611–620 of 704 posts
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GDP is still growing and inflation has come down. I agree tariffs contribute to inflation: https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco... Before tariffs, in the post-pandemic recovery, we also didn't see hiring go back to pre-pandemic levels. There are other forces like AI adoption. I don't have good intuition around the connection between tariffs and jobs. Yes, higher inflation may require cooling d…
Looking at the 30 year chart YTD there is no indication that rates come down. The short side may be under control of Trump - who's bullying of the Fed raises the prospect of them coming down but the long end of the curve is under the control of market forces and it does not look like going down at all. Real estate market effectively frozen with sales down and for sale up in the realm of decade highs. Nobody mentioned…
I imagine to make American exports cheaper.
It will take years to make America an exporting nation. In the meantime many many businesses will go bankrupt. This administration doesn't care as they just see it as a cost of fulfilling their longer term plan to make America an exporting nation.
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> Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges? Only all the people who voted for them and all the people who voted against them?
Maybe if Harris had made a few she would have won…
Trump was a terrible candidate and could've been beaten if a good candidate running against him.
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GDP is still growing and inflation has come down. I agree tariffs contribute to inflation: https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco... Before tariffs, in the post-pandemic recovery, we also didn't see hiring go back to pre-pandemic levels. There are other forces like AI adoption. I don't have good intuition around the connection between tariffs and jobs. Yes, higher inflation may require cooling d…
Because they're terrified of the uncertainty of the long tail of the tariffs. It takes months and months to see the products of those.
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China had a comparative advantage in labor costs that they have turned into an advantage in manufacturing. Plenty of Americans want factory jobs to exist - almost no Americans want to work them. Sure, nothing worth doing is easy, but not everything hard is a good use of time and resources.
I’m sure plenty of Americans would love to work a factory job if it meant they could provide a comfortable life for their family. Unfortunately, due to decades of anti-labor practices, that isn’t possible anymore. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to rectify the situation.
This is a well-known problem with factory jobs: https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...
It's not possible because you simply cannot afford to pay manual factory workers a competitive wage AND sell the goods from the factory for competitive prices.
Factory work coming back to America would have to look like car factories do right now: highly automated, highly skilled work that takes full advantage of cheap inputs and advanced technology. It will not be helped by raising the price of inputs, deporting engineers, and defunding research.
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It didn't take informed people by surprise. We still see people denying that Trump had anything to do with Project 2025, whereas honest informed people knew that he very much did.
Nobody informed saw massive tariffs on India, Brazil, etc. If you were right the stock market wouldn’t have tanked because the smart money would have priced it in.
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> The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem. That's literally what I said, and why the solution is to undo the things that produced that instead of undoing the things that fueled the aggregated growth while doubling down on the sources of inequality.
Then I agree. But, one of the sources of inequality is labor arbitrage by the capitalist class. Tariffs decrease the utility of that arbitrage.
It's not 1910 anymore. The US is integrated into the global economy and many if not most jobs export to a global audience. Do you want to hurt the labor arbitrage that allows us to support advanced manufacturing?
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I do think the state of progress in China is vastly underestimated by the west. It has been fast and messy, not evenly distributed, but it is staggering. The rhetoric around them is changing too, I think they are making significant soft power gains. I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.
China has been making soft power gains for a decade. They are everywhere in Africa. When I went to Macedonia five years ago, there was a giant screen in the main square explaining how their medical cooperation with China was such a boon for the country. China already is a diplomatic giant. I think American are partially blinded by the crazy negative propaganda against China you see all the time in the US. They signif…
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Reindustrializing America requires people that are actually willing to work in a factory.
Pay them a decent wage and they will.
Why they don't do it now? One could easily replace 90% of consumed good with US made.