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| ▲ | Henchman21 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don’t need to justify it. The other explanations are only partly correct if they ignore this giant red flag. The number of people who willfully ignore this is massive. Its a shock to process — no one wants to be even WILLING to believe it. We’ve been had and the number of people covering for this grows daily, and will continue to do so until one day we all wake the fuck up. |
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| ▲ | multjoy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They claimed a trade deficit with islands that are inhabited by penguins and imposed a tariff on said penguins. You are being governed by someone with dementia who has surrounded himself with people who appear unable to say 'no'. |
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| ▲ | anigbrowl 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think it's at odds with other explanations. If you wanted a working tariff regime you'd make the tariffs graduated and reasonable - big enough to sway customer choices and ithus investment decisions, but not arbitrary seeming. More importantly, you'd work hard to ensure it rolled out smoothly and minimized commercial disruption so as to allow your price signals to function clearly. |
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| ▲ | antonvs 2 days ago | parent [-] | | If you wanted a working tariff regime, you'd also couple tariffs with investments and tax incentives for domestic businesses. Just hoping that the market will (somehow!) sort it out is a recipe for failure, quite possibly of disastrous levels. |
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| ▲ | immibis 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The purpose of a system is what it does. |
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| ▲ | Levitz a day ago | parent [-] | | It very evidently is not, I don't know how this saying ever became popular, it's so reductionist and silly. Is the purpose of the democratic system to get people like Trump in power? Apparently that's what it does, no? | | |
| ▲ | immibis 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | The purpose of this political system is to put people like Trump in power. We can infer this because it keeps putting people like Trump in power and yet nobody has changed it yet. Look up the history of the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does". It was adopted as a principle because it made more sense than every other possible alternative. It makes no sense to claim that the purpose of a system is to do something that it never has done and consistently fails to do, because the system would have been replaced in that case. |
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| ▲ | hluska 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I think that’s a little extreme, but here is a balance sheet based explanation where it works. The US just sort of randomly decided to tariff everything from people they don’t like anymore. Because of the randomness of these tariffs, they impact not only consumer goods but production equipment. The justification for these tariffs is something along the lines of “let’s bring production back to the United States.” That’s likely a good idea (says the Canadian), but when they use that justification while simultaneously tariffing production equipment the same as consumer goods you have to wonder what’s actually going on. With production equipment, you amortize the cost of that tool over the years of usage. These tariffs are not amortized, meaning they must be paid at import. That takes cash off the balance sheet, puts it into equipment and hits liquidity. If I was wickedly powerful and really hated Americans, going after SMB liquidity would be the most convenient (and profitable) way to cause generational harm. |
