State of the Discussion

While stupid and clueless probably covers a lot of ground there's also an angle that Trump was simply psychologically unable to simply take the accomplishments of the man who whupped him in 2020 and not try and destroy them. Other writers have also pointed out that Trumps protectionist impulses have a long pedigree in what passes for his thoughts.

Which is all somewhat besides my point that Yishans' analysis is just as incoherent as Trumps policy.

I've come across a number of writers arguing that Trump's statements going back to the 80s suggest that this may be one of the few policies he actually believes in. Last time the remaining traditional Republicans floating around his administration were able to talk him back but now there's no one to do that and we are all going to suffer for it. I hope all the big business and wall street types that got on board and who are now taking a bath feel like the total moronic trash they are. The Mooch was right all along.

Yet another review on Snow White.
She has serious spoilers for the plot. Probably the biggest tell was the last few seconds where she points out all but one of the writers took their names off the credits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrLLcFuIDJU

Above, you give a fairly insightful statement: " All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from “The economy is garbage” to “The economy is great thanks to me” and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with “the genius of Trump” nonsense."

He did *NOT* do that. We agree about that too, right?

So then we're stuck with whether he's stupid and clueless or whether he's actually trying to accomplish something.

Does "stupid and clueless" make more sense to you?

He is indeed assuming that... but I wondered if what he said about China was true.

I mean, if he started stuff off by lying, that'd be a bad start.

So I learned about the Three Red Lines rule.

I learned that China did ban private tutoring (and created a black market).

I learned that China cracked down on luxury influencers as part of a country-wide internet tampdown. (And I'm sure you remember them firewalling off Americans from Chinese folx during the TikTok tempest in the teapot.)

So he has, at least, started from a position of verifiable statements.

The Dems ran a gun control activist for the House in Florida? They probably weren’t going to win anyway, but for God’s sake at least give yourselves a chance!

Yishan has an interesting take:

Ok, so I am not an administration apologist but I have not heard any intellectually rigorous discussion of the current tariff policy. I'm not sure what I'm about to say is either, but here is a perspective I have not yet seen advanced:

Before we begin, a shift in perspective. To understand where I'm going, you have to first accept that China is succeeding, that they are not backwards, and that in many areas they are already far beyond the US. If you're still in the "China's advantage is low-cost labor" mindset, you're ngmi and might as well leave now.

All right, for everyone still around:

A few years ago, Xi and the CCP made a series of what appeared to be extremely damaging moves for China.

These included:
- popping the real estate bubble, crushing investors and bankrupting more than one investment firm
- wiping out all for-profit student tutoring companies, an entire industry gone overnight
- severely tamping down the entire Chinese social media and e-commerce startup ecosystem

These were widely portrayed as damaging to the Chinese economy and part of an authoritarian reassertion of power and retreat from free markets and capitalism.

Maybe they were.

But, there was rationale behind all of those - and some people even believed them to be true for the US, namely:

- "housing is for living in, not investment" so prices should be low, not high
- for-profit tutoring advantages rich families, corrupting the meritocratic exam system
- social media and e-commerce make money but aren't tech that benefits national security, the way aerospace, robotics, and semiconductors do

A few years later, we see many of the intended results:

- working-class people have been able refinance their homes for less, even while investors took a bath
- the exam system is no longer as corrupted
- China speeds ahead in many hardtech areas

This isn't a post about China supremacy.

(The investment climate in China is still tepid, and China has many other issues)

This is a post about the fact that large-scale decisions that benefit the national interest often look bad according to conventional metrics and will certainly be decried as bad by the people who have been most successful under the current system!

That is likely to be as true in China as in the US, or anywhere.

After all, if they made things look good under the current metrics, we'd already be doing them quite uncontroversially! So anything non-obvious that needs to be done which isn't already being done is probably going to look really bad by those metrics.

I use China to illustrate this because it has leaders who are willing to take such actions, whereas the US generally does not.

Now... I don't personally know if the tariffs are that thing for the US.

But I do know that if they aren't, pointing out that the stock market is tanking is not a useful way to prove it.

US supply chains are global, and I suspect the tariffs are not focused on punishing other countries, but to force US-owned companies to move their supply chains (and thus physical production) into the United States. But it's easier for a President to yell and demonize other countries than to do that about your own country's major industry leaders.

I don't know if there's a better sequence for doing this combined with selected deregulation, but certainly any plan will end up making typical metrics look really bad. I am a fan of detail and finesse myself, and we can't just cold-start new factories in the US tomorrow.

If you just want to know how bad things will be bad, you can probably find a best-case scenario by looking at how long it took for the Chinese economy to recover after they took the drastic actions I listed above.

Dude, it's awesome that you found that. I couldn't get past Google explaining to me that I couldn't vape indoors and those things didn't exist in the early 1900s anyway.

THANK YOU!!!

Whenever I post, I get sent to a message like this:

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probably Niels Juul an Illinois state senator at the time and later a us representative.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Juul

might also have been on the mind of Briggs because his son Herb Juul was a Major League baseball player around this time. He's actually higher ranked in relevant internet searches around 'chicago' 'Illinois' 'juul' '1913' despite having a Major League career only slightly longer than Doc Moonlight Graham's

Something Chait muses about over at the Atlantic and something I'd agonized about right after the election in November, was that this is a historically massive own goal on Trumps' part. All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from "The economy is garbage" to "The economy is great thanks to me" and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with "the genius of Trump" nonsense. Trump utterly cratering the economy is, politically, the less dangerous thing he could have done vis a vis trying to topple the electoral order. It'd be a lot harder to try it with a hostile populace and congress controlled by the Dems which Trump seems to be working hard to conjure.

Once again, don't be fooled by the naked idiocy- there's no deeper scheme; they really just are idiots. Cold comfort but that's something.

In theory congress could knock this whole flaming edifice of feces down. The law Trump is using to impose these tariffs obligates Congress to weigh in on it. The current congress actually fiddled with their legislative calendar (IIRC) to functionally make their entire legislative session "day one" of this term specifically to evade a legally required vote on Trumps tarrifs. A new congress (in less than 2 years) or even this congress, if they notice the whining of the rails under their feet or the shrieking of their (suddenly much less) wealthy paymasters could put an end to this stuff with a vote.

But I'm very glad you saw the writing on the wall and jumped off near the peak.

I'm looking at retirement in the next couple of years, so I switched to mostly cash a few weeks back.

The last time we saw anything this idiotic was Smoot-Hawley. At least that was voted on by Congress, so the perpetrators could be gotten rid of in a couple years. Now that Congress has inexplicably ceded that authority to the president, we have 4 years of this idiocy.

Oh for sure, I'm in the same boat. Not planning on looking at my 401(k) until approximately 2029 but I've got at least twenty some working years still ahead of me, maybe more once social security is converted into an exotic reverse equity investment portfolio of some kind. Really tough morning though, and potentially many more to come for anyone who thought they were retiring in the immediate future.