Major price shocks do not cool down consumerism unfortunately. The culture doesn't respond to economic swings that way. People just suffer.
Initiateofthevoid
joined 2 months ago
Extremely well put. The individualism really is weird and terrible. The main character syndrome is part of what takes away the agency, I think... Like, we need to hear The Call To Adventure. We need The Plot to show up at our fucking house. We need to be The Person that Does The Thing in the Room Where It Happens. The Founding Father. It's all or nothing. Either the thing we personally do somehow fixes the country, or we don't do it at all.
Maybe we imagine that we can be the hero and shoot the bad guy and save the day. But we can't imagine, like, Fixing Things. Deciding what the future holds. What would that even look like? Boldly waving a parchment in the air? When would everybody cheer for me in particular?
No, it doesn't look like an individual. It looks like a crowd. It looks like people, outside, angry. I hope enough people see that in time.
Cheers to Good Trouble.
I know Trump is dumb. I know his administration is dumb. I still can’t fathom that someone is this stupid.
Oh but it can get more stupid, don't you worry. The following is a quote from Trump's Trade Representative, where they describe how the tariffs were calculated:
The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).*
What is this recent experience that the Trump administration learned from, you ask? Cavallo et al studied the impact of Trump's tariff on China in 2018! What else did they find?
US profit margins decreased on both imports AND exports as a result of the tariffs, while China’s was much less affected. The paper clearly shows American tariffs hurt Americans more than literally anyone else, and the Trump Administration "read" that paper and publically cited it as a source on a government website.
Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States... Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods... [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs
*Please note while prices remained stable in response to that one tariff, Cavallo did not suggest it was a generalizable fact. It's not.
TL;DR:
- Research shows Trump's 2018 tariff hurt US importers' profit margins more than anyone else. They paid the cost (that time) to keep prices stable.
- It also shows China's reciprocal tariffs hurt US exporters much more than it hurt China's importers.
- The Trump administration legitimized this research when they cited it in their flawed reasoning that domestic prices always remain stable after tariffs (they don't)
But then if the other country does it back it goes in favor to the nation that is more industrial.
Correct! That's what Cavallo et al found when the Trump administration tariffed China in 2018. US profit margins decreased on both imports AND exports, while China's remained largely unchanged.
According to their analysis, American tariffs hurt Americans more than literally anyone else.
Fun fact, the Trump Administration cited Cavallo et al as supporting evidence for their tariff calculations.
Thank you for the insightful contribution 'PM_Your_Nudes_Please'!
Really though, you have my sympathies and you're absolutely right. Of course tragedies and disabilities can break up marriages. It doesn't necessarily mean that either spouse did anything wrong.
Anything that changes a person can change a relationship, and anything that changes a relationship can end the relationship.
Yeah, sorry to say you were pretty off base friend. Smoot-Hawley didn't start the fire, but it poured fuel all over the flames and locked the firemen out of the building.
Friedman was an advisor to Reagan and Thatcher. He was a libertarian who genuinely believed that economic prosperity hinged almost entirely on just printing more money. His economic theories are all over the place, but even he acknowledges that tariffs generally don't work:
... [Friedman] uses tariffs as an example of a policy that brings noticeable financial benefits to a visible group, but causes worse harms to a diffuse group of workers and consumers
The "protectionism" falls flat the moment you consider that the tariffs blanket all goods. If you want to dramatically expand American industry, you don't start by raising the price of steel and raw materials.
Don't sit and wait for better opportunities. Fuck the lists. Band together for some of Booker and Lewis' Good Trouble. Get out on the streets. There are millions of people who are just as upset as you are, and every voice added to the crowd multiplies the reach.
and there a lot of economists who say it didn’t have that much of an effect at all.
Source? To my knowledge Smoot-Hawley is pretty widely regarded as the worst possible move at the worst possible time. Protectionism doesn't work when domestic purchasing power is already collapsing. Agreed on the rest though.
Most of them are so isolated that chaos in the streets really wouldn’t change their lives or opinions
Emphasis mine. This has been said about every single ruling class ever. It has been proven wrong many times. The wealthy are afraid of the lower classes. Their lives depend on the status quo, and their lives change when the status quo changes. Otherwise they wouldn't press so goddamn hard on the boot.
Except that this 4D chess move is not going to make the wealthy a fortune. Dismantling the global economy will only hurt, everyone, in the long-term. Including billionaires' profits. Just the threat of tariffs is enough to do that damage. Whatever short-term gains anyone might make on a market dip are going to be completely washed out by the long-term losses of destabilizing international trade on a whim.
Even if it is "according to plan", it's a stupid fucking plan, and it won't work.
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Protests of any kind are great places to find like-minded individuals. People who believe in freedom as strongly as you do. Talk to others about ideas you have. Swap signal contacts. Make connections.
If the public didn't worry them, they wouldn't invest so much money and effort militarizing police, villainizing protestors, manipulating the narrative, and black-bagging activists like Mahmoud Kahlil.
The illusion that the wealthy don't care what the poor think is a part of the system working as designed. They want you to think they don't care. They want you to think protesting is pointless.
They don't want you to feel connected. They don't want you to feel like you have a community around you that agrees with you and supports your cause. They don't want you to stand in a crowd of tens of thousands and think "boy, there sure are a lot more of us than there are of them."
Do whatever you can! Get in some Good Trouble.