How soon will the orange idiot crash the American economy? The markets already gave him the middle finger on Friday. Sadly, when the price of oil, produce, and pretty much everything else goes through the roof for Americans, the MAGA crowd will be too stupid to realize who's fault it is.
His plan is to eliminate all income and cap gains taxes and fund the government through tariffs. I'm not sure how that'll work. For people paying very little income tax (like 50% of the country and pretty much his voter base) it'll suck hard since costs will increase - they won't save money from not paying income taxes but they'll feel it at the store and paying sales taxes instead. But whatever, fuck them. If the plan is for the poor to gift me another $50,0o0 a year fine fuck 'em. That's what they voted for after all.
Aside from the economic chaos this is going to unleash, there is the diplomatic fallout. Regardless of the bumps in the road on our relationship over the centuries, and the fact that we freely poke fun of each other, the United States and Canada enjoy one of the more prosperous and beneficial relationships of two countries in history. We're friends and allies. If this is how the new administration treats its closest allies, how willing do you think other allies are going to be to step up to the plate? By 2028, the United States may indeed stand alone and despite the fact that it is (currently) a superpower, I don't think that's a good place to be.
"Yes, maybe (and maybe not!)" could be shortened to "Maybe" by anyone not invested in vacillating as much as possible.
This is Trump's Teflon right here. Convince your supporters that you're doing things the Right Way and that's what matters, and it doesn't matter how bad things get (or how offensively you talk), that's just the sacrifice necessary to know that the Right Man is doing the Right Things to lead this country. Already had the mindset planted with the gun issue, where it's more important to not suffer even the slightest gun control than it is to prevent school shootings.
Extremely telling about how this is being covered in American media. All the major news outlets have the tariffs as front-page news. FOX News? It's buried at the bottom of their page.
I am beginning to suspect that this might not be solely about fentanyl. But that cannot be because otherwise these tariffs would be illegal (the justification is a national emergency due to drug deaths). I am sure Congress will throughly investigate and hold him accountable.
History doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme, Mark Twain said. It's interesting to compare where we are now to the circumstances of the Late Bronze Collapse (circa 1177 BCE). The similarity is that the top economies of the world at the time had built a complex, intertwined economic system that benefitted all of them. That system came unglued when it was pressured from a number of directions. The likely culprits: plague, climate change, social unrest, invasion... All of those factors that caused the unravelling of the Bronze Age superpowers have their echoes in our present situation. The main difference is that none of them at that time were deliberately self-inflected. Professor Eric Cline has written a book about the Collapse and recently followed it up with an analysis of the post Collapse era. This is a video of a presentation he made about nine years ago. It's about an hour and it's well worth the time investment. If you can make it all the way through his comparison to our present situation (as of about 2016) is a bit unsettling. If you like that presentation there is also a presentation available on the post 1177 era.
Reposting from the other thread... What is Trump's endgame with the tariffs? To eliminate the trade deficit? Is he aware of why it exists in the first place? Elsewhere he's been ranting about attempts to replace the dollar as world currency. Well, this will be the fastest way to do that.
So have any of these people actually read the Bible? Or just you know, gone to a couple Sunday Schools?
It’s been a while for me but I seem to remember that a) Goliath wasn’t the good guy in the story and b) he lost. But maybe they have an Alternative Bible that they use.
I'm convinced there is no endgame. This is just about hurting people. Canada's PM and Mexican's President made fun of Trump once and now he wants revenge.
The "logic" would almost make sense, if not for the fact that we don't just import things, we also export them, and the countries we export them to have the ability to levy tariffs of their own.
