OpenAI's Stargate project struggling to get off the ground, due to tariffs

There's plenty of wealth in the EU.

What they don't have is an appetite for risk. You could lower taxes to zero, but you'd still not get the level of speculative investment in the US without cultivating a much larger appetite for risk. Similar issue exists in places like Japan. Investor classes that are, at the median, more conservative than they are in the US. So in the US we "lose" bigger, but we also "win" bigger.

(Of course all of this was pre-Trump. Now, I'm not sure there is enough certainty out there for even the big risk takers. But, historically, we in the US have been more risk-phillic.)

"the British Parliament decreed that any American vessel selling goods in London had to purchase tea as part of its return freight to the colonies. Thus, the captains of the Rotch-owned Dartmouth and Beaver dutifully loaded consignments of tea for their journeys back to Boston."

The Rotches absorbed the loss of 2/3 of the £10,000 cargo, however due to their position in the whale oil monopoly, they were unpopular in the colonies and received little sympathy. The war destroyed much of their business and wealth, and they weren't welcome back home in Nantucket, where the community felt they were abandoned.

The colonies were Crown businesses. A clearer reason for the war was the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It reserved land west of the Appalachians for native peoples.

https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/ro...

Before '67, England paid very high taxes on tea imported from China (>25%). So tea smuggling was rampant - mostly in England. But the Dutch government didn't charge any tax on the imported tea sold in the Netherlands, so that was smuggled into America.

Then in '67, the Indemnity Acts basically removed the high taxes on the tea sold in Britain. But this was followed up by the Townshend Acts, which added more taxes - specifically to the Colonies.

As you can imagine, this seems a little fucked up.... except the Colonies were already paying practically zero taxes. To the British, it was the Colonies who had been getting away with highway robbery, and these new taxes leveled the playing field.

But of course the Colonists didn't want to pay taxes. So they claimed this was unfair because they had no representation. The representation wasn't really the crux of the issue though... it was just that they wanted to weasel out of paying taxes. Only a representative in Parliament could levy taxes.

The thing is.... by this time, the Colonists had already set up a sort of shadow-Parliament. They had British representatives who were supposed to be telling the Colonists what to do.... but the Colonists basically just ignored them. By the time of the Tea Party, the British had already lost control of governance.

After several years of boycotting tea to protest the Townshend Acts, the acts were repealed in 1770, except for taxes on Tea. Yet they began importing tea again, mostly to Boston, as New York and Philadelphia were still mostly smuggling tea.

The East India Company was undergoing severe hardship during this time, for a couple different reasons. But basically they had too much tea and not enough people were buying it. So in Britain they returned the duty to the company that had been charged to them. They still needed a way to get the Colonies to buy this tea, rather than the smuggled tea. So in 1773, the Tea Act was passed. It granted the Company a monopoly on imported tea, cut out the middlemen, and added a tax due on delivery. This made the tea cheaper than smuggled tea, but added a 3 pence surcharge for each pound of tea.

One of the big purposes of all these taxes was actually for the Colonial Governors to receive their pay from British Parliament, so that they'd be loyal to Britain instead of the Colonists. Several Parliamentarians warned that these extra taxes wouldn't be accepted by the Colonists, but they were overruled. Without Lord North being a dickhead and insisting on the taxes, we wouldn't have our own country now.

So basically the reason for the Tea Party was 1) years of resistance to taxes (even though Colonists basically hadn't been paying any tax), 2) they wanted to have more Colonial control over Governors, 3) it took away money from both smugglers and legal colonial importers.

But there were other reasons too, like the fact that at this time in history, the British army was incredibly weak, with something like 40,000 soldiers total, due to recent wars nearly bankrupting the country and diminishing their fighting force. The Colonists had been calling the Empire's bluff for years, doing largely whatever they wanted. The Tea Party was a big middle finger, and the British had to respond, and so led to the eventual confrontation.

The constitution specifically states: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises..." [0] (Article I, Section 8)

Congress. NOT the executive branch or the President.

Tariffs are taxes, full stop.

Just because congress is abdicating it's duty and there are not even a handful of Republicans who will stand up to take back their proper power of taxation, does not make it either legal or moral to mis-allocate the power further away from the people.

And yes, while people did vote for that POTUS, and he did mention tariffs in campaigning, he was both not explicit about seizing power from congress, and had such a reputation for lying that it was literally impossible to predict what he would actually do.

No, you can not claim this misapplication of power is the will of the people.

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.

Except that the whole US system is binary, and your vote is too - you get to vote either 1 or 0, with no more nuance than that.

So technically yes, people voted for this, but also many were forced to because it came in a bundle which was the only way they could vote for their non-negotiables such as gun rights and abortion restrictions.

As for whether or not the people of the US got what they asked for, in a sense, that doesn't matter. Trump might think otherwise, but he is not a king. There's a document that he has to follow. This is a constitutional democratic republic, not just a democracy. The less he follows the rules, the more severe the repercussions could be for both him personally and the country at large.

Campaigned on raising taxes? Not only would a citation be needed, I would defy you to find a single Trump voter who thinks taxes needed to be raised.

This whole “it’s what people voted for” meme isn’t always an appropriate answer, and is many times just lazy commenting IMO.

Heck, the law that Trump is using to set tariff policy is designed to only be used in cases "of national emergency", and Trump has simply defined national emergency to mean whatever he wants it to mean. I think this article gives a good overview of the issues: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-usa-china-deal-is-bad-eco...

It's similar to how Trump has redefined the simple meaning of "foreign invasion" to give cover to his deportations (in some cases I'd call them abductions) without due process.

The people may have voted for this, but in the medium/long term it will be absolutely detrimental to our democracy.

Incorrect. He is the executive. Congress is the representation.

No, it's not. Congress is the representation, not the executive. The executive is supposed to implement what Congress decides.

This is the US swinging a club in an attempt at beating up the rest of the world and hitting itself on its head.

In general, tariffs which work out to >10% mean applied are only found in the poorest countries (where high tariffs arguably _can_ make sense if practically all industry is extractive/agricultural, on the basis that they may spur development of local secondary industry), or in weird micronations.

Additionally, the way Trump sets up tarrifs creates major uncertainty (which I can only assume is intentional), that can clearly be seen in the way the stocks develop. This also sets these tarrifs apart.

It’s raising them arbitrarily high on a whim - that’s the problem.

which... yeah, I could do without. I'm fine reaching parity with the level of market access in trade that other countries offer us, as well as the level of apathy in funding programs and conflicts that other countries have.

I do think its absurd to apply a different standard to the US, by people that don't really seem to notice what the standard other countries they respect are using.

I can also acknowledge that its disruptive. even at a blanket 10%, that's too much too fast for market forces to adjust adequately. but the overall idea of having domestic supply chains and velocity of wage payments and wage growth is something I like.