No, there's a couple of idiots in charge whose policy is being shaped by outside forces that literally want to destroy the country. This isn't some attack on a social issue.
I believe it is of the "there's only one lab in the world that does this kind of thing" variety. Testing and various services for extremely rare diseases.
Who would have thought you could get your TAS run published in Nature if you used enough hot buzzwords. (they have been using various old-school-definition "artifical intelligence" algorithms for a long time)
>Imagine a world where random crusading busybodies were actually given the power to interfere with every random business deal that made them feel sad, like some sort of HOA for the economy.
Imagine if... Congress had the power to regulate commerce?
Disdain for "interference" in the "free market" is a pretty bog-standard viewpoint among Americans. Has been since Reagan. There is a deeply-ingrained view that the market is optimally efficient (for what?) and any attempt to regulate or direct it will result in inefficiency at best, and deep structural problems at worst. This belief is totally free-standing, built on rhetoric alone, and obviously wrong (you literally cannot make a free market, it's not a coherent concept). Policies inspired by this thinking are uniformly disastrous, but all failings are blamed on the remaining regulatory framework and used as pretense to further accelerate wealth accumulation. This pervasive ideology has been eroding the US's capacity to function for decades, and we've finally begun buckling under the weight of the wealth gap it created. I hold no confidence that should we somehow recover that we'll learn our lesson. Perhaps once a few more liberal democracies fall the remaining ones will finally begin to protect themselves.
No, it was just a snarky garbage comment. You could make the same comment about literally everything the government does comparing it to petty busybody HOA "government", in this case conflating an enumerated power of the US Congress (regulating commerce) with whatever bored HOA rulemaker who wants to fine you for garbage bins or your paint color or whatever other petty nonsense.
>There is a deeply-ingrained view that the market is optimally efficient (for what?) and any attempt to regulate or direct it will result in inefficiency at best, and deep structural problems at worst.
No the view is that there are some necessary forms of regulatory intervention, some that are harmful, and a grey area where it depends on your priorities (are you optimising for economic growth, or are you optimising for, say, environmental protection at the cost of growth; both are valid.)
Only a tiny fringe of weirdo anarcho-capitalists think there should be zero government intervention in the economy. Treating any free market liberal as having equivalent views is a ridiculous straw man.
>This belief is totally free-standing, built on rhetoric alone, and obviously wrong (you literally cannot make a free market, it's not a coherent concept).
God talk about the irony. You haven't made a single logical argument in your whole post. Your post is pure ideology. Making bare assertions like "you literally cannot make a free market" or "policies inspired by this are uniformly disastrous" isn't an argument. It is unsubstantiated rubbish.
>Policies inspired by this thinking are uniformly disastrous
People that say this sort of thing have no idea how horrible life was when everything in society was heavily regulated. Do you have any idea how inefficient goods delivery across the US was before trucking was deregulated? Sadly it didn't get done at the state level to the same extent. The result is that it is now cheaper in many cases to have things delivered from outside your state even though it is further away.
>and we've finally begun buckling under the weight of the wealth gap it created.
Nothing is buckling. A "wealth gap" doesn't matter. What matter is absolute levels of wealth. It sounds like you would rather everyone be equally impoverished than for some to be rich and others to be extremely rich.
The average person today - even the average poor person today - is extraordinarily rich by historical standards. That is entirely because of free markets. This is economic history 101.
California Assembly, and they do have that power, and they just used that power and the answer was "lol no we don't care if you want to waste your own money that's fine"
I agree, but I also don't care. A few people are really passionate about this, most people agree but it's just not important. Let's busy our governments with important issues and not your vanity pet problem.
real estate allows a lot of bullshit from a leader like this because they're not going to go in and give orders to the structural engineers or the electricians that can actually cause huge problems, the only thing a bullshit artist is going to influence are the outward appearances which are easy and you can't do so wrong that the building falls over. the thin facade can really just be whatever and you can always screw over a new set of suppliers or go bankrupt again and keep going
now the lifelong real estate scammer is taking that facade bullshit attitude which basically couldn't go wrong and directing towards the very impactful machinery of the global economy expecting the same kind of bluster to be the same kind of effective
it's not emotional reactions it's just stupidity, people who didn't understand things voted for the guy that puts on a much better show
and didn't vote for the people who put on a terrible show, displayed zero hutzpah, and have the attitude of "i know better than you" and "i told you so" and make no effort to hide it
I want the people who work to make the things I use to earn more than $150 per month.
A sane tariff policy would be set up to penalize these very low wage exporters to give competitive advantage to exporters and local producers with higher wages but also to incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more (and likewise other human development and environmental etc issues)
What you're advocating for is these 30.000 people to lose their jobs, not earn anything and starve.
How does that help them? Oh, right. You don't care about them, actually. You just have this vague ideal that people should earn more money. Maybe not even that. You just want tariffs for some inexplicable reason. Because tariffs cannot give these people higher salaries. That's not how any of this works.
I don’t see how tariffs magically create wealth for foreign exporters that translates into higher wages. Let’s say I can buy a $10 shirt from Lesotho with zero tariff. Now a 50% tariff gets imposed. I can either eat the tariff and pay $15, in which case Lesotho still gets their $10, or Lesotho can eat the tariff to keep their exports competitive, in which case Lesotho now makes $5.
The part about giving a competitive advantage to local producers is true, though…
for countries that pay a worker $10 a day, put a tariff on the goods produced by that worker to total $10
for countries that pay a worker $15 dollars a day put a tariff on the goods produced by that work to total $4
therefore someone importing goods produced by one worker in one day from the lower wage country would spend $20 for the goods from the lower wage country but only $19 for the goods for the higher wage country giving a competitive advantage for higher wages
obviously that is a simplistic example but that's what i mean using tariffs to incentivize better behavior and level the playing field so the most exploitation doesn't make the most money
If the shirt costs $10 in labor, and the pre-tariff wholesale price is also $10, how does the manufacturer make a profit? Surely the wholesale price would at least include some markup for profit? So like $10 labor + $3 markup (per employee-day) + $10 tariff ($23) contrasted with $15 labor + $3 markup + $4 tariff ($22), in your scenario.
But now you see that the low wage manufacturer has a third option, $10 labor + $1 markup + 10 tariff ($21), which would maintain their competitive advantage and in this scenario only cut their daily per employee profit by $2, as opposed to the $5 hit they would suffer by raising their employee wages to $15 day from $10.
What I'm saying is set a minimum wage on imports. Set a global minimum wage. Anyone importing something from somewhere that doesn't meet that minimum wage would have to pay a tariff greater than the amount saved with low wages.
The goal is to increase competition and improve fairness between locations. You wouldn't want to do it all at once at first, rather a gradual increase. You wouldn't want to distort the local economy too much so don't insist somewhere pay 10x the median local wage. Lots of things you would do which are more complex with an eye for fairness and competitiveness and definitely not trying to raise everyone by force to American levels of wages, but always measured amounts of
pressure.
That’s a nice idea, but I’m skeptical—where is the new wealth coming from that will allow Lesotho to pay its workers more? It’s not an issue of strong-arming some bad guys in Lesotho to pay their workers more using tariffs as a negotiation tool.
I feel that conflating tariffs with some sort of negotiation tool to bring about positive global change is disingenuous, because the real aim is clearly protectionism.
It's coming from the people who buy the exported goods.
This would mean, of course, that the people who happen to work for an export-oriented factory become much more wealthy than most people in Lesotho. So you might reasonably wonder whether it's better to make twice as many workers half as wealthy. Labor advocates believe the answer is no: paying some people genuinely good wages both creates and encourages further development, while paying a larger number of people "good enough" wages encourages poor countries to race to the bottom competing for the lowest standard of "good enough".
It's clearly not protectionism, because you wouldn't put tariffs on everything - including all the raw materials and parts you need to import, if you wanted your local industries to succeed. And you'd have a coherent industrial policy to go along with it.
Protectionism is France and England putting tariffs on each others cheese. America putting tariffs on Canadian lumber.
Putting tariffs on places that have a 20x factor difference in wages is something else.
And protectionism isn't necessarily a dirty word. It's often valuable to save your local industries from being wiped out and to not have a foreign country have complete control of a necessity.
Such a tarrif on low wage countries would prevent the exploitation of low wage countries. Because any county could easily 'defeat' the tarrif by setting a minimum wage.
It doesn't help raise the people being exploited out of poverty. But it does prevent countries from getting stuck in a cycle of depending on low wage labor.
Whether that works out better for the exploited is uncertain. But the alternative argument is effectively "these poor countries should be happy to let themselves be exploited" it is their only way out of poverty. And that really doesn't sit right with me.
This makes sense. I think even MAGA might agree if you pitch it as "we use tarrifs to prevent American labor from being undercut.
But it is clear that the reasoning here is "I want tarrifs, how do I easily get them". And then they found the easiest possible way to say something about 'countries putting a tarrif on the US'.
The stupid theory behind this is effectively: not having a minimum wage is equivalent to putting a tarrif on the US.
Which would suggest that the low US minimum wage is actually already a tarrif on the EU.
Pressure to improve trade imbalances is a good idea! Particularly with China and some of these extremely low wage countries. Democrats being silent on the topic or not wanting to do anything about it is one of the bigger deciding issues for the kind of moderates who would actually change their vote between parties.
The current administration is like... if you're being charitable you can imagine at some point someone had a reasonable set of ideas that got filtered through a long string of fools in a game of telephone so now we have an angry toddler with a gun destroying the global economy on the basis of ideas which very well may have been interesting at the beginning of the chain but have long since descended into incoherence.
You can just put in the trade agreement that the goods are subject to tariffs unless the workers who made them are paid enough. The USMCA, for example, has requirements along these lines for auto assembly (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/usmca).
> There used to be a garment industry in the USA...
Yeah, but the last large piece of it (there are still some amall remnants) got wiped out with the most recent push for eliminating large scale non-penal slavery in the US.
And, no, I don’t mean abolishing formal chattel slavery with the 13th Amendment, I mean the push to eliminate the informal de facto slavery that persisted in the US territory of the Confederation of the Northern Mariana Islands around the turn of the millenium.
The last market crash was caused by the very economically unnatural COVID and the global response to it. This one is caused by insane foreign policy. Both of these are weird recessions because they don't have anything to do with real market conditions or even stupid pathological market conditions (housing crash).
The covid response of printing trillions of dollars and other currencies around the world meant that there was way more money and it had to end up somewhere.
There's just way more money to invest than there are productive companies to invest in. So you get crazy P/E ratios in the best bets available.
The "fix" is to inflate that money away (or maybe to tax it and pay down deficits?) but it's not an easy monetary policy or a familiar one.
The "4D Chess" is that some powerful internal people doing a lot of manipulation want America to be an isolated very independent fascist state, and some powerful external people want to destabilize America and reduce its foreign influence. They're both making solid progress towards their goals.
The majority of the American people who voted for the current regime are being taken advantage of but like many they'll progressively more and more identify with wanting whatever outcome "their" team achieves.
No, there's a couple of idiots in charge whose policy is being shaped by outside forces that literally want to destroy the country. This isn't some attack on a social issue.
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