American Politics Discussion Thread

[Zed-F]

Once you understand what Trump's economic team is trying to do, you realize that they are trying to gain more control over the world economy, not less. Effectively they are trying to force other nations to choose to become vassal states whose currency is explicitly pegged to the US dollar.

But in practice it won't work. The USA was able to institute the Breton Woods system after WWII and the Plaza accord in the Reagan era precisely because most of the rich countries of the world felt as though they could trust the US to lead the global order. Destroying that trust as a precondition to establishing a new revised order simply means other countries will decline to accept the privilege of becoming vassal states. So we will have a multi-polar world order whether the US wants it or not (which the USA should not, and neither should most other citizens of rich countries -- the world will be a far less secure and less prosperous place as a result of such a shake-up.)

[CFCJesterFool]

Trump is perfectly happy to be a fascist despot and end democracy in the USA, as Leviathan would prescribe. And he’s perfectly happy to destroy the US and the world economy to do it. This was perfectly obvious before the election; the man has amply demonstrated he cares for nothing but himself and his own ego. Anyone who voted for him is a deluded fool.

Nah man. I don't think so. WE (the working people including union members) won. The Democrats should never have abandoned the working class for the woke revolutionaries.

[Zed-F]

You won a dramatically worse economy, fewer jobs, more expensive basic necessities, a non-functional government that makes things worse for everyone at home and abroad. Congrats.

[T-hawk]

Nah man. I don't think so. WE (the working people including union members) won. The Democrats should never have abandoned the working class for the woke revolutionaries.

Right. I've often answered this here and elsewhere: How did the Republicans become the party of the working class? Because the Democrats made themselves the party of the non-working class, the un- and under-employed complainers who think that everyone else's labor and resources grows on trees for them to consume.

You don't have to have been a fool to have voted Trump or Republican, you just have to have cared more about protecting your wallet from the looters than about the wokeist outrage machine. The Democrats still have no economic policy besides tax and handout and inflate. Trump is at least trying to curb the out of control spending and waste. And if the tariffs have a purpose that may eventually work, it's to make American jobs and manufacturing viable again. Maybe Trump's implementation is hamfisted and adversarial but at least he's trying something other than spending and inflating into oblivion.

There's also this explanation that I lifted from somewhere else (reddit I think) and it rings true. Why did youth in particular swing so hard right? :

Because the left became the no fun party. When I was growing up, the right was the no fun party. It wanted to censor movies that weren’t Christian enough and dumb stuff like that. Once the left crushed the right in the culture wars during the Obama years, they overreached and became the no fun party but just with their preferred no fun criteria. Now the right gets to enjoy the fun ones.

Outrage at words, strict society norms and control of speech used to be a right wing thing and the youth rebelled against it. Now it's a left wing thing and youth is still rebelling against it.

If you're right wing you can say whatever. If you're left wing you're one sentence against the hivemind from being declared toxic garbage and getting your life destroyed. Is it really so hard to understand the shift?

[Zed-F]

If you are more worried about the stupid culture wars that nobody can actually win than practical matters like whether your candidate will destroy your economy and inflict hardship around the world, then you deserve every bit of economic pain you get. There is zero chance Trump’s economic plan will work, and every economist on both the right and the left other than Trump’s cronies will tell you the same. If he wanted to reindustrialize the US for national security reasons, this isn’t the way to do it, and this was clear before the election.

[greenline]

I think tariffs to encourage domestic production could work. These are a lot of tariffs. Putting a lot of big tariffs in quickly are what you do if you're thinking, "Man I gotta obliterate the world economy fast." Maybe. Or maybe the market just rebounds after complaining and there's no difference. The stock market optimism chugged through COVID after only a short dip, after all.

Crashing the economy sounds really bad. Crashing a plane is generally not a good idea. But sometimes your plane is out of fuel, or it's on fire, and you have to land fast. If there's no runway nearby, then you're crashing it. The best you can do is crash it nicely so it doesn't immediately explode and kill everyone. Harder to do with an economy than a plane.

First, there's the question of, 'is the situation so bad you need to crash it'? Yes and no, but mostly yes. If you had a bunch of competent congressmen willing to make necessary austerity measures across the board, you could keep the situation as it is limping forward for some more time. But we don't have that luxury. We have a democratic faction who has been on the warpath for some time on wanting to destroy their political enemies rather than governing equitably. And we have a republican faction that has more recently awakened to the fact that this is a fight to the death, and they can't play nice either. Call it polarization if you want. But things are polarized to the point where no one will agree to do nice, equitable austerity measures. Both sides now assume that any money they leave on the table will just end up being spent by their enemies instead.

Then you ask, 'what's the best way to crash this nicely'? Curtis Yarvin has wrote a lot of articles on how best to avoid the crash. Fancy plans that involve converting US dollars into a new, fixed currency all at once. But that's something you can only do if the president has complete control of the federal reserve, and Congress. Trump barely has the latter, and certainly not the former. So now every option is starting to look ugly.

Biden / Harris democrats believe in no crashes ever. That means inflation. The plane must stay in the air forever, even if that means flying out miles into the ocean while on fire before it inevitably does crash. Contrary to Ezra Klein's hopes, the party isn't interested in reforming their platform after the 2024 loss, because the people they've been considering running are some intelligence spook and AOC. Sorry, but Bill Clinton isn't coming back, ever.

So now we have Trump's tariffs. A big hit on the economy. The hit is aimed primarily at consumers and foreign countries over US producers, but everything is so entangled that US producers will suffer quite a bit too. If you're committed to a big move like the tariff plan, you're committed to the plane hitting the ground soon. The problem is that Trump might not realize this until its too late. Alternatively, it might be the case that once the lever was nudged from "inflation forever" to "not inflation forever", a big crash was inevitable and there was little Trump or anyone else could do about it. Once Chernobyl hit, there was probably nothing that Gorbachev could have done to save the Soviet Union either. Could he have crashed it more gently? Hard to say.

[Zed-F]

Crashing now does not mean you’re having an inevitable crash earlier instead of later, it means you have a crash now AND another crash later when you’re less able to absorb the shock ‘cause you’ve already crashed once. There are a whole host of economic and social challenges our societies will have to navigate over the coming decades, from the impact of demographic collapse to democratic decline to increasing personal isolation to increased international tension and war. Trump’s actions mean we are less capable of navigating all of them.

[greenline]

Crashing now does not mean you’re having an inevitable crash earlier instead of later, it means you have a crash now AND another crash later when you’re less able to absorb the shock ‘cause you’ve already crashed once. There are a whole host of economic and social challenges our societies will have to navigate over the coming decades, from the impact of demographic collapse to democratic decline to increasing personal isolation to increased international tension and war. Trump’s actions mean we are less capable of navigating all of them.

A crash with a bailout would make things worse, if it's just repeating 2008. A deep crash where capital realignment naturally occurs and deleterious social policies are removed would make future problems easier to deal with. If entitlement spending can be removed or cut back after a crash, then dealing with an ageing population would be much easier. Potential war would also be easier if our weapons weren't manufactured across thirty different countries, including China.

[Zed-F]

You are missing the obvious -- a crash is not necessary to deal with any of those issues in the first place. Smart policy is needed. Even if you argue that smart policy can't be enacted because of political division, which seems to be your opinion, you still don't get a workable solution by crashing now and then still having all those problems to deal with, because Trump's crash won't fix any of them. It just makes you and everyone else have less resources to deal with those problems as they come down the pipe.

[civac2]

Tariffs are a useful tool of industrial policy. But there has to be planning and moderation to it. Putting tariffs on everything from everywhere including energy and raw materials as well as stuff the US does not make itself is counterproductive. My guess is that this is another move by trump to get favourable deals by threatening extreme measures. But who knows at this point.