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All I can say I really hope it's stupidity instead of some Machiavellian scheming to enrich the elite while fueling some culture war bullshit as a distraction. I wouldn't call Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran stupid people doing stupid things.
How do you break up a cult of a few million people and ten of millions of sympathizers for that cult? Certainly not an easy task.
On April 04 2025 21:55 Jankisa wrote: You seem very intent to believe these people are some masterminds of media manipulation and you ascribe every idiotic thing they do to being a strategy, I'm not sure if this is cope or lapping up their propaganda but in both cases, in my opinion it's a very deluded way of viewing these people.
Them sowing hate and creating rifts between people is what they do. I fully agree they behaved like adolescent high schoolers in that chat. But just frame this from an accidental to an on purpose adding the reporter that just so happens to hate Trump's guts. Could they be so incompetent? Sure. Could they have orchestrated this to sow more dissent? Absolutely. Don't underestimate people that seemingly do stupid inept things. I'm done with that, you should too. I've seen and heard all the arguments before. I'm only trying to understand what they're doing might lead to other than us saying: lol they dumb, they're destroying everything.
Edit to add to what Simberto is saying: if they're so stupid and the good guys are so smart, why are the stupid guys still in control and winning and get to keep doing stupid things?
On April 04 2025 19:14 Uldridge wrote: I would really like to believe you, but the fact that many of these people that set up the current system have elite education under their belt and a wealth of experience at very elite firms. I'm starting to step out of the knee jerk reactionary realm and into the deeper level strategies behind these what they are trying to accomplish. Maybe I'm naive, but maybe I'm stopping the emotional feeling of "what are they doing and why" of taking over. It makes no sense because you'll always be blindsided this way no matter what. I'm not going to endorse or even sympathise with what they're doing. I'm trying to understand what they're doing and the potential fallout of it all. Because... it's in full effect at the moment.
I would love to hear the deep level strategy behind tariffing uninhabited islands
sometimes stupid is just stupid.
1) Pads the list (symbolic for your big Liberation Day) 2) Costs nothing 3) When making paper policy in an office, preemptively closes any potential theoretical paper or other loophole of people getting around tariffs by redirecting imports from those places (whether physically possible or only possible on paper or not)
It is not complicated, rather, the suggestion that something that costs nothing and has no effect needs deep justification is itself... lacking, to put it nicely.
Why not pad with North Korea and Russia then, we ask? 1) Trade with North Korea is not legal, and doesn't exist. So it would look even more retarded than taxing an uninhabited island because you're taxing a transaction you yourself prohibited to begin with. In that case all a paper tariff would do is create an excuse for Kim to paint Trump's actions as another day of American imperialism against the righteous DPRK and possibly do something stupid, but real, however small. In that case there is a potential, however slight, of a cost that is not nothing, however little. Ex. Kim can have the army bomb a random island as retaliation of the American devils taxing the People's exports. This one is not hard to see. 2) Imports from Russia exist but Russia may be a special case due to prioritizing ending a regional proxy war as the first goal of relations. Russia already has strict sanctions, if you slip more economic consequences unrelated to Ukraine in a mass tariffing of the entire world, it takes away the strategic value of those consequences as leverage in the specific negotiations re:Ukraine. That's normal and just continuing the last few wartime years of Ukraine being the center focus of US policy on Russia. This one is more arguable, or harder to see, basically the idea is the key justification of any economic penalties on Russia should be 0.01% "they are ripping us off and have been for decades" and in this case 99.9% "they invaded a neighbor and are presently engaged in armed conflict."
On April 04 2025 21:30 Uldridge wrote: Carelessness for following rules and procedure (Signalgate) should not be conflated with being unable to follow them or being too stupid to. Question: is the fact that Reps can brush this off as "well it's a mistake and we'll move on now", not insanely favorable for them? Another question: was this actually sensitive info being shared? Who's going to abuse this info? Which counter intel group can use this usefully? Yes, it could've been a different operation that was being talked about, but it wasn't. And that's how they spin it. Anti MAGA are obsessed with the what about scenarios all the while it slides off MAGAs skin like water. We need a better strat.
Their propaganda machine is working exactly as intended you're up in arms about it but your screams are silent because it doesn't matter to them what you say. You've lost.
Also, you have no idea about the intention of these people. These leaked messages might've even been an intentional set up to make "MSM" even more disfavorable in MAGA eyes. You don't know anything, neither do I. It's all speculation. It's all theater. It's all noise.
Don't assume stupid. That's how you can be caught off guard... for the 100000th time. Playing the fool is the easiest get out jail free card you can get. Treat them as machiavellian masterminds (I can't believe I've actually just typed this about Trump and his cabinet)
They aren’t Machiavellian masterminds though. Indeed, by framing them thus you just validate the bullshit conception of ‘it’s not stupid it’s 4D chess’ that supporters have been spouting for years.
It’s a quite simple problem fundamentally, but redressing it is extremely, extremely complicated.
Nothing seemingly actually works, so we gotta ride it out for the time being.
I’m calling it now, when these tariffs actually start biting and taking money out of American pockets, the MAGA crowd are just going to suck it up. Some are even going to blame anything but the tariffs.
That’s the fundamental problem. Stupidity handwaved by yet further stupidity. Good luck coming up with a counter strategy there. I certainly haven’t, and I’ve tried much.
The core problem is that while they are stupid, they are also winning. Winning at breaking stuff and making everything shitty, but they still get to make the decisions.
"They are stupid" isn't actually helpful, because that still means that we are losing to stupid people.
As I said, tricky problem to actually fix.
But dancing around the problem at its core and you’re even less likely to come up with a solution.
I’ll add the important caveat I’m not saying all Trump voters are stupid. I’m specifically talking about stupidity in government, and the hand waving of said stupidity subsequently.
Adding a journalist into very sensitive chats is a stupid thing to do. The subsequent response was even more stupid. TLDR rather than admit fault, they lied about what was exposed, and the Atlantic published information they were going to just sit on.
If a significant portion of your support base can’t go ‘look you’re still my guys and gals but come on that was an obvious fuckup.’ you’ve got a real problem on your hands.
another perspective from "the right" on Trump's tariffs. Thomas Sowell...
There are many hard right tall foreheads like Thomas Sowell and Warren Buffett who normally speak in very restrained measured ways screaming from the hilltops that Trump's tariff policies are very bad.
It is one thing when moron talk show hosts on CNN or MSNBC read the hyperbole on the teleprompter and adhere to a set of pre-written talking points made for them by the producers. It is a whole other ball game when guys like Warren Buffett and Thomas Sowell trash your policies.
Sowell does give Trump one out. If these tariffs are temporary to achieve a very specific goal. Goals such as getting Canada to spend 2.5% of GDP on military or the goal of getting Mexico to secure the border.
So far, the tariffs seem more like Trump and his team are fumbling around in the dark with no end game.
On April 04 2025 21:59 Uldridge wrote: Edit to add to what Simberto is saying: if they're so stupid and the good guys are so smart, why are the stupid guys still in control and winning and get to keep doing stupid things?
Well, in my opinion, which I held for a long time but have been suppressing up until 2014 or so it's because most people are stupid.
To quote George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Unfortunately, the human race got complacent (it's not just an American phenomenon obviously), we had it good and we all thought everyone in power is also happy with how things were going, then social media happened and people with worse intentions imaginable (Oligarchs all across the world, from Russia to US, from Israel to Hungary to Turkey etc) got their hands on the levers of propaganda and managed to convince just enough people into insane shit, insane shit like believing that Trump is a genius who hires other geniuses who then play all these amazing machiavelian games and are 3 steps ahead of everyone else.
It's the same with Putin, he convinced everyone he's a strategic genius when all he is is just way more brazen then anyone else and understood that norms and international rules are basically just suggestions if no one is going to do anything about it.
There is very credible evidence that Brexit was successful because of these people using these technologies in order to manipulate just enough people, same with Trump 1, COVID acted as a super spreading event not just of the virus but of the conspiracy mind virus, everything got supercharged and people from the old guard couldn't put their egos aside in order to stop this shit, and now we are here.
Hitler wasn't smart, he was charismatic, he had his finger on the pulse of the nation and he did some good moves because he did surround himself by malicious and non dumb people, but eventually his idiocy was his downfall, if he never attacked Russia we might be typing this in German, but he did and here we are.
There are some smart propagandists and ghouls that latched themselves to Trump, Miller is a good example, evil but obviously not dumb. JD Vance as well. The former got lucky by Trump needing republican legitimacy in the first term and picking Sessions as his AG and getting Miller as a package deal, after that their shared hatered for immigrants and obvious ability to kiss ass amazingly is what kept him there.
JD Vance was put there by Thiel and other paypal mafia / broligarch crew who have been bribing Trump since they sniffed out they can hitch a ride towards cyberpunk company towns which is also how Musk got involved and helped him win.
Those are exceptions, not the rules.
The people like Hegseth who he's been seeing on Fox news, the guy is obviously an alcoholic piece of shit, he's not smart. Neither is the vast majority of the rest of his cabinet and that much was shown in the Signal chat. If you think that all was organized and intentional I might have a nice bridge I could sell you on.
Hmm, I wonder, what do we call people who use backstabbing, deception and manipulating tactics to get what they want?
I have an absolute disdain for Hegseth. But he's slippery. I think Trump is a stooge and the brains are doing overtime to spin it in the direction they can use. It's so elegant in a way. Let Trump babble and cook some chaos, use that chaos to forge your framework to operate in. I loathe it, I hope that's not what they're doing. But I'm starting to err on the side of caution because I don't want to be burned when the flame gets too strong. I want to be out of the house by then.
I don't possess a lot of social intelligence. Some people have a lot of it and are able to, just by the virtue of networking, get to very prominent places. Does it make them less smart if they can't do highschool level calculus?
hey guys! who wants one of those amazing factory jobs? nothing more exciting than working on an assembly line!
The one factory job I had... I volunteered to work dozens of hours of free OT because I just loved the smell of WD40, grinding steel, decaying cabbage and burning rubber.
On April 04 2025 21:59 Uldridge wrote: Edit to add to what Simberto is saying: if they're so stupid and the good guys are so smart, why are the stupid guys still in control and winning and get to keep doing stupid things?
Well, in my opinion, which I held for a long time but have been suppressing up until 2014 or so it's because most people are stupid.
To quote George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Unfortunately, the human race got complacent (it's not just an American phenomenon obviously), we had it good and we all thought everyone in power is also happy with how things were going, then social media happened and people with worse intentions imaginable (Oligarchs all across the world, from Russia to US, from Israel to Hungary to Turkey etc) got their hands on the levers of propaganda and managed to convince just enough people into insane shit, insane shit like believing that Trump is a genius who hires other geniuses who then play all these amazing machiavelian games and are 3 steps ahead of everyone else.
It's the same with Putin, he convinced everyone he's a strategic genius when all he is is just way more brazen then anyone else and understood that norms and international rules are basically just suggestions if no one is going to do anything about it.
There is very credible evidence that Brexit was successful because of these people using these technologies in order to manipulate just enough people, same with Trump 1, COVID acted as a super spreading event not just of the virus but of the conspiracy mind virus, everything got supercharged and people from the old guard couldn't put their egos aside in order to stop this shit, and now we are here.
Hitler wasn't smart, he was charismatic, he had his finger on the pulse of the nation and he did some good moves because he did surround himself by malicious and non dumb people, but eventually his idiocy was his downfall, if he never attacked Russia we might be typing this in German, but he did and here we are.
There are some smart propagandists and ghouls that latched themselves to Trump, Miller is a good example, evil but obviously not dumb. JD Vance as well. The former got lucky by Trump needing republican legitimacy in the first term and picking Sessions as his AG and getting Miller as a package deal, after that their shared hatered for immigrants and obvious ability to kiss ass amazingly is what kept him there.
JD Vance was put there by Thiel and other paypal mafia / broligarch crew who have been bribing Trump since they sniffed out they can hitch a ride towards cyberpunk company towns which is also how Musk got involved and helped him win.
Those are exceptions, not the rules.
The people like Hegseth who he's been seeing on Fox news, the guy is obviously an alcoholic piece of shit, he's not smart. Neither is the vast majority of the rest of his cabinet and that much was shown in the Signal chat. If you think that all was organized and intentional I might have a nice bridge I could sell you on.
I think it’s perfectly fine being stupid, or reasonably intelligent but with gaps in a particular area. It’s a complex auld world out there. The moral intuition of a moron may be considerably more on the money than the scheming of the smart. Nout wrong with that really.
The problem comes when people lose any conception of their limitations, and I think it’s a pretty notable shift between my teens and early 20s and now even.
Put crudely, it’s really not a problem if Joe and Jane Public aren’t epidemiologists, but it starts to become one if enough of them think that they are.
It’s often framed as people losing trust in x or y institution, I think that gets it a bit backwards. It’s people trusting themselves too much, and picking and choosing accordingly.
If the flaw is the institution, then presumably one can reform it to regain that trust right? But I dunno, take someone who’s been shouting about the ‘MSM’ for a decade+. Even an outlet that reformed perfectly according to that person’s critique and was completely impartial (in thought experiment land), wouldn’t be enough because that person doesn’t actually want perfectly run, impartial media.
It’s also a problem I really, really don’t know how to put back in its box, and I guess it’s in two parts. 1. People can find internet enclaves and enough people to agree with them, somewhere, that it reinforces their beliefs, in an organic fashion. 2. Malicious actors can interject, or accelerate that process.
Even if we somehow developed a perfect solution for that second part, somehow in thought experiment land, the first part will still pose problems in and of itself, and you can’t feasibly put that particular thing back into Pandora’s Box.
On Brexit, it’s hard to tell, but there were certainly efforts to swing it from outside actors. On the flip side the Euro skeptic media did decades of groundwork and borderline/actual propaganda, which the pro camp might have lost to anyway. See also Trump in 2016, I think there’s a universe where they both won anyway, but that doesn’t mean the pipeline isn’t worth investigating and assessing.
If there’s a European party across much of Europe, if there’s no Russian money and influence involved that’s the exception rather than the rule.
And the motivations are extremely obvious there. For a relative pittance Russia has really got a huge RoI on some of this. Their information war has been as successful, and relatively cost free as their actual war has not.
Maybe they can sell it if they put the disclaimer *only for real men* in there, to take advantage of them wanting to display just how much of a man they are. You can have Adrew Tate as your "We want you" poster boy, lol.
On April 04 2025 23:43 JimmyJRaynor wrote: hey guys! who wants one of those amazing factory jobs? nothing more exciting than working on an assembly line!
The one factory job I had... I volunteered to work dozens of hours of free OT because I just loved the smell of WD40, grinding steel, decaying cabbage and burning rubber.
The people asking for the return of manufacturing jobs and voting accordingly for the dude who says he’s gonna do that?
I think what they’re actually pining for are decent paying, secure jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Of which manufacturing used to fill that gap between shit paid bottom rung jobs, and those that require a tertiary education to get into.
On April 05 2025 00:03 Uldridge wrote: Maybe they can sell it if they put the disclaimer *only for real men* in there, to take advantage of them wanting to display just how much of a man they are. You can have Adrew Tate as your "We want you" poster boy, lol.
Or even better: Andrew Tate on that other famous "Gee I wish I were a Man, I'd Join the Navy" poster.
On April 04 2025 23:25 Uldridge wrote: Hmm, I wonder, what do we call people who use backstabbing, deception and manipulating tactics to get what they want?
I have an absolute disdain for Hegseth. But he's slippery. I think Trump is a stooge and the brains are doing overtime to spin it in the direction they can use. It's so elegant in a way. Let Trump babble and cook some chaos, use that chaos to forge your framework to operate in. I loathe it, I hope that's not what they're doing. But I'm starting to err on the side of caution because I don't want to be burned when the flame gets too strong. I want to be out of the house by then.
I don't possess a lot of social intelligence. Some people have a lot of it and are able to, just by the virtue of networking, get to very prominent places. Does it make them less smart if they can't do highschool level calculus?
Assholes? In common parlance Machiavellian encompasses a certain degree of ruthless arseholeness, but also a degree of subtlety and calculation.
Most people who possess a lot of social intelligence tend to be quite likeable as a result, and able to deal with all sorts of different personality types. Such skills can of course be employed in malevolent manipulation as well.
If I was hiring say for an ambassador role, yeah I sure as shit am going with the social intelligence guy or gal. We’re an innately social species so it’s a huge facet of intelligence.
On April 04 2025 18:09 Sent. wrote: I admit my predictions related to US internal politics keep getting more and more wrong but I'm still convinced the populist right will collapse after Trump's final term and we'll go back to the standard Republican candidates after Trump's magic runs out.
Maybe, but the full Maga are not going to ever believe it so how do you an election without them as a Republican? And at the end of the day the decision makers really only care about their own power which they require getting elected for.
My overly optimistic and never going to happen hope would be that everyone is so fed up that they decide we need a better system to prevent this from happening again, and go with some proportional represented system. But that is super unrealistic. The most likely outcomes are either the "others" continue to get blamed and Maga grows. Or a new populist comes to town and people start blaming a different set of "others" (maybe the Maga). Or I guess the third option where the world and US gets whiplash every 4 years when the president changes and fires all the others guys and hires his guys at huge expense to the American people never accomplishing anything.
On April 04 2025 23:43 JimmyJRaynor wrote: hey guys! who wants one of those amazing factory jobs? nothing more exciting than working on an assembly line!
The one factory job I had... I volunteered to work dozens of hours of free OT because I just loved the smell of WD40, grinding steel, decaying cabbage and burning rubber.
The people asking for the return of manufacturing jobs and voting accordingly for the dude who says he’s gonna do that?
I think what they’re actually pining for are decent paying, secure jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Of which manufacturing used to fill that gap between shit paid bottom rung jobs, and those that require a tertiary education to get into.
Exactly. They don't want manufacturing jobs. They want what they connect with manufacturing jobs from their parents and grandparents. A situation where a single person working that kind of job can provide a good living for a family.
I think arrogance can also explain the stupidity. I don't think Trump's admin are universally stupid. But the idiocy of this administration is feeling fairly universal.
A very intelligent person can be incredibly stupid when, in their arrogance, they move beyond their field of expertise/ competencies and believe they can just make changes to unfamiliar systems without needing to understand them. I think we see this with Musk and Doge. I don't think Musk is an idiot (intellectually- though I do think he is a fool, lacking any kind of wisdom.). I do think he has no idea what he's doing with his cuts and this has been proven over and over again by the firings and necessary rehirings when they realized who exactly they fired.
I think Trump absolutely is an idiot, but he's not unskilled. He is a very skilled snake-oil salesman. His skills are to deceive, defraud, and cheat you out of your money, and with seeded money from his family, he's grown his wealth using that skill set. You want to run a scam, Trump's your man. But he is very dumb. And he's arrogant, and he's loud, and he's in charge. So that warps the entire administration around him. No matter how intelligent you are, you've got to become a yes man to Trump's ramblings or your out.
I don't think Vance is dumb, but he is slimy and he's willing to sell out his previously held beliefs for being the VP and so runs defence for all of Trump's idiotic decisions. (His hatred for Europe may be real though, which might explain why his 'diplomacy' in Europe has been an absolute disaster.) We can see hints from the leaked Signal group that Vance doesn't necessarily think Trump has a full grasp of the situation.
I think the last time around stuff got done by Trump saying one thing, his admin saying yes, we'll do that. Then Trump gets distracted by something else (or goes golfing or whatever) and then his admin would do what actually made sense. This might be why Trump keeps wondering who wrote and signed the very trade deal that his administration negotiated and he signed... he actually doesn't know what's going on at a policy level.
I might be biased by clips of Trump signing Executive Orders, but it kinda looks to me that there are a number handler that have been furiously writing up policy and are shoveling them through and telling Trump what they are and that they are good and he should sign them. It certainly doesn't like he is the chief policy maker that is crafting these executive order but maybe I'm wrong.
The tariffs on uninhabited islands, I think gives further weight to the Chat-GPT theory. It also follows because with Musk behind the scenes, I suspect there are a number of tech bros who believe that AI can replace a lot of government jobs and have been using AI as part of their analysis in their Doge cuts.
Even intelligent people can fall into a cult and will then use their intellect to rationalize why they continue to follow their cult leader even if from the outside it looks completely irrational. Followers of Trump exhibit a lot of cult-like mentality abandoning conservative principles for whatever are the whims of their leader that day.
On April 04 2025 19:14 Uldridge wrote: I would really like to believe you, but the fact that many of these people that set up the current system have elite education under their belt and a wealth of experience at very elite firms. I'm starting to step out of the knee jerk reactionary realm and into the deeper level strategies behind these what they are trying to accomplish. Maybe I'm naive, but maybe I'm stopping the emotional feeling of "what are they doing and why" of taking over. It makes no sense because you'll always be blindsided this way no matter what. I'm not going to endorse or even sympathise with what they're doing. I'm trying to understand what they're doing and the potential fallout of it all. Because... it's in full effect at the moment.
I would love to hear the deep level strategy behind tariffing uninhabited islands
sometimes stupid is just stupid.
1) Pads the list (symbolic for your big Liberation Day) 2) Costs nothing 3) When making paper policy in an office, preemptively closes any potential theoretical paper or other loophole of people getting around tariffs by redirecting imports from those places (whether physically possible or only possible on paper or not)
It is not complicated, rather, the suggestion that something that costs nothing and has no effect needs deep justification is itself... lacking, to put it nicely.
Why not pad with North Korea and Russia then, we ask? 1) Trade with North Korea is not legal, and doesn't exist. So it would look even more retarded than taxing an uninhabited island because you're taxing a transaction you yourself prohibited to begin with. In that case all a paper tariff would do is create an excuse for Kim to paint Trump's actions as another day of American imperialism against the righteous DPRK and possibly do something stupid, but real, however small. In that case there is a potential, however slight, of a cost that is not nothing, however little. Ex. Kim can have the army bomb a random island as retaliation of the American devils taxing the People's exports. This one is not hard to see. 2) Imports from Russia exist but Russia may be a special case due to prioritizing ending a regional proxy war as the first goal of relations. Russia already has strict sanctions, if you slip more economic consequences unrelated to Ukraine in a mass tariffing of the entire world, it takes away the strategic value of those consequences as leverage in the specific negotiations re:Ukraine. That's normal and just continuing the last few wartime years of Ukraine being the center focus of US policy on Russia. This one is more arguable, or harder to see, basically the idea is the key justification of any economic penalties on Russia should be 0.01% "they are ripping us off and have been for decades" and in this case 99.9% "they invaded a neighbor and are presently engaged in armed conflict."
yes not complicated at all, optically less than optimal though.
the courting/negotiation tactics well... are highly irritating and disturbing to say the least.
I would even go as far as to call it reckless on a scale not seen before.
it's like big tech logic -move fast and break stuff- is infiltrating diplomatic and economic policy, especially against "traditional allies" like the EU or the US Federal Bureaucracy
on the other hand Trump just loves strong man, dictators and murdering despots.
Actually, another piece that fits with the theory that they used AI for their trade policy is I guess the tariffs are not broken down by country but by top level internet domain.
Reunion Island and Gibraltar should not have been separated out from France and the UK if you had humans drafting the trade policies.
But their domain names are .re and .gi respectively. Penguins have .hm domain And the military base is .io
AI wouldn't necessarily know the difference. But a human that knew a thing or two about geo-politics (hopefully a requirement in the State department) ought to have spotted the problem with their populated list of tariff targets.
On April 04 2025 22:57 JimmyJRaynor wrote: another perspective from "the right" on Trump's tariffs. Thomas Sowell... + Show Spoiler +
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie5IIrB7IdA
There are many hard right tall foreheads like Thomas Sowell and Warren Buffett who normally speak in very restrained measured ways screaming from the hilltops that Trump's tariff policies are very bad.
It is one thing when moron talk show hosts on CNN or MSNBC read the hyperbole on the teleprompter and adhere to a set of pre-written talking points made for them by the producers. It is a whole other ball game when guys like Warren Buffett and Thomas Sowell trash your policies.
Sowell does give Trump one out. If these tariffs are temporary to achieve a very specific goal. Goals such as getting Canada to spend 2.5% of GDP on military or the goal of getting Mexico to secure the border.
So far, the tariffs seem more like Trump and his team are fumbling around in the dark with no end game.
The tariffs have a very accessible justification, and endgame, which was figured out months ago by most people who were just open minded and paying attention and not wearing any blinders or looking too deep. This is not a dig at anyone, I just mean there have been people since last year going oh his plan must be this.
The uncertainty, and decrease in demand, hurt revenues of people doing business in ways that send money abroad (in general). They hurt stocks as people move from speculation to safety, which is treasury bonds.
Because of the increased demand of treasury bonds, yield rates fall. (If this seems counterintuitive, or doesn't add up, imagine this. You want a loan, but only one person has money. They will screw you on interest. But if everyone wants to give you the loan, the person you finally get the deal with will end up with a much lower interest rate, and so they will be getting less money from the arrangement than in the less-competed case.)
When yield rates fall, the government can refinance debt favorably, saving hundreds of billions/trillions in future budgets, which: 1) combined with savings from cutting waste and streamlining government 2) combined with increased revenues from the tariffs puts the US government in a much more fiscally healthy position, and
3) combined with immigration policy and tax cuts and onshoring because of domestic competition with imports and new trade alignments puts the US worker in a better place, and
4) combined with tax cuts that also become affordable due to having more federal revenue from tariffs, as long as the fed doesn't increase rates, should tentatively lead to (the start of) bull markets and growth in 2026/2027 range. That's approximately the planned trajectory. If the fed were to raise rates in the middle of all this when treasury yields are dropping, that would certainly lead to an unpredictable situation.
There is absolutely a risk of pain associated with this. More like an expectation of it, with some chance of lack of it. But the range of possible pain is wide so the severity depends on how markets adapt.
The plan as such is simple to digest once it clicks, like I said people worked it out last year or so, it's not something you can run on explicitly, "My fellow Americans, I'm going to tank the stock market to fix the fiscal situation," but putting together the pieces from his different allusions and interviews, people predicted it.
When Sowell, et al. criticize tariffs due to the 1930s, while correct, they are being a bit myopic, rigid, and uncreative. Tariffs were very successful in the 19th century, when the US was industrializing, they protected industries and brought in revenue to pay off the massive Civil War debt. In the 1930s the US was an exporter but mostly pretty balanced, and didn't have a huge sustained national debt it needed to pay down. (And you need to pay it down. Governments are not special exceptions as being the only things that don't actually need to pay their debt.)
What's different now is debt is approaching 1.5x GDP (by approaching I mean the train is not stopping, national debt will be 150% of GDP) and the government is close to spending $1 trillion per year simply on interest for the debt, which would be higher than defense spending. If you don't fix that now, you quickly get into a runaway situation where all you're doing is paying interest on debt. Trump's plan is untested. The use of tariffs to force treasury yields to plummet has no historical analogue. Because such a move has never been necessary: the confluence of circumstances we have now had never occurred before.
On April 04 2025 22:57 JimmyJRaynor wrote: another perspective from "the right" on Trump's tariffs. Thomas Sowell... + Show Spoiler +
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie5IIrB7IdA
There are many hard right tall foreheads like Thomas Sowell and Warren Buffett who normally speak in very restrained measured ways screaming from the hilltops that Trump's tariff policies are very bad.
It is one thing when moron talk show hosts on CNN or MSNBC read the hyperbole on the teleprompter and adhere to a set of pre-written talking points made for them by the producers. It is a whole other ball game when guys like Warren Buffett and Thomas Sowell trash your policies.
Sowell does give Trump one out. If these tariffs are temporary to achieve a very specific goal. Goals such as getting Canada to spend 2.5% of GDP on military or the goal of getting Mexico to secure the border.
So far, the tariffs seem more like Trump and his team are fumbling around in the dark with no end game.
The tariffs have a very accessible justification, and endgame, which was figured out months ago by most people who were just open minded and paying attention and not wearing any blinders or looking too deep. This is not a dig at anyone, I just mean there have been people since last year going oh his plan must be this.
The uncertainty, and decrease in demand, hurt revenues of people doing business in ways that send money abroad (in general). They hurt stocks as people move from speculation to safety, which is treasury bonds.
Because of the increased demand of treasury bonds, yield rates fall. (If this seems counterintuitive, or doesn't add up, imagine this. You want a loan, but only one person has money. They will screw you on interest. But if everyone wants to give you the loan, the person you finally get the deal with will end up with a much lower interest rate, and so they will be getting less money from the arrangement than in the less-competed case.)
When yield rates fall, the government can refinance debt favorably, saving hundreds of billions/trillions in future budgets, which: 1) combined with savings from cutting waste and streamlining government 2) combined with increased revenues from the tariffs puts the US government in a much more fiscally healthy position, and
3) combined with immigration policy and tax cuts and onshoring because of domestic competition with imports and new trade alignments puts the US worker in a better place, and
4) combined with tax cuts that also become affordable due to having more federal revenue from tariffs, as long as the fed doesn't increase rates, should tentatively lead to (the start of) bull markets and growth in 2026/2027 range. That's approximately the planned trajectory. If the fed were to raise rates in the middle of all this when treasury yields are dropping, that would certainly lead to an unpredictable situation.
There is absolutely a risk of pain associated with this. More like an expectation of it, with some chance of lack of it. But the range of possible pain is wide so the severity depends on how markets adapt.
The plan as such is simple to digest once it clicks, like I said people worked it out last year or so, it's not something you can run on explicitly, "My fellow Americans, I'm going to tank the stock market to fix the fiscal situation," but putting together the pieces from his different allusions and interviews, people predicted it.
When Sowell, et al. criticize tariffs due to the 1930s, while correct, they are being a bit myopic, rigid, and uncreative. Tariffs were very successful in the 19th century, when the US was industrializing, they protected industries and brought in revenue to pay off the massive Civil War debt. In the 1930s the US was an exporter but mostly pretty balanced, and didn't have a huge sustained national debt it needed to pay down. (And you need to pay it down. Governments are not special exceptions as being the only things that don't actually need to pay their debt.)
What's different now is debt is approaching 1.5x GDP (by approaching I mean the train is not stopping, national debt will be 150% of GDP) and the government is close to spending $1 trillion per year simply on interest for the debt, which would be higher than defense spending. If you don't fix that now, you quickly get into a runaway situation where all you're doing is paying interest on debt. Trump's plan is untested. The use of tariffs to force treasury yields to plummet has no historical analogue. Because such a move has never been necessary: the confluence of circumstances we have now had never occurred before.
I’m not sure if science has tested if copium can actually hit a lethal dose, but I’d definitely exercise more caution in future.
If Trump exits office with a national debt lower than he inherited, I will eat my hat. Perhaps a shoe as well. Indeed I’ll have a full Michelin star standard 4 courses of various inedible items
EPT
