You don't say. That kind of seemed obvious from the very fucking start. Trump is absurdly incompetent or he is actively working to destroy the country. I honestly can't tell which it is.
Why not both?
Trump may be incompetent but the architects of project 2025 are, unfortunately, not. Trump is merely their most useful idiot.
Oh, they’re incompetent, too. They are just very effective at installing their incompetence into the government.
Sorry, I had to.
He's working very hard to meet his campaign promises. They were too grandeur. The government needs a massive increase in revenue to be able to meet the promises he's made. If you sit down and think about it, this is the easiest way for the federal government to increase revenue without directly increasing taxes. Then he does wild deportations to distract everyone from what he's doing.
All to keep the top 1%'s share of total adjusted gross income to share of total income paid at 26.3% and 45.8%. Crazy to me that the top 1% of earners cry so hard about contributing a proportional amount in taxes.
I honestly can't think of promises that would require more money.
And the simplest way to do it is to just spend the money. The government isn't required to have money in order to spend it.
The richest make more money when they sell more and the stock market does better. The tariffs hurt them more than a tax increase would because they can't dodge revenue loss and market devaluation.
He's not running a grand plan. He's not a mastermind. He's doing exactly what he said he would. He had to get back into power to avoid consequences. He did so by putting all the awful people with irrational agendas into positions of power so they would support him. He doesn't give a shit about the 1% unless they're helping him, and he doesn't give a shit about the 99% unless they're voting for people who can help him.
All the "distractions" are him letting the people who got him into power do what they want, because it doesn't hurt him and he doesn't care.
The deportations aren't a distraction, they're the point for the racists who directly helped him.
It's not about who in society it helps, rich or not. It's about who in his cabinet it helps. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.
I honestly can’t think of promises that would require more money.
There are quite literally dozens. Bringing manufacturing back to the US, eliminating income tax, eliminating tax on overtime/per diem, cut "energy prices" in half in 12 months (max of 18 months), end the Russia/Ukraine war, make in vitro fert free, end birthright citizenship, cut corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, eliminate tax on social security, car loan interest tax deductible... The list goes on. All of this will cost quite literally trillions of dollars and none of that has anything even tangentially related to his trillion dollar plan for mass deportations.
We're looking at the largest increase in federal spending in the history of the United States here. More than any war ever. You have to pay for it somehow.
Only one of those is actually something that would cost money. The rest either don't cost money (how does ending birthright citizenship require revenue increases?), or they're plans to reduce revenue.
One doesn't typically count a plan for reducing revenue as the reason for increasing revenue.
Again, the government doesn't need to match spending with revenue. When you control the money supply you can just spend what you need. There's an impact to doing so to much, but that probably won't come to a head for a few years.
It's not a grand scheme. It's surface level opportunism.
If you sit down and think about it, this is the easiest way for the federal government to increase revenue without directly increasing taxes.
Except that when tariffs are this high, they discourage imports and purchasing. It's self-defeating.
It does, however ever dollar of tariff revenue goes to the federal government. So it still increases revenue. Especially when essentials are tariff'd. Generally you can't avoid Chinese imports.
But you mean your company isn’t willing to make a years long investment in on-shore manufacturing capacity when the scales that make it advantageous to the company can change in any direction, at any point, for any made-up reason, by any amount? Don’t they love investing in America?
/s+++
It's not even that entirely
You can't build X here unless every component is also produced... here. The component factories can't be built here here until there's factories building the subcomponents for them, AND a buyer for them here.
A button up shirt needs cotton -> chemical treatment -> dyes -> fabric, base chemicals > plastic pellets -> buttons, AND the machines to do all of those processes. It's like 7 or 8 different factories just to produce a shirt with buttons on it. Imagine how many factories it is for anything more complex.
Then in comes your point of needing commitment when it's not even certain for more than a week, nobody is going to build out entire supply chains in that scenario.
That is a very good point that I hadn’t considered, thanks for your response.
To your point, that just makes it even more of a ridiculous proposition.
Another example would be Trump saying that US farmers now have unprecedented access to the UK market for sales but the US uses growth hormone which is banned in the UK and Europe. It's very unlikely they're going to designate a non growth hormone section of their farm just to ship beef overseas.
Which would only be financially sound if for some reason there is significant demand for American beef in the UK which.. Why would there be?
The beef issue is actually older and a bit more complicated than the hormone question. When the hormone ban went into effect, the only product banned that wasn't before was edible organ meats.
North America is an agricultural powerhouse and the US in particular. A lot of countries have deep and legitimate concerns about US agricultural exports purely based on the low cost and high volumes, which can threaten domestic food production: An unacceptable condition based purely on national security concerns. It's part of why the US exacerbates the situation by subsidizing agriculture. We may produce a stupid quantity of food, but it must always be, on the whole, economically viable to produce food domestically.
While the concerns of the EU citizens are real, the readiness with which they were acted upon is in part due to the convenience of protecting the agricultural sector of more powerful European countries.
While correcting artificially low prices is actually a valid use of tariffs, using them for protectionist purposes like offsetting actual competitive advantages creates a lot of trade agreement drama.
Can't retaliate against food safety restrictions. Hence the wto court cases that have been flying around for decades.
The reason there would be a demand for US beef is the same reason as Japan has such a high demand for US beef: it's cheap and available. Even the high quality import is often price competitive with average or low quality domestic.
Also, there's already a fair number of US producers of beef that didn't get hormone treatment. Nothing mandates they get it, and we even already have inspection programs to facilitate it: https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/imports-exports/nhtc
If course, that's all the center of the current wave of wto disputes, since the EU restricts beef imports to a quota, and no one can agree on certification requirements.
soybean, pork was heavily exported to asia, now with the tariffs, asia will find other countries to do it for them. brazil is willing to destroy the amazon for cattle farming. and Alfalfa which is mostly for the ME market. in the usa, outside of limited consumption of health food store, and research universities involving botany.
Gamers Nexus just talked to some PC manufacturers about this.
"We assemble PCs, made in America from these parts"
(motherboard, CPU, graphics card, PSU, ...)
So what if, for example, the motherboard manufacturer moved to the US?
Well that's an assembly of a hundred or so other Chinese components. And the equipment needed to manufacture it would need to be imported.
Ok, but what if all those hundreds of factories were built in the US?
Well, they all use imported aluminium and steel and plastic, etc., and require their own imported machines to produce...
"Is any part of your PC entirely made in the US?"
"The shipping labels? And maybe some packaging"
Never listen to the reason they claim to be doing something, look only to what they are doing. And that, quite clearly, day after day indicates that they are doing everything they can to destroy the USA, as quickly as possible. Once one has determined what they are doing, then ask who does this benefit.
The way I see, Trump's motives are:
(1) Plunder the government of anything of value.
(2) Cause a recession so rich can buy everything up on the market.
(3) Sabotage America geopolitically on behalf of foreign adversaries, most notably Russia.
(4) Cement power in their control and go after any rivals.
Nah.
These are definitely someone's motives but not Trump's.
He's old and tired and petty. All he cares about is his ego, which he supports with power, revenge, and attention.
Trump doesn't have any kind of plan other than waking up every day and stroking his ego.
Exactly, it's like thinking he had a plan the whole time to bankrupt his casinos or any of his other many failed ventures. He is just bad at leadership because his narcissism constantly self-sabotages, like with his casinos he constantly made terrible and expensive changes and his ego wouldn't allow any one working for him to challenge him, so he'd blame everyone, stiff contractors, fire competent staff who could actually turn the situation around and the next thing you know the casino is failing despite it being basically a sure bet for profit in that time and place.
It's the same here, the country will collapse because he isn't just a bad leader, he is a collection of toxic qualities that almost guarantee bad organizational outcomes even given very positive starting conditions.
doesnt help that half the voting population seems to be just as narcist and ready to go down with the ship if certain groups get fucked harder
Yeah that is fair and I should've elaborated this as the Trump Administration. As in, Trump doesn't care because he both successfully ran from prison, and is now able to golf pretty much all he wants. If anything he probably resents America for refusing to vote for him in 2020. So now all the pilot fish surrounding Trump who helped get him elected for their own end are reaping their end of the bargain.
So naturally you've got the Russian assets (Gabbard, Flynn, Trump himself), the zealots like Mike Johnson and Stephen Miller, the corporate oligarchical opportunists like Musk. The power-hungry (like Trump's sons, JDV, etc.), and so on. It's a big fuck-you to America and it ultimately matters little to me whether it's Trump or the broader Republican party. As far as I'm concerned they all made this; they all enabled it. They are criminal cartel.
The world has no appetite for his big beautiful luxury goods store.
USA used to be the managers and leaders of these factories, now he wants them to be the grunt workers and for some reason people are all for it.
Before Reaganomics and globalism the middle class was strong and built on the shoulders of blue collars, why do you think they forced globalism down our throat? So they could make stuff cheaply and could eradicate the middle class. I hate Trump and what he stands for, but globalism was something the left was fighting against back in the day because the left realized the consequences of losing manufacturing jobs in first world countries.
they also saw reagan was a easy to manipulate stooge, especially after his alzheimers starting to affect him, they took even greater advantage of him.
the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isn’t there
This is what everyone has been saying ad-nauseum since this whole shit show started.
...in the 80s.
BRB, setting up my backyard forge after years of not smooshing any metal. Looks like it's up to people like me to make all this complicated tool&die
you were warned months before, and even before the election. dont act surprised, you thought his only legislation was tax cuts, but it wasnt , he was pushing things further along the line for PUTIN.
Only the 1% are getting tax cuts. This was all known before the election but people are dumb.
But they'll be able to build big beautiful factories with huge tarriffs on all the building supplies and equipment right?
that's what happens when you have zero fucking plan at all
You mean “cOnCePts Of a PlAn” don’t count?
Tariffs aren't designed to bring manufacturing back. It's designed to crush the US economy for Daddy Putin. It's designed to starve out the plebs. It's designed to bankrupt companies to be bought by the billionaire class for pennies on the dollar.
You left out the most important reason: getting people to come kiss Trump's ass to ask for exemptions. Nothing is more important than getting Trump the sycophancy he has to settle for in lieu of respect.
Right, this is why an intelligent leader might use tariffs to bring back manufacturing, in a very targeted way and matched with incentives to help build what is missing.
This is someone who heard that you could use a hammer in conjunction with nails to build a house so starts swinging mjolnir in every direction
This is what I’ve been saying, building factories is already an expensive and time consuming process, then you slap high prices on everything you need to make a factory work it’s going to be out of reach for basically anyone and the few who can afford it likely wouldn’t anyway because like this describes it’s not fiscally responsible but also the US is in decline why would you be putting an enormous investment into a wildly unstable system? If you want manufacturing in the US building factories needs to be reasonable price wise and you need consumers with the funds to do the consuming, neither of which can be delivered now
What Trump and MAGA wanted can be done... but over a period of many years (like 20+ years) of careful and purposeful policy making.
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News