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Comment by linotype | Hacker News Reader

That’s the point. It’s not crazy. Tariffs are regressive taxes. Rich people buy more stuff, sure, but as a percentage of their income they net out as beneficiaries of shifting taxes from income to spending. It’s totally rational if you want to increase taxes on the bottom 80% to subsidize the top 20% (and especially top 5%).

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Personally I can understand tariffs on high end goods but taxes on low-end goods or raw materials is insane. Any country doing it has hobbled it's industry for decades and some might prove that they don't work even if you keep these tariffs on for centuries...

But politicians will politic what can we do huh... Really feels like no side, opinion or thought of every day folks matters anywhere.

I believe it was MIT that ran a study a couple of decades ago that proved that people were unable to influence policy through voting because the effectiveness of lobbying put the vote inputs below the noise floor?

Yup.

Our votes basically don't matter because our democracy is captured by lobbyists

Seems like the votes somehow matter. If Trump didn’t win there wouldn’t be tarifs right?

That's assuming that the voting machines accurately counted the votes and weren't tampered with

Tom Scott provided an excellent explanation of why electronic voting is a terrible idea.

Original: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

Follow-up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

Haven't watched them (yet), but I don't think it's because of the electronic side of things, but more the closed source, black-box nature of the specific devices. It would be possible to design a reasonably secure, open source voting system that would allow voters to validate their votes.

Have you had a chance to watch them now? The videos explain why electronic vote counting itself is the problem, not the closed-source black-box nature of any particular devices.

Which matches the rest of the seeming plutocratic moves afoot in the past 6 months.

Taking huge chunks out of American opportunism (defunding science, health care, education, space, and so much else), blowing a huge chunk out of social welfare programs: that's going to cause amazing downgrades for most people. Paths to success closed, cost of getting by vastly higher. (All while walking over all over habeus corpus, while collecting & colating data of everyone in the homeland, while building concentration camps and tossing random hairdressers in international terrorism dungeons; denigrating the population generally, humiliating basic rights of man.)

But the plutocratic class doesn't really notice the change. The Global Elite E1 Barbarian class (of Michael O Church 3 ladders) doesn't notice or care. They stay about the same, but the sinking tide leaves many other boats grounded.

It sure seems like there's an international conspiracy of the very wealthy to screw over the land of opportunity right now. And there's 219+53 people in congess and two in the White House happily helping aid and abet this pushing opporunity off the cliff.

Fits perfectly hand in glove with the Network State ideology (which seeks to make who you know and what connections you've gathered define your environment) and the Christofascist ideology (which says religion should rule), both of which resent government as it is, which are part of the broader long campaign to "starve the beast". But to regionalize this situation to the US feels like it misses how the real nature of the E1 Global Barbarian Elite's desire to make clear their ascent over all others.

You're effectively saying humanity replaced monarchies with a global (often faceless) ruling class.

Yup, that's it. The analysis fits. Brexit helped push the UK on the same path.

>Brexit helped push the UK on the same path.

The EU has mastered the "global (often faceless) ruling class". No Brexit needed for that one.

The EU's faces are more visible than Westminster's, and their powers much much weaker.

There's a sliding scale from "free trade agreement" to "country", and the EU is closer to the former than the latter even with the Euro and Schengen (neither of which perfectly matches the EU).

All hail the AI algorithms

Just another xerox of europe which is just another xerox of the middle east which is just a xerox of the local minima..

> It’s totally rational if you want to increase taxes on the bottom 80% to subsidize the top 20% (and especially top 5%).

Nothing rational about plutocracies or oligarchies.

What system of reason are you using?

To take the perspective of the oligarchs and plutocrats, if they can get away with it (avoiding the pitchforks), why isn't it rational?

That doesn't make it fair or just, or sustainable for societies or humanity, but it can be rational.

To be fair, the portion of the tariffs passed on to the consumer is a regressive tax. The portion of the tariff that is covered by the American companies is more complicated and probably goes mostly against the wealthy. (Then, of course, there’s the portion of the tariffs, covered by the foreign companies, which is article is saying it’s not a large portion.) There is hope the consumer is not completely screwed. We will have to see how it turns out. (I am not a fan of tariffs or the administration, but I am ok with people who are.)

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