This feels like an LSAT find the flawed reasoning question “unions don’t like NAFTA —> unions represent the working class —> free trade is bad for the working class,”
Correct answer is C: Unions don't always represent the working clas!
Unions represent a slice of the working class and that slice of the working class was very specifically threatened by automakers moving some assembly plants to Mexico, but that slice of the working class was also threatened by automakers moving plants to Alabama.
If they only represent a portion of the working class, and that portion is not "representative" - which, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue it is - then to say they "represent the working class" is misleading, at best. (Not sure if you disagree with that.)
“Losing weight with healthy eating and exercise is a good idea; losing weight by getting cholera is not.” Matt as always an expert in pointing out true things that are true.
How do you define working class nowadays? The term conjures images of factory and manual-labor jobs (like longshoreman), but most unions represent people in broadly-defined service jobs which comprise ~80% of the workforce. I can’t think of one area of the service sector that will be helped by Trump tariffs. (i.e. point #5, more or less)
Is an argument being made that some or many of these people would move to better jobs in this newly rejuvenated manufacturing sector? The number of those jobs has got to be relatively small, especially if one’s assuming they’d be well-paid. Considering most would want to locate in non-union states, zero guarantees there. I dunno
Man, it's such a loaded term. I think the best way to slice it when you're talking politics is by education attainment. Because really, when Dems complain about losing the working class, they're complaining about losing non-college educated voters.
Not professional, managerial, or ownership is probably a good set of criteria to start with. But if we want to talk about class, then, in America, you begin to get into mannerisms and customs, because the owner of a small business is not a worker in the "worker/manager/owner" scheme, but could very will be working class.
Non-office jobs. Construction, agriculture, factories sure, but also auto repair, trades, retail and warehouse, logistics/transportation/maritime, cleaning services, health aids (home and institutional), public safety and enlisted military.
This is a great question. I'd be curious as to what most Americans think, and I'd be curious if this is moldable. Part of the issue with trying to implement pro-union policies is that many Americans have never been in a union and view this as help going to someone else. Is pro-working class policy the same?
Hard disagree on the solution. The question assumes unions represent the working class. The poor reasoning would be then to assume the unions dislike of NAFTA means free trade is bad for the working class. No facts are presented for that conclusion.
Let’s take that comment further: Why would the working class have a single point of view on anything? Seems like Doordash workers have their own particular issues distinct from, say, steel workers.
One could say “solidarity” and in a country like France, that is still a thing - but perhaps this is because the government in France is a single source for most benefits.
I think what I find concerning is that the tariff plan is so breathtakingly insane, we're leaving the land of 'normal if corrupt politics' and entering..... something else. I can at least understand suboptimal, protectionist laws that benefit noisy domestic groups (the Jones Act, tariffs on pickup trucks, etc.) I can at least understand blatant corruption (Trump memecoins. Or, going back further in time, George H.W. Bush pardoning his co-conspirators in Iran Contra).
When we start to do random policies that hurt the whole economy and have very very few domestic backers, however- this seems like the direct road to something more like Maoism. We're leaving a 'personality cult' and entering something that I would just call a cult. It's been a long time since I took my sociology of fascism class, but what I remember is that the difference between 'regular' conservatism and fascism is that the former wants to conserve the existing power arrangements- and the latter wants to dramatically re-order society. Again, Maoism. Cheerful Tuesday morning posting!
Indeed, the best argument that there's nothing to worry about is he is very old and unhealthy and none of his followers have his charisma. If Trump were 20 years younger, outright dictatorship would be a virtual certainty.
Oh, sure - the man born in Queens in June of 1946, his body and his consciousness and his memories. will die, almost certainly within the next 20 years.
But AI Trump doesn't have to die. You could have a guy in a tacky blue suit decomposing six feet under Bedminister Golf Club and still have his image go out on TV and order his boundlessly devoted supporters to do "his" bidding.
And who in the cult is going to question "him"? 110 and going strong? Sure, why not? He's got RFK's health secrets!
Ehh... Even now he's going to probably get blocked by the courts, and again, his hardcore base is 35-40% of the population, not a majority. Enough to be a majority of the party that wins half the time, but no more than that.
I am not going to keep arguing with the everything will be okay and there's nothing to worry about crowd. You have been thoroughly discredited at every turn and it's only two months in. If you can't update on new information then you're not the intelligent above the fray rational entity you think you are.
What? That is a wild mischaracterization of what I just said. All I said is that I don't think he would successfully become a dictator. That's a far cry from "there's nothing to worry about."
(In fact I said I was going to save it so as to come back and reevaluate it later.)
Out of six predictions, I'd give you 1.5 *so far* - pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters and half a point for the migrants being rounded up (and I'm being generous - the courts at least seem to be putting the brakes on that). Do you still agree with all of these?
Haha. Those were my predictions for bad things that could happen over the course of 4 years! I was extremely pessimistic and feel as if I was wrong on the optimistic side. I would go much darker now.
- But yes, I absolutely believe Trump will imprison political enemies. He says he will, why wouldn't we believe him?
- Trump has wanted to withdraw from NATO since his first term. He says he will. Why wouldn't we believe him?
I would say at least 4/6 are bet-your-life certainties. Political enemies might be subjective depending on who he imprisons and what the charges are. And there will definitely shenanigans around elections in 2026 and 2028, but what that'll constitute exactly might be open to some interpretation.
How do you guys even get to 35%. There's about 340million people here, and almost 100 million are kids. Trump himself had about 77 million votes in 2024. So that's 77/340 = 23%. I very much doubt that ALL of those 77 million are hard core cult types. So his true maga base isn't above 20% of people. 77/287 = 27% if you exclude kids. Am I missing something?
One problem is that we septugenarians are well aware of our mortality. Trump knows that he doesn't have to live through the long term consequences of his actions: he can just have "fun" now.
Vance seems to agree with him on the America First stuff, though, and I see absolutely zero reason to discount JD's chances of winning the presidential election in 2028. I also worry the coming recession will be in the rear view mirror by 2028, which sets up (yet another!) challenging cycle for Democrats. Sigh.
(Yeah, I know: not much sense in worrying about things several years away, especially things I don't control. But that's the way I roll these days. It's hard to keep one's chin up. Grim times for sure.)
I have never seen a doorstop inspire loathing and visceral revulsion before, but then again I have never seen a doorstop wear heavy mascara before, either.
And at least when I find a doorstop wedged into couch cushions, it's like, furniture on furniture action, I don't judge.
That's your mental model of how US presidential elections work? Not mine. I've become more of a "structural factors" guy, not less. Last November really drove that home for me.
The thing is, until there's a change to the current paradigm, the Republican POTUS nominee heads into the general election with, what, an absolute guarantee of a minimum 47-48% of the two party vote? (Same as the Democratic nominee).
If we're in a strong recovery in 2028, the Republican nominee will be at least a modest favorite would be my guess.
They can just steal the election, because liberals have collectively decided to never be suspicious of anything as an overreaction to decades of ridiculous, unsubstantiated and implausible right-wing allegations. I don't think people realize how much they could do in plain sight and have the corporate media scold anyone who questions it for a second.
(And I swear to G-d, if I read the words "general strike" my eyes will roll so hard they fall out of my head and roll down the hallway and stairs, out the entrance of my apartment building, and into the street where they get run over by a city bus.)
He wouldn't weild the cult that Trump has. He has better political skills than I initially gave him credit for, but he hasn't had to implement his own ideas yet, he's just batting cleanup for Trump. Nobody really cares about his sort of post-liberal project. There are some aspects of it that are popular, but the whole thing together isn't all that popular offline. He could win an election maybe if the economic circumstances are right and he leans in to his more normie persona that we saw at the debate. But if he's just trying to win @basedtradwhatever1488 he's not going to get anywhere.
I mean I share your view. To be clear: they had a real shot at a Putin-style democratic coup. They're just too inept, and their leader is nuts.
But that doesn't mean I'm cheering. The damage they've done is permanent. And the more important question is: do they just come back every 4-8 years and take another bite at the apple? Is there any future to America as a nation if our politics is that unstable? (And more to the point, eventually they'll find someone more competent.)
Even if Trump's withdrawal from the scene results in the loss of MAGA (although I'm afraid that Trump will destroy our electoral infrastructure so that his authoritarian/oligarch successors will continue) I would still like to see some people go to jail as a detriment for future violators and as a new set of judicial precedents.
Speaking of jail, I wish we had laws and regulations that can address the **intentional emotional abuse of a group of people**. It's not only immigrants but also federal workers. I see this as a precursor to outright violent and economic oppression of a group of people. However it's not being discussed much philosophically or sociologically beyond complaints of the "cruelty" of it all. I want it to be prosecutable as something like a war crime.
The long term concern is this serves as a moment for other countries to reevaluate who they do business with.
It would be insane if a company intentionally created a strategy to piss their customers and suppliers off and creating a moment for them to create new relationships with other companies.
I just don’t see how we ever fully recover from this idiocy.
To be fair to Trump, Navarro and others, mercantilism, while long discredited as crank economics, is a faith adhered to by millions of people. They think "money leaving the country" is ipso facto bad, and weakening. We've never had a president as stupid on matters of public policy as Trump is, I think, but this particular stupidity is shared by vast numbers of humans, plenty of them American (and more than a few of them who serve in Congress). It's not some esoteric belief system that requires reference to a Marxist totalitarian.
And the willingness to oppose Chairman Trump even among those who know he's bonkers need not be attributed to a cult, but by simple fear of job loss (primary challenges) and threats of violence.
BTW, one reason we have to have an independent Federal Reserve is the public basically doesn't understand monetary policy (most people are either wildly too tight-- "things should cost the same as they did when I was a kid", "the dollar value must always be strong"; or wildly too loose-- "the government can print as much money as it wants to and pay for anything we need").
It's really hard for the public to understand orthodox economics. It's especially hard now with the Internet and the proliferation of crank economics (Austrians, MMT, goldbugs, etc.).
This is what I was getting at yesterday, that when there’s no clear benefit to him it’s actually scarier. Someone compared it to Lysenkoism and I think that’s apt.
In Lysenkoism the ten points are then redistributed to the other three schools and the Head Boy of Gryffindor is sentenced as an Enemy of the People to ten years of hard labor planting orange trees above the Arctic Circle.
One guy governed a bit below mediocrity and probably should have quit earlier, but actually delegated a lot of the running of the country to people who were mostly competent, even if you disagreed with their priorities and beliefs.
The other is a buffoon who surrounds himself with sycophants and is literally destroying the economy and making world war three more likely with his disastrous foreign policy. As in, this is a complete disaster even if you happen to want the same outcomes that the moron wants.
If you think these are the same, you just are not arguing in good faith.
I agree it is whataboutism. As for sycophants, I think they are tied. Otherwise, how could Biden have lasted so long when “less than mediocre” is a generous assessment. As for policies, it’s obvious from electoral results that a strong majority believed that a weird Trump was less a risk than continuation of Biden via Harris, who had proven herself a non-entity. I place Trump’s election squarely on the Democratic Party whose “mostly competent” agents bowed down to the nuts on the fringes, and worked hard to limit freedom of speech in order to advance their agendas.
I dislike Trump. That doesn’t mean that I have respect for Biden and the Democratic Party.
If you really think that “strong majority” wanted any of this policy madness, I guess we’re done arguing. I think instead that they just all voted Trump as an expression of rage against the status quo that they did not like. So they fucked around, and now they are finding out that cutting off your nose to spite your face doesn’t really work.
I think it’s disgraceful that the republicans couldn’t get rid of Trump on 2020. I’d have not been happy to see the inevitable landslide republican victory in 2024, but at least I’d not be living this nightmare own goal of having my country destroyed. I’d love to be arguing about mundane policy differences of opinion right now.
Where, anywhere, in my reply did I indicate any support for Trump’s policies or that those who voted for him wanted them? I suggest that terms such as “moron” are not elements in reasoned debate. I possibly agree with much of what you hold, but I don’t think it reasonable to hold republicans disgraceful for recognizing the democrat’s detachment from core American values. Personally, I supported Haley who, to me, sounded saner than the rest. And I despise Trump.
I don't think the sycophancy level is remotely similar. The evidence is in how they have responded to crises.
In Biden's case, things were going along reasonably well. He had a team whose vision closely aligned with his own, and -- very importantly! -- the chunks of each day during which he was lucid and energetic were large enough for them to get what course corrections they needed from him. They didn't need much, not only because they were aligned but also because he was consistent and reasonable. The fact that their time with the boss was gradually decreasing certainly didn't go unnoticed, but boiling frogs and all that, didn't raise any clanging alarm bells.
Until a crisis arrived. As it happens, that crisis wasn't a major threat to the country, it was a political crisis created by the debate. It's worth noting that the timing of that debate indicates that at least some people within his circle did see the problem and acted to highlight it so everyone else had to take it seriously.
The political crisis came and highlighted Biden's inability to be available for real crises and to campaign. There was some resistance to accepting it, but it didn't take that much for them all to accept and to turn on him. They remained superficially devoted to him... but they gave him the boot.
Now look at how Trump's people have responded to a real crisis, in addition to his random policy swings. Do you really think Biden's people wouldn't be sounding alarms if Biden were cratering the market while giving mutually contradictory reasons?
Hollywood has given us two views of what can happen when a non-politician/non-expert becomes president. Most people think it'll be #1. They are discovering that #2 is the truth.
#1. The "Dave" model. If we just put a regular guy into the presidency, he'll do common sense things that the politicians are too chicken/stupid/corrupt to do and life will get better.
#2. The "Homer" model. Homer's long-lost automotive CEO brother decides that Homer understands what typical Americans want, so he lets Homer design their next model. Homer picks a bunch of stupid ideas, stacks them all up, and ends up with something so terrible it bankrupts the company.
Good point, except we didn't put a regular guy into the White House, we picked a spoiled, silver spoon, narcissistic grifter, one who isn't a politician or an expert because he's incapable of being those things.
Homer would be better! He's also incapable of being a politician or an expert, but he's more of a regular guy. He'd do showy, dumb things but wouldn't dismantle the federal government or deliberately trash the economy.
Homer is negligent, Trump is malicious. It's an important distinction. He's an evil incompetent.
But, how would Trump's power and effectiveness change if the "middle" of the country -- the persuadable Trump supporters, swing voters, and infrequent voters -- saw him as an evil genius versus as an incompetent moron? His power comes from the former: "yes, he creates chaos, but he's a business genius who will make my life better." If people saw him as incompetent, his power would wane.
The scale and brazenness are very different. And of the two differences, I think it's the brazenness that matters the most. Quiet corruption coupled with efforts to keep others from being corrupt doesn't encourage more corruption. Open corruption coupled with dismantling of anti-corruption guardrails tells everyone "This is fine, get on board".
And my above characterization of the pre-Trump status quo actually overstates the case, I think. I think in most cases of pre-Trump corruption the actors were at least able to convince themselves that what they were doing wasn't bad for the country. Being able to convince your own conscience that what you're doing is okay even though corruption is bad is a significant guardrail, as opposed to not needing to because people from the top tell you that's how it's supposed to be done.
You are entering... another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of erratic, incoherent economic policy shifts, ego fragility, and resentment. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Trump Zone!
I mean yes, it’s been obvious all along that they want to dramatically reorder society if you listen closely to all the tech bros who want to use AI to remove the need for human labor. It would be great if we didn’t have so many dipshits on the left who agree that would be a good thing (because muh leisure time, or whatever.)
I think a lot of the tariff analysis, including Matt's here, underconsiders what I think is the most likely reason Trump is so fixed on tariffs: He literally thinks that it's a consequence free tax on another country
"Trump cannot understand any technical details" is batting close to 1.000 as an explanatory framework
If you look back at 80s anxieties about Japan, it’s not just that we’re passing up on a free lunch by not taxing them harder.
It’s also that persistent trade deficits cashed out in Japan steadily buying up more of America. More of our real estate, more of our corporations, bit by bit, on a trajectory that looked like eventually they’ll own everything and we’ll all just work for and rent from them.
I assume that Trump feels similarly about trade deficits in general, from that formative experience.
A number of the Michael Crichton / Tom Clancy pulp novels of the 80s have nefarious Japanese investors as villains or plot points. There's a line in Sphere (an acid trip of a book where a spacecraft terrorizes an undersea base of divers) where the plot stops so the characters can talk about how messed up it is that Pepsi is owned by the Japanese in the future.
Heck, that's a central part of the plot of Crichton's novel "Rising Sun," which was made into a major Hollywood film starring Sean Connery as an LAPD detective!
Debt of Honor is about Jack Ryan fighting a corporatist/fascist wing of the Japanese government, and at the end of the book a Japanese pilot flies an airliner into the Capitol, killing everyone except Jack Ryan, who becomes President on the last page.
Let us never forget that East Germany was reported to be on track to surpass the US in economic power during the same period. It was a period, like every other, of really stupid stuff pushed by purportedly intelligent people.
But if the goal is to raise revenue with other countries, then why negotiate them down? It literally makes no sense. I know nothing makes sense in Trump land, but is this just a goal of him finally being able to live out his bully fantasies on the world stage?
Bribes. The answer is bribes. Unironically this makes it more likely that we get aligned with autocracies (who have incentives to pay the ransom because an economic depression is bad news for an autocratic regime most of the time) than democracies (where being answerable to the general public creates the incentive to tell Trump to go fuck himself.)
Because it allows him a face-saving method to back down. The agreements he’ll be offered will amount to nothing, really, because his idea of what barriers there are is nonsense.
The only governments that are primarily funded by foreigners are those in countries with massive oil exports relative to their population (Norway, UAE, Qatar, Brunei)
Sorry you are in a tough position bud. Hang tough, and hopefully you can vocalize and keep sharing your story. I saw some news that if the tariffs stay in place that the US Chamber of Commerce may actually sue the Trump administration.
It seems there's a dynamic at play where the uncertainty is heavily muting the responses from businesses. Almost no one wants to be the first ones out there loudly denouncing the situation or filing lawsuits if in three days Trump decides to declare victory after someone makes a verbal commitment to buy more soybeans and everything goes away.
Who knows how much retribution risk there might be if you're among that first group.
It's going to take a few weeks of businesses having to actually shell out millions of dollars in unplanned cash before things start to move, I think.
Of course, as tomtom50 says - the uncertainty damage, the relationship damage may well be done. It will take a long while to snake through to people's pockets - before the loss of investments and hiring starts to be widely felt.
Stories of business and people trying to cope with the policies and uncertainty seem wildly under-reported to me. Stressing about what my employer can/will do and how this will play out is hitting me all day every day - it's an existential crisis for thousands of businesses.
I hope you're right. 90% of our business is export, 50% is China. Our competitors are German. Complicated industrial equipment, we need a container or two to ship a system.
We aren't very big, 50 people. Half our employees are mechanics, electricians, installers, etc, many of whom voted for Trump. The Canadian development office has been helpful (relocation to Canada). The rep, when he opened up, told us the betrayal is intensely felt. There is no going back.
It really is true. Even if we manage to keep a democracy there is no going back.
"A distinguishing characteristic of the policy course Trump has set us on is that people in his orbit keep offering justifications for it that are not only distinct but mutually contradictory, and then getting peeved if critics don’t accept their account of the real strategy."
Sounds just like the run-up to Iraq II in 2002. And that worked out just dandy.
Tariffmania seems vastly less coherent to my brain. The Iraq War was supposedly going to:
(1) Get rid of Saddam's WMDs. If you think 911 was bad, just wait until he gives a nuclear bomb to a Manhattan Al Qaeda cell; and,
(2) Install a democratic government in Iraq that will trigger a regional wave of democratization. Only via a fundamental transformation of governance in the Middle East will the appeal of jihadism be reduced, and until that happens, America is in grave danger.
Now, the above was based on lies, and it was also ludicrously utopian. But it had decent internal logic.
Trump's declaration of economic war on Planet Earth (minus Mexico and Russia) seems...indescribably crazy, incomprehensible and nonsensical. It's international relations as dreamt up by a guy down at the VFW working on his fourth boilermaker.
Right, *if* you believed that Saddam was building a nuclear bomb and was going to give it al-Qaeda, the only rational course of action was to get him out of power.
I've said it before, it wasn't entirely insane to believe this, because Saddam himself, in a world-historical miscalculation, was encouraging people to believe this out of the misguided notion that it could save him.
For what it is worth, the United States was also attacked. (I know most of the attackers were Saudi citizens)... So it at least makes it somewhat understandable that the people and country needed to respond. Trump doing this now for a bunch of conflicting reasons, either reeks of attention seeking, idiocy or both?
I believe an operation in Afghanistan was justified because of 911 (a brief operation, not a two decade one). But the invasion of Iraq was illegal, brutal, dishonestly justified, and a real calamity for the invader.
Totally agree. It also kicked off the migrant crisis in the EU which is still having lasting impacts to this day, and the damage politically cannot be understated.
There seems to be a tension between (1) those of his advisers who are saying it's all a brilliant negotiating ploy and (2) Trump himself, who doesn't appear to care about concessions. The vibe I get is he'd much rather have autarchy than zero-tariff access for American exporters.
Trump sincerely believes a big outflow of good and services from our shores that far exceeds the inflow of the same (by definition a state of affairs consistent with lower living standards) is highly desirable, and will also right our public finances.
Ironically, that is like colonialism in reverse. If your nation is a net exporter, it can be argued that you are the "bitch", not the other way around.
This is so funny because I was also in HS at the time and I was super pissed about all of this. I was promised an America that didn't spy on its citizens, put people in torture prisons, or invade countries on pretext.
I was too. Heck I know I have the personality and willingness to admit that in the absence of retrospective knowledge of GWB’s fictions/failures, that I would probably today support the invasion of Iraq during the shadow of 911.
My support of Dubya at the time was a more willful blindness, akin to that of today's highbrow conservatives. Conservatism just had to be right. Bush had to be right.
Otherwise, that meant those hippy-dippy, commie, bleeding-heart, godless Dems were right, and that just couldn't be true! If it were then the stars would fall from the sky and everything I'd ever known would be a lie!
Spoiler Alert: I eventually realized that the hippy-dippy commie bleeding heart godless Dems were right...
Did Iraq II have the phenomena where not only are the justifications mutually contradictory, but the justifiers refuse to articulate a clear overall strategy?
I (25 years old, voted for Gore, was in the dust cloud on 9/11) thought my friends who participated in NYC's anti-war protests were LARP'ing the 60's. I told them "at some point you have to trust the people with security clearances." Turns out the hippies were right and I was wrong.
I would say in hindsight that there wasn’t much of an actual “theory of the facts on the ground”. It was mostly just hopium and handwavium about how “democracy” would transform Iraq.
And to be fair, it *could* have, but engineering a democratic society would have required understanding actual Iraqi social dynamics — the Sunni/Shia split, the role of the Kurds, etc. You would have wanted to create a positive sum system that encouraged compromise and coexistence, not just plop a parliament down on them and call it a day.
I would agree with Charles that Bush’s theory was internally consistent, just woefully incomplete.
"...mostly just hopium and handwavium about how “democracy” would transform Iraq."
And any suggestion that switching from a strongman dictatorship that had kept Sunnis, Shia, Kurds together under the brutal thumb of the minority Ba'ath, to an open liberal multi-ethnic democracy was not going to be quick or easy, was met with cries of feigned outrage that you must either hate democracy or have the racist belief that brown people were incapable of democratic self-governance.
Yes, you heard it: the party of Strom Thurmond, Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan was accusing people of racism, in order to avoid answering questions about how they intended to foster democracy after they had bombed the shit out of the natives.
But then I guess that's no stranger than the party of Elon Musk accusing universities of antisemitism.
In hindsight, I think the best strategy would’ve looked something like a federal government structure for Iraq, with a scheduled constitutional convention every 10 years so that they could adjust any issues.
I’d break down the regions of the country into federated states, give them a Senate like ours — something I generally oppose, but I think would work for the purposes of keeping the peace — but with three seats per state (on a rolling 2-year schedule of six-year terms) and calibrated so that the states’ populations roughly corresponded to various ethnic and religious demographic proportions at the national level. IE so that Sunni-majority states would send enough Senators to their congress such that it matched the national proportion of Sunnis.
I’d structure the government so that it’d be highly federalized, as well. Most of the budget would be run thru the state governments, not the federal one, so that national impasses wouldn’t block budgets from passing. The Iraqi people would have felt like they were able to control their own policy in their own states, rather than have Sunni, Shia, Kurd, or Baath running the show.
The national government would mostly exist to keep up the military. National oil revenues would be its primary funding source, which would therefore strongly motivate the military to keep the oil flowing. Each state would have police forces and a modest militia, but none strong enough to oppose the military.
AIUI the major problem with a partition was that the rest of the country didn’t want to give up Kurdistan - as usual, it’s the oil.
That’s why I think that a more strongly federalized plan would have worked better. The national parliament was always hitting impasses that held up ordinary business. You circumvent those impasses by letting each state make its own decisions. Keep each one locally happy, and they won’t try to tear apart the national interest.
We probably would have had to impose a system of distributing oil revenues and protecting those revenue streams, though, to make it all work. The states would have eyed the oil money, but without it as a carrot they have no motivation to hold the country together.
I cannot collect the entire set of random, diffuse, contradictory justifications that were offered in the run-up to Iraq II, but it's worth remembering some of the standouts:
"..."Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business," which [Jonah] Goldberg remembered [neo-con Michael] Ledeen saying...."
"We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!" That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman
One really weird parallel with GWB's Iraq and today is the DOGE boys. Immediately after the invasion a bunch of ignorant, arrogant, true believer near children were sent to Iraq to run the country. As if being a successful college Republican who could spout off about free men and free markets would qualify you to run a country riven by sectarianism, a history of colonialism, and despotism.
Democrats and the left always aspire to organize the youth, but it's the Republicans that have gone all-in on Lord's Army-style child-soldier vanguards of the revolution.
ezra is stretching it to think that housing abundance and green energy will forge a winning coalition. anyone who owns their own house (~65% of households) will not benefit from building housing, and green energy makes normies yawn or worse.
substack takes abundance is an even worse tactic than ezra proposes.
"anyone who owns their own house (~65% of households) will not benefit from building housing"
I am very familiar with your views on YIMBY so i don't expect this to change them, but for the other SB readers, I can provide at least 3 reasons that's not true:
1. Sooner or later, most homeowners will need to buy a home.
2. Local tax base (declining population = declining taxes = declining services).
3. Having a lot of homelessness in your community is unpleasant for everyone whether you own a home or not.
The thing that has me confused is why there is so little discussion of the idea that Trump doesn't have the authority to impose these tariffs in the first place.
I wrote this letter to my representatives (all Republicans, and modified for Todd Young who is at least going in the right direction). It made me feel a little better.
Dear [],
I am writing because I am very concerned about President Trump's recent actions on tariffs. In addition to being ruinous to the country and to the economy, they appear to be entirely illegal. Tariff power is explicitly given to Congress in the constitution, and although Congress is allowed to delegate this sort of authority to the executive, the major questions doctrine articulated by the Supreme Count specifies that Congress needs to be much more clear if it is to delegate its authority to make such a major change [1]. In addition, it appears that the law the president claims gives him authority to impose these tariffs appears to do no such thing --- no president has imposed tariffs before under the IEEPA and the act, which is very specific about the actions the president may take, does not include any language allowing for the president to impose tariffs [2].
I am appalled that so few Republicans are calling out this reckless and illegal power grab. I was taught as a child that we are a nation of laws, and I sincerely hope that that is still the case.
This comment should be higher, Congress (specifically Mike Johnson and MAGA) have straight up abdicated their responsibilities because they don't want to piss off the purse strings of their party and get harassed by their fellow party members.
The Supreme Court is not going to save us. The law is not a mathematical test that you can apply to determine that a particular action is correct or incorrect. SCOTUS does not look at the equation 3x2=5 and mark it as incorrect.
The Courts are a human component of government subject to all the venality and biases of the other two branches. I think the current Court make up is MORE venal and biased than other iterations, but even if it isn't, it is certainly not going to try to derail the major policy initiative of the Executive when there is at least a fig leaf of statutory support, and more importantly when the Congress is controlled by the same party as the Court and is taking no action itself to try to confront the Executive on its own behalf.
Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, I don't have any special insight into how the justices think.
I do, however, believe very strongly that this attitude that the law doesn't matter, it's politics all the way down, and so on, is bad for the country. You're right that the law is constructed by people, but we are all much better off when we all believe in the rule of law and take issue with those who wish to undermine it.
I'm an attorney, and believe deeply in the application of precedent and facts. I was sugar coating my disdain for the current SCOTUS. I think it is much more biased and venal than previous iterations. It was constructed from such blatant political expediency, and with such a distinct ideological bent, that it is uniquely incapable of rising to this moment.
To steel man, if that's even the right term for this, its probable inaction here, I would say this. Our law, the Constitution, is constructed with an underlying assumption that each co-equal branch of government will jealously guard its own prerogatives. The power being usurped here is that of the legislative branch, and the legislative branch could easily remedy this problem and take back its power to tariff. If the Legislature isn't going to guard its own prerogatives, it is inappropriate for the Judicial branch to step in.
I think the actual thing happening is the Court is just as cowardly and supine as the Republican controlled Congress.
I think I'm much more optimistic on the court pushing back than you are, but if they genuinely sign off on what appears to be powers generated ex nihilo for Trump but continue to obstruct every Democratic executive initiative they can think of a justification for obstructing, I see no reason why the Democratic party should consider itself bound by SCOTUS. The legitimacy of the court is a trilateral contract between the court and the other two branches, and it is not a future Democratic president's fault that the court in this scenario would have decided to break that contract entirely.
My preference would be to just end the court's power to act as a political check by packing it, but I would not be overly bothered with a Democratic president just saying they do not see the Court's authority as supreme.
I've posted a version of this before. I think this court is very jealous of maintaining its prerogatives, which in our schema is good, if Congress was doing the same the system would be clunking along the way it's intended. But Trump is the first President in modern times who very plausibly might directly defy the Court on a matter that means a lot to him.
So the Court is going to twist itself in knots, using venue, standing, non-justiciability, etc. to avoid that confrontation. Because the real nightmare for the Court is that if Trump can defy it, then the next Democratic President, who unquestionably will hold different ideological views than the current majority, will also be able to defy the Court.
With the exception of birthright citizenship, which I don't think matters all that much to Trump personally, I don't think you'll see the Court get in Trump's way. They'll impose some process requirements, which is what I think we're starting to see with the deportation cases, so that there is the appearance of standing up and maintaining their power, but in the end Trump will get 90% of what he wants.
At this point the legitimacy of the unitary executive seems to be a given for both parties. The only people consistently complain are the likes of Reason magazine that everyone likes to disregard.
I'm not sure the partisans view executive power as a problem, just a bigger political cudel as a reward for obtaining power.
- House Republicans are all hostage to being primaried because their districts are gerrymandered. That's really keeping them silent and on the sideline.
- CEOs are keeping their pie-holes shut because the white house can carve out tariff exemptions for friends, so no matter how stupid you think this is, if you have share holders you have to play nice and hope to get a bone.
These are all stories of incentive problems. I still find the cowardice frustrating.
So maybe if there's enough consensus in conservative circles that this is all bad we could get a legal fix?
It is also the case that sound trade policy is undermined by the US's dysfunctional electoral system. Since the path to political power in the US overwhelming depends on electoral success in a few purple midwest states, politicians inevitably set policy based on the needs of the loudest constituents in those states, rather than in the nation. Service workers in California don't give a flying fuck about tariffs, but automobile workers in Michigan sure do -- and the latter influence federal elections a lot more than the former.
Even in Michigan and Pennsylvania, service workers hugely outnumbers factory employees. Democrats, to their detriment, really drank the kool-aid on the political valorization of manufacturing workers.
I want to be clear I have nothing against factories. A job in a manufacturing plant is good, honest labor. But so is a job in a hospital, hotel or construction site.
I think an important distinction is there are more vertical paths for career growth in a manufacturing plant than in services / retail. "Services" is too broad of a category but in retail specifically there's often just a single path up through management (e.g., floor to store supervisor then store manager). But in mfg. there's additional functional silos for growth (e.g., procurement, vendor management, inventory management, production planning, QA, outbound logistics, etc.). In retail orgs., these roles / functions are almost always centralized so the stores / branches can run leaner.
I agree about retail but I don't think this is true for other services. Retail is uniquely well-suited to corporate centralization, and low-level experience in retail is uniquely bad at making you a more attractive candidate for higher-level corporate roles. Hospitals and hotels both have lots of different roles for upward movement. To use hotels because it's an example I'm more personally familiar with, most of these functions are done at the property level and relatively few things are done by centralized corporate offices. As a front office person, you could end up as a supervisor, but you could also end up as a rooms controller, vendor management, inventory, etc., and then the corporate offices almost always hire from these mid-level property roles. I work with a lot of fairly high-level people at Marriott, Hyatt, etc. every single day and almost all of them have a work history that includes a low or mid-level property role.
I think the bigger problem (IMO) is what do you do with people who are just... not that competent? Like the nature of these things is that they are pyramid shaped, and this is true in manufacturing too. There are just going to be people who are in the low level jobs for 20 years because they don't get promoted. In union plants this wasn't a problem because the union negotiated for seniority pay that didn't really reflect the level of added productivity, but if you're just talking basic market reality outside of that, I am not sure any economic configuration is going to stop people in the lower part of the labor market distribution from being low-wage workers their whole lives.
I don't disagree with this - I'm a native Michigander and liked this comment. But I think the politics of trade have been more broadly pernicious.
Neither the benefits to normies nor the tradeoffs for workers in the most affected sectors have been, in my experience (I started my working life as a trade policy analyst in the NAFTA era), adequately/honestly discussed. Back in the day, there was the "political safety valve" of trade adjustment assistance. But over time the pipes sprung leaks, now the valve has blown, and the political consensus that Americans (as well as everybody else) overwhelmingly benefit from trade has vanished in the absence of leadership and honesty.
A big part of this, IMO, has been the willingness of people in politics who know better to engage in a kind of pantomime of support for protectionism, as well as an unwillingness to speak to the benefits. I remember, back in the 90s, Texas Republican Phil Gramm giving a speech on the floor in which he likened free trade to love (!!!) - everyone is better off. This was not a weird position to take at the time; I just remember it because I found the "love" angle so funny (especially coming from a cranky guy like Gramm). But where have the defenders of free trade been over the last decade? I'm tuning out most news for the sake of my sanity and have been for quite a while, so maybe I'm just missing it. But I've been honestly shocked by the supine, craven lack of response to so many of Trump's actions. Is *this* worth it?
Now I work in a different field and I see an analogous dynamic playing out. In city planning, we've paid obeisance to The Community such that policies and projects with benefits more diffuse than a few city blocks can be quite easily shot down by well-organized and -funded NIMBYs. One of the projects I worked on, on and off, when I was in NYC was a sanitation garage a couple of blocks from my building. It was an ideal location, on a City-owned parcel near 23rd St and the FDR, but it started before I worked for the city and still hasn't happened, in part because siting Sanitation infrastructure was incredibly difficult owing to "community opposition" in the face of a leadership vacuum in which council chairs and mayors dither and defer to the loudest voices.
Governing is - as we know here! - hard. Focusing on stuff that people like is good, and Democrats should do much, much more of it. But people elected to govern should not pretend that there are no tradeoffs or choices required. During my adult life, politicians at all levels of government have - with trade, with urban infrastructure including housing, with many other things - seemed to convince themselves that this doesn't have to be acknowledged, that maybe one weird trick will magically make the downside disappear, that we *can* hold back change.
The Democrats have been twisted in a bind on this for years. Sure, there are more service workers than factory workers in Michigan, but the factory workers have disproportionate influence through the AFL-CIO. It's been very hard for Democratic candidates to win primary elections while pissing labor off, and also to win national general elections in which manufacturing-heavy states place such a prominent role.
An important turning point was the TPP, which would have been an amazing accomplishment if it had more robust Democratic support, though Trump would have killed it anyway.
You can see what a mess the Democrats have made of this issue in their current discourse, e.g., "Yes, tariffs are great to restore our economy, but not the way Trump is doing them."
I guess the silver lining is that Trump is messing up so badly that he will give tariffs a black eye.
As for the local issues, yes, those are equally messed up. I see some signs that Democratic leaders are trying to push back against this stuff but Democrats continue to pay a heavy electoral price for catering to the few who are loud rather than the many.
I find it difficult to know whether the "weird gender anxieties" of it all are just an incredibly Twitter-brained irrelevant niche, or sort of a canary in a coal mine of something broadly felt but inchoate and mostly unspoken.
It seems obviously gender coded in the sense that we’re almost always talking about jobs that people picture in their heads as manly because of historical traditions, e.g., auto and steel workers. Obviously this is dumb-sewing shoes or running a robot that assembles iPhones is not masculine coded. But the very nature of Trump’s Cultural Revolution is a push to 1950s fictional television lifestyles.
Masculine-coded just means someone can support their family, even if it includes a second income from a female spouse. If the culture and economy make that possible, we're good.
People find it humiliating to work in personal services, no matter how robust the demand.
I almost think this has more to do with Protestant work ethic than with gender. It’s deep in our national psyche that something slimy is going on when you’re paying for a task that you could plausibly do yourself (“burrito taxi”). One aspect of the denigration of this type of work is it being female-coded. But it can equally be teenager-coded, or immigrant-coded. The important thing is, not befitting an adult male citizen.
Manufacturing is set up as a haven from the repulsion people feel about service work. The “alienation” factor allows them to feel less servile. But I think Matt is right that construction would be better fit for this purpose while also having more positive social effects.
Right, hitting Vietnam, China, and Thailand with tariffs might bring some jobs to NC or wherever, but there's nothing really all that manly about most of those factory jobs, and that applies to most other manufacturing. Most of it is inspection, buffing up some rough spots, packing, unjamming, etc., while being up close and personal with a machine/robot all day. Maybe people prefer this to service jobs, but it's odd to think we all need to pay higher prices, and have higher collective anxiety, to make these people more comfortable doing low-skill work. I agree with the OP that ideally they would be doing more construction and semi-skilled services associated with it as part of an abundance strategy, but I guess old fashioned widgets are where it's at.
Now, there's going to need to be engineers, machinists, and technicians to keep things humming, and maybe those roles are traditional manly roles, but those are all medium to very high skilled positions, last I knew those people were not having too much trouble finding work. Where are these people going to come from to build and run all these new factories?
Protestant work ethic and gender politics are definitely part of it but I think a lot of the reason service jobs are seen as humiliating is downstream of the fact that working these jobs often involves being expected to eat an endless series of shit sandwiches and do it with a smile on your face. We’re the land of “the customer is always right”, we have no shortage of low trust scumbags willing to exploit that to get free stuff or feel powerful, and our labor laws and unions are weak enough that you don’t really have a lot of recourse against management fuckery other than quitting and getting a better job.
I think the "weird gender anxieties" are a partial explanation. I think a more important explanation is some bizarre right-wing version of Marx's Labor Theory of Value. America is so wealthy and productive that a lot of people get paid for their brains instead of their physical labor, which seems unfair to people who don't get paid for their brains. That a lot of women get paid for their brains and a lot of men don't adds to this explanation, even if it is not causal.
It actually is quite unfair. Nature doesn't pass out IQ points in equitable fashion—nor the various enabling factors (responsible, loving parents, parents with money, a nurturing home environment, schools, etc) that put people on the path to successful adulthood.
Trump's solution is to penalize the 90% of us who don't work in factories.
My solution is to grow the economy so big and rich that skimming a bit off the top to enable everybody to live well isn't painful.
You don’t have to be an NFL QB to support a family. You do pretty much have to be an upper echelon white collar worker to house and educate a family in a major metropolitan area, if you don’t own a house already.
Looking at MSAs #10-25, the only ones where NAR's qualifying income for a single family home is materially below $100k HHI are Detroit, St. Louis, and San Antonio.
Matt and Cartoons Hate Her have both written about the idea that a meaningful number of men have difficulty getting a girlfriend/wife in a modern knowledge-based economy in which single women and single men are close to income equality.
I do wonder if this is a situation like the hypothesized problem with polygamous societies: youngish men who cannot get a wife through prosocial behavior often behave antisocially.
There doesn't seem to be an easy answer. I feel bad for the TFWNOGF men, but trade policies designed to increase gender income inequality seem like a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons.
It's all fantasy anyhow. Krugman ran some numbers the other day. I'm spitballing from memory, but he wrote something to the effect of: even if Trump's policies managed to shift manufacturing's share of GDP back to the level of 1970, we'd still only a see a miniscule increase in manufacturing's share of employment (less than 2 points, IIRC).
Trump's vision cannot work. A president is just a government official. He's not a time lord who can transport us back to another century.
EDIT: Here's the passage from Paul Krugman: "But look at my first chart above. Manufacturing as a share of employment has fallen about 17 points since 1970. Complete elimination of the trade deficit would undo only around 2.5 points of that decline. So even if tariffs “worked,” which they won’t, they would fall far short of restoring manufacturing to its former glory."
I mean sure but the problem in a polygamous society (older men simply force the young women to marry them) is different than this problem (women deciding that being single is better than these losers.)
polygamous societies are grounded in massive income inequality. much better to be the 4th wife of a very rich man than the first wife of a very poor one. little "forcing" necessary. the economics takes care of it.
Well yeah, but in one case the problem is solved by banishing the young men engaging in antisocial behaviors and in the other the problem is solved by… the young men engaging in self-improvement. It’s unclear what “prosocial” behaviors aren’t being adequately rewarded.
Why isn't "ban polygamy" the answer in the former? It seems that polygamy is good for a few old men and bad for almost everyone else.
I'm not sure that self-improvement is a solution to the latter. Gender income equality drives the latter; I don't see a way for men as a whole to self-improve without women also self-improving. Some individual men can self-improve, but they're just going to reshuffle themselves relative to other men.
Maybe. But then it’s simply never explained why men put out of manufacturing work by automation or offshoring cannot simply get an associate’s degree (or hell, a bachelor’s) and work a desk job, a career path that did not seem to elude a lot of not particularly bright women I knew growing up.
As a matter of politics, it didn’t go over well when Biden tried telling coal miners to learn to code.
As a matter of fact, American men tend to worse than American women at being agreeable and conscientious, but they are more willing to accept unpleasant/dangerous working conditions in return for more cash. If you structure your economy such that men are not given the option to exercise their relative strengths, they won’t be as successful economically.
Given that women tend to prefer higher earning partners, it’s not clear to me that hurting men’s earnings helps women, as a class.
But the key thing here is that men vote. (Not as much as women, less conscientious, but not zero.) A political program which neglects men’s interests will suffer electorally.
You’d have to convince them that men have interests as a class, but I feel exactly zero solidarity with other men who decided that they’d rather not go to college because they thought working a desk job was something for women and girly men and are obsessed over stereotypes of masculinity; in fact I consider my interests directly counter to theirs. I’m not the only one, either.
To the extent you are opposed to the interests of non-college men, you shouldn’t draw attention to it. They outnumber you, and they’re better distributed for the Senate and Electoral College.
Men are mad that society is rapidly devaluing the ways that they are able to contribute, without providing a way forward. Then people like you come in and say 'just get a degree you baby' like that's entirely possible or desirable for everyone.
Do you realize that you need men to actually implement the things that are dreamed up by desk workers? Men are the ones who dig the trenches that hold the lines that transmit the information to those desks, men build the offices and homes in which those desks sit, and here you are shitting on them like you don't need that work done. How would it help anyone to have every one of those men get a BA and a desk job?
You haven't thought this through well enough to sneer.
Because lots of people hate sitting in a room while an authority figure talks at them about the rules they need to follow.
It's often more difficult as an adult instead of as children, because as children everyone we have is an authority figure. Tell adult men that the path to looking strong enough to attract a mate goes through an institution (with a strong female presence) wielding power over them and they'll simply not believe you.
There are a lot of reasons that someone wouldn't be successful at modern college/a desk job that are not about intelligence, but about temperament and different cognitive configurations and how higher education is structured.
Men have problems accessing masculinity in a world where billionaires are schlubby and no one does physical labor. It’s been going on since at least the 1990s, so long before anyone was highly online but the admins of MUDs, much less Twitter-brained.
Which, the Cartoons Hate Her one? She's talking about how suddenly the right-wing people are degrowthers, saying "You don't *need* a new iPhone, you just want one, grow some stones and butch up and learn to do without." She shares a bunch of memes along the lines of "Your great-grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked a steel plant, and you thought you could be a 'product manager'? LOL. Cry more."
She writes: "It’s not that they think the economy will suffer temporary pain for long-term gains—it’s that they want it to crash because they want people they don’t like (ie: people with more money/power than them, especially “product manager girlbosses” or whatever) to suffer, which will presumably give them more relative power and status. In their mind, if their financial situation is already in the shitter, it can’t get worse, but those forever-hated product mommies writing Jira tickets at the pool are about to suffer and well, they might finally sleep with them. Or at least they’ll get their comeuppance, even if they continue to not fuck these guys."
Regarding the last point, count me in with the contradiction-heighteners. Bad economic policy is relatively easy to change *conditional on the ability to change the government*. Lee Kwan Yew isn't walking through that door. Trump failing spectacularly is good for both democracy and the economy.
I’m not a contradiction-heightener, but I think the best it can offer is that although heightening contradictions almost never delivers a *better* reality, it is mildly effective at breaking existing unworkable ones.
I think that much more often, it sadly serves as a crutch for those who don’t want to bother mapping out a full theory of change and simply want to eradicate their opposition.
What if him failing at the economy, makes him want to lash out more though? When bullies and narcissists lose, they don't typically get introspective and change their positions. They typically double down and try to find something else to blame.
A little economic distress is better than further erosion of our democracy, but I do worry about their perceived discussions about using military might, as well as trying to look for wins by targeting domestic people and companies when they don't get the economic wins they want.
A reasonable worry. But I would say Trump is only as powerful as his enablers, and I think the less they have public opinion on their side, the less willing they'll be to commit crimes for Trump.
"A little economic distress"? This looks like a huge amount of economic distress to me. Higher prices, less availability of goods, high unemployment—these are bad things. If a tornado deposits some nice furniture on your lawn while it wipes out 20 city blocks, I'm happy for you and you shouldn't feel guilty sitting in your new recliner, but it was still a tornado that wiped out 20 city blocks and cause huge amounts of misery.
It's really sad that it's come to this, but the contradictions have already been heightened, so now we just have to deal with it and demonstrate why they're going to be so bad.
Indeed. We TRIED to fix it with Obama, and the Boomers stopped him. I’m out of fucks to give at this point, I’m just going to look out for myself first, because this is apparently a nation that can’t have nice things.
PS: In all selfishness, my shameful hope here is that a crash can drop housing prices to something I can actually afford.
As a Millennial who graduated in 2009 with massive student loans, I feel like I’ve suffered enough by now that I don’t feel guilty about the prospect of benefiting from the consequences of the fuckwitted decisions of the Boomers who have been screwing us over ever since we tried to fix things by electing Obama.
Rapid upticks in interest rates tend to cause demand and supply to fall in tandem, so rarely produce large falls in price. They just slow the movement of people to a molasses-like slow creep. Folks don't downsize because it doesn't save money once financing is included, build additions or just squeeze in as families grow because the cost of upsizing is insane, and don't move as much in general in pursuit of opportunity.
There is every reason to think that we're headed for moderate stagflation for the next few years, and if the example of the early 80's holds (lots of reasons to believe that will be the case), prices will flatline in nominal terms, declining moderately in real terms. But initially, at least, those gains will be eaten by financing costs. Maybe in a decade you'll then be able to refinance and thus have realized some gains from real price declines, but there's little to indicate that relief is coming for the next 5-6 years unless you're in a market with substantial new-build supply. Even then, financing circumstances will strangle the next round of such supply before it hits the drawing board...
If there is a market crash, how do you know that you wouldn't be impacted? You also know that during crashes lending typically tightens a bit as does supply... I am a millennial as well that still is paying off some grad school debt, but comments like yours always seem a bit out of touch to me. I do agree with not feeling bad for people though that voted for this, I do feel bad for the rest of us though...
I’m not saying I *know* I’ll be untouched. But my job is relatively secure — my employer has an astounding track record of avoiding layoffs for the last several decades.
And yeah, I’m also not saying there won’t be any costs. But just generally… if I do happen to benefit, I’m not going to feel guilty about it. I’ll happily exploit any opportunities that come across my path.
I always wonder what my fuckwitted decisions were as a Boomer, as if "the Boomers" ever really had much control over anything besides softening up the culture in terms of the sexual moralities. The pendulum swung back and forth, we went out and voted, sometimes we marched, and that's about it.
Do the Millenials feel like they have any power to make decisions now? That's kind of how it's always been.
To be clear, if you’re on this forum, then you are almost certainly NOT the kind of Boomer implicated in my comment.
However, just as an exercise, let’s go ahead and list the “fuckwitted decisions” that can broadly be attributed to the Boomers:
1. NIMBYism. Boomers didn’t invent the suburbs or commit the sin of white flight — that was mostly their parents — but they definitely pulled the ladder up behind them and erected the enormous regulatory and local-governance regime that has blocked so much construction since the 70’s.
2. Killing nuclear energy. Anti-nuke was definitely a Boomer movement that hurt our nation.
3. Reagan’s decimation of the mental health system. It’s not as strictly impactful as NIMBY or nukes, but it’s definitely a decision Boomers made, so it goes on the ledger.
4. Gingrich. Boomers were well in the catbird seat of running everything by the 90’s. Now, all that budget balancing wasn’t actually bad. But the politics that went into it, particularly the enabling of Gingrich… was disgraceful, and put us on a path towards Trump.
5. Obstructing the Obama majority. Obama was Millennials’ one big attempt to set things right. We wanted a transformation of the country’s political economy, away from polarization, away from the Republican machine that thrived on it. The aftermath of the Great Recession could have looked VERY differently. But Mitch McConnell — not technically a Boomer, but definitely adjacent and one of the key leaders in the Boomer-driven backlash to Obama — had other ideas. This one particularly stings.
Again, I’ve said several times in the past and also directly here that YOU personally are NOT responsible for these alleged sins. So kindly stuff that objection.
But collectively? Yes, Boomers were a key voting bloc in all of these decisions I’ve listed.
So why not specify Boomer Republicans? I'll grant the nuclear energy issue. As for nimbyism, it's is embedded in human nature, (or maybe just in U.S. reliance on home equity.)
To clarify, yes, anti-nuke was a Democrat thing. But keep in mind that there were not only drop drills, but there was my teacher saying "if there's a really bright flash of light, then don't wait for me to yell 'drop!'". And then there'd be a reflection off a shiny plane flying overhead or something. And then we had to worry about tactical nukes and dirty bombs. All of this lasted until our 50s. (And now it's b-a-a-a-ck!)
I myself tended to look deeper into the science (actually had not one, but two tours of the Yucca Mountain waste repository). But as far as I'm concerned, it's just naive to blame Boomers for being against anything with the word "nuclear" in it.
NIMBY is natural to anyone of any generation who relies on home equity for longterm shelter.
This is why I try not to call out any generation. We all grow up in the culture we're born into. Blame is a pretty useless emotion anyway.
I'm not entirely sure what has caused the historical amnesia in which left-wing activists have convinced themselves that protectionism is a left-wing position and that somehow past Democratic Administrations were protectionist and it's only the modern neo-liberal sellouts like Clinton and Obama that were exceptions.
The dynamic of the 1980s was weird. I guess convincing left-wingers to be protectionist is just one of many problems with the decade.
The vote on NAFTA in 1993 split the Democrats 102-156. While it's true there was a divide, too many accounts seem to paint this narrative of Bill Clinton siding with Republicans to pass NAFTA over universal Democratic opposition. The reality is far more nuanced.
The VoteView breakdown on the DW-Nominate divide for the vote is not particularly left-right, the proportion of votes classified correctly is only 68%. https://voteview.com/rollcall/RH1030558
I think the left wing protectionist thing is in some ways as simple as, if Reagan is for it, we’re against it. Seeing as how Reagan ended up being remarkably popular, enough to get his VP elected to succeed him, this ended up being a losing proposition which Clinton rejected by embracing things like free trade (while still rejecting racism) to hit on a winning formula.
Unions were always key Lefty allies and were always pretty protectionist (and agreed with management historically on that one). On the other hand, it has for a long time been the case that liberals actually elected to the Presidency tended to come from the elite knowledge class rather than coming up into politics from shop steward. So they tended to ignore the unions' opinions on this.
Often protectionist, but the history of the Working Men's Party in the 1820s and 1830s leading to the Locofocos established an early American strain of pro-free trade labor unions.
One reason I think Abundance is underrated as a way to win elections is that it pushes politicians to campaign and govern based on what voters really prioritize (low prices), and not get sucked into ideological rabbit holes.
Matt, you have this final take, which I have also been seeing in several places:
"I’m not sure whether I should be worried about Trump making terrible economic policy decisions, or heartened that doing so makes it less likely that his efforts to undermine democracy and the rule of law will succeed."
This is such a classic underestimation of the power of conservative propaganda and Donald Trump, and so frustrating to read. Why do democrats keep doing this - assuming that conservative failures have any meaning whatsoever to American voters? You really think the 100 billion dollar conservative propaganda pipeline can't spin economic disaster as the fault of democrats and wokeness (or whatever word they settle on next)?
You smartly are caveating though with "less likely," so perhaps I am worried needlessly.
Sure. They sure quickly forgot that though, thanks to the things I mentioned above, and loudly and proudly voted for total economic disaster again in 2016, and again in 2024. And, this wasn't just conservatives - median voters too.
Americans were overall quite happy with the economy from 2016 to 2020, and (reasonably or not) assumed they'd be able to get it back if they reelected the guy who was president for those years.
This is exactly the case, but it also seems to go against your contention about the power of the right wing spin machine. National conditions count. A lot. In 2020 those conditions were terrible, and, not surprisingly, the incumbent lost. Relatedly, 2024 was a very challenging cycle for Democrats because of the inflation and real wage erosion that transpired under Biden. The incumbent party again lost.
The median voter seems to have the memory of a goldfish, and they refused to treat Trump as a known quantity who was President already. It is astounding to me.
This does not seem like an unwarranted take. Inflation brought down Joe Biden. Sure it’s possible that the American people will just eat another round of inflation at Trump’s request, but I don’t think it’s a given.
I’d put my money on inflation bringing down Trump before I’d put it on the median voter deciding that paying $15 for a 1-pound bag of coffee beans that used to cost $8 that’s very obviously a direct result of a very stupid tariff on Colombia being worth it, particularly since Trump has let’s say inadequately made the case for what he hopes to gain from this.
Nah, Trump is not at all immune to being unpopular and becoming more so when he screws things up.
The question is why Democrats haven't been able to overwhelmingly defeat such an unpopular figure. And for that, conservative propaganda probably is a decent sized part of the story. But it's not the only thing that has been making Democrats less popular over the last decade.
The $100 billion pipeline is filled with people who don’t like what Trump is doing right now and didn’t believe he would follow through. It’s a small group of wealthy people, but you already see the dissent in the Musk crowd.
I do have concerns that this doesn’t matter much as the value of that money to the propaganda is very limited in this information economy.
He's also not wrong. Tesla is - by far - the most vertically integrated US auto OEM. Even more so when you factor in they've forward integrated into charging and insurance.
Yeah I don't really disagree with you. But we have time and time again, for decades now, underestimated the strength of it, and more recently, the strength of Donald Trump's black-bile-filled messaging. So I am very hesitant!
I totally get what you're saying, and you may be right. I do think this is different, though. It's upsetting that most people turn out not to care about norms, democracy, NATO, etc. - but so be it. If these tariffs stick, and prices on consumer goods go through the roof, with Trump taking full credit, that does matter. Trump was probably cruising to reelection in 2020 as of 2019, but his handling of Covid (e.g. a real thing, too big to completely spin) stopped him. I am hoping this is in that vein. I can't think of a survey since 2022 where the economy and prices weren't the #1 issue. People can rationalize so much in service to their team and worldview, but a paycheck is a tough thing to spin. I think they'll give him 3 - 6 months, and if there aren't new factories opening by then, he's going to start losing people.
I don’t think this level of cynicism is warranted.
Trump I really did not involve any significant economic pain for the average American, aside from the legitimately exogenous Covid shock. We don’t have grounds to say that a self-inflicted economic crisis wouldn’t really hurt him.
And remember, Trump I was far less popular than you’d expect a president with a good economy who avoided the most disliked GOP policies like slashing Medicare to be.
Most of my friends and acquaintances are Trump supporters and the Conservative Media Pipeline has already provided them with ample ammo to defend these disastrous policies.
I think the most under discussed issue stemming from Trump is less the specific fallouts from each policy but instead the complete degradation of America as a stable and reliable partner. Who would sign a free-trade agreement with the US after this? Who would rely on us for security after this? Whatever gains Trump thinks we will get by being mercurial is negated by the lack of certainty. Trump basically tore up the FTA HE SIGNED HIMSELF when he was in office.
After his first term: electing Biden was enough to restore confidence. I do not think removing Trump is enough to restore our standing in the world anymore. The Pax Americana is over, you could argue that it ended a while ago, but any change of salvaging the best (or at least some) parts of it is now past. Its a dangerous multipolar world, and Trump is our steward for at least the next four years.
Taking the facts here as accurate, I don’t find the explanations behind them particularly convincing.
OK, we apparently stuck with wooden ships in the mid-late 19th century even after steel was obviously the future. But why? Overall, we were the most industrially dominant and innovative country in the world then, why were ships an exception? Was every US shipbuilder a moron?
And then we (twice) built up huge capacity during the world wars that apparently promptly fell apart right after. Again, why? Of course there’s going to be disruption in the transition to peacetime, but that could be said of everything; we didn’t lose our edge in car making when the tank factories turned back to civilian vehicles. (We did *eventually* get outcompeted and out-innovated by Japan etc, but it’s not like that happened by 1955).
Yes, the US has always had high labor costs by international standards, but that was already true by 1870, and it didn’t stop us from leading the world in output for a century afterwards. Why were ships an exception?
I think the ships America built in WW2 were more expensive and lower quality than their British or French equivalents, they just could build far more and weren't being bombed.
"The flip side of the persistent trade deficit is that the United States receives a lot of inbound investment from foreigners. People like to buy shares of stock in American companies. They like to invest in American startups. They buy American government bonds as a source of safety. Just in terms of a literal sense of how it works, this is the deal with the trade deficit: Foreigners are not “ripping us off” or getting rich off of us, they are investing and we are consuming."
This is a wasting asset; you cannot sell financial/debt instruments in perpetuity without economic strength underwriting them, hence the stance Miran takes that you disparage later on:
"The most “sophisticated” of the Trump-adjacent theories is Stephen Miran’s notion that he is attempting to craft a “Mar-a-Lago accord” that would save American exporters from the “exorbitant burden” imposed by the US dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency. I think there are a lot of questionable assumptions baked into this, but my biggest concern is that, if successful, this endeavor would make everyone’s purchasing power lower. Most of the discussion seems to me to be efforts to pull the wool over people’s eyes about this."
If there are questionable assumptions baked into this, then elucidate them.
You haven't, and I would gamble you won't, because you can't, because there really aren't any questionable assumptions there.
As I said yesterday: "There is structural demand for something like a trillion dollars a year of dollar-denominated debt instruments both because they're the medium of exchange, the hydraulic fluid that flows through global trade plumbing, and because they're a safe asset in a world where basically every other currency is more vulnerable to global market dislocations and shitty domestic policy. That's something along the lines of 25% of demand for dollars, alongside a trillion-odd of manufacturing exports and twoish trillion of services.
This demand really took off in earnest after the Asian Financial Crisis and has only grown since, which is why the USD is 25-30% stronger relative to our major trade partners than it was on January 1, 2000. This, in turn, is among the major reasons why capital formation in the US secondary sector is insanely slow and American manufacturing is no more productive today than it was in 2005-6."
Demand for American financial instruments is a wasting asset. It did not come to exist in a vacuum and is contingent on the US retaining other key strengths, but it also erodes the structural underpinnings of those same other strengths, and as such it needs to be curtailed before it rots them out entirely.
This is no different then supporting investments in mass transit funded by congestion pricing; we do this not because it's good in and of itself but because it's necessary to facilitate the economic and social life of a city in the face of rising traffic, and the hope is that the revenue collected and spent is smaller than the costs of allowing traffic to balloon unchecked.
It is a mistake to view such a devaluation as an unnecessary sacrifice of purchasing power, because if we allow this phenomenon to proceed to an endgame unchecked we will all sacrifice far more purchasing power. That day will come well before most folks here have shuffled off this mortal coil.
You've mostly convinced me about China and Germany screwing their citizens by suppressing wages and directing money to exporters. I think that both, but especially China should face tariffs from the US as a response. However, I have become increasing less convinced of your argument about the dollar's position as a global security being a bad thing. Our exorbitant privilege is easier access to capital. Its our foolishness on what we do with that capital that is the problem, not that we have easier access to it. We could have used the low rates and easy capital for the last 20 years to build productive assets instead of financing the combo of low taxes and higher social spending.
I'm also confused by this: "capital formation in the US secondary sector is insanely slow"
Would you elaborate on what you mean by this as my initial reading suggests its wrong which makes me think I'm misunderstanding what you mean. I would say that its regulatory hurdles more than anything else that make the secondary sector slow moving in the US, not access to capital - though there are some inter-linkages. Are there broad obstacles here that I'm missing?
Directionally, Germany, Japan, and South Korea are similar; they have significant transfers to industry that are nonetheless hugely smaller in percentage (let alone absolute) terms than China. Between the vastly smaller magnitude of the distortion, and the fact that they're allies, I do not actually believe any of them merit a particular response beyond perhaps making it very easy for US employers to get visas for young workers from those countries with manufacturing skillsets. Plenty of people do not desire to stay in these places, which will be consumed in the coming decades by the need to care for the elderly folks who backed them into this demographic corner in the first place, we should take advantage.
China, on top of the broader currency issues I'll come back to, directly and indirectly subsidizes industry to the tune of 10% of GDP, particularly focused on export manufacturing. I don't think a 100% tariff is fully necessary, but a ratchet tariff by the EU, US, Japan, Korea, and Canada that starts in the realm of 15-25% and increases every year until that model breaks is a necessary corrective, doubly so because Chinese neo-fascism is a major threat to liberalism and pluralism everywhere.
As regards exorbitant privilege...
By way of background, classical economic models for free trade assume that the exchange rate rapidly (instantly, really) equilibrates to one that causes flow of goods and services to balance between import and exports. That has not happened to the US because we have, as several economists have put it, a comparative advantage in the issuance of debt. That advantage did not arise in a vacuum; we have a 250 year history of not defaulting on our debts, not expropriating private property, running economic policy reasonably well, maintaining rapid growth in productivity and standards of living, accepting immigrants and allowing them to buy homes and build lives, and advancing technology.
But that advantage now accounts for around a quarter of global demand for dollars; we export a trillion or so in manufactures, about two trillion in services... and another trillion in debt instruments. This increases the exchange rate significantly as measured against our major trading partners, which renders basically all domestic businesses engaged in activities which are tradable (manufacturing and high-value services alike) less competitive relative to foreign ones whose costs are not incurred in USD.
You are correct that no one is literally holding a gun to our head and telling us to issue Treasuries. But the political consequences of failing to run a deficit are unpalatably high, because the currency headwinds limit domestic firms in investing and hiring. In essence, the strong dollar pushes demand for domestic labor down relative to baseline, because it's cheaper to buy (or for multinationals to hire) abroad. Absent the borrower of last resort (the federal government) stepping in, it is impossible to maintain full employment or anything close to it under these circumstances.
This is why I keep saying that causality between the current account deficit and the federal deficit flows in the opposite direction from what many commentors have said.
It is, yes, possible to devalue the currency by cutting the deficit, but as I said elsewhere, it would be a prolonged and extremely painful process compared to controlling parts of the capital account in order to moderately devalue the currency. This would engender a major rollover in capital by our secondary sector, which has in large part been deferring such expenditures since 2000, when this exchange rate problem began to balloon in earnest. That would generate demand for factories and equipment, followed by hiring across the board, and the first real private-sector led boom since the 1990's would give us the slack to cut the deficit without engendering a recession, as Clinton was able to in the mid-to-late 1990's.
This in turn would cement the lower exchange rate.
I am not asking anyone to support Trump's blunderbuss idiocy here. It is unproductive.
But a lot of folks here and elsewhere among the professional classes seem bound and determined to act as if there is *no* merit to the underlying arguments, namely that the trade deficit is not a natural consequence of correctly working markets, and that it does pose a threat to our prosperity or security in the long run.
I do not see why there being an increased demand for US dollars means that the dollar must be less competitive. If you look at money supply since the 90s, supply has grown to meet demand!
I started to dive into the discussion around other currencies, but let's just resolve that by saying I agree with your solution to Germany, Japan, S. Korea.
Functionally, I think where we differ the most is that I do not see currency as the biggest impediment to secondary sector. Instead, I would highlight that we have made it increasingly difficult to build and have added multiple layers of costs to accomplish various goals. This is most dramatic in some of the public spending and housing, but it also impacts capital spending across the board and private business have been able to relocate their capital to places with fewer obstacles.
To a point you have made, China also put its thumb on the scale here pretty significantly and we should act to address that. But if we could get more industry moving into Mexico & Central America, I think that's a win across the board for the US.
I don't follow your logic for the first paragraph. The money supply doesn't necessarily dictate the exchange rate in the way you're describing, and the exchange rate has risen against basically all trading partner currencies since the GFC, which is also around when our stagnation started.
To the middle paragraph, sure, agreed in full; I think the first couple comments I made after coming back here had some damning estimates regarding per-employee compliance costs for manufacturing, which are made worse by the same failures of regulation and land use that have tangled construction for other sectors up so badly.
Money's value is based mostly on perceived value and supply. The FED influences many things via the latter lever. If you look at the amount of the money supply since 2000, it has grown much faster than inflation almost every year except 2022 & 2023. I see that as foreign demand soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in increased money supply every year.
Let me ask a slightly different question, if the Fed created a new digital currency called $F and allowed foreign institutions to open an account with them and store this currency there. None of that money could be used in the US, but it could be exchanged for US dollars at a rate set by the FED. If global transactions currently settled in the US dollar switched to $F, would that solve for what you see is the issue?
"capital formation in the US secondary sector is insanely slow"
Sorry, forgot about this. Typo, mostly. Meant "low." I guess they're tantamount in some ways?
Private sector manufacturing net capital formation is barely positive in the US and has been for some time. We're barely replacing what depreciates beyond the point of use, and many SMEs have basically ridden the depreciation curve to nothing and then shut down. This is, in my thinking, mainly a result of the currency headwinds that are limiting their ability to compete with firms that have non-USD cost structures.
The Mar-a-Lago accords i think assume that the opponents will react in a very particular way and not in some other myriad ways which all make this strategy not work. I think if making threats was going to cow the world into quiescence, it would have done so already.
Surely you've seen me use the precise phrase "Trump is a moron," as well as several variants thereon, as I've discussed this issue in the last several days.
That he's an incompetent, stupid, useless sack of shit does not obviate the basic necessity of grappling with the underlying structural problems that are gutting our historic strengths in manufacturing productivity, cutting-edge scientific research, and the knowledge fields which bridge the gap between the two.
I'm not sure how Trump figures in this response. You asked about a questionable assumption Miran was making, and you were given one ("Miran presupposes no country would push back") that has nothing to do with Trump.
I read Matty's post as claiming that Miran's theory of "exorbitant privilege" has questionable assumptions baked into it, and wrote accordingly, not that his plan for resolving it has questionable assumptions.
I can see the other interpretation, now that you point it out, and agree that this is a supremely stupid, likely-to-fail way of resolving the structural issue I've been writing about.
"This demand really took off in earnest after the Asian Financial Crisis and has only grown since, which is why the USD is 25-30% stronger relative to our major trade partners than it was on January 1, 2000."
Obviously, we're in total agreement. I'd just add the additional layer that separate from the organic demand for US$, China as been manipulating their currency this entire time.
Of course. There is no reason whatsoever in hell that as China's per capita manufacturing productivity has more than doubled and the sophistication of its enterprises increased manyfold over the last decade, its currency should have weakened by close to 20%.
Again quoting myself (I find myself doing this a lot lately): "Hell, the bull case for Trump was that he was smart enough to do this *only* to China in alignment with Japan, Korea, France, Italy, the UK, Canada, Poland, and others, forcing Germany along for the ride, and extending potential advantages to SE Asian and Latin American nations to bribe them to join in too and climb the value chain at China's expense.
Turns out he's an absolute fucking moron, but ramming a red hot piker up the Party's ass is the correct thing to do and has been every single day of every year for the last two decades and counting."
How does the power of the dollar affect capital formation in the US sector? Is it because factories and investments etc are too expensive for companies to make relative to other nations?
This feels like an LSAT find the flawed reasoning question “unions don’t like NAFTA —> unions represent the working class —> free trade is bad for the working class,”
Correct answer is C: Unions don't always represent the working clas!
This is kind of a gimme question tbh.
Unions represent a slice of the working class and that slice of the working class was very specifically threatened by automakers moving some assembly plants to Mexico, but that slice of the working class was also threatened by automakers moving plants to Alabama.
The Aristocracy of Labor! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy#Criticism_of_business_unions_of_workers
If they only represent a portion of the working class, and that portion is not "representative" - which, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue it is - then to say they "represent the working class" is misleading, at best. (Not sure if you disagree with that.)
Hell, a lot of union members aren’t even “working class” by any definition (particularly when you get into public-sector unions.)
that slice of the working class makes more than some assistant professors. i have little sympathy
“Losing weight with healthy eating and exercise is a good idea; losing weight by getting cholera is not.” Matt as always an expert in pointing out true things that are true.
How do you define working class nowadays? The term conjures images of factory and manual-labor jobs (like longshoreman), but most unions represent people in broadly-defined service jobs which comprise ~80% of the workforce. I can’t think of one area of the service sector that will be helped by Trump tariffs. (i.e. point #5, more or less)
Is an argument being made that some or many of these people would move to better jobs in this newly rejuvenated manufacturing sector? The number of those jobs has got to be relatively small, especially if one’s assuming they’d be well-paid. Considering most would want to locate in non-union states, zero guarantees there. I dunno
Man, it's such a loaded term. I think the best way to slice it when you're talking politics is by education attainment. Because really, when Dems complain about losing the working class, they're complaining about losing non-college educated voters.
I think it's people who have jobs that do not require a college degree and also do not work in offices.
But definitions vary and it's a fuzzy term.
To me the receptionist at my office is not working class, even if she wouldn't count as a "skilled worker"
Not professional, managerial, or ownership is probably a good set of criteria to start with. But if we want to talk about class, then, in America, you begin to get into mannerisms and customs, because the owner of a small business is not a worker in the "worker/manager/owner" scheme, but could very will be working class.
Non-office jobs. Construction, agriculture, factories sure, but also auto repair, trades, retail and warehouse, logistics/transportation/maritime, cleaning services, health aids (home and institutional), public safety and enlisted military.
This is a great question. I'd be curious as to what most Americans think, and I'd be curious if this is moldable. Part of the issue with trying to implement pro-union policies is that many Americans have never been in a union and view this as help going to someone else. Is pro-working class policy the same?
Hard disagree on the solution. The question assumes unions represent the working class. The poor reasoning would be then to assume the unions dislike of NAFTA means free trade is bad for the working class. No facts are presented for that conclusion.
Let’s take that comment further: Why would the working class have a single point of view on anything? Seems like Doordash workers have their own particular issues distinct from, say, steel workers.
One could say “solidarity” and in a country like France, that is still a thing - but perhaps this is because the government in France is a single source for most benefits.
Is There Nowhere To Hide?
What Is The Flight To Quality Safe Haven Asset this time around??
With the dollar weakening, it sure doesn't seem to be US Treasuries. Gold, maybe? Swiss bonds? Dutch, German, Korean, or Japanese bonds???
Teacher unions are likely fine with low tariffs.
I think what I find concerning is that the tariff plan is so breathtakingly insane, we're leaving the land of 'normal if corrupt politics' and entering..... something else. I can at least understand suboptimal, protectionist laws that benefit noisy domestic groups (the Jones Act, tariffs on pickup trucks, etc.) I can at least understand blatant corruption (Trump memecoins. Or, going back further in time, George H.W. Bush pardoning his co-conspirators in Iran Contra).
When we start to do random policies that hurt the whole economy and have very very few domestic backers, however- this seems like the direct road to something more like Maoism. We're leaving a 'personality cult' and entering something that I would just call a cult. It's been a long time since I took my sociology of fascism class, but what I remember is that the difference between 'regular' conservatism and fascism is that the former wants to conserve the existing power arrangements- and the latter wants to dramatically re-order society. Again, Maoism. Cheerful Tuesday morning posting!
This is why I'm actually long term not too concerned. The hardcore Trump cult has a ceiling of 40% and it has no heir and he is old.
Indeed, the best argument that there's nothing to worry about is he is very old and unhealthy and none of his followers have his charisma. If Trump were 20 years younger, outright dictatorship would be a virtual certainty.
Can I say something a bit... out there?
Trump doesn't have to "die" for quite some time.
Oh, sure - the man born in Queens in June of 1946, his body and his consciousness and his memories. will die, almost certainly within the next 20 years.
But AI Trump doesn't have to die. You could have a guy in a tacky blue suit decomposing six feet under Bedminister Golf Club and still have his image go out on TV and order his boundlessly devoted supporters to do "his" bidding.
And who in the cult is going to question "him"? 110 and going strong? Sure, why not? He's got RFK's health secrets!
I'm sure that there is already an AI chatbot that can easily match Trump in terms of content and coherence
Ehh... Even now he's going to probably get blocked by the courts, and again, his hardcore base is 35-40% of the population, not a majority. Enough to be a majority of the party that wins half the time, but no more than that.
I am not going to keep arguing with the everything will be okay and there's nothing to worry about crowd. You have been thoroughly discredited at every turn and it's only two months in. If you can't update on new information then you're not the intelligent above the fray rational entity you think you are.
What? That is a wild mischaracterization of what I just said. All I said is that I don't think he would successfully become a dictator. That's a far cry from "there's nothing to worry about."
EVERYBODY PANIC!! DOOM!! DOOM DRAWETH NIGH UNTO US!!
With regards to predictions, here are some of yours:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/thursday-thread-2a6/comment/76196262
(In fact I said I was going to save it so as to come back and reevaluate it later.)
Out of six predictions, I'd give you 1.5 *so far* - pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters and half a point for the migrants being rounded up (and I'm being generous - the courts at least seem to be putting the brakes on that). Do you still agree with all of these?
Haha. Those were my predictions for bad things that could happen over the course of 4 years! I was extremely pessimistic and feel as if I was wrong on the optimistic side. I would go much darker now.
- But yes, I absolutely believe Trump will imprison political enemies. He says he will, why wouldn't we believe him?
- Trump has wanted to withdraw from NATO since his first term. He says he will. Why wouldn't we believe him?
I would say at least 4/6 are bet-your-life certainties. Political enemies might be subjective depending on who he imprisons and what the charges are. And there will definitely shenanigans around elections in 2026 and 2028, but what that'll constitute exactly might be open to some interpretation.
You can definitely take over a country with 35-40% supporters, especially if most of them are male and gun owners.
How do you guys even get to 35%. There's about 340million people here, and almost 100 million are kids. Trump himself had about 77 million votes in 2024. So that's 77/340 = 23%. I very much doubt that ALL of those 77 million are hard core cult types. So his true maga base isn't above 20% of people. 77/287 = 27% if you exclude kids. Am I missing something?
One problem is that we septugenarians are well aware of our mortality. Trump knows that he doesn't have to live through the long term consequences of his actions: he can just have "fun" now.
Vance seems to agree with him on the America First stuff, though, and I see absolutely zero reason to discount JD's chances of winning the presidential election in 2028. I also worry the coming recession will be in the rear view mirror by 2028, which sets up (yet another!) challenging cycle for Democrats. Sigh.
(Yeah, I know: not much sense in worrying about things several years away, especially things I don't control. But that's the way I roll these days. It's hard to keep one's chin up. Grim times for sure.)
Yeh but Vance has the charisma of a door stop.
"Yeh but Vance has the charisma of a door stop."
I have never seen a doorstop inspire loathing and visceral revulsion before, but then again I have never seen a doorstop wear heavy mascara before, either.
And at least when I find a doorstop wedged into couch cushions, it's like, furniture on furniture action, I don't judge.
>Yeh but Vance has the charisma of a door stop.<
That's your mental model of how US presidential elections work? Not mine. I've become more of a "structural factors" guy, not less. Last November really drove that home for me.
The thing is, until there's a change to the current paradigm, the Republican POTUS nominee heads into the general election with, what, an absolute guarantee of a minimum 47-48% of the two party vote? (Same as the Democratic nominee).
If we're in a strong recovery in 2028, the Republican nominee will be at least a modest favorite would be my guess.
They can just steal the election, because liberals have collectively decided to never be suspicious of anything as an overreaction to decades of ridiculous, unsubstantiated and implausible right-wing allegations. I don't think people realize how much they could do in plain sight and have the corporate media scold anyone who questions it for a second.
What would you have people do?
(And I swear to G-d, if I read the words "general strike" my eyes will roll so hard they fall out of my head and roll down the hallway and stairs, out the entrance of my apartment building, and into the street where they get run over by a city bus.)
No cult of personality there!
I kind of agree, but:
1) I also think Trump has vastly negative charisma
2) Vance is slick -- he did better against Walz in the debate than Trump ever did against Harris. Some of that is on Walz, but not all of it.
He wouldn't weild the cult that Trump has. He has better political skills than I initially gave him credit for, but he hasn't had to implement his own ideas yet, he's just batting cleanup for Trump. Nobody really cares about his sort of post-liberal project. There are some aspects of it that are popular, but the whole thing together isn't all that popular offline. He could win an election maybe if the economic circumstances are right and he leans in to his more normie persona that we saw at the debate. But if he's just trying to win @basedtradwhatever1488 he's not going to get anywhere.
I wouldn't put it past Drumpf to cause a recession that lasts longer than the rest of his term.
I mean I share your view. To be clear: they had a real shot at a Putin-style democratic coup. They're just too inept, and their leader is nuts.
But that doesn't mean I'm cheering. The damage they've done is permanent. And the more important question is: do they just come back every 4-8 years and take another bite at the apple? Is there any future to America as a nation if our politics is that unstable? (And more to the point, eventually they'll find someone more competent.)
Even if Trump's withdrawal from the scene results in the loss of MAGA (although I'm afraid that Trump will destroy our electoral infrastructure so that his authoritarian/oligarch successors will continue) I would still like to see some people go to jail as a detriment for future violators and as a new set of judicial precedents.
Speaking of jail, I wish we had laws and regulations that can address the **intentional emotional abuse of a group of people**. It's not only immigrants but also federal workers. I see this as a precursor to outright violent and economic oppression of a group of people. However it's not being discussed much philosophically or sociologically beyond complaints of the "cruelty" of it all. I want it to be prosecutable as something like a war crime.
Criticizing the agents of the State is a war crime, and firing them is economic oppression?
Why not State and local officials as well?
I think that very quickly runs into First Amendment issues.
The long term concern is this serves as a moment for other countries to reevaluate who they do business with.
It would be insane if a company intentionally created a strategy to piss their customers and suppliers off and creating a moment for them to create new relationships with other companies.
I just don’t see how we ever fully recover from this idiocy.
That is my biggest concern. I fear we're doing long term damage to our own credibility that will be hard to build back even if this is an abberation.
To be fair to Trump, Navarro and others, mercantilism, while long discredited as crank economics, is a faith adhered to by millions of people. They think "money leaving the country" is ipso facto bad, and weakening. We've never had a president as stupid on matters of public policy as Trump is, I think, but this particular stupidity is shared by vast numbers of humans, plenty of them American (and more than a few of them who serve in Congress). It's not some esoteric belief system that requires reference to a Marxist totalitarian.
And the willingness to oppose Chairman Trump even among those who know he's bonkers need not be attributed to a cult, but by simple fear of job loss (primary challenges) and threats of violence.
BTW, one reason we have to have an independent Federal Reserve is the public basically doesn't understand monetary policy (most people are either wildly too tight-- "things should cost the same as they did when I was a kid", "the dollar value must always be strong"; or wildly too loose-- "the government can print as much money as it wants to and pay for anything we need").
It's really hard for the public to understand orthodox economics. It's especially hard now with the Internet and the proliferation of crank economics (Austrians, MMT, goldbugs, etc.).
This is what I was getting at yesterday, that when there’s no clear benefit to him it’s actually scarier. Someone compared it to Lysenkoism and I think that’s apt.
I feel so well read! That was the kook Soviet agriculturist, if I'm not mistaken?
Ten points to Gryffindor!
In Lysenkoism the ten points are then redistributed to the other three schools and the Head Boy of Gryffindor is sentenced as an Enemy of the People to ten years of hard labor planting orange trees above the Arctic Circle.
In Lysenkoism you have to say there are a hundred points.
Actually, in Lysenkoism, you have to say some other stuff, but I'm not trying to pick a fight right now.
Who could have possibly known that this would be the outcome of putting someone entirely unqualified in charge?
Like Biden?
Wait we're really doing whataboutism here?
One guy governed a bit below mediocrity and probably should have quit earlier, but actually delegated a lot of the running of the country to people who were mostly competent, even if you disagreed with their priorities and beliefs.
The other is a buffoon who surrounds himself with sycophants and is literally destroying the economy and making world war three more likely with his disastrous foreign policy. As in, this is a complete disaster even if you happen to want the same outcomes that the moron wants.
If you think these are the same, you just are not arguing in good faith.
I agree it is whataboutism. As for sycophants, I think they are tied. Otherwise, how could Biden have lasted so long when “less than mediocre” is a generous assessment. As for policies, it’s obvious from electoral results that a strong majority believed that a weird Trump was less a risk than continuation of Biden via Harris, who had proven herself a non-entity. I place Trump’s election squarely on the Democratic Party whose “mostly competent” agents bowed down to the nuts on the fringes, and worked hard to limit freedom of speech in order to advance their agendas.
I dislike Trump. That doesn’t mean that I have respect for Biden and the Democratic Party.
I didn’t ask you to?
If you really think that “strong majority” wanted any of this policy madness, I guess we’re done arguing. I think instead that they just all voted Trump as an expression of rage against the status quo that they did not like. So they fucked around, and now they are finding out that cutting off your nose to spite your face doesn’t really work.
I think it’s disgraceful that the republicans couldn’t get rid of Trump on 2020. I’d have not been happy to see the inevitable landslide republican victory in 2024, but at least I’d not be living this nightmare own goal of having my country destroyed. I’d love to be arguing about mundane policy differences of opinion right now.
Where, anywhere, in my reply did I indicate any support for Trump’s policies or that those who voted for him wanted them? I suggest that terms such as “moron” are not elements in reasoned debate. I possibly agree with much of what you hold, but I don’t think it reasonable to hold republicans disgraceful for recognizing the democrat’s detachment from core American values. Personally, I supported Haley who, to me, sounded saner than the rest. And I despise Trump.
Who was Biden’s equivalent of Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy, or Tulsi Gabbard?
You’re right
I don't think the sycophancy level is remotely similar. The evidence is in how they have responded to crises.
In Biden's case, things were going along reasonably well. He had a team whose vision closely aligned with his own, and -- very importantly! -- the chunks of each day during which he was lucid and energetic were large enough for them to get what course corrections they needed from him. They didn't need much, not only because they were aligned but also because he was consistent and reasonable. The fact that their time with the boss was gradually decreasing certainly didn't go unnoticed, but boiling frogs and all that, didn't raise any clanging alarm bells.
Until a crisis arrived. As it happens, that crisis wasn't a major threat to the country, it was a political crisis created by the debate. It's worth noting that the timing of that debate indicates that at least some people within his circle did see the problem and acted to highlight it so everyone else had to take it seriously.
The political crisis came and highlighted Biden's inability to be available for real crises and to campaign. There was some resistance to accepting it, but it didn't take that much for them all to accept and to turn on him. They remained superficially devoted to him... but they gave him the boot.
Now look at how Trump's people have responded to a real crisis, in addition to his random policy swings. Do you really think Biden's people wouldn't be sounding alarms if Biden were cratering the market while giving mutually contradictory reasons?
Hollywood has given us two views of what can happen when a non-politician/non-expert becomes president. Most people think it'll be #1. They are discovering that #2 is the truth.
#1. The "Dave" model. If we just put a regular guy into the presidency, he'll do common sense things that the politicians are too chicken/stupid/corrupt to do and life will get better.
#2. The "Homer" model. Homer's long-lost automotive CEO brother decides that Homer understands what typical Americans want, so he lets Homer design their next model. Homer picks a bunch of stupid ideas, stacks them all up, and ends up with something so terrible it bankrupts the company.
https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExYjdxeTM4cno3bnd4Nno4Y3JqMnF2Y253bjljdnJsbmxjNmlrYXJ1NyZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/l2JdSP4o5EZkTU16o/giphy.gif
Good point, except we didn't put a regular guy into the White House, we picked a spoiled, silver spoon, narcissistic grifter, one who isn't a politician or an expert because he's incapable of being those things.
Homer would be better! He's also incapable of being a politician or an expert, but he's more of a regular guy. He'd do showy, dumb things but wouldn't dismantle the federal government or deliberately trash the economy.
Homer is negligent, Trump is malicious. It's an important distinction. He's an evil incompetent.
But, how would Trump's power and effectiveness change if the "middle" of the country -- the persuadable Trump supporters, swing voters, and infrequent voters -- saw him as an evil genius versus as an incompetent moron? His power comes from the former: "yes, he creates chaos, but he's a business genius who will make my life better." If people saw him as incompetent, his power would wane.
True, he's both evil and incompetent. I don't think those persuadable voters see either of those facts, though. They don't see the chaos as evil.
But isn't this all part of normal corruption politics?
step 1: make Trump meme coin as vehicle for receiving enormous quantities of untrackable money
step 2: enact wide-ranging tariffs
step 3: receive bribe offers from industry leaders who want carve-outs
step 4: let the good times roll
Except for Step 1, isn’t this standard politics for both parties? Look at the tax code.
The scale and brazenness are very different. And of the two differences, I think it's the brazenness that matters the most. Quiet corruption coupled with efforts to keep others from being corrupt doesn't encourage more corruption. Open corruption coupled with dismantling of anti-corruption guardrails tells everyone "This is fine, get on board".
And my above characterization of the pre-Trump status quo actually overstates the case, I think. I think in most cases of pre-Trump corruption the actors were at least able to convince themselves that what they were doing wasn't bad for the country. Being able to convince your own conscience that what you're doing is okay even though corruption is bad is a significant guardrail, as opposed to not needing to because people from the top tell you that's how it's supposed to be done.
You are entering... another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of erratic, incoherent economic policy shifts, ego fragility, and resentment. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Trump Zone!
>so breathtakingly insane, we're leaving the land of 'normal if corrupt politics' and entering..... something els
This is somewhere in between bat deduction (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BatDeduction) and insane troll logic (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InsaneTrollLogic).
I mean yes, it’s been obvious all along that they want to dramatically reorder society if you listen closely to all the tech bros who want to use AI to remove the need for human labor. It would be great if we didn’t have so many dipshits on the left who agree that would be a good thing (because muh leisure time, or whatever.)
I think a lot of the tariff analysis, including Matt's here, underconsiders what I think is the most likely reason Trump is so fixed on tariffs: He literally thinks that it's a consequence free tax on another country
"Trump cannot understand any technical details" is batting close to 1.000 as an explanatory framework
If you look back at 80s anxieties about Japan, it’s not just that we’re passing up on a free lunch by not taxing them harder.
It’s also that persistent trade deficits cashed out in Japan steadily buying up more of America. More of our real estate, more of our corporations, bit by bit, on a trajectory that looked like eventually they’ll own everything and we’ll all just work for and rent from them.
I assume that Trump feels similarly about trade deficits in general, from that formative experience.
Which was a big enough cultural event that it’s a key plot element of Back To The Future II!
A number of the Michael Crichton / Tom Clancy pulp novels of the 80s have nefarious Japanese investors as villains or plot points. There's a line in Sphere (an acid trip of a book where a spacecraft terrorizes an undersea base of divers) where the plot stops so the characters can talk about how messed up it is that Pepsi is owned by the Japanese in the future.
Heck, that's a central part of the plot of Crichton's novel "Rising Sun," which was made into a major Hollywood film starring Sean Connery as an LAPD detective!
Debt of Honor is about Jack Ryan fighting a corporatist/fascist wing of the Japanese government, and at the end of the book a Japanese pilot flies an airliner into the Capitol, killing everyone except Jack Ryan, who becomes President on the last page.
Not to mention having a heavy influence on the aesthetic of Blade Runner.
I guess i'll add Die Hard. You can see where our anxieties were in 1988
Let us never forget that East Germany was reported to be on track to surpass the US in economic power during the same period. It was a period, like every other, of really stupid stuff pushed by purportedly intelligent people.
But if the goal is to raise revenue with other countries, then why negotiate them down? It literally makes no sense. I know nothing makes sense in Trump land, but is this just a goal of him finally being able to live out his bully fantasies on the world stage?
Bribes. The answer is bribes. Unironically this makes it more likely that we get aligned with autocracies (who have incentives to pay the ransom because an economic depression is bad news for an autocratic regime most of the time) than democracies (where being answerable to the general public creates the incentive to tell Trump to go fuck himself.)
Because it allows him a face-saving method to back down. The agreements he’ll be offered will amount to nothing, really, because his idea of what barriers there are is nonsense.
The only governments that are primarily funded by foreigners are those in countries with massive oil exports relative to their population (Norway, UAE, Qatar, Brunei)
29. Is the big one. I own a manufacturing export company. If sustained the tariffs will drive me out of business.
And yet I derive real comfort that this insanity might drive Trump's popularity down far enough to save our democracy.
At the next DNC, Dems should have business owners like you stand on stage and talk about they were impacted by Trump's tariffs.
Would I still be welcome if I relocate the company to Canada? (Not a joke)
workers and capitalists, unite!
Sorry you are in a tough position bud. Hang tough, and hopefully you can vocalize and keep sharing your story. I saw some news that if the tariffs stay in place that the US Chamber of Commerce may actually sue the Trump administration.
https://fortune.com/2025/04/07/chamber-of-commerce-lawsuit-trump-tariffs-liberation-day/
Maybe, they could use people like you to sign on.
It seems there's a dynamic at play where the uncertainty is heavily muting the responses from businesses. Almost no one wants to be the first ones out there loudly denouncing the situation or filing lawsuits if in three days Trump decides to declare victory after someone makes a verbal commitment to buy more soybeans and everything goes away.
Who knows how much retribution risk there might be if you're among that first group.
It's going to take a few weeks of businesses having to actually shell out millions of dollars in unplanned cash before things start to move, I think.
Of course, as tomtom50 says - the uncertainty damage, the relationship damage may well be done. It will take a long while to snake through to people's pockets - before the loss of investments and hiring starts to be widely felt.
Best wishes to you. It sucks that you've been put in this situation.
Stories of business and people trying to cope with the policies and uncertainty seem wildly under-reported to me. Stressing about what my employer can/will do and how this will play out is hitting me all day every day - it's an existential crisis for thousands of businesses.
I hope you're right. 90% of our business is export, 50% is China. Our competitors are German. Complicated industrial equipment, we need a container or two to ship a system.
We aren't very big, 50 people. Half our employees are mechanics, electricians, installers, etc, many of whom voted for Trump. The Canadian development office has been helpful (relocation to Canada). The rep, when he opened up, told us the betrayal is intensely felt. There is no going back.
It really is true. Even if we manage to keep a democracy there is no going back.
"A distinguishing characteristic of the policy course Trump has set us on is that people in his orbit keep offering justifications for it that are not only distinct but mutually contradictory, and then getting peeved if critics don’t accept their account of the real strategy."
Sounds just like the run-up to Iraq II in 2002. And that worked out just dandy.
Tariffmania seems vastly less coherent to my brain. The Iraq War was supposedly going to:
(1) Get rid of Saddam's WMDs. If you think 911 was bad, just wait until he gives a nuclear bomb to a Manhattan Al Qaeda cell; and,
(2) Install a democratic government in Iraq that will trigger a regional wave of democratization. Only via a fundamental transformation of governance in the Middle East will the appeal of jihadism be reduced, and until that happens, America is in grave danger.
Now, the above was based on lies, and it was also ludicrously utopian. But it had decent internal logic.
Trump's declaration of economic war on Planet Earth (minus Mexico and Russia) seems...indescribably crazy, incomprehensible and nonsensical. It's international relations as dreamt up by a guy down at the VFW working on his fourth boilermaker.
Right, *if* you believed that Saddam was building a nuclear bomb and was going to give it al-Qaeda, the only rational course of action was to get him out of power.
I've said it before, it wasn't entirely insane to believe this, because Saddam himself, in a world-historical miscalculation, was encouraging people to believe this out of the misguided notion that it could save him.
For what it is worth, the United States was also attacked. (I know most of the attackers were Saudi citizens)... So it at least makes it somewhat understandable that the people and country needed to respond. Trump doing this now for a bunch of conflicting reasons, either reeks of attention seeking, idiocy or both?
I believe an operation in Afghanistan was justified because of 911 (a brief operation, not a two decade one). But the invasion of Iraq was illegal, brutal, dishonestly justified, and a real calamity for the invader.
Totally agree. It also kicked off the migrant crisis in the EU which is still having lasting impacts to this day, and the damage politically cannot be understated.
Wasn't the Arab Spring the main cause of the migrant crisis?
I find it morbidly fascinating that the apologists are completely decoupled from the actual policy being implemented.
I was caught up in the propaganda machine back in 2002-03 (hey, I was in HS back then), so it’s interesting to see things from the other side.
There seems to be a tension between (1) those of his advisers who are saying it's all a brilliant negotiating ploy and (2) Trump himself, who doesn't appear to care about concessions. The vibe I get is he'd much rather have autarchy than zero-tariff access for American exporters.
Trump sincerely believes a big outflow of good and services from our shores that far exceeds the inflow of the same (by definition a state of affairs consistent with lower living standards) is highly desirable, and will also right our public finances.
Ironically, that is like colonialism in reverse. If your nation is a net exporter, it can be argued that you are the "bitch", not the other way around.
This is so funny because I was also in HS at the time and I was super pissed about all of this. I was promised an America that didn't spy on its citizens, put people in torture prisons, or invade countries on pretext.
I was too. Heck I know I have the personality and willingness to admit that in the absence of retrospective knowledge of GWB’s fictions/failures, that I would probably today support the invasion of Iraq during the shadow of 911.
My support of Dubya at the time was a more willful blindness, akin to that of today's highbrow conservatives. Conservatism just had to be right. Bush had to be right.
Otherwise, that meant those hippy-dippy, commie, bleeding-heart, godless Dems were right, and that just couldn't be true! If it were then the stars would fall from the sky and everything I'd ever known would be a lie!
Spoiler Alert: I eventually realized that the hippy-dippy commie bleeding heart godless Dems were right...
"...I eventually realized ...."
And the stars did *not* fall from the sky!
I hate it when Noam Chomsky is right.
Did Iraq II have the phenomena where not only are the justifications mutually contradictory, but the justifiers refuse to articulate a clear overall strategy?
Colin Powell, who had a well-earned reputation for integrity, was very convincing in his WMD presentation at the UN Security Council:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell%27s_presentation_to_the_United_Nations_Security_Council
I (25 years old, voted for Gore, was in the dust cloud on 9/11) thought my friends who participated in NYC's anti-war protests were LARP'ing the 60's. I told them "at some point you have to trust the people with security clearances." Turns out the hippies were right and I was wrong.
"Turns out the hippies were right and I was wrong."
A spicy soundbite, Madame Secretary!
(Darn it, if only your username had the double hockey sticks!)
I would say in hindsight that there wasn’t much of an actual “theory of the facts on the ground”. It was mostly just hopium and handwavium about how “democracy” would transform Iraq.
And to be fair, it *could* have, but engineering a democratic society would have required understanding actual Iraqi social dynamics — the Sunni/Shia split, the role of the Kurds, etc. You would have wanted to create a positive sum system that encouraged compromise and coexistence, not just plop a parliament down on them and call it a day.
I would agree with Charles that Bush’s theory was internally consistent, just woefully incomplete.
"...mostly just hopium and handwavium about how “democracy” would transform Iraq."
And any suggestion that switching from a strongman dictatorship that had kept Sunnis, Shia, Kurds together under the brutal thumb of the minority Ba'ath, to an open liberal multi-ethnic democracy was not going to be quick or easy, was met with cries of feigned outrage that you must either hate democracy or have the racist belief that brown people were incapable of democratic self-governance.
Yes, you heard it: the party of Strom Thurmond, Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan was accusing people of racism, in order to avoid answering questions about how they intended to foster democracy after they had bombed the shit out of the natives.
But then I guess that's no stranger than the party of Elon Musk accusing universities of antisemitism.
In hindsight, I think the best strategy would’ve looked something like a federal government structure for Iraq, with a scheduled constitutional convention every 10 years so that they could adjust any issues.
I’d break down the regions of the country into federated states, give them a Senate like ours — something I generally oppose, but I think would work for the purposes of keeping the peace — but with three seats per state (on a rolling 2-year schedule of six-year terms) and calibrated so that the states’ populations roughly corresponded to various ethnic and religious demographic proportions at the national level. IE so that Sunni-majority states would send enough Senators to their congress such that it matched the national proportion of Sunnis.
I’d structure the government so that it’d be highly federalized, as well. Most of the budget would be run thru the state governments, not the federal one, so that national impasses wouldn’t block budgets from passing. The Iraqi people would have felt like they were able to control their own policy in their own states, rather than have Sunni, Shia, Kurd, or Baath running the show.
The national government would mostly exist to keep up the military. National oil revenues would be its primary funding source, which would therefore strongly motivate the military to keep the oil flowing. Each state would have police forces and a modest militia, but none strong enough to oppose the military.
"...I think the best strategy would’ve looked something like...."
You're clearly auditioning an "alternative history" question for Matt this week. Go ahead! Ask him!
Biden proposed a partition. I actually always kind of liked that idea.
AIUI the major problem with a partition was that the rest of the country didn’t want to give up Kurdistan - as usual, it’s the oil.
That’s why I think that a more strongly federalized plan would have worked better. The national parliament was always hitting impasses that held up ordinary business. You circumvent those impasses by letting each state make its own decisions. Keep each one locally happy, and they won’t try to tear apart the national interest.
We probably would have had to impose a system of distributing oil revenues and protecting those revenue streams, though, to make it all work. The states would have eyed the oil money, but without it as a carrot they have no motivation to hold the country together.
I cannot collect the entire set of random, diffuse, contradictory justifications that were offered in the run-up to Iraq II, but it's worth remembering some of the standouts:
"..."Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business," which [Jonah] Goldberg remembered [neo-con Michael] Ledeen saying...."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen
"We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!" That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman
Whelp. I guess Donald Trump is not unique among Republican presidents for doing terrible things for terrible, baffingly reasons.
One really weird parallel with GWB's Iraq and today is the DOGE boys. Immediately after the invasion a bunch of ignorant, arrogant, true believer near children were sent to Iraq to run the country. As if being a successful college Republican who could spout off about free men and free markets would qualify you to run a country riven by sectarianism, a history of colonialism, and despotism.
Democrats and the left always aspire to organize the youth, but it's the Republicans that have gone all-in on Lord's Army-style child-soldier vanguards of the revolution.
What the left misses about the youth is that there was also a Hitler Youth. The point is, sometimes young people are fascists like the DOGE kids.
Maoist China and the Khmer Rouge are being literally erased in these comments. I'm shaking rn.
“…the Khmer Rouge are being literally erased….”
Where does Pol Pot go to get his apology?
Everyone is talking about abundance as the next political movement, but I’m here still carrying around 1 Billion Americans.
Matt writes six days a week and pods once. Ezra is running a take ratio of roughly half that?
Who's the real abundance writer?? Just asking questions.
ezra is stretching it to think that housing abundance and green energy will forge a winning coalition. anyone who owns their own house (~65% of households) will not benefit from building housing, and green energy makes normies yawn or worse.
substack takes abundance is an even worse tactic than ezra proposes.
"anyone who owns their own house (~65% of households) will not benefit from building housing"
I am very familiar with your views on YIMBY so i don't expect this to change them, but for the other SB readers, I can provide at least 3 reasons that's not true:
1. Sooner or later, most homeowners will need to buy a home.
2. Local tax base (declining population = declining taxes = declining services).
3. Having a lot of homelessness in your community is unpleasant for everyone whether you own a home or not.
1 Billion Americans is the original abundance book! Abundance avant-le-lettre if you will.
Abundance is people, my friend.
People are abundance
Reminds me of Negan repeatedly yelling in frustration 'people are a resource!' to his underlings in The Walking Dead
hell is other people enjoying abundance you don’t share
Waiting for the sequel, “Two Billion Americans”
Two Billion Two Americans
One Billion Americans: Tokyo Land Use Laws
For funsies, I will write a book countering Matt's thesis.
"Twelve Hundred Americans."
Our time will come
The thing that has me confused is why there is so little discussion of the idea that Trump doesn't have the authority to impose these tariffs in the first place.
I wrote this letter to my representatives (all Republicans, and modified for Todd Young who is at least going in the right direction). It made me feel a little better.
Dear [],
I am writing because I am very concerned about President Trump's recent actions on tariffs. In addition to being ruinous to the country and to the economy, they appear to be entirely illegal. Tariff power is explicitly given to Congress in the constitution, and although Congress is allowed to delegate this sort of authority to the executive, the major questions doctrine articulated by the Supreme Count specifies that Congress needs to be much more clear if it is to delegate its authority to make such a major change [1]. In addition, it appears that the law the president claims gives him authority to impose these tariffs appears to do no such thing --- no president has imposed tariffs before under the IEEPA and the act, which is very specific about the actions the president may take, does not include any language allowing for the president to impose tariffs [2].
I am appalled that so few Republicans are calling out this reckless and illegal power grab. I was taught as a child that we are a nation of laws, and I sincerely hope that that is still the case.
[1] Per Ilya Somin, writing at https://reason.com/volokh/2025/04/03/why-trumps-liberation-day-tariffs-are-illegal/
[2] Both claims per Peter Harrell, writing at https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-case-against-ieepa-tariffs
The ultimate discussion there will happen in the courts, and we'll have to see what happens there.
This comment should be higher, Congress (specifically Mike Johnson and MAGA) have straight up abdicated their responsibilities because they don't want to piss off the purse strings of their party and get harassed by their fellow party members.
The Supreme Court is not going to save us. The law is not a mathematical test that you can apply to determine that a particular action is correct or incorrect. SCOTUS does not look at the equation 3x2=5 and mark it as incorrect.
The Courts are a human component of government subject to all the venality and biases of the other two branches. I think the current Court make up is MORE venal and biased than other iterations, but even if it isn't, it is certainly not going to try to derail the major policy initiative of the Executive when there is at least a fig leaf of statutory support, and more importantly when the Congress is controlled by the same party as the Court and is taking no action itself to try to confront the Executive on its own behalf.
Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, I don't have any special insight into how the justices think.
I do, however, believe very strongly that this attitude that the law doesn't matter, it's politics all the way down, and so on, is bad for the country. You're right that the law is constructed by people, but we are all much better off when we all believe in the rule of law and take issue with those who wish to undermine it.
I'm an attorney, and believe deeply in the application of precedent and facts. I was sugar coating my disdain for the current SCOTUS. I think it is much more biased and venal than previous iterations. It was constructed from such blatant political expediency, and with such a distinct ideological bent, that it is uniquely incapable of rising to this moment.
To steel man, if that's even the right term for this, its probable inaction here, I would say this. Our law, the Constitution, is constructed with an underlying assumption that each co-equal branch of government will jealously guard its own prerogatives. The power being usurped here is that of the legislative branch, and the legislative branch could easily remedy this problem and take back its power to tariff. If the Legislature isn't going to guard its own prerogatives, it is inappropriate for the Judicial branch to step in.
I think the actual thing happening is the Court is just as cowardly and supine as the Republican controlled Congress.
I think I'm much more optimistic on the court pushing back than you are, but if they genuinely sign off on what appears to be powers generated ex nihilo for Trump but continue to obstruct every Democratic executive initiative they can think of a justification for obstructing, I see no reason why the Democratic party should consider itself bound by SCOTUS. The legitimacy of the court is a trilateral contract between the court and the other two branches, and it is not a future Democratic president's fault that the court in this scenario would have decided to break that contract entirely.
My preference would be to just end the court's power to act as a political check by packing it, but I would not be overly bothered with a Democratic president just saying they do not see the Court's authority as supreme.
I've posted a version of this before. I think this court is very jealous of maintaining its prerogatives, which in our schema is good, if Congress was doing the same the system would be clunking along the way it's intended. But Trump is the first President in modern times who very plausibly might directly defy the Court on a matter that means a lot to him.
So the Court is going to twist itself in knots, using venue, standing, non-justiciability, etc. to avoid that confrontation. Because the real nightmare for the Court is that if Trump can defy it, then the next Democratic President, who unquestionably will hold different ideological views than the current majority, will also be able to defy the Court.
With the exception of birthright citizenship, which I don't think matters all that much to Trump personally, I don't think you'll see the Court get in Trump's way. They'll impose some process requirements, which is what I think we're starting to see with the deportation cases, so that there is the appearance of standing up and maintaining their power, but in the end Trump will get 90% of what he wants.
This great - just copied it to my state reps!
At this point the legitimacy of the unitary executive seems to be a given for both parties. The only people consistently complain are the likes of Reason magazine that everyone likes to disregard.
I'm not sure the partisans view executive power as a problem, just a bigger political cudel as a reward for obtaining power.
My view is that:
- House Republicans are all hostage to being primaried because their districts are gerrymandered. That's really keeping them silent and on the sideline.
- CEOs are keeping their pie-holes shut because the white house can carve out tariff exemptions for friends, so no matter how stupid you think this is, if you have share holders you have to play nice and hope to get a bone.
These are all stories of incentive problems. I still find the cowardice frustrating.
So maybe if there's enough consensus in conservative circles that this is all bad we could get a legal fix?
Can this be an article of impeachment?
It is also the case that sound trade policy is undermined by the US's dysfunctional electoral system. Since the path to political power in the US overwhelming depends on electoral success in a few purple midwest states, politicians inevitably set policy based on the needs of the loudest constituents in those states, rather than in the nation. Service workers in California don't give a flying fuck about tariffs, but automobile workers in Michigan sure do -- and the latter influence federal elections a lot more than the former.
Even in Michigan and Pennsylvania, service workers hugely outnumbers factory employees. Democrats, to their detriment, really drank the kool-aid on the political valorization of manufacturing workers.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/democrats-biden-wrong-kind-of-economic-populism-by-dani-rodrik-2024-12
I want to be clear I have nothing against factories. A job in a manufacturing plant is good, honest labor. But so is a job in a hospital, hotel or construction site.
I think an important distinction is there are more vertical paths for career growth in a manufacturing plant than in services / retail. "Services" is too broad of a category but in retail specifically there's often just a single path up through management (e.g., floor to store supervisor then store manager). But in mfg. there's additional functional silos for growth (e.g., procurement, vendor management, inventory management, production planning, QA, outbound logistics, etc.). In retail orgs., these roles / functions are almost always centralized so the stores / branches can run leaner.
I agree about retail but I don't think this is true for other services. Retail is uniquely well-suited to corporate centralization, and low-level experience in retail is uniquely bad at making you a more attractive candidate for higher-level corporate roles. Hospitals and hotels both have lots of different roles for upward movement. To use hotels because it's an example I'm more personally familiar with, most of these functions are done at the property level and relatively few things are done by centralized corporate offices. As a front office person, you could end up as a supervisor, but you could also end up as a rooms controller, vendor management, inventory, etc., and then the corporate offices almost always hire from these mid-level property roles. I work with a lot of fairly high-level people at Marriott, Hyatt, etc. every single day and almost all of them have a work history that includes a low or mid-level property role.
I think the bigger problem (IMO) is what do you do with people who are just... not that competent? Like the nature of these things is that they are pyramid shaped, and this is true in manufacturing too. There are just going to be people who are in the low level jobs for 20 years because they don't get promoted. In union plants this wasn't a problem because the union negotiated for seniority pay that didn't really reflect the level of added productivity, but if you're just talking basic market reality outside of that, I am not sure any economic configuration is going to stop people in the lower part of the labor market distribution from being low-wage workers their whole lives.
I don't disagree with this - I'm a native Michigander and liked this comment. But I think the politics of trade have been more broadly pernicious.
Neither the benefits to normies nor the tradeoffs for workers in the most affected sectors have been, in my experience (I started my working life as a trade policy analyst in the NAFTA era), adequately/honestly discussed. Back in the day, there was the "political safety valve" of trade adjustment assistance. But over time the pipes sprung leaks, now the valve has blown, and the political consensus that Americans (as well as everybody else) overwhelmingly benefit from trade has vanished in the absence of leadership and honesty.
A big part of this, IMO, has been the willingness of people in politics who know better to engage in a kind of pantomime of support for protectionism, as well as an unwillingness to speak to the benefits. I remember, back in the 90s, Texas Republican Phil Gramm giving a speech on the floor in which he likened free trade to love (!!!) - everyone is better off. This was not a weird position to take at the time; I just remember it because I found the "love" angle so funny (especially coming from a cranky guy like Gramm). But where have the defenders of free trade been over the last decade? I'm tuning out most news for the sake of my sanity and have been for quite a while, so maybe I'm just missing it. But I've been honestly shocked by the supine, craven lack of response to so many of Trump's actions. Is *this* worth it?
Now I work in a different field and I see an analogous dynamic playing out. In city planning, we've paid obeisance to The Community such that policies and projects with benefits more diffuse than a few city blocks can be quite easily shot down by well-organized and -funded NIMBYs. One of the projects I worked on, on and off, when I was in NYC was a sanitation garage a couple of blocks from my building. It was an ideal location, on a City-owned parcel near 23rd St and the FDR, but it started before I worked for the city and still hasn't happened, in part because siting Sanitation infrastructure was incredibly difficult owing to "community opposition" in the face of a leadership vacuum in which council chairs and mayors dither and defer to the loudest voices.
Governing is - as we know here! - hard. Focusing on stuff that people like is good, and Democrats should do much, much more of it. But people elected to govern should not pretend that there are no tradeoffs or choices required. During my adult life, politicians at all levels of government have - with trade, with urban infrastructure including housing, with many other things - seemed to convince themselves that this doesn't have to be acknowledged, that maybe one weird trick will magically make the downside disappear, that we *can* hold back change.
The Democrats have been twisted in a bind on this for years. Sure, there are more service workers than factory workers in Michigan, but the factory workers have disproportionate influence through the AFL-CIO. It's been very hard for Democratic candidates to win primary elections while pissing labor off, and also to win national general elections in which manufacturing-heavy states place such a prominent role.
An important turning point was the TPP, which would have been an amazing accomplishment if it had more robust Democratic support, though Trump would have killed it anyway.
You can see what a mess the Democrats have made of this issue in their current discourse, e.g., "Yes, tariffs are great to restore our economy, but not the way Trump is doing them."
I guess the silver lining is that Trump is messing up so badly that he will give tariffs a black eye.
As for the local issues, yes, those are equally messed up. I see some signs that Democratic leaders are trying to push back against this stuff but Democrats continue to pay a heavy electoral price for catering to the few who are loud rather than the many.
I find it difficult to know whether the "weird gender anxieties" of it all are just an incredibly Twitter-brained irrelevant niche, or sort of a canary in a coal mine of something broadly felt but inchoate and mostly unspoken.
It seems obviously gender coded in the sense that we’re almost always talking about jobs that people picture in their heads as manly because of historical traditions, e.g., auto and steel workers. Obviously this is dumb-sewing shoes or running a robot that assembles iPhones is not masculine coded. But the very nature of Trump’s Cultural Revolution is a push to 1950s fictional television lifestyles.
Masculine-coded just means someone can support their family, even if it includes a second income from a female spouse. If the culture and economy make that possible, we're good.
People find it humiliating to work in personal services, no matter how robust the demand.
I almost think this has more to do with Protestant work ethic than with gender. It’s deep in our national psyche that something slimy is going on when you’re paying for a task that you could plausibly do yourself (“burrito taxi”). One aspect of the denigration of this type of work is it being female-coded. But it can equally be teenager-coded, or immigrant-coded. The important thing is, not befitting an adult male citizen.
Manufacturing is set up as a haven from the repulsion people feel about service work. The “alienation” factor allows them to feel less servile. But I think Matt is right that construction would be better fit for this purpose while also having more positive social effects.
Nothing manlier than feeding textile blanks to a robot, just like thousands of Vietnamese women do every day
Textiles has been a female business forever (see: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory)
Right, hitting Vietnam, China, and Thailand with tariffs might bring some jobs to NC or wherever, but there's nothing really all that manly about most of those factory jobs, and that applies to most other manufacturing. Most of it is inspection, buffing up some rough spots, packing, unjamming, etc., while being up close and personal with a machine/robot all day. Maybe people prefer this to service jobs, but it's odd to think we all need to pay higher prices, and have higher collective anxiety, to make these people more comfortable doing low-skill work. I agree with the OP that ideally they would be doing more construction and semi-skilled services associated with it as part of an abundance strategy, but I guess old fashioned widgets are where it's at.
Now, there's going to need to be engineers, machinists, and technicians to keep things humming, and maybe those roles are traditional manly roles, but those are all medium to very high skilled positions, last I knew those people were not having too much trouble finding work. Where are these people going to come from to build and run all these new factories?
Protestant work ethic and gender politics are definitely part of it but I think a lot of the reason service jobs are seen as humiliating is downstream of the fact that working these jobs often involves being expected to eat an endless series of shit sandwiches and do it with a smile on your face. We’re the land of “the customer is always right”, we have no shortage of low trust scumbags willing to exploit that to get free stuff or feel powerful, and our labor laws and unions are weak enough that you don’t really have a lot of recourse against management fuckery other than quitting and getting a better job.
I think the "weird gender anxieties" are a partial explanation. I think a more important explanation is some bizarre right-wing version of Marx's Labor Theory of Value. America is so wealthy and productive that a lot of people get paid for their brains instead of their physical labor, which seems unfair to people who don't get paid for their brains. That a lot of women get paid for their brains and a lot of men don't adds to this explanation, even if it is not causal.
It actually is quite unfair. Nature doesn't pass out IQ points in equitable fashion—nor the various enabling factors (responsible, loving parents, parents with money, a nurturing home environment, schools, etc) that put people on the path to successful adulthood.
Trump's solution is to penalize the 90% of us who don't work in factories.
My solution is to grow the economy so big and rich that skimming a bit off the top to enable everybody to live well isn't painful.
Nature also doesn't pass out NFL QB talent in equitable fashion
You don’t have to be an NFL QB to support a family. You do pretty much have to be an upper echelon white collar worker to house and educate a family in a major metropolitan area, if you don’t own a house already.
Maybe to do it on one income, but two-income blue collar families can still do quite well in those areas.
Looking at MSAs #10-25, the only ones where NAR's qualifying income for a single family home is materially below $100k HHI are Detroit, St. Louis, and San Antonio.
Matt and Cartoons Hate Her have both written about the idea that a meaningful number of men have difficulty getting a girlfriend/wife in a modern knowledge-based economy in which single women and single men are close to income equality.
I do wonder if this is a situation like the hypothesized problem with polygamous societies: youngish men who cannot get a wife through prosocial behavior often behave antisocially.
There doesn't seem to be an easy answer. I feel bad for the TFWNOGF men, but trade policies designed to increase gender income inequality seem like a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons.
It's all fantasy anyhow. Krugman ran some numbers the other day. I'm spitballing from memory, but he wrote something to the effect of: even if Trump's policies managed to shift manufacturing's share of GDP back to the level of 1970, we'd still only a see a miniscule increase in manufacturing's share of employment (less than 2 points, IIRC).
Trump's vision cannot work. A president is just a government official. He's not a time lord who can transport us back to another century.
EDIT: Here's the passage from Paul Krugman: "But look at my first chart above. Manufacturing as a share of employment has fallen about 17 points since 1970. Complete elimination of the trade deficit would undo only around 2.5 points of that decline. So even if tariffs “worked,” which they won’t, they would fall far short of restoring manufacturing to its former glory."
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-note-on-trade-deficits-and-manufacturing
I mean sure but the problem in a polygamous society (older men simply force the young women to marry them) is different than this problem (women deciding that being single is better than these losers.)
polygamous societies are grounded in massive income inequality. much better to be the 4th wife of a very rich man than the first wife of a very poor one. little "forcing" necessary. the economics takes care of it.
Definitely a different path, just one of the same traits.
Well yeah, but in one case the problem is solved by banishing the young men engaging in antisocial behaviors and in the other the problem is solved by… the young men engaging in self-improvement. It’s unclear what “prosocial” behaviors aren’t being adequately rewarded.
Why isn't "ban polygamy" the answer in the former? It seems that polygamy is good for a few old men and bad for almost everyone else.
I'm not sure that self-improvement is a solution to the latter. Gender income equality drives the latter; I don't see a way for men as a whole to self-improve without women also self-improving. Some individual men can self-improve, but they're just going to reshuffle themselves relative to other men.
It ain't just Twitter -- Fox is pushing it too:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/04/trumps-manly-tariffs
Maybe. But then it’s simply never explained why men put out of manufacturing work by automation or offshoring cannot simply get an associate’s degree (or hell, a bachelor’s) and work a desk job, a career path that did not seem to elude a lot of not particularly bright women I knew growing up.
As a matter of politics, it didn’t go over well when Biden tried telling coal miners to learn to code.
As a matter of fact, American men tend to worse than American women at being agreeable and conscientious, but they are more willing to accept unpleasant/dangerous working conditions in return for more cash. If you structure your economy such that men are not given the option to exercise their relative strengths, they won’t be as successful economically.
So basically men are mad at the existence of a modern economy and crying about it.
Given that women tend to prefer higher earning partners, it’s not clear to me that hurting men’s earnings helps women, as a class.
But the key thing here is that men vote. (Not as much as women, less conscientious, but not zero.) A political program which neglects men’s interests will suffer electorally.
You’d have to convince them that men have interests as a class, but I feel exactly zero solidarity with other men who decided that they’d rather not go to college because they thought working a desk job was something for women and girly men and are obsessed over stereotypes of masculinity; in fact I consider my interests directly counter to theirs. I’m not the only one, either.
To the extent you are opposed to the interests of non-college men, you shouldn’t draw attention to it. They outnumber you, and they’re better distributed for the Senate and Electoral College.
Men are mad that society is rapidly devaluing the ways that they are able to contribute, without providing a way forward. Then people like you come in and say 'just get a degree you baby' like that's entirely possible or desirable for everyone.
Do you realize that you need men to actually implement the things that are dreamed up by desk workers? Men are the ones who dig the trenches that hold the lines that transmit the information to those desks, men build the offices and homes in which those desks sit, and here you are shitting on them like you don't need that work done. How would it help anyone to have every one of those men get a BA and a desk job?
You haven't thought this through well enough to sneer.
This blog’s comments section is hardly the arbiter of masculinity that it presents itself as. I’m just honest that I don’t feel any solidarity.
I didn't say anything about masculinity. Why don't you address the rest of my reply?
Because lots of people hate sitting in a room while an authority figure talks at them about the rules they need to follow.
It's often more difficult as an adult instead of as children, because as children everyone we have is an authority figure. Tell adult men that the path to looking strong enough to attract a mate goes through an institution (with a strong female presence) wielding power over them and they'll simply not believe you.
It is not lost on me that gay men manage to attain bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than anyone.
There are a lot of reasons that someone wouldn't be successful at modern college/a desk job that are not about intelligence, but about temperament and different cognitive configurations and how higher education is structured.
“how higher education is structured” is such a lame excuse.
This reply is devoid of content.
The argument being responded to was devoid of content. This is the same bullshit about “too smart for college.”
You think that every person is born with the cognitive ability and the temperament to succeed at college?
And, if not, should they be relegated to a shitty life?
Nah, it’s very real.
Men have problems accessing masculinity in a world where billionaires are schlubby and no one does physical labor. It’s been going on since at least the 1990s, so long before anyone was highly online but the admins of MUDs, much less Twitter-brained.
lol.
Since that article was paywalled I had no idea what Matt was even referring to there.
Which, the Cartoons Hate Her one? She's talking about how suddenly the right-wing people are degrowthers, saying "You don't *need* a new iPhone, you just want one, grow some stones and butch up and learn to do without." She shares a bunch of memes along the lines of "Your great-grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked a steel plant, and you thought you could be a 'product manager'? LOL. Cry more."
She writes: "It’s not that they think the economy will suffer temporary pain for long-term gains—it’s that they want it to crash because they want people they don’t like (ie: people with more money/power than them, especially “product manager girlbosses” or whatever) to suffer, which will presumably give them more relative power and status. In their mind, if their financial situation is already in the shitter, it can’t get worse, but those forever-hated product mommies writing Jira tickets at the pool are about to suffer and well, they might finally sleep with them. Or at least they’ll get their comeuppance, even if they continue to not fuck these guys."
Thanks for the summary!
Regarding the last point, count me in with the contradiction-heighteners. Bad economic policy is relatively easy to change *conditional on the ability to change the government*. Lee Kwan Yew isn't walking through that door. Trump failing spectacularly is good for both democracy and the economy.
I’m not a contradiction-heightener, but I think the best it can offer is that although heightening contradictions almost never delivers a *better* reality, it is mildly effective at breaking existing unworkable ones.
It is definitely a desperate measure suitable only for desperate times.
I applaud your courage in adding a profile pic. Nice to put a picture to the name.
I think that much more often, it sadly serves as a crutch for those who don’t want to bother mapping out a full theory of change and simply want to eradicate their opposition.
What if him failing at the economy, makes him want to lash out more though? When bullies and narcissists lose, they don't typically get introspective and change their positions. They typically double down and try to find something else to blame.
A little economic distress is better than further erosion of our democracy, but I do worry about their perceived discussions about using military might, as well as trying to look for wins by targeting domestic people and companies when they don't get the economic wins they want.
A reasonable worry. But I would say Trump is only as powerful as his enablers, and I think the less they have public opinion on their side, the less willing they'll be to commit crimes for Trump.
"A little economic distress"? This looks like a huge amount of economic distress to me. Higher prices, less availability of goods, high unemployment—these are bad things. If a tornado deposits some nice furniture on your lawn while it wipes out 20 city blocks, I'm happy for you and you shouldn't feel guilty sitting in your new recliner, but it was still a tornado that wiped out 20 city blocks and cause huge amounts of misery.
It's really sad that it's come to this, but the contradictions have already been heightened, so now we just have to deal with it and demonstrate why they're going to be so bad.
Indeed. We TRIED to fix it with Obama, and the Boomers stopped him. I’m out of fucks to give at this point, I’m just going to look out for myself first, because this is apparently a nation that can’t have nice things.
PS: In all selfishness, my shameful hope here is that a crash can drop housing prices to something I can actually afford.
As a Millennial who graduated in 2009 with massive student loans, I feel like I’ve suffered enough by now that I don’t feel guilty about the prospect of benefiting from the consequences of the fuckwitted decisions of the Boomers who have been screwing us over ever since we tried to fix things by electing Obama.
Rapid upticks in interest rates tend to cause demand and supply to fall in tandem, so rarely produce large falls in price. They just slow the movement of people to a molasses-like slow creep. Folks don't downsize because it doesn't save money once financing is included, build additions or just squeeze in as families grow because the cost of upsizing is insane, and don't move as much in general in pursuit of opportunity.
There is every reason to think that we're headed for moderate stagflation for the next few years, and if the example of the early 80's holds (lots of reasons to believe that will be the case), prices will flatline in nominal terms, declining moderately in real terms. But initially, at least, those gains will be eaten by financing costs. Maybe in a decade you'll then be able to refinance and thus have realized some gains from real price declines, but there's little to indicate that relief is coming for the next 5-6 years unless you're in a market with substantial new-build supply. Even then, financing circumstances will strangle the next round of such supply before it hits the drawing board...
Yeah, to be clear I agree with most of that analysis and don’t see any way towards lower prices.
But if they do happen to come along — or any other meaningful opportunity — I’m sure as hell not gonna feel guilty about it.
People were warned.
If there is a market crash, how do you know that you wouldn't be impacted? You also know that during crashes lending typically tightens a bit as does supply... I am a millennial as well that still is paying off some grad school debt, but comments like yours always seem a bit out of touch to me. I do agree with not feeling bad for people though that voted for this, I do feel bad for the rest of us though...
I’m not saying I *know* I’ll be untouched. But my job is relatively secure — my employer has an astounding track record of avoiding layoffs for the last several decades.
And yeah, I’m also not saying there won’t be any costs. But just generally… if I do happen to benefit, I’m not going to feel guilty about it. I’ll happily exploit any opportunities that come across my path.
I always wonder what my fuckwitted decisions were as a Boomer, as if "the Boomers" ever really had much control over anything besides softening up the culture in terms of the sexual moralities. The pendulum swung back and forth, we went out and voted, sometimes we marched, and that's about it.
Do the Millenials feel like they have any power to make decisions now? That's kind of how it's always been.
Okay, I’ll bite.
To be clear, if you’re on this forum, then you are almost certainly NOT the kind of Boomer implicated in my comment.
However, just as an exercise, let’s go ahead and list the “fuckwitted decisions” that can broadly be attributed to the Boomers:
1. NIMBYism. Boomers didn’t invent the suburbs or commit the sin of white flight — that was mostly their parents — but they definitely pulled the ladder up behind them and erected the enormous regulatory and local-governance regime that has blocked so much construction since the 70’s.
2. Killing nuclear energy. Anti-nuke was definitely a Boomer movement that hurt our nation.
3. Reagan’s decimation of the mental health system. It’s not as strictly impactful as NIMBY or nukes, but it’s definitely a decision Boomers made, so it goes on the ledger.
4. Gingrich. Boomers were well in the catbird seat of running everything by the 90’s. Now, all that budget balancing wasn’t actually bad. But the politics that went into it, particularly the enabling of Gingrich… was disgraceful, and put us on a path towards Trump.
5. Obstructing the Obama majority. Obama was Millennials’ one big attempt to set things right. We wanted a transformation of the country’s political economy, away from polarization, away from the Republican machine that thrived on it. The aftermath of the Great Recession could have looked VERY differently. But Mitch McConnell — not technically a Boomer, but definitely adjacent and one of the key leaders in the Boomer-driven backlash to Obama — had other ideas. This one particularly stings.
Again, I’ve said several times in the past and also directly here that YOU personally are NOT responsible for these alleged sins. So kindly stuff that objection.
But collectively? Yes, Boomers were a key voting bloc in all of these decisions I’ve listed.
So why not specify Boomer Republicans? I'll grant the nuclear energy issue. As for nimbyism, it's is embedded in human nature, (or maybe just in U.S. reliance on home equity.)
Because it wasn’t just Republicans, was it? Anti-nuke was a Democrat thing, as was NIMBY.
To clarify, yes, anti-nuke was a Democrat thing. But keep in mind that there were not only drop drills, but there was my teacher saying "if there's a really bright flash of light, then don't wait for me to yell 'drop!'". And then there'd be a reflection off a shiny plane flying overhead or something. And then we had to worry about tactical nukes and dirty bombs. All of this lasted until our 50s. (And now it's b-a-a-a-ck!)
I myself tended to look deeper into the science (actually had not one, but two tours of the Yucca Mountain waste repository). But as far as I'm concerned, it's just naive to blame Boomers for being against anything with the word "nuclear" in it.
NIMBY is natural to anyone of any generation who relies on home equity for longterm shelter.
This is why I try not to call out any generation. We all grow up in the culture we're born into. Blame is a pretty useless emotion anyway.
I'm not entirely sure what has caused the historical amnesia in which left-wing activists have convinced themselves that protectionism is a left-wing position and that somehow past Democratic Administrations were protectionist and it's only the modern neo-liberal sellouts like Clinton and Obama that were exceptions.
The dynamic of the 1980s was weird. I guess convincing left-wingers to be protectionist is just one of many problems with the decade.
The vote on NAFTA in 1993 split the Democrats 102-156. While it's true there was a divide, too many accounts seem to paint this narrative of Bill Clinton siding with Republicans to pass NAFTA over universal Democratic opposition. The reality is far more nuanced.
The VoteView breakdown on the DW-Nominate divide for the vote is not particularly left-right, the proportion of votes classified correctly is only 68%. https://voteview.com/rollcall/RH1030558
I think the left wing protectionist thing is in some ways as simple as, if Reagan is for it, we’re against it. Seeing as how Reagan ended up being remarkably popular, enough to get his VP elected to succeed him, this ended up being a losing proposition which Clinton rejected by embracing things like free trade (while still rejecting racism) to hit on a winning formula.
Unions were always key Lefty allies and were always pretty protectionist (and agreed with management historically on that one). On the other hand, it has for a long time been the case that liberals actually elected to the Presidency tended to come from the elite knowledge class rather than coming up into politics from shop steward. So they tended to ignore the unions' opinions on this.
Often protectionist, but the history of the Working Men's Party in the 1820s and 1830s leading to the Locofocos established an early American strain of pro-free trade labor unions.
One reason I think Abundance is underrated as a way to win elections is that it pushes politicians to campaign and govern based on what voters really prioritize (low prices), and not get sucked into ideological rabbit holes.
Matt, you have this final take, which I have also been seeing in several places:
"I’m not sure whether I should be worried about Trump making terrible economic policy decisions, or heartened that doing so makes it less likely that his efforts to undermine democracy and the rule of law will succeed."
This is such a classic underestimation of the power of conservative propaganda and Donald Trump, and so frustrating to read. Why do democrats keep doing this - assuming that conservative failures have any meaning whatsoever to American voters? You really think the 100 billion dollar conservative propaganda pipeline can't spin economic disaster as the fault of democrats and wokeness (or whatever word they settle on next)?
You smartly are caveating though with "less likely," so perhaps I am worried needlessly.
I remember American voters having strong opinions about conservative failures (both economic and foreign policy) in 2008.
Sure. They sure quickly forgot that though, thanks to the things I mentioned above, and loudly and proudly voted for total economic disaster again in 2016, and again in 2024. And, this wasn't just conservatives - median voters too.
Americans were overall quite happy with the economy from 2016 to 2020, and (reasonably or not) assumed they'd be able to get it back if they reelected the guy who was president for those years.
This is exactly the case, but it also seems to go against your contention about the power of the right wing spin machine. National conditions count. A lot. In 2020 those conditions were terrible, and, not surprisingly, the incumbent lost. Relatedly, 2024 was a very challenging cycle for Democrats because of the inflation and real wage erosion that transpired under Biden. The incumbent party again lost.
Yes, that was exactly my point.
They "forgot" because once you win and take power, you own what's going on, and the Obama admin wasn't actually the utopia we had hoped for.
The median voter seems to have the memory of a goldfish, and they refused to treat Trump as a known quantity who was President already. It is astounding to me.
Isn't it kind of the opposite? They thought they were voting for 2019 again.
This does not seem like an unwarranted take. Inflation brought down Joe Biden. Sure it’s possible that the American people will just eat another round of inflation at Trump’s request, but I don’t think it’s a given.
I’d put my money on inflation bringing down Trump before I’d put it on the median voter deciding that paying $15 for a 1-pound bag of coffee beans that used to cost $8 that’s very obviously a direct result of a very stupid tariff on Colombia being worth it, particularly since Trump has let’s say inadequately made the case for what he hopes to gain from this.
Nah, Trump is not at all immune to being unpopular and becoming more so when he screws things up.
The question is why Democrats haven't been able to overwhelmingly defeat such an unpopular figure. And for that, conservative propaganda probably is a decent sized part of the story. But it's not the only thing that has been making Democrats less popular over the last decade.
The $100 billion pipeline is filled with people who don’t like what Trump is doing right now and didn’t believe he would follow through. It’s a small group of wealthy people, but you already see the dissent in the Musk crowd.
I do have concerns that this doesn’t matter much as the value of that money to the propaganda is very limited in this information economy.
"It’s a small group of wealthy people, but you already see the dissent in the Musk crowd."
Hilariously, it's Musk now too: https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/us-news/elon-musk-rips-moron-trump-trade-adviser-peter-navarro/
He's also not wrong. Tesla is - by far - the most vertically integrated US auto OEM. Even more so when you factor in they've forward integrated into charging and insurance.
Holy crap, thanks to this coverage, I have now learned that Peter Navarro had his own "John Barron" named Ron Vara https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/us/politics/peter-navarro-ron-vara.html
Now I see why Trump likes him so much!
Musk's attack on Navarro has such an "if only the tsar knew" vibe
Yeah I don't really disagree with you. But we have time and time again, for decades now, underestimated the strength of it, and more recently, the strength of Donald Trump's black-bile-filled messaging. So I am very hesitant!
I totally get what you're saying, and you may be right. I do think this is different, though. It's upsetting that most people turn out not to care about norms, democracy, NATO, etc. - but so be it. If these tariffs stick, and prices on consumer goods go through the roof, with Trump taking full credit, that does matter. Trump was probably cruising to reelection in 2020 as of 2019, but his handling of Covid (e.g. a real thing, too big to completely spin) stopped him. I am hoping this is in that vein. I can't think of a survey since 2022 where the economy and prices weren't the #1 issue. People can rationalize so much in service to their team and worldview, but a paycheck is a tough thing to spin. I think they'll give him 3 - 6 months, and if there aren't new factories opening by then, he's going to start losing people.
I don’t think this level of cynicism is warranted.
Trump I really did not involve any significant economic pain for the average American, aside from the legitimately exogenous Covid shock. We don’t have grounds to say that a self-inflicted economic crisis wouldn’t really hurt him.
And remember, Trump I was far less popular than you’d expect a president with a good economy who avoided the most disliked GOP policies like slashing Medicare to be.
Most of my friends and acquaintances are Trump supporters and the Conservative Media Pipeline has already provided them with ample ammo to defend these disastrous policies.
Things are easy to defend until the costs come due. Higher prices and subsequent loss of living standard hasn't even kicked in yet.
I think the most under discussed issue stemming from Trump is less the specific fallouts from each policy but instead the complete degradation of America as a stable and reliable partner. Who would sign a free-trade agreement with the US after this? Who would rely on us for security after this? Whatever gains Trump thinks we will get by being mercurial is negated by the lack of certainty. Trump basically tore up the FTA HE SIGNED HIMSELF when he was in office.
After his first term: electing Biden was enough to restore confidence. I do not think removing Trump is enough to restore our standing in the world anymore. The Pax Americana is over, you could argue that it ended a while ago, but any change of salvaging the best (or at least some) parts of it is now past. Its a dangerous multipolar world, and Trump is our steward for at least the next four years.
On 28) America has never been a major (peacetime) shipbuilder, it isn't an issue with globalisation but part of the nature of the country.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships
I read the linked piece -- very interesting overview of the history of the US shipbuilding industry.
Taking the facts here as accurate, I don’t find the explanations behind them particularly convincing.
OK, we apparently stuck with wooden ships in the mid-late 19th century even after steel was obviously the future. But why? Overall, we were the most industrially dominant and innovative country in the world then, why were ships an exception? Was every US shipbuilder a moron?
And then we (twice) built up huge capacity during the world wars that apparently promptly fell apart right after. Again, why? Of course there’s going to be disruption in the transition to peacetime, but that could be said of everything; we didn’t lose our edge in car making when the tank factories turned back to civilian vehicles. (We did *eventually* get outcompeted and out-innovated by Japan etc, but it’s not like that happened by 1955).
Yes, the US has always had high labor costs by international standards, but that was already true by 1870, and it didn’t stop us from leading the world in output for a century afterwards. Why were ships an exception?
I think the ships America built in WW2 were more expensive and lower quality than their British or French equivalents, they just could build far more and weren't being bombed.
"The flip side of the persistent trade deficit is that the United States receives a lot of inbound investment from foreigners. People like to buy shares of stock in American companies. They like to invest in American startups. They buy American government bonds as a source of safety. Just in terms of a literal sense of how it works, this is the deal with the trade deficit: Foreigners are not “ripping us off” or getting rich off of us, they are investing and we are consuming."
This is a wasting asset; you cannot sell financial/debt instruments in perpetuity without economic strength underwriting them, hence the stance Miran takes that you disparage later on:
"The most “sophisticated” of the Trump-adjacent theories is Stephen Miran’s notion that he is attempting to craft a “Mar-a-Lago accord” that would save American exporters from the “exorbitant burden” imposed by the US dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency. I think there are a lot of questionable assumptions baked into this, but my biggest concern is that, if successful, this endeavor would make everyone’s purchasing power lower. Most of the discussion seems to me to be efforts to pull the wool over people’s eyes about this."
If there are questionable assumptions baked into this, then elucidate them.
You haven't, and I would gamble you won't, because you can't, because there really aren't any questionable assumptions there.
As I said yesterday: "There is structural demand for something like a trillion dollars a year of dollar-denominated debt instruments both because they're the medium of exchange, the hydraulic fluid that flows through global trade plumbing, and because they're a safe asset in a world where basically every other currency is more vulnerable to global market dislocations and shitty domestic policy. That's something along the lines of 25% of demand for dollars, alongside a trillion-odd of manufacturing exports and twoish trillion of services.
This demand really took off in earnest after the Asian Financial Crisis and has only grown since, which is why the USD is 25-30% stronger relative to our major trade partners than it was on January 1, 2000. This, in turn, is among the major reasons why capital formation in the US secondary sector is insanely slow and American manufacturing is no more productive today than it was in 2005-6."
Demand for American financial instruments is a wasting asset. It did not come to exist in a vacuum and is contingent on the US retaining other key strengths, but it also erodes the structural underpinnings of those same other strengths, and as such it needs to be curtailed before it rots them out entirely.
This is no different then supporting investments in mass transit funded by congestion pricing; we do this not because it's good in and of itself but because it's necessary to facilitate the economic and social life of a city in the face of rising traffic, and the hope is that the revenue collected and spent is smaller than the costs of allowing traffic to balloon unchecked.
It is a mistake to view such a devaluation as an unnecessary sacrifice of purchasing power, because if we allow this phenomenon to proceed to an endgame unchecked we will all sacrifice far more purchasing power. That day will come well before most folks here have shuffled off this mortal coil.
You've mostly convinced me about China and Germany screwing their citizens by suppressing wages and directing money to exporters. I think that both, but especially China should face tariffs from the US as a response. However, I have become increasing less convinced of your argument about the dollar's position as a global security being a bad thing. Our exorbitant privilege is easier access to capital. Its our foolishness on what we do with that capital that is the problem, not that we have easier access to it. We could have used the low rates and easy capital for the last 20 years to build productive assets instead of financing the combo of low taxes and higher social spending.
I'm also confused by this: "capital formation in the US secondary sector is insanely slow"
Would you elaborate on what you mean by this as my initial reading suggests its wrong which makes me think I'm misunderstanding what you mean. I would say that its regulatory hurdles more than anything else that make the secondary sector slow moving in the US, not access to capital - though there are some inter-linkages. Are there broad obstacles here that I'm missing?
Directionally, Germany, Japan, and South Korea are similar; they have significant transfers to industry that are nonetheless hugely smaller in percentage (let alone absolute) terms than China. Between the vastly smaller magnitude of the distortion, and the fact that they're allies, I do not actually believe any of them merit a particular response beyond perhaps making it very easy for US employers to get visas for young workers from those countries with manufacturing skillsets. Plenty of people do not desire to stay in these places, which will be consumed in the coming decades by the need to care for the elderly folks who backed them into this demographic corner in the first place, we should take advantage.
China, on top of the broader currency issues I'll come back to, directly and indirectly subsidizes industry to the tune of 10% of GDP, particularly focused on export manufacturing. I don't think a 100% tariff is fully necessary, but a ratchet tariff by the EU, US, Japan, Korea, and Canada that starts in the realm of 15-25% and increases every year until that model breaks is a necessary corrective, doubly so because Chinese neo-fascism is a major threat to liberalism and pluralism everywhere.
As regards exorbitant privilege...
By way of background, classical economic models for free trade assume that the exchange rate rapidly (instantly, really) equilibrates to one that causes flow of goods and services to balance between import and exports. That has not happened to the US because we have, as several economists have put it, a comparative advantage in the issuance of debt. That advantage did not arise in a vacuum; we have a 250 year history of not defaulting on our debts, not expropriating private property, running economic policy reasonably well, maintaining rapid growth in productivity and standards of living, accepting immigrants and allowing them to buy homes and build lives, and advancing technology.
But that advantage now accounts for around a quarter of global demand for dollars; we export a trillion or so in manufactures, about two trillion in services... and another trillion in debt instruments. This increases the exchange rate significantly as measured against our major trading partners, which renders basically all domestic businesses engaged in activities which are tradable (manufacturing and high-value services alike) less competitive relative to foreign ones whose costs are not incurred in USD.
You are correct that no one is literally holding a gun to our head and telling us to issue Treasuries. But the political consequences of failing to run a deficit are unpalatably high, because the currency headwinds limit domestic firms in investing and hiring. In essence, the strong dollar pushes demand for domestic labor down relative to baseline, because it's cheaper to buy (or for multinationals to hire) abroad. Absent the borrower of last resort (the federal government) stepping in, it is impossible to maintain full employment or anything close to it under these circumstances.
This is why I keep saying that causality between the current account deficit and the federal deficit flows in the opposite direction from what many commentors have said.
It is, yes, possible to devalue the currency by cutting the deficit, but as I said elsewhere, it would be a prolonged and extremely painful process compared to controlling parts of the capital account in order to moderately devalue the currency. This would engender a major rollover in capital by our secondary sector, which has in large part been deferring such expenditures since 2000, when this exchange rate problem began to balloon in earnest. That would generate demand for factories and equipment, followed by hiring across the board, and the first real private-sector led boom since the 1990's would give us the slack to cut the deficit without engendering a recession, as Clinton was able to in the mid-to-late 1990's.
This in turn would cement the lower exchange rate.
I am not asking anyone to support Trump's blunderbuss idiocy here. It is unproductive.
But a lot of folks here and elsewhere among the professional classes seem bound and determined to act as if there is *no* merit to the underlying arguments, namely that the trade deficit is not a natural consequence of correctly working markets, and that it does pose a threat to our prosperity or security in the long run.
That’s the thing, we need someone sane to do any of what you mention above.
I do not see why there being an increased demand for US dollars means that the dollar must be less competitive. If you look at money supply since the 90s, supply has grown to meet demand!
I started to dive into the discussion around other currencies, but let's just resolve that by saying I agree with your solution to Germany, Japan, S. Korea.
Functionally, I think where we differ the most is that I do not see currency as the biggest impediment to secondary sector. Instead, I would highlight that we have made it increasingly difficult to build and have added multiple layers of costs to accomplish various goals. This is most dramatic in some of the public spending and housing, but it also impacts capital spending across the board and private business have been able to relocate their capital to places with fewer obstacles.
To a point you have made, China also put its thumb on the scale here pretty significantly and we should act to address that. But if we could get more industry moving into Mexico & Central America, I think that's a win across the board for the US.
I don't follow your logic for the first paragraph. The money supply doesn't necessarily dictate the exchange rate in the way you're describing, and the exchange rate has risen against basically all trading partner currencies since the GFC, which is also around when our stagnation started.
To the middle paragraph, sure, agreed in full; I think the first couple comments I made after coming back here had some damning estimates regarding per-employee compliance costs for manufacturing, which are made worse by the same failures of regulation and land use that have tangled construction for other sectors up so badly.
Money's value is based mostly on perceived value and supply. The FED influences many things via the latter lever. If you look at the amount of the money supply since 2000, it has grown much faster than inflation almost every year except 2022 & 2023. I see that as foreign demand soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in increased money supply every year.
Let me ask a slightly different question, if the Fed created a new digital currency called $F and allowed foreign institutions to open an account with them and store this currency there. None of that money could be used in the US, but it could be exchanged for US dollars at a rate set by the FED. If global transactions currently settled in the US dollar switched to $F, would that solve for what you see is the issue?
"capital formation in the US secondary sector is insanely slow"
Sorry, forgot about this. Typo, mostly. Meant "low." I guess they're tantamount in some ways?
Private sector manufacturing net capital formation is barely positive in the US and has been for some time. We're barely replacing what depreciates beyond the point of use, and many SMEs have basically ridden the depreciation curve to nothing and then shut down. This is, in my thinking, mainly a result of the currency headwinds that are limiting their ability to compete with firms that have non-USD cost structures.
The Mar-a-Lago accords i think assume that the opponents will react in a very particular way and not in some other myriad ways which all make this strategy not work. I think if making threats was going to cow the world into quiescence, it would have done so already.
Surely you've seen me use the precise phrase "Trump is a moron," as well as several variants thereon, as I've discussed this issue in the last several days.
That he's an incompetent, stupid, useless sack of shit does not obviate the basic necessity of grappling with the underlying structural problems that are gutting our historic strengths in manufacturing productivity, cutting-edge scientific research, and the knowledge fields which bridge the gap between the two.
I'm not sure how Trump figures in this response. You asked about a questionable assumption Miran was making, and you were given one ("Miran presupposes no country would push back") that has nothing to do with Trump.
I read Matty's post as claiming that Miran's theory of "exorbitant privilege" has questionable assumptions baked into it, and wrote accordingly, not that his plan for resolving it has questionable assumptions.
I can see the other interpretation, now that you point it out, and agree that this is a supremely stupid, likely-to-fail way of resolving the structural issue I've been writing about.
"This demand really took off in earnest after the Asian Financial Crisis and has only grown since, which is why the USD is 25-30% stronger relative to our major trade partners than it was on January 1, 2000."
Obviously, we're in total agreement. I'd just add the additional layer that separate from the organic demand for US$, China as been manipulating their currency this entire time.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/obama-says-china-must-stop-manipulating-currency-idUSTRE49S7FQ/
Of course. There is no reason whatsoever in hell that as China's per capita manufacturing productivity has more than doubled and the sophistication of its enterprises increased manyfold over the last decade, its currency should have weakened by close to 20%.
Again quoting myself (I find myself doing this a lot lately): "Hell, the bull case for Trump was that he was smart enough to do this *only* to China in alignment with Japan, Korea, France, Italy, the UK, Canada, Poland, and others, forcing Germany along for the ride, and extending potential advantages to SE Asian and Latin American nations to bribe them to join in too and climb the value chain at China's expense.
Turns out he's an absolute fucking moron, but ramming a red hot piker up the Party's ass is the correct thing to do and has been every single day of every year for the last two decades and counting."
Disagree with some of you what you said elsewhere, but your solution around building a coalition of partner countries to counter China is spot on.
How does the power of the dollar affect capital formation in the US sector? Is it because factories and investments etc are too expensive for companies to make relative to other nations?