The orange man wanted tariffs, the orange man is going to get tariffs. Now we have to hope the American people aren’t so dumb as to still be convinced only he can solve their issues. I don’t hold out hope for that.
Additionally, his base will not blame him, they will swallow whichever of the many narratives the propagandists are currently cooking up that suites their fancy.
Surely you mean there is no motion from those in power in the legislative branch, namely the Republicans. The Democrats and Democrat-aligned independents make motions which are blocked by the Republicans.
People's inability to recognize who is responsible for bad acts leads to throw-the-bums out elections. People are disgruntled, whether based on facts or false beliefs fostered by propaganda. They throw the bums out. They hope for better things.
If we want the government to function better, we need to assign responsibility, not let Senator X and his pals, or Representative Y and her pals, screw everything thing up and then hide in the crowd. "Oh, look what the legislative branch has done! Throw them all out!"
But maybe their share portfolio being hurt will bring them to action...
When Democrats were in power, the Republicans found all sorts of ways to gum up the works.
In the comment above you suggested there's nothing congressional Democrats can do. That is incorrect. Any time the Republicans don't have unanimity, and any time they need sixty votes in the Senate, the Democrats have leverage. They need the guts, and/or the understanding of basic game theory, to use it.
Calling me an "armchair expert" and waving your hands about how things are complicated is not a counterargument.
And how many votes are needed for every executive order he signs? None, is the answer. The tarrifs required not one single vote from congress.
There won't be any votes that require 60 in the Senate that will happen for trump to continue his awful agenda.
Please tell us where exactly Democrats have any power, and be specific.
I didn't claim Democrats have absolute power, but they do have some.
No, they really don't have the power you think they do.
The Republicans don't need 60 votes in the Senate to pass tax cuts. They only need a simple majority, which they have.
>"Democrats, as the minority party, don’t have the votes to stop the GOP plan."
https://apnews.com/article/senate-budget-tax-cuts-spending-g...
You're crying that Democrats won't do anything, when they do not have the power to stop this. You're in need of some education about how the government works.
Not really, given the budget reconciliation process and its applicabilty to that: bypasses the filibuster entirely and only a simple majority is needed with a 20-hour capped debate time ij each house.
> Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Thursday that he planned to support the Republicans’ funding bill; he needed at least seven other Democrats to overcome a filibuster and set the vote up for final passage. Nine others who caucus with Democrats joined him and nearly all Republicans voted to advance the measure....The 62-38 vote came after days of turmoil among Senate Democrats who were split on either working with President Donald Trump and Republicans to pass a continuing resolution that includes $13 billion in cuts to nondefense spending or allowing the government to shut down.
Higher prices and a possible recession will affect every person in the country and even globally.
His MAGA base might not blame him, but that’s only like 30-40% of the electorate. The other 60-70% won’t be happy if their lives are negatively impacted.
IMO the only thing that can get through is actual personal consequences for the voter themself
Well, yes. And his approval rating has been steadily declining in tandem with the stock market declines he's caused. If/when prices suddenly skyrocket because of tariffs, you can bet his approval ratings will decline further.
They will not blame Trump, republicans, conservatives nor anyone who work foe them.
Not everybody is part of the cult. Many people simply thought Trump would take the economy and prices back to 2019. If he doesn’t, he’ll be punished.
CBS published this list: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/which-products-most-affected-ta...
What exactly on this list is a day to day item that is going to adversely affect the middle class/blue collar Trump voter enough to cause them to flip their alliance? On that list maybe clothes and shoes. But even still those are generally bought only a couple of times a year and any increase will be griped about in the moment, but come election time will be forgotten.
There are only four things that will make a middle class voter feel pain enough to re-align their vote. Fuel/energy costs, general food costs, rent/housing costs, and job insecurity. If these tariffs do not adversely touch those areas, they will have little to no impact on switching votes. Also of note, over the last four years those items are the ones that drove Trump back into the Oval Office.
But the lower class will also feel the tariffs. Because the lower class needs that $9.99 sweat pants.
Foreign Alcohol as a treat - If it’s a “treat” it’s already likely a more expensive choice than a domestic equivalent and any cost increase becomes part of the luxury of it being a treat. If your $60 bottle of Italian wine that you occasionally treat yourself with is now $80, you won’t really notice that $20. If you do, maybe you opt for a better domestic instead. If the $20 california wine you daily drink becomes $30, you notice that. But I assert that there is quite a bit of exceptional alcohol produced in the US and the middle class electorate is not going to starve for decent alcohol.
Furniture - Like cars, this is not a regular purchase and frankly not one where a price comparison with a prior purchase of a similar item will really notice any price increase due to tariffs. How often do you replace a dinner table? 10 years? Of course it’s more expensive than the last time you needed one.
Coffee is the one example where you have daily consumption and like I said on my original comment, food is one area that if affected, people will notice.
The big unknown still is the impact on the economy and job market. His actions may reduce competitiveness of American companies globally due to retaliatory tariffs and resentment.
If the tariffs cause a recession, people will punish him for it.
Ultimately Trump needs GOP in congress to be friendly…more than he needs the public at this point. He cant (and wont, despite the trolling) run again.
It did though, they just didn't know how to measure it, and it wasn't felt immediately. It was like the flash of light that dazzles before the pressure wave of the nuclear bomb blasts everything (which in the analogy is this moment, now).
What happened on Jan 6, and in the leadup and response to it, was the erosion of democratic norms. Before Nov 2020 they were stronger, and after Jan 6 they were significantly weakened. Our institutions are essentially built on trust, and Trump in his campaign to overturn the 2020 election spent every waking moment for months attacking those foundations. He purposefully eroded people's trust in Democracy for no reason, because there ultimately the fraud he alleged in that election was not found.
That impacts everyone. They just don't feel it in the supermarket; they just have no "democracy meter" that they can use to gauge how healthy their representation is in government. But the reason he's able to do what he's doing now is he because he laid the foundation in 2020.
With media in their pockets they can get away with anything.
For better or worse, though, voters don't judge politicians based on the impact their policies have in 10-20 years. They're going to judge these tariffs in 18 months when they vote in the midterms and again in 2028, long before a widespread shift in manufacturing can occur.
You accidentally answered your own question.
Folks who try to make "the insurrection!" a thing don't really have a good read on the pulse of the average American. This is a failed branding attempt for what amounted to an unscheduled tour around the Capitol.
The same people pushing "Jan 6th" can normally take home the gold medal in mental gymnastics when discussing the events ending with numerous American cities being on fire just 6 months prior. Multi-city infernos were "mostly peaceful" protests, but when a Republican is shot by Capitol security, it's an "insurrection."
Is that because we can't grow olives here, or because we don't have federal subsidies propping up a domestic olive industry that can compete with corn and soy?
I ready don't know the details well enough there, but it feels like this could just be selection bias at play.
There's no other rationale for this other than thinking this.
In return for a minor reprieve, you ensure your factory bathrooms and hiring policies are aligned with the president's agenda, among many other things. This can be a cudgel over the heads of the Apples and Costcos of this country who dare to defy the edicts of POTUS on social policy.
The problem is not so much that people don't like doing such things - they get by - it's that, at some point, enough people will start getting more favours than you do, and you'll start feeling the need to stage a coup, which is a lot of work.
I wonder how it will work out in a world where tiktok is always there as a much less exhausting form of entertainment than revolutions.
If we could snap our fingers and domestically produce most or all of our own products, would you not prefer that?
I'm not the person you asked, but I would definitely not prefer that. Trade & economic dependencies prevent wars. Wars are really, really bad things.
I could have sworn they were bad wars when they were happening ("No blood for oil"?), but opinions on that seem to have shifted all of a sudden for some reason.
Or can hire some child labor in Florida since they already changed the laws there.
That's definitely happening, but there are other possible reasons. For example a good could be more efficiently grown or produced in a country because of geographical reasons.
Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is simply not the case that all wages and wealth across the countries of the world are equal. Maybe that could be a goal but is anyone talking about that? Either way, it does not follow that the workers in that country are necessarily exploited when paid lower wages compared to the importing country, unless we are using different definitions.
This is not to mention that untargeted tariffs can increase the cost of living _for no gain at all_. If Germany manufacturers some specialty tool (not with slave labor, I would hope!), and no US manufacturer wants to make it, then I suddenly have to pay X% more for no reason at all.
This can easily be overdone. If you stop doing business with poorer people, you all but guarantee that they stay poor. Counter-productive to say the least.
In my lifetime, I saw a lot of countries grow at least somewhat wealthy from extensive commercial contact with the West, including mine (Czechia).
But the current administration is itself actively opposed to worker or environmental protections, and the result of the current tariffs will just be that the poor people overseas end up even more impoverished and still lacking in protections.
Producing the same good in the US, at anywhere near the same price, requires automation or prison labor (legal slavery in the US) and likely won't result in more manufacturing jobs and likely won't result in higher wages for workers. Florida's approach here is child labor, which is both exploitative and cheap.
Autarky is very bad.
If someone only cares about price, quantity, or some specific measure of quality certainly domestic production is limiting.
You'd want domestic production for other goals like self reliance, sustainability, or resilience.
2. Have you seen what the current US administrations is doing to allies at the moment? (the million threats to Greenland/Denmark, Canada, etc).
> If we could snap our fingers and domestically produce most or all of our own products, would you not prefer that?
Yeah, then every city could be like SF or LA or NYC.
But it's not even worth it as a thought exercise because it completely ignores reality. The reason I live in NJ and pay high taxes is because this is where the high paying jobs and good schools are. Cottontown, Alabama theoretically could be a financial capitol of the world and if you want to base your position on that, then you should probably re-examine your position.
Also a world trading with each other is a world disincentivized from war with each other.
Maybe that's fine, maybe its not, but its not as simple as trade makes everyone better off.
No, I would not prefer that. A robust distributed system is less likely to crumble under local pressures. A blight could more easily sweep through a single nation and take out a staple crop or two, where it'd be impossible for that to happen globally. You can't spin up additional global trade quickly after you've shut it down, which could lead to people starving in America. I like systems that can't fail. That's especially true when that system is how I'm able to eat food.
Global trade isn't a security issue, national or otherwise. We don't increase safety or stability by reducing sources of consumables.
Edit; super timely example because this isn't an unlikely hypothetical: egg availability due to bird flu.
This is basic fucking common sense: I'm good at some things and other people are good at other things. We each specialize in the things we're best at, and everyone ends up better off.
It's a bad idea for the same reason.
Environmental concerns would actually fit the bill too, if one is willing to consider externalized costs. Its easy to ignore mining damage in other countries and all the oil burned shipping over the oceans. When that all happens at home people would more acutely feel the costs and may be more likely to fix it.
describe how a entirely domestic food chain would be more resilient than one that is global?
Self reliance is a defective meme that breaks down once you want anything other than individual survival. Dependence on a community allows humans to specialize. Humans being able to specialize is the only reason this comment, or this thread exists. More simply, not just the Internet, but modern life couldn't exist without it.
Once you acknowledge that interdependency is a reasonable trade-off for the other nice things about life. A simple infection no longer being a death sentence is a nice thing we've commoditized reasonably well. The only question is, how do you build a robust and resilient system?
Having your government depend on foreign cloud and software was always a bad idea in my opinion, but IT security is not high on the list of the people that make decisions.
Russia depended on Europe, but got wiser after 2014 and certainly after 2022. To the point of having it's own Linux distribution (which I ridiculed along with everyone, and now it turns out they were right). Geopolitics change, friends become enemies and enemies become friends. Barring a civil war, a country will never refuse to work with itself, so it's the most reliable partner possible.
Russia is a bad example, they're doing stupid shit, the same as the US. Hurting itself in it's confusion. But I guess it's a fair point, if you're willing to cut off your own feet, you don't need to depend on importing shoes. And it might make sense to build exclusively domestic leg stub sock factories, given the rest of the globe doesn't want to cut off it's own feet.
I wouldn't actually suggest that as something the us should strive to emulate.
Its a lose-lose proposition.
Personally I don't mind not having strawberries in the middle of winter, but for some they care about that.
Kinda sad to go from that back to "well I guess I don't really need these nice things we took for granted. I suppose I can live off jellied eels again."
There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.
Want to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars or batteries? Ok, fine. But tariffs on all imports? It's the most brain dead policy in my lifetime. I can't think of any products that are produced 100% domestically without any foreign inputs. These tariffs will drive up the price of just about everything.
The US never lacked for smart entrepreneurs looking for a business opportunity. See wine.
In Italy it is not Italians who work in agriculture they also have (illegal) migrants.
An adult tree can be so expensive that there are cases of theft. It takes a heavy truck and a tree puller to steal an olive tree.
1. Support local producers. There are high-quality olive oils made right here in the US that might surprise you.
2. Work with Tunisia manufacturers to move their production to the US
3. If you don't want to support local producers, pay extra and enjoy your Tunisia olive oil as much as you want
4. If politics is the real issue for you, move to Tunisia, there is no "orange man" there
I don't know how much you know about olive oil, but it comes from olives, which grow on olive trees. Olive trees are famously long-lived and, together with the very specific types of land that they grow on, they represent extremely persistent and valuable investments for the people who produce olive oil.
They are nice trees, but beware you won't be eating the olives unless you put a lot of work in. They have to be de-bittered or "cured", which is done by soaking them in things like caustic soda. https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8267.pdf
So if you are after a nice compact tree that doesn't need a lot of water, then an olive tree is a good choice. But if you want a garden of Eden fruit tree, there are much better choices.
5. Switch to another source of fat, like lard or butter.
Even if there isn't a local industry that produces something, tariffs increase the competitiveness of domestic substitute goods.
They do use products from the US, just not physical ones. It's weird to read such takes on HN of all sites.
>Onagri data show that Spain is the leading destination for Tunisian olive oil, with 47.4 percent flowing to Spanish ports, followed closely by Italy at 42.2 percent and the United States in third at 33.8 percent.
https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/africa-middle-east/as...
We have had recent successes with developing & selling our own bottled products directly - Terra Delyssa is one good example that has gained traction in the US market.
Or perhaps I don't understand what they're trying to say in that sentence
Someone else mentioned a lot of Tunisian olive oil gets repackaged as Italian. I wonder if it could be double counting stuff like that (Italy + final destination). But yeah something is not right there.
Or is Tunisia tariffing the hell out of US Olive Oil in order to protect their local production base
https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/TUN/part...
Here is the data from 2022 on tariffs the US applies to Tunisia:
https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/USA/part...
Tunisia applies a shit ton of tariffs on the US imports.
https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/TUN/part...
Here is the data from 2022 on tariffs the US applies to Tunisia:
https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/USA/part...
However, one thing we absolutely cannot grow here in any sort of money-making way, is coffee. So 32% tariffs on imports of coffee from Indonesia.... when we do not even export coffee.
why? local producers don't pay the tariffs.
The whole thing is kind of nuts.
I'm not sure this is true. I buy olive oil specifically from California. It's niche but could be larger if they weren't competing with lower overseas labor costs.
Even if we could snap our fingers and create the orchards out of thin air there's not enough land and water to grow 50x our current production. Then where's the worker population coming from? They're also trying to drive overall immigration to essentially zero.
It's gotten so bad that Tunisian olives are shipped to Italy, pressed into oil, and labelled as Italian Olive oil.
Moreover, his use of the word 'happily' suggests he is not aware of the negative consequences for both the Tunisian exporter, who may have to lower prices or even reduce product quality standards to compete with the now relatively similar-priced Italian olive oil, and the American consumer, who ends up paying more without any improvement in value.
Why would someone be happy with a price increase if it is not helping the producers of the good (which his comment implies he is sympathetic to) or adding any value?
15 dollars for a liter of my favorite Olive Oil is a trade I would happily make. I didn't say I was happy that the price increased, nor did I say that I am happy about the tariff, nor did I say that I happy relative to how I felt about the trade last week.
Thanks for clarifying your position.
If someone can't even express their opinion without restoring to ad-hominems I assume they can't be readoned with.
That’s what wins elections now, sorry. If you don’t like it you’ll have to take it up with the voting public.
I hope you were equally as outspoken about his childish name calling.
The comment above was clearly constructive criticism. If you want to be taken seriously, don't recite name calling (if you are going to resort to name calling, at least don't join the mob and be original).
I along with a large portion of people who saw your comment immediately wrote off what you said because of name calling. You could be a nobel prize winning economist well versed in tariffs, but if you make fun of the person you disagree with because of his spray tan, then you just seem like a foaming at the mouth radical that can be ignored.
Maybe it will partially offset the increased cost of everything they need to buy and sell olives.
Now when I think of it it might be a wash.
You must not have read many of the comments here. Way too many people are trying to defend this just because they don't want to have to admit that they were wrong on Trump being better for the economy.
Pretty much everything else, including this supposed Tunisian olive oil, just sound like luxury goods to me, and should be priced accordingly.
You should be using America corn oil. /s
Surely that's not stupidly expensive, right?
Maybe you don't like either of these choices; but at the same time; saying "I believe that having cheap access to product produced halfway across the globe is a god given right to American people; how dare you imposing me to make such a choice" is part of the reason why we need 13 earth to sustain the modern US lifestyle.
I am really not a Trump supporter at all. But at the same time the gradual reduction of tariffs has been a key factor of increasing global trade; which in turn is a key component of the increase of CO2 emissions. Finding a way to dampen a bit the international component and making sure that locally sourced products and services are not affected seems not that bad.
So your dichotomy applies, but it's not some magical ratchet out of globalization unless there's a corresponding push on the federal or state level to build competitive domestic industries to replace the international supply chains we've been cut off from.
I'm not sure about that part.
International shipping in particular isn't a huge part of the energy cost of the goods that get shipped, so making the same things locally doesn't save much. This is from 2016 so things will have changed since then, but back then it was 1.6% of emissions from shipping, vs. 11.9% from road transport: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
What trade does increase directly is the global economy, and that in turn means more money is available to be spent on energy; historically the energy has been carbon intensive, but everyone is now producing as much green energy as they have factories to work with, and are making factories for those green energy systems as fast as they have bureaucracy to cope with.
I almost never see anyone disagreeing with that, and anyone that does is immediately qualified as "climate change denier". To me it looks like tariffs similar to those introduced by Trump would constitute a step in the right direction (make stuff more expensive = less consumption + if you buy it anyway you have disposable income so you give more to the state) . It feels weird to me that now it suddenly doesn't seem to be so much of an issue anymore; if it's only 1.6% why is it such a key argument.
Similarly; almost everyone agrees that "it's not normal that we depend so much on foreign countries for things that are essential for our future". That idea really came up during the COVID crisis and never left. The EU is launching "big plans" to address this issue (as usual; with barely any impact at all). Again; the reason why we have FFP2 masks made in china is purely because it's cheaper. Make them more expensive; and local options can pop up, naturally. It will take decades; but the ideal moment to begin working on your goals was yesterday. The next best opportunity is today.
There are many many things wrong with the way Trump computes the tariffs rates; the way they are announced, handled etc. But at its core: "less trade, less global & more local" is a key pillar of virtually every Green Parties over here; it's so weird to me to see Trump (!!!) actually do something that looks like it aligns with those goals.
But it’s not for the same reasons. Also, the Green parties explicitly want to reduce everyone’s consumption. Do you think American Trump supporters have intentionally voted for being able to afford less stuff, have less variety at the grocery store, etc?
You realize this money will not be used to pay down the national debt, but rather fund commensurate tax cuts for the very rich?
Their plan for the budget deficit is instead to slash expenditures (see DOGE and what they’re up to).
It's basically Europe but hundred or more years ago.
"Silver lining:" there's a good chance that oil was either rancid or doesn't pass basic quality tests for the "extra-virgin" part:
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/imported-olive-oil-quality-unre...
The COOC web site lists California olive oils that they've certified. Last time I checked California Gold Olive Oil was certified, and they even sell it in half and full gallons. That's just one I've tried and liked-- there are a bunch of others listed on the COOC web site. (Edit: there are probably certification trade associations for other countries/regions, COOC is just the one I'm familiar with.)