US Election Thread 2024

[mxleader]

Don't you guys like higher taxes? Aren't you always clamoring for higher taxes? So what's the problem? Just pay up.

I love tax increases hidden inside cost of goods increases.

I don't know what Trump was thinking when those tariffs were put in place because it was a bit late. It's not like all those thousands of jobs lost over the years from shifting production overseas will suddenly come pouring back into the US. The infrastructure is gone at this point for many of those jobs. I recall talking with some younger dude who was looking for a manufacturing job at a bicycle factory and couldn't understand why the company I worked for couldn't just build frames in the US. He had no idea that that company used to build frames in the US but then went bankrupt trying to compete against other bicycle manufactures that had already shifted production to Taiwan and China.

Also, technology marches on and trying to bring something like carbon frame manufacturing to the US is prohibitively expensive and there aren't enough skilled laborers to do so, and that would mean charging custom bike frame prices for production line stuff. It was a grand idea for Trump but a dismal failure for the American consumer and small business owner.

I also just want to add the Biden administration hasn't helped fully eliminating those tariffs either probably because it's too good of a deal for anyone with investments (politicians) in any corporation that can inflate their prices and increase profits based on tariffs.

One of the strangest effects of the tariffs on manufacturing is that it didn't hurt the high end goods market all that much at first because when you make a lot you pay a lot for things without batting an eye. For the low end of goods raising the cost of an item by 25% doesn't seem like all that much unless you're a consumer on a limited budget. Then it's a nightmare.

[heywood]

Trump saw China eating our lunch, but he focused on the trade deficit and current balance of payments as the problem, and missed the bigger strategic picture. His tariffs were intended to punish China for not being an equal trading partner, but what they did is reduce some of our exports to China and raise the price of Chinese goods here. And they didn't have any meaningful effect on the balance of payments.

The tariffs should have been targeted at preserving or helping build up strategically important industries where China was on a path to becoming the exclusive supplier. They should be a first step towards an economic divorce from China. We need to become independent from China for national security and long term economic stability reasons. That doesn't mean we can't trade with China, we just need to be independent. Our infrastructure and critical sectors of the economy need to keep going if trade with China is ever cut off due to geopolitical conflict.

The Biden administration continued the tariffs, including pointless ones that are only hurting us. But they show signs that they understand the long term strategic implications of our trade relationship, and are taking steps to develop (chip manufacturing) and preserve (US Steel) some critical industries. So I think they get it, but are cautious what they say publicly. Trump's across the board 25% is in keeping with paleo-conservatives views that are becoming common if not dominant on the right now. Like funding the government more on tariffs like we did before the 16th Amendment. And abolishing the Federal Reserve and adopting a form of fixed money supply used to be one of those Ron Paul ideas that Republicans would distance themselves from , but now it's got traction on the right. It seems the idea is to take away all the tools we've developed to mitigate the business cycle since the Second Industrial Revolution and bring back the Gilded Age.

[RippedPhreak]

No, losing all our jobs took years and it would take years for them to come back. But first we would have to set up a good environment for them to even considering coming back. Companies went overseas because they could ignore things like overtime pay, health insurance, maternity leave, safety measures in the warehouse, environmental impact studies, etc. All these things cost a lot of money.

So a business operating out of a third world country can sell a shirt for $10.00 because they don't need to worry about any of those laws or expenses. They might even have literal slave labor. A business in America has to pay for all those things I mentioned above, so they have to sell the same shirt at $30.00. Result: No one makes shirt in the USA.

The point of the tariff is to raise the cost of the overseas-made shirt to $30.00 so companies might as well just come back to the USA. But no, it won't happen all that quickly. Lastly, I would gladly pay a bit more for things if it meant Americans had jobs making X thing. And if Americans were making better money from all these jobs that came back, they wouldn't mind paying more anyway.

[mxleader]

No, losing all our jobs took years and it would take years for them to come back. But first we would have to set up a good environment for them to even considering coming back. Companies went overseas because they could ignore things like overtime pay, health insurance, maternity leave, safety measures in the warehouse, environmental impact studies, etc. All these things cost a lot of money.

So a business operating out of a third world country can sell a shirt for $10.00 because they don't need to worry about any of those laws or expenses. They might even have literal slave labor. A business in America has to pay for all those things I mentioned above, so they have to sell the same shirt at $30.00. Result: No one makes shirt in the USA.

The point of the tariff is to raise the cost of the overseas-made shirt to $30.00 so companies might as well just come back to the USA. But no, it won't happen all that quickly. Lastly, I would gladly pay a bit more for things if it meant Americans had jobs making X thing. And if Americans were making better money from all these jobs that came back, they wouldn't mind paying more anyway.

One of the primary things that hurt the cycling industry was NAFTA. Literally within a couple of years of that agreement a lot of small manufacturers shifted to Mexico. The quality suffered greatly. Then they started to ship manufacturing to Taiwan and then China because they could get better quality product for even less money than south of the border. That being said there are many scrupulous ways to get around tariffs but it takes a lot of labor and creativity here on the US side of manufacturing companies bringing product from China.

[Nicker]

Don't you guys like higher taxes?

Nope.

Next strawman, please.


Oh! Since you are here; raping children, like Donald trump has done. Are you still OK with that or has there been some change in your moral bearings?

[mxleader]

It's getting spicy in here!

[RippedPhreak]

Nobody believes these wild stories.

[mxleader]

Someone does...

[Nicker]

A jury believed he raped an adult woman. Trump bragged about grooming children. Why wouldn't we believe him? He's a straight talker, right?

Or we could ask Jeffery Epstein. Oh right.

Just ask Trump's victims then. Or his procuress, Ghislaine "I wish her well" Maxwell.

[heywood]

No, losing all our jobs took years and it would take years for them to come back. But first we would have to set up a good environment for them to even considering coming back. Companies went overseas because they could ignore things like overtime pay, health insurance, maternity leave, safety measures in the warehouse, environmental impact studies, etc. All these things cost a lot of money.

So a business operating out of a third world country can sell a shirt for $10.00 because they don't need to worry about any of those laws or expenses. They might even have literal slave labor. A business in America has to pay for all those things I mentioned above, so they have to sell the same shirt at $30.00. Result: No one makes shirt in the USA.

The point of the tariff is to raise the cost of the overseas-made shirt to $30.00 so companies might as well just come back to the USA. But no, it won't happen all that quickly. Lastly, I would gladly pay a bit more for things if it meant Americans had jobs making X thing. And if Americans were making better money from all these jobs that came back, they wouldn't mind paying more anyway.

A 25% tariff makes the $10 shirt $12.50, not $30. That's not enough to move production, it's just a shirt tax. It will be that way with most goods imported from low skill labor countries. On the other hand, a 25% tariff on some higher end manufactured goods is enough to isolate the US market and manufacturers, leading to fewer choices and complacency. The tariff would also apply to goods from countries where we already have fair trading agreements, which is backwards.

I think we have to consider which domestic industries require protection or investment for strategic national policy reasons and use tariffs in a targeted manner to support those industries. Suppose we decided the domestic apparel industry was strategically important to protect. Then we might consider a 200% tariff on imported shirts to achieve price parity. If we wanted to protect our washing machine makers, 25% is sufficient. Energy, steel, aluminum, mining, and fisheries always seem to need a raft of controls to negotiate over.

[Nicker]

tRump logic: if we raise the price of consumer goods we can generate the money we need to subsidise consumers. HYUCK!

[mxleader]

A jury believed he raped an adult woman. Trump bragged about grooming children. Why wouldn't we believe him? He's a straight talker, right?

Or we could ask Jeffery Epstein. Oh right.

Just ask Trump's victims then. Or his procuress, Ghislaine "I wish her well" Maxwell.

Well, the jury did reject the rape charge but agreed with the lesser charge of sexual assault so the columnist could be awarded $5 million. She had a pretty big smile on her face for a woman who was raped.

I'll be honest though I don't know how laws separate sexual assault from rape. Maybe it's just in the wording of the law like manslaughter vs. murder. I'm not a legal expert but I do know that both are wrong on any level.

[RippedPhreak]

A 25% tariff makes the $10 shirt $12.50, not $30.

I was illustrating a general scenario. It could be washing machines, televisions, anything.

tRump logic: if we raise the price of consumer goods we can generate the money we need to subsidise consumers.

I don't know what you mean by "subsidize consumers." If this means "people will have jobs at decent wages making those goods" here in the USA, then great. I never thought of raising peoples' wages as subsidizing them.

It will be that way with most goods imported from low skill labor countries.

There are tons of people here that could use low-skilled labor. But since we've sent most jobs overseas and brought in migrants as near-slave labor to do the rest, these folks have no low-skilled labor to do. So they turn to drugs and crime.

a 25% tariff on some higher end manufactured goods is enough to isolate the US market and manufacturers

What does this even mean and why should anyone care? If the US was more "isolated," so what? We have the ability to make everything we need right here. We just don't because politicians accepted bribes to allow all the jobs to go offshore.

The tariff would also apply to goods from countries where we already have fair trading agreements, which is backwards.

We should only need to import things that we literally can't make here, like certain rare earth elements that just aren't in the ground here. Just because we have an agreement with X country doesn't mean it can't be changed or abandoned if the agreement no longer benefits us.

[Nicker]

On January 6th, 2020, JD Vance admits he would have committed the crime against democracy, which Mike pence refused commit. Vance would have certified FAKE ELECTORS.

I don't know what you mean by "subsidize consumers."

tRump said he would offer a few crumbs to fund child care by making everything more expensive by increasing tariffs. Hence the DERP.

[Nicker]

Debate Summary

Immigrants are eating American DOGS!
Donald J. Trump

[heywood]

Well, the Twitter bros tried to accuse Haitians of cannibalism, and people didn't buy it. I guess they were hoping that pet eating would seem more plausible. After all, when I was growing up, people used to joke about people eating stray dogs and cats in the Asian immigrant communities. The immigrants eat weird stuff trope is certainly an old one.

Seriously though, we can't have a public conversation about immigration because it's a third rail issue. It's a topic that people want to get mad about but don't want to take seriously because it means addressing realities they are uncomfortable with. Politicians who try to lead people there get punished for it.

[heywood]

I was illustrating a general scenario. It could be washing machines, televisions, anything.

I don't know what you mean by "subsidize consumers." If this means "people will have jobs at decent wages making those goods" here in the USA, then great. I never thought of raising peoples' wages as subsidizing them.

There are tons of people here that could use low-skilled labor. But since we've sent most jobs overseas and brought in migrants as near-slave labor to do the rest, these folks have no low-skilled labor to do. So they turn to drugs and crime.

What does this even mean and why should anyone care? If the US was more "isolated," so what? We have the ability to make everything we need right here. We just don't because politicians accepted bribes to allow all the jobs to go offshore.

We should only need to import things that we literally can't make here, like certain rare earth elements that just aren't in the ground here. Just because we have an agreement with X country doesn't mean it can't be changed or abandoned if the agreement no longer benefits us.

I doubt there's ever been a country in the history of the world that produced everything it consumed. It's not a goal anyone should aspire too. We'll produce more together if I do what I'm most efficient at and you do what you're most efficient at, and the more people we get into our trading circle, the better off we all are. The same economic principle that makes it beneficial for individuals to live in settlements around a common market applies to tribes and nations. Our standard of living is directly linked to economic efficiency and we all benefit by producing things where it's most efficient to do so.

We could produce all our shirts here in the US, but is that something we would actually benefit from? If we're going to spend $30 per shirt instead of $10 per shirt, we either buy less shirts or live with less of something else. And to make the shirts, we'd need to divert labor to the textile and apparel industries, labor that could be used to produce something of greater economic value than shirts. Working in a sweatshop doing a repetitive mechanical job is a waste of a high school education. If we brought these jobs back, we'd have to fill them through immigration, which is already tearing the country apart enough already.

[mxleader]

I doubt there's ever been a country in the history of the world that produced everything it consumed. It's not a goal anyone should aspire too. We'll produce more together if I do what I'm most efficient at and you do what you're most efficient at, and the more people we get into our trading circle, the better off we all are. The same economic principle that makes it beneficial for individuals to live in settlements around a common market applies to tribes and nations. Our standard of living is directly linked to economic efficiency and we all benefit by producing things where it's most efficient to do so.

We could produce all our shirts here in the US, but is that something we would actually benefit from? If we're going to spend $30 per shirt instead of $10 per shirt, we either buy less shirts or live with less of something else. And to make the shirts, we'd need to divert labor to the textile and apparel industries, labor that could be used to produce something of greater economic value than shirts. Working in a sweatshop doing a repetitive mechanical job is a waste of a high school education. If we brought these jobs back, we'd have to fill them through immigration, which is already tearing the country apart enough already.

You do make some valid points, but when a country gets to the point where it is imports are greater than it's exports you will have more money leaving than coming in. Also, if you take away good paying labor jobs from those in your country, and ship them overseas, that contributes to money leaving the country instead of circulating within the economy. The only benefit to exporting labor is to increase stockholder dividends and executive pay and bonuses.

Very few companies actually suffer failures because they are unionized. There are some cases where unionized workers demand higher pay and benefits from a company that's not capable of giving them what they want. Hostess was one of those but they failed because the general population in the US has changed it's overall diet choices to either healthier options, or upgraded their tastebuds from American cafe food to gastropub grub. It's easy though to reference Ford paying its workers more because so that they could afford to buy Fords but that's not the case for companies producing random widgets or even Boeing aircraft. Maybe Boeing employees travel more when they have more money, but I don't know if that supports their own industry or not.

One of the other problems is when a countries raw resources start to dwindle or in some cases there are plenty of resources but extraction costs are higher than what it would cost to import the same materials a manufacturer would rather import the material. That of course hurts mining companies but helps transportation companies. You could shift workers but that's not easy to do.

This problem certainly isn't unique to the US though as many industrialized countries have shipped manufacturing jobs overseas in order to save a buck, and once that snowball starts rolling an avalanche soon follows. Sometimes the cost increases aren't entirely related to labor costs either and have a lot to do with environmental regulations. Coal mining might be adversely affected in a country based on environmental regulations and/or diminishing resources.

As far as immigration is concerned small amounts in any country generally helps boost economies, but massive amounts left unchecked can upturn economies very quickly to the point where it's difficult to adjust. The US as a melting pot shouldn't be overly concerned with migration and those concerns are usually related to labor competition disguised as criminal intent of immigrants that citizens claim when they feel threatened. In countries where resources and space is more limited like the UK unchecked immigration is probably more problematic economically and culturally than in places like the US. One could make the argument that entire cultures are being displaced by too high of a flow of immigrants in too short of a time period and that it is pushed on the people politically. This is where countries that have huge numbers of refugees should retain them as much as possible as cruel as that may seem. In some cases you could argue that there is politically motivated colonization happening in many countries and it's okay for more heavily melanated people to rage over past colonization but the lighter melanated people are being forced to suck it up or be labeled racists.

The most basic issue though I think is boiled down to population vs. resources in most countries and corporations and garbage politicians that exploit them both. If the livable land mass in any country could easily be expanded and they had unending resources there wouldn't be much of a reason to compete for anything. So maybe the most obvious, but also the most difficult to change, problem is the exponential increase in populations in nearly every country on Earth.

[Sulphur]

Don't worry, birth rates have been steadily declining across the world. If things continue as they are, we'll have nations of old codgers being taken care of by automated bedpan robots while the kids distract themselves from the looming heatpocalypse by generating deep fried video memes on their holophones. But at least the economy will be better after lots of people die.

[demagogue]

Nah, nah, there are export oriented economies and import oriented economies. Export oriented are developing countries pushing through an industrial boom, currently your Chinas, Thailands, Malaysias, Bangladeshes, Argentinas, etc. Import oriented are information economies that deal in information and services, the US, Western Europe, Japan. Which model do we want the US to follow?

US dollars are going out of the country, but they're going to spend that on US services, and (what I know painfully well working for a Japanese company) it keeps the value of the dollar boosted, as opposed to what's happening to the yen, which is in free fall so foreign goods & parts cost 1.5 times what they'd cost with dollar parity, exactly because Japan is having its own nativist reaction. We don't want the US reverting back to the 1970s or to look more like Thailand with all the social instability that comes with it.

Surging economic migration is usually a sign that your economy is booming, which is a good thing and pouring ice on labor demand isn't going to help, and/or your neighbors are economically/politically collapsing, which is a bad thing. But migrants send remittances to their families back home is one of the most efficient ways to prop up those governments, since we at least get cheap labor out of it (as opposed to just a flat handout). But one way or another the stability of the US is tied to the stability of our neighbors, so if we want the migration surge to slow down, we should help build a better regional plan. For one thing, I think the US ought to legalize drugs and turn it from a criminal to a health matter, to bankrupt the cartels and put really high taxes on them to pay for the social & health care systems we already need to deal with all the social ills they create.

All in all, I think the more a country blinds itself to what's happening outside its borders and tries to wish problems away, the more it gets, by definition, blindsided by forces beyond its comprehension. But it's also just a miserable, mean, & exhausting worldview to always be paranoid & in constant fear and rage over what looks different.

[Nicker]

Well, the jury did reject the rape charge but agreed with the lesser charge of sexual assault ...

The allegation was sexual assault but the JUDGE called it rape. That didn't affect the judgement but it signalled what actually happened, in the opinion of the court.

[mxleader]

Don't worry, birth rates have been steadily declining across the world. If things continue as they are, we'll have nations of old codgers being taken care of by automated bedpan robots while the kids distract themselves from the looming heatpocalypse by generating deep fried video memes on their holophones. But at least the economy will be better after lots of people die.

That sounds like fun... I wonder if I could modify a Roomba to change my bedpan.

Nah, nah, there are export oriented economies and import oriented economies. Export oriented are developing countries pushing through an industrial boom, currently your Chinas, Thailands, Malaysias, Bangladeshes, Argentinas, etc. Import oriented are information economies that deal in information and services, the US, Western Europe, Japan. Which model do we want the US to follow?

I think that the US is too vast in size and population to pick one or the other because it relies on immigrants for both menial labor and information labor. The US wouldn't survive well if it didn't import various levels of labor. Now if you quickly added thousands of either type to the US the national economy might not notice but local economies would potentially be negatively disrupted. Hell, even immigrants displace other immigrants if there are enough showing up to compete.

US dollars are going out of the country, but they're going to spend that on US services, and (what I know painfully well working for a Japanese company) it keeps the value of the dollar boosted, as opposed to what's happening to the yen, which is in free fall so foreign goods & parts cost 1.5 times what they'd cost with dollar parity, exactly because Japan is having its own nativist reaction. We don't want the US reverting back to the 1970s or to look more like Thailand with all the social instability that comes with it.

It seems to me that the US has already reverted back to the 1970's in some ways. I mean I was just a kid then but those weren't the happiest of times

Surging economic migration is usually a sign that your economy is booming, which is a good thing and pouring ice on labor demand isn't going to help, and/or your neighbors are economically/politically collapsing, which is a bad thing. But migrants send remittances to their families back home is one of the most efficient ways to prop up those governments, since we at least get cheap labor out of it (as opposed to just a flat handout). But one way or another the stability of the US is tied to the stability of our neighbors, so if we want the migration surge to slow down, we should help build a better regional plan. For one thing, I think the US ought to legalize drugs and turn it from a criminal to a health matter, to bankrupt the cartels and put really high taxes on them to pay for the social & health care systems we already need to deal with all the social ills they create.

I think that a number of countries are currently experiencing high immigration from war torn and natural disaster riddled countries and the countries they are entering are not experiencing an economic boom. So they aren't showing up because they are answering a job notice on a job board that was posted on a job board at an Internet cafe.

As far as legalizing drugs in the US I don't think that would help anything because that would happen before any social systems would be put into place. Then all hell would break loose and the cartels will capitalize on it by attempting to become legitimate business entities. The exploitation of workers in South and Central America would be far worse than it is now. The US should go back to clandestine elimination of cartels. Maybe we still do that stuff but I don't know.

All in all, I think the more a country blinds itself to what's happening outside its borders and tries to wish problems away, the more it gets, by definition, blindsided by forces beyond its comprehension. But it's also just a miserable, mean, & exhausting worldview to always be paranoid & in constant fear and rage over what looks different.

That's a fair point but I don't think that it's entirely fair to any of those countries to be forced to absorb all the world's problems. One country might be wishing their problems away and those problems are at the same time running away from their problems. Who's right?

[Nicker]

An actual post about the dog-eating allegations, published by the Judiciary Committee GOP caucus:


The image they used.




It's AI. You can tell because the hands are normal sized.

[mxleader]

His left fingers seem a bit long though. Like really long or he's doing one of those magic tricks where you pretend to pull away your thumb but it's four fingers instead.

[Nicker]

The real magic trick is not having the animals attack him.