This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
@RandomRanger
Re: Schizo tariff policy
You argue that schizo tariff policies are not worse than controlled or orderly economic wrecking. What you complete fail to mention is why people would prefer orderly wrecking over schizo policy.
In short, making decisions at the levels Trump and many others do involves massive investment of time and resources. We're not talking about needing a day to make a decision, companies need notable warning so they can do analyses, inform relevant parties of upcoming changes, etc. One of the benefits of rule of glacial change to the legal system, for example, is that if you know the law once, you don't need to constantly keep a watch on it.
For example, consider a rational Trump supporter who agrees with the stated rhetoric that the tariffs will curb income taxes. Which world would they prefer? The one in which tariffs go on and off based on Trump's whims, or one where Trump gets Congress to put tariffs into place that reduces taxes for a set period of time going forward? I argue they would overwhelmingly support the latter, not the former.
Or consider the company that might support re-shoring factories based on tariffs. They can't build factories in days or weeks, it takes time to plan, acquire raw materials, and get the building(s) constructed. This is a process that needs multi-year guarantees, not the president's favor until his attention drifts to the next Owning The Libs moment.
And then there's the political ramifications. If Trump's policies flip on a dime, then there's a clear avenue for corruption - just say the right things and you get an exemption for your company. Most of us do not want policy done based on the president choosing winners or losers, and I suspect you don't either. And if you are going to cite some Democrats being corrupt, I will pre-empt you by saying that I will likely agree and say it shouldn't be done.
You look at the effects of various policies like DEI, mass migration, etc. and you conclude that since they caused more problems than Trump's current tariff flip-flopping, obviously the latter is not as harmful. But intent matters. Side-effects and second-order effects matter. You can appeal against DEI and immigration in formal ways, even if you lose that debate. The US carves out numerous formal ways to lodge your complaints. You can even convince enough people to support your views and get hand the winning side of a debate a legal loss by legislating their policy out of existence. You can't, however, appeal schizo policy in as remotely effective or fair a way.
Oh, and then there's the fact that this is just months into Trump II. We're still not fully seeing the impact these tariffs are going to have. Despite recent proclamations of those tariffs being dropped, they're still higher than they were before Trump took office. People are going to suffer under that policy when it was never necessary. And who knows what else Trump will come up with going forward?
Then there's the impact on politics as as a whole. An expression I hear from people on the right is that there's currently a stupid (Republican) party and evil (Democrat) party in the US. If there was any hope of doing better, then it lay in convincing the stupid party to do better so the evil one can be defeated. Trump was that chance, and he just turned the party stupider and squandered a great deal of political capital in the process. It's not impossible to come back from this, but I presume you'd rather be in the Nazi Germany strategic situation after D-Day then you would the strategic situation as the Soviets are encircling Berlin.
I think that American complaints over Trump are warranted but disproportionate, that's why I spent so much of that post comparing to foreign countries.
The Australian government works in a totally responsible, law-abiding, careful and considered way like you're calling for. But the results are a complete disaster and there's no obvious way to fix it. This is paywalled but it tells you the story in the http address.
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-s-fall-in-disposable-income-is-the-worst-in-the-world-20240822-p5k4ji
Productivity is in the doldrums. Energy prices are rising despite the government's promises, the only thing they successfully did is provide subsidies for power to make the price seem lower. All major cities are ludicrously unaffordable and more people are constantly imported to make it even more unaffordable. Industry is a shambles, we're constantly bailing out what little remains due to the terrible energy policy. To top it all off they've proposed unrealized capital gains tax on superannuation, there's nothing they won't stoop to.
And the Labour government that oversaw all of this just got their biggest majority ever for seeming to be less like Trump than Peter Dutton's Liberals... who weren't really like Trump in any significant sense and basically offer the same thing as Labour albeit slightly moderated. There's no way out of this mess.
There are way worse things that could happen to the US than tariffs or Trump, you could have a deepseated economic crisis at a structural level, not a mild stock market shock that's easily undone at the executive level.
The EU loves stable, boring governance. But just being stable and predictable doesn't work very well if you're stably and predictably doing the wrong thing all the time, that's why the US is rich and relevant while the EU is not.
Stability and effectiveness is of course good. Australia did a good job of blocking illegal immigration. Violent crime is still fairly low despite the best efforts of the drug legalizers and policing reformers. But the hierarchy should be:
Without Trump, there's a decent chance that the net closes and it becomes effectively impossible to contest the deep-seated institutions and lobbies that want to wreck the economy so they can maximize their control and security, turn the US into the EU, shut off any dissent as hate-speech... Before Trump, what legal victories were there where people convinced others to moderate the madness? Were there many such victories? Were they permanent wins or temporary compromises? The net is closing in the EU, they're moving slowly to ban the AFD and any alternative to managed democracy and permanent decline/replacement. Vote poorly in Romania and your election will simply be undone.
Sure there is: the old simply need to decide/be forced to pay their damn taxes.
The old in the US chose to pay their taxes: they, wisely, chose someone who campaigned on imposing them- he even managed to make them fun. And while the results of figuring out that new tax policy have been... interesting, especially because the reformers choose to televise negotiations (which I will point out was vital to making them fun in the first place), this is necessary for American society to avoid becoming too top-heavy and collapsing under the weight of its unpaid debts. Or in other words, "a deep-seated economic crisis at a structural level".
The old in the rest of the Western world, by contrast (and you can blame some selection effects- these countries define themselves by their social conservatism, Decorum, and Orderliness), have soundly rejected paying their taxes and, as provinces of the Empire, now need to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so. "Muh Trump" is simply an excuse for this (and the fact that nobody in any one of these nations can articulate what is actually wrong with him besides righteous indignation reveals that).
The housing situation could be solved overnight if you mass-mobilized your potential workforce; I'd leave my current job instantly if someone showed up at my door, thrust a journeyman ticket with my name on it into my hands, and said "we'll pay 1.5x your current salary, and guarantee you a single family home in whatever location you choose, to come build houses for us for the next 4 years", and I think a lot of teen and twentysomethings would be willing to do that too. If the political will was there, it would occur.
Well, not until the war in Ukraine wraps up, at any rate. I wonder where that massive surplus of small arms is going to end up if the Ukrainian government wins but can't pay its soldiers (to say nothing of the Russian one)? I suspect European nations in particular are not going to like the answer.
How are are the old paying their taxes in the USA? The US is still in a huge $1.8 trillion budget deficit because of the entitlement spending. Tariffs are not going to produce that much revenue.
I'm all for cancelling the pension and laying waste to the baby boomers but it's not happening in the US or anywhere else until we hit a truly massive crisis. We still live under BOG.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link