Do you remember Michael Moore’s 1989 movie Roger and Me? It’s about the devastation experienced by 30,000 workers when GMC closed its factories in Flint, Michigan. Since then, most manufacturing jobs were moved overseas. Everywhere became Flint, Michigan.
Workers who were no longer needed turned to drugs and alcohol. Google opioid epidemic. Google deaths of despair. An enormous amount of suffering was visited on an enormous number of people in the name of free trade. Of course, it’s free only for people like Roger Smith, the CEO of GMC who ordered the firings. For everybody else, it’s dispossession and suffering.
Since then, more jobs of all kinds were offshored. Economic globalization means that companies go wherever on the globe labor is cheaper and regulations are laxer. Everybody who wants decent working conditions and decent pay is screwed. It also means that many things are no longer manufactured at all in countries where workers have legal protections against being abused. This makes countries with good, decent people completely dependent on horrible inhuman regimes. To give an example, Western Europe outsourced its energy production to Russia instead of building clean, green nuclear plants. As a result, Western Europe is paying huge amounts for Russian oil and gas. And Russia uses that money to bomb Ukraine.
In economic terms, this is what neoliberalism is. Capital is free to disregard national borders and move wherever it wants. Nation-states become irrelevant because capital doesn’t need to notice their existence. And no nation-states means no rights, no democracy in any meaningful way.
Is that what you want? Is that what you personally really like in life? Seeing yours or your neighbor’s job being given to some exploited Bangladeshi who’ll do it for $2 per hour? Meaningless elections? A fraying standard of living? More precarization? Being utterly dependent on some bloodthirsty dictatorial regime to manufacture your medication because nobody knows how to do it on this hemisphere? Do you like all this shit? I mean, if you are sincerely into all this then yay for you. But people who watched Roger and Me, who always said they are against globalization, who always knew that “free trade” was an absolute mockery, what the bloody fucking fuck are you doing now, foaming at the mouth in defense of globalization? Do you have no principles at all? Will you embrace even this because it’s politically expedient in the moment?
Maybe Trump’s tariffs won’t work. Maybe we are too far gone and are trapped by globalization forever. But at least he’s trying. Nobody else is. Nobody else is suggesting another way out of this. Globalized economy is terrible for everybody but the very rich. It’s not doing anything good for you and me. If somebody wants to take an axe to Roger Smith’s plans to steal our jobs and make us dependent on some third-world dictator who can make his population work for free, why should we oppose it? Why shouldn’t we instead use this opportunity to talk about how badly “free trade” worked out for all of us. We have one last chance to save the nation-state and instead we are making dumb jokes about penguins.
Today, in this moment, you are Roger from Michael Moore’s movie. It’s a great opportunity to sit and ponder what brought you from feeling solidarity and compassion with the workers to siding with their shady, nasty CEO. What happened in the intervening years that made you switch sides? Maybe watch the movie again and try to figure that out.
PEG is right. Maybe we are too far gone and the nation-state is truly doomed. But we’ve got to try, people. The only alternative is more austerity, more precarity, more of everything we’ve seen since Roger and Me.
At least, somebody has started asking why we are doing this, why we have decided that “free trade” and economic globalization are such a great good.
Clarissa's Blog 
The worst thing we could do here is… not roll the dice and find out.
There are a lot of things that go into having a good life. For a long time now, the US has blindly put “cheap toys” at the top of its good-life hierarchy. TVs are cheaper than ever. Nobody can afford a house. We’re supposed to cheer for this.
Some of us would very much like to try out having a house with less (but more expensive and durable) stuff in it.
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I agree. But it will be an incredibly difficult thing to overcome. Americans have been conditioned to cheap products their entire lives.
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“Americans” is a lot of people.
Maybe it’s time to find out how many of us would prefer housing stability/security more than a TV that takes up the whole wall.
If the majority goes for the TV, then… (shrugs), America’s over anyway. May as well find out.
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I would support tariffs if there appeared to be a strategy to how they were set up. We should not be dependent on China (hostile, undemocratic, steals technology, blocks foreign competition) for manufactured goods. We should impose tariffs on places with horrible wages and inhuman working conditions. But Trump’s new tariffs are extremely broad, they are taxing goods that the US has never and will never be able to produce domestically, they are taxing goods from friendly, high wage countries that have nothing to do with the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the US. Tariffs could be a good thing, but they’ve done them in a way that involves a bunch of unnecessary pain for no obvious benefits.
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I should add that I have seen some online claims that Trump’s team may have used AI to created the tariff tables that were presented yesterday. He seems to have a lot of lazy and incompetent people around him this time around. Unfortunate given that a well thought out system of tariffs could be a good thing.
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I believe the intention is that this is an opening bid: everybody has tariffs on US goods. That needs renegotiating, and this (hopefully) gets them to the negotiating table.
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See:
The Times reported, “Trump signaled he is open to negotiating tariffs, if other nations offer something ‘phenomenal’ in return.”
Opening bid.
https://x.com/RedWave_Press/status/1907915748984463655
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Yeah, this is my biggest grip with these tariffs. I also don’t know what the strategy here is.
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Thanks for the perspective Clarissa. I also see it from this point of view, but I’d also add that the current globalized system has made China incredibly rich and powerful at the expense of the United States. So there is that angle as well.
I also see this as incredibly risky for Trump. The American voter has an extremely short term memory and very little tolerance for pain. Trump is indeed taking a huge risk with such sudden and large actions.
I would also like to point out that there is huge offshoring right now of IT and software development jobs same as with manufacturing in the 80s/90s. It’s the same thing, why pay a decent salary and benefits to an American programmer, when you can just some schmuck in another country a pittance. I’m hoping this becomes a bigger issue.
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“horrible inhuman regimes”
Well the hope/idea was that prosperity would change these horrible regimes into something much better and there were signs here and there that that might be possible… but it’s been obvious for years that that isn’t the case. The experiment was a failure, time to try a new one.
My problems with the tarrifs is less conceptual and more practical in that there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to them and they won’t work on their own… a lot of other efforts will be necessary to bring manufacturing back to life in the US.
Let’s hope that they’re onto the fact that a long process like deindustrialization won’t be solved overnight.
I do hope it works.
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To a limited extent, the trade strategy *does* work on inhuman regimes… but only on the small ones, and only to the extent that US trade displaces trade with eg China. VN loosened up on the official discrimination and political persecution stuff every time the US got serious about trading with them. They like prosperity, they hate China, they were willing to make a deal. But US is very inconsistent about it, runs hot and cold depending on the admin, and progress was two-steps-forward, one-step back, a lot.
That strategy was never going to work with China, because China doesn’t have China breathing down its neck all the time, threatening to re-colonize it.
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There is a theory that is the only theory that is charitable to Trump’s team that I know of: creating instability is the point. So tariffs do not have to make sense. The less sense they make – the better. Penguins et al. Keeping as many people as possible confused is not a bug, it is a feature. Making people think Trump is an idiot so they underestimate the group for which he is a figurehead is a feature. Etc.
And then the hope (or calculation, allegedly involving AI) is that US will tolerate that global instability better than others. It remains to be seen if it turns out to be true. And even if it will be true – what will be the definition of the “US” that will end up better than others – the whole US, or just some corporations?..
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The tariffs “don’t make sense” because the media owned by the billionaire class say so. We are being lied to and manipulated by the very class that is profiting from shipping our jobs away.
I have a principle I’ve held dear for a long time. Whatever would have horrified Milton Friedman pleases me. Friedman would have hated this.
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I do not consume MSM. I do believe tariffs may bring some industries to the US. However, as long as other countries are imposing retaliatory tariffs on the US, all these new US manufacturing plants will not expand beyond the size needed to satisfy US-internal demand. There is not much sense to build export capacity if one cannot sell to other countries. Same companies, including the US-headquartered ones, will have to ALSO create jobs elsewhere, to satisfy demand there. And the US share of the global economy is smaller now than it was in the 50-ies. So I am not sure the net effect of this exercise will be positive for the US. This is what I mean when I say “no sense”.
Unless, of course, the US manages to somehow ruin everybody else and bring its share of the world economy back to the 50-ies level. There are basically two ways to do it: next Word War or creating economic instability in ways that benefit US more than others.
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Other countries were already imposing tariffs. Did it make sense that we were not?
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Even the Trump’s own infographics say these other countries’ are mostly not tariffs per se (actual tariffs are much lower), these are “effective tariffs” that are calculated based on a proprietary algorithm that includes all kinds of “unfairness”. Some economist from Yale claims that proprietary algorithm is just taking the ratio of trade deficit to given country’s exports to the US. Because trade deficits are “unfair”. Unless they are in favor of the US.
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OK. That still sounds reasonable.
If we import 10Bn worth of tools and cars from them every year and impose no tariff, and they import a truckload of M&Ms and Skittles at 20% tariff to sell as expensive specialty items to expats because their regulations, labor laws, environmental standards, etc. effectively bar entry to American products… that’s a problem.
The main reason all our jobs get offshored is because as soon as we decide that OTJ accidents have to be covered by the employer, that FT employees must be offered benefits, that you have to take reasonable measures to mitigate workplace hazards, that you can’t hire anyone under 16 for anything, or under 18 for really hazardous stuff, that you can’t force people to work more than 40 hours per week and if they do it voluntarily you have to pay them extra, that you can’t dump toxic chemicals into the local water supply, that giving the surrounding community lead poisoning isn’t OK, that you can’t offload all your waste disposal costs onto the environment and everybody downstream…
As soon as we do any of those right and good things, we lose a price advantage to countries that *don’t* do those things. Those countries don’t import any of our crap because it’s more expensive to make things with humane working conditions, adult labor, and a paycheck that supports indoor plumbing, electricity, and drinkable tapwater.
Why should we give those countries a massive competitive edge over us?
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That’s exactly it. Our jobs are being shipped away because we live in societies that fought long, hard and very successfully to achieve these reasonable and good labor protections. Our jobs are being sent away to places where such protections don’t exist.
Shouldn’t it be the #1 duty of our government to stop this despoliation?
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Look, I am not advocating for free trade here.
Please correct me if I am wrong. Let’s say Canada is producing a lot of aluminum. Because it has a lot of cheap hydro power. And it currently sells that aluminum to the US. Let’s say developing logistical solutions to ship it to Europe instead would cost as much as 15% US tariff. Then if US tariffs exceed this level, it becomes more profitable to Canada to bypass the US and sell its aluminum elsewhere.
It looks to me that effectiveness of US solution to the problem it is trying to solve depends on other countries agreeing that abandoning free trade (not only with the US but between themselves) is a proper solution. Otherwise if US tariffs go too high the rest of the world may eventually find it useful to bypass the US.
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OK.
Where’s the downside?
Like, I don’t get the logic of “everybody else is exploiting their labor force and/or raping their ecology, so we have to do it too if we want to remain competitive”. Maybe we need aluminum to be more expensive, and maybe we need to consider, very carefully, the balance of mineral/raw-material type resources coming and going in trade.
When it comes to natural/fossil resources, I think we need to be a LOT more careful about that.
Right now, the way we do agriculture, we subsidize certain staple crops, produce hugely in excess of what we need domestically, and flood overseas markets with cheap goods that crash *their* ag markets at the expense of our taxpayers. It’s a disaster for everybody involved. One of the less-examined aspects of this, is we, here in the US, are basically *giving away* fossil resources at the public expense. None of that stuff is grown sustainably: we mine phosphorus, generate nitrogen from fossil fuels, deplete very ancient aquifers, and strip-mine the topsoil to do it, and we underwrite it with public funds. All of that– nitrogen, phosphorus, topsoil, and the water– are fossil resources that we will not get back.
From what I understand, extraction of mineral resources in Canada has been *extremely* ecologically destructive. We run the same moral hazard as we do with cheap-labor countries: OK, we need aluminum. Or lithium. Or cobalt. Or oil. Or whatever. Do we have that domestically? If so, and we are unwilling to engage in the kind of environmental catastrophe it takes to extract it cheaply… why would we consent to purchase it cheaply from countries that *are* willing to do that? That’s just offshoring pollution. We decided that kind of pollution was a bad thing, didn’t we? So why is it OK if someone else is doing it, and we buy it from them?
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….all other things being equal, like, say, we are OK with how Canada is producing aluminum, and they’re the closest place to get it, then sure, tariff should probably take into account the cost difference of shipping to us vs. shipping somewhere farther away etc.
But all other things are not equal.
I think most of these tariffs are still opening bids in a continuing negotiation: get everybody to the table, and then let’s talk about trade deficits, unequal labor conditions, unequal environmental protections, unequal tariffs, strategic domestic security (it does not make strategic sense to allow complete offshore production of essential goods such as food, drugs, cars, replacement parts, etc, and it makes less sense to offshore them to countries that act like enemies, eg China), and long-term domestic resource management (eg not depleting domestic fossil resources for the benefit of foreign countries, using taxpayer dollars).
As an opening bid in a long-overdue renegotiation of trade arrangements, it is very much a good thing.
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Restructuring the economy to manufacture more things in the US and pay Americans good salaries to do so is great in theory. You need honest and skilled politicians with a long-term plan to do so. That’s feasible.
The more problematic part is having a population that is committed to that goal. A government that causes significant short-term pain will likely be voted out of office. I know Curtis Yarvin and other techno-fascists would be happy to step up and benevolently guide us through this instead, but that might end very badly for most of us.
But manufacturing has also changed. There is more automation. We can’t travel back to the economy of the 1950’s.
Technology is eating more jobs away, particularly through AI now. You can’t address that with tariffs.
To sum up: yes, we can try to restructure the economy to benefit regular people, but that’s not what Trump is doing. It’s just a cover for the oligarchy to further enrich itself.
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Yarvin has been massively critical of Trump. He’s more in agreement with what you say then with what I do.
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“The more problematic part is having a population that is committed to that goal. A government that causes significant short-term pain will likely be voted out of office. I know Curtis Yarvin and other techno-fascists would be happy to step up and benevolently guide us through this instead, but that might end very badly for most of us.
This is what a lot of MAGAs/conservatives seem to be glossing over. If things go south, like they are likely to, Republicans will be seriously punished. Trump was elected on a mandate to bring prices down, and he’s doing the exact opposite. Most American’s couldn’t care less about the finer economic and geopolitical reasons for why this may be necessary.
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If wages and job availability also go up, we might squeak by.
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I’m discovering on twitter that all those hardcore NAFTA-hating Bernie supporters were secretly free traders and invisible-hand-of-the-market cultists all this time.
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It’s because I know the Left’s long-held position on this issue so very well that I find the sudden and total about face so delightfully entertaining.
I’m eager to meet with my union rep and sound him out. If Labor also suddenly became pro-offshoring, that will really be something.
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Democratic socialists are channeling their inner Milton Friedman because it’s The New Thing they saw on social media. I wonder what the emoji for their avatars will be.
“The Markets hate this!” they exclaimed. After decades of repeating that markets aren’t alive and shouldn’t be invested with human emotions, it’s all thrown to the winds and now it’s all Markets all the time.
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Also, it’s funny how neolib snakes like Yglesias back in the day openly admitted free trade was bad because he felt safe that things were never going to change.
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This is what happens when people don’t have actual principles. They end up following every new fad. It’s sad to watch.
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Exactly. Here’s another wonk retard Dem superstar who’s never faced any accountability for his actions.
Imagine writing “Obama is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”
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The same people I’ve heard for years denounce Nike’s exploitation of 3rd world workers… are right at this moment weeping publicly that Nike is being punished for this practice. I can’t even go on social media. People have collectively turned into their exact opposite overnight.
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Oh, look, another actually good liberal principle bites the dust.
When did they start taking money from Nike?
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If Europeans actually believed in clean green nuclear plants it would solve a lot of problems. Unfortunately, they can use outsourcing to avoid difficult decisions.
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Tarrifs are for the most part a tax increase. Simply raising raising taxes is unlikely to resolve any any underlying issues, although they may convince people that new thinking is needed.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2025/04/04/vat-votes-and-the-vanishing-of-the-anc/
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Enough, time from some mansplaining before your 401’s and my RRSP are utterly destroyed. Trumps’s “Brain-Trust” stepped on its’ collective respective primary or secondary sexual organs, regardless, they have most certainly not coldly measured.
They calculated tariffs using a formula subtracting a country’s US Imports from its’ US Exports to yield a trade deficit, and then divides that trade deficit by that country’s US Exports to create their supposed tariff. This is obtuse, no rational male would be that stupid. Allow me to provide an example that everybody can understand.
Canada is your closest and once most friendly trade partner, it’s population is roughly one tenth of your own, and therefore, although considerable, one would expect US Imports to naturally be lower. But, and it is a big butt, the SHTF in the US Export factor because despite all the emotional BS, millions of barrels of oil flow from Alberta to Texas every F’ng day. That fact yields the trade deficit that creates the supposed tariff. This is not the first time that I have pointed this out, Daddy’s home, now grow up ;-D
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Well, they obviously did some thinking due to the SA exports exempted from US sanctions.
https://www.freightnews.co.za/article/white-house-lists-sa-products-exempt-tariffs
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SA actually has things to export while Cuba and Belarus… I mean, are people so in thrall to their Trump mania that they don’t see that these countries aren’t great exporters of anything whatsoever? Cubans import absolutely everything. They can’t grow a darn plantain any longer. All they eat, wear and use on a daily basis is imported. They can’t make a sheet of paper or a tube of toothpaste. So what is it people assume they export in such numbers that would actually require tariffs?
The Trump obsession completely switches off people’s brains if they have to ask why there are no tariffs on bloody North Korea. Yes, what a mystery.
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SA is a weird place where Trump’s tarrifs actually increase dependence on capitalism.
https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/south-africa/as-us-cuts-hiv-assistance-sa-turns-to-miners-insurer/
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Clarissa
LOL, using North Korea as an example, you’re mansplaining better than me ;-D
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It’s not me, it’s the Anonymous commenter who suspects some evil conspiracies in the fact that the Trump administration isn’t placing tariffs on the voluminous North Korean imports into the US. Yes, what will we all do without North Korean stuff that fills the shelves of every supermarket.
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We should definitely put heavy tariffs on all the counterfeit 20 dollar bills they are shipping in. 200% of face value.
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Well, I was thinking of tariffs on SA vs Canada, although I guess it is obvious that SA has vastly more important natural resources than Canada.
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Now make an argument for why the 50+ percent of us who will never be able to afford a house or retire, should care about your 401k.
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…I, for one, am happy to sacrifice the stock market, if it gets us a living wage or lower housing costs.
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I also need to mention that people who are suddenly worried that this will devastate the economy had no problem with shutting down the economy for 1,5 years and pumping trillions of newly printed money into it. Now they are different very worried.
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That is exactly how we are seeing it down here.
I’ve read the 401k booklet. There are ZERO “safe” investment funds that aren’t getting in on the REI game– yeah that same scheme that is making it impossible for median-income families to buy a house, so that you can skim a profit off the rental market we are locked into, for a retirement we will never be able to afford.
The PMC-investing classes were more than happy to axe our businesses, lock us out of our jobs for a year or more, and try to force us to participate in reckless medical experimentation like little lab rats. That was all totes OK, but now that the 401k where you soft-gamble with your spare pocket money might be losing value, THAT’s what we should all care about. That’s what matters.
Fuck your 401k.
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I don’t think that the ruling class remotely understands the hatred and resentment it evokes with its preening, self-righteousness and didacticism. There will be reckoning yet for laptop lockdowners with their breadmaker machines and Zoom jobs.
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My husband is obsessed with his 401K and utterly indifferent to politics. I asked him if his 401K was in danger and he said absolutely not. Only a 10-year trend matters, not whatever happens within a few day stretch. Also, when stock goes down, bonds go up, and this all evens out.
Again, he never heard of the tariffs, is deeply indifferent towards Trump and loves his 401K with an uncommon passion. I don’t understand 401K but if N says there’s no reason to worry, I trust him.
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Clarissa
History can be a bitch, there are tariffs, and then there are trade wars. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930 started trade wars that changed an economic crisis into the Great Depression. A world-wise catastrophe only finally ended by killing millions financed by governments borrowing through massive bond sales to fund WW2. We are not somehow more intelligent than the people of that era, in fact, judging from high school exams of those days, we appear far less educated ;-D
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The Great Depression was a fascinating phenomenon.
The two sides of my family are a snapshot of the thing.
Mom’s side, a large, poor, smalltown family… hardly noticed it. I interviewed the older relatives about it. They said: everybody was poor. Didn’t make a lick of difference. At times they benefited from WPA jobs. After WWII, like most other people, they enjoyed a burst of prosperity and did well for themselves, all comfortably middle-class by retirement age: postmen, electricians, contractors, home decorators, secretaries, smalltime landlords, military men, and a regional manager for the telephone company. Cheerful, solid, gracious people, all.
Dad’s side, prosperous, educated city folk from Cleveland, had a posh house in Lakeside. Great-granddad was a stockbroker. They lost everything. They moved south with only what they could fit in the car, to take charity from wealthy relatives who owned a cosmetics factory. Relatives purchased a small hotel, which they ran for some years while getting back on their feet financially. This grated on them: they were very entitled people and the work was beneath them. They were never again as wealthy as they’d been before the crash– they fell to middle class and never felt comfortable about coming down in the world– felt cheated when their kids married other middle-class people, and the patriarch went right back to securities brokering as soon as the market picked up. Never happy with where they landed– just kept wanting what they used to have.
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These are fascinating stories.
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Methylethyl
Let’s just hope cooler, more rational hands can avoid a trade war. SW Saskatchewan had lots of stories, and even a movie, of the Depression and the Dirty Thirties. My grandfather trucked Ukrainian (they made the highest quality) moonshine to speakeasies across the border for a few hungry years, and my Dad, his brother, and little sister weeded the Chinese grocer’s gardens for 10 cents a day. My Mom says that all the girls had dresses made with colourful ptinted cloth from flour bags, and she remembers the year that thousands of starving grasshoppers ate all the paint off the sides of her house.
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Not all of us *want* cooler heads handling things, you know.
The wealth pump has been going for decades now. There is no way to halt or reverse that action without pissing off a lot of people who’ve been its beneficiaries.
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methylethyl
LOL, I deliberately appended rational to cooler for a reason. We need clear headed surgery, not mindless Jacobin butchery ;-D
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You reckon the investor/donor classes are going to be like: Oh, whoops! Now that you point it out, sorry these policies that made us rich have been eating the middle/working classes! We’ll be totally fine with finding other ways to make a living… ?
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methyethyl
“Now that you point it out, sorry these policies that made us rich have been eating the middle/working classes!”
LOL, no, I am just suggesting that we punish only those that are actually guilty of somthing. For example, I really doubt like hell that most seniors with 401’s or RRSP’s know its contents. I knew mine, but as my wife’s beneficiary, her holdings had been simply appended to mine. Fortunately, her only realty holdings involved rental office buildings in Calgary.
But as for the guilty, I am likely far less generous than yourself. For example, I would consider those who broke their sworn oaths lying about border security to Congress to be treasonous, and being an old phart, I believe in capital punishment.
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The 401k thing is a giant hairball. We actually have one via my husband’s job: after looking at the options for what funds to invest it in, and seeing they were all participating in the REI game to some extent or other, I tried to convince him not to participate at all. It’s evil, it’s gambling, and it’s part of the problem. We shouldn’t be participating. But he talked to his pmc parents and they prevailed of course. Not that the trivial amount we put into it makes any difference, but as a sort of ritual participation in the evil sacrament, now all our hands are dirty, aren’t they? How can we complain, when we bought into it?
Is serving long pig at the potluck an insurance policy for the habitual cannibals? You ate it too, now you’re contaminated.
No, I don’t think everybody with a 401k is guilty. But a huge part of the intractability of the problem is that we were all sold the chickie-wickies together. Eat it. You’ll like it. Don’t ask what’s in it.
Boomers were sold on real estate going up forever, so they take out equity loans on the rising value of the house they bought back when houses were comparatively cheap. Now they cannot sell the house or leave it to the kids. And they will never vote for a decline in real estate value: that’d make their magic bank account go away. Neither will anybody with a significant 401k investment: it’s all REI now.
Any policy that actually resulted in affordable housing would poleaxe their retirement funds, which depend on real estate going up forever. Affordable means prices go down (no matter how you achieve it: build more cheap housing, or allow prices to normalize). That’s a whole lotta perverse incentive going on.
The only people who actually want affordable housing are the people who don’t already own a home, and whose retirement funds are zero, or close enough not to matter. The only way we win is if you lose.
We’ve been set up.
There’s not an easy way out, but an out must be found: this sort of thing ends in violence often as not. There might be a way to thread the needle via policies that increase wages and jobs at a quicker rate than survival goods such as food and housing. Deporting illegals and enforcing current law wrt to employing, aiding, and abetting them, would be a step in the right direction. Dialing back work visa programs is another. Tariffs… could be if handled well.
There are gains that could be made by increasing policing and prosecutions: those things can make marginal and no-go neighborhoods (which *do have* affordable housing, because nobody wants to live there) back into places to live. That’s expensive, but might be more politically tenable than a lot of other measures. Meth has *destroyed* more affordable houses than anybody wants to tally up right now. We need to stop the bleed there.
I don’t think any of that will be enough without some serious disincentives for owning large quantities of real estate… which would at least not directly penalize people who already have a house to live in. I’d like to see scaled taxes on owning residential property: own the house you live in, pay nothing; own 2 houses, pay a slight higher rate (we effectively have this already in homestead exemptions); own five, pay a bit more; own 100, pay until you bleed from the eyeballs. Give the current offenders 5 years to gradually divest, so it doesn’t tank everybody’s retirement fund: maybe they can invest the money in returning offhshored industries instead.
Rambling. Need sleep. etc.
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Methylethyl
Hmmm, well, I don’t know an easy solution for the affordability of housing. Like your country, our Liberal politicians have imported millions of immigrants from third world nations that we did not need and cannot house. We are now facing stagflation for the third time in my lifetime. Weekly, I have contractors trying to buy my place for forty eleven bazillions. planning to bulldoze every single thing that we built up and grew, just to set up another half dozen monster houses.
The city council solution is infilling, actually encouraging buildings that were once restricted, if not illegal because of fire safety concerns. First they allowed mother-in-law suites, then basement and upstory suites, and now duplexes and triplexes. There is no additional infrastructure, no bus route, no parking, and all the traffic feeds to a single route past the school and the boy and girl club. Brilliant, just brilliant ;-D
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The accretion of parasitic middlemen into the process of buying a house does not admit of an easy solution. This is the metaphor I keep pulling up, when I try to examine it:
The whole process is so encrusted with things that don’t belong there, that it can barely move. Investors, insurance companies, mortgage companies, real estate agents, bureaucrats, lawyers, all needing a cut, and all driving up costs. Needs a massive power-wash.
Imagine how much the price of houses would have to come down, if there were no such things as mortgages? It’s not that a mortgage “lets” you buy a house: it’s that it enables you to pay *far more* for a house than you would otherwise be able to scrape up, and drives up selling prices.
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“two sides of my family are a snapshot of the thing”
Very roughly similar to my family.
Father’s side: Some godforsaken poverty pit in northwest Mississippi, later some godforsaken poverty pit in east Texas. GD had minimal impact on much of anything as fas as I can tell. As soon as he could he skedaddled (as did everyone else who could). Joined the army which represented a great improvement. Looked back as little as possible.
Mother’s side: Gentile upper middle class from a state next to Clarissa’s. Mother’s father’s previously thriving business crashed in the GD and he drank himself to death and the rest ended up in FL. Mother’s sister married well but not… tranquilly (not that kind of person) and after the end of the marriage ran the business she got as part of the settlement and later worked in RE. Always tried to project an air of temporarily inconvenienced gentry (not always so successfully) and dabbled in all manner of nutty things to stand out from hoi polloi. Mother’s brother settled into a boring lower upper middle class job in a bank and was stably bourgeois until male menopause hit, he divorced his (really insufferable) wife and married a “go-go dancer” and then caught pneumonia and died (the funeral was… memorable). Mother had been the rebel and most unconventional of the kids. Had been traumatized by the depression and drove us batty with GD stories but in a way it freed her from middle class expectations and she shied away from respectable settled work until it was no longer an option. Was a fluid gig worker before the idea was given a name, was in journalism, did PR for a travelling show and a kind of folk art in the summer in the plains states (most stable of the gigs).
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Third-wave Floridians! I’m probably leaving out some important migration– apart from the natives and escaped slaves who made it here without leaving many records of course (Hawk Massalina and his father Jose are local legends, and unusually well-documented by virtue of getting dispossessed by the fedgov): then you’ve got the old malarial-swamp survivors: Spanish, Minorcans, Crackers, then the wannabe investors suckered in by Flagler, then the penniless ex-gentry who drifted in during the Depression. Did that last group all end up in Tampa/St.Pete/Ft.Meyers/Sarasota? SW peninsula cities? Or do I just not hear about the ones who landed in JAX or Miami?
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Given how long and detailed Trump’s list is, perhaps what is most amazing is the list of countries not included. I believe the list is
Russia,
Cuba,
Belarus,
North Korea,
Burkina Faso,
Somalia,
Seychelles,
Palau,
New Caledonia.
Maybe some of these are oversights? Maybe this is the list of our top strategic allies? It is hard to keep up with this energetic administration!
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Has it occured to you that maybe these countries don’t import much into the US because they are miserable third-world hellholes that don’t manufacture anything?
Is that what amazes you so much or is it something else?
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It’s a nice try, but “third world hellholes that don’t manufacture anything” doesn’t work to separate the ones on the list from the ones not on the list.
Trumps list includes all the following countries which are poorer than Burkina Faso and Somalia (the poorest of the countries Trump left out):
Burundi, Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen, Malawi, Madagascar
It also includes the following comparable countries:
Mozambique, Eritrea, Niger, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali
It is amazing that Trump lists in loving detail so many poor countries, including so many tiny ones like Tokelau, Tuvalu, Montserrat, Nauru, Saint Helena, Saint Pierre and Miequelon, and still left out Burkina Faso and Somalia!
I think Burkina Faso and Somalia must be Trump’s favorite African countries. And Seychelles, Palau, New Caledonia are his favorite tropical islands.
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“Trump lists in loving detail”
The Trump problem… he doesn’t like being corrected so he surrounds himself with yes men or mediocrities and they do dumb things like that list… the idea of tarrifs is sound but they should be part of long term multi-pronged policy to rebuild manufacturing but the Trump milieu has a habit of half-assing things and then getting bored and moving on…
Listened to Zeihan’s dissection of the signalgate mess and even taking his obvious biases into account it’s far worse than I’d imagined….
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I stopped reading after the passive aggressive “it’s a nice try.” Get a hold of yourself, please.
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Don’t be sore! I was just having fun.
My amazement is admittedly fading as more days go by. I think the minor countries are probably just oversights.
The prominent ones are really Russia, Cuba, Belarus, North Korea. Maybe Trump just thinks they have all been punished enough. Although we do still have billions of dollars of trade per year with Russia, even after all the sanctions.
I have to admit, as you keep repeating, it is impressive that Trump is making such a serious push back against globalization.
But I stand by the statement that it is hard to keep up with this energetic administration. One never knows what will be prioritized — one day it is bombing Yemen, the next is deporting random students, the next is sweeping tariffs.
I hope it’s not as simple as what cliff arroyo says above, that they will just keep half-assing one thing after another, getting bored, and moving on.
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Are you trying to be a dick on purpose, telling a person recovering from a surgery “don’t be sore”? This is supposed to be funny? Do you routinely entertain yourself by mocking people with physics infirmities?
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I apologize for my faux pas. I’m sorry you are suffering so much and I wish you all the best for a speedy recovery. Maybe you are right that it is best to ignore all these issues on which I am trying to engage you.
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“Russia, Cuba, Belarus, North Korea”
Aren’t those countries all already thoroughly sanctioned by the US? So there would be zero or close to zero trade.
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Exactly. Not that North Korea has much to sell irrespective of sanctions.
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Russia has many of the same minerals as SA. I dunno about there rest.
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“penniless ex-gentry who drifted in during the Depression”
In the case of my mother’s family they’d vacationed in Florida and maybe even had a second place…. They resettled a bit east of Tampa. Aunt’s daughter (much to Aunt’s horror) assimilated into the local cowboy-rodeo culture – partly under the influence of my mother for whom horses were both a passion and a living (at one point she performed in a wild west show). Aunt’s son dabbled in recording then went into broadcasting and political consulting (and other shady dealings).
I grew up on the SW coast… after a meandering time that including a year in the Rocky Mountains and then back in Florida to Citrus county and back down south.
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