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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
The lack of rigour is perhaps the most fundamental tenet of Trumpism. If these rates were based on actual facts or informed by expertise, then the policy could be argued with and modified based on reasons and data. This way, each other country has to negotiate its rate based on bargaining, flattery or retaliation.
The defence I hear of Trump/Musk's approach most often is that they just do things without looking too closely at data or potential harms, and that this is good because some action is better than none. Even further, this attitude seems to have become reified into something like 'if you aspire to rigour, you are a cuck and not suitable to be near power'.
I gotta assume that someone seeking to challenge the accuracy of Trump's tariff chart would be thrown out of the White House and not asked to come back, and that this preference for anti-rigour is more deeply ingrained in his circle than any particular policy.
Musk, at least prior to DOGE, erred on the side of being overly optimistic and discounting risk, rather than a clear lack of rigour. You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.
Unfortunately, the move fast and break things approach is a bit harder to endorse when it comes to federal governance, not that I'm an expert.
I do not think Musk could have done what he did at Tesla and SpaceX if he was not orientated towards objective reality. Clearly there was a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it puffery, particularly at Tesla, but it mostly involved over-optimistic projections, and Musk didn't make obviously false statements about the present.
It is possible Musk at DOGE is still orientated towards reality, but he has taken up lying on an industrial scale. But most people who successfully make a Big Lie part of their public persona end up high on their own supply.
Imo Musk has always been the same kind of person he is now - Make wildly implausible promises of over-delivering, including lying about current capabilities, and then reach beyond what anybody else can do ... while still technically significantly underdelivering compared to the promises. DOGE is the same. I'm not aware of any western government managing to significantly reduce spending in any way whatsoever - at most there is a moratorium on increase of spending. DOGE does not deliver what he is promising, but it still seems above any comparable efforts. Though I admit that his approach just objectively works best on easily-measurable metrics, such as "does the rocket fly", "how much does it cost" etc.
Sweden did in the 90s. The fiscal consolidation during the period of 94-98 amounted to some 7.5% of GDP. This led to a sustainable surplus, growth and sustainable entitlements, including pensions.
For America that would equal about $2.2T and a bit more than Musk promised.
Of course, you're never ever going to get there by firing government employees. You need to cut entitlements.
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