191–200 of 220 posts
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"Be the better person" is a good rule of thumb, but it's a bad strategy when somebody attacks you materially.
It's not about that. It's about China imposing tarrifs being harmful to China. The US shot itself in the foot. Should we also shoot ourselves in our feet? No, we can just stand back and let them bleed to death.
How is it retaliation to destroy your own economy by making the same bad life choices? Isn't actual retaliation to just ignore the entire thing and thank the US for the extra percentage points in advantage you got for free?
It’s a war, man. You inflict pain on your enemy. Trump has a pattern of tucking tail when confronted.
Wonder whether Americans or the Chinese can weather tough times better. Chinese don’t get to protest or voice dissent and Americans can’t be bothered to
Americans would understand that tough times are because their fellow Americans elected an idiot.
It will be a crisis for both countries, but it will unite one and divide another. I think everyone will lose but America is likely to lose harder, bigly even.
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I believe you may have some reading comprehension problem with what they laid out? At least in the parents posters mind that less farm exports leads to less water usage. Hence bankrupt farmers solves things like aquifers going empty and lakes draining leavings environmental disasters. Now, how it actually works out in the end may be different, but the concept doesn't seem completely broken at first appearance.
Bankrupting farmers isn't a solution. That's like also saying bankrupting consumers means they'll eat less. The initial problem laid out what farm products leaving for China. They had no problem with using the water, just that its products were being exported rather than used locally. Also, water is a local cycle. Keep the products close to put the water back into the systems.
I would presume that this is true, in the sense that the overall economic footprint of what these bankrupted consumers eat will be smaller.
The caloric difference will be insignificant. But instead of having it come from meat, and especially cattle, have it come from vegetables and poultry.
No one needs to eat red meat every day.
Just yesterday people were trying to convince me that price hikes were good and would benefit Trump’s base. Now JP Morgan is predicting a global recession. I cannot fathom how this is good for America. It just feels like a colossal own-goal that will weaken America on the global scale. Americans will suffer in a recession. And it was by choice that this administration put us here. Is there any recourse?
>Now JP Morgan is predicting a global recession. Good thing JP Morgan's predictions were never wrong /s Edit: to those who downvoted, do you have any arguments to contradict my statement and would you put your money into JP's predictions? Go ahead, I'll wait.
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Yeah 1) He won the popular vote. His support actually increased the 2nd time around, and 2) He should be in a tiny jail cell right now, what was Biden doing for 4 years? This isn’t going away even if he leaves office in 4 years (which is looking unlikely).
> He should be in a tiny jail cell right now, what was Biden doing for 4 years? Not causing a global financial crisis, mainly. But vis-a-vis his predecessor’s recurrent criminality, it’s hard to imagine what his options were, considering the capture of the remaining branches of government. Well, that, and the Constitution.
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Yes, why not? To the best of my knowledge Norway is still thriving. Ideally more countries would get on board with such ideas and there will be fewer palpable places for them to relocate to. From the article, “The model in Norway is that everyone should contribute relevant to ability and therefore those that have a greater ability to pay taxes, should pay a little more.” This seems more than fair, particularly while…
Ahh sounds like good old Karl Marx “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_a...
One thing that I'd like to inject into this discussion, is that the nominal trade imbalance is not the only relevant figure, and maybe not the most important one. For many goods, there is a very strong disconnect between the market value (the lowest price you can offer a group of suppliers competing against each other) and what one might call, for lack of a better word, true value (the price you'd be willing to pay i…
I'm not sure the 'true value' is that important for trade. Taking the example of antibiotics, they may be worth 1000x the cost of production but if country A stops selling them you can just make them in country B. We got by fine without Chinese exports until they started becoming a thing from around 1990 on.
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Small US companies near me, reliant on Chinese inputs, aren't suddenly getting hundreds of millions to build factories that'll take years to finish. Trump’s plan assumes most small businesses can pause everything for long, expensive factory construction/toolup projects. In my area our three big manufacturers depend on Canadian aluminum and Chinese subcomponents. Tariffs won’t bring jobs back but they’ll kill the ones…
That's maybe the biggest problem with the Trump tariffs - not enough time to adjust. If you were doing it properly you'd plan years ahead.
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I'm not sure the 'true value' is that important for trade. Taking the example of antibiotics, they may be worth 1000x the cost of production but if country A stops selling them you can just make them in country B. We got by fine without Chinese exports until they started becoming a thing from around 1990 on.
Long-term -- yes; short and medium-term -- not necessarily. For example, during and after Covid, Germany had a very severe antibiotics shortage. I think it is still ongoing to some extent. On one hand, it seems ridiculous to suggest that Germany is incapable of producing all the antibiotics it needs. On the other hand, ramping up production that has been offshored is not that easy, and is a lot more expensive initial…
That sounds like a good reason to favor local manufacturing.
> On the other hand, ramping up production that has been offshored is not that easy, and is a lot more expensive initially.
And that sounds like a good reason to do it now and not wait for a crisis when the consequences would be worse.