US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

Fed rate influences treasury rates, but it's not a direct impact. If creditors lose faith in our fiscal situation, rates will rise no matter what the Fed does.

> Devils advocate point, and one nobody wants to talk about: what if everyone can't be a high-skill employee?

Agree with this.

Also, what if there's just not a need for it?

Even if "everyone" in some abstract sense is capable of "high-skill" jobs, how many are really needed? Look at software jobs alone and the onslaught that is the current labor market.

I think there's nowhere near enough "work" ("real" or otherwise) to go around to maintain the level of employment necessary to support the population that we have at the costs that we have.

I don't think any sort of "UBI" (assuming you mean direct cash payments) is a realistic solution, either. People need to "work" in some organized fashion to avoid the common negative outcomes associated with "welfare" scenarios.

I legitimately, unironically, support the kinds of "fake" jobs that were prevalent in years' past (day in the life TikToks come to mind, Gov jobs where people send three emails a week, etc).

I guess in another sense I do support "UBI", as long as it's paired with the illusion of "work."

I understand this seems nonsensical, but just from practical experience it makes total sense to me.

Here's an example.

Years back I worked a software gig at a large non-"tech" F500 company. Much of the programming work there was extremely dull--occasional maintenance of large barely functional enterprise Java messes, writing a few SQL queries a week for wretched multi-table joins requiring all sorts of nasty casting and hacks as "normalization" was an alien concept to the original author and the like. Realistically, folks worked on this stuff perhaps 10 hours a week?

Anyway, I know a few people hit with a layoff that worked there a long time (decade+) and now they're back in the Thunderdome looking for work as "developers". The people in question are nearing retirement but presumably not there, for one reason or another.

Hows this going to work for them? I'm not denigrating them, but having worked with these folks, they're not going to be tearing into broken pipelines, adding React components, configuring Docker builds or whatever--there's a skill mismatch and the workload I've seen at roles lately is just so far beyond the pace, scope, and "scale" that there's no way they'd make it, if they can even get an interview at all.

In this example, would it be best to give them "UBI" payments, or some other slow near-sinecure where they have dignity?

Maybe I'm just soft.

> We want secure housing, good education, healthy food, and an opportunity for promotion in life. Those things can only come with good jobs that are accessible to the whole working class, not just the well educated who make up most of the service economy.

What level of confidence do you have that the tariffs are a path to this outcome?

You need to enforce monopoly laws, and more important than individual tax rates, you need to get the tax base spread out correctly again.

1950: 25% tax revenue came from personal income. 25% from social security. 25% from businesses. 25% from excise taxes.

Today: 50% tax revenue from personal income. 35% from social security. 7% from business. 7% from excise taxes.

This problem is never understood.

> What are the flaws in this thinking?

That the national debt matters.

A) The Fed & Treasury have the ability to buy back the securities at any time if they wanted, since they can basically poof the currency into existence. And t-bonds are as good as cash anyways, so that money is basically already in the economy.

B) The country's national debt is also our citizens' savings accounts. Every major company in the country (and the gov't itself) holds an absurd amount of t-bonds because its the best place to store billions of dollars for safe keeping. Paying off the debt means this capital needs to go somewhere. Should it go to China? The EU? Canada? American real estate?

The national debt is probably the most misunderstood concept in the country. It's denominated in USD, unlike other countries, whose debt is borrowed in currencies they don't control. And "paying off" the national debt risks capital flight and/or asset bubbles - both of which are detrimental to the economy.

The system we have in place is a good one.

Thought experiment: consider what would happen if the US Treasury decided interest rates are negative. That is, you pay $10,000 for a bond and receive back $9,900 after 10 years. What do you think this would do to the economy?

Now ratchet up that negative rate to 100%, that is, you pay $10k for a t-bond and eventually it's worth $0 after 10 years. That's pretty much what paying off the national debt would do (in fact, that's probably how the national debt would be paid off, if ordered to do so, the fed would purchase these bonds and the treasury would use the proceeds to buy existing bonds off the open market). It's two sides to the same coin, but instead of prohibiting the purchase of t-bonds, you just disincentivize it.