Leopards Ate My Face

Yeah there are too many poorly educated lefties here. Or worse, well educated and deliberately deceptive.

It's not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that's fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.

What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?

You can't get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that's all they've ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone's ears, for their entire adult lives.

I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don't obliterate my quality of life when they come due.

But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World's Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they're going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.

It took Rome 1000 years to collapse. I expect instability in the us for the rest of my lifetime. I’m struggling to balance that reality and also living my life.

Also- I think COVID is to blame too. More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.

I actually don't consider this an issue of being dumb. It IS an issue with being under-educated (often deliberately in R states) and fed a ton of propaganda

Not necessarily: the company can choose to absorb part or all the tariff, since the demand would drop at the higher price anyway, and they might make more overall profit at a lower margin per item. But generally yes, most of the cost will be passed on to the consumer and prices will increase on average.

Example:

the end consumer always foots the bill.

Or the consumer can't/won't take on the extra burden of cost, and the business loses enough sales to go under.

The difference is that this way it's much easier to calculate prices.

If the tax were 20%, the exporter would have to do the inverse calculation. That is, "which price will result in me gaining $1000?" Which is not 1200, since 20% of 1200 is 240. x = 0.8y -> y = (1/0.8)*x -> y = 1.25x. so the exporter would have to price it at 1.25x the price, $1250. 20% of 1250 is 250.

So it's unintuitive that a 20% tax would result in a 25% price increase. That's my guess why tariffs are applied to the importer instead of exporter.

I don't think he'll live more than 4 years anyway. Hopefully the movement collapses when he does

Especially when tariffs go above 100%!

Like, do you believe French companies would be paying the shipping costs to give you free Champagne?

The real Russian plot we've all missed completely has far, far less to do with paying Trump to sell them documents. That's the 2-dimensional public face of a cold-war that never ended and has been devastatingly effective against the USA.

The real Russian attack that we may never fully comprehend is exactly what they've done in other countries that they've subsequently annexed, which is making the general population stop caring about what's true or not. It's frighteningly easy to poison the well of public knowledge. You simply pour funding into efforts to boost BOTH SIDES of every social issue. When social debates and your nation's interests are ramped up and the rhetoric gets more and more extreme on both sides of an issue, when every story on both sides becomes suspect, people simply tune out or stop caring about what's true or not, and this is exactly where we are. Most people are more willing to just throw their arms up and go find a distraction than try to sift through what's real or not.

It was even easier to pull off in the USA than anywhere else because we have a built-in policy of fierce independence and individuality. We don't have communities around us, we don't have social circles that will make us want to step up our game, we don't have groups of people we care about telling us we're wrong, we don't have help from anywhere but inside our own heads. And if you've never been taught how your own thoughts can be wrong, if you've been fed the "special birthday boy" narrative for so long that you think highly of yourself, truth will seem toxic and poison because it will tell you things about yourself that will hurt. We don't seek out pain as a species, we use pain a signal to avoid a thing.

You can google "KGB tactics for destabilizing nations" and spend weeks reading about what's being done to us right now. But most people who read my message here will immediately feel that sneaking doubt or words of caution because "how do we even know what's real anymore."

What do you tell the people who are in fact thinking themselves and concluding that:

adding tariffs is a good thing for the US workers. for one, it ensures that resources (like aluminum) are being sourced from within the US, adding extra mining jobs. For two, it means that complex goods tend to be manufactured/assembled within the US, again adding labor/assembly jobs. For three, why should the product become more expensive to the end user if it's the same production process being employed?

What kills me is that we shouldn't be researching a thing that was taught in school.

Actual footage of us GenX kids learning about The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.

I don't understand why this even needs to be researched. I'm no economist and I don't know much about tariffs, but: costs more to get product to me for any reason = product costs me more. When has that ever not been the case? What am I missing?