41–50 of 205 posts
There are two silver linings to all this: 1. The evisceration of American soft power will really diminish the direct and indirect harm the US intentionally and unintentionally causes. Just look at China, South Korea and Japan deciding to respond to tariffs together [1]. That is an absolutely astonishing event given fairly recent history. Future retellings of history will correct portray the US as the actual Evil Empi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want the people who work to make the things I use to earn more than $150 per month. A sane tariff policy would be set up to penalize these very low wage exporters to give competitive advantage to exporters and local producers with higher wages but also to incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more (and likewise other human development and environmental…
Well, this gets closer. There used to be a garment industry in the USA...
Yeah, but the last large piece of it (there are still some amall remnants) got wiped out with the most recent push for eliminating large scale non-penal slavery in the US.
And, no, I don’t mean abolishing formal chattel slavery with the 13th Amendment, I mean the push to eliminate the informal de facto slavery that persisted in the US territory of the Confederation of the Northern Mariana Islands around the turn of the millenium.
It makes plenty of sense if you consider that it wasn't designed to benefit the US, but rather to drive US trade to our competitors.
Considering how open they've been about their clear conflicts of interest (Trump launching a cryptocurrency on day 1 of his presidency, being in charge of a publicly traded company that he's made no effort to remove himself from, and the Diablo cheater being in charge of a department that gets to determine "efficiency" while also bidding on government contracts), I think we should really consider the possibility that…
I mean, I don't doubt that it's true, but it seems more like an opportunity to make some money on the side than a reason to do it in the first place.
There are two silver linings to all this: 1. The evisceration of American soft power will really diminish the direct and indirect harm the US intentionally and unintentionally causes. Just look at China, South Korea and Japan deciding to respond to tariffs together [1]. That is an absolutely astonishing event given fairly recent history. Future retellings of history will correct portray the US as the actual Evil Empi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone here know what is the impact of this for Lesotho in practice? I found an article[1] but perhaps someone here knows more or is there in person. > Lesotho exported $237m of goods last year to the US and imported $2.8m. Agoa[2], which has allowed tariff-free access to the US market for thousands of product types since 2000, created a thriving garment industry, accounting for about 20% of GDP. > There are abo…
I want the people who work to make the things I use to earn more than $150 per month. A sane tariff policy would be set up to penalize these very low wage exporters to give competitive advantage to exporters and local producers with higher wages but also to incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more (and likewise other human development and environmental…
How does that help them? Oh, right. You don't care about them, actually. You just have this vague ideal that people should earn more money. Maybe not even that. You just want tariffs for some inexplicable reason. Because tariffs cannot give these people higher salaries. That's not how any of this works.
It makes plenty of sense if you consider that it wasn't designed to benefit the US, but rather to drive US trade to our competitors.
Considering how open they've been about their clear conflicts of interest (Trump launching a cryptocurrency on day 1 of his presidency, being in charge of a publicly traded company that he's made no effort to remove himself from, and the Diablo cheater being in charge of a department that gets to determine "efficiency" while also bidding on government contracts), I think we should really consider the possibility that…
The details weren't public. You can stop feeling being bad about yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want the people who work to make the things I use to earn more than $150 per month. A sane tariff policy would be set up to penalize these very low wage exporters to give competitive advantage to exporters and local producers with higher wages but also to incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more (and likewise other human development and environmental…
I don’t see how tariffs magically create wealth for foreign exporters that translates into higher wages. Let’s say I can buy a $10 shirt from Lesotho with zero tariff. Now a 50% tariff gets imposed. I can either eat the tariff and pay $15, in which case Lesotho still gets their $10, or Lesotho can eat the tariff to keep their exports competitive, in which case Lesotho now makes $5. The part about giving a competitive…
Whether that works out better for the exploited is uncertain. But the alternative argument is effectively "these poor countries should be happy to let themselves be exploited" it is their only way out of poverty. And that really doesn't sit right with me.
It makes plenty of sense if you consider that it wasn't designed to benefit the US, but rather to drive US trade to our competitors.
Considering how open they've been about their clear conflicts of interest (Trump launching a cryptocurrency on day 1 of his presidency, being in charge of a publicly traded company that he's made no effort to remove himself from, and the Diablo cheater being in charge of a department that gets to determine "efficiency" while also bidding on government contracts), I think we should really consider the possibility that…