It’s not that simple and presenting it as such is disingenuous. Your fellow employee asked an important question, why cant we produce our own stuff? Relying on a frienemy to manufacture what your country needs to function is an extreme oversight of national security. Europe is experiencing that lesson as we speak.
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Subsistence living
I don’t disagree with your point but I think this argument could have been more compelling. The way you’ve phrase it here almost makes these tariffs sound good to a socialist and we don’t want to accidentally push people to the other side. Basically, your intentions are great but execution could have been just a hair better if you don’t mind a bit of pedantry from someone who has studied debate for a few years:
A lot of us want to be producing everything we need and giving away/trading what we can. That sounds ideal. We need to be certain how how we do it though. Tariffs are a bandaid to a bigger, more systematic issue. We need to build up the infrastructure required to take care of our people, create the systems to ensure our people are taken care, and export every bit of excess. We also need to make sure people don’t say they’re going to do that (Like the orange and the melon did) and then turn around and do the opposite (like the orange and the melon did).
If you’d like, I can give you a some more specific pointers on what to say to be more effective as well (bring solutions along with problems)
The way you’ve phrase it here almost makes these tariffs sound good to a socialist
Hey, democratic socialist here, this does not sound good at all, nor does it sound remotely socialist to me.
That’s because you’re probably smart enough to hear what they’re meaning and not take it at face value. Not everyone is, so we need to pick very careful words. Subsistence living is something that sounds nice to a lot of socialists, so we can’t call our enemies policy subsistence living. We need to call it what it really is, isolationism. They didn’t build the infrastructure required for subsistence living first
I’ve never seen subsistence living as a core belief of any large number of socialists. At least, no larger than the average amount of people in the general population that also find subsistence living to be a good idea.
Most socialists understand that many goods can’t be fully produced by any one individual, and that we get a benefit from working together as a group. Hell, most of Socialist ideology revolves around groups of workers owning the means of production, and a government/society that shares resources between people to keep everyone as reasonably comfortable as possible.
The notion that subsistence living is something that more socialists would support than the average person isn’t exactly something I’ve seen to be true in my personal experience. In fact, I see a lot more of that on the very much anti-socialist right, what with all the homesteading and “rugged independent man” stereotypes you’ll see thrown about over there.
You’re right, subsistence living in an individual level is impossible. There’s a lot of Americans though, and they could do subsistence living if they worked together. Again, you and I aren’t disagreeing. We just need to make sure to use the right words. Even if subsistence living isn’t a commonly held thought, it’s one with a more positive connotation than Isolationism. We should use words with negative connotations to describe negative bills
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hows the brexit going, kitty?
Because we don’t have every resource in the world contained within our small slice of a single continent? Not to mention, it isn’t 19-dickety2, so Europe and the rest of the world aren’t brain-draining into the US as much as they once were, thanks to local-stability and our newfound US-instability. And, speaking of which, thanks to the morons grabbing the wheel and directing us into a brick wall, well…that brain-drain we benefitted from since the Nazis…yeah, the opposite is happening now. Turns out smart people don’t want to live under fascism…weird, I know. Why can’t they just hate the same people I hate???
Or, we can hold the fucking media accountable for telling blatant lies about the impacts of tariffs.
Ignorance is not an excuse. Fire all MAGAs for taxifs.
Fox News got around that by claiming they’re entertainment, not news.
Per their own arguments in court, no reasonable person would consider Fox News to be factual.
They should have been forced to rename to Fox Entertainment
They should have been forced to air disclaimers every 30 minutes
That stop the broadcast, and cover the screen before commercial breaks. “ATTENTION: THIS PROGRAM DOES NOT PRESENT FACTUAL INFORMATION. IT IS AN ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM AND NOT A NEWS PROGRAM”
The OP is battling against what Faux Newz, Dipshit Donnie, and other right-wing propagandist shitrags are telling his employee, all which the employee takes as indesputable truth. If he can override that much brainwashing he can convince anyone of anything.
But the guys in OP, they don’t turn on daddy Trump. It can’t be that they were lied to, then they’d have to do something alien to them like introspection. No, it must be…an honest mistake? Honestly have no idea how they’d justify it internally.
Because to these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. You may thank certain types of Christianity for this nonsense.
So the thinking goes something like: ‘I’m a Good Person. And as a Good Person, I only vote for/support Good People, because I am Good. So the people I voted for are Good, because only a Bad Person would vote for Bad People, and I’m not Bad, I’m Good. So Trump can’t be Bad; he must have just made a mistake.’
This is also why they favor punitive jailing instead of trying to reform criminals; criminals are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things. It’s also why they do stuff like try to get rid of abortion. If a woman got pregnant from ‘sleeping around’ then she’s a Bad Person and deserves to be punished by carrying the child to term.
How does the saying about selling a lie go?
Three liars makes a tiger
Well, a lie can be half around the world before the truth even has its boots on.
That’s because the lie’s boots have already been licked clean.
“The Big Lie” is what Sanders is calling it.
How many “big lies” are we up to now?
To be fair, economics is not intuitive. Half of it is built out of unicorn dust and human imagination. How else would bitcoin even exist? For those of you who are economists and love the money side, vs the behavioral side, that’s great, we need people like you to explain it to the rest of us.
I work with a real system that will still exist no matter what happens with politics or money, so it takes work, for me. That said, tariffs and inflation are not difficult concepts provided you simply take the time to learn.
I know someone who lost their job in December due to tariffs anticipation, and they were not alone in that group of layoffs. The effects are there even if you fail to learn the reasons.
Half of it is built out of unicorn dust and human imagination.
Economics is applied psychology at scale hiding behind the idea of math and using “businesses” and “markets” to depersonalize their findings and play pretend at describing natural laws. All it’s really describing is the behavior of people, and a wildly nonrepresentative subset of people at that.
For extra sad - what is economical is more intuitive bcs it’s not just a human skill, it’s a skill nature forces all species into in one way or the other.
‘Economics’ (the human science) however adds so many extra steps, scales, and logistics that is def not immediately intuitive (even in the simple cases when it is).In both cases there is a certain element of future uncertainty so risk management is essential.
It’s not that complicated that when a company with thin margins has to pay a tax, they have to pay it on to consumers.
Your finance department doesn’t care about the difference between a more expensive part due to scarcity vs a more expensive part due to a tax.
I’m of average intelligence so if I can understand it, so can they.
Honestly I’m dumb as hell, and when I didn’t understand something I just trust my friends who I know share my values. MAGAs seem to have decided they trust Trump over their children, for the most part.
He probably shares more of their values, to be fair…
The whole thing was very purposefully talked about using the word “tariff” and never ever its synonym “import tax” exactly so that the traditional Fascist technique of redefining the meaning of words could be easily used: if all the Fascists’ speech had been about “import taxes” they would not have been able to leverage most people’s ignorance anywhere near this level because the very words “import” and “tax” were already reasonably well understood by most - unlike “tariff” - so the opinion makers would not have been able to miseducate their targets anywhere as easily.
I’m not saying that the people who fell for this are to be excused - if there is something important enough for you to put the effort into educating yourself, it’s Politics - I’m saying it’s understandable how so many were so easy to swindle.
Simple answers to complex questions is fast, and helps people quickly move into the phase where they’re expending energy on “solutions” rather than debating the issue.
We’re lazy. People are lazy - I know I am.
Something that’s sufficiently removed from our everyday experience is mysterious, and (someone we trust) tells us that it will work? No questions, here we go!
Real answer is in the last line there. If 60% of people we’re capable of doing their own research (and arriving at the correct answer) then we wouldn’t have anti-vaxers, flat-earthers and non-billionaire/non-bigot/non-christian nationalist republicans.
The problem lies where they “find” their “research” when they see the answer they want to see on social media rather than an actual study or any factual references.
They also seem unaware that google deliberately serves them, specifically, tin foil results based on their watch history.
💯
and every one of the millions who
wereare just as dumb, will forget the lessons learned well before the next election and vote for it all over again.nice of you to assume there’s gonna be a NEXT election.
…next election?
You know, the one Trump wins with 106% of the totaled votes.
This was explained to people all over the internet. I remember people posting the dailyshow shirt guy interview where they explain to him how tariffs will impact his business. Some people didn’t care as long as it also hurt everybody they don’t like.
So ask yourself we someone who voted for Trump whines about tariffs. Is this person just dumb or a total piece of shit?.
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So ask yourself we someone who voted for Trump whines about tariffs. Is this person just dumb or a total piece of shit?.
I say both. They are stupid racist homophobic assholes and deserve any pain they get for their choices. And though we should do everything we can to help those who will be hurt by Trump’s policies, I sincerely hope that every single person who voted for that POS experiences an absolute fuck ton of pain and suffering in the coming months and years.
The most unfortunate thing is that the pain and suffering will not only be limited to the people who supported Trump and his policies. Everyone is going to pay for their poor choices.
I might be wrong here, but tariffs can be very effective tools, but as a slow burn. The way they’re being wielded here is asinine.
If you want to affect behavior, tariffs are a long game. They’re passed by Congress so they aren’t tied to the whims of one man. If you don’t want US chicken or EU trucks, make a law and let decades of implementation change behavior.
If you just want them to hurt, you do them the way we are now. The unpredictability hurts businesses and individuals, inside and outside the US. It makes prices and markets volatile and sows distrust. It hurts the vast majority of people, but benefits people who have the stability and assets to buy low and sell high. Each tariff implementation and retraction is just a mini market manipulation giving people with advance knowledge of what is affected to profit.
They’re a tool for correcting price alterations on the seller side. If China is subsidizing the manufacturing of Fidgets, a matching tarrif on the import of Fidgets protects domestic manufacturing from artificially cheap competition by preventing consumers from seeing those low prices.
The subsidies don’t even need to be hostile. The US subsidizes food to lower domestic costs, ensure a stockpile, and keep farmers happy. The side effect of driving down world grain prices is incidental.
Additionally, they strike me as the stick that pairs best with a carrot to spur domestic production of whatever you’ve put tarrifs on, along the lines of the CHIPS act.
This administration doesn’t believe in carrots, only sticks.
Personally if I had to cut someone’s hours, all else being equal, the one who took 50 attempts to figure out tariffs would go before the one who took 2.
I distinctly remember learning about tariffs in Social Studies. That was back in elementary / middle school. I understood it then and so did my classmates.
Doing your own research or, you know, trust the experts? There’s no way I will get deep enough into virology to get a proper grasp if I need a vaccination. But I for sure won’t trust a random space Karen or brainworm Jimmy.
Well they are a tax that other countries will pay so they are half right. But the point is the other countries will place tariffs on our stuff. Trade wars don’t usually end well, just fucking over consumers.
No.
A tariff on foreign products entering the US is paid by American consumers.
It’s to discourage Americans from buying foreign products and to pursue cheaper local options instead.
Except America hardly manufactures anything anymore.
Yes that’s what I was trying to communicate, I guess I didn’t phrase it well.
Goods coming in are paid by the consumers to our government, making it pretty much a tax on ourselves. The point of this is to manufacture stuff at home. I actually hope it ends up well because sometimes I want to buy stuff from people with fair wages and it’s hard to do so. Like finding stuff like electronics related is all from China.
And then there is the other tariff from our country to other countries which is placed on our American goods entering in their country. This mainly is hurting ourselves and the best case scenario is we end up being self sufficient. I’m not sure if it will turn out this way or things will stay how it is, manufactured elsewhere and imported in at a higher cost.
Also what little we do manufacture is generally more localized and smaller scale. You aren’t gonna suddenly increase the output of the guys building manufactured goods on the small scale just because there’s a tarrif.
No they are a tax that importers pay. Not exporters or their government.
I would like to ask them what happens when taffis are increased to 100%? Does that mean producers are giving stuff for free?
And then what happen when the tarris are at 200%? Do they have to send stuff for free and pay on top of that?
One more thing - don’t tell them they are wrong. Tell them they were lied to
