It’s really hard to overstate just how much this administration has lit the entire country on fire for absolutely no good reason in a way that isn’t going to magically bounce back either for at least a generation.
I went and lived overseas in Asia for a while, and at this point back in America, I keep thinking of comparisons to Mao's "Great Leap Forward".
Directly equating them remains hyperbole due to the death-toll, but... it's not a joke anymore, or at least not a funny one.
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[Edit] In brief, a disastrous attempt in 1958-1962 to quickly force China into an industrial powerhouse, with a lot of weird autocratic commands. It backfired with a severe economic recession, the killing/exile of subject matter experts, officials lying about how well it was going to avoid being punished, and tens of millions of peasants dying from famine.
The people who are lighting up the country actually enjoy and fire and smoke and they don't own (or they think they don't) anything that is worth protecting.
When England created high tariffs on The Netherlands, it started wars, and relations took almost 100 years to repair.
Trump basically did what Britain did, but against the entire world.
… it might be more than a generation for the whole world to trust any trade agreement with the US if every 4-8 years agreements can be torn up so easily
Because Brexit was a hilarious foot-gun incident (for anyone outside the UK at least). It hasn't taken 700 years because ~5 years after Brexit really happened everyone just feels sorry for us.
I assume the tariffs the parent is talking about were when England/The UK was a world power similar to America now. And it was just a dick move by a bully.
> the rest of the world is broke and needs US markets
The rest of the world is disorganised. If India, China, Iran, Russia and the E.U. implemented sanctions on America, not only would our economy crumble but our ability to fight even a single war of attrition would fail.
Oh absolutely. I don’t think we’re seeing Behemoth rising [1].
I’m just pointing out that the structural source of American power is our unity across a continent. Nobody else has that hegemony. Our markets are rich because they’re big, and they’re big because they’re unified.
That bigness also reduces the incentives for others to unify, given they can gain our economies of scale through trade and without the pesky reconciliation (or annihilation) unification would require.
I’m not arguing that Eurasian unification is probable. Just that it’s more likely now than it was before, and that’s a real diminishment of American power irrespective of what the accountants say. (I’d also argue that the aforementioned economies enacting a break with America wouldn’t require long-term unification, just a short-term alliance of the power-balancing types that put America and the USSR on the same side of a war.)
This is becoming less and less true. Trading with the US is unappealing because it is expensive (tariffs) and fraught with uncertainty. New trade deals are being forged as we speak between countries that were not even considering each other before Trump took office.
Nations realign slowly but there is no question they've all begun pivoting away from the US to various degrees, and they're unlikely to go back any time soon.
We just cut a $20 billion check to Argentina. So that they could then undercut our soybean sales even further.
Edit: Guess I should add, now that China will not buy our soybeans, we are propping up a different country’s agricultural market, and are quite likely to soon cut a check to farmers who are struggling because of administration decisions.
Russia doesn't have the demographics to win, and they're throwing what young workers they have into a Ukranian meat grinder. (Or a war-focused economy that's going to leave them uncompetitive in any other industry)
Normally yes. However, it's worth noting that the last major economic legislation passed by the prior administration took effect over 3 years ago. Further, there is not a reading of that law that would predict a negative overall effect on hiring.
However, tariffs have been extensively studied in a number of countries around the world. What we are observing in the labor market is more or less what economists would predict given the magnitude of the tax increase and the uncertainty around its application.
Further, data[1] shows a rapid deterioration in the labor market corresponding to the initial tariff announcement.
That's generally true. Presidents are routinely credited and blamed for things outside of their control, including things done by their predecessors. It's something you have to accept with the job.
In this case, though, the President is taking actions designed to have quick effects. Presidents (of both parties) generally try not to do anything radical. (They promise to, then blame inaction on Congress.) This President is actually fulfilling his campaign promises, for once.
So I think he will deserve a higher fraction of the credit and blame that he would have gotten anyway. The lag is shorter because he's bypassing the usual process for change, and is able to make much more radical changes with shorter term returns.
Unemployment was 5% going into Trumps administration, which is basically fricional levels - US recovered quite well after Covid.
The "both sides" stance is almost worse than just being a conservative at this point. Dems routinely have to fix Republican fuckups, and are judged negatively on the things they don't fix - meanwhile Republicans are judged positively on the things they manage not to fuck up.
For example, the BBB has set Medicaid to expire in 2028. Anyone wanna take a $10k bet that if we have fair elections and Dems somehow win, they are going to get blamed for not fixing that?
> But isn't the lost of jobs also attributable to previous administration policies?
According to Trump, when Biden was in office it was Biden's failing economy that was the problem (despite the fact that Biden took office directly after Trump v1.0).
Also according to Trump, when Trump is in office now it is also Biden's failing economy that is the problem.
Its the same situation with the roles reversed because of Trump's gap of being in office so either the economy is a lagging problem from the last administration or it isn't, but somehow neither situation is "Trump's fault", according to Trump.
The "Biden economy" wasn't as rosy as proclaimed by the Biden government, in large part because run-away wealth inequality is making all of the statistics we historically track very misleading (eg. consumer spending looking good, as long as you ignore the huge red flag that 50% of that spending is being done by the top 10% of wealth holders).
So I'm not fully defending Biden here (both parties are ultimately allowing the economy to unravel because they refuse to deal with wealth inequality, though I do give Biden some credit for [temporarily] getting some things on the right track by, for example, putting Lina Khan in charge of the FTC) but economically things were still fundamentally much better under Biden than Trump, and we haven't even seen the depths of how bad Trump's economy is going to get (but have plenty of leading indicators of things getting much worse) and virtually all of the problems with Trump's economy can be traced pretty clearly to his own actions, such as his wildly irresponsible tariff policies.
Like even if you believe tariffs work the way he thinks they do (they don't) anyone with any understanding of business at all would have to understand that changing the values wildly sometimes from day to day makes doing business impossible for a lot of companies due to a complete inability to plan. Its crazy shit.
