421–430 of 814 posts
Isn't this literally economics 101? How did we ever even end up imagining that tariffs are somehow paid by the exporter??
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a friend who works with american tourists visiting europe, mostly older folks, mostly to religious sights. They are, for the vast majority, indoctrinated beyond any chance of reasonable change of opinion. Talking with him makes _me_ worry about my own beliefs, because if these people can be so blind, maybe I am too.
The kind of older tourist visiting a foreign religious site is definitely going to be relatively indoctrinated regardless of their origin country. But yes, many Americans are indoctrinated. They also tend to be dominant in wide swaths of US geography and highly motivated by their indoctrinators to vote, thus maximizing their electoral impact. Many other Americans are pretty open-minded to new facts, even today. Unfor…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy. If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change. Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outr…
Why did you feel the need to use an LLM to compose this comment?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive done a lot of analysis on the Trump as Putin agent topic. I found he nearly as often acts agents Russia as with. What's more likely is he treats Putin as an inspiration, wrt to converting the country to an oligarchy and offshoring national funds for himself.
Yeah. The idea that he's a Russian asset, although tempting, has always seemed to me like a coping mechanism of sorts – externalizing the evil, like blaming the devil for one's bad deeds. And, of course, Hanlon's razor is very much relevant here, although certainly it doesn't apply to everybody in Trump's inner circle. Some of them are very much competent and malevolent.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/vladvexler/p/we-need-to-talk-a...
The issue is that the USA are in 100% post truth and 0% of the recent potus voters are able to reflect on economic policies level-headed.
I think it's the opposite. These were announced 9 months ago and none of the doomsday predictions have come to pass. There's been major impact to some things but for the most part the economy has hummed along without a blip. Certainly not the everything in Walmart is going to get 34% prognostications that some were making: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253
I'm glad they've done the work here and put a figure on it - the impact absolutely needed to be quantified - but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function. People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common cur…
There are multiple research papers that indicate that this result (in terms of what you think the paper says) is not obvious. Indeed, to think this is the case, you need an extremely superficial understanding of economics based around "rules" that only exist in theory. And, if you read the paper, you will find that evidence. How these work depends on initial conditions that vary and exporters will not react in a cons…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Women have had the right to vote for a long time. Women could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President. People talk a lot about Trump but I think a lot of people just voted against the other option so it didn't have much to do with Trump to begin with.
Harris beat Trump by 10 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Harris by 10 percentage points among men voters. Clinton beat Trump by 15 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Clinton by 11 percentage points among men voters.
> Event studies around discrete tariff shocks on Brazil (50%) and India (25–50%) confirm: export prices did not decline. Trade volumes collapsed instead. What if that was the intended result?
Even if it was, the problem is that this is a classic trap where protecting your own market will result in overpriced goods in the home market. We would be paying extravagant amounts for everything. Most other countries wouldn’t have that problem and would result in being stuck in time like a lot of the former Soviet Union.
Given the relatively low inflation in 2025, I’m skeptical of the claim that consumers bore 96% of the tariff burden. With CPI inflation at 2.7% and roughly $18,000 in goods consumption per person in US, total price increase in goods work out to ~160B. A $200 billion increase in customs revenues would exceed the total price increases attributable to inflation - which makes little sense if 96% of that was paid by consu…
Consumers are just buying from other sources (domestically or otherwise) or not buying because it is no longer worth it.
There are a lot of reasons why these tariff's are bad, but economically, it is not a bad thing for people not to buy things they do not need, or to buy them from a domestic producer. Consumer spending actually increased last year, and inflation is low.