Live updates: Trump announces sweeping tariffs
-
Does that mean oil is also 10% up?
-
They are already building one in Dresden, others are planned to follow. The CHIPS act is at last having an effect.
-
Only ones "looting, raping, and pillaging our country" are billionaires.
-
This is killing so many small businesses. I know mine is basically dead now
-
Not even via a trebuchet?
Trebuchets:
A superior siege engine for today's trying times!
-
This Wikipedia page is going to be relevant to all our lives very soon.
-
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, to alleviate the effects of the...Anyone? Anyone? The Great Depression passed the, anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Raised tariffs to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.
-
So is the plan to drive the cost of everyday essentials so high that virtually everyone bankrupts and the billionaires buy all of our assets for pennies on the thousand dollars? That is all I can come up with trying to make a scenario where this has some coherent objective.
-
If their cost goes way up, that might make hand-made American items comparatively affordable, maybe for the first time in modern history. It's (potentially) a good thing for a bad reason, I guess.
-
That's one of the stupidest things I've ever read.
-
I'm not sure that that's necessarily wrong. Excise taxes, import duties, etc. have been around for millennia. In the US, the income tax has only been around since the Civil War (which it was created to pay for).
-
And since we haven't moved the needle on the minimum wage in decades, people will be making those low-added value products at starvation wages.
-
Honestly, at this point, I think it's time to just call it a day on the very idea of the US as a single unified nation. The Constitution has been demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to be utterly incapable of actually doing its job. It's a 200+ year old document written in a different age, by people who didn't have hundreds of examples of modern democracies to draw upon. It was a good attempt, but it's horribly obsolete at this point. And our institutions are equally not up to the task. And it was written by 13 states who each joined willingly. If you gave each state a chance to join the current US today, how many would actually do it?
We need to peacefully dissolve the whole thing. Dissolve the federal government; grant every state full independence. The states can then come together into whatever number of new nations they wish to form.
This clearly isn't working. Half the country has completely given up on the Constitution, and the other half thinks institutions and laws alone will magically fix the problem. We've crossed the Rubicon. Once a president is allowed to get away with this level of flagrant law breaking, once the courts have become this corrupted, once the system has become so sclerotic and fundamentally incapable of meeting the needs of the people? It's time to call it quits. There's no repairing a system like this. Even if free and fair elections happen, electing a Democrat in 2028 will not fix this problem. At best, we'll get 4 more years of useless waffling, and then another fascist will get elected in 2032.
The US is a couple that has reached an impasse of irreconcilable differences. The US had a good run, but at this point it's time to admit that it's run its course, and it is time to move on.
The US isn't even really a nation; it's more of an empire. There are vast regional differences in the country. The cultures and desired governments of the people in the different regions vary substantially. But because we're all locked together in this bloated dying husk of an empire, nobody is happy. There's a reason the oldest countries in the world tend to be smaller ones. Empires are held together by force, not by common culture and shared values. They tend to collapse under their own weight and contradictions eventually. And the US is no exception.
And we shouldn't mourn this. The US had a good run. It did some cool things and made some real advancements on the human story. But governments exist ultimately to serve the people. Can anyone really say with a straight face that the people of the US wouldn't be better served by breaking the US into a series of smaller, more manageable nations that better reflect the will of their people? Would all the nations that border the Mediterranean really be better off if they were still united in the Roman Empire? Would all of Latin America outside of Brazil be better off if it was all still New Spain? Would the people of Asia be happier if they were still united in some post-Mongol empire? I don't think so.
Sometimes you just need to let things die. It's time to put the United States out of its misery. We can do better.
my boycott will last a lifetime.