner of Ecuador.
Unless you turned over all the islands exclusively to bananas, and forget about tourism, pineapples or anything else, you’re not even going to get close.
Hawaii is already heavily agricultural. Most of the non-agricultural land is reserved for conservation. Banana production would likely replace other production, and then we've got less of that stuff.
Also, shipping to continental US is limited by the Jones Act and the lack of capacity in US built, owned, and crewed shipping lines. Assuming a desire to produce things in the US, I don't think it's sensible to tarrif bananas to grow them in Hawaii, and then relax the Jones act so they can be shipped to the continental US on foreign carriers.
Isolationists would say we should be eating corn instead
In the end it's the biggest leopard ate my face moment ever:
China has very high growth momentum that surpasses American living standards soon, and not long before it will surpass American security standards too. China's purchasing power is probably more comfortable than most western countries, with extensive housing and high speed rail and electric cars etc. When a country becomes rich, inevitably other countries ask for their help. That's why China's growth must be curbed, fast > tariff them to their death or so. But I really don't think it will work at all. And personally I don't even think it's a good idea at all to begin with.
See this is what I don't understand. Everything you just said about China is a positive. Everything you said about China is achievable in the USA, and we at least HAD a head start on soft-power influence.
Instead we should just have tariffs instead of actually making the lives of Americans better while FIGHTING affordable housing, high speed rail, and EVs.
We've got an entire team of goons who would rather rack up penalty minutes than score goals. These freaks think we are competing with China in an MMA fight instead of a Hockey game.
I do think the state of progress in China is vastly underestimated by the west. It has been fast and messy, not evenly distributed, but it is staggering. The rhetoric around them is changing too, I think they are making significant soft power gains. I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
China has been making soft power gains for a decade. They are everywhere in Africa. When I went to Macedonia five years ago, there was a giant screen in the main square explaining how their medical cooperation with China was such a boon for the country. China already is a diplomatic giant.
I think American are partially blinded by the crazy negative propaganda against China you see all the time in the US. They significantly underestimate where China stands and overestimate the impact American tariffs can have.
Imagine how much can China get from cancelling USAID and replacing it with Chinese version!
> I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
More than that, I think China would be mad not to step into the vacuum the US is creating with it's isolationist policies. For years US aid has been extremely influential around the world, doing a huge amount of good (e.g. USAID) and buying relatively cheap influence in many countries. Countries that were reliant on that aid are going to be understandably jaded by their experience with the US and looking for more reliable allies.
> The rhetoric around them is changing too, I think they are making significant soft power gains. I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
As long as they are cooperating with Russia at least European countries will have a hard time to accept China's advances.
China has a demographic time-bomb about to go off in the next decade or two. We'll see if they can survive it.
It already did, labor force shrunk for the first time a few years ago.
They were making soft-power gains before that maniac we elected showed up. Now our now former allies are leaning on their shoulder.
I feel it's more they're not actually playing for the scoreline. They want to be the team #1, even if that causes the team to lose in the end.
I'll add that the team leader doesn't expect to live long enough to see his team lose, and that's all that really matters to him.
When people see everything as an ego-based competition, they lose track entirely of the fact that trade is not zero-sum: both parties (or nations) benefit from increased trade.
It’s the zero-sum mindset of leadership that only ever learned to excel by cheating and stealing, not cooperating, building, or synergizing.
And unfortunately, it is exactly the Gorilla chest-pounding politicians “we are #1” that attract particular large swaths of the voting population who tend to see everything as a “me first” zero-sum competition.
It's the whole "benevolent" dictatorship VS flawed democracy debate.
It might be an authoritarian one party state but China isn't a dictatorship right?
Technically China is a dictatorship.
The constitution of the People's Republic of China and the CCP constitution state that its form of government is "people's democratic dictatorship".
The current president has done much to make his appointment for life, so it is a dictatorship that is on the road towards having a dictator.
Cue comparisons to what is currently happening in the US.
Yes, 人民民主专政.
A socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.
I think you're ignoring some of the poetic intention of those words, the idea is that the Marxist collective is the dictator. It's turning the concept on its head to put the people at the forefront.
In other contexts such as casual conversation here in the West the term dictatorship means something quite different and you seem to understand that too because you say they're "on the road towards having a dictator" which is surely an admission that they currently do not have a dictator and are ergo but currently a dictatorship.
I'll certainly grant you that Xi has made moves to consolidate power in the individual but that's a separate discussion.
So it is a tyranny of the majority? That's not the vibe I get from China at all.
I wouldn't have said that either, no. What vibes do you get?
They’ve fallen into the trap Bakunin warned against, that the Party vanguardism and dictatorship of the proletariat model Marx was advocating for would lead to catastrophically authoritarian regimes. Marx eventually had him kicked out of the International. He was saying this around the time Lenin and Stalin were being born.
Can't edit but also just wanted to add this page of Marxist theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...
What is a dictatorship if not what you just described?
Dictatorships have dictators. The power flows from that one person (think Hitler or Stalin), the military is probably loyal to them rather than other state apparatus and there tends to be no codified route to succession in the event of their death.
China is different in all these cases, even after the significant moves by Xi to consolidate power. You could argue that I'm the days of Mao there was a dictatorship in place but things have radically changed since Deng Xiaoping took the helm.
The ironic thing is that tariffs are the right tool to reindustrialize America (over the period of ~a decade) but theyre being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret by somebody who thinks it's a magic wand.
I never thought America was this fragile, or should i say the governmental mindset was, to just change things are essentially the backbone of what made America "America" in the first place. Changing policies that otherwise should not be changed is dangerous. When in doubt and there needs to be change then make the changes around the preexisting guidelines/settings, not change those first. Whether we like it or not enemies and competitive economies are reliant on our policies and , therefor vice versa. Changing big things first will make you the outcast, especially to our rich economy--relatively moderate population. Vs other economies of much larger population. There is fragile silver lining there to pay attention too IMO.
There was the pre-existing constitutional authority that congress had to regulate trade, and that was only supposed to be usurped by the president in limited circumstances...
This is what happens in imperfect systems. The leadership neglected the huge PR disaster illegal immigration was having.
The fragility comes from a system vulnerability that nobody expected both the president and the congress to become nihilistic.
Reindustrializing America requires people that are actually willing to work in a factory.
Pay them a decent wage and they will.
But why compete on factories if that isn’t competitive with foreign factories?
Because the immediate profits of capitalists shouldn't be the sole dictator of our economic activities and policies.
Im with you on that. But strategically retargeting the economy towards manual labor when you're big on services and digital innovation? That makes no sense. Being entirely self-sufficient is just not a good strategy in a highly competitive world connected by trade relations. Instead, tending to alliances and partnerships, assuring mutual interests and interlinked dependencies would be a lot smarter.
It all comes down to a lot of people in other parts of the world being willing to work for far less, for far longer hours, under far worse conditions, than Americans. Anything you can make in the USA will thus be more expensive, and until you’ve re-acquired all the domain knowledge lost to other nations, these quality will also be worse. As most people don’t want to buy something worse for more, you’ll need to force them to by making it unreasonable to import foreign goods (which is already happening), but that also means you limit the market to domestic. I fail to see how that is a viable strategy, unless you aim to wage war on the rest of the world and can’t trust anyone.
That's how you become a poor country. Every country that closed itself off to the rest of the world becomes poor.
You don't have to close yourself off to the world to foster local industry.
How many of them have MAGA-style slogans though? /s
Would average American citizen like to pay x3 for made in America goods instead of Chinese?
Why they don't do it now? One could easily replace 90% of consumed good with US made.
that is actually true it seems https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d... most american workers in today s date simply dont have a good diet and work ethics like their ancestors used to have
Even that's not enough, because the tariffs are hitting raw goods as well as finished products!
that requires giving advantage to such people - and stripping advantages from the rest
Won’t people be willing when the cost of living goes up so much and all the tech jobs are gone to foreign labor that they have to work factory jobs?
So you think going backwards and becoming a developing nation is a good thing?
What do you think happens when all the “developing” nations develop and refuse to get paid peanuts to make your phones?
The Vulcans come visit Earth and the Federation gets formed. How the heck should I know?
Most people don't work in tech. IIRC the most common jobs are retail, food service, healthcare, and education.
In my experience, most US tech workers see the non-tech US like most of the US sees the rest of the world: they intellectually understand that they’re a small piece of the pie, but living within an attention and influence bubble subconsciously makes people feel like the center of the universe. This can make average people feel superior and above average people feel exceptional.
Like in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all of the children are above average.
And we're decimating retail through tariffs, we're cutting as many people as we can out of food service, and we're ending much federal funding around education. Doesn't seem great.
There won't be any factories since all the capital will be overseas.
i don't see any indication that either republicans or democrats intend to reindustrialize america
Here's private construction of manufacturing facilities in the US.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON
Biden was inaugurated in January 2021 and Trump won the election in November 2024.
Biden's major bills were very much indications of that ... even more so for the version before Manchin took a hatchet to it.
There is evidence they are trying it just isnt particularly effective.
Part of the problem is that it runs up against the corporate lobbies who would rather take a higher short term profit margin, let American industry hollow out and buy gold + a luxury bunker in New Zealand to prep for the worst case scenario.
Agreed. This is hermeneutics for Trump's self enriching or just plain dumb actions.
Tariffs are protectionist, does not boost competitiveness. Tends to be the wrong tool, there are better.
Tax breaks, grants, physical infrastructure, creation of entire markets - those are better tools.
The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.
I mean consider it, a tariff is a tax on those buying a specific competitors goods. Even if tariffs were done surgically, still it seams like a tax benefit is a better tool
I doubt explaining economic basics to an administration that seems incapable of understanding what a value-added tax is will be very fruitful
Tariffs are reactionary to China’s explicit mercantilism. There is a reason we have a word for what is going on, it’s common human behavior.
>The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.
Yes they are. They are required to compete on a level playing field domestically and they still have to compete with marked up foreign goods.
Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. Take car manufacturing in the US. The country doesn’t make enough steel, copper, etc to supply the industry, so domestic production depends on tariffed imports of these and various specialist components. Plus many parts cross the borders to and from Canada and Mexico for various stages of the manufacturing and testing process, incurring a tariff every time.
This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup on a large proportion of their parts anyway. In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.
In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening and there’s no sign it will happen. The administration doesn’t seem to be aware this is even an option.
>Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. Take car manufacturing in the US. The country doesn’t make enough steel, copper, etc to supply the industry, so domestic production depends on tariffed imports
No, it's not. The US making not enough steel is not an immutable law of the universe. It is a result of the same kind of industrial decline which tariffs would reverse by making it more economic to produce steel locally.
It only wouldn't work on products which the US has no fundamental ability to make like bananas (which yes, Trump did...).
>This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup
Yeah, that's kind of how tariffs work - there's always a markup.
>In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.
That depends entirely on how you structure your tariffs. If it is the case you've structured them incredibly poorly.
>In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening
I believe I covered that when I said that the tariffs were "being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret".
Hockey games are often AS violent as MMA fights with less regulation and more equipment which can cause injury. People really watch Hockey cus they want to see the guys beat each other up - not because they care about the puck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_in_ice_hockey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_in_ice_hockey
Yeah it's a crab mentality. I'm ideologically opposed to communism, but I'm happy for the Chinese people. I don't understand why our response is to tear them down, instead of building ourselves up. Seems backwards.
When you even mention building ourself, you are accused of being anti American simply because you point out a deficiency in our current development.
China is the most capitalist country in the world.
I've never been to china, but I've seen pictures. It doesn't look like a stateless, classless, moneyless society at all. To me anyways.
Leader for life choosing winners is max capitalism.
And of the more communist ones
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> It's not achievable in the USA because a very large chunk of our population is literally retarded. 70 mil voted for Trump for some reason.
I am not an American citizen so I cannot feel offended by this sentence, but I think it doesn't help to call people stupid.
What you describe looks like a failure of the education system, which have been defective for decades in the US, from what I've heard. This may very well take 100 years (4 generations is even slightly optimistic) to escape this downward spiral.
Meanwhile, a possible strategy is to do like the others: get a popular politician who makes empty promises, while doing the opposite, or whatever they want actually, when in charge. They can inject massive amounts of money in the public school system even though they promised to make private schools more accessible in their programme, and distract people's from this obvious lie with a wrestling showmatch against Putin.
Certainly, if you are smarter than them, you can trick them.
Measured by international tests, USA was somewhere in the middle of OECD. Not the top, not terrible.
What he describes is result of different value system, intentional radicalisation and propaganda. Education won't counteract it and especially not since above people are in charge of it.
Yes, it is a failure of the education system, by design, for decades.
The way they are trying to takeover the public school system is by "vouchers" where private schools end up getting funded by tax dollars to create a regime sanctioned and funded private school system.
Is it weird that I get more worked up about the misuse of "literally" than your use of a slur?
What’s the misuse here?
It depends on which definition of the word is being used. For the informal one, "very foolish or stupid", it's literally true.
I’m still not sure what the misuse is. “Literally” is now commonly used as an intensifier, like how “awesome “ used to mean inspiring awe, including if you were scared of something, and now is mostly an intensifier. Awesome, dude!
C'mon ... you know what "misuse" refers to, even if it's no longer considered to literally be a misuse.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
I don't know, what do you call a full grown adult that reads at a 6th grade level and can't interpret a basic graph? 60% of America.
Maybe Osho was right
It's not achievable because a disappointingly large chunk of your population believes this about "the other guys"
It's not achievable because you have something like 5.3 people in the middle wtfing in all directions.
If you're not from here, I don't think you understand how completely wrong the right is about literally everything. The president and his staff lie to the country every day and his base eat it up. I'm not taking about misrepresenting facts or misleading graphs. Flat out, easily debunked, fabricated lies, 24/7.
What numbers are you seeing for the surpassing living standards? Their gpd per capita flatlined in 2024 at $13k. That's with only 80M of their citizens making above $2000/month. The bulk of their citizens make less than $100/month, and there's a declining middle class of around 200M that makes around $800/month. But they have high youth unemployment rate (>40%), there's a massive layoff wave coming in September with the mandatory social security payment from companies, and their recent factory wages have plummeted to $2/hour, barely survivable in first tier cities.
Before everyone jumps in with GDP per capital with PPP, what quality at that low price means is tofu dreg buildings, cancerous food items, waist high flooding every summer in cities, ghost buildings, and unsafe water (recently one of the most prosperous city, Hangzhou, had sewage seeped into the water for weeks, which the local government denied responsibility).
> GDP per capital with PPP
China’s ‘25 GDP per capita on a purchasing-power parity basis is $29k to America’s $90k [1]. American real GDP per capita grew at 1.7% a year from 2015 to 2025 [2]. (American PPP GDP/c grew 4.5% a year from 2014 to 2024 [3].)
From 2004 to 2024, Chinese PPP GDP/c grew 7.4% a year [4]. If China and America keep growing at their respective rates, we wouldn’t expect convergence for 20+ (40, using America’s PPP GDP/c) years. That’s too long for our if condition to be expected to hold.
There is not a strong argument for Chinese GDP/capita, PPP-adjusted or not, approaching America’s within a generation. There is a risk China’s economy becomes bigger than ours in aggregate.
> what quality at that low price means is tofu dreg buildings, cancerous food items, waist high flooding every summer in cities, ghost buildings, and unsafe water (recently one of the most prosperous city, Hangzhou, had sewage seeped into the water for weeks, which the local government denied responsibility)
Your comment loses credibility with this rant.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...
American real GDP per capita grew at 1.7% a year from 2015 to 2025 [2]
From 2004 to 2024, Chinese PPP GDP/c grew 7.4% a year [4].
What an incredibly dishonest comparison!
What about it makes it dishonest? What do you think would be an honest comparison? And, if you do it, what numbers do you get?
Where to start? Comparing a 10 year US period to a 20 year period? Seems awfully selective.
Let's do a side by side comparison? 2018 to 2023? 2023 is the last year with solid numbers.
US: 12% real GDP growth
China: 26% real GDP growth
Sounds impressive, until you account for the base.
US: +$2.4T USD
China: +$3.64T USD
Yikes! 4x the number of people, but 0.5x the GDP growth.
> Comparing a 10 year US period to a 20 year period? Seems awfully selective
Yes, I chose the strongest form of the other side’s argument to show that even then, it’s difficult to argue that Chinese PPP GDP/c is approaching American levels within a generation. (Though China’s numbers don’t vary much between 10 and 20 years, America’s do since we had a lot of war and then economic stimulus in the 2000s.)
> 2018 to 2023?
You want to make multi-decade projections off a pandemic baseline?
> 4x the number of people, but 0.5x the GDP growth
Per capita means per person. Purchasing power means real production. The question was about potential living standards, not aggregate might.
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Why are you so well-versed in these anti-Chinese narratives? Your message reads like you're a victim of anti-Chinese propaganda.
I'm from China. I know what real numbers and news come out of China.
Sure, you are. You created this account 2 hours ago, all comments anti China, perfect english and you write about China as "their" country in one of the comments.
FWIW, I do the same thing when referring to the US if my being American is immaterial to the point or observation. It is a way of intentionally not privileging your opinion.
Rare to see "you're a bot" be invoked for anti-Chinese sentiment. Thanks for the tickle today!
Propaganda can only work for so much. At some point, what you see and experience with your own eyes beats what you can convince me of what the truth is. If China is “collapsing” while producing all these EVs, Solar and high tech stuff then what would it do in a “healthy” economy? Colonize the moon?
I'm from the US. I have no idea what numbers or news are real anymore (if I ever did). I'm impressed by either your ability to discern this for China or by your confidence that you can.
The craziest thing about all this is that Chinese exports to the US aren't even that big a part of the Chinese economy (3% or so). Sure, it'll hurt and there's multiplier effects, but the entire rest of the world is more than happy to take up the slack. So the tariffs really are the US cutting its own nose off to spite its face.
You're assuming US citizens stop buying Chinese goods, just because they got more expensive.
That's unlikely to be true. They might buy less, but the numbers won't fall to zero.
It also overlooks the detail that the component parts of items "made in the usa" also come from other places. Clothing made in the US, doesn't necessarily use fabric made in the US.
In the short to medium term, the increased cash-flow requirements (tarrifs are paid before sales) will favor large importers with access to abundant cash over smaller importers.
Yes, the purchasing power of US consumers will go down as retail prices of goods go up. Yes global producers will seek out alternate markets.
The current uncertainty causes US purchasing to prefer not to commit to long-term orders. Global suppliers will prefer orders from stable customers, even at somewhat lower prices. Once those long-term contracts are in place, it may be hard to reenter the global marketplace, especially on the currently favorable terms.
In other words tarifs are doing long-term reputational damage that will not be easily undone in a few years time.
On the up side the world is about to observe, for the first time in a couple generations, the effects of an isolationist policy. It is a valuable lesson that needs to be reinforced from time to time.
We're on the same side of the argument here? Obviously that 3% is not going to go down to 0%, which means that the US has even less leverage against the Chinese than it looks.
I agree. Plus, as alternate markets are developed, so that leverage drops even more.
The US has made friends with a lot of countries based on the goodwill generated by strong trade ties. That goodwill is being eroded in the short term, and will linger as a reputation for "unreliability". 80 years of work is being undone in months.
And unfortunately it won't be as simple as "in 4 years we can go back to normal ". It's obvious that congress supports this, and the American people voted for it, so it's not just one man's policy.
Besides, I don't see how a $20 shirt becoming a $30 shirt is going to make a difference for American manufacturing. It's simply a sales tax (maybe even the greatest in the world). And on top of that you have all inputs for American manufactures getting more expensive.
There's a great podcast about the downfall of American Apparel...
If China stops exporting to the US, and instead exports to somewhere else, this will crash American living standards. It will lift the living standards of the new recipient.
What do you mean “the rest of the world will take up the slack”?
Is the rest of the world suddenly going to start buying something they haven’t in the past? Why?
And the US consumer market is 2x the size of the next biggest (EU).
How exactly is the the rest of the world going to replace the demand of something several times its size?
As an example, I'm pretty sure I just took up some of the slack here in NZ. I've been looking at installing solar for a while, and a particularly good quote for a Chinese system (Sigen) recently made me go ahead. I strongly suspect the unusually good price and fast delivery were due to cancelled US demand.
OT: Solar is awesome! 18 panels are generating 2/3 of our load, despite it being late winter. And a 16kWh battery means the grid power we import is all off-peak. In summer we're going to be exporting enough that we may even cover our winter grid import. Plus it gives us the best UPS system we've ever had, including zero-second cut-over (c.f. Tesla's half-second glitch).
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When demand is reduced, you lower prices. Rest of the world suddenly are buyers. Governments can throw subsidies at impacted sectors too to cover the price difference while supply chains adjust. With growing trade relations, economies of scale and transition costs become factors. The cost of trade with the new trade relationships become cheaper and so does the reluctance to change (for example with a 3 year production pipeline baked, you don't walk away easily).
It seems plausible to me that growing markets like India could fill that hole over time, yeah.
The “over time” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It won’t happen on anything remotely resembling a time horizon that matters for these purposes. Factories will be closed and gone by then.
If the US buys less, there will be unsold inventory and a temporary glut in supply, which will lead to the Chinese dropping prices and exporting elsewhere. This is already happening in SE Asia:
https://www.chiangraitimes.com/china/china-export-dumping/
Obviously the profit margin will be less than selling to the US, but it does mean that the 3% of GDP mentioned above is not going away entirely, just shrinking to (say) 2 or 2.5%.
The article also mentions transshipment, where Chinese goods get routed to the US via a third country. Although Trump's strategy of "tariff everybody for all the things" is putting a damper on this too.
China exported something like 525 billion worth of goods last year to the US. Not all good can be replaced but let’s say something like 350 billion worth of goods are unmarketable because of the tariffs. Do you really think the whole world can’t swallow 350 billion of imports?
You’re ignoring the fact that the demand and supply were in equilibrium before.
So the world needs to absorb almost half a trillion of new supply.
China’s GDP growth is no longer in double digits; it’s in the 4–5% range, and many analysts expect it to fall further due to demographic decline and low productivity growth due to capital investments in infrastructure not needed but politically necessary due to city politics.
U.S. per-capita income is roughly $80,000, while China’s is about $13,000. Adjusted for purchasing power it would take decades (at current trajectories, which may be slowing due to EU backlash etc.) to converge.
China leads in high-speed rail and EV adoption. These don’t automatically translate into higher overall living standards — healthcare, wages, pensions, and social safety nets matter more.
China’s lending practices have also led to accusations of “debt-trap diplomacy,” and some countries are now cautious about overreliance on Chinese help. This is why China negativity amongst all of their immediate neighbors is so high.
Debt trap diplomacy is nicely covered in a fun read called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Was the standard approach from the US for a while during the Cold War
Such a strategy applied only in foreign aid and development lending. all programs combined was about 0.3% of GDP.
U.S. aid was about Cold War geopolitics, China’s BRI is about long-term economic influence via infrastructure debt.
Why does China's growth need to be curbed or opposed in any way? What does that accomplish? The only thing we need to be doing is ensuring our own stability, be decently self reliant, and improve the lives of our citizens. It is in inevitable fact that China will eventually surpass us economically, they have far more people, fighting that is just crabs in a bucket fighting over who gets to stand on top of the others.
The US has been working with China for decades economically. The rhetoric around them being an enemy is very peculiar, since the US and China have been tightly coupled economic partners for decades now.
That said however, the US economy relies quite heavily on the international USD hegemony, and China being a bigger economy does threaten that quite directly. It would be surprising for them to drop the USD, but it is a significant risk.
Western Elites can not stomach a non-Western country prospering. It goes against everything they believe in.
Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Singapore? Saudi and the Gulf States?
Saudi and Gulf States are run by violent dictators who are Western puppets. Did you forget about MBS 'the Bonesaw' ?
> tariff them to their death
You’re not “tariffing them to death”, you’re hurting yourself. This would only work if the USA was the main importer of goods from China, which it is not - only about 14%.
actually, i think it is okay if other countries become rich and i absolutely reject this foolish zero sum way of thinking.
"Growth momentum" isn't a thing, and more over China's growth is slowing. This would be wholly expected under normal circumstances because it's no longer a developing economy, it's a developed economy - the absurd GDP growth rates it had are won off the fact that industrialization is an enormous, enormous change in productivity but you only get to do it once.
So industrialization is a binary bit? You just “do” it and it’s over? Not a very convincing take imo.
Industrialization, like deindustrialization, is a continuous process. Every industry suffers from depreciation and decay which means that pace of industrialization per unit time matters.
It’s statements like these that remind me to not take social media so seriously.
China does not have “very high grow momentum”, in fact growth has been seriously slowing since Covid
I’m not sure sure what “growth momentum” is what it has to do with living standards.
China’s PPP is not more comfortable than the US because it’s still 1/4th that of the US.
China has very serious growth problems, a massive debt overhang from real estate (that is still slowing the economy), a supply planning model that is leaving it with an oversupply of things like cars and batteries.
Well, at least Trump is working hard on implementing an American supply planning model as well, so the damn Chinese won’t be leading on oversupply much longer!
By making the imports needed for domestic production and infrastructure development more expensive through tariffs, before there are domestic alternatives available, and expelling large swathes of the labour force necessary for such construction, no he really isn’t.
It would be possible to develop domestic supply capacity, starting with the inputs necessary to feed that development, and then nurture and encourage the process with a targeted ramp up of tariffs. That’s not happening though, instead domestic investment is collapsing.
When you look at things per Capita in China things look very different from what you describe. Sure, you have pockets of very affluent societies (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and more) but the majority of the country is not there.
Take a trip to the flyover states or rural oregon.
I have family from the Chinese countryside. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was even just a decade ago, but there’s still no comparison.
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> Literally, kill people
OP never literally called for killing anyone.
You are putting words in my mouth I didn’t say. I was just using a realpolitik theory of the tariffs nothing more.
FWIW, we’ve been affected by the tariffs (10% for now; we import mainly from Vietnam and Thailand at this point). Did our second price increase a few weeks ago. We’ll probably test out how much the market will bear because operating in this market really demands a risk premium. So far it’s not as crazy as the pandemic supply chain crisis, but it’s close. The most insane ending to all of this that I can imagine is that the tariffs get conclusively ruled unconstitutional and all the tariffs payed get returned. Would be a huge wealth transfer from consumers to businesses.
> The most insane ending to all of this that I can imagine
The most insane ending is that tarrifs are reverted but most of the price hike will stay for good.
Why would that happen, if it didn’t happen before the tarrifs?
Because companies make more profits when the prices are higher.
Under normal conditions, if one company increases their price then buyers will find an alternative.
When all the companies increase the price at the same time then there are no alternatives. Customers become acclimated to the new price.
But there then becomes an incentive to lower prices to capture more demand. I don’t think that tariffs will incentivize collusion any more often.
That's very risky for companies to do because because you might not capture that demand. If you fail then you just lost money.
One reason is buyers may only consider alternatives when prices increase.
That's how market forces work, it's risky but it pays off until prices hit equilibrium.
If you’re lowering prices because your costs went down, then you haven’t lost money.
Depends on the market. Markets with lots of competition will have to lower prices. With only 1 or 2 major players? They'll keep prices high based on backroom handshake deals or "i'm not moving till he moves"
Market forces will prevail.
Super minor FYI, but on your website all the images in your portfolio show as broken to me.
Thanks for the reminder; website is super out of date.
>FWIW, we’ve been affected by the tariffs (10% for now; we import mainly from Vietnam and Thailand at this point).
The import tariff from Vietnam is 20% and Thailand is 19%.
The 20% tariff from Vietnam has been announced by Trump, but unless I’ve missed something in the past week or so, it’s not official. There was a news piece I read a few days after he announced the 20% number that said the Vietnamese side had actually agreed to 11% and were surprised when he injected himself into the process at the end and announced a different number. So it sounds like it’s a WIP. I believe the only country that actually has a signed deal at this point is the UK.
That being said, the copper, steel, and aluminum tariffs announced recently are real and have been assigned import classification codes by US Customs (which is when new tariffs to become real).
I'm really hoping the SCOTUS wrecks his whole plan on this. We've had enough kings down through history. We'll know once and for all if they are truly sold out or not when they make this decision because clearly he has been violating the Constitution for months now with these executive orders
The majority in SCOTUS so far has put their hands in their pockets every time there is the potential for actual conflict with the executive branch.
I don't understand why there isn't a market or company that develop already to move all items to low tariff area before sending to US.
I know that manufacturing things here in Europe, there already used to be round trip by airplane and co to try to lower VAT paid on purchases to the maximum.
Because it is not allowed and it does not count. It is the origin country that counts, even if you ship via another 3rd party country.
Vietnam is partly that. Production virtually "moved" from China to Vietnam pretty fast with various degrees of fakery. Not every company can pull it up, Nintendo for instance if probably more legitimate than others, but that's a thing.
That's covered, if you try to go to an intermediary county and they find out they will raise your tariffs back up to 150% for breaking the deal, it's built in to the agreements
That doesn’t really make sense… essentially the choice to do this isn’t in the hands of any nation, rather any business in the nation could try to do this and the government has no real way to know.
You could try to raise tariffs on a whole country because one company in that country was falsifying country of origin… but it’s inevitable
Mexico has a huge network of importers for doing exactly this and it predates both administrations.
The invoicing system there is highly gamed and corrupt (not that anywhere isn’t).
All of this tariffing has created a lot of new opportunities for businesses who operate in grey areas.
This is the intuition for tariffs for countries like Vietnam (where China used to send a lot of goods to for repackaging). Not a new idea, and one that customs will aggressively police.
> Repricing, though, isn’t as easy as changing a tag—in part because suppliers and big-box stores are engaged in an epic tussle over who will pay what.
> Retailers, including Lowe’s and Home Depot, buy Thompson Traders’ wares and set the retail price themselves. And they have been reluctant to pay Thompson Traders more.
It seems like this sort of scenario would benefit from some kind of risk protection, like insurance, or a futures market
So more middlemen to make the cunsumer pay even more, joy.
Consumers will pay more regardless in this type of circumstance. But they will pay less if businesses don’t suddenly start going out of business, eliminating competition and jobs
Doesn't insurance normally work by protecting rare instances whose cost is amortized over the base?
This would be a claim by a large amount of insurance clients at once
A sudden claim against many should be priced into the cost of the insurance, offset by some risk adjustment. The goal is ultimately price stability, if the price is not too high (that’s the unknown)
Insurance tends to do really badly in ‘black swan’ type situations. Which pretty much are what Trump is doing.
Isn’t the point of insurance to provide protection against black swan events? If it’s more likely to happen then it’s not really a black swan?
insurance is best for individually unlikely but societally likely items. otherwise pricing it is really hard.
Fire burns your house down, insurance is easy.
Asteroid hits New York, insurance won’t pay out.
Or in many of these scenarios, can’t pay out, because they’re bankrupt. The biggest issue with black swan events (in the proper usage) is everyone is screwed because no one saw it coming and/or it’s so widespread no one can do anything about it for individuals.
No [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory].
It’s the difference between getting cancer (calculable, but perhaps not high probability), and getting hit by a meteorite (not actually calculable, very severe consequence).
> would be a claim by a large amount of insurance clients at once
You’d insure against a specific product from a specific country being hit with a tariff. Tariffs are going up and down, sometimes in a way that may as well be random. (India not recommending Trump for a Nobel prize.) On its face, this doesn’t seem uninsurable.
In the current situation wouldn’t that just mean one more layer that don’t know how to price their product?
My assumption is that businesses that are negotiating their prices between retailers are not experts in geopolitics and what the next move will be from the government and courts. Someone may study this more or have connections to know that better, and therefore are more willing to take bets
I'd be suspicious as hell of any insurer offering cover in the current chaos.
I don't think it's an insurable risk. If you were trying to underwrite some "adverse effects of government regulation" policy in 2024, would a surprise 50% tariff on Indian exports have even entered your calculation?
Maybe not insurable, but there are firms buying and selling tariff and affiliated refund risk. Howard Lutnick's former firm is brokering such deals, in fact.
https://www.wired.com/story/senators-probe-cantor-fitzgerald...
Perhaps in the short term but I wonder if that calculus changes as more time goes on with erratic tariff changes (which has technically been going on for years, just to a much lesser degree).
Is there a market need great enough for price stability to offset the risk? It seems tariff whiplash will be an ongoing problem
Think about the fact that inflation was effectively killed and rates were set to come down by 2%. Then this clown comes in and does this. Inexcusable. Biggest economic policy blunder in history. Don’t let sky high stock market fool you.
> Don’t let sky high stock market fool you
The simplest explanation for higher stock prices is that the dollar has lost ~9% of its value this year (see: DXY)
It’s more than that. It’s getting cross-pumped by Wall Street and Crypto bros with AI hype as backdrop.
Not only that, but now he’s trying to blame the only adult left in the room, Jerome Powell.
As well as big business, this is just shutting down or radically altering many small industries. FIlmmakers, authors/book publishers, musicians etc. are negatively incentivized to ship product to the US, so good luck if you are an American consumer with niche cultural hobbies or a specialized importer who does a lot of small-batch orders.
Books aren't tarrifed.
That's good, but do you think you'll be able to ship to the US without restriction? I don't see post office counter workers working their way through the official list of exemptions published by the WH
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...
>but do you think you'll be able to ship to the US without restriction?
Whenever I import goods the HS codes are provided for each item, so it shouldn't be hard to collect the correct amount of money for tariffs.
So rise up the prices to build a buffer war chest and strangle the economy
Trump is even using Tariff threats to strong-arm other countries to retreat on their climate goals [1]. If the Supreme Court agrees that the Trump can do this then that means we have a dictator — one that will do way more harm than the one in North Korea.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/trump-internation...
Don't forget tariffs in response to countries enforcing their own laws against an attempted military coup. We're paying higher prices on coffee because President Trump's friend is being charged with trying to overthrow the Brazilian government.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-...
Ans tariffs in response to India not nominating Trump for Nobel peace prize!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/trump-modi-in...
He's a very simple-minded person with a hammer that up til now (court case) seemed to be working. He doesn't understand nuance or negotiation or any of that, he understands having the upper hand (military, economic power) and how to bludgeon people with it. That's why when he comes up against similar sized bullies (Putin/Xi) he is flummoxed and beaten every single time because they're much more cunning than him. Sure, he can bully Laos or Thailand and get deals, but the big dogs beat him every time.
The Paris agreement was very important when renewable energy required state subsidies, but it is no longer necessary. Fossil-fuel power is no longer economically competitive without subsidies thanks to (largely Chinese) improvements in the costs of solar panels and the necessary power electronics. Over a few decades, solar-powered energy superabundance will reduce the costs of atmospheric carbon capture to the point where even private charity can handle it.
On https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... you can see that mainstream solar panels have returned to their all-time low price of €0.100 per peak watt from November, while low-cost solar panels have fallen to a new all-time low of €0.055 per peak watt, an all-time low first achieved last month, and a 21% decline from a year ago. The "mainstream" category price is down 17% from a year ago. This is driving down the prices of complementary products and enabling new low-cost installation methods that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Because it's so astoundingly cheap, last year China installed 277 GW(p) of solar power generation capacity: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064. This compares to a total electrical generation capacity in the US of 1189 GW, albeit with a higher capacity factor: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-.... This year the projection is that China will have installed another 380 GW of solar capacity, giving it more solar electrical generation capacity than the US has total electrical generation capacity from all sources: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/07/10/china-on-track-to-dep...
Consequently we're seeing reports that, for Chinese AI startups, energy is a "solved problem", while US companies worry they'll be unable to get enough energy to compete: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell....
This is one of the most historically important things happening in the world today, but it's surprisingly little known even among people who are otherwise well informed.
Even if Trump could strong-arm other rich countries into imposing US-style prohibitive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, he certainly won't strong-arm China, so the cat is out of the bag; that would just make those countries economically uncompetitive with Chinese products produced with superabundant solar energy. And panels are already being mass-produced overseas with Chinese technology at prices fossil fuels can't compete with.
Ironically, the Chinese seem to disagree, as they bring online new Coal-powered power plants every other week, with 94.5 GW of new capacity having started construction in the first half of 2024 and another 66.7 GW approved. And that's 'permanently available', not (p) = peak.
"Solar is cheaper than fossil" does not look at the whole picture, it completely ignores that solar is not scalable quickly enough to meet rising energy demands. It also is a dark laugh towards consumers, who do not see prices lowering, but exponentially rising, ironically while the so-called cheap power sources are being rolled out.
To put it in perspective, China installed 277 GW of new solar capacity in 2024.
For coal, the "started construction" number there isn't the same metric as began operation. You want to look for "commissioned" and you get 30 GW. From https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/when-coal-wont-ste...
> Note: In 2024, 66.7 GW of new coal power capacity was permitted, a decline from previous years but still above the subdued pace seen earlier in the year. New and revived coal power proposals totaled 68.9 GW, down from 117 GW in 2023 and 146 GW in 2022, indicating a potential slowdown in project initiation. Meanwhile, construction started on 94.5 GW of new coal capacity — the highest since 2015 — suggesting continued momentum in project development. However, the pace of new coal plants entering operation has been more moderate, with 30.5 GW commissioned so far in 2024, down from 49.8 GW last year but in line with 2021 and 2022 levels.
China is well positioned to do solar + storage, but a lot of that coal is probably (a) for base load, (b) for steel production and (c) to keep the coal miners in business. From the same write up:
> In 2024, more than 75% of newly approved coal power capacity was backed by coal mining companies or energy groups with coal mining operations, artificially driving up coal demand even when market fundamentals do not justify it.
Although it's somewhat obnoxious, I'll quote Rui Ma's summary in https://xcancel.com/ruima/status/1955372325970514161:
> Hey n00bs: the up‑and‑to‑the‑right charts people fling around about China’s coal tell you almost nothing you think they do. Here's what actually matters:
> 1/ China’s electricity supply exploded over the last decade (versus stagnant for US)
> 2/ new growth is now being met mostly by clean power, coal is at all time low % of total
> 3/ grid delivery got a lot better (bigger and more efficient)
> 4/ China’s power‑sector emissions look like they peaked or are peaking, like 5 years ahead of its official deadline
> So if you reply with “BUT COAL PLANTS!!1!” without talking about utilization, per‑capita numbers, or the grid, you’re, uh, auditioning for the quote‑tweet (thx ChatGPT for this insult).
> More details below for those who have more than half a brain cell available: ...
Coal plant approvals in China last year ended up even lower than the 66.7 GW number you give, only 62.24 GW: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... That's for all of 02024, not (as you said) the first half.
Contrary to your assertion, that is the peak ("(p)") or nameplate capacity of the coal plants in question. However, coal plants do have a higher capacity factor than solar plants, which may have been what you were trying to say. In the US, which has the best data available, coal plants are operated with an average capacity factor of 42% (much lower than historical averages around 75%) while PV is down at 23%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci... but I think that in China the gap is wider. From memory, I think I worked out that China's average solar capacity factor has been around 10%, while coal is nearly 50%.
So 62GW(p) of coal capacity built would be about 30GW 'permanently available'. Moreover, However, not all of those regulatorily approved projects will actually come to fruition. You can see from boulos's numbers that only about half of approved plants ever get built. So 62GW approved is more like an average of 15GW actually produced—for the few short years before the plants are shut down.
I'm not sure what you mean by "not scalable quickly enough to meet rising energy demands". China was indeed having a hard time scaling electrical generation quickly enough to meet rising energy demands, back when they were more heavily coal-dependent. They had a full-blown crisis in 02021 with widespread blackouts. But that's because fossil fuels aren't scalable. That's why they installed 500 GW (half a terawatt) of new electrical generation capacity last year, half of which is solar and 80% of which is renewables. As Lauri Myllyvirta says in https://xcancel.com/laurimyllyvirta/status/19603213250099530..., it's probably also why they're still building even the small amount of coal-fired generation capacity they are:
> Permitting of a massive wave of new coal plants was a knee-jerk response to early-2020s power shortages and grid challenges from rapid wind and solar growth. The coal industry marketed itself as the solution, showing its entrenched influence. Since then, better grid operation and storage have largely addressed those issues, while the coal projects approved at the time are still under construction. A huge pipeline of already permitted projects remains.
He cites https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-coal-is-los... for further information.
I don't have a good handle on consumer electricity prices in China, but from Rui Ma's figures in https://xcancel.com/ruima/status/1960397673921699955, they don't seem to be exponentially rising; the average residential rate she gives is 0.542 RMB/kWh, which is US$0.076/kWh. That was for 02019. According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e..., in 02024, Chinese consumers were paying US$0.08/kWh for their electricity, so they basically haven't seen a price increase in five years. And they're paying less than half the average in the US, where solar deployment is so much less advanced.
By the way, my comment you were replying to cited 5 sources of reliable information. This comment, in reply to yours, cites two reliable sources, plus Statista, World Population Review, and two people on Twitter. Your comment disagreeing with mine cites zero sources, and unsurprisingly virtually every assertion in it is wrong. I corrected five factual errors in your four-sentence comment, and I suspect there are more. Don't you have any information to contribute? Do you just not care whether what you're saying is true or not? Do you think that insufficient ignorance is a big problem in the world, so you'd like to create additional ignorance?
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Actually, that’s what called an evidence-based conclusion. I know evidence and science have really taken a plunge in our federal government these past few months, but we can still use them on HN.
So how come "half the country" (millions of people) support and appreciate the tariff ordeal due to its positive economic impact in their personal lives? They're not Trump's friends or family.
You have the wrong evidence and conclusion.
Seeing reality as it is doesn't make it black and white or blind. The dude hocked beans out of the White House for personal profit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/trump-modi-in...
How can you possibly do more harm than the one in NK, literally starving your population?
The one in NK is doing that only to his own country. Trump is destroying the whole planet by withdrawing from the Paris agreement and then by strong-arming other countries to do the same. If we haven't already passed the tipping point Trump's actions will make sure we do, destroying all hope.
Bah, India and China are pumping out way more pollutants than the USA. If you're going to bring the USA up, bring them all up. They all need to get their act together. Europe to a lesser extent but at least they're trying.
Nobody outside of SK, NK, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Of The People's Republic of China seriously two figs about anything that happens in NK.
The country could get hit by a meteor tomorrow, and nobody else would notice.
I give two figs about it, the guy should be arrested
Also trumps a fascist and NK is communist so the logic is inconsistent.
No one cares about "fascism" or "communism"; these labels distract from the root of the problem: authoritarianism. Mind you, without excessive power and authority, neither hardcore fascists nor hardcore communists can do that much.
So NK workers own or control the means of production?
That's not communism. They are all oppressed, impoverished and dehumanised by the mechanism of the state. Like China and the Soviet union.
You can't just redefine communism to mean "bad thing" and then say "see? Communism bad!"
Communism has a real definition. NK is not communist. China is not communist either.
At this stage communism has been tried and failed so many times that it's silly to conclude that it isn't inherently evil. It's just hubris to think you could do it better yourself.
There are many bad systems that fail and cause misery and poverty. Communism is one of them but there are others.
This is a different belief.
You can believe communism is evil. You can't believe communism is evil because you just attribute everything evil to communism.
That's just bad reasoning. Like, really really bad reasoning. Like, I think most small children have higher reasoning capabilities than that.
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Please don't fulminate or post inflammatory comments about nations on HN.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
My point of view , from Europe, is that political violence is already there in the US. As well as state violence (not just on political opponents, but also on all minorities and "people who have a different opinion"). The next step is indeed a second civil war, with 21st century characteristics (hybrid war, etc...) I am not enthusiastic about the near future for the US nor for the world.
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What children are being “gang raped”? Your comment reads like extremist rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
I fully understand your disbelief but that is actually what is going on. Thousands of children abused by gangs.
If you fully understand the disbelief, you'd understand why you, being the one advancing the claim, should provide the source(s) you are using for your Bayesian priors so that, assuming those information sources are of sufficient quality, we can also have the benefit of your knowledge. Until then, it is only rational that people reject your claim.
I'm not sure what all that sophistry is about seeing as this is easily available information that anyone can find out about with literally 2 seconds of googling. Anyway heres a report from the bbc https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2r2ejlvm1o .
That’s whataboutism though
Ironically, if a civil war was going to happen it will be because Trump's overuse of the military. It is such an newbie African dictator mistake. Every time you use the military to put down civil unrest you give them an inch of your power and before you know it, they figure they don't need the regime anymore.
You will never see Putin outsourcing civilian tasks to the military.
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I'm fairly certain you've never lived in Chicago or spoken to the people in areas affected by gang violence.
You'd be wrong empirically but also wrong in how you came to a "fairly certain" conclusion with very little evidence.
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Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If those things are true they all are seen small peanuts compared to the police state that is being developed in the U.S. with masked men pulling brown people of the street without identifying themselves and without due process.
Get your priorities straight.
To quote Niemöller:
That seems extremely unlikely given the significant global economic impact of tariffs, and the comparatively microscopic effect of transgender athletic participation in the United States.
For example, when Kentucky passed their trans sports ban in 2022, there was a grand total of one (1) transgender high school athlete in the state[0].
I mean, it's almost laughable to suggest that any of those things are even near comparable to the potential long-term impact of historically unprecedented tariffs being thoughtlessly tossed around on a whim.
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trans-athlete-bans-fischer-we...
They are related in the sense that stuff like violent crime by ethnic gangs and transgender affirmation of children easily rile up people to Trump or others who will bluntly oppose it, and then you end up with poorly designed tariffs.
It was largely a failure of anti tariff other candidates to capture these other 'easy wins' needed to get to the point of implementing sane economic policy.
Haven't tariffs been paused since they've been announced?
Some of them yes, some of them no. There are now several thousand different "tax brackets" for imported items and the apparent rates on them fluctuate by the day.
Most global post offices are just suspending packages to the US because they don’t know what the price is or how to pay it.
Makes it hard to believe the administration's claims of hundreds of billions in revenue
The best data I could find* was that tariffs Jan - Jun raised 93b in revenue (or 180b / year if it were constant- unlikely but who knows). For comparison, the 2025 deficit is $1865b, so tariffs could take a bite out of the deficit, but never come close to balancing the budget.
The most positive argument I have heard is that it would be a small consumption tax that is regressive. Small because the US doesn't really import that much compared to most global economies. It's just things we fixate on like cars or steel, which actually aren't that economically important anymore. Maybe strategically? I feel like people are trying to make economic sense of an emotional / populist policy.
* https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff...
this isn't true, tariffs are assessed within the US by the receiving firm, not on the sender's side. We run a business with a foreign supply chain and our suppliers have changed nothing, we just get an extra bill to pay to the government when our inventory arrives.
This is related to the removal of 'de minimis' rule that exempts parcels under $800 to ship duty free. This has caused some European postal services to stop/delay shipping some packages to the US [0]. The Dutch postal service for instance has stopped shipping to the US [1]
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/us-tariffs-goods-services-suspens...
[1]: https://www.postnl.nl/campagnes/online-frankeren-vs/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-26/australia-post-commer...
>"Specifically, the requirement for duties and taxes to be prepaid on all shipments prior to their arrival in the US,"
It's more the public postal services with very cheap international shipping, they typically can't or won't handle import customs/tariffs and operate under the assumption that the packages aren't valuable enough. Many of them don't even have tracking.
Some have been paused, some have been raised (India for example). It seems to be pretty chaotic.
The originally announced tariff rates have been “paused” (in reality they were never implemented), but in their place has been a 10% global tariff. China already had tariffs of 25% from the 1st Trump admin, plus 20% from February, so tariffs on goods from China are currently at 55%. But the rest of the world is at 10% right now (only the UK has actually signed a trade deal).
It changes every week :)
Which is also very destructive because such instability is very bad for long-term business planning.
If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.
Why? Because policy was stable during Obama. Whatever the policy is, if it's predictable, businesses can work around that. This was a real problem during the Biden term when there was constant policy shifts.
We're seeing that now with the tariffs. The problem isn't the tariffs so much as it is the uncertainty. They change from day to day.
One might be tempted to think the administration is intentionally trying to crash the economy. No, they just have absolutely no idea what they're doing and there's a dementia patient in charge nobody can so no to.
> If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.
Hmm, it's not that I couldn't believe it was Obama, but this is like a 2nd-hand appeal to authority. I would be interested in a bit more data to see why this is.
> Why? Because policy was stable during Obama.
Now of course we can see there was a record period of near all-time high high oil prices from 2011 to 2014 which corresponds to US employment boom in the sector. Was that the Obama good times that oil and gas experts would refer to? That started to crash in 2015 though, and petroleum industry employment with it. Was that crash due to Obama policy or just global drop in oil prices behind taht?
Some might argue the high oil prices of 2011-2014 years are related to Obama's presidency, but it would probably be less about stable trade policy and more like references to the Arab Spring, peak of ISIS, capitulation to Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.
Now the 2015 oil crash is something I could talk a lot about. I'll try not to turn this into a wall of text.
In Obama's last term he faced a hostile Congress and wanted to pass some wind and solar rebates [2]. The deal he made with the Republican controlled Congress was to lift the ban on exporting crude oil in exchange for the renewable subsidies. This happened in 2015.
So why were crude oil exports banned? This happened about 40 years earlier during the OPEC oil crisis. As an aside, net crude oil exports stand at about ~3M barrels per day. Pretty much all production increases since have been for the export market. US domestic oil consumption has remained relatively stable, despite population increases.
In 2015, OPEC in general and Saudi Arabia in particular crashed the oil market by ramping up production. You can see this here [3]. Saudi Arabia in particular increased production by ~1M bpd in a short period of time. A lot of people think this was to crush the fracking industry, which was heavily in debt. I personally don't buy this explanation because as soon as the price recovers, someone else will buy their assets out of bankruptcy and you're back when you started.
I think it was punishment for lifting the crude oil export ban.
A whole bunch of oil producers and services companies did file for bankruptcy [4] and this whole incident set the stage for what later happened in 2017-2018 and 2020 where Trump basically screwed the energy sector multiple times.
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35136831
[3]: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/35226/opec-persian-gulf-regi...
[4]: https://graphics.wsj.com/oil-bankruptcies-tracker/?gaa_at=ea...
Because the cost of goods continues to fluctuate wildly due to ongoing tariff wrangling that nobody asked for or needed.
Also farmers can’t sell anything because retaliation has destroyed international demand (I’d say decimated but it’s way worse than reduction by a tenth)
I don’t know if you can factually back up your claims but I applaud your proper use of decimate. It is a rare thing. One might even say it happens less than 10% of the time.
Decimation was way worse than reduction by a tenth. It was a punishment in the Roman army where the offending unit was divided into groups of 10 and each group had to draw straws. Whoever drew the short straw must be stoned or clubbed to death by the other 9.
If you threatened me with death if I didn't cut off my feet, I wouldn't consider that "reduction by 10%" even if mathematically it might be.
Look on the bright side, it would have been much more harsh, had they worked in binary.
Hmm.. Is this my brain inference or the parent comment author' too: "Bright side of life" -> "Always look at the bright side of life" from "Monty Python's Life of Brian" -> plot was taking place during Roman times (mentioned in the GP comment)
Yep. 10 times worse.
Would you say it's half as bad as the worst-case scenario?
Could be worse, you could be stabbed.
At least it gets you out in the fresh air.
It's not proper use, it's archaic use. Do you also claim bread is meat? A cat is a deer?
I wouldn’t say archaic or historical definitions are improper, but you’re right - the primary meaning of decimate in English changed and now means to destroy the majority of. Maybe this is because decimate was always very damaging; threat of death is very serious, regardless of the numbers.
That said, I had sweet breads recently. And a cat being a deer sounds strange in English now, but deer is still the word for animal in other Germanic languages today, even if it faded in English, so it doesn’t sound completely archaic.
I split the hair where chickens were men
> farmers can’t sell anything because retaliation has destroyed international demand
Not true. At least not yet.
Q2 agricultural exports were roughly flat to Q1 [1].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B181RC1Q027SBEA
Soybean farmers are predicting a world of hurt as China continues to acquire from South America instead.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/08/20/soybean-farme...South America doesn't produce enough soy beans for them to replace America even if China bought every single ounce of soy.
When it comes to soy, America has enormous leverage and China already accepted they're negotiating from a position of weakness.
Leverage? Soybeans are the number one US food export (historically mostly to China). To date, China has purchased zero bushels this year. This is with US soy being cheaper than the competition. Maybe China cannot replace 100% of their demand today, but they are showing a united front that their import numbers will be kept as low as possible.
https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/soybeans/8-soybeans-thats-r...China may elect not to replace the whole shortfall. They may value the message it sends more.
80% of soy is destined for animal feed. While there is undoubtedly some reason why chicken and pigs have historically been fed soy meal ($/kg, nutritional profile, speed of animal growth, etc) -animal feed seems very fungible. If there is a soybean deficit, seems plausible to swap to some other abundant crop.
Those crops would need to have been planted at scale months ago, with the full supply chain build-out leading up to that beforehand. The history of agricultural supply chains demonstrates that it is not nearly as agile as laypeople assume due to a long chain of sequential dependencies.
You either have to find a way to consume what is already in the pipeline or go without. Governments are very sensitive to the food security implications because there isn’t much slack politically to “go without”.
If China has a monopsony on soy beans, then they nogociate from a position if power, because the US either sells on their terms or see the beans rot.
The worst scenario for China is inflation. They are fighting deflation so that would actually help them solve the issue.
Is that normal? It seems to me like we’d expect Q2 agricultural exports to usually be much higher than Q1.
Seasonally adjusted and annualised.
> nobody asked for
The american public asked for it loud and clear for it last november. We should respect that.
Loud and clear? Trump didn't even get half of the votes (49.8%) and almost 36% of eligible voters didn't vote, meaning that not even one third of the American public voted for this.
Popular vote does not matter to americans, otherwise they would have changed the voting system.
36% of voters said: I support every outcome of the election, no matter what.
And we are now about half a year into his term and I see some complaining, but not one single person seriously opposing him and his politics. If the things he does were really that unpopular, he would not be able to do them. To me it seems like he has the full support of the american public.
> Popular vote does not matter to americans
The question is whether and how much these policies are supported, and the popular vote is obviously relevant in this regard.
> 36% of voters said: I support every outcome of the election, no matter what
That's not really true, for all you know those voters didn't support either outcome. You would expect a "loud and clear" victory not to leave one third of people unconvinced enough to avoid voting altogether.
> but not one single person seriously opposing him and his politics
Almost four hundred lawsuits have been filed against his administration, thousands of public protest events are happening, and the tariffs themselves were just ruled illegal. What does "serious" opposition look like to you? In any case, this is certainly not what "full support" looks like.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-series/trials-of-the-t...
https://time.com/7312601/anti-trump-administration-protests-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgj7jxkq58o
> If the things he does were really that unpopular, he would not be able to do them.
What is the logic behind this?
> The question is whether and how much these policies are supported, and the popular vote is obviously relevant in this regard.
They are supported by the election. The american puplic accepted the result. Popular vote is not relevant for Trump.
> That's not really true, for all you know those voters didn't support either outcome. You would expect a "loud and clear" victory not to leave one third of people unconvinced enough to avoid voting altogether.
Maybe they had different reasons, but unfortunately thats not how not casting a vote works in a democracy. If you do not vote, you support the winner, no matter your intentions.
> Almost four hundred lawsuits have been filed against his administration
Trump has every branch of the government in his hand, law does not matter to him. Besides, he is a convicted criminal already. A few more lost lawsuits don't matter.
> Thousands of public protest events are happening
And millions of americans are not attending. Feels more like a vocal minority to me than a real movement.
> the tariffs themselves were just ruled illegal
I have not followed closely, but someday it gets to the supreme court and they will say "the president can do whatever he want", like they have said in the past.
> What does "serious" opposition look like to you?
Something that prevents Trump from executing his plans. Something that prevents Trump from just doing whatever he wants.
> time.com: "...thousands of protesters attended demonstrations on Independence Day..."
Thousands? Thats a fraction of a fraction of the american population. I am sorry, but I fail to see how that supports your point.
I will have to admit I am a little jaded when it comes to the US, but you must forgive me: when the US threatens your country with war, a lot of nuance goes out of the window. If an american clusterbomb kills me and my family tomorrow, I won't care that it has been ruled illegal by some lower court (Trump won't either).
Somebody give my man Trump a fiddle.
I'm trying to imagine Trump playing any sort of musical instrument.
something good for small hands, some kind of russian flute?
I was gonna say something gross but decided against it.
Somebody make AI replace this guy with Donald Trump pretty please: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZbfNtDCHdM>.
Needs more cheese spray on the face but otherwise the resemblance is uncanny!
Funny how there is a post-it with a password glued to the screen of the computer in the lede image, now in plain sight for thousands of readers.
Looks like there's a year at the end; might be to facilitate suckurity requirements such as yearly password rotation.
Some places do 3 months! It's amazing
PasswordAugust2025!
I keep a list of every time I change one of my work passwords with the date it would have expired, and it seems to fluctuate between 2.5 and 3.5 months with little consistency. Some of us used to have it locked so we didn't need to keep changing it, but they reenabled it some time ago and we got confirmation it was for some sort of external security requirements.
That was best practice until maybe 10 years ago. Point the people in charge of that to the NIST standards.
I hear cyber insurance companies (ransomware cover etc) still require outdated standards.
People think cyber insurance requirements are hard rules, but they aren't. For the most part, you just need to show effort as it's completely impossible to be 100% compliant with all standards. For example, if you weren't rotating passwords but had proper MFA on your accounts, you're fine. Hell they even have conflicting standards sometimes. I've been through this multiple times when I worked at an MSP. For the most part, leadership just pushes to meet those standards to cya, which makes sense, but as long as you don't demonstrate gross negligence, they'll pay out.
I think this is Ccjaas2004. I'm not 100% sure on the letters, but the year is easy to see. Hopefully, they've changed their password sometime in the past 21 years.
It's ok, comes back clean on https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords, probably a few more years of life left in it!
Ah thanks for that. I've been meaning to change my password for a while, looks like this is a strong choice then.
The image URL contains a parameter for size in pixel, and it's modifiable...
That's true. Now it is most likely Ccjaas2025.
I think you're correct. They probably use it as the password "format" and haven't updated the post-it in order to trick anyone trying to steal the password! What could go wrong?
That's CCJ who married AAS in 2004. The password is still the same. But what's the username and what's the service?
Everybody logs-in with the same username into the only app. It's a kiosk computer without a surviving vendor to support it.
Sorta how those Fox Raw livestreams on YouTube Live consistently show the inner workings of room-to-room shuffles and background whispers INSIDE the White House for the entire online world to dissect; it's definitely a security flaw but maybe not considered so by either Fox or the admin.
You'd be surprised (or probably not) how much incredibly critical infrastructure has one ancient lynchpin PC doing some weird essential thing with a post-it note password like NameOfCompanyYear! where it's clear based on the year that the password hasn't been reset in a quarter century
My guess: Ccjacs 2004
Odds are it hasn't been updated for 20+ years
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@Dang can you please delete this comment
OP might not be wrong, but let's at least follow SOP for disclosing security failures (30 days pre-disclosure)
We don't delete things unless the poster asks us to, and really I doubt this comment is creating any more risk than the picture itself on the WSJ.
Fair enough!
Spending nights figuring out which tariffs apply to which imported goods is surely a well spent time for any business owner.
Yeah, complicated, costly and always changing regulations are great for doing business... /s
Complicated, costly, and, as it turns out, illegal.
Let’s see if the Supreme Court agrees. Dear Leader must be able to do as he pleases.
I think they will. If they don't see this as gross breakage of the Constitution, then we're cooked no matter what. Clearly there is no "national emergency" like a war or economic depression, so he's breaking the law, either that or the law doesn't mean anything in a legal or common sense interpretation, just the imaginings of a tinpot orange dictator.
We’ll see what the Supreme Court says, or what happens after he shuffles the deck a few times and yells at people more. :s
The underlying issue is complete chaos and confusion caused by this situation, not just any specific actual Tariff or not.
I think this won't be the last thing up Krasnov's (well the Project 2025 lawyers anyway) sleeve, I do think the SCOTUS will shoot down the tariffs though.
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A perfect example of the simple-minded zero-sum thinking that’s going to make the world much worse the more it takes hold.
"Swimming naked," "bent... over the barrel," "supporting actors."
Do you always speak in grotesque metaphor, or are you capable of referring to concrete phenomena? Congratulations, there is a part of my mind that finds your vague idiom disconcerting. Moreso I am resigned to take your entire cadre less seriously—if such a downgrade is possible.
No that you care; I am "beyond hope!"
> In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him.
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
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No, why should they, there are many concurents out there.
But! Once the prices go up because of some taxes, they never go as low as they were before. Thats no theory, thats life.
Say good bye, to the prices you see now, you will never see them again ;-)
> Thats no theory, thats life.
It's inflation, which is caused by deficit spending.
The US didn't have inflation before 1914.
That is measurably untrue and it took me about ten seconds of searching to find it. https://www.billmeridian.com/articles-files/inflation.htm and many others. Historically I know you tend to argue pretty dishonestly but this was pretty easy to find and so either you're lying or didn't bother doing any research past reading Ayn Rand.
Also, prices spiking up from incompetent threats of tariffs and not coming down are categorically different than regular inflation. This is obvious and shouldn't need to be explained to you.
ETA:
Just realized that the source for the one I posted was pretty dubious (Bill Meridian is apparently a "financial astrologer", whatever that means), so here's a more reputable one: https://northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/the-war-of-1812/
I think you might have been a little harsh on Walter. Perhaps the answer is more of a "yes and no" depending on your point of view. It does seem like inflation/deflation kind of canceled each other out before moving off the gold standard.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-inflation-since-1775-2...
> It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the founders of the Fed as a relatively rare phenomenon associated with wars and their immediate aftermath. Figure 1 plots the US price level from 1775 (set equal to one) until 2012. In 1913 prices were only about 20 percent higher than in 1775 and around 40 percent lower than in 1813, during the War of 1812. Whatever the mandates of the Federal Reserve, it is clear that the evolution of the price level in the United States is dominated by the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 and the adoption of fiat money subsequently. One hundred years after its creation, consumer prices are about 30 times higher than what they were in 1913. This pattern, in varying orders of magnitudes, repeats itself across nearly all countries.
Not my area of expertise and no skin in the game, just wanted to point this out.
I am harsh on Walter because he tends to argue in bad faith in order to support some weird pro-business libertarian world view. He's super active on HN (as am I) so I have argued with him and there are multiple times he has said things that are outright dishonest (like once claiming that incompetent workers immediately get fired from corporations, a post I can't find quickly but is in my history somewhere, or trying to paint me as some alien-believing UFO fanboy which I am not).
So when he makes absolutist statements like "there was no inflation in the US before 1914", which is a typical springboard for libertarians to start complaining about the federal reserve and propose some idiotic Ayn Rand nonsense, I have trouble not being literal here.
The Fed is the cause of endemic inflation. Look at the chart I linked to.
By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.
> By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.
Fair enough. I tend to use Rand interchangeably for libertarian stuff.
There is nothing wrong with being a UFO fanboy - anyone that is not these days is psychotic. There have been so many leaks at this point, if you don't believe that's dangerous.
You're all waiting for Trump to claim it or something? It's already been announced.
Kind of off course for this convo, but no I do not think that recent "evidence" of UFOs is very compelling. Feel free to believe what you'd like but I do not think it's extra-terrestrials.
Even if we do some phenomena that we cannot explain as of right now, that does not imply aliens, it only implies that there's something we can't (yet) explain. A lot of the videos that were being hailed as smoking guns seemed to be a combination of camera artifacts and just optical parallax and stuff like that. It doesn't pass my metric for aliens yet.
The thing is, I would absolutely love to be wrong on this. It would be insanely cool to be part of the first humans who found extra-terrestrial life, so if anything I'm biased in favor of these things being aliens, but as of right now I am not convinced.
We’ve also been running deficits since the birth of our nation [1]. Perpetual deficits are a post-WWII thing, not post-Fed.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021115/how-long-has...
Yeah but that doesn't align at all with the "1914 Federal Reserve is Evil Boogeyman".
A lot of libertarian "bad guys" tend to be pretty reductive, or just outright lies.
Inflation started the year after the Fed was created.
See "Monetary History of the United States" by Milton Friedman.
Can you quote where Friedman says “inflation [in America] started the year after the Fed was created”?
What you may be trying to say is until about 1900 there was little secular (i.e. fundamental long-term) inflation, given price levels oscillated more than they moved [1]. But the change to steady inflation pre-dates the Fed. And the secular shift to constant inflation starts in WWII, not 1914 or 1976.
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/s...
The chart I showed did not show "steady inflation" before the Fed. The Depression is a bit of a special case, the deflation there was also caused by the Fed and their misunderstanding of how to adapt to changing conditions.
"The Federal Reserve System therefore began operations with no effectiye legislative criterion for determining the total stock of money. The discretionary judgment of a group of men was inevitably substituted for the quasi-automatic discipline of the gold Standard." pg 193
"The stock of money, which had been rising at a moderaterate through-out 1914, started to rise at an increasing rate in early 1915, rose most rapidly, as prices did, from late 1915 to mid-1917, and then resumed its rapid rise before the end of 1918, rather sooner than prices did. At its peak, in June 1920, the stock of money was roughly double its September 1915 level and more than double the level of November 1914, when the Federal Reserve Banks opened for business." pg 198
"The Reserve System was thus in an asymmetrical position. It had the power to create high-powered money and to put it in the hands of the public or the banks by rediscounting paper or by purchasing bonds or other financial assets. It could therefore exert an expansionary influence on the money stock." pg 213
"The large federal government deficits, totaling in all some $23 billion, or nearly three-quarters of total expenditures of $32 billion from April 1917 to June 1919, were financed by explicit borrowing and by money creation.30 The Federal Reserve became to all intents and purposes the bond-selling window of the Treasury, using its monetary powers almost exclusively to that end. Although no "greenbacks" were printed, the same result was achieved by more indirect methods using Federal Re serve notes and Federal Reserve deposits. At the beginning of U.S. participation in the war, Federal Reserve notes accounted for 7 per cent of high-powered money and bank deposits at Federal Reserve Banks for 14 per cent" pg 217
"The Reserve Board was aware that Bank discount rates were below current market rates throughout 1919, that this was contributing to monetary expansion, and that monetary expansion was contributing to the inflation." pg 222
I’m not seeing anything in these quotes claiming there wasn’t inflation in America before the Fed.
The Friedman quotes attributed inflation to the actions of the Fed.
As for inflation through the history of the US, see:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081346
> Friedman quotes attributed inflation to the actions of the Fed
Then this is a lie: “Inflation started the year after the Fed was created. See ‘Monetary History of the United States’ by Milton Friedman” [1].
> for inflation through the history of the US, see
I’ve already pointed out how that source lies about the data it cites [2].
I will assume you’re misunderstanding what you’re reading. But it’s too close to willful dishonesty for me to continue to engage if you’re just going to double down.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081413
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081346
There's no need for you to be nasty.
Sorry, didn’t mean to convey that. Just perhaps mild frustration.
I don’t believe you meant to speak inaccurately. But the chart clearly misquotes its source data. That was pointed out and yet we couldn’t get past it across multiple threads.
I pulled the source data and recompiled the true rates; they partly support your hypothesis (but not the chart’s). There was inflation before the Fed but, if those data are to be believed, very little of it was secular. The balance of inter- versus intragenerational stability (and how that may have changed with industrialization and computers) is a genuinely interesting question, and not one I’d have stumbled across in this context were it not for you.
Check out the graph:
https://www.visualizingeconomics.com/blog?tag=Inflation
Scroll down to "US Inflation 1790-2015".
"-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
> Check out the graph
Visualizing Economics cites this source [1]. VE seem to lie about what it says.
Measuring Worth shows 1774 CPI at 7.8; by 1912 it is 9.4 [2]. That’s a low, low inflation rate of 0.1% per year, 20% over 138 years. But it’s not zero and it’s certainly not negative.
If we take 1790 (8.86) to 1914 (9.69), MW shows 0.07% annual inflation. That is the statistic you should be pointing to.
But! Within the 1790 to 1914 era we see inflation from 1790 to 1814 (2.75% annually; prices doubled over 20 years). During the Civil War, prices doubled in just five years; inflation 1860 to 1865 was over 14% annually. (CPI inflation goes to 2% annually between 1914 and 1944, 3.7% ‘44 to ‘76, 4.2% ‘76 to ‘08 and 2.4% from ‘08 to ‘24.)
We had inflation in America before the Federal Reserve. It was lower, long term, than it has been post Fed. But the common factor to our inflation is war. To the extent there is a link in these data, and I’m saying this having not noticed this before, it’s between inflation and war.
[1] https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/uscpi/#
[2] https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/uscpi/result.php
> That’s a low, low inflation rate of 0.1% per year,
See where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
BTW, inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912? Not only are records poor, but the goods being compared are wildly different.
I.e. I don't know what the error bars are on the aggregate statistics, and neither do you. 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars. In fact, even today, 0.1% is likely within the error bars, as measuring inflation is fairly difficult, and there's always going to be noise as market prices are a chaotic system.
> where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
You quoted VE. They misquoted MW. If VE is adding error bars to MW’s data, they—one—should not. But if they do, they should show how they manipulated the data.
There is no legitimate source showing negative annual inflation between 1774 and 1912; your source’s own sole citation disagrees with its claim.
> 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars
What error bars?! They’re the same data!
Your chart on VE says it is showing data from MW. I took those same data and calculated the same number your chart claims to calculate with the same data they link to. The answer is different. And this isn’t, like, I used CAGR and they did simple growth because the sign flipped!
> inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912?
You really can’t. Not meaningfully. You’re integrating data covering the pound sterling, Continental Congress, eras with no federal currency, eras with state and wildcat currency, and a civil war to boot. You’re also trying to compare a basket of wooden teeth and suet with one holding smartphones, gasoline and antibiotics.
But you brought the data and made the claim, and while VE is lying about what their source says, the actual data at MW is actually a legitimate attempt at the problem.
You're hanging your hat on a minute difference and ignoring the elephant on the graph.
I’m saying the data the graph cites says something different from what the graph says it does. The graph is lying about what its source says.
There are many concurrents? How do you figure? There has never been as little choice and alternatives, let alone actual competition than today.
A few corporations control most of the food you eat, even less control the food you eat in restaurants. Very few media companies control the "content" you can consume and you cannot even own it, let alone sell or even trade it, and it seems everyone just pays more whether they keep raising their prices.
You own very little, are you getting happier?
Historically this would be a good bet, due to inflation:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
Not really a question of that. More so how much will prices go up
While there are industries where that might be the case (and, if and when the Trump tariffs are removed, companies will absolutely take advantage for a bit), most industries are actually pretty low-margin, due to competition. If you're a supermarket chain, say, your net profit margin is probably under 5%.
How do you come to that conclusion? It seems wildly inaccurate.
Because it's market/human psychology.
Reality is simply that industries are locking in tariff increase price expectations because they can (Wal Mart is even already increasing prices and the tariffs may not and have not yet even started impacting prices). It's just like how everyone started expecting a tip everywhere at all times at 25%, 35% rates during COVID and that not only has not disappear, it got even worse for a while before leveling off and the tip expectation is now north of 20% on average.
It's a common human behavior, a kind of ladder, the realization that "wow, I got away with all the previous increase rates, let's keep up the price increase rates since everyone has come to expect them".
Another example, car dealership premiums; they're still trying to push those and there is clearly a limited market and an unspoken agreement to keep them going across the dealerships. If people expect certain price increase rates, they have normalized those increases in their minds.
It's also why the fed has always "targeted 2% inflation" because it's a small amount that can be normalized over 12 months and you don't even notice it. But it's a steady rate that can be siphoned off the whole economy without people noticing the theft by fraud. You didn't complain about the fed stealing 2% of your wealth every single year, compounded all your life before they started stealing 5-12% for the last 5 years, did you? Sure, they can't get away with increased rates forever, lest the whole system collapse, but without someone/something forcing the hand, why should they stop. We are STILL hearing how the consumer is strong, while various revolving credit balances are increasing and people are just squandering future/other people's money, why would they care if they have to pay more, so why would sellers care not to increase prices if people are just willing and able to charge more.
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Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45079542 and marked it off topic.
As a wealthier person (income of ~1m/year, give or take), I could not more strongly support Mamdani (no 'h' in Zohran's last name afaik). I want a candidate like him in my city to vote for.
If you're still measuring wealth by income, you're probably not in the bracket that is being discussed here. $1 million per year is an extremely comfortable income, but it would take 30 years of saving that, post tax, before you hit $30 million in net worth, which is the entry point for UHNW status.
I do see your point, but it's highly unlikely that they are putting their wealth into a HISA for 30 years. There is likely 0 people who got to UHNW through saving money.
Completely agree with you. Which it why I mentioned measuring wealth by income shows a disconnect from what real wealth is.
This is assuming they have to work for the $1M income. The point of having $30M is to make $1M income without doing anything.
Totally. I'm someone who could choose to enter the capital class via purchasing rental properties or investing heavily in stocks, but I deliberately do not.
Capital class wildly different than wealthier working class. But in all honesty, bring the taxes all the way down to me at least. Anyone making a million a year could be taxed a lot more and still live comfortably. The capital class above me could afford a LOT more taxation and still live lives of unbridled luxury.
"very wealthy" is heavily understating just how ludicrously wealthy some of these people are compared to the vast majority, and it's reflected in historical numbers.
I am wondering why "very wealthy" would be so stressed by increased taxes. Don't they have ludicrous wealth, shouldn't it have almost no material impact for them?
Are there money games I am unaware of that means they are running brittle houses of cards and marginal percentage increases in taxes would topple their empires?
I just don't understand the fear or concern, but I am not ludicrously wealthy so I suppose I wouldn't.
If someone is truly strong then they have strength to spare for others. I guess I assume the same would be true of wealth, but perhaps you don't get ludicrously wealthy by being proportionally generous.
They are so ludicrously wealthy that even a very small increase in percentage points of tax ends up being a very large number, and no one likes to see a very large number of their “hard-earned” dollars get “taken away”. The marginal value of each dollar to them I don’t think is a calculation that is very accessible to our emotional human minds.
That’s fine if you accept that you can’t force the rich at gunpoint to stay, or seize their wealth upon exit.
But if they do choose to leave, or at least stop expanding their businesses, you can’t deny the rational self interest
> But if they do choose to leave, or at least stop expanding their businesses, you can’t deny the rational self interest
"If you tax the rich, they will leave" is a myth created by the rich so that you won't tax them.
In the middle of the 1900s, the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was 91%.
Nobody is going to leave over Mamdani's extremely modest proposal.
> In the middle of the 1900s, the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was 91%
You forgot to mention that only half of capital gains were subject to tax. So the highest marginal rate was 45.5%.
The maximum effective rate on long-term capital gains was 45.5% but the top marginal rate on ordinary income was 91%.
In any case, this is all a major deflection resulting from the lie that the low job creation rate is due to "the threat" of a possible future mayor rather than tariffs.
This statement is also supported by the fact that despite the relatively high taxes in NYC billionaires will jump through all loops necessary to effectively still live there just not on paper
If a nation's fortune hinges on permitting a handful of extremely rich individuals to extract wealth with impunity, wield their immense hoard to buy up major media organizations and communication platforms, use those assets to continually suppress labor and consumer protections, and fix political elections by way of SuperPACs and other dark-money slush funds... well, that isn't my idea of a robust society or economy.
We've done fine without them in the past, and we'd be better off without them now. At the end of the day, labor and its fruits are the primary origin of value in an economy, not the handful of individuals that have had the immense luck and/or dubious ethics required to capture that value for their personal gain.
This is making a lot of assumptions --
1) That we're at the threshold for taxes that the wealthy will accept. I would bet many wealthy folks feel attached to their homes as their identity, and it would take some amount to price them out. Like, clearly a billionaire would leave if the cost to stay was a 100% of their wealth, but would probably stay if it was $10 more in taxes. So there's a very nebulous line somewhere in between. I suspect we are not close to that line.
2) That wealthy people living in an area are storing their wealth or declaring that area as their home. Plenty of ways to shield wealth from local taxes, and plenty of ways to claim a place as your home without being taxed by it.
3) That having wealthy people in your community is a net positive for the community. Wealthy people tend to use a lot more resources and distort local politics for their personal gain rather than the gain of the community. Maybe we'd be better off if they weren't around, and several families moved in to take their place. Wealthy people don't ride public transit, normal folks do. Wealthy people can push city council positions to reduce transit, normal folks don't have that influence. Maybe we need more normal folks around.
4) That businesses owned by the wealthy are a net positive compared to, e.g., workers co-ops. Maybe we could be a bit more collective in our approaches and a bit less lionizing towards the wealthy person who got lucky. Maybe we need more community oriented businesses run by members of the community they live in and fewer wealthy business owners racing to the bottom.
If they want to sell off all their assets and leave, then lets see them do it. If they don't want to sell their assets, I don't see why it can't be seized if they leave.
> That’s fine
Oh good. Then we can ignore your baseless assertions / talking points / propaganda and outright [non-truths].
I heard New Zealand is nice.
It is, probably because it has a 39% tax rate on income over $180k, and no capital gains (stock sales are considered income and taxed at income tax rates).
The bayonets of the capitalists. Better lie down and take it.
The system that allows very wealthy to exist is also the reason the US has the highest class mobility among western nations.
Also, on a purely pragmatic note, capital is mobile. If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.
> If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.
This is a myth created by the rich so that you won't tax them.
It's pretty observable and part of the reason many microstates are extremely wealthy.
Also keep in mind the US is a winner here. The UK loses the most millionaires and it's had an observable impact on their economy.
Just one more follow up, the US is 27th on social mobility, behind most EU countries, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries which are consider "western"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
No, Bob is right and you are wrong.
Nah… UK’s economy is broken due to the fact we’ve never recovered from the financial crisis
It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs
Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject
You are thinking of “social mobility”, which is a term of art that doesn’t mean what people assume it means. It is essentially a zero-sum rank of your income compare to your neighbor. You can become poorer and still be “socially mobile” or much richer and not be “socially mobile”.
Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.
AFAIK the stats do show Europe passing the US in class mobility as of about 20 years ago. It is notable as Europe of course had low class mobility and the US just dominated class mobility.
AFAIK class mobility is measured by class at birth compared to adulthood (i believe as measured by net household wealth)
Economic, class, social mobility classically means ability for an individual to attain significantly more wealth than they were born with and ability to change their and their family's lifestyle. In which case it's not zero sum.
But yeah, some statistics indeed are just likelihood that the ranking order changes, or even self-reported...
It's like the definition of "middle class". Everyone thinks they're middle class. The OECD calls anyone with 75% to 200% of the average income "middle class". Classically the term means you are above the labour class but not noble.
Beware of rankings that rate perception.
Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.
This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.
A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.
Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...
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Certainly from an entrepreneurial stand point it's beneficial. On the other side, it's current descent in to an authoritarian police state is kinda hard to ignore.
> It’s not even worth arguing.
Fine, then we can safely ignore anything you write.
> HN is beyond absurd
Because not everyone agrees with you.
Hi, I live here
My priorities do not align with your postulating
Anyone who took macroeconomics knows that stratifying an economy of ~370 million people by ambition ends with the most ambitious employees working the behind-the-counter at McDonalds. None of them ever end up at the fed, or filling white-collar corporate seats, that's been an open secret since the '80s. By the sound of it, you're just regurgitating Tweets you read in 202X while VCs were insecure about China whooping their ass in natsec, AI and robotics.
Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.
The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state. It isn’t even comparable
> The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state
Mississippi has a GDP per capita of $53k.
11% of Mississippi's population has no health insurance.
Mississippi is one of the highest inequality states in the US. Its median income is $30k. It's Gini Index is 49%.
It has poor physical and social infrastructure by advanced country standards.
Spain has a GDP per capita of $35k. Its median income is $20k.
Everyone in Spain is covered with modern healthcare.
Spain has a nationwide high speed rail network. A lot of its infrastructure is top-notch compared to Mississippi and even wealthy parts of the US.
This is despite Spain having some of the highest inequality in Europe, and undoubtedly a host of other problems, including decreasing affordability for average people. Yet it's inequality is far lower than Mississippi, with a 31% Gini Index.
So perhaps GDP per capita doesn't tell the full story. Also, I'm being fair by comparing Mississippi to one of the poorer countries in Europe, not one of the middle or wealthier countries.
I know several Spaniards who emigrated to the US, including my sister-in-law. The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
Beyond "Statistics and anecdotes are different", there's probably some heavy selection bias presented in "Spaniards that had the wealth to emmigrate"
I'm Spanish. I make about 40k/yr. I wouldn't move to the US for, say, 200k.
I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.
I'll stay thanks.
Undoubtedly, but the corollary 'statistics is not reality' doesn't really hold. I'm sure people here would know many Americans who moved to Spain.
Statistics might not be ideal, but making policy decisions based on anecdotes is far, far worse.
Why does your anecdotal evidence trump math, exactly?
> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
So you reject mathematics in favor of a few cherry-picked experiences.
> I know several Spaniards who emigrated to the US,
As do I. They all seem to have moved to cosmopolitan places with advanced economies, not Mississippi. I also have friends and relatives that have migrated to Spain. Overall, there is no mass migration in either direction.
> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
A high speed rail network and universal healthcare are not statistics, they are as real as it gets.
But I definitely agree that Spain is probably not a good place if you want to make an absolute shitload of money.
"Poorer" in what aspect(s), exactly? Because not everything is about gross monetary amounts when it comes to a good life. Even the poorest of the European nations (never mind that EU !== Europe, and that by invoking Europe you're also talking about the countries with the highest QoLs in the entire world like the Scandinavians) still have superior worker protections & medical infrastructure that doesn't leave the poor in generational debt than the US, which for me both rank infinitely higher than earning more money. I'm sure the poor Mississippians wouldn't mind some of those 30+ paid vacation days my Spanish friends get in exchange for earning a bit less.
This is an incredibly naive take in trying to postulate the US as a better place to live, and genuinely makes me curious how much you’ve actually seen of EU.
Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.
Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.
And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.
You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.
Indeed.
The nation V. nation median ranking of class mobility is hardly the Nation V. {many nations} average of wealth.
I don't know how you came up with that statement. It certainly does not reflect reality unless you don't count Sweden, Germany, Canada as part of the western world.
>Individual studies have estimated absolute mobility rates for recent cohorts of roughly 50% in the US (Chetty et al. 2017), 53% in Canada (Ostrovsky 2017), 70% in Germany (Bönke, Harnack, and Luthen 2019; Stockhausen 2018), and 77% in Sweden (Liss, Korpi, and Wennberg 2019).
From https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2020/wp-2020-11-tren...
Cite your sources. That may have been true 30 years ago.
What is the incremental value of having a rich person around? Increased yacht sales?
The US used to have to class mobility. The completely disproportionate wealth of the current crop of billionaires is evidence instead that that mobility has disappeared, and that the accrual of wealth by the already wealthy is the dominant class "mobility" pattern today.
The globe can collaborate to make sure capital has nowhere to fly to. Form the USSA and get china onboard and let the USSR come back (they’re still the loyal opposition in today’s Russia) and capital will just fucking take it like they deserve to. What, you gonna go to the moon now?
> The globe can collaborate to make sure capital has nowhere to fly to
<meme>hahahaha no</meme>
There are countless places that are more than happy to accept capital with few questions asked. Including, funnily enough, the US itself.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-becomin...
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You think I’d be caught dead using a standing desk? That’s the real insult.
The fundamental question is who gets to start, control, own and grow businesses. Who makes those decisions? If it’s not private citizens, it is government functionaries. The latter has been tried many times. It can just about work, but only barely, and it has all the same problems of patronage, cronyism, monopolisation and labour abuse as capitalism but x10.
We also tried the 'let the market do whatever it wants' method and it ended up with babies being fed milk with formaldehyde in it, pharmaceuticals that were mostly opiates or ethanol, and entire industries owned by single families.
Capitalism is a morally reprehensible way to distribute resources in a society, but still better than any of the alternatives.
> but still better than any of the alternatives.
Is it though?
For many of our current societies I would say that we have failed to distribute the available resources. And even more so if we look at how we have failed distributing resources between societies and countries.
> Capitalism is a morally reprehensible way to distribute resources
Agreed!
Fantastic. And tax levy for the city goes down, and cuts are made while middle class people pick up the rest of the burden.
Notice your statement is a broad morale, and I'm presenting a consequence out here in the real world.
The math of booting wealthy people from the city doesn't play out well for the city.
This argument has been made time and time again.
It seems reasonable at first glance, but I’ve seen no proof of it. California, usually mentioned as having high taxes, still has a large percentage of the ultra-wealthy in the USA. Same with NYC. Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
> Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.
NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.
NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.
That is one of those questions where if you're asking it, I do question how serous you are in seeking out answers. It is mathematically guaranteed that an optimal rate exists, the topic has been an ongoing research question for several centuries and it is hard to avoid if you spend time arguing economics. Wikipedia points out [0] that scholars dating back to Ibn Khaldun have been working on the topic of pinpointing an optimal tax rate for maximising income.
So while I admit to not providing you with a study in this comment [1], it is pretty obvious they have been done and I don't see what there is to challenge on the topic. Obviously there is an optimal tax rate for maximising revenue, this is an area where there has been a huge amount of research done and if a municipality pushes their rates beyond that point (which will happen with some regularity) it'll see its tax take go down. There isn't much to document, anywhere with taxing authority would be feeling out limits experimentally all the time.
> Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
They moved states for tax reasons, so yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved. If notable people are starting to move then the system sounds like it is very close to the critical point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (not that it'd be total tax burden that needs is the limit, not just the slice imposed by one area).
[1] Wikipedia has a lot of sources though if you actually want to look it up.
So just to be clear: there is some undetermined optimal number, but so far no place has determined it and no place gone on the other side of it such that the ultra-wealthy left any particular area of note, causing a decrease in tax revenue. Got it. Thanks for the info!
> ...but so far no place has determined it and no place gone on the other side of it...
This is what I mean when I say I'm not sure if you're actually interested in the answer. The Wikipedia article is a pretty thorough treatment. This isn't some new or unexplored area, it is about as well trodden ground as the economists have. There isn't any need to gather more evidence to retest it yet again, the numbers are well known.
The income-maximising tax rate is between 60 and 75% and depends a bit on local conditions (probably mostly migration and language barriers). Lots of places have gone beyond it, happens all the time, and they generally lower their tax rates when someone points out they could make more money that way. You'd probably find the California tax people do studies on this sort of thing fairly regularly; not that anyone particularly cares or that I'm going to try and look it up. The real question is whether the government should even be trying to maximise the tax take.
> I'm presenting a consequence out here in the real world.
No, you're making baseless assertions / talking points / propaganda.
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I just realised for the first time in my life I’ve decided to delete my comment/reply because I’m concerned with how it’ll be used.
I will say this; different countries wield different powers at their disposal.
It’s unfair how China conducts business, but other countries can be equally exploitative.
Trump is killing freedom of speech.
I don't understand how any supporter can claim to love our country.
Weird. For the first time since 2020 I feel like I can speak freely without someone successfully destroying my career or getting me fired.
Then the US is doomed.
It is a global market. https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d...
That’s kind of the sad thing with this tariffs stuff, isn’t it? That it can actually be a sharp and effective weapon to set some things straight that badly need to be set straight, but this whole execution feels… suboptimal.
I don't understand the point of this comment. If you consider the most important target to be China, so important that it's worth a 10,000% tariff unless certain demands are met, shouldn't you be furious that the tariffs the source article describes on copper and India and Turkey are distracting from the important things?
No because it's obvious those countries don't have the leverage to negotiate. Trump hasn't even started discussing h1b with India.
So what you want is extortion, not trade. It's a worldwide version of the mafia.
Maybe we should just lay down and let the world do whatever they want. I would hate to be accused of negotiating from a position of power.
The entire post-WWII world order was deliberately designed by clever Americans who knew how to use the situation to its full advantage. Enshrining the USD as the world's reserve currency, a network of military bases around the world to protect trade lanes, a combination of propaganda and economic incentive to bring the best and brightest to work in the US, while deliberately transforming the economy from a manufacturing economy to a service and finance economy, always putting itself in a position to be able to extract rent from everyone else.
The last vestiges of this world order was the TPP. The US negotiated a trade deal that would cement its top position in the Pacific region, while curbing China's growing economy and influence.
And then Trump axed it, because he didn't understand it.
China understood perfectly what an opportunity that was for them, and they have been quietly become less and less reliant on trade with the US since.
The current US regime is now hell-bent on dismantling the remaining alliances, relationships, and trade agreements that actually kept the US on top, the ones that actually kept the US powerful.
...while baselessly claiming that the existing world order was somehow "unfair" or "a bad deal", and that whatever the hell they're doing now is restoring some kind of lost power. They clearly have no clue what the source of America's power really is.
And here you are repeating their talking points.
What do you mean, exactly, when you're saying that the US shouldn't "let the world do whatever they want" ? What specific trade policies do you think are unfavourable to the US?
Yes, Trump is destroying it. But this order was crumbling already. The reason is that the "smart" people from the past believed they could always count on being the middlemen of the world. They believed that other countries would always be happy to send their best people and products to the US so that American companies would trade their branded versions around the world for a high markup. The reality is that other countries slowly understood that they had everything they needed to start trading among themselves without the need of a middleman. And once this realization sinks in it is difficult to go back to the status quo of depending on a single country.
Chest thumping false bravado will mislead you every time.
If I go to a restaurant, wait an hour for a table, get very hungry, and then see on the menu that the restaurant has tripled prices, is the restaurant "negotiating from a position of power" ? Sure, once.
What exactly do you think happens to our power after Trump squanders it to extract one-time concessions that mostly flow into his own pockets?
Trump has all of his grifty garbage made in china. Trump uses H1Bs. None of this is to make you or anyone you know's life better.
Sorry, I'm imposing my personal tariff on this conversation. You obviously don't have enough leverage to be worth my time, you'll need to pay me $100 or accept my general boycott of Trump supporters.
The world for 50 years: "hey let's use China as a factory. We can move all of our technology and production there and make things for cheap!"
The world now: "oh wow these dirty Chinese thieves stole everything from us how did it happen?!?"
This whole situation really is a mystery... A single variable equation the globalist brain cannot comprehend
Putting aside the idea that American companies can hold their own and China doesn't pay the tariffs, it really wasn't necessary to tank the entire economy and kick off a depression to do this.
I guess they can't steal IP if we have no IP to steal, so there is that.
I kind of welcome this. Corporations panicking and being afraid to raise prices too much, and perhaps having to take a loss because they're essentially giving away product, is the LEAST that could happen to them after their naked and abusive COVID-era gouging.
EDIT: You had years of corporate stimulus and ZIRP expanding M2, but the inflation floodgates only opened after a paltry return of a small fraction of the real wage losses the middle class and lower sustained over that period? Live by the macro grift, die by the macro grift. And I wrote-in Bernie both times.
"Companies" aren't going to suffer. Their workers and vendors will, and the whole thing cascades.
Their workers and vendors only suffer if their owners and executives decide to pass the buck of 1) poor management (not being able to set prices adequately), and 2) being in the socioeconomic class with the most influence on the most recent election. That class has expanded their wealth ludicrously during the last 3 presidential administrations, while most Americans have suffered. Any hits they take now are completely deserved, and nobly so if accepted willingly, in order to spare those lower on the ladder even more pain. (I am, of course, not holding my breath.)
"The workers only suffer if the owners deliberately act against their own interest" is "the workers will suffer" with more words tacked on the end.
"The workers only suffer if the owners deliberately act against their own short-term self-interest in order to secure their workforce, their industry, and, ultimately, the economy, over the long term," is the more correct characterization, and accurately portrays the behavior as misanthropic and illogical for anyone expecting to live beyond the next handful of quarters.
Iwata took a paycut. The least our guys could do is take responsibility.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-sal...
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80 percent plus of economic activity is domestic: all its inputs are entirely unaffected by tariffs.
This is a Premier Cru Red Herring.
20% of the economy is a massive portion.
> all its inputs are entirely unaffected by tariffs.
80% of economic activity imports nothing? 80% of economic activity doesn’t involve on oil, cars/trucks, or computers?
Very very very not true.
Do you have a source on this?
This is how you know most economic theory is a total lie, if it wasn't they would just "price what people are willing to pay" and be forced to eat the loss. Is that cause copper bathtubs are a special item or are you just making up more rules after the fact to patch holes in your leaky theory.
It's because basic economic theory makes some really bad assumptions. It assumes everyone has the information they need, and sellers can instantaneously change prices in response to changes in demand or cost of production.
Neither of which is true in the real world.
I don't think you've successfully demonstrated that those assumptions are bad. They're simplifying assumptions that are necessary to have a "basic" economic theory in the first place—one with tractable and understandable mathematics that can produce an answer without immediately dumping you into partial differential equations or requiring impossibly detailed input data.
The assumptions are only bad if they prevent the simple models from being useful, and the existence of a scenario where a model's simplifying assumptions prevent it from being useful does not prove that the model is worthless.
I don't think the model is worthless. But there also going to be many real world scenarios where they aren't good enough.
It's like doing physics where you assume perfectly uniform spherical objects in a vacuum. It isn't worthless just because that isn't how the real world works, but depending on the circumstance it can also give you incorrect results, and sometimes even be way off.
> It assumes everyone has the information they need
This is incorrect. Lack of information is priced in as "risk".
This is satisfying similar to the ai response in Hyperion as (spoilers) the entire system collapses.
It's not so much that theory makes these assumptions, as that they describe the simplest economic models. You can make your models as detailed or not as you'd like, but the more work to construct/operate/understand them, the lower your likely return on that effort. It's just like how some people want simplistic games like Candy Crush, others want high investment ones like Dwarf Fortress.
> basic economic theory makes some really bad assumptions. It assumes everyone has the information they need, and sellers can instantaneously change prices in response to changes in demand or cost of production
This…is not true. What theory are you referring to?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
Its a long time known flaw in economics. Im sure there are better models but i still agree with GP, the scientific field of economics is still a joke on par with psychology.
There's nothing in this article about an assumption of perfect information or of instantaneous price changes.
Or... there is some elasticity with price and supply/demand, which falls totally within microeconomics
Economic theory makes some unsubstantiated assumptions, like consumers have information needed to make decisions, and those decisions are rational. In the real world the market is determined by external events that consumers have no way to know.
"Risk" is the term for unknown information, and is priced in.
How can they even price it if there is no model for (true instead of theoretical) risk?
Things like credit scores, which are a systematic way to evaluate risk. The higher the credit score, the lower the interest rate you get charged. It's all about the risk.
Insurance companies totally operate on evaluating and quantifying risk.
.I’m not sure about economics Our complex supply chain has created an environment where the cost of something is tied to externalities. I think not knowing the cost of the various steps of production is a problem.
Most economic theory is good, but most theory salespeople are flogging a simplistic version of it. 'Pure' price theory demands perfect market information and zero costs to enter/exit the market - that's why it's easiest to study on extremely fungible commodities.
In real world markets economics considers elasticity, arbitrage, and distribution of market information between producers, wholesalers, retailers, buyers etc. But very little of that finds its way into op-eds or blogs aimed at a non-academic audience.
> This is how you know most economic theory is a total lie, if it wasn't they would just "price what people are willing to pay" and be forced to eat the loss
... Wait, why on earth would businesses do that? "Yeah, we're in the business of buying X for a dollar and selling it for 90 cents". What economic theory are you referring to that makes that in any way plausible?
When input prices go up, output prices go up, and usually consumption falls.
> if it wasn't they would just "price what people are willing to pay" and be forced to eat the loss
Classical economic theory predicts literally the opposite. It predicts the prices will go up exactly as if the base materials became more expensive. Classical economic theory predicts that free market produces lowest possible prices and thus any tarif means price up.
Economic theory covers what happens when the cost of goods goes up for suppliers. Prices go up for consumers. But the costs haven’t stopped fluctuating.
Now that I think about it, creating confusion and uncertainty is actually a pretty effective move if you want to play protectionism. Any "known" tariff would just be paid as far as still profitable.
Don’t really buy this logic.
If you want companies to invest in your country, the tariff has to make doing so make financial sense, and for the long term.
A lot of these tariffs are going on things that would require a whole factory to be built in the USA which doesn’t currently exist at all, and has no supporting infrastructure or workforce.
Companies can’t just decide right now, “oh shit there’s a tariff. Better but it in the USA right away!”
Right, and if you're a non-American producer do you want to make massive forced investments to sell into the US market, or put less money into developing your presence in other markets that are not as hostile/unpredictable.
Probably some of the uncertainty, and the fact that these tariffs are illegal, so they wouldn't stand long
Maybe. But if your goal is to incentivize more domestic manufacturing, putting tariffs on the raw materials to do that manufacturing and build new factories is pretty counterproductive.
> if you want to play protectionism
It’s great if you want to grant yourself the power to exempt those who please or pay you.
Clutching at straws but one silver lining from the accelerationist perspective is that the global economic damage of US Tariff War 2.0. will speed up the adoption of AI / automation. Payroll is one of the most expensive, high risk and illiquid commitments to the organisational budget, so the idea of replacing it with dial up / dial down Saas subscriptions will move from 'good idea' to 'business critical'
The effect will probably be similar to Covid / Remote Work - marginal idea until an externality made it essential. Does mean sh1t tons more unemployment though, so like I said, straws being clutched
Too bad most people are on a payroll and the economy relies on those people being able to have spare money to spend.
If this is the silver lining I’d hate to see the cloud
The cloud being moving away from the "you must work to eat" economy and into the "you can work if you want nice stuff" economy. Getting there won't be fun but a lot of us would like that for our grandchildren.
I’d like to lay out an argument about why tariffs are good.
The only businesses that are derailing with tariffs issues are those that import goods to sell. The argument against tariffs is that they make goods more expensive.
Of course, this argument is true. But that’s not the end of the story.
Because prices are higher for imported goods, demand for domestically produced goods increases. This increase in demand leads to increased demand for labor, which can increase wages. Additionally, the money multiplier effect is higher when money is kept domestically vs paid to offshore parties.
Finally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that this nation can maintain its wealth without producing anything. We act as if the producers of food are fungible cogs that businesses can swap out. But I think we’ll find that management is the fungible part. Anyone can sell a quality good. Knowing how to make it is what’s important. I’m surprised that mindset doesn’t resonate more with software engineers.
Except for one little thing: countries have comparative advantage in the production of different goods and services. Boeing is great at turning aluminum and steel (low in the value chain) into jetliners (at the top of the value chain).
Because of this, Boeing gets to make thousands of jetliners and sell them all across the world and America gets to be one of very few places that can do this.
I think you'll find that steel and aluminum are a lot more fungible than jetliner factories. Why are we kneecapping what we're good at for the sake of things that China will ALWAYS be better than us at?
> Finally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that this nation can maintain its wealth without producing anything.
The total value of US exports has only ever gone up (see above).
I do get the argument for moving manufacturing expertise back onshore, I really do. But tariffs are not gonna lower the minimum wage and if manufacturing is gonna come back to the US, it'll come back in a highly automated form with a boatload of government support.
>China will ALWAYS be better than us
Comparative advantage is not innate. China was a rural country and didn't have a comparative advantage in manufacturing, they developed it and are now a powerhouse.
Nothing worth doing is easy. I don't know why Americans think that if its not easy, it's not worth doing. Americans 80 years ago would hate us for what we have become today.
In some sense of the word “manufacturing” china has several thousand years of experience in silk production. It also has - and had for much of it’s history - a stable government overseeing a high order society. The situation makes a lot more sense if we stop thinking about “the rise” of china and more “return to the historical norm”. There are a lot of other countries with cheap labour and governments desiring to industrialise that have achieved nothing like china did.
China had a comparative advantage in labor costs that they have turned into an advantage in manufacturing.
Plenty of Americans want factory jobs to exist - almost no Americans want to work them. Sure, nothing worth doing is easy, but not everything hard is a good use of time and resources.
I’m sure plenty of Americans would love to work a factory job if it meant they could provide a comfortable life for their family. Unfortunately, due to decades of anti-labor practices, that isn’t possible anymore. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to rectify the situation.
You're sure, but virtually no Americans want to work in factories when there are plenty of jobs with either less physical demands or higher pay.
This is a well-known problem with factory jobs: https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...
It's not possible because you simply cannot afford to pay manual factory workers a competitive wage AND sell the goods from the factory for competitive prices.
Factory work coming back to America would have to look like car factories do right now: highly automated, highly skilled work that takes full advantage of cheap inputs and advanced technology. It will not be helped by raising the price of inputs, deporting engineers, and defunding research.
Its not “due to decades of abti-labor practices" but “due to a century of economic progress driving higher expectations”.
Now, its true that there have, within that, been a few decades of regression in tax and other policy effecting a worsening of the distributional situation, such that labor gets a smaller share of the returns that are returned. But even with that, basically every segment of society is better off in absolute terms than when manufacturing was more dominant: working against comparative advantage and regressing on the US’s industrial mix would only reduce aggrgeate output and do nothing to improve distribution. And that's the point, because its a policy proposed by those who don't want to deal with distribution, and in fact want to take further steps to worsen it, because they expect the benefit their narrow group will receive from that will outweigh, for them, the impact of shrinking the total output.
The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem. Productivity is increasing faster than wages. That means labor is losing out on economic gains. Your argument is that labor should just accept this because “at least they’re better off than before.”
Imagine you invest $1000 in the stock market and the market is growing at 10%. But when you open your brokerage account, you see only 5% growth, and it turns out someone has been pocketing the difference. When you confront this person, they say: don’t be angry, you’re still better off than you were before. You would be right to be angry and you would be right to demand policies that force this person to give you your fair share.
> The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem.
That's literally what I said, and why the solution is to undo the things that produced that instead of undoing the things that fueled the aggregated growth while doubling down on the sources of inequality.
Then I agree. But, one of the sources of inequality is labor arbitrage by the capitalist class. Tariffs decrease the utility of that arbitrage.
Tariffs decrease that utility by decreasing the utility of all imports, even the ones that were supporting domestic employment.
It's not 1910 anymore. The US is integrated into the global economy and many if not most jobs export to a global audience. Do you want to hurt the labor arbitrage that allows us to support advanced manufacturing?
I agree with you. Reading the comments here, it’s clear that many people lack the “fighting spirit” for competition and improvement.
Honestly, I’m surprised by this, especially here on HN. This is/was a place where builders congregate. Building new things is never easy. Sometimes all you have is a belief that you can do it. It’s sad to see that go.
Boeing is going to be the first company to feel the pain of Trump’s tariffs.
The govt of India has already put one small order on hold and the word in aviation circles is to switch to Airbus as far as possible.
Military purchases now also won’t happen.
Peter Navarro in one of his rants inadvertently leaked this out on TV: his specific issue was a demand for mandatory tech transfer and manufacturing in India.
Perhaps if tariffs were implemented in a somewhat sane way, your argument might have more merit. Today, we are also tariffing the raw materials needed for domestic production, including many that have zero or insufficient local production. so it actually makes it harder and more expensive to meet demand domestically.
Plus, with the fickle and chaotic application of trumps tariffs, you’d be insane to invest in domestic production.
A cogent, long range tariff and industrial policy might accomplish something like this over a period of years. Does that describe the last 6 months?
If you're interested in a detailed discussion of what a "cogent, long range tariff and industrial policy" might actually look like, you could do worse than my new book on this subject. The website is at IndustrialPolicy.US.
Sure, a cogent policy would be ideal. But you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. America was getting their lunch eaten well before Trump. At least the tariff policy is an attempt at rectifying the situation.
> you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good
You can let bad be the enemy of both good and perfect.
Investment in manufacturing structures is down in ‘25 [1]. Manufacturing activity in the northeast is down, with “the new orders index dip[ping] into negative territory” [2].
Tariffs can reduce trade imbalances and incentivize domestic production. We’re not doing that. Our tariffs are too volatile. They tax manufacturing inputs. Tweets grasping for the straws of a Nobel prize cede prized export markets like India to China [3]. Cancelled licenses for nearly-complete projects add risk [4].
The policies of a degrowth leftist who wanted to reduce our industrial output and pivot to manufacturing would be virtually identical.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RX1Q020SBEA
[2] https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/regional-ec...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/trump-modi-in...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-orders-orsted-ha...
From your first link, investment in manufacturing is lower than in 2024 (by like 3%), but both 2024 and 2025 (Trump’s presidency) are the highest datapoints in that dataset.
Also, your second link generally paints a mixed picture, not an outright negative one:
> On balance, the firms indicated an increase in employment, and the price indexes rose further above their long-run averages. The survey’s broad indicators for future activity suggest that firms continue to expect growth over the next six months.
I think it’s misguided to interpret current data as evidence either for or against the current policies. This is something that’s going to take a decade plus to play out. Trying to use data to call winners 6 months in isn’t really possible.
Your argument ignores that Trump is using tariffs for non-economic reasons. You are arguing a weird straw man that isn't reality.
Trump has used tariffs as leverage against India for buying Russian oil, as leverage against Brazil for domestic politics he dislikes, against Mexico to pressure actions against drug cartels, and against Canada and others for recognizing a Palestinian state.
There is no sound economic logic to these schemes. The rates change as Trump likes or dislikes the praise he hears; deals are announced without signed agreements or details; rates, justified by "returning manufacturing" are changed faster than you could dig a foundation for a new factory, let alone actually make anything; industries are targeted for political reasons (like climate change denialism) and not economic reasons; deals are reached to exchange dollars for US-based manufacturing (like the china chip buying kickbacks).
The only logical consistent aspect of the tariff scheme is as unrestrained (and likely illegal) power play for Trump to get what Trump wants.
Lunch eaten by whom? Who was eating the world's richest country's lunch? The only lunch eating going on is the American rich eating the poors', something that's only accelerated under Trump. The tariffs are a tax that is most disproportionate on the poor. And they are in no way, shape or form actually intelligently designed to help them. It's just stupid madness.
It's actually pretty amazing that the current regime has managed to get people to believe that the current world order, where the US has been sitting on top for decades and managed to extract the largest piece of the growing world trade cake, somehow means that the US is being taken advantage of.
There's more than one commenter in this post that talks about "other countries walking all over the US", or claiming that capitalist free trade allowing American consumers to purchase ridiculous amounts of stuff is somehow a scam?
It's as infuriating as it is mindboggling how people can fall for it. It's completely baseless.
Their whole platform is grievance. It’s the only thing he’s good at.
The American worker has had their lunch eaten by the American capitalist class in conjunction with countries providing cheaper labor. By allowing unfettered labor arbitrage (i.e. tariff-free trade) the US has allowed their working class to be completely gutted. Combined with with unfettered illegal immigration (another Democratic Party position), the assault on the American worker is immense.
Unfettered illegal immigration is not a Democratic Party position.
Both Obama & Biden deported more illegal immigrants than Trump.
Due Process is a Democratic Party position that Republicans don't value.
Actually, considering the lack of real penalties for employers of illegal aliens, I'd say that the acceptance by both parties of white-collar crime is the real problem.
Properly prosecute rich criminals & illegal immigration will dry up real fast.
I agree more could be done in prosecuting employers. But supporting illegal immigrants absolutely was a part of the democrat platform. Sanctuary cities are not about supporting “due process.”
Also, the number of deportations does not tell the whole story. The number of illegal crossings under Biden was astronomical compared to both Obama and Trump.
> Sanctuary cities are not about supporting “due process.”
I thought it was about keeping local law enforcement out of immigration matters. Because otherwise undocumented people would be afraid to report crimes or be witnesses, and that's worse for local crime. Which is what city governments care about.
"Demand for domestic goods" includes a lot of exports. And when the foreign policy is explicitly "the US vs everyone else", it's obviously the US businesses that will have nowhere else to go as the retaliatory tariffs hit the businesses/industries that were previously strong.
How do businesses hire local labor for non-existent manufacturing facilities? Why would anyone spend the massive amounts of money over years required to make new factories when people expect that eventually sanity and rule of law will return to the White House?
Incentives work better than tariffs. Tariffs are less effective due to their uncertainty (why would I build a factory if the next admin removes the tariffs?)
The problem with incentives is that they need to be ongoing. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is to build a factory in the US if foreign competition can still bring comparable products to market for cheaper. Because then you won’t sell anything, so your ROI is zero.
The fact that X is more effective than Y is not an argument against Y if X and Y are not mutually exclusive.
the real problem is that sudden tariff changes are one of the worst tools imaginable. building large scale factories requires spending billions that will only pay off over decades. if the tariff changes every month that's one of the worst things you can do to build confidence in long term bets.
Sure, I get your point. It all comes down to the pros and cons of each on the rest of the economic system. The goal isn’t to get industry onshore at the expense of the economy. If you have a better tool, use that instead
Do you think you just have to flip a switch somewhere in buttfuck nowhere Wisconsin and all of a sudden you get a full fledged factory and the trained workers needed to compete with China on low quality/high volume products?
Even with triple digit tarrifs Chinese goods would still be cheaper.
No, I don’t think there is a switch. It will be a long and difficult process. But your argument seems to be that, just because it’s difficult, we should just give up. I don’t believe in that argument. Building things is always hard.
Both raw materials and finished goods are tariffed.
So if the idea is to be more self sustaining: we cannot.
Also, read this: https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d...
Is the argument here what we should forgo important things because they’re difficult? As far as I can tell, the difficulty will only increase as time goes on.
no. the argument is that show deliberate policy is how you fix long term systematic problems. flash grenades thrown by toddlers just make everything worse.
It is neither in our best interests to continue this, because I can't give you the level of detail this can. It would be a pale imitation of the reasons in front of you.
Basically, there is no way we "win" this economically through tariffs. Nor can we power through it by trying to throw labor at the problem, because the labor cost is cheaper everywhere else.
This is one of the most surface-level understandings of national economics that I have seen. Sure, all of that would be great, if not for two things a) these tariffs are not targeted and b) your country could produce everything that it is tariffing. What is the plan for cocoa beans? bananas? aluminum and steel?
These thinly veiled pro-trump people are much too common the internet and I'm getting tired of it.
The US makes both aluminum and steel FYI. I don’t think banana tariffs are going to make a huge difference either way.
They sure do, but not enough to be self sustaining, and tariffs aren't going to magically produce more aluminum and steel. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47294. Canadian aluminum is critical to the US supply.
Bananas may not matter (to you), but coffee certainly will.
How about direct orders from retailers in foreign countries of products that aren’t made domestically (and are so specialized and small market in the US that there’s no world where they manufacture here)? I’ve already been burned on specialty products just suspending shipping here due to tariff uncertainty in addition to the various postal services suspending to the US, like JP Post.
American companies will move manufacturing offshore long before they’ll open factories in the U.S. The economics of using domestic labor for cheap goods don’t add up.
Will? They did a long time ago!
How does this argument apply to a good like coffee? We drink a lot of coffee, and it makes us more productive, but we produce very little of it. Maybe we could increase coffee production in Hawaii, but since we can use the land and the labor for more high-value purposes, it would cost a lot more than importing it from Brazil or Colombia. So when we slap a 50% tariff on Brazil, the average American ends up consuming less of something that they enjoy and find valuable, or paying more to consume the same amount. Maybe some land owners and agricultural workers in Hawaii benefit. Doesn't seem like a worthwhile trade-off.
I think there are some categories of goods where protectionism makes sense for national security reasons, but for most goods, I don't really see the value of propping up less productive domestic production and causing increased prices for consumers. Do we need to make underwear in America? Or toys?
And of course tariffs are not one-sided, so retaliatory tariffs hurt the domestic industries where our exports are competitive, which tend to be high-value.
They also grow coffee in Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, these few small islands have much less area available for coffee growing than Brazil. And coffee is grown in many other countries than Brazil, all of which are under Trump's trade assault. There is no way to substitute US-grown coffee for foreign-grown coffee.
Mercantilism is evil.
This would make sense if there were a single labor market. There isn’t, so this simply increases prices (even for domestic goods, as raw materials are frequently imported).
There is no meaningful path to restoring much of the US’s lost manufacturing capacity. The rent is too damn high, and the cost of goods is rising quickly as well. Labor is expensive and becoming moreso daily. Manufacturing in the US can never compete with SE asia even with 50% tariffs due to the gigantic disparity in the cost of labor.
It’s not going to increase wages, it may even result in even more offshoring due to the increases in cost for raw materials.
Low labor costs are not why goods are produced in China. That viewpoint is outdated. Goods are produced in China because they have the most capacity and expertise. Don’t believe me. Believe Tim Cook: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2wacXUrONUY
https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d...
Oh, that too. China is the best place to manufacture most precision goods today, period, independent of labor costs.
But even if you could wave a magic wand and put the USA on equal footing in terms of skills and experience and capability, it would still cost several times more to make the same goods in the USA due to the labor costs (and labor-adjacent overhead costs like workplace safety).
Both would need to be solved, and I think that solving either one alone is already basically impossible on any short- or medium-term timescale. A tiny bandaid like tariffs isn’t going to move the needle.
He’s giving that speech in China. It’s impossible to know if he’s glazing or not. Either way, I would want to hear him commit to building those factories in the US if education was not a factor. I suspect real estate costs, unions, OSHA, and US wages are bigger factors than he’s letting on. Still, I’m not going to fault the man for complimenting China while speaking to a Chinese audience.
Apple had a lot of supply chain issues when trying to manufacture in the US. E.g. they failed to procure enough screws: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...
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