Because it was a Biden success. Same reason he wanted to end the successful ACA. He cares nothing about policy. Trump is zero-sum; he sees a Biden success as a loss for him.
Obamacare was originally a Republican idea. But when it was the opposition party that made it a thing, they fought it tooth and nail. Because they don't want effective Dem policies to be popular, and erode their power. Look at the number of Red States that *still* haven't adopted ACA Medicaid Expansion. Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Trump--and Johnson--are just following the GOP knee-jerk impulse to destroy any Dem policy that could actually help the country.
And ironically, it appears Biden viewed Trump the same way, since his first act was to revoke almost all of his EOs, including those on the border that were working very well, and he refused to change course until 6 months before this election. Both parties appear to be locked in a Manichean dynamic.
Nonsense. Biden didn't reverse Trump's tariffs, nor did he back out of the Afghanistan surrender deal with the Taliban (which he should have).
He got rid of the Remain in Mexico policy because coyotes were preying on asylum seekers while they waited for their hearings. The success of that program is greatly exaggerated, and its drawbacks have never been fully acknowledged. Even with RIM in place, Trump was insisting to Congress that he needed changes to our asylum laws, before COVID came along and allowed him to shut down the border under Title 42.
This is what allows him to take advantage of Americans' apparently poor memories (or just general ignorance) to push the narrative that he "fixed immigration" and that Biden came along and cancelled RIM and made everything a problem again. And so Biden doesn't really need any new laws, like Trump claimed he did, so don't sign on to that bill, Republicans, because Trump needs an issue to run on.
The Biden Administration, like the Trump administration, tried a number of different tactics to stem the tide which got shot down by the courts or tied up in litigation. The difference between the two parties is that Democrats have made several serious attempts over the years to pass immigration legislation, and each time the Republicans have stood in the way.
Before the most recent act of hypocrisy, the Democrats were going to agree to give Trump what he wanted in 2017, to let him fund his border wall, so long as he agreed to protection of the Dreamers. Then Stephen Miller whispered in his ear that this sort of thing wouldn't go down well with his nativist base, and that was that. Clearly, one party is making good faith efforts to fix the problem, while the other just wants an issue to run on.
I don't care why. I don't care what program it was under. I care about results. Biden bragged about undoing all of Trump's immigration related EOs and illegal immigration went up by 400%. And then he did nothing to fix it until 4 months before the election.
The "we need legislation" argument is a red herring. Obama and Trump had this under control using existing law for a decade. Biden could too. He chose not to.
C'mon, dude. That's ridiculous to say that you don't care about causes or factors and only "results". By that logic, Trump destroyed our economy in 2020, and killed a whole lot of Americans. That's a cop-out.
In fact, you clearly *do* care about causes, because you claim that Biden "chose not to". Which would be irrelevant if all you cared about is results, and is plainly ridiculous in either case. If you want to blame people for things that are beyond their control, fine, but that's a lousy way to evaluate performance.
Firstly, the remain in Mexico program only detained something around 70,000 people. That's only a fraction of border crossings. Now, I can't see your link since it's behind a paywall. But data on border apprehensions are widely available. So go back and look at the yearly apprehension numbers. Specifically, note that RIM began in January of 2019. Notice something?
Note how the number of border apprehensions *doubled* between 2018 and 2019, from around 400,000 to 800,000. Now, since you're all about results, I ask you—does that look like a successful program to you? No wonder Trump was asking for new laws!
Unsurprisingly, that number plummeted in 2020, for obvious reasons. And then it shot back up again in 2021, with numbers much higher than in 2019. The point being that outside of 2020, the data fits with a dramatic yearly rise in border crossings that began in 2019. Something clearly happened that year, probably a confluence of factors, that caused the number of people attempting to enter the country to surge. And that's going to increase your apprehension numbers no matter what you do.
It's not like there are no obvious explanations. Latin America is full of unrest these days, in places like Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Mexico is practically run by drug cartels. It's no surprise that a lot of people want to get into America. In fact, the proportion of immigrants entering with *families* has nearly tripled since 2020, which just further supports the idea that these are people legitimately fleeing from violence and persecution, and not just a bunch of gang members trying to get into America.
And the Biden administration has tried a number of things, some novel and others similar to what Trump tried. Just like Trump, Biden has encountered pushback from the ACLU and immigrant civil rights groups. Few people dispute that our asylum laws are a factor here, as they *require* us to grant asylum to people who end up on U.S. soil, no matter how they got here. (The exception to this is if people are expelled under Title 42, in which case they can't claim asylum.) In fact, the Biden Administration was even forced to resume RIM for much of 2022; there was a modest dip in the apprehension numbers after this, but it didn't last.
Then there's the issue of the same people crossing the border and getting caught multiple times, which pumps up the numbers. Ironically, Title 42 made this worse, because it just quickly kicks people out without worrying about putting them someplace. At times during Title 42, this overwhelmed border patrol officials, leading to spikes in the "gotaway" rate (the rate of known cases of people eluding border patrol officials). This rate plummeted after the end of Title 42.
And in the end, we don't know how many illegals make it into the country, because we only have the apprehension numbers, but estimated apprehension rates are high these days; about twice as high as they were 20 years ago. And the seriousness of this whole thing has been exaggerated by Republican governors like Greg Abbot and Ron Desantis playing these cruel jokes on immigrants by lying to them about jobs and other accomodations, then bussing them into blue states completely unprepared for them, in order to create a spectacle.
In the end we *should* care about why the numbers are the way they are, because whether or not our officials are making good faith efforts to solve problems, vs. just exploiting things for political gain, matters a great deal. And given the stunt that Trump pulled with the border bill earlier this year, it's clear which category he falls into.
I agree with all the comments posted. I’d like to address the people who say, in effect, about another Trump term, how bad could it be. Even if Trump doesn’t damage many of our valuable and valued institutions beyond repair, even if he is, at worst, net neutral, with Trump we lose 4 critical years to address areas of concern that are or will shortly be national emergencies. Chips, green energy transition including investing in and building up every industry needed to facilitate this transition, rebuilding our armaments industry, continued investments in public health including preparation for the next pandemic to name a few. We simply can’t have 4 years of grievance settling and indifference, largely out of ignorance, to critical national priorities
Because he's an idiot who doesn't think about things beyond Joe Biden got it passed and therefore it must be 100% bad. Also he knows that the MAGA base probably is against it so it's literally red meat to his base. It's possible that he honestly never actually read what the bill does or the long term, strategic thinking behind it, but then again trying to figure out why Trump says anything that doesn't make sense shouldn't be a surprise anymore.
If Trump is not actually an FSB (KGB) thrall, then he done an impeccable job of imitating one. Having a chief executive who is under the control of a hostile intelligence service is simply unacceptable.
An important sub rule of Occam's razor is that the amount of words it takes to state a hypothesis in English is not a reliable guide to how complex it is. The hypothesis that Trump is an agent for Putin has been tested and found wanting. At most he's a useful idiot for Putin, not actively working for him.
That's hardly conclusive. At best it proves that Trump didn't actively collaborate with Putin on the election, and it doesn't really even prove that. It could well be that Putin is just careful not to leave evidence (Trump isn't competent enough to avoid it, but Putin and his people are).
Alice in Wonderland used to be a fascinating but scary book about a world where everything was upside down. Unfortunately, Trump has made this fantasy come true. Isn't it obvious that a man who cannot understand how a tariff works should be in charge of nothing?
Remember that this is the same guy who went into a trade war with China after cancelling a massive, multi-lateral trade agreement which would have placed him in a much, much better negotiating position, and would have done a lot to shield our farmers from the retaliatory tarriffs that they were hit with during Trump's game of tarriff chicken.
As a result, our farmers permanently lost markets for a half-baked trade deal that relied on promises China ultimately reneged on. And to top it off they had to be bailed out by the American taxpayer, which is apparently only OK to do if it benefits a Trump constituency to compensate for his incompetence.
The whole point of the TPP, from our perspective, was to open up markets in southeast Asia *around China*. This is why I think Trump gets far too much credit for initiating an anti-China stance on economic policy, because we were already taking steps to mitigate and weaken China's influence under the Obama administration. But Trump went and flushed a decade's worth of negotiations down the toilet, all because it was part of Obama's legacy, not his.
The fact that Trump basically shot himself in the foot before going into battle demonstrates how he's not only selfish, vain, and petty, but also not very smart.
“My reaction to all this is: What on Earth?! Are you kidding me??”
That’s my reaction when I consider the U.S. is the only country that has allowed a leader who led a failed coup attempt to run for the presidency.
“The oceans will be no barrier.”
What is this based on. The U.S. patrols all major shipping lanes and has 147 military bases scattered across the world. China can’t feed itself without imports. Can’t supply its energy needs without imports. We live in a physical world. Game theory and military strategy projections have proven to be bullshit when the big powers take on a guerrilla asymmetrical war theater. Name one military strategist that said Putin’s 41-mile-long blitzkrieg would be stopped dead in its tracks by 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles. Both the U.S. and Russia failed in Afghanistan. Putin is now so desperate for troops he’s throwing large sums of money to encourage conscription. He’s using elite North Korean troops, whose officers and foot soldiers are defecting to Ukraine. What an incredible intel gift this is to western intelligence agencies. They will learn more about the North Korean military and leadership in the next year than the previous 20 years. Putin is doing this for one reason and one reason only: he doesn’t dare start drafting from Russia’s middle class. That would bring the reality of the war home, and his popularity would drop off a cliff. Remember pundits have been sayings No from the get-go that Russia would win this war because it’s population dwarfs Ukraine’s population. That works in theory, but if you fear most of your people won’t tolerate being drafted into your military, those numbers mean nothing. Russia, Iran, and North Korea economies are suffering from sanctions. The Russian Central Bank has the lending rate at 21%. This is what happens when you run an economy based on war. And you lose the entire EU as your natural gas customer, and, in the process, create an energy boom for the U.S. small wonder we’re drilling and producing more oil and natural gas at unprecedented levels. And Putin has no choice but to sell Russian natural gas and oil to China at a significant discount.
Iran is scared spitless of the lengths to which Israel is going with its war against Hanas and Hezbollah. Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria are all targets for Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and soldiers. There’s only so much the Houtis can do as the west strikes weapons caches in Iraq. Shipping rates and insurance may be higher, but it’s not showing up in U.S. inflation rates.
If China wants to invade Taiwan, they might be surprised by the number of kill switches installed in key industries. TSMC is building in a Taiwan as well as Arizona. ASML is building a second corporate campus and manufacturing facility in Taiwan, it’s first significant expansion in anticipation of AI and space industries increasing scale.
If China wants to orphan itself with a weaker Russia, Iran, and North Korea, it’s an incredibly I’ll-considered move and on a scale much greater than Putin’s overreach. Of course, it’s possible Xi and the hardliners around him have learned nothing from the Ukraine War.
As E.M. Forester wrote: “I distrust Great Men. They create a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too.”
> the U.S. is the only country that has allowed a leader who led a failed coup attempt to run for the presidency.
I would be interested in actually evaluating this claim. Is it really true? I would expect there are some trivial counterexamples where people who led coup attempts against previous regimes were allowed to run in later democratic regimes. But I think there are likely other examples, depending on what exactly counts as a "coup attempt". Indira Gandhi was allowed to run again (and became prime minister again) even after she imposed martial law in an attempt to take over full power, but then held another election later that she lost. I suspect that Italy and South Korea and Israel are plausible cases too (though I don't know enough of the history). And I don't want to make the comparison, but Hitler did lead a coup attempt in the 1920s and almost get jailed for it before he later ran and won the chancellorship.
Check out AMLO in 2006. He narrowly lost the presidential election in Mexico and then took over the main avenue in central Mexico City for two months in protest. Also never conceded defeat. Also threw out a variety of frivolous lawsuits to attempt to smear the election results. The only difference is he didn't get to the point of encouraging a violent mob the way Trump did. That same dude ran again in 2012 and was defeated, then ran for a third time and was elected president in 2018 and a few months ago got his annointed successor Claudia Sheinbaum elected in a landslide. To a great many observers she seems to be merely AMLO's puppet.
Mexico is also interesting to me because it seems that Sheinbaum is one of the few leaders running as a quasi-incumbent in the post-pandemic years who had an easy election. Everywhere else - UK, France, Japan, Canada, India, Germany, USA, New Zealand, even Poland, seems to have featured the incumbent party struggling to hold on, or else going down in flames.
I think AMLO has been so disruptive to Mexico’s previously established political order that in the eyes of many he and his party Morena are not seen as incumbents yet, even though the opposition has crumbled and they now enjoy basically no limits on their power from any direction.That and his cash giveaways to lower income people I think explain their electoral strength despite global trends.
I'm disappointed that this forum can't seem to have any debate about this topic. I'm not a fan of Trump by any means, but can we at least discuss his actual position? Noah, he went on the record on the Joe Rogan podcast. Trump said that he was against the CHIPs act because he believed it was unnecessary - with a tariff policy in place that penalizes imported chips, companies would naturally relocate to onshore production. He believes that S Korean and Taiwanese companies are rich and would do this without the massive subsidies which add to our massive debt. Now, you can argue against tariffs, and/or this position is wrong, but to simply default to "anything that Trump says or does is by definition insane" IMHO just fuels the "TDS" viewpoint.
Because repealing the CHIPS act IS insane, as outlined in the above analysis. This blog does not say "anything that Trump says or does is insane" without explaining why, you are straw-manning. Let's call a spade a spade.
Also, this blog HAS analyzed Trump's tariffs proposals, they are bad. Other economists HAVE analyzed the tariff proposals, most of them think they're insane. Enough with the "TDS" nonsense, you aren't serious.
Noah just said he had no idea why Trump was against the CHIPS act, when Ink Binks was able to find out easily; but you would prefer ignorance because TDS is mentioned. Repealing the CHIPS act may be a bad strategy, but doesn’t come close to being “insane”. If you said Trump wants to repeal it because he thinks it’s a subsidy to FritoLay to make Nacho Cheese Flavor Doritos cheaper and because the NYT just printed that those are Kamala’s favorite, and plus the orange gets on his fingers and clashes with his makeup, that would be insane.
How can it be insane when it's the very same strategy China used? China doesn't write huge cheques to get US companies to set up shop there. It simply blocks market access until they do. Trump argues that it'd have been better to use the same strategy.
You can certainly argue he's wrong in that analysis and that for some reason the same strategy would have different outcomes, but you do have to actually argue it. This thread has filled up with comments of the form "It must be because Trump is {evil, insane, stupid, inexplicable}" when Trump has clearly articulated his reasoning. So attack his reasoning. And if one can't even be bothered finding out what the reasoning is, when he literally went on the world's most famous podcast and explained it in detail, it's silly and immature to attack him over straw men.
Despite thier insistence otherwise, I find many of this audience suffers from moderate TDS. Our host's case has been minor until the last few weeks, but it seems to be getting worse. Mercifully, this will all be over in a few days one way or another.
The French system is looking better and better to me: call election, 1st round 4 weeks later, 2nd round 1 week after that, swear in new leader. Can we get that, please. The system we have was designed for the 18th century where the speed of news was that of a horse.
IB, I understand what you're saying, but I think you're missing the bigger point here.
Set aside the fact that we've been around this block so many times with Trump and his tariff obsession already. Set aside that people are getting a little tired of having to suspend disbelief and pretend for the sake of argument that Trump has a clue what he's doing when it comes to economic policy. Set aside the fact that Trump has already repeatedly demonstrated an alarming proclivity for acting in the best interests of our adversaries (for which Noah gave a few examples).
The point here is that we have a program that *is already working*, and Trump wants to scrap it for something that, to be extremely charitable, is unproven. That's nuts. Massive subsidies? The total subsidies for chip manufacturing is $52 billion. For something which, as Smith points out, is already spurring *hundreds of billions* of dollars in private investment, and mostly in red states.
To put that in context, Trump's trade wars with China cost taxpayers $28 billion dollars just to bail out the farmers that got screwed over with retaliatory tariffs and lost markets—and while the former problem was temporary, the latter was permanent, to the tune of about $10 billion per year in lost farm revenue. And the massive tax cut that Trump gave to the wealthy—when the economy was soaring, by the way—costs us $200 billion per year.
And I get it—you'll probably say, "Well let's just say that then and not just bash Trump! If his arguments are bad then fine, but at least acknowledge that he has a rationale." But at some point, the arguments are just so bad that's it's impossible to believe they're made in good faith. For years we've listened to Trump spew fact-free nonsense, and the media has done its level best to give him the benefit of the doubt and frame it in precisely the way you seem to want us to talk about it here.
All this after he gave a rambling answer to Rogan, replete with gems like this:
"You know, Taiwan, they stole our chip business, okay? They want us to protect and they want protection. They don't pay us money for the protection. You know, the mob makes you pay money, right? But with these countries that we protect, I got hundreds of billions of dollars from NATO countries that were never paying us."
And yes, around that recapitulation of his completely unhinged understanding of our international partnerships, he "articulated" how effective he believed it would be to extort rather than incentivize Taiwanese companies to build their factories here.
Do you understand why most of us are now long past the point of suspension of disbelief with this guy? Why we can no longer sit and stroke our chins and assume that Trump's policy proposals are anything more than tough-guy posturing to his red-pilled bro base, who consider Joe Rogan some kind of intellectual? Why we just frankly can't take him seriously anymore?
We have a candidate trying to solve a problem that has already been fixed because he doesn't like the solution that is actually working. Why? This is like a repeat of what he did with the TPP, a cornerstone of our anti-China strategy that he scrapped in favor of a disastrous trade war, and in the end accomplished nothing except handing over most of our Chinese soybean markets to Brazil. And now he wants to again stymie the progress we've made so he can have something to run on.
We're tired of this, IB. Tired of wasting time with this guy. Having our nation's problems languish while an unserious man with the personality of an Internet troll pursues his personal vanity projects. Hoping he doesn't set us back too much before the country can once again be put back in the hands of reasonable people with some grasp of reality. Someone whose principle motivation for running isn't to stay out of jail for the crimes they committed the last time.
Sorry, but Noah's question was mostly rhetorical, and for good reason.
Brainless drivel, most likely. They'll repeal The CHIPS Act and then replace it with an Act Formerly Known as the CHIPS Act. Just like Nancy Pelosi's observation on NAFTA.
I'm voting for him tomorrow for other reasons which I've already detailed here. Trump is not a builder but a disruptor. We needed that in 2016, but it's really weird that a guy who is a reasonably successful real estate developer is more interested in tearing things down than building them up. I was hoping the GOP would nominate a candidate with more constructive ideas and a longer attention span this time. Alas they did not. So I have to make a choice between an incredibly flawed and destructive man on one side and an incredibly flawed and destructive ideology n the other.
Because it was a Biden success. Same reason he wanted to end the successful ACA. He cares nothing about policy. Trump is zero-sum; he sees a Biden success as a loss for him.
Obamacare was originally a Republican idea. But when it was the opposition party that made it a thing, they fought it tooth and nail. Because they don't want effective Dem policies to be popular, and erode their power. Look at the number of Red States that *still* haven't adopted ACA Medicaid Expansion. Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Trump--and Johnson--are just following the GOP knee-jerk impulse to destroy any Dem policy that could actually help the country.
And ironically, it appears Biden viewed Trump the same way, since his first act was to revoke almost all of his EOs, including those on the border that were working very well, and he refused to change course until 6 months before this election. Both parties appear to be locked in a Manichean dynamic.
Nonsense. Biden didn't reverse Trump's tariffs, nor did he back out of the Afghanistan surrender deal with the Taliban (which he should have).
He got rid of the Remain in Mexico policy because coyotes were preying on asylum seekers while they waited for their hearings. The success of that program is greatly exaggerated, and its drawbacks have never been fully acknowledged. Even with RIM in place, Trump was insisting to Congress that he needed changes to our asylum laws, before COVID came along and allowed him to shut down the border under Title 42.
This is what allows him to take advantage of Americans' apparently poor memories (or just general ignorance) to push the narrative that he "fixed immigration" and that Biden came along and cancelled RIM and made everything a problem again. And so Biden doesn't really need any new laws, like Trump claimed he did, so don't sign on to that bill, Republicans, because Trump needs an issue to run on.
The Biden Administration, like the Trump administration, tried a number of different tactics to stem the tide which got shot down by the courts or tied up in litigation. The difference between the two parties is that Democrats have made several serious attempts over the years to pass immigration legislation, and each time the Republicans have stood in the way.
Before the most recent act of hypocrisy, the Democrats were going to agree to give Trump what he wanted in 2017, to let him fund his border wall, so long as he agreed to protection of the Dreamers. Then Stephen Miller whispered in his ear that this sort of thing wouldn't go down well with his nativist base, and that was that. Clearly, one party is making good faith efforts to fix the problem, while the other just wants an issue to run on.
I might’ve screwed up the link above. It’s a sign that says:
Today feels like the whole country is waiting for the results of a STD test.
Funny but tragically on the money.
You're correct. He didn't undo all of them. But he made a big deal about undoing many.
"The success of RIM has been greatly exaggerated."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/329256/alien-apprehensions-registered-by-the-us-border-patrol/
I don't care why. I don't care what program it was under. I care about results. Biden bragged about undoing all of Trump's immigration related EOs and illegal immigration went up by 400%. And then he did nothing to fix it until 4 months before the election.
The "we need legislation" argument is a red herring. Obama and Trump had this under control using existing law for a decade. Biden could too. He chose not to.
C'mon, dude. That's ridiculous to say that you don't care about causes or factors and only "results". By that logic, Trump destroyed our economy in 2020, and killed a whole lot of Americans. That's a cop-out.
In fact, you clearly *do* care about causes, because you claim that Biden "chose not to". Which would be irrelevant if all you cared about is results, and is plainly ridiculous in either case. If you want to blame people for things that are beyond their control, fine, but that's a lousy way to evaluate performance.
Firstly, the remain in Mexico program only detained something around 70,000 people. That's only a fraction of border crossings. Now, I can't see your link since it's behind a paywall. But data on border apprehensions are widely available. So go back and look at the yearly apprehension numbers. Specifically, note that RIM began in January of 2019. Notice something?
Note how the number of border apprehensions *doubled* between 2018 and 2019, from around 400,000 to 800,000. Now, since you're all about results, I ask you—does that look like a successful program to you? No wonder Trump was asking for new laws!
Unsurprisingly, that number plummeted in 2020, for obvious reasons. And then it shot back up again in 2021, with numbers much higher than in 2019. The point being that outside of 2020, the data fits with a dramatic yearly rise in border crossings that began in 2019. Something clearly happened that year, probably a confluence of factors, that caused the number of people attempting to enter the country to surge. And that's going to increase your apprehension numbers no matter what you do.
It's not like there are no obvious explanations. Latin America is full of unrest these days, in places like Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Mexico is practically run by drug cartels. It's no surprise that a lot of people want to get into America. In fact, the proportion of immigrants entering with *families* has nearly tripled since 2020, which just further supports the idea that these are people legitimately fleeing from violence and persecution, and not just a bunch of gang members trying to get into America.
And the Biden administration has tried a number of things, some novel and others similar to what Trump tried. Just like Trump, Biden has encountered pushback from the ACLU and immigrant civil rights groups. Few people dispute that our asylum laws are a factor here, as they *require* us to grant asylum to people who end up on U.S. soil, no matter how they got here. (The exception to this is if people are expelled under Title 42, in which case they can't claim asylum.) In fact, the Biden Administration was even forced to resume RIM for much of 2022; there was a modest dip in the apprehension numbers after this, but it didn't last.
Then there's the issue of the same people crossing the border and getting caught multiple times, which pumps up the numbers. Ironically, Title 42 made this worse, because it just quickly kicks people out without worrying about putting them someplace. At times during Title 42, this overwhelmed border patrol officials, leading to spikes in the "gotaway" rate (the rate of known cases of people eluding border patrol officials). This rate plummeted after the end of Title 42.
And in the end, we don't know how many illegals make it into the country, because we only have the apprehension numbers, but estimated apprehension rates are high these days; about twice as high as they were 20 years ago. And the seriousness of this whole thing has been exaggerated by Republican governors like Greg Abbot and Ron Desantis playing these cruel jokes on immigrants by lying to them about jobs and other accomodations, then bussing them into blue states completely unprepared for them, in order to create a spectacle.
In the end we *should* care about why the numbers are the way they are, because whether or not our officials are making good faith efforts to solve problems, vs. just exploiting things for political gain, matters a great deal. And given the stunt that Trump pulled with the border bill earlier this year, it's clear which category he falls into.
file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/9a/10/61D2CE37-ADE2-40E0-81DD-04928C4D2126/IMG_5842.jpeg
It’s not complicated. If he did not do it, he is against it. It’s not about the county, it’s always about him.
I agree with all the comments posted. I’d like to address the people who say, in effect, about another Trump term, how bad could it be. Even if Trump doesn’t damage many of our valuable and valued institutions beyond repair, even if he is, at worst, net neutral, with Trump we lose 4 critical years to address areas of concern that are or will shortly be national emergencies. Chips, green energy transition including investing in and building up every industry needed to facilitate this transition, rebuilding our armaments industry, continued investments in public health including preparation for the next pandemic to name a few. We simply can’t have 4 years of grievance settling and indifference, largely out of ignorance, to critical national priorities
Because he's an idiot who doesn't think about things beyond Joe Biden got it passed and therefore it must be 100% bad. Also he knows that the MAGA base probably is against it so it's literally red meat to his base. It's possible that he honestly never actually read what the bill does or the long term, strategic thinking behind it, but then again trying to figure out why Trump says anything that doesn't make sense shouldn't be a surprise anymore.
Occam’s razor suggests a horrible answer to your rhetorical question: “because Trump is in Putin’s pocket and Putin is in Xi’s pocket!”
This. Sadly, this.
If Trump is not actually an FSB (KGB) thrall, then he done an impeccable job of imitating one. Having a chief executive who is under the control of a hostile intelligence service is simply unacceptable.
An important sub rule of Occam's razor is that the amount of words it takes to state a hypothesis in English is not a reliable guide to how complex it is. The hypothesis that Trump is an agent for Putin has been tested and found wanting. At most he's a useful idiot for Putin, not actively working for him.
How has it been tested, and in what way did it fail?
There was a big investigation by Robert Mueller and he didn't find enough evidence to charge Trump.
That's hardly conclusive. At best it proves that Trump didn't actively collaborate with Putin on the election, and it doesn't really even prove that. It could well be that Putin is just careful not to leave evidence (Trump isn't competent enough to avoid it, but Putin and his people are).
Got anything else?
Alice in Wonderland used to be a fascinating but scary book about a world where everything was upside down. Unfortunately, Trump has made this fantasy come true. Isn't it obvious that a man who cannot understand how a tariff works should be in charge of nothing?
Remember that this is the same guy who went into a trade war with China after cancelling a massive, multi-lateral trade agreement which would have placed him in a much, much better negotiating position, and would have done a lot to shield our farmers from the retaliatory tarriffs that they were hit with during Trump's game of tarriff chicken.
As a result, our farmers permanently lost markets for a half-baked trade deal that relied on promises China ultimately reneged on. And to top it off they had to be bailed out by the American taxpayer, which is apparently only OK to do if it benefits a Trump constituency to compensate for his incompetence.
The whole point of the TPP, from our perspective, was to open up markets in southeast Asia *around China*. This is why I think Trump gets far too much credit for initiating an anti-China stance on economic policy, because we were already taking steps to mitigate and weaken China's influence under the Obama administration. But Trump went and flushed a decade's worth of negotiations down the toilet, all because it was part of Obama's legacy, not his.
The fact that Trump basically shot himself in the foot before going into battle demonstrates how he's not only selfish, vain, and petty, but also not very smart.
Because Trump is rubber and CHIPS ACT is glue …
“My reaction to all this is: What on Earth?! Are you kidding me??”
That’s my reaction when I consider the U.S. is the only country that has allowed a leader who led a failed coup attempt to run for the presidency.
“The oceans will be no barrier.”
What is this based on. The U.S. patrols all major shipping lanes and has 147 military bases scattered across the world. China can’t feed itself without imports. Can’t supply its energy needs without imports. We live in a physical world. Game theory and military strategy projections have proven to be bullshit when the big powers take on a guerrilla asymmetrical war theater. Name one military strategist that said Putin’s 41-mile-long blitzkrieg would be stopped dead in its tracks by 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles. Both the U.S. and Russia failed in Afghanistan. Putin is now so desperate for troops he’s throwing large sums of money to encourage conscription. He’s using elite North Korean troops, whose officers and foot soldiers are defecting to Ukraine. What an incredible intel gift this is to western intelligence agencies. They will learn more about the North Korean military and leadership in the next year than the previous 20 years. Putin is doing this for one reason and one reason only: he doesn’t dare start drafting from Russia’s middle class. That would bring the reality of the war home, and his popularity would drop off a cliff. Remember pundits have been sayings No from the get-go that Russia would win this war because it’s population dwarfs Ukraine’s population. That works in theory, but if you fear most of your people won’t tolerate being drafted into your military, those numbers mean nothing. Russia, Iran, and North Korea economies are suffering from sanctions. The Russian Central Bank has the lending rate at 21%. This is what happens when you run an economy based on war. And you lose the entire EU as your natural gas customer, and, in the process, create an energy boom for the U.S. small wonder we’re drilling and producing more oil and natural gas at unprecedented levels. And Putin has no choice but to sell Russian natural gas and oil to China at a significant discount.
Iran is scared spitless of the lengths to which Israel is going with its war against Hanas and Hezbollah. Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria are all targets for Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and soldiers. There’s only so much the Houtis can do as the west strikes weapons caches in Iraq. Shipping rates and insurance may be higher, but it’s not showing up in U.S. inflation rates.
If China wants to invade Taiwan, they might be surprised by the number of kill switches installed in key industries. TSMC is building in a Taiwan as well as Arizona. ASML is building a second corporate campus and manufacturing facility in Taiwan, it’s first significant expansion in anticipation of AI and space industries increasing scale.
If China wants to orphan itself with a weaker Russia, Iran, and North Korea, it’s an incredibly I’ll-considered move and on a scale much greater than Putin’s overreach. Of course, it’s possible Xi and the hardliners around him have learned nothing from the Ukraine War.
As E.M. Forester wrote: “I distrust Great Men. They create a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too.”
> the U.S. is the only country that has allowed a leader who led a failed coup attempt to run for the presidency.
I would be interested in actually evaluating this claim. Is it really true? I would expect there are some trivial counterexamples where people who led coup attempts against previous regimes were allowed to run in later democratic regimes. But I think there are likely other examples, depending on what exactly counts as a "coup attempt". Indira Gandhi was allowed to run again (and became prime minister again) even after she imposed martial law in an attempt to take over full power, but then held another election later that she lost. I suspect that Italy and South Korea and Israel are plausible cases too (though I don't know enough of the history). And I don't want to make the comparison, but Hitler did lead a coup attempt in the 1920s and almost get jailed for it before he later ran and won the chancellorship.
Check out AMLO in 2006. He narrowly lost the presidential election in Mexico and then took over the main avenue in central Mexico City for two months in protest. Also never conceded defeat. Also threw out a variety of frivolous lawsuits to attempt to smear the election results. The only difference is he didn't get to the point of encouraging a violent mob the way Trump did. That same dude ran again in 2012 and was defeated, then ran for a third time and was elected president in 2018 and a few months ago got his annointed successor Claudia Sheinbaum elected in a landslide. To a great many observers she seems to be merely AMLO's puppet.
Mexico is also interesting to me because it seems that Sheinbaum is one of the few leaders running as a quasi-incumbent in the post-pandemic years who had an easy election. Everywhere else - UK, France, Japan, Canada, India, Germany, USA, New Zealand, even Poland, seems to have featured the incumbent party struggling to hold on, or else going down in flames.
I think AMLO has been so disruptive to Mexico’s previously established political order that in the eyes of many he and his party Morena are not seen as incumbents yet, even though the opposition has crumbled and they now enjoy basically no limits on their power from any direction.That and his cash giveaways to lower income people I think explain their electoral strength despite global trends.
I'm disappointed that this forum can't seem to have any debate about this topic. I'm not a fan of Trump by any means, but can we at least discuss his actual position? Noah, he went on the record on the Joe Rogan podcast. Trump said that he was against the CHIPs act because he believed it was unnecessary - with a tariff policy in place that penalizes imported chips, companies would naturally relocate to onshore production. He believes that S Korean and Taiwanese companies are rich and would do this without the massive subsidies which add to our massive debt. Now, you can argue against tariffs, and/or this position is wrong, but to simply default to "anything that Trump says or does is by definition insane" IMHO just fuels the "TDS" viewpoint.
Because repealing the CHIPS act IS insane, as outlined in the above analysis. This blog does not say "anything that Trump says or does is insane" without explaining why, you are straw-manning. Let's call a spade a spade.
Also, this blog HAS analyzed Trump's tariffs proposals, they are bad. Other economists HAVE analyzed the tariff proposals, most of them think they're insane. Enough with the "TDS" nonsense, you aren't serious.
Noah just said he had no idea why Trump was against the CHIPS act, when Ink Binks was able to find out easily; but you would prefer ignorance because TDS is mentioned. Repealing the CHIPS act may be a bad strategy, but doesn’t come close to being “insane”. If you said Trump wants to repeal it because he thinks it’s a subsidy to FritoLay to make Nacho Cheese Flavor Doritos cheaper and because the NYT just printed that those are Kamala’s favorite, and plus the orange gets on his fingers and clashes with his makeup, that would be insane.
How can it be insane when it's the very same strategy China used? China doesn't write huge cheques to get US companies to set up shop there. It simply blocks market access until they do. Trump argues that it'd have been better to use the same strategy.
You can certainly argue he's wrong in that analysis and that for some reason the same strategy would have different outcomes, but you do have to actually argue it. This thread has filled up with comments of the form "It must be because Trump is {evil, insane, stupid, inexplicable}" when Trump has clearly articulated his reasoning. So attack his reasoning. And if one can't even be bothered finding out what the reasoning is, when he literally went on the world's most famous podcast and explained it in detail, it's silly and immature to attack him over straw men.
Despite thier insistence otherwise, I find many of this audience suffers from moderate TDS. Our host's case has been minor until the last few weeks, but it seems to be getting worse. Mercifully, this will all be over in a few days one way or another.
The French system is looking better and better to me: call election, 1st round 4 weeks later, 2nd round 1 week after that, swear in new leader. Can we get that, please. The system we have was designed for the 18th century where the speed of news was that of a horse.
IB, I understand what you're saying, but I think you're missing the bigger point here.
Set aside the fact that we've been around this block so many times with Trump and his tariff obsession already. Set aside that people are getting a little tired of having to suspend disbelief and pretend for the sake of argument that Trump has a clue what he's doing when it comes to economic policy. Set aside the fact that Trump has already repeatedly demonstrated an alarming proclivity for acting in the best interests of our adversaries (for which Noah gave a few examples).
The point here is that we have a program that *is already working*, and Trump wants to scrap it for something that, to be extremely charitable, is unproven. That's nuts. Massive subsidies? The total subsidies for chip manufacturing is $52 billion. For something which, as Smith points out, is already spurring *hundreds of billions* of dollars in private investment, and mostly in red states.
To put that in context, Trump's trade wars with China cost taxpayers $28 billion dollars just to bail out the farmers that got screwed over with retaliatory tariffs and lost markets—and while the former problem was temporary, the latter was permanent, to the tune of about $10 billion per year in lost farm revenue. And the massive tax cut that Trump gave to the wealthy—when the economy was soaring, by the way—costs us $200 billion per year.
And I get it—you'll probably say, "Well let's just say that then and not just bash Trump! If his arguments are bad then fine, but at least acknowledge that he has a rationale." But at some point, the arguments are just so bad that's it's impossible to believe they're made in good faith. For years we've listened to Trump spew fact-free nonsense, and the media has done its level best to give him the benefit of the doubt and frame it in precisely the way you seem to want us to talk about it here.
All this after he gave a rambling answer to Rogan, replete with gems like this:
"You know, Taiwan, they stole our chip business, okay? They want us to protect and they want protection. They don't pay us money for the protection. You know, the mob makes you pay money, right? But with these countries that we protect, I got hundreds of billions of dollars from NATO countries that were never paying us."
And yes, around that recapitulation of his completely unhinged understanding of our international partnerships, he "articulated" how effective he believed it would be to extort rather than incentivize Taiwanese companies to build their factories here.
Do you understand why most of us are now long past the point of suspension of disbelief with this guy? Why we can no longer sit and stroke our chins and assume that Trump's policy proposals are anything more than tough-guy posturing to his red-pilled bro base, who consider Joe Rogan some kind of intellectual? Why we just frankly can't take him seriously anymore?
We have a candidate trying to solve a problem that has already been fixed because he doesn't like the solution that is actually working. Why? This is like a repeat of what he did with the TPP, a cornerstone of our anti-China strategy that he scrapped in favor of a disastrous trade war, and in the end accomplished nothing except handing over most of our Chinese soybean markets to Brazil. And now he wants to again stymie the progress we've made so he can have something to run on.
We're tired of this, IB. Tired of wasting time with this guy. Having our nation's problems languish while an unserious man with the personality of an Internet troll pursues his personal vanity projects. Hoping he doesn't set us back too much before the country can once again be put back in the hands of reasonable people with some grasp of reality. Someone whose principle motivation for running isn't to stay out of jail for the crimes they committed the last time.
Sorry, but Noah's question was mostly rhetorical, and for good reason.
Because a democrat administration passed it, who cares if it’s good for America
Because Democrats did it. I would not overthink this.
wonder if this is another NAFTA->USMCA thing
very similar to Biden cancelling each and every Trump EO on his first day in office. including the fateful cancelling of border policies.
did Biden say "let's keep the good aspects"? no. cancel it all.
Brainless drivel, most likely. They'll repeal The CHIPS Act and then replace it with an Act Formerly Known as the CHIPS Act. Just like Nancy Pelosi's observation on NAFTA.
I'm voting for him tomorrow for other reasons which I've already detailed here. Trump is not a builder but a disruptor. We needed that in 2016, but it's really weird that a guy who is a reasonably successful real estate developer is more interested in tearing things down than building them up. I was hoping the GOP would nominate a candidate with more constructive ideas and a longer attention span this time. Alas they did not. So I have to make a choice between an incredibly flawed and destructive man on one side and an incredibly flawed and destructive ideology n the other.