Tariffs on Mexico and Canada are bad news... destruction of the federal civil service is almost fatal news. If Trump has his way, we will not have a functioning federal government, and no one around him has the skills to rebuild one.
Those who are fired (many in an illegal manner) must sue immediately. I'm not sure anyone else has standing to b bring a suit.
You’re absolutely right about the destruction of the civil service. It’s weird how Noah is so reluctant to criticize Musk even while Musk presides over that destruction. And even while Musk cosplays as a Nazi.
if your threshold of evidence for identifying a Nazi is "threw Jews into the gas chamber" and not just their own words and gestures, I'm sorry to disappoint you.
The ideal scenario is to have targeted reforms in the federal government but since the Democrats do not believe in that and Democratic Presidents are more interested in legislation vs execution, we ended up with a bull in a china shop scenario. Ultimately, this is a result of complexity in the government and voters feeling that they don’t have any level of control over policies, regardless of which party is in power.
I spent many years as a federal civil servant. In my experience, we were the same sort of people as my wife dealt with in the primate sector. The biggest difference was that incompetence and insubordination often had consequences in the private sector and rarely in the federal service.
Feds have a host of perfectly reasonable sounding protections. Intense retraining if incompetent. Formal grievance procedures. An EEO system process that covers virtually everyone other than white males under forty, and even them in some cases. And unions closely tied to the Democratic Party.
My main concern about Trump’s approach isn’t his position that those who implement policies can be fired if they ignore or oppose implementation; no one voted for any of those people. It is that the worst of the employees will opt to stay, while the best take the buyout. But the federal civil service needs fixing. I don’t think Trump is the ideal agent for that purpose, but he’s what we have.
Civil service needs reforming, but I don’t think it’s so bad that any change will be for the better. From how it’s going so far, this change seems decidedly for the worse
I'm not sure why people persist in proposing "legal" action. Why do you think this administration will pay any attention to losing a court case. They can spread out appeals for years, and ultimately some government employee has to do or not do something, and if Trump doesn't like it, they'll be fired. The law is moot.
A federal court can enjoin firing until the issue is resolved. It can mandate that that the Trump Administration is proving that it is following correct procedure in firing career civil servants. In other words, it can put the Trump administration in the position of having to prove it is following the law until the court case is resolved.
This has already happened on the issues of impoundment and birthright citizenship.
My darker suspicion is that this has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with psychology. Trump feels stronger than he ever has. He's a bully, and he thinks he can bully Canada into collapse, thus getting them begging to be the 51st state as a means of eliminating the tariffs.
I don't think it will work, but given how dumb all the other explanations are, I think it's the most plausible.
"Never assume malice, when ignorance will suffice."
Trump is a TV personality who became famous pretending to be a successful businessman. If it wasn't for the fact that his daddy gave him *half a billion dollars* to play with, he'd be a nobody. He's an idiot who's got some skill as a showman.
He’s going to do some real damage now though, isn’t he?
Think of some names from history who you could describe as ‘idiots with some skills as a showman’. Given the right tools, they can inflict immense damage and suffering.
I’m sure that’s the driver for the ideologues behind the scenes - Bannon, Stephen Miller, etc.
But for Trump it’s even more basic. He is driven by having his mug on TV, his name in the national conversation, and having the media and other crowds turn up day after day to listen to him. It’s why he will continue to have rallies. He is addicted to attention, and has a rat instinct for how to get it.
On the Quebec license plate it says "je me souviens" which translates to "i will remember". This will be, explicitly or not, the motto of all the allied countries he has chosen to bully. Great damage has already occurred.
I would argue that this will be the motto of the entire world. Those that are bullied for sure. But those who could be bullied will shy away from the US. And everyone now knows that a good faith legal agreement like the USMCA is not worth the paper it’s written on. At the end of the day trust is the thing and it’s now broken.
And it was all made possible by FOX News and RW media. Which hide behind their 1st Amendment rights to spew an endless stream of made-up nonsense and deliberate lies. That conservative voters implicitly believe. And then vote on.
I've no problem with *opinion* going crazy partisan. Because it's just opinion. But when blatant mis-/dis-information is peddled nonstop as *news*, that even our current President believes to be true, then we're in deep shit.
To your point, I think we need to spend less $$ flying politicos to Washington to tin cup and redirect those funds to a massive traditional and social media campaign across the US to tell them what exactly is going to happen to them when Canada, Mexico and the rest of the world turn on them. Might be a start :)
And until/unless consumer prices begin to skyrocket, his voter base simply won't give a damn. Or they'll even applaud him for how much he's upsetting Democrats right now, because that's the angle FOX News is currently covering.
But the Conservative business elite types who read the Wall Street Journal more than they watch FOX, understand very well how badly his idiocy is harming both the economy and the efficiency of the civil service. As Trump's policies start to kill their profits, they'll be screaming bloody murder.
The big question is whether Trump will course correct on tariffs when the shit hits the fan.
This is a real mistake from Trump: if you want to both entrench an autocracy and put in unpopular tariffs, you should secure control of the state and crush the opposition *first*.
If your biggest, highest-profile action is one that makes everyone mad at you and rallies opposition while that’s still easy to do, you fucked up.
And a business class who will forgive any amount of economic inefficiency to hold onto their gains from the 2017 "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act."
I think this prob hits different business class differently - l imagine the new Trump's friend tech sector will be hit less as it depends less on import of materials while manufacturing sector and retails would suffer a lot.
I imagine tech type will care less but wall street folks, I think they prob care to an extent
If you are not already a subscriber, may I invite you to subscribe (for free) to my substack, "Radical Centrist?" file:///C:/Users/Thomas/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml
I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
Many PCs come from Mexico, so that part will hurt the tech sector, and 10% on China will hurt other hardware imports. If Trump actually goes through with the crazy threats to target semiconductor imports , that will be insanely bad.
Trump is talking about fentanyl more as a distraction from the likely unemployment and higher prices due to his tariffs. Despite some alluring examples, Canadian fentanyl is small compared to, for example, gun smuggling into Canada from the use. To the contrary, Trump simply believes, as he has stated many times, that tariffs are good. He has repeatedly stated that tariffs will improve the US’s fiscal position or even coerce Canada, by “economic force,” to accede to the US as a state. So, also as he has said, there are no concessions Canada can make to convince him to remove the tariffs.
Factually, Canada is less that 1% of the fentanyl and illegal border crossings. To your point, we have a huge illegal gun smuggling problem with guns coming in from the US. And the trade deficit he sites is products only. Canada has a significant trade deficit with the US in terms of services and products, and our oil is sold to the US at a significant discount to world prices. So who’s subsidizing who if we follow his line of thinking to its logical conclusion.
The immigration and fentanyl claims are bullshit, he just used them so that he can call this an emergency which allows him to put on the tariffs. Congress has had many chances to put limits on emergency powers but was too weak or stupid to do it.
Fentanyl is actually a legal pharmaceutical used to control pain for cancer and surgery, it’s just controlled by the FDA as to who can prescribe and supply it.
George's idea would require descheduling fentanyl which raises significant public health concerns. Oregon’s Measure 110 decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs (including opioids). While this is not the same as descheduling, the negative impacts on visible drug use, positive impact on overdoses (positive in numbers only) are sufficient to dismiss the idea, in my neighborhood at least. But it is a valid economic argument in the Pigouvian sense. Reality >> economic arguments.
As a Canadian it seems to me these tariffs will push us to do more business with the rest of the world rather than the US going forward. That means China, for the most part. Which is strange because it felt to me that as recently as a couple months ago that China was a shared enemy of Canada and the US. I guess we’ll see how that turns out in 6m.
Eggs are a red herring now, already being disingenuously used by Klobuchar and others as being the tariff’s fault, when it is a supply chain issue caused by the culling of chickens because of H5N1 bird flu outbreaks in Georgia and California. You will notice that while vegetables are on the import charts in the article, eggs are not.
I don’t expect the tariffs to affect eggs (but maybe they will in some indirect way, I’m not sure). My comment was more aimed at the voters who gave Trump the slight edge in the election because they believed he would actually bring down the prices of groceries, mainly eggs and bacon. In my opinion, the opposition should be loudly and repeatedly pointing at the price of eggs to show it is not going down. If it’s due to factors beyond the president’s control, that’s too bad for him. Inflation during Biden’s term was also a global phenomenon beyond his control but it cost Kamala the election.
The negative effect of Trump's tariffs on the integrated North American auto industry will be huge. The Cato institute has an interesting description and analysis. Much of the trade is in parts and components, some of which cross borders several times. Will they be taxed each time? I would like to be at the border on Tuesday to see all the customs officials assessing the cargo of all the trucks and trains trying to cross. It will probably shut down entire borders. This will close plants here and give Tesla and China a gargantuan advantage over the others more dispersed on this continent. The auto industry (and Democrats) should be howling for blood.
That's what's stunning: in this tariff regime, they will be taxed each time.
Several of the biggest parts manufacturers are Canadian and Mexican, and the biggest automakers use them in practically all their models.
This weirdly advantages cars made overseas, who face a much smaller tariff (except China), and only face it once, rather than up to half a dozen times.
Trump’s a loose cannon and worse than I thought. A severe price to pay for getting rid of the excesses in the Democratic Party.
No idea what he’s thinking about next with regard to these tariffs or those elsewhere. Or what it means for bonds and stocks and the health of the economy. Frankly it can’t be good.
Next up are taxes and the budget. God knows what comes up there. And what it does to our already too large budget deficit. My optimism about DOGE rationalizing a leaky Federal government is also fast fading—we’ll see.
Frankly the only things that will bring him to his senses are interest rates shooting higher and the stock market getting crushed. Monday will be interesting. If not then, the budget and tax negotiations could be D day. We’ll see…the markets may simply shrug it off.
$4 billion dollars a day in spending reductions so far, according to the boss on X as well as end of remote work DEI departments and buyout offers on bureaucrats are all reasons for optimism.
Let's see what he does with the budget. "Severe price to pay for getting rid of the excesses in the Democratic Party." Agreed, but there's no political candidate I've ever agreed with 100%. the Democrats were running us off a cultural cliff. let us hope Trump doesn't run us off an economic one.
The biggest problem I see here is the rapidity. It's one of the qualities I really like about him in other settings (Columbia, Venezuela), but uncertainty is death for business, something he ought to know. If you really believe tariffs are good, announce that they'll be phased in over the last 12 months, not in 12 hours.
He’s only good at show business, and doesn’t understand economics let alone how businesses work, that’s why he is about to ruin the economy with tariffs. He won’t stop until his ratings go down, and let’s hope they do soon.
If and when interest rates do shoot higher, the question is whether he accepts that, tries to fix it the right way, or tries to suborn the Federal Reserve.
Politicizing the Fed would be a real break-the-glass moment; I’d start wondering about whether there’s hyperinflation coming.
The Federal Government is enormously bloated, mostly in regulations but also in departments and, to a lesser extent, personnel. It needs much more serious creative destruction than the democrats would ever get near. Any organization needs to be pruned, reformed, reimagined regularly and the dems will never do this.
DOGE is as close as we've come to dealing with it. It's unlikely to work, because Elon and repubs don't know what they're doing, but the optimistic view is that they'll take a hatchet and the democrats will be able to rebuild by, not kidding here, being unburdened by what has been.
That said, none of that is near worth the damage Trump is doing, and was obviously going to do, on economic policy and otherwise.
You’re not trying to understand what we’re saying.
I agree it’s a corrupt power grab. But there’s an optimistic take that it could lead to some creative destruction that dems can then fix into something better than the antiquated, bloated systems we have now.
Do you work in or near federal government? It’s a mess, partially because dems generally protect it rather than try to improve it.
There’s no room for nativity in what I’m saying. “Bad people destroy thing that’s not working, gives opportunity to build something better after they’re gone.” This is a plausible outcome.
What about this is naive? It’s not only not been proven false, it’s basically unfalsifiable in the short term. That’s a better argument against it!
Lots. Look up "Dollar Men" for examples from WWII.
Bringing in experienced people from private enterprise to increase production and efficiency as the economy is reshaped has several precedents.
I think Trump's economic policies are hot garbage, and endanger the national security of the US and its allies. But slimming a civil service is among the hardest things to do, and one of the more effective ways is to use wrecking balls rather than scalpels. Scalpels get turned away. Musk lacks enough experience in government that he can't wield a scalpel. If he lasts, which is doubtful, he's going to be a wrecking ball, but one that can competently manage a re-org. Trump's other cronies, on the other hand, will likely work in gutting the civil service so much at cross-purposes to DOGE that it's going to be a lovely mess, which they will all try to lie about and cover up.
The problem is though: in the course of swinging this wrecking ball, he’s breaking basically every applicable law. If he slims down the civil service at the cost of showing everyone that law is optional, that’s not a good trade.
It’s worse for basically everyone in every way — you don’t want to live in the sort of country where powerful people don’t have to follow the law.
The problem is not that an agency is breaking the law - that happens pretty regularly, and courts sort it out. The problem is that courts can be too slow or ineffective or both. In this particular case, the courts themselves and their efficacy could be undermined.
Having lived in Russia in the '90s, I see more differences than similarities. So you haven't convinced me. Besides, the analogy is too vague, the oligarchs and their methods were actually quite varied.
If you believe that Biden didn’t wildly overspent on everything, except border enforcement; then maybe you weren’t an adult in 2020. DOGE won’t eliminate all or most of the crazy spending and regulations, but it has resulted in some reductions in both, so there is reason for optimism.
Please take the bigotry to X where it belongs. You'll find plenty of sympathetic haters there to commiserate with about how other people's gender expression is ruining your life.
Both Democrats and Republicans have their own monoculture which they would like to impose on all 50 states. I'm not thrilled with either party. Democrats can tolerate anyone but a Republican.
Democrats are apparently guilty of both being intolerant of Republicans by some and being too friendly with Republicans (Cheney's, Kinzinger, John Giles, etc) by others.
I think you have come up with a formulation that makes for better political rhetoric than description of the true situation.
Some people, including a fair number of Democrats, believe that blue America includes a lot of intolerance for groups of Americans unlike themselves.
Some people, including much of the progressive wing, believe that Democrats are too friendly with the Liz Cheney/Kinzinger sort of Republicans.
There's not much overlap between these two groups of critics. Rather, this is a pretty good start to describing the division between centrist Democrats and progressives.
Sorry, but no. The transqueer movement, fully backed by the Democrats in office, has resulted in the mutilation and sterilization of tens of thousands of kids, mostly gay and austistic. They're the ones whose lives were ruined, not mine. I'm totally fine.
Yeah, but as the Tavistock Gender study showing o such positive results and the refusal of Johanna Olson-Kennedy to release her study which also showed no such results show, this is not scientifically proven in any way.
I think the medical community has overstepped somewhat, but not extremely so. I don't need to defend Kenny here (he can do that himself.) There are no conclusive studies on happiness, including the one you point out.
Most professional medical bodies (not a great standard but enough to validate Kenny's presumption) currently find that gender-affirming approaches can be beneficial for many transgender youth, even as they call for better and bigger research trials.
An argument from ignorance isn't sufficient given the clear medical cases and the increased prevalence of suicide in these cohorts (if not happiness in those affirmed - unhappiness in the unaffirmed is documented.)
I have personal feelings, more inline with your sentiments than I will admit, but I have deep respect for those who attempt to craft public policy that protects the prospects and rights of others. I would urge you to do extend the same respect.
"Most professional medical bodies" is US only. In Europe, several countries with not-for-profit (this is key!) health-care systems have conducted systematic reviews of the evidence, and all have found that it is too weak to base treatment on. Most have moved to severely restrict sex-trait modification drugs and surgeries for minors.
The "professional medical bodies" in the US are essentially unions advocating only for the best interests of their members, which are to make more money and to not get sued for malpractice. They are not scientific organizations. They have NOT called for "better and bigger research trials". Instead they have suppressed the results of those that have been done. WPATH commissioned an evidence review from Johns Hopkins, then refused to release the results, and enjoined JHU from doing so (because WPATH had paid for it, they had the legal power to do so). The US AAP said over a year ago that they would conduct their own evidence review, but have made no move to do so. There is no question whatsoever what an honest review would reveal: there have been many already, and they have all come to the same conclusion.
If there's one problem in the United States more pressing than any other, it's surely that small socially-hated minorities have too easy a time accessing highly controversial medical care.
Curses! If only the US medical system weren't so ruthlessly and unrelentingly efficient!
You're completely off on the facts here. I encourage you to read up on this. I'll grant that some trans people regret their transitions, but that doesn't invalidate the rights of the majority to make their own choices. Parents need to be informed, and we should fully assess the upcoming NIH study—along with others—to shape the best policies for preserving the health and prospects of all Americans.
These are deeply personal decisions that deserve privacy and respect, not simplistic talking points. Don't fall for Shrier's simplistic presentation.
I'm more than willing to vet this here if you like.
Many LGB people reject being force-teamed with TQ, lesbians in particular, who are finding their spaces invaded by men claiming to be women who love women. One such LGB organzition is LGB Alliance USA:
"We advocate for the prioritization of sex-based rights over gender ideology. Without sex-based protections or the acknowledgment of sex as a material reality, we cannot protect same-sex orientation."
Absolutely, best available evidence is the standard. And in other cases (eg other body dysphorias) where the evidence is this weak, standard practice is NOT to use powerful drugs and surgeries to change body presentation to match the patient's mental model.
ONLY gender dysphoria is treated in this way. It is very reasonable to ask why that is.
I've noticed you talking about kid's genitals for a while here in the comments, at least a year. I think at this point it's worth reporting you to the FBI, before they're totally co-opted. Men like you constantly obsessing over children's genitals more often than not are deep, evil predators. I hope they find you and give you justice!
It’s bigotry to note that Democrats sacrificed the future of the free, liberal world on the alter of far-left cultural issue positioning? Well call me a bigot then. I can only imagine what Nazism I’d be accused of for wishing we didn’t nominate a candidate who explicitly endorsed gender reassignment surgeries for convicted illegal immigrants - on video.
FOX News fully agrees with you...Well, at least the part about how uppity women. black and gays have ruined America with DEI.
Like Critical Race Theory (CRT)--which is a few obscure grad school courses that FOX News fabulized was being used to race-shame whites in every public school in the country--DEI is (was) a fringe attempt in academia to create equality. But FOX News used it as a culture war cudgel to bring racism, sexism and homophobia back into fashion.
The culture wars are what the GOP uses to win elections. It's the only way they can get working class citizens to vote against their own economic self-interest.
Are you suggesting that universities requiring DEI statements from all professors had no effect on the quality of research or education? Or the FAA testing scandal where only members of an affinity group were given a list of correct answers to a biographical survey that overrode test scores for ATC licenses had no effect on candidate quality?
Wait, you’re saying that *Democrats* sacrificed the future of the free world because of trans people? I would have thought *Republicans* are the ones who sacrificed the future of the free world because of trans people.
And you would be wrong. I have been a registered Democrat for 50 years, I have worked over those decades as a volunteer on multiple Democrat campaigns at all levels, and I now vote straight Republican, entirely because the Democrats have become anti-science and anti-human. There is no other way to describe their full-on support for the regiment of mutilation, sterilization, and de-sexing that is being foisted on our children and their parents with pure lies ("do you want a live son or a dead daughter", completely unsupported by actual suicide statistics).
I guess you are reiterating my claim, that people who are opposed to trans people are the ones who are so obsessed that they are willing to sacrifice the future of the free world to get this questionable benefit for a tiny fraction of individuals.
Germany in the 1920s had the world's first gender reassignment clinic. It also had a thriving gay culture.
These were, of course, some of the first things on the chopping block by the actual historical Nazis.
Harris's answer was dumb and very clearly very shortsighted primary era position that probably got her nothing at the time and even less later, but that wasn't the reason she lost.
#1 of 25 reasons swing voters chose Trump: "Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class"
When a team loses a game, the first thing that the coaches and fans do is figure out what mistakes have been made. It is not unserious to wonder what mistakes the Democrats made in the 2024 campaign.
I think most people here would agree that electing Trump was disastrous.
But you are putting your thumb on the scales when you characterize progressive overreach as diversity theater or trans women in sports.
The internet has broadly allowed both left and right wing movements to gain political influence far beyond their actual numbers --such that each isn't at all shy about trying to use federal government to dictate things without obtaining majority approval. And fervently believe that that is okay because they (and those within their bubble) are absolutely sure that they are right.
Maybe the election of '24 was really about the economy. But as I witnessed it, it appeared to be largely about the two sides each making quite clear the many ways the other side had, in recent memory, tried to override majority opinion.
Disastrously for us, it turned out that the general public was (marginally) more concerned about left wing overreach than right wing overreach.
Obviously, I do not agree with them. But if progressives go on with their view that we can't possibly blame Democrats for the loss, we can't possibly consider our own failings, then who are we blaming? If we are blaming the voters, this is tantamount to proving my point above -- the left (like the right) no longer feels it proper that they must obtain a majority to get their way.
Every moral panic eventually comes to an end. We certainly don’t need to put all of the least qualified, mendacious people in charge to accomplish it. And drag the rest of the world in on it.
That you call it a "moral panic" tells me all I need to know, namely that you don't care about women's sex-based rights. You're entitled to that opinion, of course, but its unpopularity is high and growing. Recent NYT poll showed 67% of Democrats(!) (and 79% of people overall) want men out of women's sports. But the DNC is tripling down on support for men in women's spaces at will, so good to them, they're going to need it.
Dobbs was decided by the Supreme Court during Biden’s term and not by any administration.
Neither I nor anyone else knows what Trump will do, but he said he’s for leaving abortion rights to the states, so if you live in such a state, you can blame them.
Did Kamala have a plan to restore your sex-based rights? If she did, she didn’t articulate it last year, but that may have just been because of how she campaigns.
Do you believe that ending this overreach, which I also agree is overreach, is worth blowing up the economy, establishing definitively that powerful people do not need to follow the law, and putting a group of people in power who have previously refused to leave peacefully and will presumably do so again?
That was the choice, and you voted for dictatorship. I hope it was worth it. As the saying goes, there’s a word for people who supported the Nazis because they were unhappy about the economy, and that word is Nazi.
But why were Democrats married to so many loser electoral issues? How long did it take Biden to figure out they needed to do something g with the border?
When an arsonist turns up to burn down the grandstand, we don’t review the plays from the previous game to see what we can do better next week.
It’s time to realise that there are more serious things going on. Trump is not trying to be President. He’s doing something else, and if you haven’t worked that out yet, then you should open your eyes.
In my mind, this makes it all the more important to figure out what we are doing wrong.
If our antagonist were a literal arsonist, we would not be saying that because he is so evil and destructive, the police need not search more deeply for a better strategy to stop him. Rather: All the more so, what can we do better to turn this around?
Apparently their biggest mistake was thinking Americans were mature enough to vote for a qualified black woman when the alternative was voting for a cognitively impaired felon and rapist, who provoked a deadly attack on the legislative branch and stored highly classified national security material in his resorts bathrooms, but he was a white man.
Their mistake is that they don't own a series of television propaganda outlets like FOX, OANN, Newsmax, etc. Add in AM conservative talk radio, and Dems face an almost insurmountable messaging handicap.
Who are MSNBC, NPR, Washington Post and NYT? It’s a mistake for the White House to put OAN and Breitbart at the front row of the press room, but I remember all the mainstream outlets I mentioned faithfully pushing the “cheap fakes” that Karine paraded out to explain the video of Biden aimlessly wandering into a forest during the D-day ceremonies instead of admitting he was in obvious decline. And Peter Doocy of Fox isn’t very good at propaganda according to this report:
During the White House press briefing following President Trump's comments on the DCA airplane crash, Peter Doocy, Fox News Senior White House Correspondent, asked several pointed questions aimed at addressing the contradictions in Trump's statements. Here are some of the key questions he posed:
- Doocy asked if it was safe to fly commercially, given Trump's assertion that air traffic control towers are staffed with unqualified controllers, whom he referred to as DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) hires. He specifically questioned, "If President Trump is telling us that air traffic control towers are staffed with unqualified controllers—these DEI hires who never should have been brought on—it’s not safe to fly commercially, is it?"
- He also inquired about the hiring or firing of the air traffic controller involved in the DCA tower incident, asking, "Was the air traffic controller in the DCA tower on Wednesday night hired or not fired at some point because of his or her race?"
- Additionally, Doocy challenged Trump's public statements on Truth Social regarding the specifics of the crash, asking, "And when the president says on Truth Social, 'The Black Hawk helicopter was flying too high by a lot, it was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it?' Is he suggesting a helicopter malfunction or a crew error, or a crew doing this intentionally?"
Political audio media like AM radio (and now podcasts) is right-biased because it is especially well-suited to people who spend much of their lives behind the wheel.
People who live this kind of lifestyle tend to be more right-wing due to the zero-sum competition between drivers for road space.
True enough although one has to wonder about prioritizing being anti-transqueer over being less bad on economic policy. How much is one less transqueer worth compared to one less farmworker?
Biden failed on economic policy as well. I don’t think trans was the main reason for independents to vote for Trump. The top two reasons were the economy and immigration.
For swing voters, transgenderism was slightly ahead of those two (but all 3 within the margin of error) according to post-election analysis by the Democrat aligned PAC Blueprint 2024:
You’ve said this multiple times but repeating the same thing doesn’t make it more true. This is a composite question, not purely focussed on trans. It includes other issues like DEI/AA and BLM/racial justice, all of which are issues where Democrats are on the wrong side of public opinion.
“Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”
Relatively speaking, that is true, but her policies for helping the middle class are less bad than Trumps. Tariffs, deportations, "extending" the 2017 tax cuts for the rich and creating more deficit, harm the middle class, too.
It’s hard to make these arguments when you’re the incumbent and have been busting the budget for the last 4 years. Voters were right to not buy these arguments. If the Republicans had nominated Haley, she would have won by a big margin.
Well, trans was the only issue that was specifically mentioned, so we have no idea how the respondents interpreted what those other "cultural issues" might be.
But I completely agree that the Democrats are ALSO on the wrong side of DEI/AA and BLM/racial justice (they're on the racist side), and I won't vote for any of them ever again unless and until they support race-neutral policies as well as sex-realist policies.
I'm not holding by breath. Those are the hills that they plan to die on, just as they did last November.
It was clearly mentioned as an example of a cultural issue. So, data on this question is not sufficient proof of what you’re claiming unless the question is made more specific.
There's no going forward. Voters were given a choice and they chose Trump over Harris. Whether it's fair or unfair, voters gave poor marks to Biden for his handling of the economy. Harris has been a politician long enough but is still not comfortable talking about policy like Obama or Clintons were.
Neither of the parties understand the basic fact that winning elections and governing involves moderation. American voters punish extremism. Democrats were the more extreme party in this election. Republicans will get the message in 2026 and 2028 if Trump keeps doing this.
It is, in the sense that (like many Americans) this person is implicitly confessing to being duped by culture war garbage on social media.
For years now, millions of us have wondered why people don’t dismiss Trump as the charlatan that he so obviously is. This is how. The right wing influencers dupe someone into believing a lie, where the lie taps into some core piece of their psychology.
The whole MAGA evangelical cohort works like this. Trump is about as far away from Jesus as you can get, and yet he wins their votes, because they’re such a susceptible group to emotional manipulation.
Kamala pitched her campaign as close to the middle as you can get (possibly a bit right for some tastes), and yet someone has convinced this person that she was more extreme than the person who attempted a coup and was promising to be a dictator.
None of it is rational. It’s all psychology.
If inflation spikes over the next few months, these people will blame Joe Biden. Or just won’t care like they pretended to last year.
I voted for Harris because I think Trump is worse for the reasons that you mentioned but the fact is that she was not able to fool sufficient voters into thinking that she's a moderate when she was on tape advocating for far left policies in 2019 or that she was part of one of the most progressive administrations in history, with none of the centrist instincts that Obama or Clinton had as Presidents. I don't think enough Democrats realize that Trump forced the Republican Party to moderate on issues that voters care about, like Social Security and Medicare and taking a federal ban on abortion off the table. Democrats could have done the same by moderating on immigration and trans and DEI but they couldn't help themselves.
I'm an elitist who has luxury beliefs but many voters are willing to look past Trump's many personal flaws because he was the candidate with common sense views, unlike an extremist who thought incarcerated people should have access to free gender affirming surgery.
Don’t fall for these stories about how Trump voters ackshully had some good points.
It’s all rubbish. Trans issues affect almost nobody, but they became a hot button issue in the election because millions of Americans are so bored with their comfortable lives that they could be duped into thinking that Dems were threatening their way of life.
Voting for Trump in the last election was an obviously irresponsible decision. Harris was a flawed but sensible candidate. Trump was not a sensible candidate. He had already attempted a coup and was promising destructive policies (which he is now delivering on).
So get a grip, and stop making silly excuses. America made a gigantic error in the last election and the citizens of the US owe it to the world to contain the damage. Starting now.
I have an extremely low opinion of the Biden administration so I don’t blame voters for going back to Trump. This was an election where neither side deserved to win.
Trans/DEI were issues for me. If you don’t care about these issues, that’s your choice but you don’t get to decide what others should care about. If Republicans had nominated Haley, I would have voted for her without hesitation. Because of Trump, I held my nose and voted for Harris.
I think Trump aims to close budget deficits without raising income taxes, corporate taxes, or capital gains taxes. By relying on tariffs and executing deregulation to boost economic activity, he is hoping to increase gov revenue. However, he overlooks the economic harm tariffs cause. In 2024, in Biden's final year, the government earned $4.9T and spent $6.8T, with $900B on interest. Trump expects tariffs to increase tax receipts and DOGE to cut spending, but I’m skeptical.
For 2025, I estimate $5.2T in revenue and $7T in spending.
Dawg I know that... but tariffs are a type of taxes on imports. When I say "close budget deficit without raising taxes" I mean without raising income taxes, capital gains taxes, or corporate taxes.
Everyone is focusing on tariffs as a tool of diplomacy but I suspect you're correct that Trump sees them in terms of revenue primarily. Like you, I suspect he's wrong about that, but it means the 2 sides are mostly talking past each other on this issue.
From this article, "Mr. Trump should forego blanket economic tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which are partners with the United States in the North America-wide USMCA..."
This is your pro-tariff article but is still calling Trumps move something like incoherent, ignorant or irrational. They're clearly trying to tell Trump he's right while actually saying he's wrong, because they're dealing with a baby.
interesting article, but with debatable claims. For example:
´ America’s very status as the world’s importer of last resort alone demonstrates how most major foreign economies depend much more on selling to the U.S. market for their own prosperity than vice versa.´\\
I have seen numbers quoted in European news that say 20% of EU exports go to the US and 15% of China exports. The world is big enough to try to find other export markets for these amounts, contrary to what the article claims. After all: the US has a population of 300 mln on a planet with 8 billion people. Canada and Mexico are being hurt hard though.
The EU imports lots of services from the US (including much cloud computing and platform services). A trade war might be the kick in the butt the EU needs to finally start developing our own tech.
It sounds to me the US is doing a lot of self harm in the long term.
The article also says this:
´Implementing this universal tariff as a form of value-added tax (VAT) would bring many other advantages as well.´
I do not really understand this, is there some cunning VAT plan we all overlook? Would like to hear more on this.
It's not a VAT plan, it just proposes a export rebates as part of Trump's tariff policy that resembles the rebate (or flow-through) portion of VATs.
It's completely rubbish. Such schemes work mathematically but not practically, the are extremely cumbersome. They wouldn't stop the bedlam at the border about to start on Tuesday.
The article is terrible at prognostication. The first paragraph is less than 24 hours old, and clearly ignored what informed people already knew.
"Because going big on such tariffs, and quickly, is amply capable of helping revive the economy without reigniting significant (if any) inflation, without provoking meaningful (if any) retaliation, and without driving American allies into rivals’ arms."
Retaliation was already telegraphed by America's two largest trading partners, and is now underway. And they are using targeted rather than blanket tariffs, which is more effective.
As for driving former allies into rivals' arms, that's already underway, and has been since Trump started his threats.
They can't even predict the past - the article's not even mildly coherent.
Noah, as someone who is somewhat connected to Silicon Valley bigwigs. I’m curious, what do you think people like Andreesen and others are thinking. People who went hard for Trump and who are supposed to be our intellectual elite. What are they thinking observing this plainly ridiculous trade war started for no good reason ?
Silicon Valley is mostly services. It isn't impacted seriously by tariffs. Andreessen was very upfront in his FP interview a couple of weeks ago: he's changed teams when the Dems told him they wanted to ban crypto and regulate AI to death. Marc is here for business, not ideology.
Andreesen’s a16z was a major funder of Coinbase which had over $1.2 billion in revenue last quarter, which appears to be a real business.
OpenAI wanted other AI companies regulated, as is the case with crony capitalist rent seekers who don’t like competition, but since Meta and DeepSeek have shown with their open source models, it isn’t realistic for western governments to regulate AI, and PRC will only regulate it in its own interest.
He’ll be gone in a few weeks but to me it’s a no brainer that Mark Carney should be the next PM. Protecting the UK during Brexit as their central banker seems like the kind of experience and stature you want right now in a leader.
There isn't one. The Conservative Party, unlike the Republican Party, remains both thoroughly pro-market and pro-democracy (or majority-seeking). Although it would easily have the most pro-Trump supporters, no party is isolationist, or in favour of Trump's economic policies.
Although before the 1980s conservatives in Canada consistently eschewed reciprocity (free trade) with the US, there isn't even a vestige of that in the modern party.
I did hear Trump say he wants to put tariffs on EU imports because the EU charge VAT on US products....
Yes, we in the EU charge VAT on basically everything, that is how our tax system works. Is Trump now going to tell the world how to tax things? Whats next, corporation tax? Income tax?
In the same press conference he said tariffs are going to make the US rich. That seems to be his main objective. Same with the ´protection money´ that he wants from NATO partners, its a business model for him.
VAT is only refundable for temporary visitors. When my daughter was a university student in London I mailed her a new iPhone because they were expensive there, but she had to pay a £150 duty to pick it up at the post office, which was later refunded at Heathrow when she came home.
that page is about certain business to business transactions.
About VAT from the EU website:
´Value Added Tax (VAT) is a consumption tax that is applied to nearly all goods and services that are bought and sold for use or consumption in the EU.´
I assume he wants them to tax exports - after all, his plan is to tax European exports. He must be mad that they require US *imports* into Europe to be taxed.
its confusing to try to make some sense of this all, the weird thing is that all these tariffs he is imposing on products from Canada, Mexico, China and next the EU are in fact being paid by American companies importing these goods. And they are probably going to pass these costs on to their customers. So while Trump may think the US government is going to be rich with income from tariffs, they are being paid by US companies and consumers. Maybe he hopes in the long run exports from these countries will go down. But my guess is he didnt really think this through.
(While it is really bad) Instead of talking about Elon's gesture at inauguration, I think Dems should focus more attach on this tariff stuff with correct angle of analysis.
And my super biased opinion one is this is one of million reasns econ 101 price theory class should be mandatory to all college kids (or tbh high school too but I digress) even as you said, the real picture is more complicated, having the conceptual picture helps.
And my super biased opinion 2 is we all should be able to be comfortable with multivariate calculus to be comfortable with price theory...
Also, this makes me strengthen the conviction that Trump can't understand anything other than zero sum transaction - and neither can the majority of his voter base...
Tariffs on Mexico and Canada are bad news... destruction of the federal civil service is almost fatal news. If Trump has his way, we will not have a functioning federal government, and no one around him has the skills to rebuild one.
Those who are fired (many in an illegal manner) must sue immediately. I'm not sure anyone else has standing to b bring a suit.
You’re absolutely right about the destruction of the civil service. It’s weird how Noah is so reluctant to criticize Musk even while Musk presides over that destruction. And even while Musk cosplays as a Nazi.
South African born Musk is the best argument for the idea that immigration is ruining our country
agree, except for "cosplays"
Do you have evidence that Elon Musk sees the world through a prism of a no-holds-barred life-and-death struggle between races?
(That AFAIK is what defines a "Nazi".)
yes read his comments that he made to Germany's neo-Nazi AfD party:
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/27/nx-s1-5276084/elon-musk-german-far-right-afd-holocaust
if your threshold of evidence for identifying a Nazi is "threw Jews into the gas chamber" and not just their own words and gestures, I'm sorry to disappoint you.
Honestly, don’t even engage with that troll. He knows. Everyone knows. He’s not asking that question in good faith.
OK that certainly makes him at least an apologist for Nazism, which is certainly bad enough.
True. Nothing playful about.
The ideal scenario is to have targeted reforms in the federal government but since the Democrats do not believe in that and Democratic Presidents are more interested in legislation vs execution, we ended up with a bull in a china shop scenario. Ultimately, this is a result of complexity in the government and voters feeling that they don’t have any level of control over policies, regardless of which party is in power.
I spent many years as a federal civil servant. In my experience, we were the same sort of people as my wife dealt with in the primate sector. The biggest difference was that incompetence and insubordination often had consequences in the private sector and rarely in the federal service.
Feds have a host of perfectly reasonable sounding protections. Intense retraining if incompetent. Formal grievance procedures. An EEO system process that covers virtually everyone other than white males under forty, and even them in some cases. And unions closely tied to the Democratic Party.
My main concern about Trump’s approach isn’t his position that those who implement policies can be fired if they ignore or oppose implementation; no one voted for any of those people. It is that the worst of the employees will opt to stay, while the best take the buyout. But the federal civil service needs fixing. I don’t think Trump is the ideal agent for that purpose, but he’s what we have.
Civil service needs reforming, but I don’t think it’s so bad that any change will be for the better. From how it’s going so far, this change seems decidedly for the worse
It took me a moment to figure out what your wife was doing in the primate sector. 😛
I'm not sure why people persist in proposing "legal" action. Why do you think this administration will pay any attention to losing a court case. They can spread out appeals for years, and ultimately some government employee has to do or not do something, and if Trump doesn't like it, they'll be fired. The law is moot.
A federal court can enjoin firing until the issue is resolved. It can mandate that that the Trump Administration is proving that it is following correct procedure in firing career civil servants. In other words, it can put the Trump administration in the position of having to prove it is following the law until the court case is resolved.
This has already happened on the issues of impoundment and birthright citizenship.
My darker suspicion is that this has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with psychology. Trump feels stronger than he ever has. He's a bully, and he thinks he can bully Canada into collapse, thus getting them begging to be the 51st state as a means of eliminating the tariffs.
I don't think it will work, but given how dumb all the other explanations are, I think it's the most plausible.
Of course it’s nothing to do with economics.
Trump is not trying to be ‘President’, insofar as the office is meant to do good by American citizens.
None of his decisions are based on a policy rationale. It’s all chaos, to generate attention. Look at his Cabinet picks.
"Never assume malice, when ignorance will suffice."
Trump is a TV personality who became famous pretending to be a successful businessman. If it wasn't for the fact that his daddy gave him *half a billion dollars* to play with, he'd be a nobody. He's an idiot who's got some skill as a showman.
He’s going to do some real damage now though, isn’t he?
Think of some names from history who you could describe as ‘idiots with some skills as a showman’. Given the right tools, they can inflict immense damage and suffering.
Pero people keep thinking he is a useful idiot
The chaos is to make people yearn for a "stable genius" to come and rescue them. That's how authoritarians seize power. That's the policy rationale.
I’m sure that’s the driver for the ideologues behind the scenes - Bannon, Stephen Miller, etc.
But for Trump it’s even more basic. He is driven by having his mug on TV, his name in the national conversation, and having the media and other crowds turn up day after day to listen to him. It’s why he will continue to have rallies. He is addicted to attention, and has a rat instinct for how to get it.
On the Quebec license plate it says "je me souviens" which translates to "i will remember". This will be, explicitly or not, the motto of all the allied countries he has chosen to bully. Great damage has already occurred.
I would argue that this will be the motto of the entire world. Those that are bullied for sure. But those who could be bullied will shy away from the US. And everyone now knows that a good faith legal agreement like the USMCA is not worth the paper it’s written on. At the end of the day trust is the thing and it’s now broken.
And it was all made possible by FOX News and RW media. Which hide behind their 1st Amendment rights to spew an endless stream of made-up nonsense and deliberate lies. That conservative voters implicitly believe. And then vote on.
I've no problem with *opinion* going crazy partisan. Because it's just opinion. But when blatant mis-/dis-information is peddled nonstop as *news*, that even our current President believes to be true, then we're in deep shit.
To your point, I think we need to spend less $$ flying politicos to Washington to tin cup and redirect those funds to a massive traditional and social media campaign across the US to tell them what exactly is going to happen to them when Canada, Mexico and the rest of the world turn on them. Might be a start :)
Isn't it lovely to have an idiot for president? Taxing inputs used by American manufacturers?
And until/unless consumer prices begin to skyrocket, his voter base simply won't give a damn. Or they'll even applaud him for how much he's upsetting Democrats right now, because that's the angle FOX News is currently covering.
But the Conservative business elite types who read the Wall Street Journal more than they watch FOX, understand very well how badly his idiocy is harming both the economy and the efficiency of the civil service. As Trump's policies start to kill their profits, they'll be screaming bloody murder.
The big question is whether Trump will course correct on tariffs when the shit hits the fan.
This is a real mistake from Trump: if you want to both entrench an autocracy and put in unpopular tariffs, you should secure control of the state and crush the opposition *first*.
If your biggest, highest-profile action is one that makes everyone mad at you and rallies opposition while that’s still easy to do, you fucked up.
And a business class who will forgive any amount of economic inefficiency to hold onto their gains from the 2017 "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act."
I think this prob hits different business class differently - l imagine the new Trump's friend tech sector will be hit less as it depends less on import of materials while manufacturing sector and retails would suffer a lot.
I imagine tech type will care less but wall street folks, I think they prob care to an extent
:)
Hi
If you are not already a subscriber, may I invite you to subscribe (for free) to my substack, "Radical Centrist?" file:///C:/Users/Thomas/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml
I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I want to be that scribbler.
Thanks
Many PCs come from Mexico, so that part will hurt the tech sector, and 10% on China will hurt other hardware imports. If Trump actually goes through with the crazy threats to target semiconductor imports , that will be insanely bad.
Trump is talking about fentanyl more as a distraction from the likely unemployment and higher prices due to his tariffs. Despite some alluring examples, Canadian fentanyl is small compared to, for example, gun smuggling into Canada from the use. To the contrary, Trump simply believes, as he has stated many times, that tariffs are good. He has repeatedly stated that tariffs will improve the US’s fiscal position or even coerce Canada, by “economic force,” to accede to the US as a state. So, also as he has said, there are no concessions Canada can make to convince him to remove the tariffs.
I believe the only way he can do these without congress is to claim a national security issue. Thus fentanyl…
Factually, Canada is less that 1% of the fentanyl and illegal border crossings. To your point, we have a huge illegal gun smuggling problem with guns coming in from the US. And the trade deficit he sites is products only. Canada has a significant trade deficit with the US in terms of services and products, and our oil is sold to the US at a significant discount to world prices. So who’s subsidizing who if we follow his line of thinking to its logical conclusion.
The immigration and fentanyl claims are bullshit, he just used them so that he can call this an emergency which allows him to put on the tariffs. Congress has had many chances to put limits on emergency powers but was too weak or stupid to do it.
How about a targeted tariff on Fentanyl? This would protect the American fentanyl industry, create jobs etc
Make Fentanyl Great Again ! MFGA!
Finally, someone who makes sense! And it should be "MAFGA": "Make American fentanyl great again!"
MAFGA!
Except you can't (by definition) tariff imports of contraband (or more generally, tax any kind of criminal activity).
Fentanyl is actually a legal pharmaceutical used to control pain for cancer and surgery, it’s just controlled by the FDA as to who can prescribe and supply it.
George/Buzen,
George's idea would require descheduling fentanyl which raises significant public health concerns. Oregon’s Measure 110 decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs (including opioids). While this is not the same as descheduling, the negative impacts on visible drug use, positive impact on overdoses (positive in numbers only) are sufficient to dismiss the idea, in my neighborhood at least. But it is a valid economic argument in the Pigouvian sense. Reality >> economic arguments.
Tim
As a Canadian it seems to me these tariffs will push us to do more business with the rest of the world rather than the US going forward. That means China, for the most part. Which is strange because it felt to me that as recently as a couple months ago that China was a shared enemy of Canada and the US. I guess we’ll see how that turns out in 6m.
Unfortunately with natural gas, and especially Quebecois hydroelectric power, other countries are much harder to export to.
Are groceries cheaper yet?
Noah should keep a running tracker of grocery prices, especially eggs and bacon, throughout the Trump presidency
Eggs are a red herring now, already being disingenuously used by Klobuchar and others as being the tariff’s fault, when it is a supply chain issue caused by the culling of chickens because of H5N1 bird flu outbreaks in Georgia and California. You will notice that while vegetables are on the import charts in the article, eggs are not.
I don’t expect the tariffs to affect eggs (but maybe they will in some indirect way, I’m not sure). My comment was more aimed at the voters who gave Trump the slight edge in the election because they believed he would actually bring down the prices of groceries, mainly eggs and bacon. In my opinion, the opposition should be loudly and repeatedly pointing at the price of eggs to show it is not going down. If it’s due to factors beyond the president’s control, that’s too bad for him. Inflation during Biden’s term was also a global phenomenon beyond his control but it cost Kamala the election.
The negative effect of Trump's tariffs on the integrated North American auto industry will be huge. The Cato institute has an interesting description and analysis. Much of the trade is in parts and components, some of which cross borders several times. Will they be taxed each time? I would like to be at the border on Tuesday to see all the customs officials assessing the cargo of all the trucks and trains trying to cross. It will probably shut down entire borders. This will close plants here and give Tesla and China a gargantuan advantage over the others more dispersed on this continent. The auto industry (and Democrats) should be howling for blood.
That's what's stunning: in this tariff regime, they will be taxed each time.
Several of the biggest parts manufacturers are Canadian and Mexican, and the biggest automakers use them in practically all their models.
This weirdly advantages cars made overseas, who face a much smaller tariff (except China), and only face it once, rather than up to half a dozen times.
Trump’s a loose cannon and worse than I thought. A severe price to pay for getting rid of the excesses in the Democratic Party.
No idea what he’s thinking about next with regard to these tariffs or those elsewhere. Or what it means for bonds and stocks and the health of the economy. Frankly it can’t be good.
Next up are taxes and the budget. God knows what comes up there. And what it does to our already too large budget deficit. My optimism about DOGE rationalizing a leaky Federal government is also fast fading—we’ll see.
Frankly the only things that will bring him to his senses are interest rates shooting higher and the stock market getting crushed. Monday will be interesting. If not then, the budget and tax negotiations could be D day. We’ll see…the markets may simply shrug it off.
Why did you have any optimism about DOGE in the first place?
$4 billion dollars a day in spending reductions so far, according to the boss on X as well as end of remote work DEI departments and buyout offers on bureaucrats are all reasons for optimism.
The 4 billion dollars is what Musk needs to say to justify what he's doing and the source he is using for much he is saving?...himself
According to the boss? What exactly is he the boss of, and what evidence has he provided of these $4 billion /day spending reductions?
Let's see what he does with the budget. "Severe price to pay for getting rid of the excesses in the Democratic Party." Agreed, but there's no political candidate I've ever agreed with 100%. the Democrats were running us off a cultural cliff. let us hope Trump doesn't run us off an economic one.
The biggest problem I see here is the rapidity. It's one of the qualities I really like about him in other settings (Columbia, Venezuela), but uncertainty is death for business, something he ought to know. If you really believe tariffs are good, announce that they'll be phased in over the last 12 months, not in 12 hours.
He’s only good at show business, and doesn’t understand economics let alone how businesses work, that’s why he is about to ruin the economy with tariffs. He won’t stop until his ratings go down, and let’s hope they do soon.
If and when interest rates do shoot higher, the question is whether he accepts that, tries to fix it the right way, or tries to suborn the Federal Reserve.
Politicizing the Fed would be a real break-the-glass moment; I’d start wondering about whether there’s hyperinflation coming.
The Federal Government is enormously bloated, mostly in regulations but also in departments and, to a lesser extent, personnel. It needs much more serious creative destruction than the democrats would ever get near. Any organization needs to be pruned, reformed, reimagined regularly and the dems will never do this.
DOGE is as close as we've come to dealing with it. It's unlikely to work, because Elon and repubs don't know what they're doing, but the optimistic view is that they'll take a hatchet and the democrats will be able to rebuild by, not kidding here, being unburdened by what has been.
That said, none of that is near worth the damage Trump is doing, and was obviously going to do, on economic policy and otherwise.
You’re not trying to understand what we’re saying.
I agree it’s a corrupt power grab. But there’s an optimistic take that it could lead to some creative destruction that dems can then fix into something better than the antiquated, bloated systems we have now.
Do you work in or near federal government? It’s a mess, partially because dems generally protect it rather than try to improve it.
There’s no room for nativity in what I’m saying. “Bad people destroy thing that’s not working, gives opportunity to build something better after they’re gone.” This is a plausible outcome.
What about this is naive? It’s not only not been proven false, it’s basically unfalsifiable in the short term. That’s a better argument against it!
Lots. Look up "Dollar Men" for examples from WWII.
Bringing in experienced people from private enterprise to increase production and efficiency as the economy is reshaped has several precedents.
I think Trump's economic policies are hot garbage, and endanger the national security of the US and its allies. But slimming a civil service is among the hardest things to do, and one of the more effective ways is to use wrecking balls rather than scalpels. Scalpels get turned away. Musk lacks enough experience in government that he can't wield a scalpel. If he lasts, which is doubtful, he's going to be a wrecking ball, but one that can competently manage a re-org. Trump's other cronies, on the other hand, will likely work in gutting the civil service so much at cross-purposes to DOGE that it's going to be a lovely mess, which they will all try to lie about and cover up.
The problem is though: in the course of swinging this wrecking ball, he’s breaking basically every applicable law. If he slims down the civil service at the cost of showing everyone that law is optional, that’s not a good trade.
It’s worse for basically everyone in every way — you don’t want to live in the sort of country where powerful people don’t have to follow the law.
The problem is not that an agency is breaking the law - that happens pretty regularly, and courts sort it out. The problem is that courts can be too slow or ineffective or both. In this particular case, the courts themselves and their efficacy could be undermined.
I didn't describe who Musk is, but the level of finesse with which he will will be able to operate (little), if he is able to at all.
What analogy for his intensions or results would you find more appropriate?
Having lived in Russia in the '90s, I see more differences than similarities. So you haven't convinced me. Besides, the analogy is too vague, the oligarchs and their methods were actually quite varied.
What is Musk going to do? And how will he do it?
If you believe that Biden didn’t wildly overspent on everything, except border enforcement; then maybe you weren’t an adult in 2020. DOGE won’t eliminate all or most of the crazy spending and regulations, but it has resulted in some reductions in both, so there is reason for optimism.
TRUMP WAS PRESIDENT IN 2020, am I taking crazy pills?
You may have missed a dose; as the previous one was in 2016, presidential elections are held every four years.
If only the Democrats hadn't been completely captured by the transqueer cult, more of us could have voted for them, like we always did before.
Oh well.
Haim performs Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well" live at T in the Park, 2014, BBC video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VikyxJoBF2k
Please take the bigotry to X where it belongs. You'll find plenty of sympathetic haters there to commiserate with about how other people's gender expression is ruining your life.
Both Democrats and Republicans have their own monoculture which they would like to impose on all 50 states. I'm not thrilled with either party. Democrats can tolerate anyone but a Republican.
Democrats are apparently guilty of both being intolerant of Republicans by some and being too friendly with Republicans (Cheney's, Kinzinger, John Giles, etc) by others.
I think you have come up with a formulation that makes for better political rhetoric than description of the true situation.
Some people, including a fair number of Democrats, believe that blue America includes a lot of intolerance for groups of Americans unlike themselves.
Some people, including much of the progressive wing, believe that Democrats are too friendly with the Liz Cheney/Kinzinger sort of Republicans.
There's not much overlap between these two groups of critics. Rather, this is a pretty good start to describing the division between centrist Democrats and progressives.
Please, find help. You desperately need some perspective!
Sorry, but no. The transqueer movement, fully backed by the Democrats in office, has resulted in the mutilation and sterilization of tens of thousands of kids, mostly gay and austistic. They're the ones whose lives were ruined, not mine. I'm totally fine.
"a handful of transqueer individuals had surgery, so I had to vote for a fascist to take down the U.S. Government"
Changing “kids” to “individuals” and not voting for Harris with “voting for a fascist” kinda negates your argument.
You’re a long way from fine.
Take some time away from the Internet.
Go outside
I think most of these kids are happier than they would be without these interventions.
Yeah, but as the Tavistock Gender study showing o such positive results and the refusal of Johanna Olson-Kennedy to release her study which also showed no such results show, this is not scientifically proven in any way.
Buzen,
I think the medical community has overstepped somewhat, but not extremely so. I don't need to defend Kenny here (he can do that himself.) There are no conclusive studies on happiness, including the one you point out.
Most professional medical bodies (not a great standard but enough to validate Kenny's presumption) currently find that gender-affirming approaches can be beneficial for many transgender youth, even as they call for better and bigger research trials.
An argument from ignorance isn't sufficient given the clear medical cases and the increased prevalence of suicide in these cohorts (if not happiness in those affirmed - unhappiness in the unaffirmed is documented.)
I have personal feelings, more inline with your sentiments than I will admit, but I have deep respect for those who attempt to craft public policy that protects the prospects and rights of others. I would urge you to do extend the same respect.
Tim
"Most professional medical bodies" is US only. In Europe, several countries with not-for-profit (this is key!) health-care systems have conducted systematic reviews of the evidence, and all have found that it is too weak to base treatment on. Most have moved to severely restrict sex-trait modification drugs and surgeries for minors.
The "professional medical bodies" in the US are essentially unions advocating only for the best interests of their members, which are to make more money and to not get sued for malpractice. They are not scientific organizations. They have NOT called for "better and bigger research trials". Instead they have suppressed the results of those that have been done. WPATH commissioned an evidence review from Johns Hopkins, then refused to release the results, and enjoined JHU from doing so (because WPATH had paid for it, they had the legal power to do so). The US AAP said over a year ago that they would conduct their own evidence review, but have made no move to do so. There is no question whatsoever what an honest review would reveal: there have been many already, and they have all come to the same conclusion.
If there's one problem in the United States more pressing than any other, it's surely that small socially-hated minorities have too easy a time accessing highly controversial medical care.
Curses! If only the US medical system weren't so ruthlessly and unrelentingly efficient!
Mark,
You're completely off on the facts here. I encourage you to read up on this. I'll grant that some trans people regret their transitions, but that doesn't invalidate the rights of the majority to make their own choices. Parents need to be informed, and we should fully assess the upcoming NIH study—along with others—to shape the best policies for preserving the health and prospects of all Americans.
These are deeply personal decisions that deserve privacy and respect, not simplistic talking points. Don't fall for Shrier's simplistic presentation.
I'm more than willing to vet this here if you like.
Tim
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/early/2025/01/24/archdischild-2024-327909.full.pdf
https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/early/2025/01/24/archdischild-2024-327921.full.pdf
Gordon Guyatt, one of the authors of those last two papers, is one of the key proponents of the practice of evidence-based medicine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Guyatt
Mark, you're completely wrong with regards to post-transitioning surgery regret. It's only 1%, vastly lower than any other kind of elective surgery: https://www.americanjournalofsurgery.com/article/S0002-9610(24)00238-1/abstract
I think you are letting your distaste of LGBTQ cloud your judgement.
That's for adults, and even then the methodology is questionable. There is no comparable study for children:
"The Detransition Rate Is Unknown"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02623-5
Your attempt at psychoanalysis of me is noted.
Many LGB people reject being force-teamed with TQ, lesbians in particular, who are finding their spaces invaded by men claiming to be women who love women. One such LGB organzition is LGB Alliance USA:
"We advocate for the prioritization of sex-based rights over gender ideology. Without sex-based protections or the acknowledgment of sex as a material reality, we cannot protect same-sex orientation."
https://lgbausa.org/about
Mark,
I responded above ==>https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trump-starts-to-break-things/comment/90657933. Note I shared links to similar if not the same papers in my response. Let's come to terms there. Note the medical standard isn’t absolute certainty—it’s best available evidence.
Best,
Tim
Absolutely, best available evidence is the standard. And in other cases (eg other body dysphorias) where the evidence is this weak, standard practice is NOT to use powerful drugs and surgeries to change body presentation to match the patient's mental model.
ONLY gender dysphoria is treated in this way. It is very reasonable to ask why that is.
Bullshit. Seek help man - you're losing it!
I've noticed you talking about kid's genitals for a while here in the comments, at least a year. I think at this point it's worth reporting you to the FBI, before they're totally co-opted. Men like you constantly obsessing over children's genitals more often than not are deep, evil predators. I hope they find you and give you justice!
I am not at all surprised to get personal insults and personal threats from a supporter of child mutilation.
It’s bigotry to note that Democrats sacrificed the future of the free, liberal world on the alter of far-left cultural issue positioning? Well call me a bigot then. I can only imagine what Nazism I’d be accused of for wishing we didn’t nominate a candidate who explicitly endorsed gender reassignment surgeries for convicted illegal immigrants - on video.
FOX News fully agrees with you...Well, at least the part about how uppity women. black and gays have ruined America with DEI.
Like Critical Race Theory (CRT)--which is a few obscure grad school courses that FOX News fabulized was being used to race-shame whites in every public school in the country--DEI is (was) a fringe attempt in academia to create equality. But FOX News used it as a culture war cudgel to bring racism, sexism and homophobia back into fashion.
The culture wars are what the GOP uses to win elections. It's the only way they can get working class citizens to vote against their own economic self-interest.
Are you suggesting that universities requiring DEI statements from all professors had no effect on the quality of research or education? Or the FAA testing scandal where only members of an affinity group were given a list of correct answers to a biographical survey that overrode test scores for ATC licenses had no effect on candidate quality?
https://mslegal.org/cases/brigida-v-faa/
Wait, you’re saying that *Democrats* sacrificed the future of the free world because of trans people? I would have thought *Republicans* are the ones who sacrificed the future of the free world because of trans people.
And you would be wrong. I have been a registered Democrat for 50 years, I have worked over those decades as a volunteer on multiple Democrat campaigns at all levels, and I now vote straight Republican, entirely because the Democrats have become anti-science and anti-human. There is no other way to describe their full-on support for the regiment of mutilation, sterilization, and de-sexing that is being foisted on our children and their parents with pure lies ("do you want a live son or a dead daughter", completely unsupported by actual suicide statistics).
I guess you are reiterating my claim, that people who are opposed to trans people are the ones who are so obsessed that they are willing to sacrifice the future of the free world to get this questionable benefit for a tiny fraction of individuals.
Germany in the 1920s had the world's first gender reassignment clinic. It also had a thriving gay culture.
These were, of course, some of the first things on the chopping block by the actual historical Nazis.
Harris's answer was dumb and very clearly very shortsighted primary era position that probably got her nothing at the time and even less later, but that wasn't the reason she lost.
Data shows that it was big contributing factor:
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/
#1 of 25 reasons swing voters chose Trump: "Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class"
"Somehow this is the fault of Democrats" -unserious person
When a team loses a game, the first thing that the coaches and fans do is figure out what mistakes have been made. It is not unserious to wonder what mistakes the Democrats made in the 2024 campaign.
Of course. But the idea that the only or best way to deal with diversity theater or trans women in sports was to vote for Trump is abjectly insane.
I think most people here would agree that electing Trump was disastrous.
But you are putting your thumb on the scales when you characterize progressive overreach as diversity theater or trans women in sports.
The internet has broadly allowed both left and right wing movements to gain political influence far beyond their actual numbers --such that each isn't at all shy about trying to use federal government to dictate things without obtaining majority approval. And fervently believe that that is okay because they (and those within their bubble) are absolutely sure that they are right.
Maybe the election of '24 was really about the economy. But as I witnessed it, it appeared to be largely about the two sides each making quite clear the many ways the other side had, in recent memory, tried to override majority opinion.
Disastrously for us, it turned out that the general public was (marginally) more concerned about left wing overreach than right wing overreach.
Obviously, I do not agree with them. But if progressives go on with their view that we can't possibly blame Democrats for the loss, we can't possibly consider our own failings, then who are we blaming? If we are blaming the voters, this is tantamount to proving my point above -- the left (like the right) no longer feels it proper that they must obtain a majority to get their way.
What was your plan for restoring women's sex-based rights and for ending government-mandated racism? Ask Kamala very nicely?
Every moral panic eventually comes to an end. We certainly don’t need to put all of the least qualified, mendacious people in charge to accomplish it. And drag the rest of the world in on it.
That you call it a "moral panic" tells me all I need to know, namely that you don't care about women's sex-based rights. You're entitled to that opinion, of course, but its unpopularity is high and growing. Recent NYT poll showed 67% of Democrats(!) (and 79% of people overall) want men out of women's sports. But the DNC is tripling down on support for men in women's spaces at will, so good to them, they're going to need it.
Are you seriously asserting that this administration will
restore my sex-based rights? The very rights they already took away under Dobbs and are planning to destroy all the way back to 1919?
Also, DEI is government mandated racism? I’m sorry for you and your complete lack of perspective.
Dobbs was decided by the Supreme Court during Biden’s term and not by any administration.
Neither I nor anyone else knows what Trump will do, but he said he’s for leaving abortion rights to the states, so if you live in such a state, you can blame them.
Did Kamala have a plan to restore your sex-based rights? If she did, she didn’t articulate it last year, but that may have just been because of how she campaigns.
Do you believe that ending this overreach, which I also agree is overreach, is worth blowing up the economy, establishing definitively that powerful people do not need to follow the law, and putting a group of people in power who have previously refused to leave peacefully and will presumably do so again?
That was the choice, and you voted for dictatorship. I hope it was worth it. As the saying goes, there’s a word for people who supported the Nazis because they were unhappy about the economy, and that word is Nazi.
Godwin's law proven yet again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
But why were Democrats married to so many loser electoral issues? How long did it take Biden to figure out they needed to do something g with the border?
Because they are true believers, at the level of a religious cult, in those losing issues. As can be seen from comments here.
When an arsonist turns up to burn down the grandstand, we don’t review the plays from the previous game to see what we can do better next week.
It’s time to realise that there are more serious things going on. Trump is not trying to be President. He’s doing something else, and if you haven’t worked that out yet, then you should open your eyes.
Please read my posts and see if I'm not concerned about the arsonist.
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/please-dont-resign
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/our-first-big-win
In my mind, this makes it all the more important to figure out what we are doing wrong.
If our antagonist were a literal arsonist, we would not be saying that because he is so evil and destructive, the police need not search more deeply for a better strategy to stop him. Rather: All the more so, what can we do better to turn this around?
Apparently their biggest mistake was thinking Americans were mature enough to vote for a qualified black woman when the alternative was voting for a cognitively impaired felon and rapist, who provoked a deadly attack on the legislative branch and stored highly classified national security material in his resorts bathrooms, but he was a white man.
This post is about Trump's tariffs. Not a post-2024 election autopsy centered on a supposed "total trans capture" of the democratic party.
If Noah wants to delete my comment, he has the power to do so.
Be a shame to lose the link to that Haim video though!
Their mistake is that they don't own a series of television propaganda outlets like FOX, OANN, Newsmax, etc. Add in AM conservative talk radio, and Dems face an almost insurmountable messaging handicap.
Not sure if you’ve seen the research, but Democrats read and Republicans watch TV. That’s part of the problem.
Democratic media outfits are not nearly as effective, yes.
Who are MSNBC, NPR, Washington Post and NYT? It’s a mistake for the White House to put OAN and Breitbart at the front row of the press room, but I remember all the mainstream outlets I mentioned faithfully pushing the “cheap fakes” that Karine paraded out to explain the video of Biden aimlessly wandering into a forest during the D-day ceremonies instead of admitting he was in obvious decline. And Peter Doocy of Fox isn’t very good at propaganda according to this report:
During the White House press briefing following President Trump's comments on the DCA airplane crash, Peter Doocy, Fox News Senior White House Correspondent, asked several pointed questions aimed at addressing the contradictions in Trump's statements. Here are some of the key questions he posed:
- Doocy asked if it was safe to fly commercially, given Trump's assertion that air traffic control towers are staffed with unqualified controllers, whom he referred to as DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) hires. He specifically questioned, "If President Trump is telling us that air traffic control towers are staffed with unqualified controllers—these DEI hires who never should have been brought on—it’s not safe to fly commercially, is it?"
- He also inquired about the hiring or firing of the air traffic controller involved in the DCA tower incident, asking, "Was the air traffic controller in the DCA tower on Wednesday night hired or not fired at some point because of his or her race?"
- Additionally, Doocy challenged Trump's public statements on Truth Social regarding the specifics of the crash, asking, "And when the president says on Truth Social, 'The Black Hawk helicopter was flying too high by a lot, it was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it?' Is he suggesting a helicopter malfunction or a crew error, or a crew doing this intentionally?"
These questions were part of Doocy's effort to scrutinize the implications of Trump's remarks on aviation safety and personnel decisions.[](https://www.mediaite.com/news/foxs-peter-doocy-calls-out-trump-air-crash-rants-with-carefully-loaded-questions-at-briefing/)[](https://www.yahoo.com/news/peter-doocy-grills-wh-over-231707318.html)
Buzen, telling facts to the crowd here is a losing game! Ask me how I know!
Political audio media like AM radio (and now podcasts) is right-biased because it is especially well-suited to people who spend much of their lives behind the wheel.
People who live this kind of lifestyle tend to be more right-wing due to the zero-sum competition between drivers for road space.
This cure is MUCH worse than the disease, and it’s not even in the same ballpark
True enough although one has to wonder about prioritizing being anti-transqueer over being less bad on economic policy. How much is one less transqueer worth compared to one less farmworker?
Biden failed on economic policy as well. I don’t think trans was the main reason for independents to vote for Trump. The top two reasons were the economy and immigration.
For swing voters, transgenderism was slightly ahead of those two (but all 3 within the margin of error) according to post-election analysis by the Democrat aligned PAC Blueprint 2024:
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/
You’ve said this multiple times but repeating the same thing doesn’t make it more true. This is a composite question, not purely focussed on trans. It includes other issues like DEI/AA and BLM/racial justice, all of which are issues where Democrats are on the wrong side of public opinion.
“Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”
Relatively speaking, that is true, but her policies for helping the middle class are less bad than Trumps. Tariffs, deportations, "extending" the 2017 tax cuts for the rich and creating more deficit, harm the middle class, too.
It’s hard to make these arguments when you’re the incumbent and have been busting the budget for the last 4 years. Voters were right to not buy these arguments. If the Republicans had nominated Haley, she would have won by a big margin.
Well, trans was the only issue that was specifically mentioned, so we have no idea how the respondents interpreted what those other "cultural issues" might be.
But I completely agree that the Democrats are ALSO on the wrong side of DEI/AA and BLM/racial justice (they're on the racist side), and I won't vote for any of them ever again unless and until they support race-neutral policies as well as sex-realist policies.
I'm not holding by breath. Those are the hills that they plan to die on, just as they did last November.
It was clearly mentioned as an example of a cultural issue. So, data on this question is not sufficient proof of what you’re claiming unless the question is made more specific.
Agree. But going forward Harris is better than Trump.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/an-unfair-evaluation-of-bidens-economic
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/fairness-for-harris
There's no going forward. Voters were given a choice and they chose Trump over Harris. Whether it's fair or unfair, voters gave poor marks to Biden for his handling of the economy. Harris has been a politician long enough but is still not comfortable talking about policy like Obama or Clintons were.
Neither of the parties understand the basic fact that winning elections and governing involves moderation. American voters punish extremism. Democrats were the more extreme party in this election. Republicans will get the message in 2026 and 2028 if Trump keeps doing this.
Is this a serious comment?
It is, in the sense that (like many Americans) this person is implicitly confessing to being duped by culture war garbage on social media.
For years now, millions of us have wondered why people don’t dismiss Trump as the charlatan that he so obviously is. This is how. The right wing influencers dupe someone into believing a lie, where the lie taps into some core piece of their psychology.
The whole MAGA evangelical cohort works like this. Trump is about as far away from Jesus as you can get, and yet he wins their votes, because they’re such a susceptible group to emotional manipulation.
Kamala pitched her campaign as close to the middle as you can get (possibly a bit right for some tastes), and yet someone has convinced this person that she was more extreme than the person who attempted a coup and was promising to be a dictator.
None of it is rational. It’s all psychology.
If inflation spikes over the next few months, these people will blame Joe Biden. Or just won’t care like they pretended to last year.
I voted for Harris because I think Trump is worse for the reasons that you mentioned but the fact is that she was not able to fool sufficient voters into thinking that she's a moderate when she was on tape advocating for far left policies in 2019 or that she was part of one of the most progressive administrations in history, with none of the centrist instincts that Obama or Clinton had as Presidents. I don't think enough Democrats realize that Trump forced the Republican Party to moderate on issues that voters care about, like Social Security and Medicare and taking a federal ban on abortion off the table. Democrats could have done the same by moderating on immigration and trans and DEI but they couldn't help themselves.
I'm an elitist who has luxury beliefs but many voters are willing to look past Trump's many personal flaws because he was the candidate with common sense views, unlike an extremist who thought incarcerated people should have access to free gender affirming surgery.
Don’t fall for these stories about how Trump voters ackshully had some good points.
It’s all rubbish. Trans issues affect almost nobody, but they became a hot button issue in the election because millions of Americans are so bored with their comfortable lives that they could be duped into thinking that Dems were threatening their way of life.
Voting for Trump in the last election was an obviously irresponsible decision. Harris was a flawed but sensible candidate. Trump was not a sensible candidate. He had already attempted a coup and was promising destructive policies (which he is now delivering on).
So get a grip, and stop making silly excuses. America made a gigantic error in the last election and the citizens of the US owe it to the world to contain the damage. Starting now.
I have an extremely low opinion of the Biden administration so I don’t blame voters for going back to Trump. This was an election where neither side deserved to win.
Trans/DEI were issues for me. If you don’t care about these issues, that’s your choice but you don’t get to decide what others should care about. If Republicans had nominated Haley, I would have voted for her without hesitation. Because of Trump, I held my nose and voted for Harris.
It is. The fact that you don't understand that (along with most Democrats) is why the Democrats lost.
Hint: "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you." Most effective political ad ever, by some estimates.
67% of Democrats(!) now want men out of women's sports, per recent NYT polling, 79% of people overall.
Democrats in office apparently plan to die again and again on that hill. Once was not enough for them.
I think Trump aims to close budget deficits without raising income taxes, corporate taxes, or capital gains taxes. By relying on tariffs and executing deregulation to boost economic activity, he is hoping to increase gov revenue. However, he overlooks the economic harm tariffs cause. In 2024, in Biden's final year, the government earned $4.9T and spent $6.8T, with $900B on interest. Trump expects tariffs to increase tax receipts and DOGE to cut spending, but I’m skeptical.
For 2025, I estimate $5.2T in revenue and $7T in spending.
I regret to inform you that tariffs are taxes.
Dawg I know that... but tariffs are a type of taxes on imports. When I say "close budget deficit without raising taxes" I mean without raising income taxes, capital gains taxes, or corporate taxes.
Maybe I should make it clear by explicitly saying that, so I don't get comments like this.
Everyone is focusing on tariffs as a tool of diplomacy but I suspect you're correct that Trump sees them in terms of revenue primarily. Like you, I suspect he's wrong about that, but it means the 2 sides are mostly talking past each other on this issue.
Great article today in TAC summarizing this view:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trump-should-go-big-on-tariffs/
Again, many here may think it's incorrect. But it's not incoherent or ignorant or irrational.
From this article, "Mr. Trump should forego blanket economic tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which are partners with the United States in the North America-wide USMCA..."
This is your pro-tariff article but is still calling Trumps move something like incoherent, ignorant or irrational. They're clearly trying to tell Trump he's right while actually saying he's wrong, because they're dealing with a baby.
interesting article, but with debatable claims. For example:
´ America’s very status as the world’s importer of last resort alone demonstrates how most major foreign economies depend much more on selling to the U.S. market for their own prosperity than vice versa.´\\
I have seen numbers quoted in European news that say 20% of EU exports go to the US and 15% of China exports. The world is big enough to try to find other export markets for these amounts, contrary to what the article claims. After all: the US has a population of 300 mln on a planet with 8 billion people. Canada and Mexico are being hurt hard though.
The EU imports lots of services from the US (including much cloud computing and platform services). A trade war might be the kick in the butt the EU needs to finally start developing our own tech.
It sounds to me the US is doing a lot of self harm in the long term.
The article also says this:
´Implementing this universal tariff as a form of value-added tax (VAT) would bring many other advantages as well.´
I do not really understand this, is there some cunning VAT plan we all overlook? Would like to hear more on this.
It's not a VAT plan, it just proposes a export rebates as part of Trump's tariff policy that resembles the rebate (or flow-through) portion of VATs.
It's completely rubbish. Such schemes work mathematically but not practically, the are extremely cumbersome. They wouldn't stop the bedlam at the border about to start on Tuesday.
It is ignorant, ignorant of economic reality.
I don't find it particularly coherent.
The article is terrible at prognostication. The first paragraph is less than 24 hours old, and clearly ignored what informed people already knew.
"Because going big on such tariffs, and quickly, is amply capable of helping revive the economy without reigniting significant (if any) inflation, without provoking meaningful (if any) retaliation, and without driving American allies into rivals’ arms."
Retaliation was already telegraphed by America's two largest trading partners, and is now underway. And they are using targeted rather than blanket tariffs, which is more effective.
As for driving former allies into rivals' arms, that's already underway, and has been since Trump started his threats.
They can't even predict the past - the article's not even mildly coherent.
Noah, as someone who is somewhat connected to Silicon Valley bigwigs. I’m curious, what do you think people like Andreesen and others are thinking. People who went hard for Trump and who are supposed to be our intellectual elite. What are they thinking observing this plainly ridiculous trade war started for no good reason ?
Silicon Valley is mostly services. It isn't impacted seriously by tariffs. Andreessen was very upfront in his FP interview a couple of weeks ago: he's changed teams when the Dems told him they wanted to ban crypto and regulate AI to death. Marc is here for business, not ideology.
Crypto isn’t real business though. And AI is something that AI people want to have regulated.
Andreesen’s a16z was a major funder of Coinbase which had over $1.2 billion in revenue last quarter, which appears to be a real business.
OpenAI wanted other AI companies regulated, as is the case with crony capitalist rent seekers who don’t like competition, but since Meta and DeepSeek have shown with their open source models, it isn’t realistic for western governments to regulate AI, and PRC will only regulate it in its own interest.
I knew it was coming but a trade war with Canada and Mexico is so fucking dumb
It’s like saying hey China and Russia I will punch myself in the face
Punch myself in the face and go to war with Denmark
How is this happening
I was impressed with Trudeau’s speech last night on the topic where he starts by addressing Americans directly
https://www.youtube.com/live/-psCZv0-0Po?si=NEFyoeXr8o8FWyeK
Trump could, ironically, end up saving Trudeau's bacon.
He’ll be gone in a few weeks but to me it’s a no brainer that Mark Carney should be the next PM. Protecting the UK during Brexit as their central banker seems like the kind of experience and stature you want right now in a leader.
No, but he might save the next Liberal leaders' bacon, whoever they turn out to be.
Yes. Trump's policy makes it much harder for the Make Canada Great Again party (such as there is one) to win in October.
There isn't one. The Conservative Party, unlike the Republican Party, remains both thoroughly pro-market and pro-democracy (or majority-seeking). Although it would easily have the most pro-Trump supporters, no party is isolationist, or in favour of Trump's economic policies.
Although before the 1980s conservatives in Canada consistently eschewed reciprocity (free trade) with the US, there isn't even a vestige of that in the modern party.
Don’t egg him on, Trudeau is not worth saving.
I did hear Trump say he wants to put tariffs on EU imports because the EU charge VAT on US products....
Yes, we in the EU charge VAT on basically everything, that is how our tax system works. Is Trump now going to tell the world how to tax things? Whats next, corporation tax? Income tax?
In the same press conference he said tariffs are going to make the US rich. That seems to be his main objective. Same with the ´protection money´ that he wants from NATO partners, its a business model for him.
But don't foreigners get a rebate on VAT?
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-refunds/index_en.htm
Or does that only apply to tourists not exports?
VAT is only refundable for temporary visitors. When my daughter was a university student in London I mailed her a new iPhone because they were expensive there, but she had to pay a £150 duty to pick it up at the post office, which was later refunded at Heathrow when she came home.
that page is about certain business to business transactions.
About VAT from the EU website:
´Value Added Tax (VAT) is a consumption tax that is applied to nearly all goods and services that are bought and sold for use or consumption in the EU.´
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-rules-rates/index_en.htm
maybe Trump was mixing up VAT with import/export tariffs
I assume he wants them to tax exports - after all, his plan is to tax European exports. He must be mad that they require US *imports* into Europe to be taxed.
its confusing to try to make some sense of this all, the weird thing is that all these tariffs he is imposing on products from Canada, Mexico, China and next the EU are in fact being paid by American companies importing these goods. And they are probably going to pass these costs on to their customers. So while Trump may think the US government is going to be rich with income from tariffs, they are being paid by US companies and consumers. Maybe he hopes in the long run exports from these countries will go down. But my guess is he didnt really think this through.
(While it is really bad) Instead of talking about Elon's gesture at inauguration, I think Dems should focus more attach on this tariff stuff with correct angle of analysis.
And my super biased opinion one is this is one of million reasns econ 101 price theory class should be mandatory to all college kids (or tbh high school too but I digress) even as you said, the real picture is more complicated, having the conceptual picture helps.
And my super biased opinion 2 is we all should be able to be comfortable with multivariate calculus to be comfortable with price theory...
Also, this makes me strengthen the conviction that Trump can't understand anything other than zero sum transaction - and neither can the majority of his voter base...
Education really matters...