U.S. already has the critical minerals it needs, according to new analysis
minesnewsroom.com
minesnewsroom.com
The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.
Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
America was great when the pocket books of the government were open to public spending and funded primarily by high taxes on the rich. In the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 90%.
What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich and big business to the point where they'd rather invest in their employees and companies. That's what drove the innovation and quality of life improvements throughout the 50s and 60s. We abandoned that in the late 70s onwards because of an economic downturn that hit everyone. Rather than just powering through it we went with "Let's just tear down everything" and now we are dealing with what the government was like in the gilded age of the 1920s. Stories of corruption, corporate capture, and scandal are nearly identical to what we see today.
We need a new deal.
No, it wasn't. The american dream was the reality of huge swaths of the middle class. Who do you think all those pre-1950 single family homes were built for? And of those that didn't live in a single family dwelling, the other inhabitants of a multi-family was often related to them.
The subsidy just made it a little more accessible down-market.
>What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich
Um, what? Look at tax receipts relative to GDP. We've never taxed harder than we do now. Even if you assume we took it all from the rich back then it was still less.
The only way this comment only holds if you look at fed income tax only and you look at the nominal rate, which is farcical.
Can anyone recommend a resource that comes to a definitive, non-partisan conclusion (even if the answer is: "it's complicated," or "neither")?
(Separately, it's interesting to ask LLMs questions like this: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc9e37-8a2c-800e-aeef-dc88977f56...)
(Though this doesn’t capture top end federal income tax rate.)
U.S. Corporate Tax Revenue as a Percentage of GDP (1900–2020s)
Decade Corporate Tax Revenue as % of GDP
1900s ~0.1%
1910s ~0.5%
1920s ~0.8%
1930s ~1.0%
1940s ~4.0%
1950s ~4.3%
1960s ~3.5%
1970s ~3.0%
1980s ~2.5%
1990s ~2.5%
2000s ~1.3%
2010s ~1.0%
2020s (est.) ~1.0% (varies slightly)
U.S. Individual Income Tax Revenue as a Percentage of GDP (1900-2020s)
Decade Income Tax Revenue as % of GDP
1900s ~0.0%
1910s ~0.5%
1920s ~1.5%
1930s ~3.5%
1940s ~7.5%
1950s ~8.0%
1960s ~8.0%
1970s ~8.5%
1980s ~8.0%
1990s ~8.0%
2000s ~8.5%
2010s ~8.0%
2020s (est.) ~8.0% (varies slightly)Unclear how we recover as a country given the reach of the Fox News propaganda. Maybe a huge recession?
This, but an actual depression that will likely make the Great Depression look like a good time - largely due to folks being a lot more self-sustaining back then due to common skillsets and lived experiences.
it's the same shit with high fructose corn syrup! everyone hates that shit, why did it take the Great Orange Menace (not to be confused with this website, the other Great Orange Menace) to get companies to realize that?
I know that bringing up HFCS here is a big digression; there are probably better examples. It's just another "broken clock is right twice a day" issue from the current admin that is so obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.
I’m beginning to believe the best path forward is a new constitution, which is absolutely crazy because I used to believe we had an extraordinary system designed with incredible foresight. It turns out it was full of holes and we mostly got by on the honor system. Sure, there have been lousy and corrupt politicians, but we never had a truly bad actor determined to sidestep every rule until now.
The problem is the citizens, which are chronically disengaged (a fact which has ample evidence behind it), not the legal framework. If you disagree, then feel free to point to a functioning democratic system at the same scale as the US that can survive 99% of its voters not caring enough to do anything more than spend 15 minutes voting once every two years, which is where we're at now.
The only way to keep a democratic government is to keep Huxley at bay.
What do really expect them to do ?
That sounds like a problem with the legal framework, if it relies on millions of individuals changing their personalities and priorities. That's not realistic.
> because that's a hard constraint that bounds all democratic systems.
There's no way to have democracy without an engaged citizenship.
And not only is it not a problem with the Constitution because of that fact, but it's a fact that the citizens were engaged in the past, so it absolutely is realistic.
100%. The Constitution was designed with good faith actors in mind. It was not designed in an age of gamification, in which we find ourselves now.
In fact you could very easily argue that the reliance on HFCS which is native grown and keeps a huge amount of tillable land in production is a national security asset. It keeps farmers (and thus the institutional knowledge that can easily be switched to other crops in dire emergency) in business vs. importing a product from overseas to replace it.
If the argument was removing sugar from most products - sure! But it's not like "banning" HFCS is going to change anything when you simply switch it out for beet or cane sugar instead. It's the sugar, not the slight difference in molecules, that cause the health problems. The only real health argument against HFCS is that it's so cheap it ends up in everything. But that likely has more to do with the war on fats from past eras than much else.
I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on this topic, but in the context of national security HFCS vs. Cane Sugar is a clear win.
The only way to avoid fructose is to avoid natural sugars. HFCS is created by taking a low-fructose sugar and modifying it to have fructose levels more similar to natural sugars.
Maybe previous administrations have been economically incentivized to not fix those problems. Perhaps those previous administrations didn't have our best interests in mind.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Mea...
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Altered-Harvest-Jack-Doyle/dp/0670115... This book also explains why tea is the British beverage (and not coffee), or how the Irish potato famine happened. And it explains the source of the corn blight that caused rioting farmers & housewives - texas male-sterile cytoplasm was used by all the hybrid seed companies, so a blight that affected one plant affected 80% of the US corn/maize crop.
Many heavy rare earth, i.e. the strategic stuff, is actually rare in terms of economic extractable sources we know of, mostly ionic clays found in China and parts of south east Asia I think also Brazil. It's the same reason PRC is the largest oil importer even though on paper PRC has the largest shale reserve in the world (more than the US), their deposits are just very deep in the desert, technically extractable but not remotely economically to the point where it doesn't even make strategically (not for lack of trying). This without even mentioning behind behind in extraction tech.
Yes, you _can_ try to regulate your way out of that. It'll result in a giant thicket of rulebooks, laws, procedures and processes. Exactly what a "slim" state would not want to see ...
(I am not sure there is a perfect way out; "extremely strong" gating criteria though tend to always favour the incumbents, and a prescription of "100% domestic all the way through" is a strong gating criterion if I've ever seen one)
They already operate in a thicket of laws, rules, and procedures. These all need to adapt to the behavior of domestic and foreign businesses to achieve national security. I think my proposal acknowledged and presented an initial set of propositions to deal with graft. It's better to try than to let national security fall by the wayside due to idealism about free markets. I am very idealistic about them myself, but we see our foreign counterparts use this idealism against us strategically. They are not constrained by idealism.
If it's universally true that free markets reign supreme for economic development, then how come "foreign counterparts" can strategically leverage that without having a free market themselves? How did they even get to the comparable economic level without them?
So I would counter that this is the wrong conclusion. Due to USA supporting and driving the globalization of trade and production, it has remained the "world leader" for as long as it has. Let's remember that USA has 1/4-1/3 of the population of China or India — I would say that the tactic has worked for a long while. Unless you want to claim how USA has inherently more capable and more intelligent people (which I would dispute)?
Without this, I believe USA would have likely lost the lead even sooner — let's see how high end tech export restrictions will end up? Will it make China actually catch up sooner since they can't leverage top end tech anymore, and now they have to invest a lot more in developing it themselves?
Now, maybe we are at a tipping point where USA does need a change of tactic to remain a "leader" (but why?), but it really seems like squeezing the last ounces of the tech leadership by USA to remain "top dog" for a little longer. At the same time, it's completely normal that countries 3x or 4x the size of it, with improved economic and scientific development, are about to overtake the USA. Do you think there'd be any incentive to go into a war if all the people in the world were as rich as middle class people in USA? I think it'd be very hard to get anyone to sign up for an army, even if there are any profiteers looking to start it.
A good world, IMO, is one where everybody has at-least comparable means as the US middle class. That would naturally mean that bigger countries than US are richer than them, and that is OK. I know US people have been growing up with this superiority complex, but really, a lot of historical things have come together for US to be as successful as it was.
I believe that all of you HN participants from US are closer in mindset to HN participants all over the world than to some of your fellow Americans. Don't let the nationalism get to you either: you've got good examples of what comes out of people in other countries who fall prey to it (they get abused by their politicians and war criminals, get the shitty end of the stick while the former get rich and avoid any life-threatening drama).
If we even imagine a war between nuclear powers like Russia and China vs US, I would hope that most of the smart, liberal population of USA would realise that this is not about "winning", but rather about having fewer casualties (iow, fewer dead people). And that is best done by less war (ideally none), and if war is in progress, figuring out a way to stop it as soon as possible, even if it means making some concessions.
While war does lead to engagement of industries which might have been long forgotten, in the big scheme of things, it is always an economic loss for anyone directly being hit. US does have the benefit of not having been directly hit for centuries (if we exclude a terrorist-style attacks like Sep 11th, or single instances like Pearl Harbour), but that would be hard to avoid in a conflict between Russia/China and USA.
And that's when polarisation in a society comes out, and with such a long, lingering list of "unresolved" issues, I wouldn't allow myself to predict an outcome.
While I am not a fan of Chinese or Russian leadership, I definitely hope that there are enough smart people in there to not allow such craziness to unfold either.
That's what Europe has done when it comes to most of its industry, and that is a big reason why now we (I'm from Europe myself) have to buy stuff like weapons from the Americans.
This doesn't seem to happen, at least not at scale.
That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.
So if you every have one of those thought experiments about traveling back in time and "inventing" steel (or gunpowder or penicillin or overthrowing the Roman Empire) hundreds of years earlier, forget about titanium because commercial scaled production couldn't happen until the 20th Century.
0 - https://www.titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-history-de...
This followed a 2021 deal with General Motors to insure GM's magnet supply.[2] That resulted in building a modest magnet plant in an industrial park in Texas, using MP Minerals ore.
This deal expanded in 2025, with DoD taking a majority stake in MP Minerals.[3]
The history here is that the price goes up and down so much that the Mountain Pass mine has been shut down twice since the 1990s. There were two bankruptcies. The most recent glut and price crash was in 2015.[4]
The process has four steps: 1) mining, 2) beneficiation, where mixed rare earth ores are separated out, 3) chemical separation, where the individual rare earths are separated, and 4) magnet metal making. For years, 3) wasn't done in the US, and MP Minerals was shipping ore to China for processing.
[1] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
[2] https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/g...
[3] https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transfor...
Well... In 2024 there were things like that.
Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280 coffee mug. They don't forget that, even half a decade later, when they hear the word "waste." Apple's monitor stand has better build quality than what it's known for.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23...
DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.
My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.
So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it.
The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.
I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr.
That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.
I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste.
The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue.
To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.
They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.
What "good slashing" did they actually do anywhere to assume they would have done good there?
a) many of the individual people leading DOGE benefit personally from DoD spending (which is not true of IRS, HHS, USAID, etc), and
b) most civilian policy leaders in this administration have built their political brand around boosting the military, and dramatic cuts don’t align with that.
It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.
The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!
The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.
Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.
They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.
Once that happens, if the system lasts more than a year, they have to start sourcing Dell 1234ABCs with the same specs. However, that's an item that's no longer sold. So then they switch to maintaining the ones they have, which means a support contractor is hired to staff locations to handle these repairs (because the local IT staff is already responsible for a lot of things, and maintaining obsolete hardware is not their priority). When what's needed is any computer with X GB of RAM, X GB (or TB these days) of storage, and so on. Set the minimum specs, go acquire it from whatever vendor, and move on. It'd cost a fraction of the amount of that multi-million support contract whose entire job is to maintain obsolete computers.
Adherence to internal procedure becomes ever more important as organisations grow larger, eventually becoming by far the most critical requirement for all work, internal or external. Cost, efficacy, customer happiness, etc... become distant secondary requirements, dwarfed by the mountains of procedure, policy, and paperwork.
1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump)
Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)
Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven.
A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract.
At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense.
Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.
So increasing taxes can be said to reduce government spending? Do you think anyone really buys that argument?
The argument that taxes are part of the social contract was made by the same people who invented the concept of the social contract, of which the US constitution is famously an explicit example. So yes in general I think the people who founded the country bought the argument that creating a government required the payment of taxes necessarily as an obligation.
Do you think anyone really buys the idea that it's anything else?
On top of that, the premise was based on defying congressional appropriations. Congress decides how money is spent. When the Clinton administration undertook this, they went through Congress to enact legitimate and lasting reform. [1]
The federal government has a much lower employee to citizen ratio than it used to have, it's quite efficient.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...
That reality isn't something either party seems to be willing to deal with today. The only time changes happen in the federal government are when one party controls the whole thing. Which is why there's such a fight for these mid-terms. If Republicans lose either house of congress, the last 2 years of the Trump admin will be stalemate.
In other words, it’s just something Trump wanted to do. The GOP is very firmly under his control.
The other policy that’s like that is tariffs. Nobody in the GOP wants tariffs except for Trump. You could see the lack of cheers at the SOTU.
The other truth of the matter is that the Republican Party has become addicted to cutting taxes without replacing revenue. It seems to me that there’s a desire to create a debt crisis to justify cuts to social programs. In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.
That wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that Bill Clinton was able to balance the budget _and_ keep the programs he wanted to not because it was something he originally wanted to do.
He did it because the Democrats lost power in the midterms to Republicans who ran on balancing the budget.
He was looking at either not being able to do anything he wanted and possibly vetoing a Republican agenda that the American people just voted for or changing his own agenda to more closely align with that and work with the Republicans to make sure programs that Democrats really wanted weren't cut but still balancing the budget. He did the latter and it's largely used as a point of pride for the democratic party but they ignore the fact that it was only achieved through compromise.
A more modern opportunity/example for this would have been if Biden, after the midterms, chose to work with yhe Republican congress on immigration reform and get something done that everyone could live with.
Instead he doubled down and made the situation worse, supercharging the issue in the next election leading to the election of Trump on largely that platform.
I'm not blaming just the Democrats for this, neither party would do it, it's just the example that came to mind.
> In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.
There's not really a good example of this in practice. Healthy social programs in other countries are typically funded largely through pretty substantial middle class taxes.
There simply aren't enough rich people and corporations to yax to fund the rest of the country.
The desire to tax the other to fund my benefits is the problem. Instead of looking at poverty and wanted to do something about it, we look to other people and tell them they should do something about it.
Nobody in the GOP was asking Trump to make cuts at (e.g.) the FAA, that was just the incompetence of the administration at work.
As far as whether taxes can pay for social programs, I’m just going to go ahead and disagree with you on that. We know this because we have math to tell us that the tax cut and jobs act and the big beautiful bill added to the deficit while still making cuts to social programs and increasing tax burden for the poor/middle class.
In addition, Social security is not a wealth transfer program at all and has always been self-funded. Its funding issues could be resolved overnight with modest reforms.
Medicare is funded by the same people who use the program, it’s not a wealth transfer program either.
Social programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare are at their most cynical evaluation society’s pitchfork insurance. If you let people go hungry you will get societal and political instability, it is in any regime’s best interest to keep the poorest people in society fed.
> Medicare is funded by the same people who use the program, it’s not a wealth transfer program either.
> Social programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare are at their most cynical evaluation society’s pitchfork insurance. If you let people go hungry you will get societal and political instability, it is in any regime’s best interest to keep the poorest people in society fed.
We're way off topic and really don't disagree much but I was mostly thinking of actual wealth transfer programs. The "social safety net" type programs you see in some European countries, and most iconically, Nordic countries.
Anyway, genuinely good chat but, seeing as we're so off topic, I'll probably not reply again (but I will read yours).
Like a coffee cup might've been in the shipping manifest, but that wasn't all of it and we still needed to pay to ship it to [redacted]
Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux and the US will still need rare earths.
Easier than smuggling a few tonnes of metal? Let me introduce you to my elderly parents...
That's actually a funny and real example. For a long time there was a heat map that showed where the concentration of MSIE 6 was. It was China because every copy of Windows was pirated and may have also had government keys hard coded in the pirated copies. They were locked at the patch level the pirated version was made from and it was impossible to patch it otherwise.
Either way the US has nearly unlimited amounts of rare earth material in raw form. Its just much more expensive and time consuming to process it in the US and US regulations make it even more expensive. China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that. That's why they are processed in China. Processing it in the US would reduce global pollution for a hefty price.
Some of it perhaps. A lot of it is more localised, going into their dust clouds and water supplies. We should face the fact that moving rare earth processing to the US would mean either expensive mitigation measures or a lot more Americans experiencing health conditions - and probably both.
2. Why do you think the pirated versions of Windows largely used in China are getting updates?
3. What do you think happens when patches aren't applied to Windows?
As for proprietary software that runs on Windows, these would need to be handled individually. The simplest solution for them is to use old versions that need no connection to the outside world to function. There might be some risks involved but I think they will rapidly adjust.
In my opinion, China and probably other countries currently have stolen code for every major proprietary software product. They just won't use it openly or officially because of IP laws. In a war, all that will go out the window. They may not have quite as many competent people to throw at fixing issues with that software, but they will do what they can.
What about scenarios short of a war? Well, a lot of what China does for us involves IP. If they stop respecting a bunch of our IP and stop exporting things that only they currently make, they can cause tremendous damage. Go look in a store and see what is made in China. American cars currently rely on Chinese parts and materials. The Chinese can stop exporting steel if they want. They will certainly take damage but you seem to not understand the extent of the damage they can inflict on the West. Windows Updates won't mean a damn thing in the long run, or even the short run.
Of course it's not. Imagine how difficult it will be to rebuild things to function half as well after all the corruption and disruption with less money
It's going to be a rough couple of decades.
The current admin has made it rocky, but the rest of the countries are still participating in it.
To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.
Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.
Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.
The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.
You're not going to find a lot of vegans working in a meat packing plant.
Your first link is the first-person account of a vegan who went undercover to document the abject cruelty that exists in slaughterhouses. The pragmatism was in service of a mission to protect animals by disseminating information on such cruelty rather than the “I need a job.” type of pragmatism. There’s a moral distinction here.
> Basically, I'm an animal lover. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something.
I was not at all referring to 'the "I need a job" type of pragmatism' (which would not be moral pragmatism for a vegan); rather, doing a job that involves killing animals in such a way that your presence reduces the marginal harm could be seen as defensible to a vegan.
and thus be fired?
But if said bureaucrat makes its own process more efficient, they might get fired because they are not needed anymore.
So even if the DMV clerks want it to not suck, management want it to suck.
Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible.
So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.
Not for long.
> high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn
See
It should and not even just linearily. If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets. Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on. Of course it should be funded with taxes not debt and that's where the worst part of government spending is. That it's done by indebting itself to billionaires and letting them suck more and more government money each year through debt servicing.
Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves.
It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.
I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in.
> The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not
To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.
I don't think you're articulating your point clearly here - what billionaires extract from consumers has to go towards funding the government in part, that is what they use to pay their taxes. Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from? Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.
Just to put my view - I'm with you 100% that billionaires are sucking money out of the government. Look at any billionaire and a good chunk of their wealth seems to come from some combination of regulatory capture and government contracts. I'm just not seeing how you square that with "and therefore the government should grow at the same rate of the economy". It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government.
The wealth of government is ultimately funded by the middle class. There aren't enough billionaires to carry the load. Eg, Elon Musk's net worth is estimated at $500 billion which isn't enough to cover 1 year of spending of the US military, for example. So he taps out after 1 year and then someone has to find funding for the 2nd year somewhere else. And you'd consume a few more billionaires (none of whom have Musk-level wealth) to cover the parts of the US government that aren't war-related. It wouldn't last long if billionaires have to fund it.
Consumers.
> Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.
Exactly. If you don't tax the return sufficiently it amplifies the capital (lands in th pockets of billionaires in other words).
> It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government.
What billionaires extract from the government in terms of subsidies and such is nothing compared to what they get as a result of tax cuts and being undertaxed in general.
Basically we should tax billionaires more. Government getting richer because of that is just a side effect.
Government growing with the size of the economy is not a goal. It's a gauge showing us that billionaires are adequately taxed.
I'm using term "billionaires" loosely. 10 hecto-millionaires are fine too as a replacement for one billionaire.
Again the goal is not to fund the government. It's to remove power from unelected oligarchs.
Government budgets should increase with inflation but there is zero reason for them to partake in the increase in productivity. Increases in productivity should, generally, also be applicable to government programs and, as such, they should get relatively cheaper over time, not more expensive.
If we want to _add_ programs, government budgets should increase in kind but the efficiency of government should rise over time as the things required to run government become cheaper. This rarely happens though because government programs don't have the same incentives that lead to increases in efficiency.
It's funny you're so against billionaires scooping up that money but want the government to scoop it up instead. Government is just big business with guns.
The reason is that government is ruled democratically which makes it less likely to successfully execute terrible decisions persistently. There's also some influence of the public on those decisions. In case of billionaires there's nothing to stop them to pursue idiotic, societally and economically harmful goals on a whim. There's also difference of transparency and availability of warning signs. Not to mention that I can change which government rules me by boarding a plane but Zuckerberg is influencing my life in every place on Earth.
Leaving the money with the populace is not an option. Citizens are weak, money will get scooped. The question is by whom. I'll pick democratic government over billionaires every day of the week.
> If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets
Stupid. For the purposes of this discussion, the government exists to provide services. The cost of those services, in general, decreases with economic productivity.
> Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on.
Both stupid and malicious. Mind-bogglingly stupid, because that profit isn't just captured by the wealthy, but by all economic classes. Malicious, because you'd rather sabotage the economy than let some people take excess profits based on their wealth alone.
You can't with straight face claim that profit is not captured by billionaires but by everybody if economy grows 3% but billionaires wealth doubles in the same period. They not only capture the entire new profit of economy growth but also extract wealth from all other parties including government.
Yet again, factually incorrect. The government provides many services - social security, food stamps, military protection, utilities, research funding, pharmaceutical oversight, and many, many, many other things. You're just wrong.
> You provide the service of producing economic value.
Also wrong. That is not a "service" provided to the government - it's just something that people do, and they have the right to keep those rewards.
> You can't with straight face claim that profit is not captured by billionaires but by everybody if economy grows 3% but billionaires wealth doubles in the same period
Those things are unrelated.
Yet again - a mixture between stupidity and malice, driven by base greed, envy, and resentment of what others have that you don't.
Sorry for using a short-hand. Government doesn't provide services for your benefit. The only goal of providing those benefits is to best enable you to produce economic value that government and the rich can capture.
> That is not a "service" provided to the government - it's just something that people do, and they have the right to keep those rewards.
The only right of the physical world is might.
Why do you think anyone just lets people do what people "just" do? They let people do it because powerful benefit.
It's the same reasoning why a warlord lets peasants grow crops and raise animals and chases away neighboring warlord. Because then there's something he can take for himself. Political systems change but the basic mechanic never did. Democracy and capitalism are just a way better tool for exploitation than feudalism could ever be. Efficient. Stable. Didn't you ever notice that with development of new, more enlightened systems of power tax burden doesn't shrink but grows instead?
> Those things are unrelated.
We have one monetary system. It's all related.
> Yet again - a mixture between stupidity and malice, driven by base greed, envy, and resentment of what others have that you don't.
I have plenty, way more than I ever deserved. I'm at risk of being directly negatively financially affected by policies I advocate for. Drop the armchair moral psychoanalysis because you miss every time, on all counts.
Ok, you're just evil. No need to justify anything to an evil person.
Factually incorrect. "The only right of the physical world is might." is not a realist statement, because being a realist is when you look at the factual truth of the world - it's a cynical worldview, which is non-truthful and therefore non-realist, by definition.
It's always entertaining to watch evil people try to justify their actions and (lack of) morality.
It's absolutely correct. Familiarize yourself with concept of "monopoly on violence". That's the physical source of any other arrangements including rights.
You handwave about some vague morality a lot, even after your accusation of envy missed by a mile and you think it's a substitute for a robust argument. It's tiresome and boring.
Now you shifted the goalposts from "The only right of the physical world is might." - so you can't even be consistent with your own positions.
> You handwave about some vague morality a lot
It should be pretty obvious that an evil person or someone with a repellent ideology's claims on morality are invalid, and how that's relevant to assertions about the function of the government, for instance.
The "might is right" ideology means that you believe that every tyrant, like Mao and Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini, was justified in their genocides and war crimes, because they were powerful enough to effect them, and therefore morally right by definition. That is, as any sane person would tell you, a perverse and evil morality.
I don't really need to go on further, because I know that I can't convince an evil and immoral person that they're evil. My only goal is to convince future HN readers that that idea is evil, and that therefore your assertions are invalid, and I think I've succeeded at that, given the downvotes on your other comments, and the general HN understanding that "might is right" is an abhorrent ideology.
So, my goal is fulfilled. Feel free to continue digging yourself a hole for future readers, if you wish :)
I was just trying to get through your confusion and reach thinking part of your brain. I repeatedly failed.
> It should be pretty obvious that an evil person or someone with a repellent ideology's claims on morality are invalid
You are so deep in your confused morality that you didn't even notice I made no moral claims except for "Being a realist doesn't make someone evil".
"The only right of the physical world is might." is not a moral claim same way "Acceleration due to gravity is indistinguishable from any other acceleration" is not. It's a factual claim. The fact that it's more vague and general and uses the word "right" doesn't turn it into a moral claim.
> The "might is right" ideology means that you believe that every tyrant, like Mao and Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini, was justified in their genocides and war crimes, because they were powerful enough to effect them, and therefore morally right by definition.
Again you are so confused that you can't tell apart narrative from a factual state. Saying that Mao had was justified because he had might is a moral claim (a wrong one) and is of no interest to me.
What I'm saying is that the only reason Mao could have awarded any rights to himself, his enforcers or his victims was because he had might. In this aspect he doesn't differ from any post WWII president of US. If you don't have might you are not the one who can create and award rights. Not in the real world. It has nothing to do with morality. Morality comes later to evaluate how benevolently the entity with might used its right to create further rights for themselves and others.
> My only goal is to convince future HN readers that that idea is evil, and that therefore your assertions are invalid, and I think I've succeeded at that, given the downvotes on your other comments [...]
Sorry to interrupt your victory lap, but not a single of my comments, on the path between the first one I made and this one, has karma below 1 at this moment. Even in theory, all you did was basically use ad hominem "you are evil" to declare my points invalid.
I had no goal in this thread other than being understood by you and I failed. If that makes you a winner, I don't really care.
> Feel free to continue digging yourself a hole for future readers, if you wish
I think it's plain to see which side tried to make arguments and which started and ended by flinging accusations of immorality, greed, envy and resentment and pretty much avoided the point altogether.
Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut.
But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.
Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.
The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.
If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.
Really? That’s the exact opposite of my experience. How do you even contact Google?
I have had consistently great experiences with government agencies from my local utility to the IRS. With a government agency I call the clearly posted phone number and immediately get an actual person who solves the problem. With private companies I have to navigate byzantine phone trees or fight with brain dead chat bots.
Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.
That specific one is an unfortunate side-effect of needing to allocate budgets in advance. Large organizations working with a lot of money need to statically schedule their budgets in advance - and because they don't have crystal balls, they can't actually know in advance how much they'll need, and have to make educated guesses. If a department didn't use all of its allocated budget last year, sure that's a very weak signal that it was given too large of a budget - but it is a signal, and there aren't very many other good ones.
Its the way of the world now to aim for growing into a huge org, hiring as much as you can on the way up. Once those in charge know little more about a part of their company than the budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year the model just doesn't make sense.
And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.
The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government.
Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.
I know this seems so abstract it sounds like a truism and not actionable. Considering that incentive structures come in many guises (laws, morals, money etc.) the first thing we need to figure out which incentive structure is dominant in a given situation. An employee of a bureaucracy, for example, might share the presented moral disapproval about inefficiency but is it the dominant incentive structure? Probably not.
For example, DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, emphasising cost reduction vs. effectivity and privacy. People were (maybe are, nobody is reporting anything on this anymore) up in arms because they had to abandon incentive structures they knew to navigate. DOGE was a colossal failure because emphasising efficiency over effectivity is always like polishing a turd and many people said as much "back then" but look at the incentive structure of those who didn't and don't. Many of them have not prospered in the previous structures, so they support the new ones, even if they are insane to you and me. They act rationally.
> emphasising cost reduction
no.
DOGE attacked organizations investigating companies owned by Musk. Nothing else.
I don't think it's easy to design a firing process that would outperform random chance there. In any non-random process, office politicians would always be first in line with an excuse for why they specifically should not be fired. No matter what the criteria for not getting fired are - they'll do their damn best to make sure they meet them.
I do think there's a threshold of organizational dysfunction that justifies unleashing "random destruction" upon it. Or even "total destruction" - and building it all anew.
Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.
Random destruction might be the best kind of destruction but that doesn’t mean destruction leads to efficiency. If politicians are inevitable why would what comes next be any less susceptible to political manipulation than what we already built?
What’s step two in the revolutionary underpants gnome playbook?
1) Burn it all down
2) ???
3) profit?
> Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.
I assume this is a bad joke because otherwise it’s extremely dangerous and ignorant. In the current climate it translates to an actual call to violence.
Jefferson’s quote is about the necessity of violent revolution which ultimately led to the systems we have today. He had a specific grievance. He desired self-determination. He won. We have it. Why are you so eager to repeat the sacrifice and hard work of our ancestors to get back to where we already are? What benefit do you see in doing so?
Career bureaucrats aren’t politicians. Those are different things. I have had many positive experiences with “career bureaucrats”. They really only exist to help. It’s why we call them public servants.
It is a lot easier to call my public utility provider and solve a problem than it is to call Facebook, Disney, or Alaska Airlines. I have had nothing but positive experiences with the IRS.
It’s easy to break things. Children can do it. What’s your plan for building and operating something if you can’t even operate what we already have?
Government agencies rarely face anything like this. TSA exists without facing a risk of being destroyed for being worthless. There is a mechanism missing.
The "step two" is to rebuild it from the grounds up. If there is any need in rebuilding it at all. Never rehire any of the old people. It's how a lot of the post-Soviet countries ended up fixing their dysfunctional government institutions.
They had to thoroughly destroy what was there and build it anew to as much as make them sort of work. There are reasons to believe that the dysfunction would have survived lesser measures - and in some countries that shied away from destruction, it did.
How do you know what can be rebuilt better? If you can identify these systems why can’t you modify them? If destruction is constructive don’t you have to concede that whatever you build next also deserves destruction? And if so why build it at all?
If you can’t articulate specific failures and propose solutions now then why would you be able to post-destruction?
What properties make a post-Soviet system worthy of keeping? Why shouldn’t those systems also be constructively destroyed? Why should we apply constructive destruction to non-Soviet systems?
If your entire plan is to break things how do you ever build? What philosophy guides your rebuilding process?
Sometimes things fail so badly that a randomly initialized system outperforms them. Sometimes things fail so badly that no system at all outperforms them. The point is: recognize that and apply destruction.
Define egregious. Why would the next thing be any different than what it replaced?
> Sometimes things fail so badly that a randomly initialized system outperforms them.
Sometimes? When?
> The point is: recognize that and apply destruction.
How do we recognize what needs to be destroyed? What are the criteria?
What you’re describing here seems incredibly careless.
If you don't find yourself saying "destroying this was a mistake" every once in a while, you aren't destroying nearly enough.
I still don’t see why we should try to cut into the bone of our society. I see no benefit to careless destruction.
If you believe something along the lines of "the richest 1% of society, the ones who have > 10x more wealth each than a typical upper-middle-class person, have too much money and too much power and we should change that" -- which I think is the kind of thing Sanders believes -- then talking about "millionaires" was a reasonable way to express that 50 years ago; these days what we need is a word whose meaning is more like "person with $20M or more"; give it another 50 years and "billionaires" might express roughly the same meaning that "millionaires" did in 1975. (Or, of course, there might be a huge economic crash, or a currency devaluation, or a technological singularity, or something.)
So someone could switch from complaining about "millionaires" to complaining about "billionaires" just because the way the meanings of those words have shifted means that the best word for pointing at a particular social issue used to be "millionaires" and is now "billionaires".
Because we really only have "millionaire" and "billionaire" and, more generally, numbers spaced by powers of 1000, the sets of people you can talk about pithily change over time. So, at the moment, you can talk about "millionaires" and be referencing something like the top 15% of US households (so if you're wanting to engage in some hostile rhetoric, pointing it at "millionaires" is probably broader than you want for several reasons); or you can talk about "billionaires" and be referencing something more like the top 0.0003% (so if you're wanting to raise money by redistribution, "billionaires" is probably much narrower than you want).
I suspect there are a few good PhD theses to be written investigating questions like "do populist-leftist movements have more success in places/times where some handy term like 'millionaire' picks out roughly the top 0.3%-3% of the population than in places where there's no word that does that?".
(Note: numbers above are in the right ballpark but I make no claim that careful calculation wouldn't change them somewhat.)
My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!
Not if you need a house
For anyone who's dealt with a hoarder house that's not the reducto ad absurdum you think it is, just the tragic reality.
Likely you’re psychologically unable to ever do it, but it’s comforting to have this convenient lie.
There’s only one way to know.
"I'm not addicted, I can quit anytime I want"
No helpful disposition is required behind the "calling out" for that to be the case.
The (unverifiable anyway) intention doesn't add some magic dust to a comment to make it good or bad.
my experience helping clear out a hoarding family member's house tells me this is highly unlikely.
If the decision is just "dump", the problem become easy: you strip the house bare and throw it in a dumpster. There was a hoarder house near me that was cleaned out in a couple days that way - they parked a dumpster in the front yard, hired a couple guys to toss everything in the house in garbage bags and toss all the garbage bags in the dumpster, gutted it down to the studs, remodeled it, and sold it.
They regaled us with a tale of how they just got to the city and were looking forward to being able to furnish/populate their house, but it was obvious that they were just grabbing and selling everything as a career. No harm no foul though, as we just wanted stuff cleared out and it certainly ended up 'in circulation' for folks that could use it.
> they want to evaluate every single item
I almost gave up on him and only resumed when he was literally crying for me to come back. Did not regret coming back.
When he died 5 years later, my poor mother needed WEEKS to throw away all the useless shit he had accumulated in his apartment. Then I did regret not being harsher on him, but he was mentally and physically ill.
To anyone reading this: You are not the only one being hurt when you are a hoarder. Let people help you.
Even more unlikely when said hoarder says _they_ can do it in a few days.
It's not the junk that is the problem, it's the way of thinking that leads someone to refuse to discard it. Or more likely there is some even deeper rooted cause that makes them think that way.
It can also be the case that the people they live with don't help either.
Don't agree in demolition of the USG though - it's actually quite effective when you think about it.
As a matter of fact, hoarder house is quite an accurate description of the US government.
Choices...
Goverments and lawmakers do get to "do that with people's lives". And they do that, affecting them, all the time. Including affecting them negatively a lot of the time.
And it gets worse: ineffective bureucracies (or incompetend ones) also "get to do that with people's lives"
["that" being: affecting them negatively, destroying their livehood, even causing deaths, e.g. consider some country's organization similar to FEMA being incompetent when there's a crisis].
We can never reduce the size of the federal workforce because it means people will lose jobs?
We can never cut any federal benefit or subsidy regardless of the cost, importance, or overall value to society because someone, somewhere is benefiting from it?
I was young, but I remember cries of "you can't do this to people!" then as well, just like we hear from a select group of people every time any cut is contemplated, which is why I asked the parent poster what exactly they mean by their comment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Rei...
And obviously sustaining an ineffective bureaucracy can never itself lead to the deaths of children and the elderly /s
I guess if the goal is to harass innocent Hispanics and deport fewer criminals then effectiveness is on the rise!
Almost always the real solution is the unsexy and emotionally unsatisfying task of just fixing the machine you've already got
It's not funny, it's practical.
Even if we were to demolish and rebuild first there's cleanup. Then there is a survey. And then planning, input design and then after all that, construction.
If you were going to do all those tasks inside that building you already destroyed, it's now much harder to rebuild.
Order of operations matter.
A September 2025 executive order authorized the usage of "Department of War" as a secondary name. Department of Defense remains the legal name.
'Active clubs' are on the rise - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/19/active-clubs...
Trump's signature accomplishment is to unintentionally convince China to enact a total ban[1,2] on the exports of several rare-earths (and some other minerals)—something he didn't predict, and is now trying to undo.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/26/trump-tariffs-china-rare-ear... ("Trump threatened 200% tariffs on China if Beijing does not export rare-earth magnets to the U.S.")
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor... ("China bans export of critical minerals to US as trade tensions escalate")
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/business/china-rare-earth... ("China’s Grip on [Samarium] Threatens the West’s Militaries")
The EU, UK, and India are working on scaling out EESM production and Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India are working on building an ExChina processing and supply chain for a number of materials. This played a role in the recent Japanese pledge to invest $60B in India and transfer processing tech IP to Indian firms.
Japan and South Korea are not western nations and hence not part of the west.
> This played a role in the recent Japanese pledge to invest $60B in India and transfer processing tech IP to Indian firms.
Think it had more to do with the US forcing Japan to join its trade war against china. Don't you?
Japan and South Korea are commonly treated as being part of the West for the same reason Australia is - they are geographically in Asia but aligned with the United States and EU.
If you don't like Japan or South Korea being called "Western" we can call them NATO+ then.
> Think it had more to do with the US forcing Japan to join its trade war against china. Don't you?
Japan began moving REE processing to India all the way back to 2010-12 when the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff happenened and China blockaded Japanese access to REEs. That's when both Toyota and Hitachi began working with IREL on REE extraction and processing.
And China initiated the trade war with Japan all the way back to the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff, just like China initiated the trade war with South Korea due to South Korea allowing THAAD deployments. The interest in developing an ExChina supply in Japan and South Korea has existed ever since China was the aggressor to both countries.
And Japan (as well as South Korea) has been an economic partner of India since all the way back during the socialist 1980s era. Japanese JVs like Maruti Suzuki, Tata Hitachi, Tata Docomo, Sumimoto Chemicals India, and others have been around for decades. Heck, it was Softbank that helped spark India's startup boom in the 2000s and 2010s which became the IPO boom today.
Australia isn't "treated" as being part of the West. It is a western nation. It's people, institutions, culture, language, etc are all of western origin. Japan and South Korea are not western nations. All you would have to do is go ask the japanese or south koreans themselves. I don't know of anyone who "treats" Japan and South Korea as western nations except those with a bizarre agenda.
> they are geographically in Asia but aligned with the United States and EU.
Australia would still be a western nation even if australia was aligned with china. Also, western nations existed before the EU and even before the US were created. If the US and Australia went to war against each other, they would still be western nations.
> And China initiated the trade war with Japan all the way back to the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff.
Then you might as well argue Japan initiated the trade war by imperial expansion to those islands.
(Insert here a logical gap wider than the ocean between the US and where the rare earth is produced)
> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
as long as if you're willing to ignore the people it will kill
Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China because of an extortion incident between the two... they process the ore in far off places (Australia and other places), before importing the final products.
The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.
Nope. They are still dependent on transshipment via Thailand or processing in 3rd countries like India or Vietnam.
Heck, Toyota's India JV has been halted [0] from exporting processed rare earths to Japan from India right now because China has blockaded Indian access [1] to rare earths which China promised to remove recently but still hasn't [2], which lead to India blocking it's export of REEs.
And people wonder why countries have continued to engage with the US despite Trump.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-moves-conserve-its...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...
[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250916VL202/tata-group-rar...
That’s pretty big news if true.
The Japanese government, Toyota, and the Indian government began a REE joint venture back in 2009 called Toyotsu Rare Earths India Ltd [4] that dramatically expanded after China started a trade war with Japan over the Senkaku Diaoyu islands in 2012.
> That’s pretty big news if true
It has been in Japan and India for months now. This is why the Indian government began a massive processing campaign over the past 1-2 years with Japanese and Korean involvement, along with a push for EESM mass production.
[0] - https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4196
[1] - https://cuashub.com/en/content/a-geopolitical-game-of-drones...
[2] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/
[3] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/coe-sards
[4] - https://trei.co.in/
[5] - https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/cfer-202...
There has to be some reason to use such a roundabout method and get the Indian board members signatures on the record on whatever they sent to Beijing to get it approved in the first place.
Japan began moving extraction and processing to India. Japan conducts transshipment via Thailand and Vietnam (though Vietnam is now graduating into processing as well).
TREI is completely ExChina.
> China was fine with rare earths ultimately making its way to Japan
The worry has been if China and Japan are ever in a diplomatic tussle again like in 2010-12, then the entire flow of REEs from China could be shut down, but the Chinese government still wants to let some amount of flow to happen in order to ensure that the incentive to build an entirely ExChina supply chain does not take hold.
(By genuinely using the materials in India which Indian JVs typically do)
India and China have been at logger heads since the 1960s. The same moment India and Japan started the joint JV, India and China had a naval standoff because India's ONGC began developing Vietnam's claim in the South China Sea [0] and the PLA began normalizing encroachment [1] in Ladakh and Arunachal.
China has weaponized export controls against India for years now, from requiring Foxconn pull back Chinese employees working on equipment transfers to India [2] to barring magnet exports for India's EV industry [3] to barring Chinese EV firms and suppliers from moving to India and Vietnam [4].
China is trying to do to India what America should have done to China in the 2000s and 2010s. Even if the US did not figure in conversations, the same weaponization against India by China would have happened.
> By genuinely using the materials in India which Indian JVs typically do
Japanese and Korean companies have been using IREL and transferring IP to Indian SOEs for almost 15 years now as well.
[0] - https://thediplomat.com/2011/09/india-china-navies-face-off/
[1] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/08/impasse-at-th...
[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/02/foxconn-tells-hundreds-of-...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-magnet-curbs-risk...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/business/china-electric-v...
They seem orthogonal to the issue of Indian board members now being involved on the record.
The funniest part is our current admin's inadvertent exposure of this situation. Tinfoil hats on, but I hear tell of difficulties in the subprime auto-lending space because so many of immigrants who were targeted for those loans either stopped making payments because they're too afraid to go to work, or else self-deported with their cars. Lender bankruptcies are in-process, which is probably not good for all of the derivatives that are about to go to zero in sympathy. So much for consumer strength, and completely avoidable if not for our insistence on squeezing our least for every last cent.
If you're going to get smart, at least pay attention.
China doesn't want to keep refining the metals - they want to move up the value chain by making things out of these metals. Instead of selling the refined neodymium & dysprosium for $50, they want to sell the electric motors that sell for $1,000.
Notes:
1 - They aren't rare at all, they're the bottom 2 strips/rows of the periodic table (of how it is most commonly displayed). Chemically, they're rather similar so the separation process is more complicated and annoying than, say, refining iron ore. Many people like to specifically exclude the actinides (the bottom row which includes uranium & plutonium) from the category "rare earth" because scary! radioactive! nuke! stuff! tends to divert discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
2 - A major problem with SuperFund sites is that every person/corporation who owned that land at any time is responsible for cleaning up the toxic waste. Just like asbestos waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund
It went bankrupt in 2015, but came out of it and is still operating today. $MP, up 300% YTD
The Japan incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in...
tldr: Japan arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain in disputed territory. China responded by restricting exports of rare earth elements to Japan. Japan responded by forming a new partnership with Lynas Rare Earths which mines in Australia and processes in Malaysia. $LYS, up 150% YTD
Are second-sources no longer a thing? Going with the lowest cost is fine, but it used to be that every critical project lined up a second domestic source for its supply chain. A lot of prominent semiconductor companies (eg. AMD) got started this way.
China did not stop selling to USA before USA decided to introduce tariffs and stopped selling to China advanced tech like GPUs and NPUs.
In a sense, mutual economic dependency has worked in the past, would work in the present, but "blowing up the government" is leading to one strong-arm play after another — and really, it only leads to everybody being unhappier, and prices being higher for everything, yet the trade will continue very similar to how it did before.
And really, this trade inter-dependency is really the only guarantee (if there is such a thing) of no big military conflict coming out between the two countries. And I am pretty sure that's worse.
Though it doesn't address the issue of waste from the refining process which currently looks like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
Either you eat the cost of the externality or you accept that countries that can will end up dominating the industry, and hold entire sectors like automotive or semiconductors hostage. This is what China did and what Vietnam [0] and India [1] are attempting to do as well.
It's like packaging for grid batteries - someone has to do the dirty work because manufacturing is inherently dirty.
The only rule that matters even in a "rules based order" is might makes right.
If we don't want to do it, then we need to cultivate partners who can - but the only countries who are not China and open to eating the externalities are Vietnam and India, which is why South Korea and Japan depend on them after China weaponized REE imports to both in 2016 (THAAD) and 2012 (Senkaku) respectively.
[0] - https://en.mae.gov.vn/Pages/chi-tiet-tin-Eng.aspx?ItemID=811...
Let China process the materials under normal circumstances, but keep 6 months of processed output on hand in case trade is disrupted (trade disagreement, pandemic, war, etc.).
That's not enough of a leeway when dealing with a country who has active land disputes with 2 countries we have a defense treaty with (Japan, Phillipines) and 1 with whom we have an ambiguous defense commitment (Taiwan).
And even the Chinese government knows that countries like the the US will try to stockpile. Almost all processing, mining, and exporting in China for REEs is managed by SoEs and under close monitoring from state regulators.
This is why the Biden admin initiated the Minerals Security Partnership with Japan, India, and Australia.
I think there are two ways to effectively mitigate this risk: 1) have mining and manufacturing of your own that covers most of your needs, or 2) balanced trade where you get something critical from another country, but they also get something critical from you (and can't easily get it somewhere else).
(Of course when you have very solid allies, you can relax a bit more and rely on them, but you still have to be prepared for a situation where that ally has a shortage and prioritizes their own use.)
Waiting out 6 months of production would be easy. And even the threat of interruption would drastically mess with prices.
I don't think it is good, but let's be reasonable in comparing environmental harm.
This isn't about China or the size of the lake, but the fact that there is a lake because the effluent is difficult to dispose of and currently has no use.
Edit: to further clarify, I am not against refining them in the USA. Just that we have to also address the consequences of doing so.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mildred+Lake,+AB+T9K+2Z1/@...
Check the previous dates. 2018 yes, 2022, no.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/northern-ontario/article/company-work...
https://www.jxscmineral.com/blogs/gold-tailings-impacts-and-...
You want carcinogens in you water supply, and a whole NYT expose about it? That's why. Mining and processing is VERY VERY VERY dirty.
Countries like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India are choosing the accept the externalities and/or make deals with shady partners if needed.
Add to that spamoflauge campaigns lead by nation state competitors trying to stoke opposition to these projects [0], and it becomes hard.
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
Edit: can't reply, so replying here.
> mines many elements domestically, so why the sudden environmental concern specifically with rare earths
Optics mostly, along with a healthy dose of social media disinfo [0]. Processing is also a pain in the butt and causes severe externalities.
> while the US relied on market forces to handle supply chains.
Pretty much, but private sector firms are also worried/hemmed by the implications of litigation.
The recognition that the status quo is unstable arose after China weaponized exports to Japan during the Senkaku Diaoyu crisis (it was one of the first things I worked on in my short stint in policy), but "industrial policy" was a dark word you could never utter on the hill until the last 3-4 years.
Also, 13-15 years ago, China wasn't really viewed as a threat the same way it is today. Russia was viewed as the primary peer state competitor to the US back then. I yelled hoarse warning the people I reported to that we needed to deep dive into Chinese institutions back then, but no one listened.
These are good things, but they make it a lot more expensive to do this stuff domestically.
Mining and processing is very dirty.
In a similar vain, I was talking with a friend about plastic straws and the movement at the time to ban them. My friend was all on board and told me about the stainless steel ones they just bought from Amazon Prime. It's very convenient, delivers straight to your house and if you don't like it you just send it back.
So here we are worried about the straw but are having things shipped with 2 day delivery to the door. We live in a reasonable large city, drive to and from work past stores that are selling the same items. 2019 numbers have Amazon's van fleet at 30,000. Assuming 67 tons of GHG per vehicle(https://www.transportationenergy.org/resources/the-commute/l...) gets you 2 million tons.
I don't worry about the straws, I worry about the thinking that gets us to focus on the straws instead of the larger picture.
I hardly ever drive anywhere these days. Pretty much everything we buy in the household comes through Amazon or another online seller, and gets delivered by vehicles that would have been on the road anyway, delivering other things to other people. The "larger picture" may be larger than you think it is.
I'm not saying it's doable. I'm sure that in Soviet USA there'd only be one delivery service, but it'd be about as fast and reliable as UDP over avian carrier :)
Before Amazon Prime we had 2 major deliver services: UPS and FedEx as well as USPS.
Now we have 3.
I didn't include in my previous comment but most of the people using Prime that I know still drive everyday, many drop their kids off at school. Going past stores that sell the same sorts of things they are buying on Prime.
For them the main driver is convenience of not having to stop and the ability to tell Alexa to put it on a list and reorder periodically.
This seems to be the case for most of the customers, look at the rise of Instacart. Door Dash followed suite by expanded from just hot meal delivery to Retail and Grocery. Traditional grocery stores don't want to leave the margins on the table so they are launching their own efforts.
I leave some food for thought:) https://web.archive.org/web/20200612211824/https://www.thegu...
Is there evidence that China’s rare earth mining creates more environmental damage than US coal, gold, or other domestic mining operations?
The real issue seems to be strategic: China made rare earth supply security a policy priority, while the US relied on market forces to handle supply chains.
With that being the case, how can I in good conscious take a position that would lead to mining and manufacturing being done in any country that is not enforcing environmental and safety regulations? In any country that is not paying a living wage?
So yes, I want mining and processing done here. I want the manufacturing jobs here. We want clean air and clean water, we have to pay for it.
As such, there will be environmental externalities no matter what, and wishing for "clean mining and processing" is the same as giving "thoughts and prayers" - essentially meaningless.
In my opinion, we need to accept that cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine
The Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility, owned by MP Materials, is an open-pit mine of rare-earth elements on the south flank of the Clark Mountain Range in California, 53 miles (85 km) southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2020 the mine supplied 15.8% of the world's rare-earth production. It is the only rare-earth mining and processing facility in the United States. It is the largest single known deposit of such minerals.
Look at the history section to see how this mine initially dominated rare earth element production, then shut down due to low price competition, then reopened, then shut down due to low prices, then reopened.
The total addressable market for rare earth elements is small in dollar and tonnage terms, but opening mines and processing plants is expensive. One big new mine could tank the global market price.
The US used to maintain large stockpiles of many mineral resources for defense purposes, but mostly stopped in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. The pendulum may be swinging the other way now. The Mountain Pass mine received DoD grants in 2022 and 2023 to support continued operation, regardless of open market prices.
The only way to mine rare earths is to just process massive quantities of earth. Typically this is done as part of another mining operation, like mining nickel. It's labor intensive and requires nasty chemicals. Places with cheap labor, weak environemental regulations, and extremely large scale mining operations that they are going to be operating anyways are always going to be able to produce the cheapest rare earths. It's very easy to see why China naturally dominates the market.
...and we were just looking for zinc!
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/52342/202...
This creates a perverse incentive where it is often cheaper to reprocess low-grade ore from an existing mine than to jump through the regulatory hoops and decades of lawsuits to develop a new mine with high-grade ore. Refining a low-grade ore in the US often is not cost competitive on the global market, so there isn't much incentive to do so even though you've already mined the material.
The US needs to make it fast and efficient to develop new high-grade ore deposits. America has extraordinary mineral wealth as a matter of geology but we barely even explore in the US anymore because even if you find it you can't develop it. This has been the case since circa the 1980s or 1990s.
Price controls on gold up until the late 1970s didn't help either, since it discouraged gold exploration. Many high-value mineral deposits in the US have been discovered as a side-effect of gold exploration. The price controls disappeared but were almost immediately replaced with regulatory regimes that made it unprofitable to develop new mines.
Many rare earth deposits in the US were discovered as a side-effect of uranium prospecting. The US government stopped subsidizing uranium mining ~1970, which was the main reason it was being done at all, and so people stopped discovering associated minerals around the same time.
Or is that just the inefficiency introduced by them pesky regulations you're trying to make more "fast and efficient"?
If you don't price all that in, some might say you're asking some locals and counties to give a pretty major subsidy to some private mine owner.
Simplistic thought, but, they're the only ones willing to ignore and cover up the insane pollution it causes. Rare earth is somewhat synonymous with "exceptionally toxic."
The unwritten implication is, we can do it ourselves, but the price will skyrocket as a result. I personally think that would be fine. Wait a minute and someone else will come by to yell about this the other way.
Question is whats more cost-effective: paying market rates to secretly stockpile, or paying for another Iraq or Afghanistan in the south china sea...
For the same reason that only China can produce t-shirts, or a quality sedan EV with a 5-star EU crash test rating and 350 miles of range for $15,000.
Pollution. The smokestack emissions are very toxic. The residue/slag is toxic and radioactive. One should remember that "rare earth metals" are not rare, they're the bottom 2 rows of the periodic table. They are rather hard to separate chemically and many people like to exclude the bottom row of the periodic table (the actinides) because that's where uranium and plutonium are located and those 2 elements terrify people enough to derail discussions about the materials.
The problem is that the US, for the most part, no longer has any appetite for projects that leave the landscape scarred and the waters polluted.
In California, we prefer to go through annual cycles of water rationing rather than build new dams. I'm sure the mindset would change if things get sufficiently dire, but that threshold might be farther than we assume.
The major fresh water use is mostly agriculture. We need to eat, but on the other hand a lot of that water ends up getting used to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia: profitable for certain farmers, not great for the rest of us.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
That and brine are legitimate concerns.
Also cost. The desal project in Huntington Beach was projected to increase local water prices.
Yes. And they're all being rapidly depleted
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...
The anger is that China is being "uppity" by wanting to make the things (like motors) out of the "rare earth" elements instead of being the colony that supplies raw materials to the Empire/colonizer. This was one of the complaints leading to the Revolution in 1776 - only raw materials could be shipped to England and all finished goods could only be shipped from England. The colonies were forced to remain at the bottom of the economy.
China wants "a seat at the table". Western countries are unwilling to let that happen.
https://thoriumenergyalliance.com/resource/jim-kennedy-rare-...
Its sounds plausible, but I'm not a geologist.
Turns out (to no surprise) that it's to the US's advantage to outsource very polluting mining and processing of critical minerals. (Nobody likes open-pit mines, see people thoughts about the Permanente quarry south of Cupertino)
Of course it's a trade-off, as the US becomes dependent on an external source, and the cost of bringing up internal production increases as internal mining sources are shut down and potentially skill is lost.
Related link: https://www.usgs.gov/news/science-snippet/department-interio...
And here's the 2025 draft report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2025/1047/ofr20251047.pdf
Edit: here's the USGS talk, from 2017: https://youtu.be/N53Rm-aDCu8
Well now see that'd be government spending and the majority of our voters/government don't want none of that
Tangentially, attending the USGS talks gave me a huge appreciation for the excellent, useful work that (some?) of our federal agencies do, which just made me that much more livid at the senseless cuts that DOGE & Republicans have done.
What do you mean? Trump spent more than the US government has ever spent before just this year. He did so in his last term too.
He just doesn't want to spend it on necessary things. After all, they're necessary. If he doesn't do it, someone will, right? There's a slight issue with this reasoning: it usually ends in the state having to do it anyway, at greatly increased cost, further increasing the already eye-watering spend Trump did.
Most metals commonly occur together with specific other metals in nature. For example, it is rare to find silver and zinc without a lot of associated lead. You can't make that lead disappear and we still need silver and zinc.
The problem always was the cost for managing the mining externalities in a developed society.
With the current setup we were getting a great deal because we’re were paying very low cost to get rare earths while shipping mining externalities and horrible working conditions overseas.
The problem has never been availability of minerals.
It is the environmental damage from the polluting extraction process and lack of operational know how and trade secrets to do it efficiently.
An often overlooked competitive advantage China has is lack of environmental regulations
Iluka (Aus) has a mineral sands stockpile from their zircon/rutile processing, and are constructing a refinery next to the heap to process the rare earth minerals. Plant is fully funded and should come online end of 2026.
https://www.iluka.com/products-markets/rare-earth-products/
Lynas (Aus) has two refineries (and one planned in the US with DoD funding) and is partnering with a Korean firm in magnet production. They are also the only commercial-scale producer of Dy/Tb outside of China and recently raised an additional AUD800m to fund expansion.
Nobody invests in operations that only make a token profit when they could instead invest it overseas and earn a substantial profit.
they are rare PER amount of earth
it's very labor intensive which makes it expensive to mine
which is why countries with oppressed labor can do it far cheaper than USA
ALSO it's extremely toxic with radioactive byproducts in the earth accumulated
which again why companies in USA didn't want to do it for little to no profit
But he's still going to invade Greenland, he's already got CIA mucking around there trying to get rid of opposition to forced annexation
> which again why companies in USA didn't want to do it for little to no profit
Genuinely asking, do you really think American megacorps care about their laborers and the environment?
There are many reasons why America is falling behind economically, but their dominant corps being too moral and ethical is not one of them.
North American mining firms tend to be private sector, but in Asian countries like China, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam the mining conglomerates and processors are state-owned enterprises, or in the case of Japan and South Korea, private sector firms with a controlling stake owned by a sovereign development fund.
This is why we need a Temasek or Mubadala for America.
Mining seems like it should be firmly on the list of things that are of national security importance.
But the US in general hates "state owned enterprises" in the form that China has.
The only North American pension funds I can think of that act like SDFs is the Ontario Teacher's Venture Growth arm, but they've begun pulling back from venture and growth funding.
> But the US in general hates "state owned enterprises" in the form that China has
We don't need a China style model tbh.
A coordinated trust banking model with a controlling stake owned by an agency or ministry like in Japan and South Korea is probably a better analogue for the US - in most cases we have the IP, human, and financial capital, it's coordination that is lacking. The issue is antitrust fundamentalists would balk at that kind of government enabled consolidation. The IRA and CHIPS would have been steps in the right direction, but who knows now with this admin. They are discussion SWFs but I do not trust their ability to execute.
I would love In-Q-Tel to transition into something similar for Cybersecurity and Enterprise SaaS, but they have issues.
(And, you know, environmental regulations, so mining and refining sites don't turn into what's described in a sibling comment.)
The Chinese government even attempted to lead a spamoflauge campaign against North American REE projects initiated by the Biden admin [0]
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...