"Well, Doctor [Ben Franklin], what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

"A republic, if you can keep it"

The question I put to every individual American is: can you?

I've honestly wondered this too. But we cannot obey in advance. If they're going to try and take it from us, then there should be a fight every step of the way. That means our cynical perspectives, as right as they may be, could lead us into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most likely, but with a predetermined outcome.

Wishing it in the idiots who inflicted it on the rest of us feels entirely appropriate.

Well... We do have a lot of guns over here! /s

> if there was a rapid reversal

I have some bad news. It's already some 8 months too late for "rapid".

> Not enough time has really passed for things to change _that_ much

Here in Brazil we are in a mini economic boom because every single country is willing to pay a premium on anything that didn't come from the US. The EU is shutting up internal racist and protectionist dissidents (strong on their 2 largest economies) so that they can diversify from you. Most of the world is discussing independent payment systems... Nato countries are organizing to defend against the US and China and Russia are promising military protection to Latin America.

I wonder if things changed that fast when WWI started, but it absolutely never changed that fast in my lifetime.

The world has seen how unreliable the US is. Its not even just the tarrifs, its the tarrifs applied at random, based on how happy the Don is. The world has seen the "checks and balances" don't exist, a populist leader can do whatever they want for any reason and has no accountability.

The horse has bolted, you can't ctrl-z this.

The supereme court seems quite happy to do whatever the president wants through the one-two punch of fake emergency declarations and shadow docket decisions...

I want you to think about, for a minute, the notion that you can have a number bigger than all of the atoms in the universe :-). From that, you can see that its possible to have more 'dollars' than there are atoms in the universe. Specifically, without defining 'growth' you can't reason about the limits on that growth.

The other point that simplified analysis fails to consider is that you are inside the system so as it "grows", it also "changes". If you lived in the 70's with the tales of how we're going to run out of fossil fuels by 2000, looking back you can see how things changed (cars got more efficient, other sources were discovered, etc).

My macroeconomics professor had a funny saying that you could take any segment of a sinusoid and use that to extrapolate forward and get the wrong answer about what the waveform was going to do. In my differential equations class we got to see how you could predict some things if you new both the initial conditions and you continued to refine your model. But to predict all things your model needed to take into account all variables and their impact, and it was the unknown variable problem that messed up predictions using that method.

As long as you calculate inflation “correctly”, you can have infinite growth lol. It will be fake but you know, line goes up.

That implies that economic activity is confined to this planet. Even today we can see this doesn't hold true as we already have activity in orbit. Also, economic activity is less and less tied to physical constraints as technology progresses and digitization spreads.

If I sell you a banana for $1, and you sell it back to me for $1, we have just created $2 of GDP. The trick is we need to repeat this process faster and faster over time. Luckily computers also get faster every year due to Moore’s law, so growth shouldn’t be an issue.

In fact, every person in the country could take turns with the banana for a brief period of time (provided they quickly sell it to the next person) which should enable broad prosperity for all.

Let me introduction you to asymptotes.

Come on, don't be pedantic. We are so far from hitting any limits on growth imposed by a finite planet as to be effectively unlimited.

This is what’s so dangerous about the game the Republicans are playing. They are perpetuating a belief that American society is broken by breaking it themselves. If the blinders ever come off their base the violent impulses will be directed at them the same way they were directed at Mike Pence. It’s phenomenally stupid to wind up an ignorant mob and think you can control it. The only way to maintain control is to make the mob angrier and angrier but there’s always a breaking point.

Re: your EDIT - fair enough, thanks for the additional information.

I don't the current economy is "entirely" the result of bad policy, but I do think it is the primary contributor. I read/listen to a lot of economic commentators as an interest of mine, and there is pretty broad agreement that tariffs are the main cause of inflation failing to tick down to target this year. There also seems to be consensus that the manufacturing sector has been harmed by tariffs and immigration policy rather than helped.

In my opinion, the AI hype cycle has temporarily buoyed the economy from more serious pain. If significant economic gains aren't realized from it soon I think we'll begin to see that pull back.

I do, however, think a return to ZIRP by the Fed would result in a significant economic boost. Psychologically, everyone remembers how advantageous low interest rates are and I think it could result in real investor/borrower optimism, temporarily, if we go back to that. Unfortunately, that would likely mainly stimulate the demand side of the economy, and not as much supply. I don't have high hopes for how that would affect inflation.

That is a bad thing. It doesn't mean there aren't other contributors to our economic challenges.

I'm as anti-trump as anyone. He's doing tremendous harm to our economy and our society. Your anger is making you see things that aren't there. All I did was question the assumption that our economic problems are ENTIRELY the result of bad policy. Some how you jumped to some very wrong conclusions based on that tiny shred of information which wasn't even about Trump.