Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 131 of 479
Speaking of evil people...
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Far-Left Maryland Lawmakers Pass Reparations Bill While Financial Crisis Looms
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?
Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.
By Paul Krugman | Apr 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the
America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some [?????] negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world.
When we were the only remaining industrial economy after WWII ... and for the longest time the largest ... international trade was beneficial. But international trade was also killing the goose that laid golden eggs. The creation of the "Rust Belt" began in the 70s and was a harbinger of things to come.
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Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America ...
Period.
Foreign governments SHOULDN'T make policies that help America (to their detriment) if their leaders are minding their own national interests. The only way we have gotten nations to sacrifice is by regime change, threats, and bribery.
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tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess.
I was wondering how they came up with those numbers.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're going to find out, so I'll take what ends up happening as the truth over the people you quote that denied we were in a recession for the better part of Joe Biden*'s administration, and it cost about $9 Trillion to keep up the illusion that we weren't in that amount of time.
You are a simple minded fool.
If Trump and his team are as simple minded as you, then we're in a world of hurt and Democrats will rise from the grave.
If not, you're going to look really stupid again. Just like you always do.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.
By Paul Krugman | Apr 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the
America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.
National Debt in 1934: $27 Billion
National Debt in 2024: $35,464 Billion
Shut the fuck up, Paul.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trump is imposing tariffs because American democracy is no longer strong enough to stop him.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love how riled up Trump has gotten our idiots.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By Zack Beauchamp | Apr 3, 2025, 3:15 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/407053/trump-tariff-expensive-democracy-a
uthoritarianism-breakdown
One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly.
Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences.
Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes.
For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him.
Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.
Now, it’s still possible that Trump steps back from the brink. But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: the long decay of America’s democratic system means that we are all living under an axe.
And if this isn’t the moment it falls, there will surely be another.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs
Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.
By Jonathan Chait | April 2, 2025, 5:34 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-pol
itical-capital/682274/
All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.
But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.
That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.
This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.
Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)
He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.
If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.
Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sw
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How a Con Man President Is Destroying Confidence
By Paul Krugman / Apr 4, 2025 at 5:32 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-a-con-man-president-is-destroyi
ng
Normally, I don’t believe in confidence.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, “confidence” was the first refuge of scoundrels. That is, the supposed need to retain or restore confidence was constantly invoked as a reason to pursue destructive policies. If you argued for adequate stimulus to fight the Great Recession, you were told that this would undermine confidence. If you argued against austerity that would block economic recovery, you were told that slashing spending would actually boost the economy, because it would inspire confidence — a claim I mocked as belief in the “confidence fairy.”
The truth is that most of the time you should evaluate economic policies based on what they actually do, not with speculation about how you imagine they will affect confidence.
But this isn’t most of the time. This is the third year of the second Trump presidency — OK, it’s actually only part way through the third month, but it feels like years. And Trump is in the process of showing that a sufficiently chaotic and incompetent government can, in fact, do enough damage to confidence to inflict serious economic harm.
The most telling indicator here isn’t the plunging stock market — Paul Samuelson’s old jibe about the market having predicted nine of the last five recessions still applies. It is, instead, the plunging value of the dollar:
Source: xe.com
Standard economic analysis says that tariffs strengthen a nation’s currency. If the United States puts taxes on imports, this discourages businesses and consumers from buying foreign goods, which reduces the supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market and should drive the value of the dollar up.
In fact, the normal effect of tariffs on the exchange rate was one of the reasons to doubt that the Trump tariffs would help U.S. manufacturing: A stronger dollar would make U.S. producers less competitive, offsetting the protective effects of the tariffs. And as you can see in the chart above, investors drove the dollar up after Trump’s election win, partly because they believed that tariffs would have their usual effect.
But the dollar fell once investors began to see Trump policy in action. Permanent tariffs are bad for the economy, but businesses can, for the most part, find a way to live with them. What business can’t deal with is a regime under which trade policy reflects the whims of a mad king, where nobody knows what tariffs will be next week, let alone over the next five years. Are these tariffs going to be permanent? Are they a negotiating ploy? The administration can’t even get its talking points straight, with top officials saying that tariffs aren’t up for negotiation only to be undercut by Trump a few hours later.
Under these conditions, how is a business supposed to make investments, or any kind of long-term commitment? Everyone is going to sit on their hands, waiting for clarity that may never come.
Wait, it gets worse. You might have expected a lot of careful thought to go into the biggest change in U.S. trade policy since the republic was founded:
But since Trump delivered his Rose Garden remarks, we’ve had a series of revelations about how slapdash and amateurish an operation this was. Trump declared that he was imposing tariffs on nations “that treat us badly”:
[W]e will calculate the combined rate of all their tariffs, non-monetary barriers, and other forms of cheating.
But we soon learned that no such calculation had taken place. Trump’s tariffs w
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More fearmongering from the Dead Clinton/Obama party.
Nobody cares.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs
Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.
By Jonathan Chait | April 2, 2025, 5:34 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-pol
itical-capital/682274/
All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.
Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.
1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.
We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.
1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.
We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts
By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.
1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.
We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts
By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Nah.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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