No - of course not. The supposed "bad guys" never think they are the bad guys. Right now there is someone wondering if Democrats will ever realize they are the bad guys.
We’re supposed to trust a profoundly stupid buffoon who went bankrupt 6 times and couldn’t even make money off a casino? We’re supposed to trust republicans who have given us 9 out of the last 10 recessions and are about to make it #10?
You don't know where the money is going. The ultra wealthy never pay taxes in the first place. How can you go lower than 0? It might be a bad idea. The premise behind it is not a bad idea. We have talked about this for well over 2 decades - we have outsourced way too much and gutted the middle class. Door dashing and uber while begging for tips is not a way to live. Service economy wages does not support middle class upward mobility. We all can't be software engineers and being a doctor or lawyer is just lame. We need good paying jobs that doesn't require a very high IQ.[/QUOTE] My response to "where is the money going" as to off setting the trillions of dollars in tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the ultra wealthy. I don't know what the fall out of all of this will be either - I am concerned but I don't know what the end outcome will be. The wealth concentration in the USA is the worst it has been in over 100 years - that is a large part of the problem in the USA. Having American manufacturing of general goods will not be able to globally compete -and will not yield high paying jobs, that is why they left the USA anyway. The cost of labor in other parts of the world is far lower. So this idea that all these manufacturing jobs are coming back isn't happening - and if it is forced, Americans will overall suffer when they suddenly are paying 20-25% more for everything. Also - I would argue that the premise behind it isn't sound, and the execution certainly isn't sound. Having said that - we will see what happens. I would gladly be wrong to have a more prosperous country.
If nothing else living through the Trump era has taught has that the law is meaningless if nobody is willing to enforce it. Trump and Musk show us the power of political influence and money amidst the nationalization of politics. Joni Ernst, a sexual assault survivor, was pressured to confirm Pete Hegseth or face a well-funded primary opponent whose primary position would've been loyalty to Donald Trump, not the interests of Iowa. Congress is supposed to be representative of the country, but Trump has nationalized all politics. That comes before local interests for all Republicans. Therefore Congress has ceded its power to Trump because it doesn't want to piss him off.
If we are going to start building everything in the US, then I guess we will need tens of millions of new factory workers. Do Americans today want to work in a factory? If companies do build new factories, they won’t be building factories in areas where unions are strong. The new factory jobs will not be high paying jobs with great benefits. However, the goods produced by these new factories will still be far more expensive to the American consumer then what they are paying now. Not sure how this is going to work.
I am onboard with the idea that the economy is overly financialized and we are essentially on a treadmill to hell that will ultimately result in collapse unless we move in a drastically new direction. I think tariffs are a key component to reindustrializing the country so that we can better compete internationally. However, Trump's approach seems like it will most likely fail unless: (1) he legislates these tariffs so everyone knows they are sticking around, (2) his DOJ goes hard on anti-trust to break up a lot of the consolidation that is choking the life out of our economy, and (3) he stimulates demand broadly with robust public spending that is meant to actually grow the industrial economy rather than fatten up his remoras. I just think there is too much corruption to pull it off.
They might be too busy working in the ag fields, since Trump is gonna deport all of the illegals and illegal adjacents ... to El Salvador prisons with life sentences.
He could lose the house and senate if the economy really tanks. Enjoy the last two year of the presidency then. The country will be run on executive actions. It will get ugly I fear
Trump’s a ****ing idiot so is the auto union leader that supported him. I hope the union workers fire his ass. As there are going to be a lot more layoffs in the auto sector
No, Deb. It's time to stop thinking Trump is dumb. They're systematically breaking down the country and the people for a reason. Desperate people will accept far less than the norm and agree to much worse than they normally would.
The editors of the Economist have weighed in on the all-but-certain ramifications of those tariffs: If you failed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era. Almost everything Mr Trump said this week—on history, economics and the technicalities of trade—was utterly deluded. His reading of history is upside down. He has long glorified the high-tariff, low-income-tax era of the late-19th century. In fact, the best scholarship shows that tariffs impeded the economy back then. He has now added the bizarre claim that lifting tariffs caused the Depression of the 1930s and that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were too late to rescue the situation. The reality is that tariffs made the Depression much worse, just as they will harm all economies today. It was the painstaking rounds of trade talks in the subsequent 80 years that lowered tariffs and helped increase prosperity.
