This situation feels dumb. I feel like I am watching idiots cheer on someone doing parkor and that person getting his teeth smashed on a wall. Like, what is the point?
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And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actually take effect or be rolled back soon. So much cost that could have been avoided!
I don't think anyone is cheering. At least most of the people cheering are starting to realize it's actually their face planting into the cement.
- H. L. Mencken
For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good.
The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah.
I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal. Using tariffs where imbalances exist, especially when countries arbitrarily lock your goods out of their markets, is a tool for fixing this.
One reason the US is so fucked up for the lower and middle classes is our global reserve currency and how it provides increasing pressure on the dollar and slowly deindustrializes our society. This has been pushing us towards ever more radical politics
Anyone who spend 30 seconds thinking would understand that spinning up the logistics to collect hundreds of millions if not billions of payments would take some real doing. Instead, we're gifted mr "it's obvious and easy".
The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive.
Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.
Tariffs aren't even justified, as they're anti-free-market, anti-capitalistic, and the government provides no extra services. It's equivalent to an illegal federal sales tax. If anything, the government has been cutting major services.
The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect.
Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on.
It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase.
It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).
I get to hear my Rep ask questions. There is a Congressional research office that acts as a kind of neutral arbiter of truth allowing for evidenced based instructions. Then, after weeks or months, a consensus builds and Congress passes a law and tells the President what to do (hence Congress=Article ONE -> two).
Now, I get to watch a single person dictating tax rates and dumb twitter threads doing a horrific job replacing what I described above.
I could debate you on the merits of your comment, but my real point is that before you wreck the lives of millions of people, you should make sure most people are onboard with all the consequences (1st order and 2nd order effects).
How we redirect money to the medical system is so completely insane it must be the #1 place politicians get their graft from. It’s just so insane
Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.
A prior historical US example would be FDR, who my teachers growing up simply adored, who strong armed many aggressive executive policies through and radically reshaped America for a century.
Same argument. If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US. It's the same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center.
Setting aside judgment of the tariff policy and the chaotic implementation, it does make sense to make them blanket actions. Much of the byzantine nature of our existing supply chains is due to gaming of international tariff policy.
Tariffs are happening because it's an idea he came up with 40 years ago when he was in his prime and it stuck to him.
And no one is doing anything to stop the tariffs, despite everyone knowing better, because the people in power can't tell him "no", because that would hurt his ego. You see what he does to people who hurt his ego? They get mocked on social media, deported to a foreign gulag, they and/or their spouse gets fired, their company gets investigated or loses grants, or their house gets raided by the FBI.
So everyone has to go along with it no matter how dumb it is.
Actually the thirteenth amendment explicitely allows slavery to exist in a case a whole bunch of people (maybe even yourself) think is super useful.
The positive thing about having a king is that there was only one head to cut when things got out of hand.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887634
I’m no monarchist, but it’s about time to have a serious discussion about political philosophy instead of hiding behind the “Western representative democracy is the best we can do” cliché.
No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is.
> same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center
Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
Voters are bound to a make serious mistake time to time, and make conclusions from the outcome. This negative feedback is vital, as long as it's not fatal. (That latter seems to be needing serious attention lately.)
I didn't say "overnight". But if you don't think it would happen, you haven't been paying attention: it has been happening for decades. It's not a crazy thing to consider when establishing a tariff policy.
> Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
Flinging names ("lazy", "superficial") is not an argument. You've obviously decided that these actions are stupid -- maybe they are! [1] -- and nobody is going to convince you otherwise, but I just gave you a plausible reason that you'd choose to do it this way.
[1] I don't personally like these policies, but I'm willing to admit when something I don't like as a whole makes sense in part.
(One can also make some interesting arguments around the notion of the draft).
But when previous administrations did this, they (usually, as far as I know) consulted with domain experts on predictable consequences and set timelines to factor that in. This administration seems to have "effective immediately" as the only timeframe it's aware of.
Do you mean balanced trade as a whole, so it would be OK to have deficits or surpluses with individual countries as long as the total surpluses match the total deficits? Or do you mean trade with each individual country should be balanced?
You're blaming the wrong economist. Keynes believed that trade deficits are a big problem and tariffs are an effective policy to remediate them.
Notice the date -- 2016. This has been brewing for a long time, and I will never forgive / forget that the people who recognized it and called it out early [1] were mocked and ridiculed to no end. They were shunned in their professions, called alarmists, and liars. But they were right the whole time, they were just ahead of the curve. If we had just listened to them, this could have all been avoided.
[1] https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... (also from 2016, as far as I know the first person to make the connection between Trump's narcissism and his inevitable attempt to become a dictator. She predicted January 6 five years before it happened just by pattern matching his personality disorder to dictators of the past).
Tariffs artificially increase costs of goods with another country. That should incentivize purchasing the goods from other countries, with the cheapest being our own. Of course we have very high labor costs, and lack a huge supply chain, and on and on. But China only 50 years ago had very little of the same, and America systematically de-industrialized, teaching other countries, moving the kit, and so on, until we lost the ability to make things at scale cheaply ourselves. But the same thing can happen in reverse, there is nothing inherently impossible about having Americans build and run factories, with the benefit of robots and AI and all the latest tools.
Yes, but there's an alternative 'significant process' which is to simply have a political party capture the body which interprets the constitution, and then an elite group of powerful insiders captures the political party, and then you're just an oligopoly but with additional steps.
Certainly not impossible though.
The USA today will probably (and hopefully) not be considered a democracy by some future standard. Disqualifications may include:
* limited suffrage,
* limited or unequal access to health care and education for a significant portion of the population,
* convoluted voting system where certain demographics have little to no chance to pursue public office,
* large constituencies,
* non-state territories/districts with little to no representation at the national level,
* unincorporated populated areas, with little to no representation at the local level,
* a lack of clear separation of power between the different democratic institution,
* failure to enact popular policies,
* police violence,
* the death penalty,
* a large wealth gap,
* a lack of consumer protection,
* a lack of worker rights,
* failure to prosecute the rich and powerful for their crimes,
* a large nuclear armed military which constantly engages in imperialist actions,
* failure to respect the sovereignty of other states,
* etc.
I think describing this system as a Democratic Republic offers no insight into whether it is democratic or not (or how democratic it is on this spectrum). Republic just means that there is a president which holds some the executive power.
There is far more insight into calling the USA a capitalistic aristocracy, a two party state, a militaristic imperial superpower, a flawed, unequal, and underrepresented democracy, a police state, etc.
Suppose for example the US needs to buy some natural resource from country X, which the US uses to build something that it sells to country Y at a very large profit. Suppose that the US doesn't export anything that country X needs or wants.
Balancing trade with X would mean cutting back on importing that natural resource, which would cut back on how much the US can build to sell to Y.
There will almost certainly also be loops in the graph of imports and exports. Things like A exports to B exports to C exports to A, with A, B, and C all having net balanced trade, but with each have a trade surplus with one of the others and a trade deficit with one.
If they all tried to force balanced trade with tariffs they just all end up paying more with no actual change in trade except possibly a reduction all around in the volume of trade.
If I post something from Denmark to Canada, they want to know the origin of the goods. If it's China, the China tariffs (if any) apply rather than the Denmark/EU ones.
If the declaration is incorrect, the goods can be siezed or returned.
Penguin Island is a nature preserve (the whole thing), no one is building anything.
Exporters in country A (with high tariffs on exports to USA) ship partially completed products to country B (with no/lower tariffs to USA), and then do some manufacturing step. Country B then exports completed products to USA.
China was doing this extensively via Mexico under the USMCA [2]. It's not a matter of debate.
[1] https://www.trade.gov/rules-origin-substantial-transformatio...
Just like how we don’t view pre-civil rights USA as democratic by modern standards. For example, we would never consider a country with legalized slavery to be democratic today. Similarly a future concept of democracy is unlikely to consider a country which practices the death penalty to be democratic by that hypothetical future standard.
This twisting of definitions is the same thing happening to "racist". Some people only consider what was previously called "systemic racism" to be the singular definition of "racism" and pretend the old definition does not exist.
In the 1970s people were debating whether Apartheid South Africa was democratic or not (it obviously wasn’t; not even by the standards of the time) and today people are debating whether Israel is a democracy (again; it obviously isn’t) but if we apply the standards of the 1940s to both Apartheid South Africa, and today’s Israel, they would both be considered democratic.
And just to clarify, the concept of racism is equally evolving. Much of what we consider racist today would not have been considered racist in the 1980s. The (then considered non-racist) behavior of the 1980s was equally harmful as the same behavior today. But humanity has simply learned, and updated the concept of racism to include this behavior. This is the nature of knowledge and the human experience, we learn more things, and adjust our concepts to fit with our ever increasing knowledge.