Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

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 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.

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 don't see any indication that either republicans or democrats intend to reindustrialize america

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.

Agreed. This is hermeneutics for Trump's self enriching or just plain dumb actions.

Reindustrializing America requires people that are actually willing to work in a factory.

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?

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.

Most people don't work in tech. IIRC the most common jobs are retail, food service, healthcare, and education.

There won't be any factories since all the capital will be overseas.

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.

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.

So you think going backwards and becoming a developing nation is a good thing?

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?

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

What do you think happens when all the “developing” nations develop and refuse to get paid peanuts to make your phones?

China is the most capitalist country in the world.

Biden's major bills were very much indications of that ... even more so for the version before Manchin took a hatchet to it.

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...

It depends on which definition of the word is being used. For the informal one, "very foolish or stupid", it's literally true.

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

Maybe Osho was right

It's not achievable because a disappointingly large chunk of your population believes this about "the other guys"

Pay them a decent wage and they will.

The Vulcans come visit Earth and the Federation gets formed. How the heck should I know?

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.

And of the more communist ones

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.

But why compete on factories if that isn’t competitive with foreign factories?

I doubt explaining economic basics to an administration that seems incapable of understanding what a value-added tax is will be very fruitful

Because the immediate profits of capitalists shouldn't be the sole dictator of our economic activities and policies.

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

that requires giving advantage to such people - and stripping advantages from the rest

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.

Even that's not enough, because the tariffs are hitting raw goods as well as finished products!

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.

That's how you become a poor country. Every country that closed itself off to the rest of the world becomes poor.

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?

> 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.

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.

How many of them have MAGA-style slogans though? /s

So it is a tyranny of the majority? That's not the vibe I get from China at all.

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

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.

It's not achievable because you have something like 5.3 people in the middle wtfing in all directions.

> 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.

China has a demographic time-bomb about to go off in the next decade or two. We'll see if they can survive it.

I wouldn't have said that either, no. What vibes do you get?

The fragility comes from a system vulnerability that nobody expected both the president and the congress to become nihilistic.

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.

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.

>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.

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

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.

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.

Can't edit but also just wanted to add this page of Marxist theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...

You don't have to close yourself off to the world to foster local industry.

They were making soft-power gains before that maniac we elected showed up. Now our now former allies are leaning on their shoulder.

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.

What is a dictatorship if not what you just described?

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.

Imagine how much can China get from cancelling USAID and replacing it with Chinese version!

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.

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.

It already did, labor force shrunk for the first time a few years ago.

This is what happens in imperfect systems. The leadership neglected the huge PR disaster illegal immigration was having.

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.

Leader for life choosing winners is max capitalism.

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.

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.

>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".

The President of the USA is the commander in chief. The military is loyal to the Commander in Chief until the President changes. What happens when the President never changes. If you want to say “they are actually loyal to the constitution”, if that were the case, they would have mutinied a while ago.

You missed the point.

The point of Hockey is to score the most points, not win the most fights. If fact, you are penalized for fighting. The more violent team often loses the game.

The point of MMA is to win the fight by using violence.

The people who watch this metaphorical hockey game for the violence have a 4 letter acronym that they label themselves with.

I'm not talking about the USA, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say in context of what I am talking about.

That China is a society that strives to control the lives of its subjects in all imaginable ways. It's a totalitarian one-party-dictatorship.