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 currency a year ago.
I wouldn't like to comment on HN's political leanings in the round and, obviously, there are a large portion of non-US readers/commenters on the site (including me), but will say this: there are a portion of you who voted for this. Exactly this.
What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
EDIT: Wow... well, having asked the question, it looks like I now have a lot of answers and perspectives to read. Thank you all for taking the time to comment.
A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in.
You're assuming that modern politics across most of the World has something to do with rational, logical thought. Russia, China, Europe, the US, the Middle East - they are all in a quagmire of irrational fractures between the public and the political classes who want power/control for benefit of themselves rather than for the benefit of that public.
It's not unique to the US, it's just that they look like they are speed running it from outside.
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. Unfortunately this kind is relatively geographically concentrated in urban or academic communities, and many of them are also discouraged from voting by being fully aware of how desperate and hard-to-fix the US political situation is, thus minimizing their electoral impact.
In Israel, virtually every Christian relic is fake. Some are hundreds of years old, but nevertheless fake. This is not a comment on Christianity as a religion. Religions need relics, and if they can’t find them, they are created. This is operating in modern times. I was working as a contractor for Intel Israel. They took everybody on a day trip. To an LDS temple to “see the organ” (what else?). An American LDS church. Needed a place in Israel to “represent.” Now wait 100 years. You wait. I have things to do.
Relics are only a way of advertising the religion.
We should ban advertisements of religions. If their gods are so powerful then they shouldn't need advertising. And if you are a believer AND god turns out to be real then banning advertising could lead to the return of Jesus. Win win.
The Americans visiting Europe are a sample very skewed towards sanity due to their socioeconomic situation and interest in history/culture. So this is either not true or highly troubling.
Even the strongest believes eventually collide with the hard cold solid wall of reality.
But if you do believe hard enough, if you give it your all and exclude anything else than your believes, when you become one with it - then you can certainly increase the collision speed quite a bit! :-)
That is populism in a nutshell. It is anti-rationalism at its heart. There's no real ideology - that's how it applies to both Chávez and Trump, Corbyn and Orbán. People want to believe what feels "instinctively" correct, because the intellectual overhead of modern society leaves the majority of the population unable to deal with the reality that political and economic systems are incredibly difficult to understand without hours of study and thought. That is uncomfortable, so people rebel against intellectualism, because it's easier to be told lies through 30-second videos and feel well informed, rather than sitting through a 20-hour session that one might need to truly understand a niche of a niche. The more they read, the less they understand, so disengage from it altogether and go with their gut (designed for tribes of monkeys) because the cognitive overload is too much to bear.
It's so exhausting having the same conversation every time. A friend reads something on reddit, flips out about it. Asks in our signal chat "can anyone explain this" as bait. Occasionally I take the bait and explain the extreme thing through a centrist lens. Now I'm instantly on the side of whoever did the bad thing and spend the next 90 minutes explaining rationality until we arrive at the center. Things calm down. 3 days go by, and my friend visits reddit again...
Please don't reduce decades of friendship with a person to a couple dozen words I posted on a website and think you can judge what friendship means to me.
I was talking about the impact of the current state of the world on existing relationships.
Who said they’re contributing to the problem? Perhaps you are by constantly downplaying what sounds like wilful ignorance on the part of your friend? Some people’s ignorance does not deserve the same respect as others’ reasoning. Your friend sounds like they enjoy trolling you.
In fairness to this report, the report is about tariffs and their impact on...imported goods affected directly by tariffs isn't it?
From an overall economic policy standpoint, missing facts that provide context are pretty important especially when you're trying to paint an entire side of the isle as completely brainwashed. Nobody can have a conversation when we create straw men to argue with.
Other relevant context:
- The US trade deficit just hit its lowest points since 2009 due to decreased imports and increased exports, which rose by record amounts.
- US Q4 2025 GDP grew by 5.5%, outpacing China at 4.5%. For context, over the last 25 years China averages 8% per year while the US average 2.1% per year.
- US inflation has continued to slow at 2.7% with core inflation at 2.6%, continuing the trend from the last 2 years under Biden after a huge 9.1% inflation spike in 2022.
- US gas prices continued to trend downward by national average, with significant regional drops. I live in South Carolina and filled up for $2.39 / gallon a couple of days ago.
There's a lot of economic doom and gloom in the comments section here that's simply not reflected in the overall economic numbers. It's not perfect, but it's trending in the right direction.
> The US trade deficit just hit its lowest points since 2009 due to decreased imports and increased exports, which rose by record amounts.
Why is this positive? And I’m not implying it’s negative either. It’s just a fact sans context on the effect of the market unless you’ve bought the current admins argument that a trade deficit means you’re getting ripped off.
> US Q4 2025 GDP grew by 5.5%, outpacing China at 4.5%. For context, over the last 25 years China averages 8% per year while the US average 2.1% per year.
I can find no mention of Q4 gdp results in your linked source, it appears to be looking at annual gdp rates over years and focusing on the US compared to China and India
> US inflation has continued to slow at 2.7% with core inflation at 2.6%, continuing the trend from the last 2 years under Biden after a huge 9.1% inflation spike in 2022.
Still above the feds target of 2% but it’s good to see it still trending down
> US gas prices continued to trend downward by national average, with significant regional drops. I live in South Carolina and filled up for $2.39 / gallon a couple of days ago.
It’s winter, prices for gas always drop in winter. Your own source shows that we’re still above pre COVID prices
> The price of eggs have come down significantly, to their lowest rates in 4 years.
I’m not sure if I’m reading your source correctly but it appears to be saying eggs are $0.45/ dozen
That seems implausibly low but I can’t find other sources to compare as every source I’m finding has conflicting information internally, and the price given doesn’t match up with the lowest prices even if I multiply it by 12 assuming I misunderstood price per dozen for price per egg
> And the US stock market is at all time highs right now.
Yea but over half of that is mag7 and only propped up by the AI bubble. It’s nice temporarily but all the context around the stock market doesn’t make it look particularly healthy atm.
The economy looks about as healthy as it did in 2024. I think a lot of people’s views on the health of the economy, whether it’s good or bad, are being more influenced by political leanings than by numbers. Fits with the zeitgeist of the era.
Yeah I am not sure where I read the article recently, but there was a nice write-up about how all politics everywhere is turning into tribalism with little or no actual consideration for policy beyond ideology.
Not that it’s necessarily as bad everywhere, but time and time again I talk to people from various countries who say the current leader never could have been elected back when they were living there.
A lot of this, as in the case of Trump, seems like legitimate dissatisfaction that voters have which is funneled into finding alternatives to the people that are currently representing them, without deep thought about the outcomes of the policies the replacement is pushing for. In the case of Trump voters in particular people seem to very frequently be willing to overlook statements they would otherwise disagree with just because there are other statements that align with their thinking, or that seem like “change” that they are willing to support to see where it leads.
Things aren't perfect in a lot of countries, but what is happening in the US right now is absolutely unique. Things are careening out of control, and the political system seems completely incapable of getting a handle on it.
Most people I speak to in Canada, Europe and Central America seem perplexed why Americans they know do not seem more alarmed.
> The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”
> “The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.”
> It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”
Multi-party representative democracy is less than half. And none of the top 3. An interesting, but uncomfortable, fact. The people are not good at picking economically rational leaders in adversarial elections.
> There are many natural economic reasons for GDP-per-capita to vary between jurisdictions (e.g. places rich in oil and gas tend to have high GDP-per-capita figures). However, it is increasingly being recognized that tax havens, or corporate tax havens, have distorted economic data which produces artificially high, or inflated, GDP-per-capita figures.
> ...
> In 2017, Ireland's economic data became so distorted by U.S. multinational tax avoidance strategies (see leprechaun economics), also known as BEPS actions, that Ireland effectively abandoned GDP (and GNP) statistics as credible measures of its economy, and created a replacement statistic called modified gross national income (or GNI*)
Source: Wikipedia on GDP per capita, PPP
I don't think your conclusion about governance is warranted, given the important other factors you aren't accounting for in your list (also presence of large oil & gas natural resources).
What are you saying then, that you wouldn't want to live in Monaco (assuming you had median Monaco income)? That you think large oil & gas resources is good (Venezuela)? I'm struggling to figure out which side you're on
I'm on the side of "looking at top 10 GDP per capita PPP countries is not good evidence for what type of government is better for a country's economy, at least not without far more analysis"
You called out per capita GDP as not a great metric but you didn't seem to deny that living in Monaco on a Monegasque income (for example, or any of these other monarchies) would be a bad thing, despite their type of government.
And you called out vast oil & gas resources as essential, or scale-tipping, for the goodness of a monarchy but I'm assuming you are against the US intervention in Venezuela for the purposes of securing such resources for American interest.
Did you have other factors in mind that you did not mention?
This is a perfect example of how to lie with statistics. All of these countries are either tax havens or oil-rich economies, apart from half of them having the population of a small city. The economic policy implemented by any of these countries cannot be implemented by a large economy with little or no natural resources, or would you recommend to Germany or Japan to just "HAVE" oil or open their banks as offshore foreign accounts?
Those countries are rich in resources or tax-heavens with lax law. Most of them also have very few citizens (down to ~40k in some cases) which are usually also insanely rich. There is no rational economic policies at work here, except to accept all money and don't look at the bloodstains.
Also worth noticing the size of these countries. Mostly on the small/tiny side, besides Norway (an oil exporter) and Ireland (a corporate tax haven)
Perhaps making good economic decisions grows exponentially in difficulty with the population size, especially for “conventional” economies that do not have another cash cow.
The reality is to you get way more benefit from attracting a multinational company to shift its revenue to you for tax purposes when you're a (very) small state. This strategy simply isn't available to you when you're the US (which already has major bases for all these companies, it's just not that big a deal compared with their population and govt budget)
I can only assyme that you meant something more akin to "absolute monarchy" but I still feel like pointing out that Norway, Bermuda, and Luxembourg are all monarchies. And of course out of all the monarchies listed Qatar is probably the closest to an absolute one.
And in the inverse Monaco is a multi-party representative (semi-)constitutional principality, so a monarchy as said.
So I don't necessarily disagree with your points, I'm mostly just adding thy these aspects of politics can and do coexist.
Liechtenstein is as much a monarchy as Britain is. It probably falls more in the direct democracy bucket. Also, the GDP per capita figures for these tiny countries are very missleading because you can have a situation where more than half the work force is commuting into the country every day for work. They increase the GDP but don't count in the capita part.
But a monarchy/autocracy hardly guarantees you success either. Isn't this Bill Gates and charter schools all over again?
Basically, the boring solution (democracy) gets you boring, middle-of-the-road results, while a monarchy is more likely to get you an outlier. The outlier might be at the top or the bottom of the pack, but because it's not democracy any more you don't have any say, so tough toenails if it's the wrong one.
There's no connection with monarchy at all - the only absolute monarchy is Qatar and we know their money comes from a lot of oil per capita. The other countries all have legislatures involving multiparty democracy with or without quirks/flaws (Switzerland has referenda, the microstates still give their constitutional monarch significant executive powers, Singapore's major party has completely dominated since the 1960s). The more obvious thing they have in common is low populations [relative to resources]
I agree that the top of the list is clearly small-population edge cases, but one could also make an argument that strong, consistent economic leadership yields more coordination and reduces waste and thrash in the market (boom/bust cycles, etc).
All of it still comes down to the competency of that leadership though.
I’m an American and I have spoken to a lot of Americans about this issue. Especially in the south. They could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President . That’s it. That’s the bottom line.
What's the intersection of Americans who won't vote for a woman presidential candidate and Americans who support MAGA? I imagine it's fairly high.
That said, I don't believe there's a single factor that determined the election. A flip in any of a dozen or more factors could have resulted in a different outcome.
I have spent my whole life intimately involved with southern Republicans. They will never ever not vote Republican, let alone vote Democrat. It is an identity marker.
It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are. They’ll complain for a while, but they will always internalize a Republican policy shift no matter what it is. They used to treat “free market economics” as a religion just 10 years ago.
Secondarily, they love to define their identity as opposition to the northeast (a stereotypical fictional version of northeast). Democrats and “coastal elites” are the same to them. Once they elected a black man, they all got more racist. They nominated a woman, then they got more sexist. They campaigned on social programs, fuck the poor (even if they are poor).
And there is a cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and their experience. They’ll say “deport them all” but be personal friends with immigrants from church. They simply don’t connect their political beliefs to their reality.
I’m a southerner and I don’t see a future for this country. I used to think if they felt enough pain, then they would take politics seriously, but then a whole bunch of them died of COVID and it changed nothing. If I was a non-American, I’d be telling my government to do what they can to remove all dependence on this country as possible because it won’t get better.
I don’t really know how we’d get there, but the US would be better structured as an EU of regions, IMO. The states are too small, but we’ve got regions with definite noticeable cultural differences (Northeast vs Southeast, etc etc). These areas have more similar values than the country as a whole, and are big enough to handle 99% of their issues. Like, we should not have done the ACA, just merged all the various already successful Northeastern healthcare systems. Then the South could decide to copy it if they wanted, after they saw it working. Or not. What can you do? Trying to impose it seems to have drastically backfired.
Since these regional governments would be picked from the inside, hopefully there wouldn’t be as much of a contrarian reflex to oppose everything they do.
The EU is moving in the opposite direction and trying to become more cohesive. The politicians and technocrats see the Euro as hamstrung with weak fiscal policies.
This really sounds like the population just isn't ripe for democracy yet. We also had that, this is a major reason why our 1848 revolution failed and why we didn't become a democracy between 1848 and 1918.
So what you actually kind of miss is a nobility that has common sense and class-consciousness of the leading class.
Is this a bot? Is this someone telling an unpopular truth on an alt account? Is this someone telling a fabrication on an alt account?
The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.
Real person. Live in the south. Kamala being a woman had no impact on her election chances. Most people in my circles were big Haley fans.
Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.
I know women in NYC who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough to handle the geopolitical stage. I know Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who voted Trump because they believe they are being replaced by a wave of new immigrants who will vote Democrat. My friends, an interracial couple who voted democrat, voted Trump because the schools were going to give their kids hormone pills without their consent.
The amount of crazy and not so crazy shit I hear for voting for this idiot is incredible. Though the Dems do themselves no favors either.
> who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough
No, they voted for Trump because he was their guy then later made up a rational justification. We know that people generally do NOT make decisions by rationally evaluating things, their subconscious makes a decision and their conscious makes plausible rational arguments. (Yes, citation needed.)
I don't buy this - Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race and I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything. This bullshit that American's won't vote for a woman is just an excuse not to run women and to deflect blame towards a culture war issue and away from the fact that the democrats don't actually have popular policies.
I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but I think its a sexist oversimplification to suggest she lost because she is a woman. She lost because her campaign was lame.
> I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything.
But she did offer voters lots of things if you spent 30 seconds listening to her and stepped out of the faux news and Twitter echo chambers.
And basically every last bit of it would’ve helped the average American. She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.
*And to be clear, it’s rather interesting that both Kamala and Hillary were blamed for “not having a platform” which seems to be the go-to for people who refuse to vote for a woman but can’t actually attack them on their platform. Just claim they don't have one or didn’t do a good enough job explaining it!
Politicians should not preemptively give in to political resistance and tell their voters they can't solve their problems because its "unrealistic." You'd think we would have figured this out in the Clinton campaign. Politicians should have a set of goals they fight for rabidly and when political resistance manifests they should point their fingers at it and say "Those assholes over there kept me from forgiving student loans."
Democrats who believe in "realistic" political campaigns are why awful people keep winning.
Now you’re criticizing her for “giving in to political resistance” - and by that you mean not getting up on stage and just knowingly and blatantly lying to the American public by claiming she would single handedly drop the price of groceries and gasoline in her first week in office while also ending the war in Ukraine?
I think you’re both moving the goal posts and claiming that the rest of us are looking for a presidential candidate that has no moral compass. I’m good.
Like I said, I canvassed for and voted for Harris, but when I think of her campaign, all I can think of is "wiping the debt of Pell Grant recipients who start successful businesses that benefit disadvantaged communities."
This is the lamest bullshit policy which almost seems calculated to alienate voters who it doesn't put to sleep.
Please don't act like democratic politicians are losing because they have a moral compass. Ridiculous.
She’s known to own firearms. I wonder what would happen if one of these Democrat candidates released a video like “A girl and her Glock: Kamala goes John Wick”.
Similarly, AOC should visit the south, eat some grits, volunteer with some Black churches, and do a little skeet shooting with some good ole boys.
It would be perceived as pandering bullshit from either of them.
What the democrats need is an aggressive economic policy that actually will manifestly improve regular people's lives. If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.
She can articulate the policy at the shooting range while eating some grits. And drinking some Keystone Light. That is when they will be receptive to the ideas.
Both parties already know which voters change their votes depending on the situation. The data's already told strategists in both parties that the hotspots are, generally speaking, a few counties in a few states in the midwest, Pennsylvania, and more and more Arizona. So they don't really need to do more than pay lip service to any others. Because the data's already told them that the others won't change their votes in any case.
I don’t care about the US anymore but it seems to me it’s always up to the Democrats to be responsible, while Republicans can literally end democracy and turn the country into a pay to play kleptocracy where you can even be intimate with children without consequences or backlash.
You know what’s interesting though is I think that a Republican woman would be unbeatable. Many Democrats would be salivating at the historical opportunity.
A Republican candidate could be a Muslim, a women, or trans, but that's not a good reason to vote for them. It should be about what they stand for. Voting for a Kristi Noem would be terrible, for example.
Similarly, the Democratic Party, if they're to win, should not depend on the opposition failing or on identity, but instead on solid ideas and the ability to communicate it well. Kamala wasn't that.
A woman would never win the Republican primary as long as MAGA dominates the right.
And Democrats aren't so broadly driven by identity politics that a Republican candidate merely being a woman would attract significant Democratic defectors. She would still have to be somewhat inspiring/charismatic, fairly centrist, and probably pro-choice.
Even in the peak-"woke" Democratic primary of 2020, all the women lost to two old white men.
>You know what’s interesting though is I think that a Republican woman would be unbeatable
Not anymore.
Three more years to climb out of the dumpster fire though. Then, maybe?
But right now? No.
In this moment, the political reality in the US is that Democrats would have to lose. Republicans, male or female, can't really win without that help. Especially in light of MAGA.
I would have thought Wisconsin would have been a wake up call for Republicans. But it hasn't happened yet.
So far both of these parties are sleepwalking into disaster and the world outside the US will pay a portion of that cost. Which is sad.
She lost for the same reason Hillary lost. She came across as Marie Antoinette. Oblivious to the anger of the working class. Touting how great the economy was going and ignoring the resentment felt by those who believed the “liberal elite” betrayed them.
Frankly, bullshit. This was not about working class in the slightest. Working class as such supported and voted for democrats. The thing is, women are working class too, not just men. And farmers are frequently effectively rich owners - in unstable business bu owning a lot.
This was about all thosw isms and hierarchies we pretended dont exisr anymore.
Its more accurate to say that leftist policies polled well, which they always do. I think the main issue is that people don't really trust democrats to do anything they say they want to do.
Harris was shitcanned post haste when she actually primaried, so the party already knew she was non-viable. She got put in as VP as the best token non-white woman from a large population state they could shove in there and then Democrats got caught with their pants down because they hid Biden's physical state past the point they could have an actual primary to vet the proper candidate.
The fact Biden said he wouldn't back out then suddenly did at the 11th hour made the whole thing far more bizarre and was a massive erosion of confidence in any semblance of a plan for the presidency by the Democratic Party. I ended up voting for a 3rd party because both campaigns were run so horribly to the point I couldn't even imagine either side managing a mayor's office let alone the country.
This kind of purity test is why the left cant win right now. Anyone who does a wrong-think is shitcanned and othered.
Im gonna put a theory out that I havent seen here yet, a lot of people voted for Trump because they got dunked on by leftist Twitter, told they were racist/fascist/whatever for having an opinion like "communism is bad", and now comes a guy who wont back down and who legit makes them cry liberal tears. Ever been pissed off at someone with no recourse? Of course they want that kind of satisfaction.
Curious how it was a vote for trump and not harris. If harris had won, would a 3rd party vote have been for harris?
Because if that is true, you're re-writing the rules of your "personal voter math" to fit your narrative, and if it isn't true, your "personal voter math" === your opinion, which isn't really useful.
The risk those people took is radicalizing people like me, who were previously on their side for whom Trump was an absolute red line. Now Trump is charging them extra taxes, and when he falls their reputation will be dumped even further into the gutter - hope the temporary satisfaction was worth the costs.
I dont 100% understand what you're saying, who got the temporary satisfaction? The leftists doing online dunks, or the trump voting moderates who just dont like the way the left does discourse? Its unclear to me from your post.
The Trump voting moderates. Their lives will now be permanently worse, both from the immediate effect of Trump's policies and the backlash from Trump opposing moderates who didn't and don't care about online dunks.
I will confirm what the person you replied to said. I have had white collar colleagues and blue collar truck drivers (one who is a family member) say the same thing, that they wouldn’t vote for a women. You severely underestimate racism and misogyny in the US electorate imho.
I did not bother canvassing or donating to the Harris campaign for this reason, for the same reason I did not help pro vaccine non profits during the pandemic trying to convince antivaxxers. You aren’t changing someone’s belief system and mental model on timelines that matter for election outcomes. Mamdani was able to win NYC because young people and women turned out in force and ranked choice voting. The electoral college overweights rural, lower education parts of the country in US voting influence.
Based on the above, it will be a long time before enough of the US electorate has turned over before you can run a women presidential candidate imho. 78% of farmers voted for him, and still support him, even as he destroys their way of life, for example. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Planck).
I recommend the recently released book “The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us” by Ryan P Burge (ISBN13 9781587436697) as a contributor to understanding this topic, as well as “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (ISBN13 9780062390851).
I think that's wrong. The Democrat platform offered a lot.
It's just that if in front of you, you have a weirdo who gives some stupid "with me, everything is free, and there's no problem" line, that is provable completely bullshit, but that your population is too uneducated (or too in a cult) to understand, then this happens...
What did you want Democrat to do? Give the same lies that GOP does? then what's the endgame?
I wouldn't read too much into Mamdani's success bearing in mind the other candidates represented scandal or the party that had no chance in New York...
The Democrats ran a campaign that managed to lose to a liar and a felon. They couldn’t have been more out of touch if they had immigrated from Antarctica.
Having right vote when you belong to some category doesn’t mean having possibility to elect someone in that category. It could be that legally the category of people is not illegible, or are bared from being elected by other practical considerations.
Also being part of a social category doesn’t mean one will be immune to bias against this very category if it’s heavily pushed in the dominant social constructs.
Actually women able to reach top level political function in a patriarchal system will more likely do so by being doubly virulent against feminist standpoints. Look at Tatcher or Takaichi for a more recent example.
Much like I think if any Dem other than Hillary Clinton ran against Trump for his winning term 1, I think if the Dems had a proper primary process for this last election they'd probably have picked somebody who'd also have won.
That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.)
In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.
They didn’t even have a proper primary with Hillary. She was anointed by the DNC to start and the party itself worked against other candidates any way it could to make sure she “won”. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the opposite of any candidate that might snag a single vote from the republicans, and unlikable among most dem voters themselves. Throw in the fact that they were so convinced of a victory that Trump flipped blue states by virtue of showing up versus ignoring them on the basis of “who cares, they’ll vote for me anyway”, and it was a recipe for disaster.
Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.
I don't really disagree with this but my opinion is that basically no one is capable of winning a US presidential campaign in the modern era in a matter of ~100 days. The fact Harris was a uniquely bad candidate that weirdly refused to differentiate herself from Biden, just exacerbated that problem.
If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.
Elections are kind of an "average" / pulse of the ~236 million eligible voters.
The reasons people vote a certain way or can't be bothered to show up at the polls are going to vary significantly across the nearly quarter billion humans making those choices.
So any attempt to "single issue" explain election results are going to be wrong, particularly in a close election like this one. (49.8% vs 48.3%, and Electoral Votes in battleground states often in the tens of thousands of voters, out of tens of millions.
But many of the issues certainly contribute to flipping voters between one candidate, another, or staying home.
So sure, totally, gender and race played a role.
The economy (and steep inflation) played a role.
Biden being an increasingly disliked incumbent, staying in the race too long, and Harris being too conservative to distance herself from him played a role.
News and propaganda played a role (and I suspect this is a big one. Remember when Trump was all like Deep State, Democrats and Epstein, let's get those files released! And then it came time to do it, and for some reason he was like... oh that's a bad idea?)
No doubt individual state politics play a role, too - an unpopular governor might give the opposing party a boost.
But yeah, if the Democratic nominee was a) nominated, and b) a white male, the odds probably would've shifted in their favor enough to flip those few battleground states.
It seemed like the D. did not want to win. They wanted to make a point. The R seemingly also wanted to make a point. The current administration also strives to make an point here and there, against anyone's best interest (including themselves): the silly tariffs, the insane ICE, the irrational play around Greenland, etc.
Both parties are quite disconnected from the interests of the "ordinary people", and the "ordinary people" voting from them are often quite disconnected from the reality; instead they want someone who would approve their preconceptions, and would stick it to "them" in the endless political sports match.
Which may not be that endless: if the political climate of the US deteriorates enough, some authoritarian populist could just get elected and never leave. The current administration likes to hint at that, but they seem to inane to actually pull this off. Somebody less theatrical and more cold-blooded could, though :(
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 outrage and clicks. People’s attention spans would recover, making them more capable of listening to opposing views and engaging in meaningful discussion. The overall quality of public debate would improve, and political leaders would be chosen based on objective, long-term policies rather than emotional manipulation.
The reinforcement-learning algorithms that drive these feeds are fundamentally unnatural. They represent a massive, uncontrolled social experiment on humanity—one that is far too powerful for our psychological reward systems to handle.
What needs to happen is education. Education on how the attention economy works. People must learn to resist becoming social media junkies, because every hour surrendered to these platforms reinforces the very systems that distort public discourse. When we lose control over our attention, we don’t just harm ourselves—we actively worsen the societal conditions that enable manipulation, polarization, and poor political leadership.
> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds,
The age groups who spend the most time on TikTok and Instagram are the least likely to have voted for this administration.
There were populist demagogues getting elected before social media and cell phones, too. This isn’t a modern thing.
I know everyone wants to use this moment in politics to blame their own pet peeves, but blaming social media junkies for this election just isn’t consistent.
I dont hink doom scrollers are the root cause, but I belive in that we would have a better political debate and better successful politicians if people who spend a lot of time in feeds were aware of the income they generate for platform companies, and how this fuels the attention economy, which in turn amplifies these problems. One of them being: it incentivizes politicians to be populistic in order to be heard through the noise and be successful.
> 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.
We had the same problems before social media. It's not the cause, just a symptom.
> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change.
Many people willingly choose the distraction, they just don't want to bother with politics and stuff. Social Media is just today's most popular distraction at the moment. And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.
> We had the same problems before social media. It's not the cause, just a symptom.
It may not be the cause, but I think it's also not quite just a symptom. To me it looks like social media has taken an existing problem and made it worse, for all the reasons the parent comment describes, and then some.
> And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.
Also true, but I'm not sure this is prevalent or impactful enough for it to avoid being a net-negative. Also don't forget about the motivation & presentation of the platforms - they also have some outcomes they can optimize for, and I think there's a strong case to be made that they're optimizing for attention theft.
I disagree completely. It is very obviously LLM-written, and I would much rather read grammatically poor English than LLM-written text, which has a dystopian vibe and just makes me depressed.
I always have been using em-dashes with specific spacing:
1. replacing parentheses —given that the em-dash in pairs for me mark more-relevant-to-the-main content than a parenthesized expression would— so I use the same spacing as `()`
2. replacing colon or just finishing the sentence with a subsentence— so the spacing goes like for a colon.
Probably unfounded grammatically and against any style guides, but this spacing makes sense to me.
The main reason for populism is that the incumbent governments do a consistently poor job satisfying their constituents' preferences and interests, so people get desperate to find something / someone different that might work better. Always has been, always will be, social media or not.
We haven't invented a governance structure yet that would be immune to this, although some are better than others. I'm sure the current social media algorithms are harmful as well. You can ban viral algorithms, but the hostile actors whose literal job it is to drive polarization / populism will just find other strategies to effectively deliver their message.
"Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education, not to mention the many limitations, taxes, and bans. I mention smoking as an obviously-bad-thing that everyone knows is bad. Education succeeded, and yet, here we are, still puffing poison. But you can also look already-polarized political topics. There's been no shortage of education on those topics either, but if that worked well enough, we wouldn't be decrying populism right now.
> "Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education
I think there’s a missed opportunity for media to make it explicit that by giving their time and attention to these platforms, people are directly generating profit. Way too many assume their involvement has no real effect, but it does. I suspect people would be far less willing to log in if it were clear that each session generates, on average, X dollars in revenue. It’s a business model most people still haven’t fully digested.
> Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks.
For that we would need a new funding model for journalism. Local journalism (i.e. local newspapers, radio and TV stations) used to be financed by classifieds and ads. Classifieds are long since gone off to the Internet and ads have been replaced by Google Maps plus Facebook, so there's no monetary stream - and as a result of that, there's barely anyone left holding local politicians and companies accountable. Yes, some places have "citizen journalists" and bloggers, but these usually do not have the funds to pay for legal teams and court proceedings, so they usually only target government stuff.
Something like taxpayer-paid media is way too easily corruptible by the government, just look at Hungary for the worst possible outcome. "Mandatory contribution" systems like the BBC or Germany's public broadcasters aren't that easily corruptible, but it still happens - just watch the shitshow every few years here in Germany when the contribution needs to be raised.
to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function.
No, it is surprising, as noted in the article, because basic economics suggests that suppliers will adjust pricing, and eat some of the tariff to keep their products competitive. Page 5:
This finding was initially surprising to some observers. Standard economic models suggest that the incidence of a tariff depends on the relative elasticities of supply and demand. If foreign exporters face highly elastic demand (meaning buyers can easily switch to alternatives), they might be expected to absorb part of the tariff to remain competitive.
What that view ignores is the opposite which is what happens if sellers can easily switch to new alternatives?
ie what happens if global demand exceeds supply and a lot of companies have never tried to find other markets because of the inertia required to do so - but if they are pushed by tariffs they find there are alternative customers out there.
As an example - Canada appear to replaced trading food for cars with the US, to food for cars with China.
that assumes that external suppliers were not already at their cheapest price point and that they were not competing with each other already
it also assumes that there are no other alternative markets to sell to or that supplier capacity is equally elastic; the US might be a high margin market to sell to, but if you only have a fixed amount of product to sell then it makes no sense to eat the high cost of a tariff to keep selling a low margin product when you can instead sell your product at a medium margin in europe
building out more supply for a product is often capital intensive if you want to make it at an economically efficient price point in these times; efficiencies of scale are hard to overcome and a rapid shift of economic policies makes anyone uncertain about future investment so it takes a very long time for these supply chains to rebalance, if they ever do
Yes, so turns out people with a basic grasp of how economies function can have different models of how things work. This a great paper, and important in that it shows who is paying the tariffs in the examples they looked at. What it still leaves unaddressed is the obvious prediction of increase in CPI not really showing up.
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 consistent way.
As a specific example, theoretical research in this area tends to make assumptions around the stationarity of margins that are obviously ludicrous in the context of reality in the US. It is quite easy to justify almost any policy with theoretical research in economics so people who have no understanding of economics will find evidence for whatever position they choose. Reality is quite different.
Great points. This paper is a static, partial-equilibrium analysis that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, which I suspect the NYT will happily run as gospel.
The most glaring, disqualifying omission is the disregard for FX adjustments. We have not seen the CNY/USD crash yet , but that is because of MASSIVE currency intervention from China to the tune of $200B+ per month: https://x.com/Brad_Setser/status/2012021712012145030
The other wonky thing is they call $200 billion in tariff revenue "a tax" and they also call it a "deadweight loss." Are the authors not the Keynesians I thought they were? At any rate, tariff revenue is not a new tax, but merely a shift in the tax base - since it is $200B that the government does not need to collect elsewhere.
Lastly the collapse of trade volumes from Brazil and India is not a bug it's a feature. Yes supply chains are sticky. The POINT of tariffs is to force supply chain decoupling and reshoring. To "unstuck" the supply chain. Does disruption come with temporary supply shocks? Of course.
The European export growth model is not working for Europe. They are not far behind the US in doing what we are attempting. Canada cozying up to China is not what they wanted for themselves, lol. Etc.
Below is the #1 paper, extraordinarily widely cited. They found that countries with significant market power systematically set higher tariffs on goods with inelastic supply, and in these cases the exporter lowers their price to absorb the tariff, improving the importer's terms of trade.
There is basically no overlap between the things that economists generally say are good (free trade, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, immigration, land value taxes, organ trade, congestion pricing, etc…) and the things that populists of either the left or right say are good (rent control, price controls, tariffs, wealth taxes, debt relief, minimum parking requirements, etc…).
Why would you (or anyone) be surprised that economically sound policies are not popular? They are not popular in the US. They are not popular in Europe. They’re not even popular on HN.
For reasons I don’t understand, almost everyone hates economics.
> but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function.
Exactly: tariffs are taxes in another guise. They only serve to create an (artificial) price advantage of local over imported goods for as long as they're levied.
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
I also can't fathom why the crowd (not just a HN subset) that was clamoring for tariffs thought it'd be anyone other than them shouldering the increase. Perhaps their influencers didn't spell it out for them?
Now everyone gets to pay more - and not just in the US.
> I also can't fathom why the crowd (not just a HN subset) that was clamoring for tariffs thought it'd be anyone other than them shouldering the increase. Perhaps their influencers didn't spell it out for them?
Now I'm neither in the US, American nor Democrat/Republican, but as far as I understand their argument, is that they know it means higher costs for those products for them, and it'll eventually lead to companies wanting to produce things within the border, and only after that is in place, will things actually get cheaper (and better?).
So I think for these people with that perspective, the idea is: everything cheap -> tariffs to make imports expensive > People buy less imports and companies start selling within the border > Eventually things get cheap.
Again, this is just me trying to understand their perspective.
Yep, I came down to a similar conclusion in my thinking, and assumed they wouldn't have thought of the cost of restarting local industry, or of importing foreign (tariffed) materials for the local industry to work with.
Thank you for offering an additional perspective. The article reads like the tariffs were a complete and total failure. You are saying it is too soon to tell, correct?
For many if not most of the affected imports, it would never ever make economical sense to try to rebuild a local industry from scratch, at least not without major subsidies. And as for local alternatives that already exist, they carry a premium higher than any tariff (because a local workforce likes to be paid living wages), even if magically scaled up to achieve some degree of economies of scale. Western economies are truly and irreversibly post-industrial.
This take depends on the munificence of the local retailers deciding all on their own (because there's no external pressure apart from other retailers in the same position) to lower the price of their goods (and therefore reduce their profit) once the tariffs have forced the foreign goods off the market.
I don't believe it for a second.
Here's something that has happened before though. During the American War of Treasonous Aggression, the southern states decided to impose tariffs on the export of cotton to the UK. That caused massive hardship in the UK in the short term as it made the goods that the cotton was a raw material for impossible to sell. UK jobs were lost, UK workers starved etc.
So the local UK manufacturing companies found markets to supply them elsewhere in the world. They set up the supply lines, they reached agreements, and life went on. UK jobs were gained again, UK workers stopped starving. Life was good.
When the American War of Treasonous Aggression was over, the southern states wanted to drop their tariffs and start supplying the UK again. It didn't happen - there was no need to return to an unreliable partner when everything was set up just fine and dandy as it was, and the US cotton was essentially unsellable. US jobs were lost, US workers starved etc. The cotton industry never recovered from that.
Tariffs are a "fuck you, make me" slap in the face. Do it to people you don't like, but if you do it to people who are supposed to be "allies" (obviously not allies in the above case, but the consequences here were just as real), the consequences can be ... quite concerning for the tariffers.
Tariffs/subsidies should be weaned off over time. Their success absolutely does not depend on "local retailers [why are you even talking about retailers when it is all about manufacturers?] deciding all on their own to lower their prices". The external competitors are still there and will just come back when tariffs are lowered, so domestic manufacturers are forced to become cost competitive.
The incidence result isn’t surprising, but incidence alone isn’t a full policy critique. Consumers bear most taxes in general: corporate, VAT, payroll, etc.
The real distinction is that tariffs are conditional. Currently, firms can avoid them by changing sourcing. That makes them more behavior-shaping than revenue maximizing.
Given that the U.S. never reversed the TCJA corporate cuts from 2020-2024, tariffs are one of the few active levers currently increasing the marginal cost of offshore supply chains.
The founders were skeptical of direct democracy because it assumes people have time and expertise they mostly don’t. People should not be voting based on their understanding of tariffs. It’s why we ended up with a republic.
But social media changes the equation entirely. It gives us the speed of direct democracy without any of the structure or responsibility. It pushes people to judge candidates issue-by-issue, often on topics they don’t understand well, while eroding the deliberative layers a republic is supposed to have.
The problem isn’t people or education — America didn’t get this far because Americans are any smarter or dumber than anyone else. It’s the design of the systems. The founding fathers built a system that has so far lasted almost 250 years.
You cannot expect people to change — safety protocols, procedures, govenments — it’s about the systems.
I’ll never be able to respect someone who voted for tariffs because they were upset about inflation. Five minutes on Google would have shown how dumb that was.
I don’t remember there being a big discussion before the election about Trump using tariffs as a giant stick to try to make the world do what he wants by punishing US citizens.
Yeah essentially this. In my mental model, tariffs give an advantage to domestic suppliers / penalize foreign suppliers, and thus encourage domestic production by making it more viable. And bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. has been a pretty big GOP selling point.
The implementation matters a lot. When fiscal policy is hand-wavy and unreliable, manufacturers can't risk huge domestic capital investment. They're trying to strategize on the order of decades, this administration is more so acting on the order of weeks.
The same thing as usual: people don't like how things are going, they demand change, but they're not specific, so the result is extreme, and then people demand change again, and on it goes. There's no great insight or rationale going on. People are just dumb animals in hats.
It's still a bit of a mystery to me TBH. Not that Americans are paying it, but where's the cash?
The headline suggests it was all passed into consumers. So why is inflation still so low? If you add 10-30% to prices (granted, of imports, not of houses, domestic food etc), you'd expect more.
If companies were eating it (which apparently they aren't) then their profitability should be down. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.
So..??? It's like that riddle with the three guys buying a pizza. Where did the money go?
Imports seeing large tariff changes aren't a particularly large part of the CPI basket, and domestic substitutes exist. Expected responses from US manufacturers putting their own prices up are lagged, and tempered by some of the consumer response being simply buying less stuff.
How can it be possible that consumers are paying 96% of tariffs that range from 25-100%. Yet inflation has only risen by 0.5 points? Consumption would have to be less than a fifth of what it was a year ago. And why haven’t there been such equally drastic price changes on shelves if whats functionally the entire cost is being passed to consumer?
Ask your question the other way round? How did Chinese companies absorb the cost of the 125% tariff, were they selling it at less than half price or giving it away for free?
Answer is they didn't: if the US buyer wanted it that badly they picked up the tab or otherwise they waited for the tariff to come down to 10% or went without. Also, very few goods in the US (probably none in the CPI representative basket of goods) are bought directly from Chinese vendors, they're bought from US retailers. Those US companies can eat the tariff cost if the exporter won't and they can't sell at a higher price. That obviously affects their margins, their sales and their hiring.
Yes exactly, if the exporter is not absorbing the cost, and the consumer is not absorbing the cost (for the most part), the importing company must be absorbing the bulk of the cost.
inflation is low because people are buying less; remember that inflation is calculated based on actual expenses (a "basket of goods" but that basket is adjusted based on how much people are actually spending); demand for the newest tv or plastic phone case is down; people are still buying the same amount of food and using the same amount of gas, neither of which are tariffed because of exceptions to the tariff rules
prices are up so people are buying less, it's just that simple; only a handful of companies have reported their Q4 christmas earnings but retailers' are already forecasted to be way below previous years'
Chinese exporters and the Beijing government absorb most US tariffs rather than passing them fully to American consumers.
Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick: “The model is clear: 10% tariffs or less are paid by the manufacturers, the distributors, the businesses,” he said. “The consumer doesn’t pay. The consumer doesn’t pay because the seller doesn’t want to raise prices, because if they could, they would, but they don’t want to sell less. So they eat it.”
I feel we should have an independent source by now if that was true. Thousands of Chinese suppliers all taking losses to keep market share seems unlikely. A government program would have been clearly shown too. I think it is more likely that goods are being labelled with different origins and being imported through preexisting treaties like NAFTA (I forgot the Trumpian name for his negotiated version), or that Economists are shameless modern tortoise shell baking shamans that we need to sacrifice to appease angry dead ancestors.
Who ultimately pays the tariffs is missing the forest for the trees, their primary function is to tax, and taxation virtually always reduces spending. Don't want to pay tariffs? Buy domestic. Tariffs are the single reason (or one of very few) that the US isn't flooded with BYD electric cars from China. China's dirt cheap labor could decimate the US auto industry, but for tariffs and trade regulation, but I repeat myself.
That’s an incredibly naive position that assumes there are domestic options available for most things, and that they would be cheaper than tariffed items.
> the US isn't flooded with BYD electric cars from China. China's dirt cheap labor could decimate the US auto industry,
What you're describing is called "dumping", and it's a strategy China has used to varying degrees of success in other markets in order to destabilize foreign industries. It could be seen as an act of war.
Chinese labor is not actually so cheap anymore, many other developing nations are significantly less expensive. But China's secret weapon is total control and coordination across industries. They use this to subsidize target industries for the export market. You've highlighted automakers, but they also target steel, aluminum, and others. To a casual observer it almost appears as if they were targeting industries that could be readily adapted to wartime production.
It isn't US specific and what goes into people's head is what propaganda wants it to be.
Economics tell people the clear impact, but it doesn't make the news. We get fed with whatever the political influencers decide to tell us. Did the brits expect the consequence of brexit? No but that's because they deemed whatever the news said to be unreliable on this topic. Which for once happened to be true.
Actually, it's pretty clear to those who have been paying attention that the main influence that swung the polls by about 4% from Remain to Leave in the last 2 days was a £10m advertising campaign on Facebook packed with lies, paid for by a Brexiteer who can't quite explain to the Electoral Commission where that money came from, but it did seem to just "appear" a few days after he allegedly met with the Russian ambassador to the UK.
I'd get out more, but my tinfoil hat doesn't like the rain.
I mean there were plenty of what would be considered intelligent people that laid out the exact consequences of brexit... problem is the masses don't seem to pay attention to well mannered intelligent people.
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
I don't think it's a simple answer. A couple things that likely contributed (I'm not an expert, just my opinion): there is an EXTRAORDINARY amount of propaganda being spread, whether people realize it or not, on and off the internet that gets consumed nearly 24/7. This happens on both sides of course, but think about some of the events leading up to the election. Musk bought twitter and quite literally turned it into a multi-billion dollar propaganda machine.
The general "drain the swamp attitude" that the administration parroted during the election (and first term) represented a change from how "traditional" politicians/government do things. People value that even if they don't understand/think about how it would affect them personally. This ultimately lead to demonizing the federal work force and mass random firings (in many cases having nothing to do with merit).
Trump also represented a push towards traditional values and national identity, which for some people was more important than whatever economic plan Trump had to improve things in the country. Other than tariffs, did he even have a plan? I don't know. But many people didn't/don't seem to care.
Outside the specious argument that other countries would pay, the other more serious argument was that tarrifs would promote the growth of domestic alternatives.
Yes it will hurt, they argued, but the long term effect will be a stronger and more independent domestic economy. And the pain is worth it for that end. There's plenty of evidence that what actually results are inferior products from domestic companies insulated from international competition, but that was the pitch.
There's also a large group in the base that voted for this who already had an ideological "buy local even if it costs more" philosophy, so to them the proposal was just to force everyone else to join their cause.
Thing is, whilst you can make that argument for carefully chosen tariffs in strategic industries (something basically every country including the US was already trying to do, for better and for worse), you don't get much domestic production realignment for arbitrarily large short term tariffs as a precursor to a "big beautiful deal" or punitive tariffs because other countries push back on your proposal to annex another country. Or indeed tariffs levied on the exports of uninhabited islands
In some cases, the Trump tariffs have actually been so poorly designed that US manufacturing has been hit, because the tariffs on the raw materials and parts are higher than the tariffs on importing finished products from third countries...
Tariffs could make sense economically, but even in that case, they would "hurt consumers", because that's the whole point - address the imbalance between consumption and production currently being made to add up with constantly increasing debt.
If you were going to do that though, it would be more like a 10-20% blanket tariff on all goods. No exceptions, no special deals, and you can't use tariffs as a negotiating tool. So that's not what's going on and the current approach doesn't make any sense economically
Or you can use tariffs in a highly targeted way to try defend certain domestic industries from foreign competition. But as is common with this administration, they're doing everything in the dumbest and least productive way possible.
Yep you're right, that would be another possible legitimate (sort of) use of tariffs. Make the case that (for example) steel production is a vital national interest which must be defended even if it results in higher steel prices.
Of course it will result in higher prices, that's the point, but also the part politicians aren't too keen to spell out
You misunderstand. Tariffs have always been in place like this. They are just expanded now. Enacted in 1988 via the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, the HTS replaced the older Tariff Schedules of the United States and took effect January 1, 1989. It aligns with the World Customs Organization's HS, adopted globally by over 200 countries. https://hts.usitc.gov/
First, people vote on a candidate, not a single issue. Many voted for Trump despite his tariffs stance rather than because of it.
Second, reducing consumer prices was not the goal of the tariffs. The primary goals were to encourage companies to move manufacturing to the US and to be used as leverage in negotiating other matters with foreign leaders.
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
See Brexit. As Michael Gove said, the people have had enough of experts; for a certain sort of person, not understanding things is a badge of pride, and they're more liable to trust people like Trump, who transparently do _not_ understand things, than _experts_.
Depends on your goals - what I see is it increases US government income to help reduce deficit ( without the political fall out from raising direct taxes ), and at the same time encouraging businesses to move manufacturing to the US to avoid tariffs.
And in terms of burden - the cost hits the poor the most - but if your a billionaire funder of US political parties that's the point.
For a non-US person the most worrying aspect of this is that it also helps make the US more self-sufficient which means it's better prepared to go to war - which is not really good news.
> to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function.
Trump and his entire administration admitted there would be short term pain, possibly a recession, but that it would be "worth it" to restructure the economy.
So the question is: how long does the pain last? And is the economy stronger when it's over (do we get over it)? It's been 9 months so far.
From my perspective the policy goals are very unclear since it seems like they're actively wielding tariffs both as a means to reorganize the economy and as a weapon to bully other countries. Mainly bullying. The intended effectiveness on our economy seems difficult to judge.
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
I know two people who voted for him.
Person one has voted Democrat her whole life. Has worked for the Democratic Party. Has a son who was a Democratic elected official. But she lives in Texas, and watches too much local news, and believed that murderous immigrants were pouring over the border, guns blazing, taking out innocent American citizens daily at the beach and grocery store. So she voted for him because she believed only he could stop this from happening.
Person two is a wealthy white boomer. His business already runs in America. He actually has an advanced degree in economics. He believed that the tariffs would only be used surgically by smart people to protect American business. He is not personally affected by any of the racist policies or any of the other shenanigans. So he voted for him because he liked the protectionist and tax cut policies.
He regrets his vote. I haven't spoken to her in months because she stopped talking to me when I kept show her that her "facts" were made up.
The election is a state at a moment in time. Before the election, to affect the state, propaganda machines target whatever is lower on the maslow hierarchy of needs for the voters - pesky tariffs are a tiny issue compared to that boogeyman that wants to target your children. Someone’s freedom is a pesky thing compared to that immigrant boogeyman going after your retirement savings. Once people have voted because they are scared for their life savings and their children, the elected can do whatever they want and target whomever they want with impunity for several years. Especially if they start building their own militia and threatening the judiciary.
This authoritarian model has proven very successful for anyone Putin and his aparatus has installed anywhere. Now it may be franchised even further.
It's depressingly funny too when you ask these people if they've ever been directly affected by said boogeyman and they'll say no, but the know someone that has. Meanwhile you can ask them things about healthcare, local government, and other matters that affect their daily life, and they'll swear the trans-immigrant-boogeyman de jour is has far more affect on their lives.
Where on the US ballot was there an option to vote for tariffs?
If I recall correctly, we vote for presidents, senators and the congress who have policy stances on a variety of issues. There are usually only two options, one of which stands for open borders, not enforcing laws, socialism and demonizing people who choose the other option on the ballot.
A large cohort of independents didn't vote for republicans, they voted AGAINST democrats.
Do check, since one hopes I erred in reading the chart.
The victory of Trump is mostly the same process that gave the UK Brexit.
Just people acting based on the information they are being provided. If the other side is filled with feckless buffoons, and every source of news you have is telling you the same thing, then what else will someone do?
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
The point when Trump was elected was to make americans buy american and to get international companies to move their production to the U.S.
In Sweden they did something similar when they thought people were buying too much cheap stuff directly from China instead of from the middlemen paying taxes. The solution was to add a tariff on cheap goods from China specifically.
I don't enough to know if it works, but it's not a new strategy. In Trumps current politics though it's used more as a bargaining tool and not something that's supposed to stimulate the economy, is anyone even claiming it is the goal?
Like you observed, no one with a grasp of economics thought exporters would absorb the cost of these tariffs. That includes myself, a person who supports tariffs. I don't think it should be necessary to explain why tariffs might be desirable, because they were not invented by idiots, but I will explain briefly.
Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened. I consider that a good thing. There will be pain while local manufacturing ramps up (or forever, if it never does) for products that have no domestic equivalent. That sucks, but sometimes things need to suck before they improve. Paying off the national debt, for example, is something I support, even if we have to slash a lot of useful spending for awhile. I think most rational Republicans are voting for these sorts of things despite knowing they will make things temporarily worse, in the hopes of an eventual better. The left tends to never do this, for they are very attuned to the immediate suffering their plans cause. The right tends to be less sensitive to the short term suffering their plans cause; the right thinks that the alternative, a slow decline, is worth the pain to avoid. Trump has bungled the implementation of the tariffs, but I still support their use in general.
Fundamentally it makes no sense to me to support a minimum wage for your countrymen, but also support them importing massive amounts of slave made goods. You are creating rules on the supply side that the demand side does not have to follow, which only harms your own domestic businesses. Your own country's businesses have to compete against slave labor while paying living wages; for most manufacturing this is just not possible. You are incentivizing off shoring, which harms your working class, who have to compete with subminimum wage workers. Workers rights must be paired with tariffs, or every additional worker right is a demerit on his hireability against foreign workers without those rights! If you want your country to produce anything, and to have a strong working class, you either remove minimum wage, or you implement tariffs. We cannot simultaneously support strong domestic workers rights and mass importation of sweatshop goods that were made without them. It hollows out the country.
Edit: I am rate limited though I would like to reply to some of my interlocutors. I will reply later.
First, there have been huge numbers of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. that Americans simply didn’t want to do, so adding more manufacturing jobs they also don’t want to do isn’t going to help the economy. It’s the proverbial, “Americans don’t want to screw tiny screws into iPhones.” situation.
Second, for there to be any prayer of the tariffs working to boost local production (whether staffed or automated), they both cannot be capricious nor can they be applied to the goods and services necessary to acquire and deploy in service of increasing that productive capacity. If the tariffs can be waved around randomly like a threat of grounding a child, then they work only as an instrument of short-term extortion, not as a mechanism to expand an economic base. If the goods and services required for expansion are tariffed, then there’s a giant margin and time-to-ROI disincentive to make the investment as well.
Third, there is absolutely no good reason to apply tariffs to goods and services for which you have no plausible domestic substitute. There’s no point in putting tariffs on bananas and coffee in the U.S. unless what you want is to basically put the equivalent of a “sin tax” on bananas and coffee because you’re weirdly morally opposed to people eating bananas and drinking coffee or something.
Fourth, tariffs don’t ever make domestic equivalents cheaper or more affordable for consumers relative to comparable foreign imports. They just drive the price of all available options up to or near the baseline cost of goods plus the tariff. In the absolute best case scenario where everything about tariffs works out as perfectly as possible, you’re just adding margin for producers.
Trying to be globally competitive economically by using tariffs makes no sense. Trying to improve domestic economic conditions by using tariffs makes no sense. It’s a ridiculously shallow, nonsensical approach to attempting to do either of those things even when they’re used carefully and responsibly, but they were never going to be used carefully and responsibly.
The point of them was always going to be to use them as a means of paying for indulgences and dispensations.
Though perhaps that’s a preferable policy than to re-shore sweatshops and child labor to the U.S. as you’re implicitly suggesting should be done?
I appreciate the moral stance behind your tariff support. I read it as a way to discourage slave labor (even abroad) and encourage decent wages/allowing people to live with dignitiy.
I can see how this stance can be justified for imports from countries who do not provide a meaningful minimum wage.
I do not see how this stance can be justified for tariffs on EU countries (where worker rights are strongly protected), especially when the basis for that tariff is to "punish" those countries for not wanting to change national borders against the will of the people inside those borders.
It's one thing to vote in support of politicians who want to use tariffs to reduce imports / increase the price of goods to support US manufacturing. It's quite another to vote for a politician who wields tariffs in inconsistent and arbitrary ways and claims that it won't increase prices.
Let's say it works and we're in the future where the manufacturing has returned to the US and you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day? Do you have faith the US has an edge in manufactoring automation and won't need these semi-slaves? Do you have faith the national manufacturing will ever reach the same prices on finished goods that the foreign manufacters were able to provide before the tariffs? I'm asking these questions sincerely as I don't see how this advances the US society in any way (unless you trust the US could have been doing a much better job than China and others in manufacturing consumer goods).
> ...you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day?
The observation was that the wage boost of a minimum wage can be undercut by importing cheap goods made with slave labor. Workers can't get hired, domestic manufacturers cannot afford to hire.
The point is not that snapping phones together is some aspirational career. The point is that a legally mandated wage floor is meaningless if domestic producers cannot hire at all because they are competing with goods made under conditions that would be illegal here.
If you support minimum wages and labor standards, you either accept trade barriers that enforce those standards at the border, or you accept offshoring as a structural feature that permanently shrinks the set of jobs available to low-skill workers. You cannot have both.
No one is arguing that people should be forced into factory work. The argument is that a living wage should be available to anyone willing to work, and that requires domestic production capacity. Whether those jobs are in manufacturing, logistics, or automated facilities is secondary. What matters is that the price system does not systematically reward labor exploitation abroad while penalizing it at home.
I'll respond with a question: why wouldn't you want a living wage available to anyone willing to work? One way to enable that might be to ramp up US manufacturing and production.
I see little to no sign that a living wage isn’t available to anyone willing to work and lots of signs that there are plenty of people who simply don’t want to work. They want a handout, not a wage.
Definitely support a living wage available to anyone willing to work.
However, as evidenced by the current situation, the US economy doesn't support manufacturing all types of consumer goods that it demands.
I understand the pressure points you're arguing for but I don't think that the US society will be in a better place once those are enforced.
If everybody willing to work doesn't have access to a job that pays a living wage, isn't that a different issue? Maybe the government could have educational programs so everybody has access to getting the education needed for jobs that pay a living wage (those not offshored to China and others) but I guess that's too much socialism for the US.
> Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened.
But what about the other side of the coin - that exports will now become more difficult, because of retaliatory tariffs? How does that help your domestic economy?
Trumps solution seems to be to try to bully other countries into accepting tariffs and not imposing tariffs on American goods. But how is this supposed to work? Quite apart from the appalling moral and fairness aspects of this strategy, trashing the economies of other countries is a bad idea, because you want other countries to be wealthy so they can buy stuff from you.
Free trade has built the modern Western world, and has already made the US the world's leading economic superpower. I can't even see what Trump is trying to achieve.
I think the right mostly doesn't believe climate change is a problem or manmade. If you could convince them that it was a real, fixable, harmful thing, I suspect the right would support strict green policy that would look much different than the green new deal. For example, there would be no "environmental justice" focus which is a big thing in the GND; it would probably just focus on reducing total emissions even if that harmed the middle class / poor disproportionately.
As a Brit who studied history, the parallels to 1930s Germany are too strong for comfort. So I would suggest reading up on that for some answers.
Although as the comparison hopefully makes clear, you worrying about tariffs is missing the point, it's more a question of basic democracy at this point. I'm also somewhat concerned about your (edit: as in the USs) new found lust for Lebensraum, because again, that went well last time.
As a German, I am generally cautious about drawing hasty parallels with the Holocaust, but I must admit: now that you mention it, the Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel probably began their work in the streets of the country in a similar way to ICE today.
"""
Sturmabteilung (SA)
The SA was formed in 1921 as the paramilitary fighting organization of the NSDAP and protected party events. After 1933, under Ernst Röhm, it carried out street violence against Jews, communists, and trade unions, grew to millions of members, but was crushed in 1934 in the Röhm Putsch.
Schutzstaffel (SS)
The SS started in 1925 as Hitler's elite bodyguard under Heinrich Himmler and emancipated itself from the SA. From 1934, it took over police duties, concentration camp guarding, and from 1936, the Gestapo, directing deportations and the Holocaust.
"""
It sends a chill down my spine when I think about this comparison. I recently heard about an ICE agent who tried to drag an indigenous woman out of her car and said to her, “You're next!”
> As a German, I am generally cautious about drawing hasty parallels with the Holocaust,
The drawings are not about the holocaust, but the fascism which has led to that point. The holocaust started nearly a decade after Hitler taking power. And I don't think anyone believes Trump or his puppet masters are seriously after an actual genocide; everything else and the victims they accept as "necessary" for their goals are the problem.
History can repeat itself, but never in the same cloths. Some details are always different.
Anti jew laws and violence started literally as he took power. They did not had mechanics of it down yet, but the intention and first attempts were present.
I'm not drawing parallels to the holocaust per se. I don't think anyone in Germany voted for the mustachioed one expecting that. They had various grievances and wanted a 'strong' leader. The voting against democracy is the issue, not the thing that was voted for. The holocaust is just a very good example of why you shouldn't throw your principles out to vote for a 'strong' leader who will improve 'your' life.
Back then, yes, many voted for holocaust. It did not had a name yet, but they wanted exactly that.
They also voted for military conquest, they celebrated start of the war. Including or even especially so young men seeking to prove their masculinity. They were not voting to just bring better conditions for themselves. They voted to bring glory and violent victories.
They believed themselves to be strong dominant men who will bring good times to the aryan races.
The 'final solution' hadn't been decided on, so no I don't think any Germans voted for that, were the Jews openly being vilified? Yes, but that's like equating ICE rounding up illegals, and Trump sending your neighbour to a death camp, because the imagined 'other' doesn't include your neighbour who technically is an other, but one of the good ones so will be fine.
For the rest, you're forgetting how humans work. Do you think the average MAGA voting is voting to destroy someone else? Or do you think they're voting to improve their lot? Voting for expansionism doesn't necessarily mean voting for world war. I'm British, it's very easy to compartmentalise invading a country, from developing a country, civilising, being a net good, etc, etc. What did the average USian think Afghanistan was going to be? Or Iraq? Do the USians who want Greenland imagine that's going to turn into WW3? Nuclear war?
The enemy are very rarely mustache twiddling baddies.
I think that it is you who is ignoring all of the following: how humans work, historical record of Germany right before and after 1933 election and also actually what MAGA is saying they want now.
Just for some background, jews were trying to emigrate away from jermany already before fairly violent elections of 1933. It was already bad, dangerous and getting worst. It was not just a rhetoric.
> Trump sending your neighbour to a death camp
It already happened, didnt it? The oppression is smaller then 1933 ... but this particular thing happened.
> Do you think the average MAGA voting is voting to destroy someone else?
Yes. They openly talk about it. And they openly talked about it.
> Or do you think they're voting to improve their lot?
Not much. They are willing to sacrifice own lot for their ideological goals. Per their own words. Also, their voting patterns are NOT consistent with someone who vote to improvw own lot. Their pattern is consistent with someone who vote by values - and value dominating and punishing lesser people.
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious
Many people were thinking Joe Biden was looking old... Until 2 months before the election when a faceless political elite replaced him with a candidate who had repeatedly lied about Joe Biden looking old. The American public might be stupid, but they don't like being treated as though they are stupid - which is exactly what the DNC did.
Those same economists warning about tariffs also warned it would lead to runaway skyrocketing inflation and quote "the mother of all recessions" [1] [2] [3], which objectively did not happen. The same economists were nowhere to be seen when prices doubled 2020-24 and the official inflation numbers were 13%.
Once again proving that economists are engaged in mere astrology.
You also frame the argument that the last administration was tariff opposed, after they issued a 10% blanket tariff on the US' largest trading partner and tariffed Canadian wood products, directly causing house prices to skyrocket during the pandemic. You will never consider those impacts, because you're engaged in a fundamentally political argument, not an economic one.
The US has 4% GDP growth and a 2.7% inflation run rate. Wage growth is exceeding inflation again. Data doesn't lie, but economists do. Routinely.
There’s a difference between predicting the degree of inflation (an output metric of the entire complex system) and predicting that the country imposing a tariff pays most of the tariff (almost the definition of the word tariff). And if you can’t see that obvious distinction, who’s the one engaged in a fundamentally political argument?
The titles have rolled. The prediction in Q1 last year was specifically that by this time, the US would be in a deep recession due to tariffs.
I can understand that most people do not actually stay with these forecasts. The story hits NBC, you are completely outraged about this forecast made by these economists, the thing never happens, NBC has moved onto next disaster coming round the corner, next outrage.
If you work in markets, you are confronted with the relentless inability of talking head economists to just say mildly rational things. It is constant, almost every year now we have this latest economic disaster by economists in the periphery of political parties...no-one pays attention to these people, they have tenure, they make money from cashing in their political contacts not through actual correct forecasts (and yes, they always say that the thing they predicted will definitely happen next year now).
Stopped clock is eventually right. But there was literally zero information in the insane claims made in Q1. If you did not see this immediately, don't pay attention to these forecasts.
That's a really nice comment but does not bear in any way on what I wrote. The Trump administration has now completed its first year. There are three to go.
I'm not unconvinced by the idea that businesses in the US dulled inflation by pulling forward stock purchases and stockpiling goods. But 9 months worth of goods? SMBs can't afford to do that. Large enterprises don't have the warehousing capacity to do that.
Could you imagine Amazon increasing their stock on hand by 30%? Maybe. Could you imagine them quadrupling their stock on hand? Seems unlikely.
Impacts should've shown up by now, most of the stockpiled goods would've been sold down.
I don't know, it seems like there has been a fair amount of reporting about closing or struggling SMBs and farms, and there's also the economy changing to make more and more of the spending come from upper income, which will be less price sensitive and the question of whether various things could have gone down in price otherwise.
The popular zeitgeist seems to reject the inflation numbers because of perceiving it to be higher, too.
I do agree it's probably not inventory, but the frequent changes to the policies may also be part of it too.
Astrology is probably far more apt than you might think, because most don't know the history of astrology. For centuries it was taught as a scholarly proper and real 'science.' Think of something like e.g. modern psychology. Various fields like social psychology have something like a 20% replication rate among top journals which means the entire field is pretty dodgy, but plenty of people keep on repeating the latest headlines, which even end up shared on here fairly frequently, and treating it like any other science.
Astrology only really fell out of fashion due to a perfect storm of a bunch of different factors. The Church defacto banned aspects of it that implied external forces driving human behavior as that would contradict free will, and that happened just about the Renaissance was kicking off and all sorts of new astronomical discoveries led to no greater precision in astrological predictions, along with a more broadly skeptical shift in society, which gradually left it relegated to where it remains to this day.
"My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth." - Carl Jung to Sigmund Freud, 1911
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It's a great example of how what is deemed proper and scientific at one point in time is still heavily influenced by things that, in the future, will be considered 'obviously' nonsense. Even in far more modern times, it wasn't long ago that lobotomization was considered an appropriate psychological treatment. No less than JFK's sister [1] was lobotomized as a 'cure' for her irritability.
Right, but what people miss is that some people (usually not academic economists) are able to predict the economy with good levels of accuracy. It is not hard, there is a ton of data, the problem is that you have to drop your own personal interest in politics...for 99.99% of people feeling politically validated is more important than being right on the economy.
Isn't there reams of data on weather patterns too? I thought that like the weather, economic systems are fundamentally chaotic and thus demonstrably unpredictable. There's a whole field of math where we can create these mathematical models that simulate chaos and are fundamentally unpredictable. I was under the impression that Economics falls under the purview of this mathematical theory in terms of unpredictability.
If I may ask, who are the people that do these predictions? What is there methodology and how do you know it's not luck?
This is incredibly wrong and untrue. He promised a $2000 check to every American as a payoff from tariffs during election year and balance the budget at the same time. His chief economic advisor wrote a book on using tariffs to wage war on China and bring manufacturing to USA. He has talked about using tariffs as tool for decades. He just promises so many things, even contradictory things, that it might be hard to keep track of.
Oh ok I didn't follow it that closely of course but that part didn't make it into the news here. He did complain about the trade imbalance but not specifically tariffs.
Ps: there isn't really a trade imbalance if you take services into accounts but Trump calculated them only on goods as if that makes sense
I don't think that would have resonated with his followers at all though.
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
I’m adamantly against all forms of illegal immigration. There are plenty of people around the world that want to come here and are willing to wait in line. I’m perfectly fine with the intentions and methods of the current administration.
I’m in favor of doing whatever we can to increase our manufacturing base for the future. I’m perfectly fine with paying more for imported goods that I don’t actually buy anyway. Paying 95% for crap from China that I have no intention of purchasing does not impact me.
I hate all taxes and do not consider it charitable to spend other people’s money. Taxes are a necessity as we need to fund government functions. But it is those functions that should be limited. Because government is generally terrible at most of them.
> I'm adamantly against all forms of illegal immigration
And Trump did what, exactly, make something already illegal even more illegal? And now that you are ruled by a de facto fascist with the rule of law only applicable to his enemies, how is the payoff? On the upside, illegal immigration is no longer a primary concern, I guess.
> I hate all taxes [...] because government is generally terrible
Better to let everything be run by cartels instead, surely they will have your best interests at heart. There's not a single example of a functional and effective government out there, so why even try?
I'm not American but tariffs might be a way to "make America great again" because it makes it harder to trade with other countries. This means that it makes it relatively easier than before, to trade within the USA.
Another effect is that it serves as a tax. Easy for me to say but I think Americans aren't taxed enough.
What I find so astonishing about this recent US "debate" is that I was taught in my German high school during the 1980s in a discipline called "Erdkunde" that the US is transitioning from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy that would be vastly superior to the classical manufacturing-based approach and that Germany would need to make this transition, too, if we wanted to remain globally competitive.
I don't want to glorify German high schools but I find it hard to believe that those school books were so wrong that 40 years later it would make sense to return to a manufacturing-oriented economy.
I don't "like" taxes I just think that people are more generous when they are obliged to be. It won't make them generous on top of the taxes but at least they'll pay the damn taxes.
I live in France where the taxes are much higher than in the US. It's annoying but there are clearly some advantages and we are adapted to a more humble lifestyle, which is fine.
Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
Tariffs are a mid-long term strategy to encourage onshoring business, for reasons including military, national security, and political influence on foreign powers.
This is a complicated topic involving the global economy and evolving intercountry landscape. All these slam dunk takes are incomplete to the point of being wrong - and inflammatory.
The use of tariffs as a mid-long strategy, in my view, would require a stable, long-term communication that the US government will implement careful, strategic tariffs alongside incentives to strengthen chosen domestic industries where they believe a domestic alternative is feasible. We haven't seen anything even close to that at any point in this tariff rollercoaster - tariffs for products that cannot be produced at scale domestically (coffee, bananas), tariffs for grudges, tariffs that only exist for a week, tariffs that are written post-hoc after a Truth post to fit what the president said. There's an argument to be made for domestic protectionism, but the people currently at the levers are not serious policy-minded folks.
Because it's a layer too rudimentary. You also don't see people commentating that "taxation is when the government takes a cut of a transaction or of property."
The only people who need to back up to "industrial policy requires consistency and transparency" are those who are either incapable of or willfully deciding not to understand what's going on around them.
We never accurately measured effect of pedal on the gas trade with China caused with WTO admission nor even NAFTA, the no on ramp was huge shock that didn’t show up in traditional measures. So trying to go full gas reverse with no real strategy is almost mindless.
This is the real problem with the US tariffs. There is no strategy and no confidence from businesses that their investments will pay off. China can do it because everyone knows that the CCP will stick to their plan but Trump changes his mind every hour and no policy can ever last more than an election cycle.
There were many explanations given by the administration to justify the tariffs. One of them was that it would improve domestic manufacturing; another was that it would improve national security. The tariffs are (so far) not advancing either goal. Tech is getting so many tariff carve-outs that I am suspicious they ever will.
Yes, and also tariffs are a strategy to appeal to nationalists. This group is fine making the tradeoff of a worse economy if it means putting your nation's people first
Many people in Trumpistan do believe tariffs magically make the US economy better.
Then there are the sanewashers who try to act like there is a grand strategy behind taxing uhhh... bathroom vanities... then removing the tax a few months later.
Both are wrong, just different flavors and with different moral and intellectual culpability for being wrong (the latter are worse).
That argument seems completely nullified by the fact that the president unilaterally changes his mind on tariffs every other day and setting up a manufacturing basis can take 10+ years.
Seems safer for many business to just continue to operate outside of the US and get a more consistent business relationship with every other country in the world.
My aunt is a republican lobbyist. She is also a drunk. This means that she gets drunk and texts my family her unfiltered thoughts all the time.
She absolutely thinks that tariffs magically make the US economy better in a very short time period. She thinks that the governments of the countries that she hates are paying them and that the tariffs are solving the deficit problem. She thinks that the number of manufacturing jobs in the US has skyrocketed.
> Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
This is a person who is deeply involved in the mechanics of writing legislation supported by GOP legislators. I do not believe that she is uniquely dumb amongst right wingers who have access to the levers of power.
> Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
> “She is a liar. She makes up crap … I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
> Vance said in late August that as a result of tariffs Trump imposed during his presidency, “prices went down for American citizens.”
Oh dear. There is zero chance there was anything resembling this sort of semi-plausible logic behind the tarrifs. What you said above is sane washing invented by people who operate on logic, trying to find some reason-based logic. No such logic exists. It's all insanity, sadism and tribal performance.
Its an interesting point you end up raising - does it still count as a strategy even if you are doing something patently impossible given the knowledge and intelligence at your disposal?
If someone decided to come up with a strategy to do something fanciful, like find the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow to solve their debt problems, would it really be worthy enough to be called a strategy?
You're not wrong, but at the same time, any discussion around this subject that remotely resembles a truth bombshell promptly gets flagged, so the only way you're going to see anything about this subject is if it states the obvious in the most bland way possible.
This means that to the subset of HN crowd that don't have alternate sources of political news, this indeed looks like a bombshell.
There's an entire world to trade with. If the Americans choose to shoot themselves in the foot, we won't be the ones paying for the bandage.
Also, it's deeply naïve to assume tariffed countries would absorb the cost. Why would they? It's like going into a shop and asking for a discount because you just took out a loan. Why would the shop give you a discount for something you inflicted on yourself? And what makes you think other customers wouldn't ask for the same discount?
Also see recent trade deal between Canada and China. And of course Canada and the EU have a trade deal. And Merz was visiting India recently so there are also trade deals between India and the EU coming. In short, everybody is trading with everybody.
The US might have an easy to choice to make after Trump. Regardless of who takes over. Simply roll back tariffs and instantly boost the economy. The protection aspect of tariffs will probably have proven to be mostly counter productive by then.
At least I don't see the US car industry doing any better when it can't export. Coal probably won't ever recover from being obsolete, etc. I think this mostly won't be controversial a few years down the line.
I bought a mini PC today. On the US website, it goes for $460, on the German website it goes for 360 euros or $420. But that price includes 20% tax so its actually $335.
Prices for the same product are about 37.5% higher in the US. It's nuts and the reverse of how it used to be not long ago.
I was intrigued by what you have said, because I have also bought an ASUS NUC mini-PC today, in Europe.
I paid EUR 510, which means $593. This is with all taxes included, so the price without tax would be about $490.
I have searched now the ASUS mini-PC on Newegg, and its cost is $679, around +38.5% more expensive.
This is wild, because indeed, until recently the price of electronics devices was significantly lower in USA in comparison with Europe, while now it is the reverse.
This is not a "Made in China" mini-PC, which might have been affected by worse tariffs.
Moreover, I have equipped the mini-PC with 32 GB DDR5 & 1 TB SSD, while cursing the more than triple price of DDR5 compared with last summer, so that now the DRAM has been more than a third of the price of the complete computer.
This configuration has cost me the equivalent of slightly less than $900, without taxes. The same configuration has a price on Newegg of almost $1200.
Few thoughts/observations on Tariff impacts now that we have a decent amount of time/data to look at:
Suppliers in China are dropping prices to offset the tariff impact - this is what I see in my direct industry and also in many adjacent ones. This is benefitting other countries that don't have Tariffs on Chinese goods since they can buy cheaper as well. I suspect this is a significant factor in the GBP/EUR strengthening in relation to USD. There was a point where there was such a pronounced impact to imported goods that the cost of shipping a container from China to US went from ~$3500 to <$1500 pre/post Tariff.
Large manufacturers (automotive certainly, but also raw materials production and component production) are actually moving facilities to the US, which was one of the intended effects.
US manufacturers are enjoying some price relief as landed costs of chinese-produced goods are increasing. Hard to quantify what this means but the frustrating part is that they are not reducing their prices just enjoying higher margins.
Countries outside the Tariff zone are enjoying more trade - Canada is a very real example of this policy backfiring - they just walked back the Chinese Automotive Tariffs in exchange for relief on agricultural reciprocal tariffs. Mexico is entering into similar agreements with non-US trade partners. Some products are releasing in non-US markets first and at lower costs than they are in the US.
US-sourced chipmaking is accelerating - Intel's new fabs are probably the most prominent example of this (albeit they are slow to pick up volume - I expect this will shift with TSMC rationing production to brands like Apple and Qualcomm).
I think the increase in cost to consumers is painful and that the current Tariff rates are excessive + there is a lot of "cheating" where Chinese suppliers are declaring lower cost of goods on import to reduce the landed cost of Tariffed goods - there doesn't appear to be enough resources to police this policy fully.
All in all an interesting economic experiment and it will certainly take years for any of these realities to have a measurable positive impact domestically.
I suspect tens of millions of Americans believe whatever they are told by their trusted "news" source. My only basis is anecdotal though, a dozen or so "maga/trump no matter what" family members and people I grew up with are mostly believing the tariffs are something other countries are paying the US.
FOX News, after their scandal with Dominion, should have been broken down or even shutdown.
They deliberately disinformed the public, there is blatant evidence that the news anchors were aware that they were lying. Not just bending facts a little or opining, but knowingly and purposefully lying.
The pretext of freedom of expression, and more narrowly freedom of press should not *continue* to apply to businesses/individuals which are found liable/guilty of such destructive behavior for the society they operate in.
The same should apply to people like Alex Jones, you had your chance to use freedom and you have wasted it, move on to another profession.
Can you stretch your imagination to a scenario in which a hostile administration, eager to shut down critical reporting, might declare that various outlets are engaging in fake news and must thus be shut down? Let's be glad a precedent wasn't set.
While I do agree with you (and unlike the other reply, I want to acknowledge that this bad-faith kind of thing happened with Louisiana declaring law enforcement a protected class), my hope was that this would have happened via Dominion's civil lawsuit, which could have been structured to name anchors & reporters individually as well as the larger Fox News organization.
I can, and I've specifically said "guilty/liable", meaning that people will go to the highest court available to them to defend their rights. If in the last instance they are still found guilty/liable, they should suffer the consequences I've mentioned. These legal decisions, by multiple courts/juries, if you can't trust them anymore you have already lost in terms of democracy/republic.
I still believe the SCOTUS is trying to uphold the principles in the Constitution, for now. And there are already limits on what one can say in public, yelling fire in a theater when there's no fire is not far from what FOX is doing. Lying at this scale to cause panic based on such lies has demonstrable deleterious effects on society. The effect is delayed due to the scale of the target groups, but the principle is the same and courts/juries are able to observe this when it happens.
"Yelling fire in a theater" was the reasoning used to shut down anti-war protesters 100 years ago and, IIRC, charge them with sedition. It's not a good example.
If you are alluding the Holmes’ judgement, he spoke not simply about free speech, but about actions in service to a market place of ideas.
His argument was in defense of the process to uncover truth.
Given that Fox has clearly said they cannot be taken seriously, and that they were from inception created to muddy the waters and wage war for political gain, they are an enemy to the process that was envisioned back in that era.
If someone is demonstrably selling false goods, and multiple sources have evidenced this, as has a court of law, should that all be dismissed because every single individual in America has not taken the time to look at the evidence?
At some point you abdicate roles and responsibilities to others, so that they can do the job of ensuring that a fair debate takes place.
Oh the Murdoch Empire is a more than deft hand at escaping any meaningful comeuppance. As I recall, in a court case brought against them by Prince Harry, they just folded and accepted they were guilty.
I believe that admission was because ending the trial and eating the judgement, was less damaging than allowing the light of discovery and trial ingress into their workings.
“people who disagree with me must do it because they are stupid and/or manipulated”
It’s true on its surface - most people don’t know about economics, across all political spectrums, and so rely on leaders (which I thought is what liberalism advocates for?).
It’s not a helpful model if you want to understand what’s going on. So then the interesting parts to explore are the reasons they want to believe it, and the reasons given by the educated economists who also support the position
Let's keep in mind that a tariff is, by definition, a tax that is paid by an importer to their own government for importing some good.
> the educated economists who also support the position
> the tariffs are something other countries are paying the US
I'm quite sure the provided definition of a tariff is accurate. Given that, who are these economists and what are the reasons they give for supporting this belief that the exporters (other countries) pay the tariff?
My position is that nobody educated in economics would believe that a tariff is something exporters from other countries pay the government of the importer's country.
Funny how the in-depth analysis of motivations is strictly in one direction, ratcheting the Overton window forever rightward.
On one hand we had mountains of articles about "economic anxiety" & "The MAGA next door" in 2016. On the flip side is "Fuck your feelings" and never a "humanizing, fish out of water" longform article about the life of a Democratic Socialist in a small Texas town after Biden 2020.
Econ 101 normally covers tax incidence (which side bears the burden of a tax). It has a lot to do with elasticity of both demand and supply. If foreign exporters can easily shift to other markets or adjust production (elastic supply), they'll pass most of the tariff cost to consumers through higher prices. If American consumers have few substitute products (inelastic demand), they'll end up absorbing most of the cost. Of course if the opposite is true, the sellers end up eating the tariff.
The reality is that tariffs typically get passed through to consumers as higher prices, not absorbed by exporters. The exact split depends on how flexible each side can be, but empirical evidence shows consumers usually bear most of the burden.
The granularity of the targeting seems like a separate issue (I could be wrong though). The tariff should shift people to buying from non-tariffed suppliers. Targeted means it could shift people to importing from other counties. Broad should shift people to buy domestic, right?
I mean, just to be clear, I think the tariffs are a bad plan. But targeted vs broad seems more like an implementation detail… the big picture plan is the bad part!
What do you mean by "pass the cost"? Exporters do not pay tariffs, importers do. The exporter doesn't give a shit because it doesn't affect them at all.
This is one of the most fundamental misunderstandings of how tariffs work in the first place. The entity that's picking up the cargo at the port is who literally has to pay CBP for them to release the goods. The middleman (say, Walmart) may pass the cost to customers or whatever, but tariffs are entirely inconsequential and irrelevant to foreign exporters. There's no way to send a bill to a foreign entity demanding a tax for some goods that have arrived at a port, after all.
The exporters care because tariffs cause the demand curve for their products to shift to the left. As a result, the exporter can either choose to lower prices or sell fewer items. If they choose to lower prices, then that means the cost of the tariffs has “passed onto them.”
> The exporter doesn't give a shit because it doesn't affect them at all.
Well that’s not true. Otherwise you are going to have to explain why so many outside the USA were upset with tariffs, and why there were retaliatory ones applied on the inverse.
I make no other claim that your quoted assertion is wrong.
It relies on understanding that the person paying the bill for the tariff is not necessarily the person that takes the economic hit. If you read the second half of the sentence you quoted it hints at that. The exporter does "give a shit", because all other things being equal, the net cost of the product has gone up, which will reduce demand (and therefore sales at a given price point) in any market that has the slightest bit of elasticity, which is just about every market.
Simplified: a seller can lower their price by the amount of the tariff. The buyer is responsible for paying the tariff bill, but the seller is the one eating the cost at the end of the day, it is "passed" to the seller.
Alternatively, the seller can refuse to budge on price. The seller makes the same amount per unit, and the buyer gets the privilege of paying the tariff while not receiving any sort of break on the price. The entire cost of the tariff is "passed" to the buyer.
It doesn’t help that the person who imposed these tariffs was indeed claiming the cost would be borne by foreign countries, and the political party in power is repeating the claim ad nauseam on every channel imaginable. It’s a misleading claim, but OTOH the point of making imports more expensive for Americans is to push them to prefer US made products, and if that happens and imports go down then at some level it’s true that tariffs cost other countries. The biggest most important question is whether that’s actually happening - whether US consumers are switching to US-made brands - whether the US even makes alternatives to most of the imports we’re now taxing - whether demand for imports is dropping - or whether the politicians are just collecting a lot more tax money and raising the cost of living.
One big problem with arguing about this is that it will take many years for the effects of the tariffs to settle. If there’s new opportunity for local competition of goods that we’ve been importing, new companies can’t form and meet that demand over night, it will take longer than the president has to see that succeed, which certainly hasn’t stopped him from claiming it already has.
That was one claim about their purpose among many others. But it doesn’t make sense either. Will America start growing coffee? Will we suddenly develop capacity for all of the raw materials and processing we require to make everything in-house?
Tariffs rates by this administration are capricious and punitive, not targeted and strategic.
That’s certainly possible, but by no means guaranteed, right? If someone selling goods to the US is selling out (supply-limited) the rest of the global market might absorb the US share. But one might wonder if that was the case, why would they be selling to the US in the first place. I would, by default, assume that losing the US market reduces demand for any given non-US export, and the amount that it hurts depends on how big the US market was compared to the non-US market.
This isn’t the first time tariffs have been used in a country to push purchasing preferences. The problem is that it hurts them and it hurts us, it’s just a net economic drain and doesn’t effectively achieve the local economic boost that some want it to, especially in today’s global economy where trade has become so integral that we no longer produce many of the products we buy, and therefore tariffs can’t fix. “There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff
No, it isn’t that simple. Who bears the most weight depends on the elasticity of the curve on each side. This is confirming demand is more inelastic, which causes it to bear the burden, but could have been the other way around.
Producer has minimal margins and cannot lower their price. Consumer, at least in the immediate future, has more money to spend. Never were the curves going to be any different in this case. Only in the case of a poorer country placing tariffs on a wealthier country with higher margins, would this be any different than the blindingly obvious outcome here.
The only fruit of this is real economic pain for the American consumer. But that was likely the goal, so mission accomplished I guess.
An Asian factory of imperial rulers and scales might have had to bear the burden because they have only the USA to sell to. However if they have products that they can sell to all the world and they manage to, why lower the prices to the USA instead of selling more to other markets?
Countries geographically closer to the USA might reason differently because close countries usually trade more and they have more to lose. But even in this case, if a Mexican or Canadian company can find other markets or discovers that it can keep selling at the same price, they will not bear any of the burden of the tariffs.
Russian like sanctions were applied to Italy about 100 years ago because of colonial wars in Africa. Despite the sanctions lasted only 6 months, Italy discovered that they ended up trading less with the usual partners and more with others. Tariffs are somewhat similar to sanctions as they apply friction to trading.
What does elasticity matter if you no longer make a profit?
Isn't the only thing that could matter - apart from strategic considerations of financing a loss for a time - if the margins are big enough? Who wants to pay for people to take their products below the full cost of making them, apart from some investor-financed hype startups?
I understood part of the point of the tariffs as encouraging on-shore production of some items by increasing the price of their imported counterparts.
Such protectionist practices were used by China to bootstrap their own automobile industry, before they became competitive in the global market. Of course, China had surplus capacity of untapped cheap labor, which America does not.
Barring an evolution in automated manufacturing, or an overhaul of regulatory policy, I'm pessimistic it's possible to accomplish the same in the US. But, in principle, tariffs have a valid place in supporting an emerging local industry.
This has been my understanding for e.g. European chips as well:
First you subsidize and support the creation of currently not commercially viable chip fabs on-shore. Literally handing companies money under some obligation into the future.
Eventually the on-shore chips are produced, but they have higher total cost of ownership for the users: Logistics may be cheaper due to less distance, or more expensive because they are not well-trodden paths yet. Production costs like labor, water, energy could be higher. And the chips could just have higher failure rate, because problems in the new processes need to be kinked out.
But to get local consumers to switch to these switches, one applies tariffs to other sources of chips so the on-shore chips become more competitive artificially, until they become actually cheaper and competitive.
The way it is threatened here isn't in the use case of tariffs at all from my limited understanding.
I don’t think the evidence supports this. This was the marketing of tarifs. But the reality is rates have been changed rapidly, added, dropped - this is just leverage Trump is using to exert his will. Whether it is Greenland, defense spending by NATO, whims of narcissism, or kickback deal making (like NVIDIA or Intel). There is little evidence this policy is designed to increase US manufacturing.
I agree in the case of the US, which I chalk up partially to investors knowing the US tariffs are both arbitrary and transitory. Even if the Trump administration were consistent, there's the possibility that the next president will undo them and corporations need more than a four-year guarantee before making investments.
I'm mostly responding to the position that tariffs have no place in economic policy, when we've seen them used successfully in other countries. Should Congress pass a bill legislating tariffs, then I could see them having more of the desired effect, though as I said I'd still be pessimistic without broader changes.
Agreed, and the intention here isn't to block any particular policy outcome, it's to ask that you narrowly scope your tools to what can work, instead of being the 20th failed attempt at price controls or tariffs. (And Econ 101 will teach you when tariffs can make sense, too)
I was an econ major, and a lot of the lower level courses were required for business majors.
It was genuinely shocking how many people from the latter group just could not understand the absolute basics of supply curves and demand curves.
The upside is that I was able to help them understand it by offering tutoring, where I was in limited supply, and there was endless demand for my services!
Studies consistently find about 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, depending on what is meant by functionally illiterate. Typically this means that they can read, but frequently cannot grasp the meaning of what they read.
The US is actually pretty illiterate compared to peer countries.
There's been this phrase 'passing costs off to the consumer' that I've heard since I was a kid, used as some kind of indictment against companies raising prices when their costs go up.
Even as a kid I was confused. Where else is the money going to come from?
There are circumstances where much of the burden of increased production costs is borne by the producer. When demand is very elastic (consumers are price sensitive, or there are many good substitutes), and supply is inelastic (its hard to change the level of output), the suppliers will eat the cost.
Which would be a nice balance to the way productivity has rocketed since the late 70s, and has mostly flowed to the top 1%.
Ultimately - and predictably - wealth hoarding becomes economic self-harm. You need distributed prosperity if you want diverse growth and economic and social stability.
An exporter could in theory reduce prices specifically for the US market to avoid sell volume decline (which happens when consumers face higher prices because of tariffs). But in most cases they cannot because profit margins are no high enough to begin with.
Because people vote for the name on the ticket and not the dude he planned to put in charge of the economy who, economically speaking, has always been a madman on a corner soapbox ranting that every other economist doesn’t understand the effects of tariffs. He’s great.
I guess one explanation of the delusion would be "surely if exporter product is more expensive they will have to lower price to compete with locally made product, and if they do not the local equivalent will just sell better".
Doesn't really work when main reason for product existence on market is either "no equivalent" or "this particular subgroup is only imported" (say given specifically tasting cheese).
even if we take the number presented as fact (i'm not sure we should), the articles claim is that:
> "Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden-the remaining 96% is passed through to US buyers."
so yeah, the exporter does pay some burden. it's not binary. indeed, tariff exports can be designed in a way to dial either direction. certainly, we could dial foreign exporters burden to 0% – and we could dial it back up to 4% (where we're currently at). but, 4% likely isn't a hard ceiling, either. Of course, the 4% number is an aggregate, not the blanket value across indidual goods (or services).
finally, the effect of tariffs is argued to be wealth transfer to the US Treasury. this is worth thinking harder about. but also, exports may change from whom goods are purchased. thus, it's a diplomatic policy, as well.
This is a whole lot of words with no meaning. Yes 4% is a number that can go up or down, cool? 4% is absolutely meaningless compared to to what was shouted loudly about how other countries would be paying these.
Does it change who customers buy food from? No, because everyone increases their prices regardless of if they’re impacted by tariffs or not.
The 2018 washing machine tariffs are a clear cut example of why tariffs are a garbage strategy.
Price Pass-Through: Studies found that 100% of the tariff cost was passed through to consumers, resulting in an estimated $1.5 billion in additional costs to American families in the first year.
The "Unexpected" Dryer Rise: Although tariffs only applied to washers, the price of dryers (a complementary good often sold with washers) also rose by an equivalent amount—approximately $92 per unit—as manufacturers increased prices on laundry pairs.
Job Creation Cost: While the tariffs helped domestic manufacturers like Whirlpool, LG, and Samsung shift production to the U.S. and create about 1,800 new jobs, researchers estimated that consumers paid over $800,000 annually for each job created.
Outcome: The tariffs resulted in a 49% decline in imports from 2017 to 2019. They expired in February 2023, after which washer prices decreased.
It wasn't a whole lot of words with no meaning, it was a response to the parent comment.
> Isn't this literally economics 101? How did we ever even end up imagining that tariffs are somehow paid by the exporter??
My response was that it's not binary, but a mixed case. And, furthermore, from the perspective of an individual exporter, their export profile may change if goods and services are purchased from a different exporter.
E.g. if the same good may be cheaper without a 25% tariff, then you'd expect the incentive to pay less to have some effect.
The US Treasury would still get money, but the exporting country might change.
> finally, the effect of tariffs is argued to be wealth transfer to the US Treasury. this is worth thinking harder about. but also, exports may change from whom goods are purchased. thus, it's a diplomatic policy, as well.
Tariffs do hurt the exporter nonetheless, which I suspect is a goal in itself for Trump and some of his supporters. Agents aren't rational, this is eco 102.
American Conservatives explicitly admitted they are not part of the reality-based community (their words) back in 2004 [1]. In 2017 Kellyanne Conway offered "alternative facts" (her words). In a lawsuit, Fox News admitted that Tucker Carlson's commentary was not to be taken literally. Alex Jones similarly claimed in a lawsuit that his work is "performance art" and is playing a character like The Joker. [4]
It's constantly disappointing how the apparent intellectuals who frequent and operate HN will rally to that side out of libertarian convenience and out of annoyance and disgust at "wokism". And then will inevitably be shocked when everything goes sideways again. Hopefully the education will stick longer this time than it did after G.W.Bush.
It is, but there has been lots of resistance to this understanding. Part of why is repeated lies. Bessent just the other day was going on about how tariffs are the “signature” economic policy of the administration. This is a person who was highly trusted on economic topics, now supporting anything Trump does blindly. Trump keeps saying things like “tariffs brings us trillions”, which is obviously false but a lot of his base accepts it as the truth. One reason why this works is the base has been told that news media lies to them and that only a few people in social media can be trusted.
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 consumers. Essentially tariffs did not increase inflation in any meaningful sense which means that somebody else paid the bill - not consumers.
While consumers are paying for pretty much the entire tariff (according to the article), the volume what they are buying has "collapsed" (according to the article).
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.
This is a single Walmart and clearly dominated by outlier price swings. No, NPR didn’t make their own CPI. Surely there are other independent price baskets that actually attempt to do this, why choose this article, as interesting as it is?
> Event studies around discrete tariff shocks on Brazil (50%) and India (25–50%) confirm: export prices did not decline. Trade volumes collapsed instead.
I've heard this defence plenty from other Americans. & the campaign pushed "built in America" as a goal, so it seems likely the person in charge had this idea
Bob Woodward's book Fear: Trump in the White House made it pretty clear that Trump (in his first term) either did not understand how trade works between countries or did not care. At the time he was singularly focused on "trade deficits," especially the one between the US and South Korea, because on paper it seemed like the US was "losing" or "being taken advantage of" by South Korea. That was all he cared about, reducing that trade deficit so the US came out on top.
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.
It certainly was to anyone who has been paying attention. I would highly recommend that anyone who thinks the tariff strategy is irrational to read through Michael Kao's substack and his analysis of the administration's 2.0 playbook [1]. There's good news and bad news, but overall there's glimmers of hope.
How can one come to the conclusion that US consumers suffered from the US trade deficit with China? They’ve effectively received free stuff every single year, manufactured by Chinese workers, without paying them. I don’t get it.
Talking about competition between places with good labor standards and environmental regulation and places without those things is bullshit.
I would be 100% pro free trade between nations with identical labor rights and environmental protections, but that really isn't what free trade is about, is it?
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.
I found Vlad Vexler’s take interesting. Trump has a narcissistic personality disorder. Not a narcissistic trait that many elites have, but an actual disorder. He looks up to Putin and wants to bask in Putin’s glory to elevate himself.
is the acting against Russia and against American interest, in a way that helps Russian interests, of equivocal effect?
For example if I shoot Batman in the back when he's fighting The Joker (because Batman is a vigilante so that's illegal, gotta take him down), and later make a statement to the press after Joker has been sent to Arkham "You know I think Arkham is a good place for that guy, he got what he deserved", I have acted for and against The Joker's interest, which is a good cover for me as an agent of The Joker.
I have often seen Trump doing stuff that is counter Russia's interests, but stuff that seems extremely weak sauce in contrast to weakening Nato, as just one example. It is spycraft 101 that you give your assets some simple stuff they can do against you, to make them seem trustworthy.
There does seem to be indications that the actual tariffs collected seems far lower than the actual tariffs promised, likely just half of what was promised:
I remember the justification for Obama Care was by calling it a 'type of tax'. Which actually was the reason to negate the rights argument at the time, they were using to cancel it. The government is allowed to create 'taxes', and since it was a 'type of tax', it is allowed.
Specifically Congress. The President doesn’t have the right to create taxes which is one key difference here. The argument is whether Congress abdicated their power here and whether that’s something they can do in the first place.
> The argument is whether Congress abdicated their power here and whether that’s something they can do in the first place.
It would seem that as elected representatives of the people (we are literally their boss), they can't do that without asking us first. The whole point of them existing is to give us power and limit the executive's power, not the opposite.
It's called the nondelegation doctrine, which forbids one branch of government from authorizing another branch of government to exercise its functions.
Because Article One vests "all legislative powers" to Congress, they cannot delegate legislative powers to the Executive and Judicial branches (because then not all legislative powers would be vested with Congress).
I think the opposition wanted to toss the entire ACA system calling it a tax. However, SCOTUS took a more piecemeal approach than the opposition wished and removed the bit they felt was a tax and left the ACA unaffected generally.
I don't think the opposition was using 'its a tax' as argument to cancel ACA, since the SC Ruling that saved ACA was made by saying congress is allowed to created taxes, and this was a 'type of tax'.
If calling it a tax saved it, that would then not be a good argument to get rid of it.
The 2017 TCJA removed the individual mandate. Presumably, that is what FrustratedMonky and kccqzy are referring to.
Obviously, the ACA made it so all health insurance premiums have a large "tax" component, due to the extremely narrow underwriting criteria health insurers are allowed to use. The individual mandate had previously applied a tax to all taxpayers, but after TCJA 2017, the tax is only paid by people with health insurance.
>Enacted in December 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the shared responsibility payment to zero for tax year 2019 and all subsequent years.
SCOTUS has been reasoning backward from their blatant partisanship for a couple decades now. It used to have a bit of randomness with some justices defecting with "reasoned arguments", but that's basically over now.
Well the purpose of the tariff is to control US Americans to rely less on foreign goods. So of course to control something you would enact policies that affect the thing you’re trying to control.
If the importer took on most of the burden that would defeat the purpose of the tariff.
The report states that US customs revenue surged by $200Bn (of which the US consumer pays 96%). That does not breath confidence into the idea of lower reliance on foreign goods.
Your conclusion is a non sequitur. Of course Customs revenue boomed, that’s what tariffs do. To assess impact on the country’s reliance on foreign goods you’d need to see how the volume of foreign imports changed over time.
Americans will rightly be suspicious when a think tank in Germany writes about tariff relief that benefits them. Of course, we should all be critical always – that's the first word in the term "critical thinking".
Nitpick: The Kiel Institute is not a think tank in the sense that people would understand the word.
It is a federally funded research organization (part of the family of Leibniz institutes) similar to a university but without teaching. Here's a list of the others [1].
These are independent, high-quality research institutions without political money or a designated political agenda.
The fact that they don't have an agenda written into their charter doesn't mean they don't have an agenda. Basically every American news organization is an example of this.
While your assessment may be true in many contexts, this is not one of them.
American hyper polarization does not permeate other countries in the same degree and German academia is actually full of sober, level-headed, nuanced people.
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that the Kiel Institute shouldn't be trusted, but there will appropriately be greater scrutiny applied due to its location.
Which sources would I trust? I feel it's important to read broadly, and (on a long scale) improve your ability to discount biases. To that end, I'm not recommending anything, but everything in proportion.
As an American, I wasn’t suspicious at all. I don’t know anyone personally who I think would be, either.
Your comment serves nothing but to suggest anew that Americans _should_ be suspicious. Either that was your aim to begin with or you’re okay with that result.
For the sake of quality of discussion, you should least least attempt to write something about the actual study, instead of basing your argument completely on superficial information outside said study.
If you add that information, if you really think it adds any value, after discussing what's actually in the study the comment would be sooo much better.
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:
"Retailers like Costco and Best Buy said they have already raised some prices, while Walmart, Target and Macy's plan to follow suit"
I'll be the first to say that given the circumstances our underlying economy and people have held up better than complete collapse. But you can't pretend this is not happening.
Eggs were the same way. Now they are at their lowest point since 2019 and cost 5% of what they peaked at. There's an inherent volatility in food prices that can't really be helped.
Some please write a web plugin to use AI to analyze comments so we can filter partisan comments and only read the truly engaging and intelligent comments by more objective people.
The point of taxing goods made elsewhere is to make building equivalent goods in your local economy competitive for locals to purchase. I am pretty sure they are not putting a tax on EUV Lithography machines from ASML or at least you can have an exception if you bow down to the king...
How did the US become this insane this fast - I'm not even against tariffs but you need to decide which industries to use them on e.g. steel, drones, maybe electric vehicles - blanket tariffs by a mad king are really difficult to fathom. When will congress wake up and will it be too late?
They are funding alternatives to ASML. ASML has hit a wall and it co-insides with a new innovation based policy, to bring America back to a tech leadership role. This is a critical economic and security policy, they are pouring billions into this tech as we speak. To think that ASML will continue to have a monopoly would be the actual insane thing.
I did some research and you are right there is some interesting stuff being developed but to say the whole stack will be available in the US soon - even 3-5 years is ridiculous. ASML is still going to be producing the best lithography machines in said timeframe I suspect.
It's also extremely hard to pick winners which is why the Chinese just fund everyone and let the winners cannibalise their less successful competitors. I'd be more confident of Chinese semiconductors being ahead over the medium term than US without ASML.
It's become a national issue, I think China will be at the forefront with the USA, and ASML/Europe will certainly stay in the mix. I'm no expert, but Russia is lagging in this industry, this has a very direct effect on their capabilities moving forward. Have a look at https://substrate.com/
In India, every tax imposed on a business goes straight to consumer. The consumer receipt even mentions some of those taxes item-wise. I thought American consumer also might see this on their shopping receipts? Who thinks businesses would swallow taxes?
Your speaking of VAT. And even though it’s pointed out on the receipt, it doesn’t mean that the consumer pays all of it compared to a scenario without tax: just imagine you’re a businessman and a VAT of 20% is introduced. Would you be able to increase the prices of all your goods by 20%? For some, maybe. For others with fierce competition and hesitant buyers? Maybe not. The same shows the other way around: imagine a VAT of 20% is abolished. Would you lower all your prices by ~16.6%? Probably, but only for those items that you know your competitors will reduce the price for as well. The terminology to look up is elasticity of supply and demand. There are nice graphs that show the effects of different kinds of interventions.
> In India, every tax imposed on a business goes straight to consumer. The consumer receipt even mentions all those taxes item-wise.
As someone in India, this statement is incorrect. There are no consumer receipts in India that show the import duties (which is what tariffs are) as an amount or as a percentage. There are plenty of goods sold in India that are imported, duty paid, and the costs are passed on to the consumers (with no explicit mention of that in the invoice or receipt).
You may be confusing these US tariffs with local taxes in India like GST. In the US, sales tax is shown in the consumer receipts (if or as applicable in the state, county, city, etc.).
In India and in the US, import duties are not shown in consumer receipts, except in the case where an individual is importing something and is liable to pay the duties and levies directly. Indians would probably revolt if they actually knew how much customs duty they’re paying for all the goods they buy individually.
I was looking at GST and other state taxes etc, that are simply passed to customer. Anyway, the whole point of tax on sales is that, the business would pay the tax out of its pocket without burdening the consumer. But that is blatantly and openly violated.
in 2020 we lived through the extreme left's remedial lesson in public safety. Now we're living through the MAGA right's remedial lesson in trade policy.
(Most MAGA right know this, don't care, see tariffs as a hammer. But they are hitting all of us)
> Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden—the remaining 96% is passed through to US buyers.
Unfortunately (for sellers) tariff decrease trade volume so even if only 4% absorbed by a seller they have much bigger losses from sell volume decline.
Economy is not a zero sum game - almost everyone looses from tariffs - consumers no longer can afford the same some things they did buy in the past because tariffs increased prices. Sellers cannot decrease prices because in many cases it will make their business unprofitable but they still loose on the volume.
In Europe, prices show the price INCLUDING sales tax (VAT, typically 20%). What you see is what you pay at the register.
In the US, prices show the price BEFORE sales tax (national average circa 7%). You pay 7% more at the register than what you saw.
I wonder if we could update US pricing so that the tariff was collected at the cash register, just like sales tax is, so that people could see that they were the one paying the tax.
yes, I see the obvious practical difficulties with this. It is a though experiment, nothing more.
A full analysis needs to look at the downstream effects as well. e.g. Exports and retail.
As a Canadian, I now avoid American products and retailers as much as possible. This isn't just political (Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada). This is about filthy lucre too.
Anything manufactured in the U.S. with tariffed inputs (e.g. Steel, Aluminum, softwood) is more expensive now. Foreign goods that merely pass through the U.S. on their way to Canada are not supposed to be tariffed, but many U.S. retailers simply don't do the paper work necessary to make that happen, no doubt because the Trump administration has made that paperwork so chaotic and difficult to do.
The upside is that Americans aren't just paying for 95% of these tariffs, they're losing export business from the rest of the world too. On top of this is the additional cost of unpredictability. Is the U.S. about to slap additional tariff's on the EU because of Trump's Greenland ambitions? If you're planning a project in Canada, you'd be wise to avoid any U.S. products that use EU inputs for the foreseeable future too.
Here is the thing that makes me really pissed off about these tariffs: if SCOTUS finds that they were imposed improperly (and I suspect they will), then companies like Amazon, Walmart, etc. get to sue the government to get the tariffs refunded. The consumers to whom the costs were passed on will never see any of that money.
One thing after overlooked about the tariffs is that since the financial market is completely parasitic into the US when a tarif on the imported competitive product makes it more productive the local producer can also increase their prices and their profits without having to do anything. The consumer is really the loser here.
You don't need any reports to understand this. Right after the initial tariffs were introduced I compared the prices on Amazon for some items I was buying from EU - the prices increased by 20%.
I can hear the retort of “fake news” before I get past the headline. When people are living in a different reality, facts from the “other” reality no longer have influence.
If customs duties act like a domestic tax, wouldn't that mean that they should initially be considered neutral? They would then be another type of consumption tax. Any assessment would have to be made in the context of the tax system as a whole. Are consumption taxes too high overall? Too low? Or just right? Who pays the taxes? Is that fair? Who and what are the taxes collected spent on? Etc.
Neat as in fantastic - it literally can't get any better - for the oligarchs. Tax the poor, and tell them we're collecting money for them, from the foreigners.
Raise and lower the rates willy-nilly, no need to really justify why you're squeezing who.
Whether foreign companies pay or not for the tarrifs is clear here. However, I want to point that not receiving income from reduced trade is an impact of its own. An indirect way to pay for the tariffs, so to speak.
Without an opinion on the actual claim here (although I'm skeptical of a claim of 96%, given the relatively moderate inflation in the US in 2025), I think this quote by itself (first bullet point of the abstract) should disqualify this as a serious analysis - no academic paper uses this language, only biased think tanks, and the fact that it's a German think tank doesn't change that.
US Americans is usually used outside the US to differentiate inhabitants of the US from citizens of other countries in the Americas (e.g. Mexico, Canada, and all of central and South America).
E.g. in Germany, inhabitants of the US are usually called "US amerikaner", so this is a direct translation (the Kiel institute is in Germany).
It's just Germans being stereotypically precise about things (and reminding citizens of the USA that they aren't the only people in the Americas).
> ‘US Americans’ makes it sound as if a distinction is being drawn between Americans inside and outside of the US or something
"US Americans" is routinely used to name "people in the US", since "Americans" is ambiguous, and "US citizens" is more restrictive and explicitly excludes residents that are not citizens.
Americans across North/South/Central America are feeling the impact of the tariffs in various ways. This report is talking specifically about the impact on US citizens, so the distinction is ultimately warranted IMO
which is why retaliating with import tariffs is the exact opposite of what should be done, but go tell politicians that they need to give up their dick measuring games...
"Tariff" is indeed a beautiful word; one that led the most virulent anti-taxation crowd to passionately support new taxes. It's a fantastic example of how much the choice of words matters.
Americans using foreign inputs or buying from companies that do. If you phrase it like that, then there's obvious solutions to reduce the effects of tariffs.
> export prices did not decline. Trade volumes collapsed instead.
That is its own kind of burden. We are shooting ourselves in the foot here, but but I think we're getting the other guy's foot to the tune of a bit more than 4%.
It's mutually assured destruction logic. I hate everything about it, but this seems like a mischaracterization of its efficacy.
Yeah but the average cult voter doesn’t care. Let alone the cult voter, most voters won’t see it as they may not tie the price increases directly to tariffs. We are already in an inflationary cycle when the tariffs are put so the administration will just claim the issue is not tariffs and that the tariffs are helping somehow and the base will believe it. We are in a world where the administration has fully doubled down on “never accept failure, never apologize and always double down” strategy and unfortunately it’s working
I think there's an implicit assumption here that because Americans pay the costs of tariffs it means there isn't a knock on impact (where for instance goods from other countries aren't bought, in preference of US local goods), in turn affecting the other economy. And that therefore Trump's tariff plays are without impact, whereas I'm not convinced that is the case.
Most directly, when foreign products become more expensive, people may choose a local product that was previously seen as too expensive. So it generally has a negative effect on the foreign economy and boosts local production.
Unfortunately, it also drives the foreign companies to become more efficient so they can get their prices back down, while giving the local producers a crutch to justify higher prices and stagnate.
And there are other side effects, and all of the side-effects have side effects of their own. Economies are complicated.
We also pay the counter tariffs. As Americans, we basically pay for everything, even for other Americans. I read Modi was going to tariff lentils at 30%, idk for Putin’s oil or something (?), didn’t really read it closely since it could be an AI fake anyway. Pretty sure my lentil costs will skyrocket as a result. It’s tough being the global leader.
Of course they do. That’s how tariffs work but people somehow have been deluded into thinking otherwise. Everyone that’s ever lived in a non-western country with import duties knows that.
American trade policy has gone so far in the direction of Mercantilism that both the Neoliberal and the Keynesian economists can agree on something. That's not a good thing.
Mercantilism is bad in itself, but the unpredictably is another special factor, leading to lower business confidence and lower investment. Why would anyone do anything when the rug might get pulled? Better to save and wait a few years. It's no surprise the US is seeing weak manufacturing investment.
Keynsian economists are in favour of reducing global imbalances. While tariffs are a crude and disruptive tool to achieve it, the US ultimately can unilaterally close the gap.
What is misleading is labeling a global system marked by large, persistent imbalances as benign or indicative of "free trade". A healthy free trade system should have balanced trade, and the reasons that are not are unfortunately the fault of surplus nations like China or the EU. I know, its unintuitive, but going back to Bretton Woods to IMF analysis will back this point.
P.S if one wants to note the grocery shop analogy, a better analogy is that if you count up all your transactions, your income should exceed your spending, or else you're probably in trouble. That's roughly the problem here, but made more complex with the shenanigans of the US dollar.
Is this supposed to be some sort of "gotcha"? The whole point of tariffs is to increase prices so that there is a chance for more expensive domestic producers to establish themselves against foreign competition. It's working as intended.
The article was written by "Europe’s preeminent research institute for global economic affairs" which is based in Germany. Europe, and Germany, saw a significant drop in its trade to the US since the tariffs started. Seems like they care.
Ladies & Gentlemen, the President of the United States of Amerca:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel
Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an
obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be
predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the
United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia
or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are
no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of
years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for
NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do
something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have
Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Given that, should it be any surprise at all that Trump has been gaslighting America on who pays for his tariffs?
And guess what mechanism he's brought to bear on the countries that do not see things his way when it comes to Greenland?
This whole message is in 'not even wrong' territory. I had a demented aunt that was declared unfit to manage her own financial affairs, which she agreed with and passed over as a responsibility to another family member. She was in better shape mentally than Trump and he's the most powerful person in the world.
It is quite amusing watching people try to argue that there's a very serious plan behind Greenland whilst Trump privately lobbies for it with the arguments of a young and very spoiled child. His tariff preferences have the same level of thought behind them, at least until the people that have the slightest idea of how things actually work can tone them down and put his ideas on the shelf for long enough to stave off serious damage and unwind their TACO trades.
It's entirely possible he's not even informed enough on the issue to be intentionally lying.
What amazes me is that all of the checks and balances have either failed or have been disabled. The US is always full of their 'Founding Fathers', I can't help but think that they'd be horrified to see the situation as it has developed so far and that's with a serious note that I suspect it will get a lot worse still.
The heritage society has worked for decades to tilt the ideological balance of the judiciary and the Supreme Court specifically. The GOP base’s cult-like devotion to Trump and his power to target the reelection prospects of individual representatives and senators has lead to them sidelining themselves.
Unlike Trump’s first term, his cabinet and agency heads are little more than loyalists and yes men. Checks and balances are gone. Independent thinking is gone. The president has long been an incompetent racist and malignant narcissist and the country (and world — for now) are suffering as he unleashes whatever cruel, imbecilic impulses that cross his mind. Add to that the fact that he’s quite clearly unwell.
Its the autocrat play book, hurting your country makes it easier to pilfer it. Doesn't matter if the pie get smaller as long as your slice of it gets bigger.
I remember predicting years ago that if MAGA got in again they'd raise taxes massively and sell it through some kind of deception that convinced people it was actually a tax cut or something else.
I thought what they'd do is push for a national sales tax (which would be regressive) with the promise of repealing the income tax, but when it came to the last part they'd just kind of conveniently forget about that and we'd end up with a huge national sales tax on top of existing income tax.
Side note: US Americans still strikes me as a weird Europeanism,
even though it's accurate.
Only people living in the US think the work American refers only to them and their fellow countrymen.
FWIW, every non-US American I've ever known or worked with (from Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada) has been more amused than bothered when I've asked how they feel about US Americans calling themselves "American", and excluding non-US Americans.
Non-US Americans don't seem to care, and they think it's silly that I'd wonder whether they did.
It still feels dismissive and rude, so I try to avoid it -- but evidently it's not a significant or widespread concern among those with standing to be offended.
I feel that many of the reactions to this paper is misplaced. To be upfront, I am not a fan of tariffs because I am pro free trade, pro capitalist, and feel that tariffs do not promote good will between countries.
First of all, the summary of the article (I did not read the article) clearly states that foreign exporters did not eat the tariffs, instead they held their prices, American consumers paid for the tariffs, and that trade volumes collapsed.
"trade volumes collapsed" - so, Americans did not buy foreign goods that they did not need/want at those prices, or found an alternative (presumably American) product to substitute. American consumer spending increased in 2025 and inflation settled down to a reasonable level. It seems that consumption shifted to domestic products.
That does not appear to be a good outcome, economically.
.
Second, tariff's are a tax. No sh-t. But so are VAT taxes, which are very high throughout many countries, and no one seems to believe they are the downfall of these countries. You can argue which is "better" or "fairer", but from the consumer point of view, VAT makes everything more expensive and tariffs make only foreign goods more expensive. You can say that VAT forces everyone, foreign and domestic to compete and be more efficient, while tariffs penalize foreign production and rewards domestic production, even if some domestic production is less efficient. But both are taxes, and at least the American consumer can choose whether or not to pay that tax.
While I disagree with tariffs, and especially disagree with how they are being wielded, the economic effect that they have had on Americans in 2025 is to shift away from foreign imports, buy more domestic products, and they have not increased inflation. Neither did the tariffs on Tr-mps first term on China.
If a 20% VAT was instituted, I would think that that would have had a much larger "tax" effect, and would have taken away peoples choice on whether or not to pay that tax. Yet, the VAT would be considered "good".
I think the biggest issue here is the serious negative impact on our relationships with our allies.
But here’s the hard truth: the US has needed to raise taxes for decades given its inability to reduce spending.
Hence they massively inflating runaway deficit. If this is the only way Americans will accept tax increases, and they aren’t willing to decrease spending, then this policy will ironically end up being the only way forward to climb out of the financial hole.
The most depressing thing about the tariff fiasco is how stupid and gullible many people are because a significant number of them thought that the other country was somehow going to pay the tariff.
I don't mind people being ignorant. We all are at some point. We all learn. But what's really depressing is that people who wear their ignorance and intentional unwillingness to learn like it's a badge of honor.
In the early 2010s I had discussions with people who pushed the idea of the resurgence of anti-intellectualism in the US, which I dismissed at the time. I think about that a lot.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
How could that possibly have not been the case. A tariff is no different from the cost of any input into the price of a finished good. There is some sense in which price increases are limited by supply and demand, but if the market won't pay for the production cost of the good, then the market will cease to provide that good. There are only two possible outcomes, long term -- either the price goes up, or the product becomes unavailable.
There's an argument that domestically produced goods would substitute for imported goods leaving the market, but markets are so global and intertwined now that even domestic goods have imported inputs that are also affected by tariffs, and there often are no domestic goods or not enough domestic goods produced to act as a price-competitive substitute, and companies are not going to invest a ton of money into expanding domestic capacity, when tariffs are imposed on the whim of a lunatic and will probably be eventually tossed out by the supreme court or congress.
What's the problem about it? Trump cuts one kinds of taxes and introduces others in place. I see it reasonable because it means going from taxing good things (people making money, people holding property) to taxing bad things (imports that drain cash from the country). Direct net result is perhaps zero, but indirect one is what it's for.
Imports are needed and important, not "bad". Most countries import goods. Why? Because not everyone produces everything. That is how society started and still works today.
"Were they absorbed by foreign exporters through lower export prices, or were they passed through to US importers and ultimately consumers?"
Go actually read the pdf. Their methodology conflates any and all price increases of foreign goods as being a burden bore upon Americans. No talk of purchasing habits changing towards domestic products. Nope. Oh and does it account for recent price increases across the board related to inflation? Nope. It (I would argue intentionally) does not control for that at all.
Pure propaganda from a foreign think tank to convince you to go back to policies where American exports got taxed, but theirs did not.
I actually think Trump is going to lose big soon. One turning point was the death of Renee Good. Past this point the ICE stormtroopers may kill anyone else too, no matter who that is - just step in front of a car and shoot when the car moves.
For serious penalty, all those TechBro cronies need to have all assets seized. They are imcompatible with democracy.
Unfortunately, this didn't get a lot of attention, but they also threw a flash-bang grenade and tear gas at a car filled with six children. A six month old baby had to get CPR from her mom. Two kids were hospitalized.
None of this is acceptable. And their overtly violent behavior has nothing to do with enforcing the law.
There’s no solidarity movement coalescing around Good’s death. When the local police chief invoked “say her name” in a public statement on it, it caused a bunch of acrimony and resentment instead.
I think Americans past the point where individual instances of police violence can shock us into taking political action (which is extremely risky in any case). It’s going to take kilodeath crimes, I imagine.
I do think Trump and the rest of his cronies have way overplayed their hand. They've been ruling like they have 60% public support, when it's nowhere close to that. A lot more damage is still to come, but the pendulum is swinging back. That's why Trump is so scared of the midterms.
Yeah, fair point. Yes, obviously taxes on businesses are born by the consumer. Saying that automatically makes them an "own goal" though is... quite the take.
All of it? There's no question about who pays VAT, and there never has been. You can have whatever opinion you want on VAT, but there's never been any messaging that anyone else will be paying for VAT.
BFD. The reason for tariffs is NOT to reduce prices but to bring production (jobs, capacity) home. (Don't take some British newspapers' word for it - most of them are extremely anti-Trump - and they're really, really good at tabloid journalism.
Our economy remains robust (down jackets moving like mad in Minneapolis) and the number of native-born Americans and legal aliens working is higher than ever. Illegal aliens are either heading for the door or being pushed out the door.
USA increased payroll employment (+584,000 jobs in 2025). Unemployment rate has decreased to 4.4%. We show gains in food services, healthcare, and social assistance, but retail trade has declined (necessarily). The labor market is stabilizing and expanding more slowly than before. Private payrolls have risen an average of 43,000 jobs/month over the past six months. Wage growth eased and average hourly earnings are up 3.8% over the past year.
We're much better off and it is showing: the US economy grew by 4.3% in the 3rd quarter of 2025, while Germany's GDP grew by 0.2% for the year. The German economy is so far down, some websites quit updating website statistics years ago, e.g.:
> The reason for tariffs is NOT to reduce prices but to bring production (jobs, capacity) home.
Tariffs can be used for many purposes. I would say this is administration is clearly not using them to bring jobs home. Earlier tariffs were lowered/dropped when trade deals were signed, and the current ones are clearly a way to strong arm Europe to giving up its territory.
"The unemployment rate in the U.S. has decreased to 4.4% in December 2025, down from 4.5% in November. This decline follows a period of rising rates, with the economy adding just 50,000 jobs in December, indicating a slowdown in job growth. The labor market is showing signs of stabilization, with the broader U-6 unemployment rate easing to 8.4%."
Some PRC manufacturers uniquely exposed to US market probably ate/split tariffs, but US like 5% of PRC exports, so it only matters so much. And after initial shock, most figured out to tranship/reroute and arbitrate lower tariff rates elsewhere and preserve margins.
Otherwise "broad" producer price index down primarily due to coal prices getting creamed by renewables, also cheap RU gas. When fossil/input prices drop, PRC PPI always drops. Industrial profit index for manufacturing sectors up 5-10%. Note broad industrial profit index down because it heavily weights state owned / SEO fossil sectors (aforementioned coal+oil dropped by 20-40%). Decompose industrial profits and story is PRC manufactures getting cheap energy and cheap inputs while growing profits more than they lower prices, aka why PRC winning trade game in the first place.
It's stayed perfectly flat across Trump taking office? Consistent with the tariffs not changing the price at which China sells goods at all and the US consumer bearing the entire cost of the tariffs.
I always thought that this tariff stuff is about restraining American consumerism first and coerce export oriented countries.
Also, this obsession over the importance of accessing US consumers feels ridiculous. If Americans aren't buying then it means more stuff for everyone else.
EU/China etc. sends actual things to US and US sends back dollars that are created out of thin air. It must be a restructuring pain more than anything since US doesn't actually export much goods. With the proliferation of cheap and available solar energy the trade with US can halt, endure the pain of restructuring came out of the other side with using the produced goods domestically instead of sending them to US and replace the US services with domestic ones. Then US can produce their things that they consume and have 350M market for the US companies instead of 7B.
It almost looks like Trump is Pushing for US irrelevance, its vey strange. Why would US be looking to abandone such an advantageous position? The people in the rest of the world are working their asses off, breathing toxic air just to obtain dollars.
The issue is that the EU and China are not structured to rely on internal consumption. We just cannot buy everything we produce. Fixing that would require years of carefully managed policies and at least for the EU, I've lost confidence that the national governments can work well-enough together to manage such a project. The rest of the world is in a similar situation, so it will be fun times until things settle, hopefully, not on a lower equilibrium.
See the core issue is that you get US dollars in exchange, which is of infinite supply but still happens to have value due to the reserve currency status. You send your stuff to US, you get the dollars and pay your suppliers etc but they don’t send that dollar to US to get something they want because US doesn’t actually produce that many stuff. So you should be able to augment the US, pay the producers with your imaginary dollars you put in the books for example. Sure that will be fraud but it is fraud only because you are not US. However that’s not the point, the point is that you don’t actually need US, you need to figure out a financial instrument that fulfills the role of US and that must be possible.
Trump has floated the idea of eliminating federal income tax completely, which would balance things out. I think I’d rather pay taxes in the form of tariffs than through income tax. The tariffs can help protect jobs from being outsourced, which has been a big issue over the last several decades. With everyone talking about out AI coming for our jobs, having more options for employment seems like a good thing.
I suppose the issue would be for those on the lower end of the earnings distribution, as they pay little to no federal income tax, but would be hit by a consumption tax. Though I do wonder if we could see wages increase when we don’t have to compete as much with low production costs in China.
US federal income tax raises vastly more revenue than tariffs ever have. Eliminating income tax would require tariffs at levels high enough to dramatically raise consumer prices and would certainly trigger retaliation.
Also, reduced competition from China does not imply higher wages unless labor has bargaining power and firms pass gains to workers. Historically it has been passed to shareholders not workers.
Finally, tariffs mainly protect manufacturing jobs. AI threatens white-collar and service work
As you pointed out in your comment. Trading income tax for tariffs is just shifting tax burden to the poor. Which the rich have been trying to do since the dawn of currency so at least the policy is consistent.
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 currency a year ago.
I wouldn't like to comment on HN's political leanings in the round and, obviously, there are a large portion of non-US readers/commenters on the site (including me), but will say this: there are a portion of you who voted for this. Exactly this.
What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
EDIT: Wow... well, having asked the question, it looks like I now have a lot of answers and perspectives to read. Thank you all for taking the time to comment.
You're assuming that modern politics across most of the World has something to do with rational, logical thought. Russia, China, Europe, the US, the Middle East - they are all in a quagmire of irrational fractures between the public and the political classes who want power/control for benefit of themselves rather than for the benefit of that public.
It's not unique to the US, it's just that they look like they are speed running it from outside.
Facts change nothing. This report means nothing. These people still believe. The report is wrong. They are right.
The truth is whatever they want it to be, not something out of their control.
Talking with him makes _me_ worry about my own beliefs, because if these people can be so blind, maybe I am too.
Many other Americans are pretty open-minded to new facts, even today. Unfortunately this kind is relatively geographically concentrated in urban or academic communities, and many of them are also discouraged from voting by being fully aware of how desperate and hard-to-fix the US political situation is, thus minimizing their electoral impact.
The Italian Catholics have got a handle on this with many of their relics.
Bits of various saints are in glass boxes all over Italy. Presumably they could be DNA tested?
We should ban advertisements of religions. If their gods are so powerful then they shouldn't need advertising. And if you are a believer AND god turns out to be real then banning advertising could lead to the return of Jesus. Win win.
I can't follow you here. Relics only have a meaning when you already believe them to be relics and no just random bones. How is that advertising?
Don't be so sure.
But if you do believe hard enough, if you give it your all and exclude anything else than your believes, when you become one with it - then you can certainly increase the collision speed quite a bit! :-)
I was talking about the impact of the current state of the world on existing relationships.
Stop contributing to the problem.
???
From an overall economic policy standpoint, missing facts that provide context are pretty important especially when you're trying to paint an entire side of the isle as completely brainwashed. Nobody can have a conversation when we create straw men to argue with.
Other relevant context:
- The US trade deficit just hit its lowest points since 2009 due to decreased imports and increased exports, which rose by record amounts.
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-october-trade-deficit-lo...
- US Q4 2025 GDP grew by 5.5%, outpacing China at 4.5%. For context, over the last 25 years China averages 8% per year while the US average 2.1% per year.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-50-economies-real-gdp-g...
Q4 forecast https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
- US inflation has continued to slow at 2.7% with core inflation at 2.6%, continuing the trend from the last 2 years under Biden after a huge 9.1% inflation spike in 2022.
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-current-inflation-r...
- US gas prices continued to trend downward by national average, with significant regional drops. I live in South Carolina and filled up for $2.39 / gallon a couple of days ago.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...
- The price of eggs have come down significantly, to their lowest rates in 4 years.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us
- And the US stock market is at all time highs right now.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/stock-market#:~:t...
There's a lot of economic doom and gloom in the comments section here that's simply not reflected in the overall economic numbers. It's not perfect, but it's trending in the right direction.
Why is this positive? And I’m not implying it’s negative either. It’s just a fact sans context on the effect of the market unless you’ve bought the current admins argument that a trade deficit means you’re getting ripped off.
> US Q4 2025 GDP grew by 5.5%, outpacing China at 4.5%. For context, over the last 25 years China averages 8% per year while the US average 2.1% per year.
I can find no mention of Q4 gdp results in your linked source, it appears to be looking at annual gdp rates over years and focusing on the US compared to China and India
> US inflation has continued to slow at 2.7% with core inflation at 2.6%, continuing the trend from the last 2 years under Biden after a huge 9.1% inflation spike in 2022.
Still above the feds target of 2% but it’s good to see it still trending down
> US gas prices continued to trend downward by national average, with significant regional drops. I live in South Carolina and filled up for $2.39 / gallon a couple of days ago.
It’s winter, prices for gas always drop in winter. Your own source shows that we’re still above pre COVID prices
> The price of eggs have come down significantly, to their lowest rates in 4 years.
I’m not sure if I’m reading your source correctly but it appears to be saying eggs are $0.45/ dozen
That seems implausibly low but I can’t find other sources to compare as every source I’m finding has conflicting information internally, and the price given doesn’t match up with the lowest prices even if I multiply it by 12 assuming I misunderstood price per dozen for price per egg
> And the US stock market is at all time highs right now.
Yea but over half of that is mag7 and only propped up by the AI bubble. It’s nice temporarily but all the context around the stock market doesn’t make it look particularly healthy atm.
The economy looks about as healthy as it did in 2024. I think a lot of people’s views on the health of the economy, whether it’s good or bad, are being more influenced by political leanings than by numbers. Fits with the zeitgeist of the era.
It's sad but true. Deep down, political thinking is influenced by tribal thinking, a rigid us versus them mentality.
This is, after all, how the "divide and conquer" method gets to be so effective. A house divided amongst itself and all that.
Not that it’s necessarily as bad everywhere, but time and time again I talk to people from various countries who say the current leader never could have been elected back when they were living there.
A lot of this, as in the case of Trump, seems like legitimate dissatisfaction that voters have which is funneled into finding alternatives to the people that are currently representing them, without deep thought about the outcomes of the policies the replacement is pushing for. In the case of Trump voters in particular people seem to very frequently be willing to overlook statements they would otherwise disagree with just because there are other statements that align with their thinking, or that seem like “change” that they are willing to support to see where it leads.
Most people I speak to in Canada, Europe and Central America seem perplexed why Americans they know do not seem more alarmed.
It's because we live in the beginnings of a dual state:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/opinion/renee-good-ice-im...
Quoting the key point:
> The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”
> “The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.”
> It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”
More at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-e...
It's not unique. If anything, it's inevitable regression to the mean. Entropy rises eventually and does this
One party state w/ elections: singapore, macau
direct democracy: switzerland
represented democracy: Norway, Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg
Multi-party representative democracy is less than half. And none of the top 3. An interesting, but uncomfortable, fact. The people are not good at picking economically rational leaders in adversarial elections.
> ...
> In 2017, Ireland's economic data became so distorted by U.S. multinational tax avoidance strategies (see leprechaun economics), also known as BEPS actions, that Ireland effectively abandoned GDP (and GNP) statistics as credible measures of its economy, and created a replacement statistic called modified gross national income (or GNI*)
Source: Wikipedia on GDP per capita, PPP
I don't think your conclusion about governance is warranted, given the important other factors you aren't accounting for in your list (also presence of large oil & gas natural resources).
You called out per capita GDP as not a great metric but you didn't seem to deny that living in Monaco on a Monegasque income (for example, or any of these other monarchies) would be a bad thing, despite their type of government.
And you called out vast oil & gas resources as essential, or scale-tipping, for the goodness of a monarchy but I'm assuming you are against the US intervention in Venezuela for the purposes of securing such resources for American interest.
Did you have other factors in mind that you did not mention?
Perhaps making good economic decisions grows exponentially in difficulty with the population size, especially for “conventional” economies that do not have another cash cow.
E.g. which of these countries has any kind of youth culture to speak of?
And in the inverse Monaco is a multi-party representative (semi-)constitutional principality, so a monarchy as said.
So I don't necessarily disagree with your points, I'm mostly just adding thy these aspects of politics can and do coexist.
Basically, the boring solution (democracy) gets you boring, middle-of-the-road results, while a monarchy is more likely to get you an outlier. The outlier might be at the top or the bottom of the pack, but because it's not democracy any more you don't have any say, so tough toenails if it's the wrong one.
All of it still comes down to the competency of that leadership though.
That said, I don't believe there's a single factor that determined the election. A flip in any of a dozen or more factors could have resulted in a different outcome.
Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense.
Not sure if that's specifically directed at me, but that's exactly what I said.
Since these regional governments would be picked from the inside, hopefully there wouldn’t be as much of a contrarian reflex to oppose everything they do.
So what you actually kind of miss is a nobility that has common sense and class-consciousness of the leading class.
The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.
Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.
The amount of crazy and not so crazy shit I hear for voting for this idiot is incredible. Though the Dems do themselves no favors either.
No, they voted for Trump because he was their guy then later made up a rational justification. We know that people generally do NOT make decisions by rationally evaluating things, their subconscious makes a decision and their conscious makes plausible rational arguments. (Yes, citation needed.)
I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but I think its a sexist oversimplification to suggest she lost because she is a woman. She lost because her campaign was lame.
But she did offer voters lots of things if you spent 30 seconds listening to her and stepped out of the faux news and Twitter echo chambers.
And basically every last bit of it would’ve helped the average American. She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris...
*And to be clear, it’s rather interesting that both Kamala and Hillary were blamed for “not having a platform” which seems to be the go-to for people who refuse to vote for a woman but can’t actually attack them on their platform. Just claim they don't have one or didn’t do a good enough job explaining it!
Democrats who believe in "realistic" political campaigns are why awful people keep winning.
Now you’re criticizing her for “giving in to political resistance” - and by that you mean not getting up on stage and just knowingly and blatantly lying to the American public by claiming she would single handedly drop the price of groceries and gasoline in her first week in office while also ending the war in Ukraine?
I think you’re both moving the goal posts and claiming that the rest of us are looking for a presidential candidate that has no moral compass. I’m good.
This is the lamest bullshit policy which almost seems calculated to alienate voters who it doesn't put to sleep.
Please don't act like democratic politicians are losing because they have a moral compass. Ridiculous.
Similarly, AOC should visit the south, eat some grits, volunteer with some Black churches, and do a little skeet shooting with some good ole boys.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/186248/quarter-voters-say-candi...
But I don't think that one performative step would help, it would require like decades of change on the platform of the Democratic party.
What the democrats need is an aggressive economic policy that actually will manifestly improve regular people's lives. If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.
No one at a gun range is changing their vote.
Both parties already know which voters change their votes depending on the situation. The data's already told strategists in both parties that the hotspots are, generally speaking, a few counties in a few states in the midwest, Pennsylvania, and more and more Arizona. So they don't really need to do more than pay lip service to any others. Because the data's already told them that the others won't change their votes in any case.
Ideas and modeling no longer matters? What matters is that you're doing a TikTok eating a southern specialty?
Spectacles actually matter too. You need to know which one to perform and that requires certain understanding of your audience
A Republican candidate could be a Muslim, a women, or trans, but that's not a good reason to vote for them. It should be about what they stand for. Voting for a Kristi Noem would be terrible, for example.
Similarly, the Democratic Party, if they're to win, should not depend on the opposition failing or on identity, but instead on solid ideas and the ability to communicate it well. Kamala wasn't that.
Only when nothing else is on the line will they say "I won't vote for a woman."
And Democrats aren't so broadly driven by identity politics that a Republican candidate merely being a woman would attract significant Democratic defectors. She would still have to be somewhat inspiring/charismatic, fairly centrist, and probably pro-choice.
Even in the peak-"woke" Democratic primary of 2020, all the women lost to two old white men.
Not anymore.
Three more years to climb out of the dumpster fire though. Then, maybe?
But right now? No.
In this moment, the political reality in the US is that Democrats would have to lose. Republicans, male or female, can't really win without that help. Especially in light of MAGA.
I would have thought Wisconsin would have been a wake up call for Republicans. But it hasn't happened yet.
So far both of these parties are sleepwalking into disaster and the world outside the US will pay a portion of that cost. Which is sad.
This was about all thosw isms and hierarchies we pretended dont exisr anymore.
Democrat policies polled better than Republican policies at the last election.
The fact Biden said he wouldn't back out then suddenly did at the 11th hour made the whole thing far more bizarre and was a massive erosion of confidence in any semblance of a plan for the presidency by the Democratic Party. I ended up voting for a 3rd party because both campaigns were run so horribly to the point I couldn't even imagine either side managing a mayor's office let alone the country.
Im gonna put a theory out that I havent seen here yet, a lot of people voted for Trump because they got dunked on by leftist Twitter, told they were racist/fascist/whatever for having an opinion like "communism is bad", and now comes a guy who wont back down and who legit makes them cry liberal tears. Ever been pissed off at someone with no recourse? Of course they want that kind of satisfaction.
Because if that is true, you're re-writing the rules of your "personal voter math" to fit your narrative, and if it isn't true, your "personal voter math" === your opinion, which isn't really useful.
I did not bother canvassing or donating to the Harris campaign for this reason, for the same reason I did not help pro vaccine non profits during the pandemic trying to convince antivaxxers. You aren’t changing someone’s belief system and mental model on timelines that matter for election outcomes. Mamdani was able to win NYC because young people and women turned out in force and ranked choice voting. The electoral college overweights rural, lower education parts of the country in US voting influence.
Based on the above, it will be a long time before enough of the US electorate has turned over before you can run a women presidential candidate imho. 78% of farmers voted for him, and still support him, even as he destroys their way of life, for example. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Planck).
I recommend the recently released book “The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us” by Ryan P Burge (ISBN13 9781587436697) as a contributor to understanding this topic, as well as “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (ISBN13 9780062390851).
Edit: This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681760 touches on this as well.
It's just that if in front of you, you have a weirdo who gives some stupid "with me, everything is free, and there's no problem" line, that is provable completely bullshit, but that your population is too uneducated (or too in a cult) to understand, then this happens...
What did you want Democrat to do? Give the same lies that GOP does? then what's the endgame?
I hope I'm wrong.
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.
Also being part of a social category doesn’t mean one will be immune to bias against this very category if it’s heavily pushed in the dominant social constructs.
Actually women able to reach top level political function in a patriarchal system will more likely do so by being doubly virulent against feminist standpoints. Look at Tatcher or Takaichi for a more recent example.
Clinton beat Trump by 15 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Clinton by 11 percentage points among men voters.
That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.)
In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.
Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.
If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.
The reasons people vote a certain way or can't be bothered to show up at the polls are going to vary significantly across the nearly quarter billion humans making those choices.
So any attempt to "single issue" explain election results are going to be wrong, particularly in a close election like this one. (49.8% vs 48.3%, and Electoral Votes in battleground states often in the tens of thousands of voters, out of tens of millions.
But many of the issues certainly contribute to flipping voters between one candidate, another, or staying home.
So sure, totally, gender and race played a role.
The economy (and steep inflation) played a role.
Biden being an increasingly disliked incumbent, staying in the race too long, and Harris being too conservative to distance herself from him played a role.
News and propaganda played a role (and I suspect this is a big one. Remember when Trump was all like Deep State, Democrats and Epstein, let's get those files released! And then it came time to do it, and for some reason he was like... oh that's a bad idea?)
No doubt individual state politics play a role, too - an unpopular governor might give the opposing party a boost.
But yeah, if the Democratic nominee was a) nominated, and b) a white male, the odds probably would've shifted in their favor enough to flip those few battleground states.
Both parties are quite disconnected from the interests of the "ordinary people", and the "ordinary people" voting from them are often quite disconnected from the reality; instead they want someone who would approve their preconceptions, and would stick it to "them" in the endless political sports match.
Which may not be that endless: if the political climate of the US deteriorates enough, some authoritarian populist could just get elected and never leave. The current administration likes to hint at that, but they seem to inane to actually pull this off. Somebody less theatrical and more cold-blooded could, though :(
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 outrage and clicks. People’s attention spans would recover, making them more capable of listening to opposing views and engaging in meaningful discussion. The overall quality of public debate would improve, and political leaders would be chosen based on objective, long-term policies rather than emotional manipulation.
The reinforcement-learning algorithms that drive these feeds are fundamentally unnatural. They represent a massive, uncontrolled social experiment on humanity—one that is far too powerful for our psychological reward systems to handle.
What needs to happen is education. Education on how the attention economy works. People must learn to resist becoming social media junkies, because every hour surrendered to these platforms reinforces the very systems that distort public discourse. When we lose control over our attention, we don’t just harm ourselves—we actively worsen the societal conditions that enable manipulation, polarization, and poor political leadership.
The age groups who spend the most time on TikTok and Instagram are the least likely to have voted for this administration.
There were populist demagogues getting elected before social media and cell phones, too. This isn’t a modern thing.
I know everyone wants to use this moment in politics to blame their own pet peeves, but blaming social media junkies for this election just isn’t consistent.
We had the same problems before social media. It's not the cause, just a symptom.
> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change.
Many people willingly choose the distraction, they just don't want to bother with politics and stuff. Social Media is just today's most popular distraction at the moment. And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.
It may not be the cause, but I think it's also not quite just a symptom. To me it looks like social media has taken an existing problem and made it worse, for all the reasons the parent comment describes, and then some.
> And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.
Also true, but I'm not sure this is prevalent or impactful enough for it to avoid being a net-negative. Also don't forget about the motivation & presentation of the platforms - they also have some outcomes they can optimize for, and I think there's a strong case to be made that they're optimizing for attention theft.
I have never — not once — seen an LLM use it in pairs.
1. replacing parentheses —given that the em-dash in pairs for me mark more-relevant-to-the-main content than a parenthesized expression would— so I use the same spacing as `()`
2. replacing colon or just finishing the sentence with a subsentence— so the spacing goes like for a colon.
Probably unfounded grammatically and against any style guides, but this spacing makes sense to me.
Something weird is going on, on iOS I can type either but they look the same in my comment.
Edit: Only before pressing reply. Once posted they look different.
Example: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4230288
We haven't invented a governance structure yet that would be immune to this, although some are better than others. I'm sure the current social media algorithms are harmful as well. You can ban viral algorithms, but the hostile actors whose literal job it is to drive polarization / populism will just find other strategies to effectively deliver their message.
"Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education, not to mention the many limitations, taxes, and bans. I mention smoking as an obviously-bad-thing that everyone knows is bad. Education succeeded, and yet, here we are, still puffing poison. But you can also look already-polarized political topics. There's been no shortage of education on those topics either, but if that worked well enough, we wouldn't be decrying populism right now.
I think there’s a missed opportunity for media to make it explicit that by giving their time and attention to these platforms, people are directly generating profit. Way too many assume their involvement has no real effect, but it does. I suspect people would be far less willing to log in if it were clear that each session generates, on average, X dollars in revenue. It’s a business model most people still haven’t fully digested.
For that we would need a new funding model for journalism. Local journalism (i.e. local newspapers, radio and TV stations) used to be financed by classifieds and ads. Classifieds are long since gone off to the Internet and ads have been replaced by Google Maps plus Facebook, so there's no monetary stream - and as a result of that, there's barely anyone left holding local politicians and companies accountable. Yes, some places have "citizen journalists" and bloggers, but these usually do not have the funds to pay for legal teams and court proceedings, so they usually only target government stuff.
Something like taxpayer-paid media is way too easily corruptible by the government, just look at Hungary for the worst possible outcome. "Mandatory contribution" systems like the BBC or Germany's public broadcasters aren't that easily corruptible, but it still happens - just watch the shitshow every few years here in Germany when the contribution needs to be raised.
It's an all-around mess.
No, it is surprising, as noted in the article, because basic economics suggests that suppliers will adjust pricing, and eat some of the tariff to keep their products competitive. Page 5:
This finding was initially surprising to some observers. Standard economic models suggest that the incidence of a tariff depends on the relative elasticities of supply and demand. If foreign exporters face highly elastic demand (meaning buyers can easily switch to alternatives), they might be expected to absorb part of the tariff to remain competitive.
ie what happens if global demand exceeds supply and a lot of companies have never tried to find other markets because of the inertia required to do so - but if they are pushed by tariffs they find there are alternative customers out there.
As an example - Canada appear to replaced trading food for cars with the US, to food for cars with China.
https://www.facebook.com/TechXnew/posts/canada-has-made-a-de...
That's a huge 'if'.
it also assumes that there are no other alternative markets to sell to or that supplier capacity is equally elastic; the US might be a high margin market to sell to, but if you only have a fixed amount of product to sell then it makes no sense to eat the high cost of a tariff to keep selling a low margin product when you can instead sell your product at a medium margin in europe
building out more supply for a product is often capital intensive if you want to make it at an economically efficient price point in these times; efficiencies of scale are hard to overcome and a rapid shift of economic policies makes anyone uncertain about future investment so it takes a very long time for these supply chains to rebalance, if they ever do
> to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function.
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 consistent way.
As a specific example, theoretical research in this area tends to make assumptions around the stationarity of margins that are obviously ludicrous in the context of reality in the US. It is quite easy to justify almost any policy with theoretical research in economics so people who have no understanding of economics will find evidence for whatever position they choose. Reality is quite different.
The most glaring, disqualifying omission is the disregard for FX adjustments. We have not seen the CNY/USD crash yet , but that is because of MASSIVE currency intervention from China to the tune of $200B+ per month: https://x.com/Brad_Setser/status/2012021712012145030
The other wonky thing is they call $200 billion in tariff revenue "a tax" and they also call it a "deadweight loss." Are the authors not the Keynesians I thought they were? At any rate, tariff revenue is not a new tax, but merely a shift in the tax base - since it is $200B that the government does not need to collect elsewhere.
Lastly the collapse of trade volumes from Brazil and India is not a bug it's a feature. Yes supply chains are sticky. The POINT of tariffs is to force supply chain decoupling and reshoring. To "unstuck" the supply chain. Does disruption come with temporary supply shocks? Of course.
The European export growth model is not working for Europe. They are not far behind the US in doing what we are attempting. Canada cozying up to China is not what they wanted for themselves, lol. Etc.
https://www.columbia.edu/~dew35/Papers/Optimal_Tariffs_Marke...
Why would you (or anyone) be surprised that economically sound policies are not popular? They are not popular in the US. They are not popular in Europe. They’re not even popular on HN.
For reasons I don’t understand, almost everyone hates economics.
Exactly: tariffs are taxes in another guise. They only serve to create an (artificial) price advantage of local over imported goods for as long as they're levied.
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.
I also can't fathom why the crowd (not just a HN subset) that was clamoring for tariffs thought it'd be anyone other than them shouldering the increase. Perhaps their influencers didn't spell it out for them?
Now everyone gets to pay more - and not just in the US.
Now I'm neither in the US, American nor Democrat/Republican, but as far as I understand their argument, is that they know it means higher costs for those products for them, and it'll eventually lead to companies wanting to produce things within the border, and only after that is in place, will things actually get cheaper (and better?).
So I think for these people with that perspective, the idea is: everything cheap -> tariffs to make imports expensive > People buy less imports and companies start selling within the border > Eventually things get cheap.
Again, this is just me trying to understand their perspective.
I don't believe it for a second.
Here's something that has happened before though. During the American War of Treasonous Aggression, the southern states decided to impose tariffs on the export of cotton to the UK. That caused massive hardship in the UK in the short term as it made the goods that the cotton was a raw material for impossible to sell. UK jobs were lost, UK workers starved etc.
So the local UK manufacturing companies found markets to supply them elsewhere in the world. They set up the supply lines, they reached agreements, and life went on. UK jobs were gained again, UK workers stopped starving. Life was good.
When the American War of Treasonous Aggression was over, the southern states wanted to drop their tariffs and start supplying the UK again. It didn't happen - there was no need to return to an unreliable partner when everything was set up just fine and dandy as it was, and the US cotton was essentially unsellable. US jobs were lost, US workers starved etc. The cotton industry never recovered from that.
Tariffs are a "fuck you, make me" slap in the face. Do it to people you don't like, but if you do it to people who are supposed to be "allies" (obviously not allies in the above case, but the consequences here were just as real), the consequences can be ... quite concerning for the tariffers.
The real distinction is that tariffs are conditional. Currently, firms can avoid them by changing sourcing. That makes them more behavior-shaping than revenue maximizing.
Given that the U.S. never reversed the TCJA corporate cuts from 2020-2024, tariffs are one of the few active levers currently increasing the marginal cost of offshore supply chains.
But social media changes the equation entirely. It gives us the speed of direct democracy without any of the structure or responsibility. It pushes people to judge candidates issue-by-issue, often on topics they don’t understand well, while eroding the deliberative layers a republic is supposed to have.
The problem isn’t people or education — America didn’t get this far because Americans are any smarter or dumber than anyone else. It’s the design of the systems. The founding fathers built a system that has so far lasted almost 250 years.
You cannot expect people to change — safety protocols, procedures, govenments — it’s about the systems.
Let's pray we're able to figure it out before more blood is shed.
So roughly 98% of the population was surprised?
The same thing as usual: people don't like how things are going, they demand change, but they're not specific, so the result is extreme, and then people demand change again, and on it goes. There's no great insight or rationale going on. People are just dumb animals in hats.
The headline suggests it was all passed into consumers. So why is inflation still so low? If you add 10-30% to prices (granted, of imports, not of houses, domestic food etc), you'd expect more.
If companies were eating it (which apparently they aren't) then their profitability should be down. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.
So..??? It's like that riddle with the three guys buying a pizza. Where did the money go?
The Fed predicted it added 0.5 points to what inflation could have fallen to with the expected effects only partially visible. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/oct/how-tarif...
Answer is they didn't: if the US buyer wanted it that badly they picked up the tab or otherwise they waited for the tariff to come down to 10% or went without. Also, very few goods in the US (probably none in the CPI representative basket of goods) are bought directly from Chinese vendors, they're bought from US retailers. Those US companies can eat the tariff cost if the exporter won't and they can't sell at a higher price. That obviously affects their margins, their sales and their hiring.
prices are up so people are buying less, it's just that simple; only a handful of companies have reported their Q4 christmas earnings but retailers' are already forecasted to be way below previous years'
Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick: “The model is clear: 10% tariffs or less are paid by the manufacturers, the distributors, the businesses,” he said. “The consumer doesn’t pay. The consumer doesn’t pay because the seller doesn’t want to raise prices, because if they could, they would, but they don’t want to sell less. So they eat it.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/lutnick-beijing-eating-maj...
Why am I not paying substantially more year over year for the wide variety of things I purchase?
What you're describing is called "dumping", and it's a strategy China has used to varying degrees of success in other markets in order to destabilize foreign industries. It could be seen as an act of war.
Chinese labor is not actually so cheap anymore, many other developing nations are significantly less expensive. But China's secret weapon is total control and coordination across industries. They use this to subsidize target industries for the export market. You've highlighted automakers, but they also target steel, aluminum, and others. To a casual observer it almost appears as if they were targeting industries that could be readily adapted to wartime production.
Economics tell people the clear impact, but it doesn't make the news. We get fed with whatever the political influencers decide to tell us. Did the brits expect the consequence of brexit? No but that's because they deemed whatever the news said to be unreliable on this topic. Which for once happened to be true.
I'd get out more, but my tinfoil hat doesn't like the rain.
I mean there were plenty of what would be considered intelligent people that laid out the exact consequences of brexit... problem is the masses don't seem to pay attention to well mannered intelligent people.
I don't think it's a simple answer. A couple things that likely contributed (I'm not an expert, just my opinion): there is an EXTRAORDINARY amount of propaganda being spread, whether people realize it or not, on and off the internet that gets consumed nearly 24/7. This happens on both sides of course, but think about some of the events leading up to the election. Musk bought twitter and quite literally turned it into a multi-billion dollar propaganda machine.
The general "drain the swamp attitude" that the administration parroted during the election (and first term) represented a change from how "traditional" politicians/government do things. People value that even if they don't understand/think about how it would affect them personally. This ultimately lead to demonizing the federal work force and mass random firings (in many cases having nothing to do with merit).
Trump also represented a push towards traditional values and national identity, which for some people was more important than whatever economic plan Trump had to improve things in the country. Other than tariffs, did he even have a plan? I don't know. But many people didn't/don't seem to care.
Yes it will hurt, they argued, but the long term effect will be a stronger and more independent domestic economy. And the pain is worth it for that end. There's plenty of evidence that what actually results are inferior products from domestic companies insulated from international competition, but that was the pitch.
There's also a large group in the base that voted for this who already had an ideological "buy local even if it costs more" philosophy, so to them the proposal was just to force everyone else to join their cause.
In some cases, the Trump tariffs have actually been so poorly designed that US manufacturing has been hit, because the tariffs on the raw materials and parts are higher than the tariffs on importing finished products from third countries...
See also Brexit.
If you were going to do that though, it would be more like a 10-20% blanket tariff on all goods. No exceptions, no special deals, and you can't use tariffs as a negotiating tool. So that's not what's going on and the current approach doesn't make any sense economically
Of course it will result in higher prices, that's the point, but also the part politicians aren't too keen to spell out
You can see the archive going to "2015 and older" here https://hts.usitc.gov/download/archive
Sorry buddy but it is you who misunderstands.
10 years ago
Second, reducing consumer prices was not the goal of the tariffs. The primary goals were to encourage companies to move manufacturing to the US and to be used as leverage in negotiating other matters with foreign leaders.
See Brexit. As Michael Gove said, the people have had enough of experts; for a certain sort of person, not understanding things is a badge of pride, and they're more liable to trust people like Trump, who transparently do _not_ understand things, than _experts_.
And in terms of burden - the cost hits the poor the most - but if your a billionaire funder of US political parties that's the point.
For a non-US person the most worrying aspect of this is that it also helps make the US more self-sufficient which means it's better prepared to go to war - which is not really good news.
Trump and his entire administration admitted there would be short term pain, possibly a recession, but that it would be "worth it" to restructure the economy.
So the question is: how long does the pain last? And is the economy stronger when it's over (do we get over it)? It's been 9 months so far.
From my perspective the policy goals are very unclear since it seems like they're actively wielding tariffs both as a means to reorganize the economy and as a weapon to bully other countries. Mainly bullying. The intended effectiveness on our economy seems difficult to judge.
I know two people who voted for him.
Person one has voted Democrat her whole life. Has worked for the Democratic Party. Has a son who was a Democratic elected official. But she lives in Texas, and watches too much local news, and believed that murderous immigrants were pouring over the border, guns blazing, taking out innocent American citizens daily at the beach and grocery store. So she voted for him because she believed only he could stop this from happening.
Person two is a wealthy white boomer. His business already runs in America. He actually has an advanced degree in economics. He believed that the tariffs would only be used surgically by smart people to protect American business. He is not personally affected by any of the racist policies or any of the other shenanigans. So he voted for him because he liked the protectionist and tax cut policies.
He regrets his vote. I haven't spoken to her in months because she stopped talking to me when I kept show her that her "facts" were made up.
Horseshoe theory and all that, populists gonna populist.
This authoritarian model has proven very successful for anyone Putin and his aparatus has installed anywhere. Now it may be franchised even further.
It's depressingly funny too when you ask these people if they've ever been directly affected by said boogeyman and they'll say no, but the know someone that has. Meanwhile you can ask them things about healthcare, local government, and other matters that affect their daily life, and they'll swear the trans-immigrant-boogeyman de jour is has far more affect on their lives.
If I recall correctly, we vote for presidents, senators and the congress who have policy stances on a variety of issues. There are usually only two options, one of which stands for open borders, not enforcing laws, socialism and demonizing people who choose the other option on the ballot.
A large cohort of independents didn't vote for republicans, they voted AGAINST democrats.
I like the idea of reaching across the aisle. However the divide is no longer the gap of a few feet. It’s a different world, with different rules.
I just checked yougov, and Trump has an 88% approval rating amongst Republicans.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/donald-tru...
Do check, since one hopes I erred in reading the chart.
The victory of Trump is mostly the same process that gave the UK Brexit.
Just people acting based on the information they are being provided. If the other side is filled with feckless buffoons, and every source of news you have is telling you the same thing, then what else will someone do?
The point when Trump was elected was to make americans buy american and to get international companies to move their production to the U.S.
In Sweden they did something similar when they thought people were buying too much cheap stuff directly from China instead of from the middlemen paying taxes. The solution was to add a tariff on cheap goods from China specifically.
I don't enough to know if it works, but it's not a new strategy. In Trumps current politics though it's used more as a bargaining tool and not something that's supposed to stimulate the economy, is anyone even claiming it is the goal?
Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened. I consider that a good thing. There will be pain while local manufacturing ramps up (or forever, if it never does) for products that have no domestic equivalent. That sucks, but sometimes things need to suck before they improve. Paying off the national debt, for example, is something I support, even if we have to slash a lot of useful spending for awhile. I think most rational Republicans are voting for these sorts of things despite knowing they will make things temporarily worse, in the hopes of an eventual better. The left tends to never do this, for they are very attuned to the immediate suffering their plans cause. The right tends to be less sensitive to the short term suffering their plans cause; the right thinks that the alternative, a slow decline, is worth the pain to avoid. Trump has bungled the implementation of the tariffs, but I still support their use in general.
Fundamentally it makes no sense to me to support a minimum wage for your countrymen, but also support them importing massive amounts of slave made goods. You are creating rules on the supply side that the demand side does not have to follow, which only harms your own domestic businesses. Your own country's businesses have to compete against slave labor while paying living wages; for most manufacturing this is just not possible. You are incentivizing off shoring, which harms your working class, who have to compete with subminimum wage workers. Workers rights must be paired with tariffs, or every additional worker right is a demerit on his hireability against foreign workers without those rights! If you want your country to produce anything, and to have a strong working class, you either remove minimum wage, or you implement tariffs. We cannot simultaneously support strong domestic workers rights and mass importation of sweatshop goods that were made without them. It hollows out the country.
Edit: I am rate limited though I would like to reply to some of my interlocutors. I will reply later.
First, there have been huge numbers of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. that Americans simply didn’t want to do, so adding more manufacturing jobs they also don’t want to do isn’t going to help the economy. It’s the proverbial, “Americans don’t want to screw tiny screws into iPhones.” situation.
Second, for there to be any prayer of the tariffs working to boost local production (whether staffed or automated), they both cannot be capricious nor can they be applied to the goods and services necessary to acquire and deploy in service of increasing that productive capacity. If the tariffs can be waved around randomly like a threat of grounding a child, then they work only as an instrument of short-term extortion, not as a mechanism to expand an economic base. If the goods and services required for expansion are tariffed, then there’s a giant margin and time-to-ROI disincentive to make the investment as well.
Third, there is absolutely no good reason to apply tariffs to goods and services for which you have no plausible domestic substitute. There’s no point in putting tariffs on bananas and coffee in the U.S. unless what you want is to basically put the equivalent of a “sin tax” on bananas and coffee because you’re weirdly morally opposed to people eating bananas and drinking coffee or something.
Fourth, tariffs don’t ever make domestic equivalents cheaper or more affordable for consumers relative to comparable foreign imports. They just drive the price of all available options up to or near the baseline cost of goods plus the tariff. In the absolute best case scenario where everything about tariffs works out as perfectly as possible, you’re just adding margin for producers.
Trying to be globally competitive economically by using tariffs makes no sense. Trying to improve domestic economic conditions by using tariffs makes no sense. It’s a ridiculously shallow, nonsensical approach to attempting to do either of those things even when they’re used carefully and responsibly, but they were never going to be used carefully and responsibly.
The point of them was always going to be to use them as a means of paying for indulgences and dispensations.
Though perhaps that’s a preferable policy than to re-shore sweatshops and child labor to the U.S. as you’re implicitly suggesting should be done?
I can see how this stance can be justified for imports from countries who do not provide a meaningful minimum wage.
I do not see how this stance can be justified for tariffs on EU countries (where worker rights are strongly protected), especially when the basis for that tariff is to "punish" those countries for not wanting to change national borders against the will of the people inside those borders.
The observation was that the wage boost of a minimum wage can be undercut by importing cheap goods made with slave labor. Workers can't get hired, domestic manufacturers cannot afford to hire.
The point is not that snapping phones together is some aspirational career. The point is that a legally mandated wage floor is meaningless if domestic producers cannot hire at all because they are competing with goods made under conditions that would be illegal here.
If you support minimum wages and labor standards, you either accept trade barriers that enforce those standards at the border, or you accept offshoring as a structural feature that permanently shrinks the set of jobs available to low-skill workers. You cannot have both.
No one is arguing that people should be forced into factory work. The argument is that a living wage should be available to anyone willing to work, and that requires domestic production capacity. Whether those jobs are in manufacturing, logistics, or automated facilities is secondary. What matters is that the price system does not systematically reward labor exploitation abroad while penalizing it at home.
I'll respond with a question: why wouldn't you want a living wage available to anyone willing to work? One way to enable that might be to ramp up US manufacturing and production.
However, as evidenced by the current situation, the US economy doesn't support manufacturing all types of consumer goods that it demands.
I understand the pressure points you're arguing for but I don't think that the US society will be in a better place once those are enforced.
If everybody willing to work doesn't have access to a job that pays a living wage, isn't that a different issue? Maybe the government could have educational programs so everybody has access to getting the education needed for jobs that pay a living wage (those not offshored to China and others) but I guess that's too much socialism for the US.
But what about the other side of the coin - that exports will now become more difficult, because of retaliatory tariffs? How does that help your domestic economy?
Trumps solution seems to be to try to bully other countries into accepting tariffs and not imposing tariffs on American goods. But how is this supposed to work? Quite apart from the appalling moral and fairness aspects of this strategy, trashing the economies of other countries is a bad idea, because you want other countries to be wealthy so they can buy stuff from you.
Free trade has built the modern Western world, and has already made the US the world's leading economic superpower. I can't even see what Trump is trying to achieve.
Although as the comparison hopefully makes clear, you worrying about tariffs is missing the point, it's more a question of basic democracy at this point. I'm also somewhat concerned about your (edit: as in the USs) new found lust for Lebensraum, because again, that went well last time.
"""
Sturmabteilung (SA)
The SA was formed in 1921 as the paramilitary fighting organization of the NSDAP and protected party events. After 1933, under Ernst Röhm, it carried out street violence against Jews, communists, and trade unions, grew to millions of members, but was crushed in 1934 in the Röhm Putsch.
Schutzstaffel (SS)
The SS started in 1925 as Hitler's elite bodyguard under Heinrich Himmler and emancipated itself from the SA. From 1934, it took over police duties, concentration camp guarding, and from 1936, the Gestapo, directing deportations and the Holocaust.
"""
It sends a chill down my spine when I think about this comparison. I recently heard about an ICE agent who tried to drag an indigenous woman out of her car and said to her, “You're next!”
The drawings are not about the holocaust, but the fascism which has led to that point. The holocaust started nearly a decade after Hitler taking power. And I don't think anyone believes Trump or his puppet masters are seriously after an actual genocide; everything else and the victims they accept as "necessary" for their goals are the problem.
History can repeat itself, but never in the same cloths. Some details are always different.
They also voted for military conquest, they celebrated start of the war. Including or even especially so young men seeking to prove their masculinity. They were not voting to just bring better conditions for themselves. They voted to bring glory and violent victories.
They believed themselves to be strong dominant men who will bring good times to the aryan races.
For the rest, you're forgetting how humans work. Do you think the average MAGA voting is voting to destroy someone else? Or do you think they're voting to improve their lot? Voting for expansionism doesn't necessarily mean voting for world war. I'm British, it's very easy to compartmentalise invading a country, from developing a country, civilising, being a net good, etc, etc. What did the average USian think Afghanistan was going to be? Or Iraq? Do the USians who want Greenland imagine that's going to turn into WW3? Nuclear war?
The enemy are very rarely mustache twiddling baddies.
Just for some background, jews were trying to emigrate away from jermany already before fairly violent elections of 1933. It was already bad, dangerous and getting worst. It was not just a rhetoric.
> Trump sending your neighbour to a death camp
It already happened, didnt it? The oppression is smaller then 1933 ... but this particular thing happened.
> Do you think the average MAGA voting is voting to destroy someone else?
Yes. They openly talk about it. And they openly talked about it.
> Or do you think they're voting to improve their lot?
Not much. They are willing to sacrifice own lot for their ideological goals. Per their own words. Also, their voting patterns are NOT consistent with someone who vote to improvw own lot. Their pattern is consistent with someone who vote by values - and value dominating and punishing lesser people.
I beg your pardon?!? Who the hell do you think you're talking to? Read my comment again.
I wasn't accusing you personally of supporting your governments actions, but I think you as in your country is acceptable terminology.
Many people were thinking Joe Biden was looking old... Until 2 months before the election when a faceless political elite replaced him with a candidate who had repeatedly lied about Joe Biden looking old. The American public might be stupid, but they don't like being treated as though they are stupid - which is exactly what the DNC did.
Once again proving that economists are engaged in mere astrology.
You also frame the argument that the last administration was tariff opposed, after they issued a 10% blanket tariff on the US' largest trading partner and tariffed Canadian wood products, directly causing house prices to skyrocket during the pandemic. You will never consider those impacts, because you're engaged in a fundamentally political argument, not an economic one.
The US has 4% GDP growth and a 2.7% inflation run rate. Wage growth is exceeding inflation again. Data doesn't lie, but economists do. Routinely.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/other/economist-warns-of-moth...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/13/economy/inflation-trump-econo...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/25/nobel-prize-economists-warn-...
I can understand that most people do not actually stay with these forecasts. The story hits NBC, you are completely outraged about this forecast made by these economists, the thing never happens, NBC has moved onto next disaster coming round the corner, next outrage.
If you work in markets, you are confronted with the relentless inability of talking head economists to just say mildly rational things. It is constant, almost every year now we have this latest economic disaster by economists in the periphery of political parties...no-one pays attention to these people, they have tenure, they make money from cashing in their political contacts not through actual correct forecasts (and yes, they always say that the thing they predicted will definitely happen next year now).
Stopped clock is eventually right. But there was literally zero information in the insane claims made in Q1. If you did not see this immediately, don't pay attention to these forecasts.
Could you imagine Amazon increasing their stock on hand by 30%? Maybe. Could you imagine them quadrupling their stock on hand? Seems unlikely.
Impacts should've shown up by now, most of the stockpiled goods would've been sold down.
The popular zeitgeist seems to reject the inflation numbers because of perceiving it to be higher, too.
I do agree it's probably not inventory, but the frequent changes to the policies may also be part of it too.
Astrology only really fell out of fashion due to a perfect storm of a bunch of different factors. The Church defacto banned aspects of it that implied external forces driving human behavior as that would contradict free will, and that happened just about the Renaissance was kicking off and all sorts of new astronomical discoveries led to no greater precision in astrological predictions, along with a more broadly skeptical shift in society, which gradually left it relegated to where it remains to this day.
"My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth." - Carl Jung to Sigmund Freud, 1911
---
It's a great example of how what is deemed proper and scientific at one point in time is still heavily influenced by things that, in the future, will be considered 'obviously' nonsense. Even in far more modern times, it wasn't long ago that lobotomization was considered an appropriate psychological treatment. No less than JFK's sister [1] was lobotomized as a 'cure' for her irritability.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
If I may ask, who are the people that do these predictions? What is there methodology and how do you know it's not luck?
He only started that tariff stuff when he took office.
Edit: Clearly I was not following things well enough, sorry for the wrong information.
Besides, he started the tariff nonsense in his first term - it even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_tr...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c209x48ndjpo
Ps: there isn't really a trade imbalance if you take services into accounts but Trump calculated them only on goods as if that makes sense
I don't think that would have resonated with his followers at all though.
I’m adamantly against all forms of illegal immigration. There are plenty of people around the world that want to come here and are willing to wait in line. I’m perfectly fine with the intentions and methods of the current administration.
I’m in favor of doing whatever we can to increase our manufacturing base for the future. I’m perfectly fine with paying more for imported goods that I don’t actually buy anyway. Paying 95% for crap from China that I have no intention of purchasing does not impact me.
I hate all taxes and do not consider it charitable to spend other people’s money. Taxes are a necessity as we need to fund government functions. But it is those functions that should be limited. Because government is generally terrible at most of them.
> I'm adamantly against all forms of illegal immigration
And Trump did what, exactly, make something already illegal even more illegal? And now that you are ruled by a de facto fascist with the rule of law only applicable to his enemies, how is the payoff? On the upside, illegal immigration is no longer a primary concern, I guess.
> I hate all taxes [...] because government is generally terrible
Better to let everything be run by cartels instead, surely they will have your best interests at heart. There's not a single example of a functional and effective government out there, so why even try?
I don't want to glorify German high schools but I find it hard to believe that those school books were so wrong that 40 years later it would make sense to return to a manufacturing-oriented economy.
If tariffs are a tax on the consumer, then you probably think the tariffs are in fact good ("American's aren't taxed enough").
But I'm more curious about what makes you think Americans aren't taxed enough. Why do you say that and do you have something specific in mind?
2018+: 37%
1993 - 2000: 39.6%
1981 - 1986: between 50% and 28%
1964 - 1980: 70%
1944 - 1963: 91%
1930s: 63 - 79%
1913 (income tax created): 7%
In most, though not all states, there's also State Income Tax. NYC also has a city tax on income.
Tariffs are a mid-long term strategy to encourage onshoring business, for reasons including military, national security, and political influence on foreign powers.
This is a complicated topic involving the global economy and evolving intercountry landscape. All these slam dunk takes are incomplete to the point of being wrong - and inflammatory.
My point is that your thoughtful response about reliable continuity, both inter- and intra- president, is not present in a lot of the comments.
The only people who need to back up to "industrial policy requires consistency and transparency" are those who are either incapable of or willfully deciding not to understand what's going on around them.
I'm sure it worked great when we were in small groups living in caves, but it is making the modern world a lot more dangerous.
We never accurately measured effect of pedal on the gas trade with China caused with WTO admission nor even NAFTA, the no on ramp was huge shock that didn’t show up in traditional measures. So trying to go full gas reverse with no real strategy is almost mindless.
Whatever strategy you pursue I think it’s good to know who is actually paying for it.
Then there are the sanewashers who try to act like there is a grand strategy behind taxing uhhh... bathroom vanities... then removing the tax a few months later.
Both are wrong, just different flavors and with different moral and intellectual culpability for being wrong (the latter are worse).
No, tariffs can be a tool in a mid-long term strategy. They are not themselves a strategy.
No, that's the literal messaging from the US government. Trump has been talking about tariffs as the magic pill that fixes everything.
The article just says it doesn’t show up when shipping containers change hands.
Seems safer for many business to just continue to operate outside of the US and get a more consistent business relationship with every other country in the world.
She absolutely thinks that tariffs magically make the US economy better in a very short time period. She thinks that the governments of the countries that she hates are paying them and that the tariffs are solving the deficit problem. She thinks that the number of manufacturing jobs in the US has skyrocketed.
> Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
This is a person who is deeply involved in the mechanics of writing legislation supported by GOP legislators. I do not believe that she is uniquely dumb amongst right wingers who have access to the levers of power.
No. It isn’t.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/fact-check-trump-van...
> “She is a liar. She makes up crap … I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
> Vance said in late August that as a result of tariffs Trump imposed during his presidency, “prices went down for American citizens.”
Trump has said many times, including as recently as last month, that tariffs will make so much money we can get rid of the income tax.
This suggests that the man is not thinking coherently on the subject.
If someone decided to come up with a strategy to do something fanciful, like find the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow to solve their debt problems, would it really be worthy enough to be called a strategy?
This means that to the subset of HN crowd that don't have alternate sources of political news, this indeed looks like a bombshell.
Also, it's deeply naïve to assume tariffed countries would absorb the cost. Why would they? It's like going into a shop and asking for a discount because you just took out a loan. Why would the shop give you a discount for something you inflicted on yourself? And what makes you think other customers wouldn't ask for the same discount?
EU + South America start trading more while America shuts itself out.
The US might have an easy to choice to make after Trump. Regardless of who takes over. Simply roll back tariffs and instantly boost the economy. The protection aspect of tariffs will probably have proven to be mostly counter productive by then.
At least I don't see the US car industry doing any better when it can't export. Coal probably won't ever recover from being obsolete, etc. I think this mostly won't be controversial a few years down the line.
Prices for the same product are about 37.5% higher in the US. It's nuts and the reverse of how it used to be not long ago.
I paid EUR 510, which means $593. This is with all taxes included, so the price without tax would be about $490.
I have searched now the ASUS mini-PC on Newegg, and its cost is $679, around +38.5% more expensive.
This is wild, because indeed, until recently the price of electronics devices was significantly lower in USA in comparison with Europe, while now it is the reverse.
This is not a "Made in China" mini-PC, which might have been affected by worse tariffs.
Moreover, I have equipped the mini-PC with 32 GB DDR5 & 1 TB SSD, while cursing the more than triple price of DDR5 compared with last summer, so that now the DRAM has been more than a third of the price of the complete computer.
This configuration has cost me the equivalent of slightly less than $900, without taxes. The same configuration has a price on Newegg of almost $1200.
In a sense I am happy. All empires decline. This will decline USA forever.
Suppliers in China are dropping prices to offset the tariff impact - this is what I see in my direct industry and also in many adjacent ones. This is benefitting other countries that don't have Tariffs on Chinese goods since they can buy cheaper as well. I suspect this is a significant factor in the GBP/EUR strengthening in relation to USD. There was a point where there was such a pronounced impact to imported goods that the cost of shipping a container from China to US went from ~$3500 to <$1500 pre/post Tariff.
Large manufacturers (automotive certainly, but also raw materials production and component production) are actually moving facilities to the US, which was one of the intended effects.
US manufacturers are enjoying some price relief as landed costs of chinese-produced goods are increasing. Hard to quantify what this means but the frustrating part is that they are not reducing their prices just enjoying higher margins.
Countries outside the Tariff zone are enjoying more trade - Canada is a very real example of this policy backfiring - they just walked back the Chinese Automotive Tariffs in exchange for relief on agricultural reciprocal tariffs. Mexico is entering into similar agreements with non-US trade partners. Some products are releasing in non-US markets first and at lower costs than they are in the US.
US-sourced chipmaking is accelerating - Intel's new fabs are probably the most prominent example of this (albeit they are slow to pick up volume - I expect this will shift with TSMC rationing production to brands like Apple and Qualcomm).
I think the increase in cost to consumers is painful and that the current Tariff rates are excessive + there is a lot of "cheating" where Chinese suppliers are declaring lower cost of goods on import to reduce the landed cost of Tariffed goods - there doesn't appear to be enough resources to police this policy fully.
All in all an interesting economic experiment and it will certainly take years for any of these realities to have a measurable positive impact domestically.
What countries are those? As far as I know, most important markets have great tariffs on Chinese goods.
They deliberately disinformed the public, there is blatant evidence that the news anchors were aware that they were lying. Not just bending facts a little or opining, but knowingly and purposefully lying.
The pretext of freedom of expression, and more narrowly freedom of press should not *continue* to apply to businesses/individuals which are found liable/guilty of such destructive behavior for the society they operate in.
The same should apply to people like Alex Jones, you had your chance to use freedom and you have wasted it, move on to another profession.
I still believe the SCOTUS is trying to uphold the principles in the Constitution, for now. And there are already limits on what one can say in public, yelling fire in a theater when there's no fire is not far from what FOX is doing. Lying at this scale to cause panic based on such lies has demonstrable deleterious effects on society. The effect is delayed due to the scale of the target groups, but the principle is the same and courts/juries are able to observe this when it happens.
Republicans on court are very clearly pusuing agenda that has nothing to do with that.
His argument was in defense of the process to uncover truth.
Given that Fox has clearly said they cannot be taken seriously, and that they were from inception created to muddy the waters and wage war for political gain, they are an enemy to the process that was envisioned back in that era.
If someone is demonstrably selling false goods, and multiple sources have evidenced this, as has a court of law, should that all be dismissed because every single individual in America has not taken the time to look at the evidence?
At some point you abdicate roles and responsibilities to others, so that they can do the job of ensuring that a fair debate takes place.
I believe that admission was because ending the trial and eating the judgement, was less damaging than allowing the light of discovery and trial ingress into their workings.
It’s true on its surface - most people don’t know about economics, across all political spectrums, and so rely on leaders (which I thought is what liberalism advocates for?).
It’s not a helpful model if you want to understand what’s going on. So then the interesting parts to explore are the reasons they want to believe it, and the reasons given by the educated economists who also support the position
> the educated economists who also support the position
> the tariffs are something other countries are paying the US
I'm quite sure the provided definition of a tariff is accurate. Given that, who are these economists and what are the reasons they give for supporting this belief that the exporters (other countries) pay the tariff?
edit: in the context of giving good economic advice.
Funny how the in-depth analysis of motivations is strictly in one direction, ratcheting the Overton window forever rightward.
On one hand we had mountains of articles about "economic anxiety" & "The MAGA next door" in 2016. On the flip side is "Fuck your feelings" and never a "humanizing, fish out of water" longform article about the life of a Democratic Socialist in a small Texas town after Biden 2020.
I’m not telling you it’s a moral obligation to understand. It’s in your interest.
Econ 101 normally covers tax incidence (which side bears the burden of a tax). It has a lot to do with elasticity of both demand and supply. If foreign exporters can easily shift to other markets or adjust production (elastic supply), they'll pass most of the tariff cost to consumers through higher prices. If American consumers have few substitute products (inelastic demand), they'll end up absorbing most of the cost. Of course if the opposite is true, the sellers end up eating the tariff.
The reality is that tariffs typically get passed through to consumers as higher prices, not absorbed by exporters. The exact split depends on how flexible each side can be, but empirical evidence shows consumers usually bear most of the burden.
I mean, just to be clear, I think the tariffs are a bad plan. But targeted vs broad seems more like an implementation detail… the big picture plan is the bad part!
What do you mean by "pass the cost"? Exporters do not pay tariffs, importers do. The exporter doesn't give a shit because it doesn't affect them at all.
This is one of the most fundamental misunderstandings of how tariffs work in the first place. The entity that's picking up the cargo at the port is who literally has to pay CBP for them to release the goods. The middleman (say, Walmart) may pass the cost to customers or whatever, but tariffs are entirely inconsequential and irrelevant to foreign exporters. There's no way to send a bill to a foreign entity demanding a tax for some goods that have arrived at a port, after all.
Well that’s not true. Otherwise you are going to have to explain why so many outside the USA were upset with tariffs, and why there were retaliatory ones applied on the inverse.
I make no other claim that your quoted assertion is wrong.
Simplified: a seller can lower their price by the amount of the tariff. The buyer is responsible for paying the tariff bill, but the seller is the one eating the cost at the end of the day, it is "passed" to the seller.
Alternatively, the seller can refuse to budge on price. The seller makes the same amount per unit, and the buyer gets the privilege of paying the tariff while not receiving any sort of break on the price. The entire cost of the tariff is "passed" to the buyer.
One big problem with arguing about this is that it will take many years for the effects of the tariffs to settle. If there’s new opportunity for local competition of goods that we’ve been importing, new companies can’t form and meet that demand over night, it will take longer than the president has to see that succeed, which certainly hasn’t stopped him from claiming it already has.
Tariffs rates by this administration are capricious and punitive, not targeted and strategic.
This isn’t the first time tariffs have been used in a country to push purchasing preferences. The problem is that it hurts them and it hurts us, it’s just a net economic drain and doesn’t effectively achieve the local economic boost that some want it to, especially in today’s global economy where trade has become so integral that we no longer produce many of the products we buy, and therefore tariffs can’t fix. “There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff
The only fruit of this is real economic pain for the American consumer. But that was likely the goal, so mission accomplished I guess.
Countries geographically closer to the USA might reason differently because close countries usually trade more and they have more to lose. But even in this case, if a Mexican or Canadian company can find other markets or discovers that it can keep selling at the same price, they will not bear any of the burden of the tariffs.
Russian like sanctions were applied to Italy about 100 years ago because of colonial wars in Africa. Despite the sanctions lasted only 6 months, Italy discovered that they ended up trading less with the usual partners and more with others. Tariffs are somewhat similar to sanctions as they apply friction to trading.
Isn't the only thing that could matter - apart from strategic considerations of financing a loss for a time - if the margins are big enough? Who wants to pay for people to take their products below the full cost of making them, apart from some investor-financed hype startups?
I wonder what supply and demand curves look like if you keep telling people that the increased costs will be paid by foreigners and not them?
I assume it has an impact eventually but it must dampen the speed of response if people believe that.
But, integrally the whole package is just wishful thinking.
I mean, maybe it was elastic for imports from Heard and McDonald Islands. Penguins don't care about margins after all.
Such protectionist practices were used by China to bootstrap their own automobile industry, before they became competitive in the global market. Of course, China had surplus capacity of untapped cheap labor, which America does not.
Barring an evolution in automated manufacturing, or an overhaul of regulatory policy, I'm pessimistic it's possible to accomplish the same in the US. But, in principle, tariffs have a valid place in supporting an emerging local industry.
First you subsidize and support the creation of currently not commercially viable chip fabs on-shore. Literally handing companies money under some obligation into the future.
Eventually the on-shore chips are produced, but they have higher total cost of ownership for the users: Logistics may be cheaper due to less distance, or more expensive because they are not well-trodden paths yet. Production costs like labor, water, energy could be higher. And the chips could just have higher failure rate, because problems in the new processes need to be kinked out.
But to get local consumers to switch to these switches, one applies tariffs to other sources of chips so the on-shore chips become more competitive artificially, until they become actually cheaper and competitive.
The way it is threatened here isn't in the use case of tariffs at all from my limited understanding.
I'm mostly responding to the position that tariffs have no place in economic policy, when we've seen them used successfully in other countries. Should Congress pass a bill legislating tariffs, then I could see them having more of the desired effect, though as I said I'd still be pessimistic without broader changes.
It was genuinely shocking how many people from the latter group just could not understand the absolute basics of supply curves and demand curves.
The upside is that I was able to help them understand it by offering tutoring, where I was in limited supply, and there was endless demand for my services!
However, they rarely read books and indeed most don’t read at a university level.
Rarely reading books is also not tied strictly to the US.
The US is actually pretty illiterate compared to peer countries.
Even as a kid I was confused. Where else is the money going to come from?
There are circumstances where much of the burden of increased production costs is borne by the producer. When demand is very elastic (consumers are price sensitive, or there are many good substitutes), and supply is inelastic (its hard to change the level of output), the suppliers will eat the cost.
Which would be a nice balance to the way productivity has rocketed since the late 70s, and has mostly flowed to the top 1%.
Ultimately - and predictably - wealth hoarding becomes economic self-harm. You need distributed prosperity if you want diverse growth and economic and social stability.
Out of that price: $3 goes to production cost, $3 goes to tariffs, and $4 goes to profits.
Now the taxes/tariffs are doubled. The producer can up their price to $13, meaning $3 to production, $6 to tariffs and $4 to profit.
But customers might not accept any price higher than $10. They won't buy.
So instead you continue selling for $10 and your costs are: $3 for production, $6 for tariffs and $1 in profit.
That's what people mean when they say that companies are paying the tariffs. They're not profiting as much as before.
In practice it's usually a mix of higher consumer prices, lower company profits, or even some products not being imported anymore.
Doesn't really work when main reason for product existence on market is either "no equivalent" or "this particular subgroup is only imported" (say given specifically tasting cheese).
> "Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden-the remaining 96% is passed through to US buyers."
so yeah, the exporter does pay some burden. it's not binary. indeed, tariff exports can be designed in a way to dial either direction. certainly, we could dial foreign exporters burden to 0% – and we could dial it back up to 4% (where we're currently at). but, 4% likely isn't a hard ceiling, either. Of course, the 4% number is an aggregate, not the blanket value across indidual goods (or services).
finally, the effect of tariffs is argued to be wealth transfer to the US Treasury. this is worth thinking harder about. but also, exports may change from whom goods are purchased. thus, it's a diplomatic policy, as well.
Does it change who customers buy food from? No, because everyone increases their prices regardless of if they’re impacted by tariffs or not.
The 2018 washing machine tariffs are a clear cut example of why tariffs are a garbage strategy.
https://www.warrantyweek.com/archive/ww20250522.html#:~:text...
Price Pass-Through: Studies found that 100% of the tariff cost was passed through to consumers, resulting in an estimated $1.5 billion in additional costs to American families in the first year. The "Unexpected" Dryer Rise: Although tariffs only applied to washers, the price of dryers (a complementary good often sold with washers) also rose by an equivalent amount—approximately $92 per unit—as manufacturers increased prices on laundry pairs. Job Creation Cost: While the tariffs helped domestic manufacturers like Whirlpool, LG, and Samsung shift production to the U.S. and create about 1,800 new jobs, researchers estimated that consumers paid over $800,000 annually for each job created. Outcome: The tariffs resulted in a 49% decline in imports from 2017 to 2019. They expired in February 2023, after which washer prices decreased.
> Isn't this literally economics 101? How did we ever even end up imagining that tariffs are somehow paid by the exporter??
My response was that it's not binary, but a mixed case. And, furthermore, from the perspective of an individual exporter, their export profile may change if goods and services are purchased from a different exporter.
E.g. if the same good may be cheaper without a 25% tariff, then you'd expect the incentive to pay less to have some effect.
The US Treasury would still get money, but the exporting country might change.
It's a national sales tax really.
It's constantly disappointing how the apparent intellectuals who frequent and operate HN will rally to that side out of libertarian convenience and out of annoyance and disgust at "wokism". And then will inevitably be shocked when everything goes sideways again. Hopefully the education will stick longer this time than it did after G.W.Bush.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts
[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
[4] https://mashable.com/article/alex-jones-defense-performance-...
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.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5638908/walmart-prices-...
What if that was the intended result?
[1] https://archive.ph/kLxw3
I would be 100% pro free trade between nations with identical labor rights and environmental protections, but that really isn't what free trade is about, is it?
Perhaps the US should charge them negative tariffs until it gets up to snuff.
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...
For example if I shoot Batman in the back when he's fighting The Joker (because Batman is a vigilante so that's illegal, gotta take him down), and later make a statement to the press after Joker has been sent to Arkham "You know I think Arkham is a good place for that guy, he got what he deserved", I have acted for and against The Joker's interest, which is a good cover for me as an agent of The Joker.
I have often seen Trump doing stuff that is counter Russia's interests, but stuff that seems extremely weak sauce in contrast to weakening Nato, as just one example. It is spycraft 101 that you give your assets some simple stuff they can do against you, to make them seem trustworthy.
I fear that they already decided that issue when they chose not to intervene and now have the excuse of "lol well can't undo it now" ready to go.
Edit: It appears Trump & Co intend to replace SCOTUS if they lose the tariffs ruling ... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/us/politics/trump-tariffs...
--------
There does seem to be indications that the actual tariffs collected seems far lower than the actual tariffs promised, likely just half of what was promised:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/business/economy/trump-ta...
It would seem that as elected representatives of the people (we are literally their boss), they can't do that without asking us first. The whole point of them existing is to give us power and limit the executive's power, not the opposite.
Because Article One vests "all legislative powers" to Congress, they cannot delegate legislative powers to the Executive and Judicial branches (because then not all legislative powers would be vested with Congress).
Congress can create taxes. ACA was created by Congress not the president in isolation.
Tariff issue is because president is making taxes unilaterally.
If calling it a tax saved it, that would then not be a good argument to get rid of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...
The 2017 TCJA removed the individual mandate. Presumably, that is what FrustratedMonky and kccqzy are referring to.
Obviously, the ACA made it so all health insurance premiums have a large "tax" component, due to the extremely narrow underwriting criteria health insurers are allowed to use. The individual mandate had previously applied a tax to all taxpayers, but after TCJA 2017, the tax is only paid by people with health insurance.
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/individuals-and-fami...
>Enacted in December 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the shared responsibility payment to zero for tax year 2019 and all subsequent years.
If the importer took on most of the burden that would defeat the purpose of the tariff.
It is a federally funded research organization (part of the family of Leibniz institutes) similar to a university but without teaching. Here's a list of the others [1].
These are independent, high-quality research institutions without political money or a designated political agenda.
[1] https://www.leibniz-gemeinschaft.de/en/institutes/leibniz-in...
American hyper polarization does not permeate other countries in the same degree and German academia is actually full of sober, level-headed, nuanced people.
If a think tank from a non-tariffed country would write this piece, they risk getting tariffs tomorrow.
And would Americans trust a (US) think tank in the juristiction of the US government right now?
What source would you trust on this matter? Or rather: who has published something we could look at that contrasts these findings?
[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/kiel-institute-for-the-world-...
Which sources would I trust? I feel it's important to read broadly, and (on a long scale) improve your ability to discount biases. To that end, I'm not recommending anything, but everything in proportion.
Your comment serves nothing but to suggest anew that Americans _should_ be suspicious. Either that was your aim to begin with or you’re okay with that result.
What reason do you have to trust this "Kiel Institute?" I would bet my life you've never even heard of them before today.
If you add that information, if you really think it adds any value, after discussing what's actually in the study the comment would be sooo much better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253
"There's been major impact to some things" -> so bad things have happened
"but for the most part the economy has hummed along without a blip." -> so despite bad things happening, just plug your ears and sing loudly?
As for prices in Walmart, they HAVE gone up. Several companies have had press releases stating they need to increase prices because of tariffs:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/31/trump-tariffs-here-are-the-r...
"Retailers like Costco and Best Buy said they have already raised some prices, while Walmart, Target and Macy's plan to follow suit"
I'll be the first to say that given the circumstances our underlying economy and people have held up better than complete collapse. But you can't pretend this is not happening.
Also, i was hinting at the fact that issue is larger than economics.
I will contribute $$$.
How did the US become this insane this fast - I'm not even against tariffs but you need to decide which industries to use them on e.g. steel, drones, maybe electric vehicles - blanket tariffs by a mad king are really difficult to fathom. When will congress wake up and will it be too late?
It's also extremely hard to pick winners which is why the Chinese just fund everyone and let the winners cannibalise their less successful competitors. I'd be more confident of Chinese semiconductors being ahead over the medium term than US without ASML.
As someone in India, this statement is incorrect. There are no consumer receipts in India that show the import duties (which is what tariffs are) as an amount or as a percentage. There are plenty of goods sold in India that are imported, duty paid, and the costs are passed on to the consumers (with no explicit mention of that in the invoice or receipt).
You may be confusing these US tariffs with local taxes in India like GST. In the US, sales tax is shown in the consumer receipts (if or as applicable in the state, county, city, etc.).
In India and in the US, import duties are not shown in consumer receipts, except in the case where an individual is importing something and is liable to pay the duties and levies directly. Indians would probably revolt if they actually knew how much customs duty they’re paying for all the goods they buy individually.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxg7xpr2j0o
(Most MAGA right know this, don't care, see tariffs as a hammer. But they are hitting all of us)
Unfortunately (for sellers) tariff decrease trade volume so even if only 4% absorbed by a seller they have much bigger losses from sell volume decline.
Economy is not a zero sum game - almost everyone looses from tariffs - consumers no longer can afford the same some things they did buy in the past because tariffs increased prices. Sellers cannot decrease prices because in many cases it will make their business unprofitable but they still loose on the volume.
In Europe, prices show the price INCLUDING sales tax (VAT, typically 20%). What you see is what you pay at the register.
In the US, prices show the price BEFORE sales tax (national average circa 7%). You pay 7% more at the register than what you saw.
I wonder if we could update US pricing so that the tariff was collected at the cash register, just like sales tax is, so that people could see that they were the one paying the tax.
yes, I see the obvious practical difficulties with this. It is a though experiment, nothing more.
As a Canadian, I now avoid American products and retailers as much as possible. This isn't just political (Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada). This is about filthy lucre too.
Anything manufactured in the U.S. with tariffed inputs (e.g. Steel, Aluminum, softwood) is more expensive now. Foreign goods that merely pass through the U.S. on their way to Canada are not supposed to be tariffed, but many U.S. retailers simply don't do the paper work necessary to make that happen, no doubt because the Trump administration has made that paperwork so chaotic and difficult to do.
The upside is that Americans aren't just paying for 95% of these tariffs, they're losing export business from the rest of the world too. On top of this is the additional cost of unpredictability. Is the U.S. about to slap additional tariff's on the EU because of Trump's Greenland ambitions? If you're planning a project in Canada, you'd be wise to avoid any U.S. products that use EU inputs for the foreseeable future too.
Neat as in fantastic - it literally can't get any better - for the oligarchs. Tax the poor, and tell them we're collecting money for them, from the foreigners.
Raise and lower the rates willy-nilly, no need to really justify why you're squeezing who.
Its still a dumb idea since any following administration could reverse the policy, so why invest in local manufacturing?
Without an opinion on the actual claim here (although I'm skeptical of a claim of 96%, given the relatively moderate inflation in the US in 2025), I think this quote by itself (first bullet point of the abstract) should disqualify this as a serious analysis - no academic paper uses this language, only biased think tanks, and the fact that it's a German think tank doesn't change that.
‘US Americans’ makes it sound as if a distinction is being drawn between Americans inside and outside of the US or something
E.g. in Germany, inhabitants of the US are usually called "US amerikaner", so this is a direct translation (the Kiel institute is in Germany).
It's just Germans being stereotypically precise about things (and reminding citizens of the USA that they aren't the only people in the Americas).
"US Americans" is routinely used to name "people in the US", since "Americans" is ambiguous, and "US citizens" is more restrictive and explicitly excludes residents that are not citizens.
Tariffs are like a military tactic, its not good for the domestic economy, its good for the military.
Not true. Tax burdens can fall incredibly unequally depending on market dynamics.
Chuckles in German.
That is its own kind of burden. We are shooting ourselves in the foot here, but but I think we're getting the other guy's foot to the tune of a bit more than 4%.
It's mutually assured destruction logic. I hate everything about it, but this seems like a mischaracterization of its efficacy.
Most directly, when foreign products become more expensive, people may choose a local product that was previously seen as too expensive. So it generally has a negative effect on the foreign economy and boosts local production.
Unfortunately, it also drives the foreign companies to become more efficient so they can get their prices back down, while giving the local producers a crutch to justify higher prices and stagnate.
And there are other side effects, and all of the side-effects have side effects of their own. Economies are complicated.
Tarrifs are a restrictor plate on a big block V-8 engine.
Take it away and you get more power, more noise, more freedom.
Don’t you want more freedom?
https://fortune.com/2026/01/18/europe-retaliation-8-trillion...
What is misleading is labeling a global system marked by large, persistent imbalances as benign or indicative of "free trade". A healthy free trade system should have balanced trade, and the reasons that are not are unfortunately the fault of surplus nations like China or the EU. I know, its unintuitive, but going back to Bretton Woods to IMF analysis will back this point.
P.S if one wants to note the grocery shop analogy, a better analogy is that if you count up all your transactions, your income should exceed your spending, or else you're probably in trouble. That's roughly the problem here, but made more complex with the shenanigans of the US dollar.
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Given that, should it be any surprise at all that Trump has been gaslighting America on who pays for his tariffs?
And guess what mechanism he's brought to bear on the countries that do not see things his way when it comes to Greenland?
Talking about Kiel, the non existent document was signed there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Kiel
It's entirely possible he's not even informed enough on the issue to be intentionally lying.
Unlike Trump’s first term, his cabinet and agency heads are little more than loyalists and yes men. Checks and balances are gone. Independent thinking is gone. The president has long been an incompetent racist and malignant narcissist and the country (and world — for now) are suffering as he unleashes whatever cruel, imbecilic impulses that cross his mind. Add to that the fact that he’s quite clearly unwell.
Meanwhile, he puts all your tax dollars in his and his friend's pocket...
I thought what they'd do is push for a national sales tax (which would be regressive) with the promise of repealing the income tax, but when it came to the last part they'd just kind of conveniently forget about that and we'd end up with a huge national sales tax on top of existing income tax.
But this works too.
Non-US Americans don't seem to care, and they think it's silly that I'd wonder whether they did.
It still feels dismissive and rude, so I try to avoid it -- but evidently it's not a significant or widespread concern among those with standing to be offended.
The broader term is "North American"
First of all, the summary of the article (I did not read the article) clearly states that foreign exporters did not eat the tariffs, instead they held their prices, American consumers paid for the tariffs, and that trade volumes collapsed.
"trade volumes collapsed" - so, Americans did not buy foreign goods that they did not need/want at those prices, or found an alternative (presumably American) product to substitute. American consumer spending increased in 2025 and inflation settled down to a reasonable level. It seems that consumption shifted to domestic products.
That does not appear to be a good outcome, economically. . Second, tariff's are a tax. No sh-t. But so are VAT taxes, which are very high throughout many countries, and no one seems to believe they are the downfall of these countries. You can argue which is "better" or "fairer", but from the consumer point of view, VAT makes everything more expensive and tariffs make only foreign goods more expensive. You can say that VAT forces everyone, foreign and domestic to compete and be more efficient, while tariffs penalize foreign production and rewards domestic production, even if some domestic production is less efficient. But both are taxes, and at least the American consumer can choose whether or not to pay that tax.
While I disagree with tariffs, and especially disagree with how they are being wielded, the economic effect that they have had on Americans in 2025 is to shift away from foreign imports, buy more domestic products, and they have not increased inflation. Neither did the tariffs on Tr-mps first term on China.
If a 20% VAT was instituted, I would think that that would have had a much larger "tax" effect, and would have taken away peoples choice on whether or not to pay that tax. Yet, the VAT would be considered "good".
I think the biggest issue here is the serious negative impact on our relationships with our allies.
But here’s the hard truth: the US has needed to raise taxes for decades given its inability to reduce spending.
Hence they massively inflating runaway deficit. If this is the only way Americans will accept tax increases, and they aren’t willing to decrease spending, then this policy will ironically end up being the only way forward to climb out of the financial hole.
I don't mind people being ignorant. We all are at some point. We all learn. But what's really depressing is that people who wear their ignorance and intentional unwillingness to learn like it's a badge of honor.
In the early 2010s I had discussions with people who pushed the idea of the resurgence of anti-intellectualism in the US, which I dismissed at the time. I think about that a lot.
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
There's an argument that domestically produced goods would substitute for imported goods leaving the market, but markets are so global and intertwined now that even domestic goods have imported inputs that are also affected by tariffs, and there often are no domestic goods or not enough domestic goods produced to act as a price-competitive substitute, and companies are not going to invest a ton of money into expanding domestic capacity, when tariffs are imposed on the whim of a lunatic and will probably be eventually tossed out by the supreme court or congress.
Yeah no need for coffee beans in USA.
Seems more like from taxing companies to taxing citizens.
Go actually read the pdf. Their methodology conflates any and all price increases of foreign goods as being a burden bore upon Americans. No talk of purchasing habits changing towards domestic products. Nope. Oh and does it account for recent price increases across the board related to inflation? Nope. It (I would argue intentionally) does not control for that at all.
Pure propaganda from a foreign think tank to convince you to go back to policies where American exports got taxed, but theirs did not.
For serious penalty, all those TechBro cronies need to have all assets seized. They are imcompatible with democracy.
Unfortunately, this didn't get a lot of attention, but they also threw a flash-bang grenade and tear gas at a car filled with six children. A six month old baby had to get CPR from her mom. Two kids were hospitalized.
None of this is acceptable. And their overtly violent behavior has nothing to do with enforcing the law.
Finally the “right people” are getting hurt.
That is how they see it
I think Americans past the point where individual instances of police violence can shock us into taking political action (which is extremely risky in any case). It’s going to take kilodeath crimes, I imagine.
This is clearly untrue, and you must be in a bubble if you think this
I'm pretty sure someone has done an analysis on VAT since it was introduced 58 years ago...
It's a really destabilising policy as you can see.
Our economy remains robust (down jackets moving like mad in Minneapolis) and the number of native-born Americans and legal aliens working is higher than ever. Illegal aliens are either heading for the door or being pushed out the door.
USA increased payroll employment (+584,000 jobs in 2025). Unemployment rate has decreased to 4.4%. We show gains in food services, healthcare, and social assistance, but retail trade has declined (necessarily). The labor market is stabilizing and expanding more slowly than before. Private payrolls have risen an average of 43,000 jobs/month over the past six months. Wage growth eased and average hourly earnings are up 3.8% over the past year.
We're much better off and it is showing: the US economy grew by 4.3% in the 3rd quarter of 2025, while Germany's GDP grew by 0.2% for the year. The German economy is so far down, some websites quit updating website statistics years ago, e.g.:
https://georank.org/economy/germany/united-states
The Kiel Institute may be trying to draw German voters' eyes away from their government's poor economic policies, e.g.,
"Germany’s economy is so bad even sausage factories are closing"
https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/01/15/germanys-economy...
Of course that is another "tabloid" journal of the British strain. Told you they're really, really good at feeding the flames with their journalism.
[Strains of Carly Simon's "Nobody does it better,... makes you feel sad for all the rest..."]
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=nobody+...
> The reason for tariffs is NOT to reduce prices but to bring production (jobs, capacity) home.
Tariffs can be used for many purposes. I would say this is administration is clearly not using them to bring jobs home. Earlier tariffs were lowered/dropped when trade deals were signed, and the current ones are clearly a way to strong arm Europe to giving up its territory.
> Unemployment rate has decreased to 4.4%.
Decreased from where...? Not including the pandemic, 4.4% is the highest rate in almost a decade. Unemployment is clearly rising: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
"Flash Report: U.S. Jobless Rate Ticked Down in December"
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jan/flash-rep...
FTFA:
"The unemployment rate in the U.S. has decreased to 4.4% in December 2025, down from 4.5% in November. This decline follows a period of rising rates, with the economy adding just 50,000 jobs in December, indicating a slowdown in job growth. The labor market is showing signs of stabilization, with the broader U-6 unemployment rate easing to 8.4%."
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
"Flash Report: U.S. Jobless Rate Ticked Down in December"
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jan/flash-rep...
Otherwise "broad" producer price index down primarily due to coal prices getting creamed by renewables, also cheap RU gas. When fossil/input prices drop, PRC PPI always drops. Industrial profit index for manufacturing sectors up 5-10%. Note broad industrial profit index down because it heavily weights state owned / SEO fossil sectors (aforementioned coal+oil dropped by 20-40%). Decompose industrial profits and story is PRC manufactures getting cheap energy and cheap inputs while growing profits more than they lower prices, aka why PRC winning trade game in the first place.
Looks like around ~2% a year
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/producer-prices
Click to, say, 3 year view of https://ycharts.com/indicators/china_producer_price_index
Also, this obsession over the importance of accessing US consumers feels ridiculous. If Americans aren't buying then it means more stuff for everyone else.
EU/China etc. sends actual things to US and US sends back dollars that are created out of thin air. It must be a restructuring pain more than anything since US doesn't actually export much goods. With the proliferation of cheap and available solar energy the trade with US can halt, endure the pain of restructuring came out of the other side with using the produced goods domestically instead of sending them to US and replace the US services with domestic ones. Then US can produce their things that they consume and have 350M market for the US companies instead of 7B.
It almost looks like Trump is Pushing for US irrelevance, its vey strange. Why would US be looking to abandone such an advantageous position? The people in the rest of the world are working their asses off, breathing toxic air just to obtain dollars.
I suppose the issue would be for those on the lower end of the earnings distribution, as they pay little to no federal income tax, but would be hit by a consumption tax. Though I do wonder if we could see wages increase when we don’t have to compete as much with low production costs in China.
Also, reduced competition from China does not imply higher wages unless labor has bargaining power and firms pass gains to workers. Historically it has been passed to shareholders not workers.
Finally, tariffs mainly protect manufacturing jobs. AI threatens white-collar and service work