Wonder whether Americans or the Chinese can weather tough times better.
Chinese don’t get to protest or voice dissent and Americans can’t be bothered to
Chinese don’t get to protest or voice dissent and Americans can’t be bothered to
Americans would understand that tough times are because their fellow Americans elected an idiot.
It will be a crisis for both countries, but it will unite one and divide another. I think everyone will lose but America is likely to lose harder, bigly even.
Traditionally, countries get pretty unhappy with their own leadership when the economy gets bad...
There's not a lot of room for nuanced political attribution at population scale.
But you can be sure that in the USA, this will all stop in 2 years with the midterms, and be reversed in 4 with the presidential elections. No one other than Trump’s fan base likes this even now, imagine in a few months when people start feeling the terrible repercussions.
Anyone saying they are sure about what is happening in the next 2-4 years in the USA is delusional.
Besides, corporations are actually better equipped to deal with sudden expenses then small businesses. Corporations will suffer the lest and possibly will pay for exceptions for themselves in white house. Smaller businesses wont be able to do the same.
EU needs to start taxing heavily any services provided here by the USA. Having the USA moron in Chief pretending that the comercial balance is solely made of physical goods to create an Excel sheet warrants a nice lesson.
Their services are provided by companies/branches in the EU not the US.
When you buy a EC2/S3 bucket from AWS you get invoiced by Amazon Luxembourg, not Amazon Washington. When you buy a Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Meta or Apple service, you'll be buying from a company registered in Ireland or Netherlands. And most of them also have datacenters in the EU for their EU customers.
So how do you tax them more than other companies in the EU? Make The Great EUSSR Firewall?
They are beholden to the US government in many ways, and relying on the services beholden to a hostile foreign nation should be considered a risk.
Honestly not sure what they'll do about tech, but it's not gonna be pretty.
Trade wars are bad for everyone, but we are where we are I guess.
The tariffs aren't some carefully-devised scheme to work out how to reshore manufacturing to the US; they're a slapdash scheme based on such idiotic economics that people had to do a double-take because the President of the United States and his cabinet couldn't possibly be that stupid. And once that sinks in, it becomes extremely counterproductive to the ostensible aims.
Why should anyone bother reshoring anything to the US? You might escape 30% tariffs on your product, but only for 30% tariffs on the inputs to your product. And living in the US means your long-term plans are always at risk of the toddler-in-chief throwing another tantrum because, as we've already seen, a deal he makes yesterday can become the worst deal in the world that is proof of how much the US is getting cheated tomorrow.
Really, I don't like Trump, I think he is a buffoon, but Democrats are so tiresome, calling wolf every time they don't get what they want. I know toddlers with more self restrain.
Winning > rule of law
Which I blame solely on conservative talk radio's lack of morals, and inspiring the same in their listenership.
The specific text in the 22nd Amendment states: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once"
Key word is "ELECTED," (the loophole) but this is up for debate as the intent of the amendment. Deeper dive here: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/04/legal-scholars-dispute-con...
1. Identity a problem
2. Blame $group of people for the issue and rally citizens to you
3. Oust previous administration/rulers with rallied citizens
And then to stay in power
1. Create or identity a problem
2. Blame $group of people for the problem
3. Rally citizens to ostracize the new group of ppl
4. Back to 1
The issues never need to be resolved, as long as the citizens blame someone and feel empowered to lash out against someone (the people getting blamed).
No one can be sure of anything, but the specific years you picked happen to have possibly two of the least electable candidates on the ballot.
Biden was not even a particularly good candidate in 2020, but he was able to win. I think that’s indicative of how low the bar is.
Congress stepping in to exclude Canada and Mexico and the NAFTA exemption cushions the blow significantly.
Most of Latin America being placed at the lower end of the announcement means manufacturers who used to be competitive until China Shock set around 2014-16 can be cost competitive again.
Other large markets like India, UK, and Vietnam are negotiating as well and India expects as Bilateral Trade Agreement to be closed by Aug-Oct.
It's gonna take a lot longer, and cost Americans a lot more money for "supply chains to react" and move manufacturing to the US.
Just like before the tariffs, the US is still too expensive.
On the other hand, it has killed cost-competitiveness for Chinese exports directly from China or via transshipment from Vietnam.
The tariff regime has now made Latin America (Brazil, Colombia), Turkiye, Philippines, parts of the EU (Poland, Czechia, Romania), and India cost competitive. And NAFTA/USMCA exemptions still remain and this was something Congress pushed back HARD on to ensure.
Even if it did, who cares? It wouldn't make anything less expensive or better and unemployment was already basically as close to zero as it will ever get. If wages go up that would just increase inflation more.
I can't figure out what they even imagined this was going to accomplish.
The downfall of Democracy in America and the alienation of all our allies? That is clearly their goal here...
Even if it did, is it even desirable?
Countries that actually tried to keep manufacturing beyond its usefulness typically punch beneath their weight, such as the case of Germany.
The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.
The US, being the most advanced economy in the world, transitioned a long time ago into a finance and service economy. It's kind of fascinating (viewing from the outside) that it want to revert to a more rudimentary economy, and there are people applauding that.
Can you explain to me how Germany is punching below their weight?
Like, I personally think that having manufacturing in multiple places is good for resiliency reasons at the very least.
> The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.
This is a complete myth. The US lost manufacturing because capital controls were removed, and capital went looking for new margins. Like, all of Microsoft's English customer service and technical documentation were in Ireland in the 90's. Is that because Irish people have comparative advantage in these fields? No, it's because wages were super super low compared to the US. We used to have a bunch of clothing factories too, because we were cheap.
Fundamentally, stuff actually needs to be made if you want a modern society. You can outsource that to cheaper countries/Asia for a while, but it's not gonna end well. Like, a large proportion of the population are not cut out to be tech or finance professionals, and if you outsource all the factories that they could have worked at, then they'll get really depressed and angry and vote for Brexit/Trump/Le Pen/AfD.
And given that most of the rich west are democracies, you can't just pretend these people don't exist.
Those that can will be cutting spending, which will ripple across the rest of the economy.
There's no sign that negotiation is even possible, never mind likely.
One tell is that tariffs have been applied to the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are inhabited by penguins and produce no imports or exports.
These are not the actions of a rational administration.
The median American household has an income of around $78,000 [0]. They can survive the blowback. The Trump admin on the other hand will not.
As a Sullivan, Raimondo, and IRA supporting Dem, it's a win-win for me. Harsher policies against China have been enacted which will not be rolled back (just like how the Biden admin let Trump 1 era tariffs remain) and it will cause a severe blow as midterm fundraising season has started. The NY by-election for Stefanik's seat itself proved that the tariffs and DOGE have made plenty of purple to light red seats vulnerabile.
I wrote some thoughts about this recently [1]
[0] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255223
Income distribution: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...
Then later they will make fun of the people that have missing teeth because they chose food for their kids over dental work and call those people trash.
What are the expenses of the median American household?
What do you think the death toll will be? A majority of households not surviving would put it over 160 million.
$4k per capita (not household) loss would put the US in 2022 territory [1].
So kind of you to volunteer that the poorest among us have nothing and should be happy about it.
You admit this is a $4k hit that Congress didn’t pass. Guess after all your talk here, you don’t actually believe in the Constitution or separation of powers just “I should be able to do what I want with power.”
$4k no biggie, right? From my experience, it just means when things wear out, they don’t get replaced. So shoes for kids get stretched to last longer. Car maintenance gets skipped. (You can judge a bad president by the number of broken-down cars on the side of the road.). It’s food not bought, medical/dental care skipped, rent coming up short.
The real death toll won’t be a one-time body count. It’ll be slow and quiet: worse health, more homelessness, more suicides. And for what? So we can LARP like we’re rebuilding American industry without giving businesses the capital, labor, or time to do it?
This isn’t strategy. It’s cruelty pretending to be policy.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/11/19/bank-of-america-nearly-h...
I know the senate voted this through. But it still has to pass the house doesn't it? I doubt it will even get to be voted on with Mike Johnson as speaker.
There’s no way they’d get that in the house.
Can you explain the magical supply chain adjustment that will lower prices after a year?
- Wasn’t this the administration that campaigned on lowering costs of goods? Now, not even a half-year in, the narrative is “Sorry, deal with it, while we chaotically disrupt global markets.” - The administration is apparently intent on a strategy that builds the U.S. manufacturing base. That’s not a one-year horizon, if ever.