US tariff negotiations with Canada terminated over advertisement
bbc.com
bbc.com
Tourism in The US is down to the tune of billions of dollars, soybean exports have tanked, US liquor is basically non-existent across Canada and other countries, etc etc.
I don’t know how long this can go on , when will the average American not be able to take it anymore?
The average American loves this Right up until they lose their farms, their distilleries, tourism-based jobs and everything else.
If that were true, you'd not see economy as the top or one of the top issues. Perhaps some marginal short term economical concerns can be offset by personality/perceived cultural improvements, but not to the point of bankruptcy or even close.
"It's the economy, stupid" was Clinton's slogan after all.
Polls also show that Republicans rate economic conditions as positive when there's a Republican in office, and negative when there's a Democrat in office regardless of the actual state of the economy. (The effect is much weaker among Democrats.)
This means that people care about the economy, but are terrible at knowing whether the economy is actually doing well or not, and certainly not educated enough to understand the impact that particular policies have on the economy.
The conclusion is that when there's a Democrat in office, Republicans are told by the Republican news media that the economy is bad; and when there's a Republican in office, Republicans are told by the Republican news media that the economy is good.
Find a conservative-leaning group on Facebook or reddit and see the resistance you get when you try to explain that Trump's tariffs are an inflationary tax on Americans. Political opinions have no bearing on reality, especially in the context of economic policy.
It totally does. If they say what they care most about is the economy, but they interpret the economy through the lens of whether their political party is in power, then their actions will be radically different than a theoretically objective voter.
If voters say that their top concern is X, but they act like they are willing to compromise on X for the sake of Y, then we should interpret that as Y actually being their top priority.
[1] https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/files/partisaneconomy202504.pd...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439322...
[3] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2025/01/3...
P.S. nothing about your conclusion is obvious. Everything cited seems to be referring to one specific period (COVID/Biden era inflation) with no historical analysis, in which case the parties in charge had every attempt to portray their loss as "economy was good but perceived by idiots who didn't know better" so I'll take the analyses with a grain of salt from clearly partisan hacks.
Joanne Hsu, UMich: https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?... and Politico is parroting the research.
It's not hard to find research that supports conclusions based on polling from different time periods. [1]
Fact is most people don't have enough data points in their personal lives to make any kind of conclusion about the state of the economy. They haven't gotten a raise in two years and their cousin Dale got laid off last week, but no one would extrapolate that to mean the economy is bad.
> They do different jobs, live in different geographic locations with varying density and urbanization
Yes, but they don't typically all swap locations with each other when a new administration takes power. Nevertheless their opinions do swap.
> economy was good but perceived by idiots who didn't know better
That is, in fact, exactly what happened.
[1] https://isr.umich.edu/news-events/news-releases/partisan-att...
That's not evidence of bias, unless, you think that anyone who makes a political contribution is unable to perform accurate research or do their job. Would you casually dismiss the work of a cop or a professor just because they made a donation? If you find a flaw in the research method, let me know.
You're literally looking for any reason to justify your a priori decision to ignore research you don't like. That makes you the partisan hack, not the researcher.
Faux News and other outlets have taught them it is a sin to vote for Ds or like anything they propose. They will chose any R over any D
I also see Democrats perfectly happy to see Democrats justly convicted of crimes. The Republican approach is to defend members of your "team" at all costs, no matter how guilty they are. The cult of personality is much strong on the Republican side.
Trump has sort of killed this phenomenon - partly because his brand has rubbed off on other Republicans, and partly because they have been running more extreme candidates even in blue states. Before Trump, though, it was not even close.
This seems to be an emotional reaction by the observer, not a quantified study, so citation needed. The US market is so big and relatively unified in language and regulations and that make you willing to bite a lot of bullets. Have you ever listed an app on the App Store and dealt with French BS, for example, for a relatively tiny market?
> They will all just trade with each other instead.
Many of the US products and services are not as commoditized.
A citation would be good, yes.
I've not seen overall import/export stats this year.
But stats from a few years back, say that the number 1 and 2 imports and exports are food and oil? EVs significantly reduce demand for oil, but it's not got much to do with Trump. I saw the same stories as everyone else abouy soy bean exports to China going to zero, but that's just one export to just one country, not an overall trade update.
> The US market is so big and relatively unified in language and regulations and that make you willing to bite a lot of bullets. Have you ever listed an app on the App Store and dealt with French BS, for example, for a relatively tiny market?
Solving this is the primary purpose of the EU: unified single market.
China also big, unified.
Correct. It is a goal of the EU, but practically speaking, it isn't as nicely unified, and some reasons being inherent like the variety of languages.
China is much more protectionist and you can't sell into it from the outside easily. US tariffs don't even come close to their tariff and non-tariff barriers.
If you think of <20% tariff as Groupon discounts for US consumers buying a bunch of products together, it is likely a more than acceptable trade for many businesses.
It's all tech / AI / crypto focus now.
Anyone with a shred of sense can see where this is heading: the inevitable collapse of the American empire and the end of its unparalleled global dominance. At this point, it’s unavoidable. The U.S. has alienated nearly every ally it once had. Ironically, Trump might be the one who saves Europe in the long run.
Except that the political class in EU is almost unanimous in following behind US and begging US for approval.
We are astonishingly bad at understanding abstraction. We understand that if Kevin shows up at our house and punches us in the face, we should avoid Kevin. But once you put a layer of abstraction between Kevin and the broken nose, we suddenly become baffled about how this could happen, and then we vote for Kevin.
This is an extremely arrogant statement to think a single individual can know the best interests of an entire country and to know they were wrong in identifying their own. To quantify this, perhaps one close proxy is to see how many people really regretted their vote after the fact, which in the context of US does not appear to be that many (even those unsatisfied with the outcome post hoc would not necessarily have voted for the opponent if given a time machine.)
Perhaps it is not trivial to have visibility into the intricacies of other people's lives and their priorities. Even harder to generalize it to tens of millions of people in a country.
It's also an opinion that doesn't require omniscience to hold. I don't know why that's the bar you've set. Yeah - of course nobody can really know what's best.
Democrats claim that Republican vote against their best interests due to base instincts (tribalism & all the phobias).
Republicans claim systemic corruption, both mundane & satanic.
Voters, to a great extent, aren't motivated by what one might either expect or hope, nor 1/10th as well informed about the operation of their own government or the issues at stake as one might hope. It's a shit-show, so much so that it's practically miraculous that voting produces functioning governments ever, at all, and the whole thing's terribly fragile (after convincing themselves the data weren't wrong, the next step was a few decades of trying to figure out some mechanism by which this whole thing wasn't as worrisome as it seemed, which effort turned out to be based mostly on "copium", to use a modern term, and was eventually regarded as having more-or-less failed)
My point specifically is if people are voting for someone, more often than not (at least in the US, perhaps less so elsewhere where they elect the parliament and the parliament by proxy elects the executive which induces some machinations), want that person for whatever reason and consider that person aligned with their interests even if some second-order effects are not so. They did not get "fooled" and bait-and-switched even if they later feel the performance was not great. Proof for that is you are not going to find that many who say they would have switched their votes even after the fact. Those political scientists and the GP have the arrogance and audacity to project their own interests on every single person and conclude they did not vote appropriately.
Not necessarily! It means that the model of the typical voter's behavior (and of the reasons why elections go the ways they do) isn't what many conceive it to be (or hope it may be), and that democracy's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, strengths, and capabilities may in-fact be at least somewhat different from what one operating from that idealized (and apparently very wrong) model of voter behavior would expect. It could still be the best of a bad lot.
> They did not get "fooled" and bait-and-switched even if they later feel the performance was not great.
They are extremely often operating from incorrect information, either regarding facts about the state of the world, or about probable outcomes of various policies. This can include things that directly affect them (or don't) in ways that one would expect them to notice—one fun form of study that's been run a few times is to ask a population whether a tax increase or decrease that in-fact affected only a tiny sliver of the population but was the subject of substantial propagandizing and/or publicity affected them personally (this is about as direct as it gets!) and the typical result is pretty much exactly what your most-pessimistic guess would be.
Supposing that people very-often hold a bunch of incorrect beliefs about how policies affect them but are also good at voting for their own interests when it comes time to mark the ballot is probably somewhere in the category of wishful thinking—and that's assuming motivations and intentions focused on policies and their outcomes in the first place. There's less-strong but still-quite-strong evidence that, as the kids say, "vibes" are a huge factor in the outcomes of elections, even when those "vibes" come from things that even the extremely politically-ignorant ought to know have nothing much to do with, say, who the President is, like a rash of shark attacks for example. This, of course, doesn't mean that this "vibes-from-irrelevant-stuff" voting makes the difference for anywhere near as many people as incorrect information does (it almost certainly doesn't) but that it has an outsize effect on the true-swing (not self-reported swing, that's mostly bullshit) vote, which tends to consist almost entirely of so-called "low-information voters", with the result that it may not have any effect at all on most voters but elections still turn on it (one of a billion reasons FPTP voting sucks is that it amplifies the power of this effect).
I do think, separately, there are cases of rational trade-offs, of picking (say) an anti-abortion candidate who holds many other positions one dislikes because one's stake in one's position on abortion is that important. That's not the kind of thing I mean, and I don't think it's the kind of thing most people mean when they say people are making mistakes by "voting against their own interests", though the effect of such a choice may well be that one is also in these cases (consciously!) voting against one's own interests on various issues.
In aggregate, however, I believe in the US presidential elections end up voting for their own best interests, as they see it, and even if they become unhappy with the state of the world after four years, it appears to be unlikely to find people who say they would have switched votes. If anything, they are becoming more polarized and committed to one side, thus harder to "fool." In that sense, they are not mistaken. The human experience is not a set of entirely quantifiable metrics, and being "happily-fooled" is also a human interest, as long as they don't get buyer's remorse. Lots of buyer's remorse is really the only metric that can prove the counterpoint.
What GP is saying is isomorphic to telling Apple customers "you don't know your interests and Apple is charging you too much while keeping you in the walled garden." Maybe right, maybe wrong, but who are you to judge they would have been better off with a Dell?
This is extremely close to one of the early "OK, but maybe there's a reason what we're observing at the individual level isn't so scary" hypotheses explored by political science in the latter half of the 20th century—that individually poor choices would nonetheless produce good outcomes by being in some way chaotic and the good outcomes often manifesting as attractors in that chaotic space, or something like that, or by some "wisdom of the crowds" effect that emerges in aggregate. These approaches have been found untenable despite much trying, though I think there are some limited efforts at it still under way.
HOWEVER! I think after this post I do see what you're actually getting at, which is that if people believe they voted in their own best interests ("as they see it" being key) then they may believe they did in-fact do that indefinitely, even if entirely incorrect, so long as they... well, continue to believe so.
The prisoner voting to remain a prisoner not because they don't want to be free—not because if you describe completely and in detail, leaving nothing out, the conditions they're in-fact in they tell you they would love to live that way (they claim they would hate it!), and then if you also describe free life they claim that is the outcome they would rather have, and if you carefully probe you find that it's not even for some greater-interest purpose they are voting to remain imprisoned (it's not that they believe they'd be a danger to others if free, for example), but because they believe they aren't in prison despite [gestures at their prison cell]—is voting in their own interest.
By that standard, yes, a lot more voters are voting in their own interest than may be reckoned by other standards.
The Mullah regime in Iran also tries to forcefully direct people to heaven, because they think that’s in their best interest long term and they don’t know better. In fact they sometimes even use the same phrases used in your analogy to refer to mortal life: a prison.
If you are hoping for some limit to be reached where a popular uprising will be triggered, then I would advise to not put your hopes on it.
I expect most of the pain will be from lost potential growth rather than an actual decline in real terms, and that it'll take a while for most people to realize how stagnant we've become—because line will continue to Go Up thanks to an inflation-based debt reduction strategy, plus the US is such a giant player in the global economy that our slowing way down will also slow the global economy for quite a while, until it adjusts, so we'll still seem to be doing relatively OK for potentially another decade or more.
Of course we could also derail into something even worse than Russia. Or capital flight might hit us harder and faster than I think it will (anyone who can't see a way to, or can't stomach, getting on the good side of our rulers, will want to get out so they don't lose all their shit, including possibly their lives in extreme cases)
-- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hacker News is not a political news discussion forum. It is an AI news discussion forum.
P.S., > “BBC seems like a trustworthy”
Indeed! That’s their best trick.
But that's a reduction, not a termination. US demand for those goods still exist. And it is US consumers that pay.
The reduction is a result of lower consumer spending power. Which will affect everything, not just the tariffed goods.
Some of the goods may end up being sourced in the US. However that won't affect consumer prices, which will remain high. (The whole point of tarifs is to drive up local prices so domestic production can compete. )
Some may be sourced from other countries. But since all countries are being tariffed there are only marginal gains here.
At the same time Canadian producers will actively explore alternate markets. This will (long term) improve Canada's economic security by reducing dependence on US markets.
All the above assumes T won't start negotiating again next week. Which since TACO is likely anyway.
Either way, this will be a long-term gain for Canada and long term pain for the US.
If Chinese cars enter Canada and enter Mexico, you can say goodbye to the US auto industry. Recall, the most recent news is the bankruptcy of an auto loan firm in the US, itself a sign that cars are not affordable to workers, which is the only way these workers can travel for their jobs because public transit is so poorly funded.
Car manufacturing is not going to get cheaper in the US without a whole lotta pain, and the loss of inertia is going to affect all industrial sectors.
Mexico has increased tariffs, to 50%, but Chinese cars remain competitive even after that.
His inheritance performed worse than the s&p by a large margin under his stewardship.
He’s not a business man, he’s someone who inherited $450M in today’s dollars and wears a business suit as a costume, and incidentally more makeup than most drag queens.
He’s disgracing everything he touches and the Trump name will be hated and associated with stupidity and bigotry for a long time.
> Canada cuts tariff relief on some US cars due to Stellantis, GM ending some Canadian production
https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-auto-production-tariffs...
The ad aired a week ago and Trump said he’d do the same thing and didn’t care. However this development prompted a retaliation. There’s a low simmering trade war that Trump has been waging against partners and these are just excuses he claims so the media doesn’t focus on the actual details of the war but instead on BS culture war topics.
That really does seem to be what set him off.
What the article in the parent post doesn't mention is that Stellantis and GM received massive handouts from the Canadian government to retool factories in Canada, contingent on actually operating those factories and employing Canadian workers. Abandoning them and moving production to the U.S. (because of tariffs) violated their agreements. Hence, no more tariff relief for them.
North American auto companies are between a rock and a hard place right now, but it'd be folly for the Canadian government to let them ignore their agreements without consequence.
TL;DR: It would be more accurate to say Trump tried to steal a cookie from the Canadian cookie jar and is now acting shocked that his hand has been slapped. Canada is merely reacting here, and rather mildly at that. Calling off trade negotiations entirely is clearly not warranted and everyone should expect another TACO Tuesday.
Trump already tariffed cars and car parts from Canada under the guise of national security, in complete and utter defiance of USMCA (you know, the best trade agreement ever as described by the guy who signed it: Donald Trump). Canada should return the favour. Canada had tried to play nice with the "American" automakers, but if they screw Canada to pander to the rapist, they lose that benefit.
The situation in Canada is kind of messed up. We literally have trade barriers between provinces, tariffs on a ton of stuff, government protected monopolies and all that has lead to capital either being allocated poorly or allocated right out of the country. Even government pensions put most of their capital in US markets instead of in our own country.
While US tariffs on Canada will obviously lead to economic malaise, I can't say it's undeserved. Hopefully it leads to a wake up call here (it probably won't though, Canadians will just become more and more insular).
It's funny, we've been trying to forge closer ties with the EU and China but again, we are rebuked because we have tariffs on a bunch of their goods.
> tariffs on a ton of stuff
> we are rebuked because we have tariffs on a bunch of their goods
I can guess why one might think some of this (tariffs on Chinese EVs directly led to agricultural counter-tariffs from them and dairy trade barriers have always been a source of frustration), but in general, Canada's tariffs and barriers are by all indications in line with peer countries (US, UK, EU, Australia, etc.) and not particularly noteworthy. If you have concrete evidence to the contrary (not just that some trade barriers exist between Canada and its trading partners, but that they are out of the ordinary and much higher than other countries'; and that the world, in particular EU does not want closer ties with us because of them), I would love to study your sources and update my understanding.
Sure, specific sectors and certain quotes but all countries have those.
Didn't take long to discover that your "as a Canadian" is actually "as a hyper-partisan Alberta separatist that thinks oil is all that matters".
Kind of gave up the game when you said this nonsense: "we've been putting up tariffs on trading partners' goods".
"It's funny, we've been trying to forge closer ties with the EU and China but again"
You really, really have no idea what you're talking about.