Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Notes -
Maybe, maybe not. But in reality it went like this:
Trump: I know you don't want to do this, but I'm going to try to make you build in America.
Businesses: Even if I wanted to do this, it takes years to plan to build factories and millions of dollars. China has optimized their industrial pipelines for this. U.S. can't compete with that and we'd just lose money as Chinese products would be massively cheaper everywhere outside the U.S. if not in the U.S.
Trump: I'm making you pay more to import everything, effective immediately, until you build a factory that takes years to build.
Businesses: We're just going to pass the cost onto consumers and continue to import. This is still cheaper than onshoring and you'll be gone in 4 years max.
Trump: *surprised Pikachu*
Im not saying that he’s doing so in the perfect way, but unless it actually costs more to import, there’s no incentive to build in America, and to hire Americans. It’s just basic business, unless it costs less to build and hire in America than to import, the business community will build in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Mexico, or El Salvador. Your underwear comes from El Salvador because it’s much cheaper to build in El Salvador, hire Salvadorans, and ship to America than it is to build in America and hire Americans. Increasing the cost of imports is part of encouraging American manufacturing, probably would work if they had done other things to lower costs to build and hire in the USA — tax breaks or rebates, preferential treatment in getting government contracts, and so on. But it doesn’t change unless the cost of imports goes up enough to offset the cost of American manufacturing, it doesn’t happen.
I already understand the reasoning, but the reasoning doesn't work.
Offshore production is massively cheaper. If Trump's tariffs make a product 10% more expensive to import but it would cost 50% more to make here, then making it here is still competitive suicide. Especially if they sell the product outside the U.S. and their product has to compete internationally with China.
My hobby is board games. Board games are already a product that barely makes a profit. A board game producer laid it out. Board games involve a lot of different custom pieces. Most factories aren't set up to handle that, but China is. The ones that are, wouldn't want to take the job unless they produced several thousand minimum, far greater than the board game is expected to sell. As this is a luxury good, if you raise the price people won't purchase it. Effectively, to even try to comply with Trump's plan would kill their business.
My message here is you don't get points for effort. A half-assed attempt is worse than doing nothing, and costs a lot of people their livelihood and doesn't even get you closer to the outcome intended.
My contention is that you also have to start somewhere and such a major economic shift is not going to happen quickly. I think Trump’s method is off because it’s all stick and no carrots which isn’t good. If the tariffs were more targeted and there were major tax breaks for building manufacturing in America, it would work. But I see the necessity of doing something to create manufacturing in America, and unless we start somewhere we won’t ever have a manufacturing base.
My contention is that you don't have to start somewhere. You first look at the situation and how it came to be, consider what you want to happen and if you can accomplish it, and consider the ramifications of doing it.
Trump did none of that. What Trump did is the equivalent of thinking you have a leaky roof, trying to fix it yourself with a half-assed understanding of roofing, and ending up with a torn-up roof. If you don't have the means to fix the roof, putting up a tarp is actually better.
If you don't understand what you're doing and why, it's not just a matter of not getting the economic shift you wanted. It's a matter of getting a completely different shift from rich to poorer.
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