Drawbacks of living in a country where half the people are dumbshits. It's the new normal and we better get used to it. When you are out in public doing anything, look around. Roughly half the people you see are fucking idiots.
Just read estimates his tariffs would cost the average household 7600 annually. I told my folks and they didn't understand why I thought it was funny. I told them they wanted this.
I posted a meme last week before the election about a lot of my fellow Americans being depressingly ignorant and a bunch of people got pissed off about it.
Yeah, a lot has been said about why the 'Democrats' failed; sure they were/are imperfect.
Where are the articles bemoaning our stupid and/or mean citizens who have no curiosity and think being obstinate will work like a time machine? I'm frustrated to hell with apathy of my countrymen.
And the huge shift right by male GenZ people. Reading posts by them specifically today: they felt marginalized by democrats and ignored. They felt like Maga cared about them, and they could belong in the Republican party. And some of them simply wanted revenge and to feel powerful.
Now this isn't everyone, but I gotta say:
WTF are you doing thinking about feelings? And fitting in? Look at the damn effects your choice is going to make based on "feelings". That group is going to lose consumer protection, worker protection and safety, medical coverage, relief on college tuition, housing subsidies, debt relief, small business loans. What they gain is higher prices, worse infrastructure, and possibly the nastiest thing of al:l the direct path of their income going to the wealthiest people and perpetuating generational wealth for the very few.
Because they wanted to "feel" like they were seen and heard as men. You got played!
"Democrats" is too vague to be meaningful in this discussion. I do put a lot of blame on the DNC organization for deenergizing their base, but also the working class for not understanding basic economics and being taken by a carpet bagger.
He likely understands what a tariff is well enough. His problem is that he either doesn't understand the implications or chooses not to communicate that part to voters.
He understands tariffs in his terms - that "tariffs" is a useful word to trick people into doing what he wants. How tariffs work in the real world is irrelevant to him, the word gets him what he wants, and that's all he needs from tariffs.
Trump understands tariffs, as far as they sound fancy and like a threat to foreigners, his followers understands it even less. Using fancy words make you sound authoritative. Trump's followers like authoritarian leaders.
Maybe it's because I took economics as far back as high school, but even just from reading high school history books I knew what a Tariff was. How the FUCK did they not know that?
I am also willing to bet that they will eventually blame the democrats for breaking the system, as they always do.
There’s a fair portion of people 21+ that have difficulty playing blackjack because they can’t add to 21. Last night I was asked by a grown man what 9+1+3 is.
You’d be surprised how incompetent some people are.
Last time I was at a casino I kept asking myself: who honestly thinks any of this is a good idea, or thinks that any of these are "games" in the conventional sense? Now I know.
Edit: I have also been confronted with people that simply cannot do addition, period. It's wild.
Even if you're competent at arithmetic in school, those skills can definitely atrophy. I say this as someone who's unreasonably slow at basic arithmetic despite being an ex-mathlete; I got complacent because I've been learning and using graduate level maths, so I thought that would keep me from getting rusty. Nope — it turns out that basic arithmetic that you'd use in daily life is a different "muscle" to the kind of maths you use in academic research (which is obvious in hindsight)
I can't imagine how much I'd be struggling if I didn't have a good foundation to be starting from
I worked in customer service for 7 years. I am aware... so very aware...
To give you an idea, when I worked for Verizon mobile, it was a few times a week that I came across a client who did not know how to hang up their cellphone calls. No joke. It took such a while to get them off the hook it wasn't funny. And if you ask me why I wouldn't hang up on them, it was because Verizon had a strict no hang-up policy. You were not allowed to hang up on a client no matter what. It was grounds for immediate termination.
Math anxiety is real tbf, I can add that up real fast without the pressure of someone looking at me waiting for me to solve it, but the second another person is watching I can't even think about the math I just obsess about how I should be solving it faster and how they now think I'm dumb because instead of doing the math I'm thinking about this bullshit and it's taken 10 whole seconds which is a lot longer than it sounds..
As a foreign asset, I think Trump is just actively performing a proxy war to drain the US of money, power, and resources for Russia. If you think he's going to be doing anything else - lol.
Some companies have already said they're going to pass the extra cost onto consumers, so while the companies will pay more, they'll make a lot of that back from the consumers that can still afford the products.
Electronics will probably be the hardest hit, with prices of cell phones, laptops, and game consoles increasing quite a bit.
Good thing I got a new computer now. They'll just blame democrats (who do have a lot to blame for not countering the bullshit of the Republicans over the past 45 years) for it and insist that the tariffs would have brought prices down if they were done without democratic interference...
This tells me the information pipe to voters is broken, and hacked.
People live in their own social media realities. There has always been ignorance, but it's never been so widely personalized. And Trump and the GoP played it like a fiddle.
And just watch, the Dems are going to learn precisely nothing from this and campaign like it's the 1950s again, thinking policy was their problem.
Silicon valley: Here is a device that makes it possible to exchange information to everyone, everywhere, immediately.
GOP: Oh, you mean I can disseminate anything I want? How about lies? That'd be neat.
Silicon valley: No, not like that.
One thing that I observed is that the right wing had/has the more progressive campaign, from a technology and media use standpoint. The DNC, on the other hand, was still more or less using the same moves they had back in the 1990's, relying on extinct concepts like the fairness doctrine, debate performance, and journalistic integrity of news outlets (fact-checks anyone?).
It's not just the Overton Window that has moved: our information diet has completely changed too. To win at politics today, the entire landscape has shifted to propaganda, bombast, showmanship, clickbait, and leading the 24/7 news cycle by the nose. You must be louder and more interesting than the other guy. I think it's possible to play that game ethically though, without disinformation, but what's clear is that billionaire-owned media isn't going to do it for you anymore.
Silicon Valley is laughing all the way to the bank enabling this.
They are the root cause, because no one told them they aren't allowed to rot brains with relentless engagement optimization. Modern politics would still be bad, but it wouldn't be so apocalyptic without the monsters they built.
The sheer stupidity of the dems is kinda astonishing. The reason why Obama won is because he had a goddamn narrative. Yes we can! Change you can believe in! It's almost like they were onto something... then they did nothing.
I get where you're coming from, and I sympathize with what is sometimes referred to as "low information voters" (though I don’t know how I personally feel about that term), but it's important to point out that they are not NO information voters. They have heard at least some of what Trump has to say, and are willing to overlook blatant racism/fascism/misogyny/homophobia for what they think will be lower costs (or another either equally empty promise or overtly harmful promise). I am not by any means well off, but if someone said they could decrease my costs if I assented to rounding up X group, I would not take that deal. They have. They might not know the extent to which he will do others harm, but they are willing to take the deal because they do not think it will harm them directly. Hence the leopard/face jokes. They might be doing "honest work", but that does not make them good people (though "some, I assume, are good people").
I have family that voted for Trump who would be classed as "low info" and they only know he's "gonna put god back in schools". They don't go out of their way to physically injure people different from them, but it's clear that not only do they not care about those people, they want to force them to conform or leave. Imho, that's not indicative of a good person. In fact, it's often indicative of a bad person. Say what you want about "different values" or how dems are more open minded or whatever the studies show, at a certain point, conservatism makes you a bad person.
Sure, we can debate about where that line is, but the further back you want to "conserve" the worse you are in my experience. Wanna go back to the 90s? Probably economically motivated, but willing to throw the lgbt+ community under the bus. 70s? Them and women are not important to you. 50s? Just blatantly racist at this point. Anything before that and they might as well want to bring back ownership of people. At the end of the day what are they trying to conserve? Their own power. They just differ in who they're willing to trample to take it back.
I think what a lot of Americans don't want to admit, as imperialists, is that our relatively good quality of life was because we grave robbed and enslaved people for it.
When people say that there's economic booms after wars - that's not like, from no where. That's from all the dead bodies and looted countries. We sifted through pockets and took their change. And that's not better for growth or the economy than just keeping everyone alive btw - it is far superior to just keep everyone alive, educated, and fed and they will produce goods for the economy without sacrificing local people (eg Irish potato famine). Like healthy societies don't engage in war.
We could be getting played by some random person on tiktok showing an unsubstantiated claim from another random person.
I'm not saying it's definitely fake but don't just blindly believe this when spreading stories without evidence is the EXACT sort of shit dishonest people do. They're eating the dogs, etc.
And it's sooo typical of their hyper-inflated personal and national egos:
They didn't wonder for one minute why on earth foreign companies would pay up. For the honor or doing business with the greatest country on earth tm? Because they'd have no choice of other buyers, since no other countries has car / computer / whatever manufacturers who'd buy their products instead?
There was another post about how Americans unfairly generalize Russians (or others) for the things their country does, and how hypocritical it is, implying we would get defensive. Well here I am, an American, reacting to my people being generalized:
It's not just Americans, remember the Brexiteers realizing that due to Brexit, they need a visa for their Spanish holiday, and they have to stand in the "rest of the world" line?
We will see a bunch of "this is not the Brexit I've voted for" to come.
Liberals enjoy that schadenfreude a little too much. They're the ones that are first to turn in their minority neighbours to protect their own status in society. They're the Reddit mods of society
So I feel like I'm probably missing something or am not understanding how Tariffs work.
Tariffs would increase the price of foreign goods and commodities and those increases would be passed on to consumers, but isn't the goal not to get more tax money for the government but to disincentivize the purchase of those foreign goods at all thus fueling domestic manufacturing and economy?
It seems like tariffs aren't great short term but if we have the ability to manufacture domestically and are not doing so due to costs, then it may be good in the longer term. Especially because if we rely on those countries now, they have control over those goods and can end them whenever they want. At least this way we can ramp up US manufacturing without a disruption to the existing supply chain, it just costs more.
You're understanding tariffs correctly, but the conclusion is off. I'll give an example driving tariffs to the extreme to explain:
Imagine tariffs are so high, the US can't economically import anymore. This is effectively the same as very tight sanctions, aka like North Korea.
Everything in North Korea is manufactured locally, and it doesn't scale. Doing things locally works great, but you focus on a couple things and trade for the rest.
Can some tariffs help the economy? Definitely, it's a bit of a catalyst. Will a lot of tariffs hurt the economy? Also definitely.
Maybe Trump has mathed out the exact level of tariffs to boost the economy. If, however, that is the case, he hasn't shown his work on it.
Edit: I will caveat it is clear most people in this thread saying "even I know what a tariff is!" Are mostly wrong. So if that's why you're feeling crazy, it's because you're in a thread full of people who aren't as smart as they think they are.
Life under Trump in 2024 will be orders of magnitude worse than life under him in 2016. It won't take long for Americans to begin to feel strong consequences of the election result.
I guess I forgot some people knew what to expect from a second Trump term and would plan accordingly. It would have been nice if this guy had sat these people down and had this talk before the election.
They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff.
This is probably what Trump thinks, too. I can easily believe he is that stupid.
I'm also wondering just what the fuck Trump and co. are going to do with all the money obtained from these tariffs. Just, like, spend it all on hookers and blow or what? Remember how you all believed this was the party of "low taxes?" Yeah, guess what a tariff is, fuckers.
100%. If he isn't reading it from a script that someone else wrote, he knows nothing about the topics he's talking about.
He even boasts about "knowing more than anyone about XYZ", yet, it can't expand on the subject, can't answer questions about it, is vague, and reminds me of how really bad LLMs answer questions.
I found some additional articles on what he said about this, and he did indeed flat out say he expects the "other countries" to pay the tariffs. For instance, this.
A sweeping tariff policy will kill two birds with one stone, Trump says: It could find a new source of revenue for the U.S. government, which could offset losses from lowering or eliminating certain forms of income tax, while extracting money from rival governments.
That's not how tariffs have worked at any point in history.
I don't know if this post is true or not. However, a lot of people don't know history, civics, & economics. (This is the result of the Reagan & Bushes dismantling of the education system.) I've told a lot of people to look up the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the impact it had on our and the global economy. Tariffs will start a trade war. That's what happened to our farmers the last time Trump was in office. He ended up having to bail out farmers which cost more than the tariff brought into the government. The Chinese simply bought their soy beans from other countries instead of paying for ours. There were a lot of farmers that lost their farms then.
We need fewer corporate farms, which are dirty as fuck now let alone after they gut the USDA. I hope that they lose their family farm to two gay dudes from Vermont who got really into organic gardening and decided to cash in their b&b for corgis to start growing high quality produce right here in America's heartland.
I mean the whole point is paying a tariff so American companies make the goods instead for less.
So American companies make the goods at the current prices which are now relatively lower than the imports, but still the same or more than they are priced now.
Ideally to more than what they would be if they were made by American workers in American factories. Otherwise there's no point and you're just increasing prices out of spite.
But we're relying on a lot of landlords to go "fair enough, we'll lower our rents so you can buy those American goods at their new higher prices" rather than going "no, go fuck yourselves". And I feel that's unrealistic.
But whatever, turkeys voting for Christmas is not a new thing and I'm sure they'll find a way to blame it on immigrants or gays or something.
Global trade drove the cost of supplies and goods down to the lowest available prices, so while setting tariffs may encourage local production because it makes overseas less attractive, the price of goods still goes up on both scenarios.
If moved locally, there will be more local labor required for production but it's not clear if that is a net benefit.
Hypothetically under globalism more developed countries shed their "dirty manufacturing labor jobs" and move more people upmarket. Of course this is matter of nonstop debate among economists because as we all know the whole population of a country can't move upmarket together and a lot of people were/are screwed because of lack of education and opportunity to develop themselves.
In an ideal implemention of this, more people would be moving to the arts, self expression, and technology, while fewer are involved in survival activities like shelter and food.
I think the unsolved problem now is that average people believe way too much of that wealth went to the top while the middle class is working harder than ever and getting less.
It's also dumb to just assume that foreign companies can just flip a switch and start building/assembling whatever they sell in America. You need facilities, you need to hire employees, you need to train employees. You can't just pick up your factory, drop it in Kansas, and just slot people into the building to work it right away.
You can't just pick up your factory, drop it in Kansas, and just slot people into the building to work it right away.
This was demonstrated in Springfield, OH. That whole thing about Haitian immigrants? A large factory opened there, but they couldn’t find Americans who wanted to work there for wages that would make them profitable, so the mayor sent out a call welcoming Haitian immigrants to the town. They were invited specifically for this reason.
What happens when immigration is halted and people are deported? Where do they expect to find Americans willing to work for wages that will have to be even lower to make up the costs the tariffs will cause?
It takes only minutes of thought to realise how stupid and doomed trump’s plan is (which is obviously more than his supporters can manage).
Also, unless your plan is to exclusively export to the US, then it's less cost effective to open up new facilities in the US. You just raise prices and and have the consumers take the hit for the tariff. There's also the problem of logistics for raw materials for whatever products your manufacturing. Those also tend to cost more to acquire stateside.
The worst part is that policy is only a single bullet in the policy foot gun Trump has loaded. It gets even more expensive when the low cost labor is suddenly deported and/or put in camps. Which I realize isn't even the worst thing about the immigration policy, but just pointing out that it too has consequences to these same people.
Sure, but the whole concept relies on Americans being too wealthy and need to pay more for their stuff. They're lazy and need more work to do.
And with all the poverty about, people working multiple jobs, the gig economy turning minimum wage evasion into "well you chose to do it", I'm surprised that over half the country agreed with the billionaire about that.
I mean regardless I think pulling back spending is a great idea for 2025. Make those purchases now while they're still cheap. Buy your toilet paper etc
Is the owner of the company purchasing a year's worth in order to keep the price they charge down, or in order to raise prices in February when their customers expect it because of the new tariffs, and pocket the difference? While having avoided paying bonuses?
Obviously I don't know the business in question, but it's quite possible that the company has a bunch of longer running contracts that would become a loss if the inputs become much more expensive.
Of course, businesses will use the opportunity to charge more, but sudden price hikes are a very real problem.
I sell steel, and we have been telling everyone to buy as much of their estimated annual usage as possible right now in order for us to hold the pricing, especially if it isn't mill runs and double especially for exotic alloys.
It's going to fuck over so hard the small machine shops that are prevalent everywhere that just do whatever jobs get called out and don't really have the sway or size to be able to negotiate a better deal.
The same machine shops that were flying Trump memorabilia.
This is almost certainly what's happening. The proposed tariffs will be very hard on American businesses and devastating for the consumer. It's quite literally a fairly severe tax on domestic companies and the American people. But, honestly, we could do with a less consumerism in this country. Unfortunately, it's likely to cause a tough economic downturn that will hurt poor people the most.
Large and small manufacturing companies have contracts for orders for months to years out with set prices, some of which might have wiggle room for costs but not to this extent. Plus manufacturing already tries to balance out costs across projects due to fluctuating prices for materials. If their materials double (or more) in price they will be screwed by the contracts and guaranteed to lose money on all of them.
Buying at the current prices means they will have to pay to have the materials stored in a warehouse, which will cut into their planned profits for those existing contracts. Hell, they might be buying at a higher cost than they normally would when fulfilling the contracts.
The company is getting screwed, not trying to fleece customers or their employees.
Without having more detail I can't speak with certainty, but, general principles of inventory management and cash flow discourage having a surplus of stock, as that ties up a significant amount of working capital in the costs of storing and handling it all - you risk not being able to pay your liabilities because you've sunk all your funds into inventory that hasn't yet sold and generated more revenue.
Companies often have longer term contracts with specific prices agreed that can't always be easily changed. Those contacts could quite easily become unprofitable if there are sudden increases to the direct costs of fulfilling them. So, rather than trying to fuck customers, this company is likely trying to stock-up at current market prices to ride-out the first year of tariffs, but in doing so, needs a large injection of working capital to cover the expenditure (hence cancelling bonuses), and also puts itself in a very vulnerable position where cash flow is concerned by tying up that capital in inventory - any further sudden and unexpected costs could lead to the business folding.
If they're reputable enough and tend to operate in good faith, they could be giving their customers time to prepare for the incoming price hike. They'll probably lose customers that can't afford to operate with the new price later on but the transparency would go a long way towards maintaining healthy business relations with the remaining customers.
they'll pocket the difference, jack up prices, refuse bonuses next year, business slows, lay off half the staff, buy material on credit--maybe siphoning some of that off, bonuses are now a distant memory, jack prices up again. business slows to a crawl, lay off more. business falters. file bankruptcy with millions of outstanding debt to write off.
Does it matter? This wouldn't have happened without Trump being elected and the looking threat of tariffs. Whether the owner is using that as cover for jacking up the prices or not, it's still a LAMF moment.
if anything like it happens in Turkey, most businesses will buy early, stockpile goods as prices keep increasing (increased effect of tariffs + shortage of goods in market) and release them to the market for a hefty profit
The truly enraging thing about the voters who said they voted for trump due to economic concerns is HOW IN THE GODDAMNED FUCK do they think he's going to fix anything? To the extent that a president can change the cost of living, among the worst ideas is probably to fucking add fees to imports. This is his one idea and yet no one can explain to him the extremely simple negative effect that it would have on consumers.
This absolute fucking dope had one terrible idea for helping lower prices (which will certainly raise them) and the voters lapped it up without thinking. America is full of morons.
Studies generally show the economy does better under Democrats than Republicans, in measurements of CPI, GDP, job growth, and unemployment. Republicans however have a massive propaganda machine that has gaslit the country in believing the opposite. Frequently this is backed by short term plays that make things "feel" better but cause significant long term problems. Like a CEO firing the QA team, line goes up this quarter and by the time the consequences arrive they're gone and blame the next guy.
They're operating under a lot of propaganda, and no understanding of economics. They're ignorant of the fact that Trump inherited the economy that Obama fixed, which is why at the time under Trump things were better. They're ignorant of the fact that Trump fucked everything up with his handling of the pandemic, previous tarrifs, and in turn fucked the economy up on the way out. They're ignorant that Biden was trying to clean up Trump's mess, and instead assign blame to Biden.
And every after all that, there is still the added fact that the president doesn't directly control the economy, and has limited options. But that doesn't matter to them. They've been sold a simple solution to a complicated problem.
Unfortunately, this kind of ignorance comes from a weakening of our education system. It's not just on them that this has happened, and its only going to get worse if we don't try to stop it.
Hey, exactly! The fact that we are even allowing this nonsense is a true testimony to how extremely important education is! If you remain ignorant, you are more easily persuaded to believe anything because you aren't taught what "bullshit" is, and have no real ability to think for yourself.
This!!! I don't actually expect our K thru 12 education system to inform the average people about macro-economic policy impacts. This is about being gullible, hearing what you want to hear, refusing to listen to opposing opinions with an open mind, and hero worship.
So if there's anything to blame on our education system (and society culture at large) it's a lack of critical thinking education and an excess of magical thinking education that emphasizes blind agreement with authority.
I'm about to print off about a million of those "I did that!!" stickers that the magats loved to stick on gas pumps. You better believe those things are going everywhere.
I don't want to put blame directly on individual voters, in the sense that they might be able to learn in 4 years, and "Trump did that" only addresses the symptom of the problem. "MAGA did that" sounds apt to me.
Was about to pull the trigger on a new car, but decided to go a much cheaper route and replace my nearly dead computer instead. A mid-tier computer and me sitting at home gaming for a few years will be insanely cheaper and less financially risky than an SUV under Trump's uneducated shenanigans.
Yup. My household is going to pull back on the impulse to improve and just build up the reserves for the "have to fix" things that happen.
Working on doing more cooking, more gardening, cutting out expense conveniences. With the waves of deregulation and tariffs coming, prices on everything are going to skyrocket while quality goes to hell. The more we can produce ourselves, the better.
I am a hollow shell of a man, emptied of all but schadenfreude. If we're all going to suffer, I find peace in the fact that they'll suffer alongside me.
I have been made into that which I hated most and now I don't even have the energy to fight it anymore.
Saw an interview of Bernie Sanders in 2003. This level of ignorance was manufactured by the GOP by creating millions of single issue voters. It’s all about divide and conquer. If you look at GOP rhetoric it’s always issues meant to divide the people. Abortion, lgbtq, war. Instead of voting based on a platform, now millions of people vote based off abortion or Gaza for example. This is how they get people to vote against their own interests
If only the majority of voters understood anything more detailed than someone shouting a slogan over and over.
It is great that Harris had a plan. That plan must also be dumbed down to the common voter while campaigning to get through. I mean, Republicans had Project 2025 that was widely available and a ton of Trump voters are going to be surprised when it is implemented because they didn't read that either.
Ah but see, there's juuuuust enough left for the execs to still get their bonuses, and we wouldn't to deny them their bonuses lest they stop "creating jobs". And they really needed more corporate tax cuts, so we can't tell people not to vote against their own interests because then that's not in the company's interest.
Not sure what a union would have done in this case. The problem is near term cost of inputs vs long term contracts with fixed revenue.
I'm not saying it would be bad for this to kick them into forming a union, only that it wouldn't have solved this problem unless the union had an education campaign to explain why excessive tariffs are bad.
Unfortunately a union after the fact does nothing to help the workers.
Unions are great for ensuring that the profit from their labour; is fairly distributed.
If the company is unprofitable; forming a union to squeeze blood from a stone is not helpful. It will just hasten the demise. These tariffs, as others have pointed out are probably making their fixed term contracts into money losers.....We don't have all the data, but it is quite likely.
And from a personal point of view, smaller companies tend to care more than big ones....I've worked in both. Being 1 of 5 is great, being 1 of 15,000 not so much.
They don't need to buy a year of stuff. They need to buy American. It'll be more expensive, but people should not be cheap. We're not appliances and Chinese people also aren't appliances.