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The point of taxing digital services that come from the EU is that it's not hindering EU digital transformation, it's enabling us to do it in a healthy way where we aren't dependant on US companies and the whims of the US politics.
Microsoft just recently admitted that the data they keep in EU is subject to US laws, and not really private. Let's say that the next thing Trump wants form EU is for Denmark to cede Greenland to them, EU says no, Denmark says no and Trump says to Microsoft, Google and Amazon cut them off.
Huge swaths (92 %) of digital infrastructure in Europe is fucked. There are no backups, because they are in S3 on Amazon. Toll roads stop working because they are running through Azure kubernetes services. Spotify is instantly out of business. Millions of people have to move from WhatsApp to Viber, Signal and Telegram. All of these companies have to invest in European infrastructure in order to regain our digital sovereignty. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are created, huge investments need to happen. There is a period of suffering, but Europe comes out stronger on the other side.
This is why playing hardball with the US makes sense, this, given that US has shown to be an extremely unreliable partner needs to happen anyway, if they used it as a bargaining chip the things that could of happened are either Trump caves, we forget about tariffs and we continue on our merry way, or he says OK, tariffs are now 30 % and shoots himself in the chest as many have noted before.
People are forgetting that Europe is the biggest consumer market in the world, all of these companies are making immense wealth doing business with Europe. Trump is not immune to pressure, but someone needs to be willing to apply it.
The analogy of "Trump is shooting himself and threatening others and there is nothing to be done" is just extremely misguided, he can be pressured, every time someone from the Corporate world comes to him they walk out with exceptions and concessions, god forbid that EU decided to use it's leverage of being the biggest market in the world in order to put actual pressure on these tech and other companies so they can do the same to Trump, nah, much better to just bow down and be happy with negotiating him down from 25 % to 15 % when we started the year at 2 %.
What would have been a successful outcome of the negotiations in your opinion?
A hard line EU approach would be to have our base stance be to start taxing digital services in EU to the same amounts that Trump taxes US citizens with tariffs, tit for tat.
If Trump is OK with that, OK, EU gets more revenue, companies pay a bit more for digital service (AWS, MS cloud, banking) and there is pressure for EU companies to develop and offer alternatives to EU companies that use them.
When Trump caves because he is, after all, deeply entangled with corporate interests a free trade deal where tariffs for both sides get reduced to 0 (as was proposed early on) would be ideal.
I am a bit confused by this. Couldn't we just increase taxes on digital services if we wanted to?
I mean, isn't the argument here the same as with the tariffs, i.e. doing this would decrease investment and growth of a sector that is currently attracting some of the highest investments and growth worldwide? As I understand it, the digital transition is one of the EU's central growth pillars, and is expected to be a huge driver of prosperity. Why mess with that in a pissing contest with Trump?
I am for raising taxes on "international" companies making huge profits in the EU and paying no taxes on it because for some reason the good they provide is intangible to the boomer legislature and the headqarter is somewhere else. I would want that to happen no matter what DJT does. But if the EU is trying to negotiate with him to not be hit with a tariff, i would have loved if that tax was the bargaining chip because if DJT then does not do tariffs because Zuckerberg sucks him off, no tariff and if he does the tariff we at least get some fairness into taxing facebook for the bullshit they are doing. It would have been better then tariffing goods because goods raise inflation, taxing the ad income of facebook does not. But of course the devil is in the details and it could also be possible that such a tax would backfire because it again would hit companies we deem useful and not the ones we believe it should target. Like facebook.
The argument for increasing taxes is the same as with the tariffs (because it's effectively the same thing). A tit for tat tariff/tax increase makes it harder to do business so economic activity goes down which makes growth go down, which makes people lose their jobs. You can target facebook if you like or whiskey from Kentucky. The end result is the same since Trump's reciprocal tariff would be coming.
You guys are arguing for a targeted tariff (on facebook or whatever) by calling it a tax on digital services. Effectively you just want the EU to take China's tit for tat approach. If you want to argue this, it would be good if you actually argued how this would be better for the EU.
I am not the person arguing in favor of tit for tat. I would prefer to have no tariffs between the US and EU. I just understand the frustration of seeing the bully come up to the EU and saying give me your export income and the EU responds with yes sir and also have some investments. Also, you look very attractive right now.
I cannot say if it had been better to try to play hardball with him to get rid of it all together, who knows, maybe we could have actually scared him into lowering tariffs. And i think a pretty good approach for that would have been the digital service tax for foreign countries because it combines my desire to tax those companies with my desire for not giving the man what he wants. But i would not have any idea if this would have worked on him.
I’d broadly concur. I imagine it’s far from the only reason, but I’d imagine a factor in not bringing in such a tax is not wishing to strain relations with the US. If, however the US comes over and pisses in your morning cornflakes, one’s effort to keep things cordial is in vain already. You don’t even necessarily have to do it, it does seem a bar of potentially viable leverage.
I must confess I haven’t deep-dived, or even done much beyond a shallow skim in terms of the economic cases for/against properly taxing some of these multinationals.
However, it does seem to be a rather widespread sentiment among Joe and Jane Public, at least from a fairness perspective.
It’ll vary hugely by locale too I’d imagine. Ireland for example simultaneously hugely benefits from this, but also probably eats more of the negatives simply by being a smaller nation, with multinationals proportionally bringing in more economic activity.
i don't think Trump's tariff policies are the right thing to do. However, if we get strong economic growth #s.... who cares what those opposed to tariffs think.
Congratz America... and enjoy.
Could you have more economic growth without tariffs?
If so, it would seem entirely relevant.
we will never know. one can't micromanage any world leader. all one can do is look at the overall picture and make choices based on that. personally, the last 17 years or so, my choices have been between Netanyahu, Trudeau/Carney, and Obama/Biden/Trump. I went with Obama/Biden/Trump. meh, i'm doing ok. Over those years perhaps Obama/Trump/Biden haven't been great... but they have been better than Netanyahu and Trudeau by a pretty big margin.
Regarding the US economic performance... I projected 2% growth this year for the USA. Q1 was -0.5% and Q2 was +3.0%. So far, it looks like i am close. I hope I'm wrong though ... I hope the USA has 7.3% growth this year.
On July 31 2025 21:33 Jankisa wrote: The point of taxing digital services that come from the EU is that it's not hindering EU digital transformation, it's enabling us to do it in a healthy way where we aren't dependant on US companies and the whims of the US politics.
Microsoft just recently admitted that the data they keep in EU is subject to US laws, and not really private. Let's say that the next thing Trump wants form EU is for Denmark to cede Greenland to them, EU says no, Denmark says no and Trump says to Microsoft, Google and Amazon cut them off.
Huge swaths (92 %) of digital infrastructure in Europe is fucked. There are no backups, because they are in S3 on Amazon. Toll roads stop working because they are running through Azure kubernetes services. Spotify is instantly out of business. Millions of people have to move from WhatsApp to Viber, Signal and Telegram. All of these companies have to invest in European infrastructure in order to regain our digital sovereignty. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are created, huge investments need to happen. There is a period of suffering, but Europe comes out stronger on the other side.
This is why playing hardball with the US makes sense, this, given that US has shown to be an extremely unreliable partner needs to happen anyway, if they used it as a bargaining chip the things that could of happened are either Trump caves, we forget about tariffs and we continue on our merry way, or he says OK, tariffs are now 30 % and shoots himself in the chest as many have noted before.
People are forgetting that Europe is the biggest consumer market in the world, all of these companies are making immense wealth doing business with Europe. Trump is not immune to pressure, but someone needs to be willing to apply it.
You literally listed reasons why EU cant play hardball, and then said that playing hardball makes sense. When it comes to digital services EU cant play hardball because, as of now, they dont have the ball, they not even on the field, they are in the viewers seats. What do you think would happen if Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon withdraw from EU? Essentially you would have hordes of addicted zombies tearing apart government buildings in quest for daily dose of screen dopamine.
Not the worst thing to happen. But honestly companies would not like that and would try to circomvent it, but if Facebook had to choose between making Ad Money from Europe and having to tax it and not making money from Europe at all, they would chose the option where they make money. It's not like wthey are in a market where their service is limited and they can choose who will get that service. Doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea to tax them, but i think the argument that they could stop servicing the EU holds much weight.
i don't think Trump's tariff policies are the right thing to do. However, if we get strong economic growth #s.... who cares what those opposed to tariffs think.
Congratz America... and enjoy.
Could you have more economic growth without tariffs?
If so, it would seem entirely relevant.
we will never know. one can't micromanage any world leader. all one can do is look at the overall picture and make choices based on that. personally, the last 17 years or so, my choices have been between Netanyahu, Trudeau/Carney, and Obama/Biden/Trump. I went with Obama/Biden/Trump. meh, i'm doing ok. Over those years perhaps Obama/Trump/Biden haven't been great... but they have been better than Netanyahu and Trudeau by a pretty big margin.
Regarding the US economic performance... I projected 2% growth this year for the USA. Q1 was -0.5% and Q2 was +3.0%. So far, it looks like i am close. I hope I'm wrong though ... I hope the USA has 7.3% growth this year.
I think you need either somewhat tangible evidence of policies affecting growth overall, or negatively impacting it to really give or take away credit
Unless you’re someone like FDR and do something as ambitious and obviously his specific baby as the New Deal, yeah maybe one can assess something like that.
Overall economic growth? Unless you’re atypically shit, or remarkably good, it’s probably not something a singular individual’s tenancy can swing all that much.
Distribution trends, absolutely something individual administrations can have a big impact on, budget deficits or surpluses as well.
The hordes of addicted zombies missing their social media would probably not even score in the top 50 of problems with the EU going cold turkey on Microsoft(!!!)/Apple/Amazon/Meta.
I specified the cold turkey scenario being in a very specific case where EU and US are basically in a severing ties situation, this, obviously, is neither likely or going to happen.
I also noted that this is something to be used as leverage, and in order for that leverage to be realistic EU should have already taken steps to move in to this direction, so far, we mostly have citizen incentives, again, mostly because our politicians are cowards who are afraid to anger daddy Trump.
As others said, putting a real, enforced tax on these services would increase revenue, make things actually equitable and more fair and allow EU companies to start filling the gaps and provide real competition to AWS, Azure etc. where they are now at severe disadvantage not only because of the economies of scale those companies enjoy but also the way that these companies skirt taxes.
I'm pretty sure that if Meta had to pay a tax on selling our data from WhatsApp or using it for AI training and reacted by putting adds or requiring a subscription services like Viber, Telegram and Signal would explode in popularity, new ones would also appear, it's a net positive and I doubt that people would have a problem with switching. Right now most people use them because it's convenient and everyone is on them.
One of the reasons I re-activated my account here was the Reddit boycott over the api changes, I went back but I'm posting and using it way less, I'm sure many would say goodbye to services like that if they tried to strongarm users or make them pay very quickly, especially if there are viable alternatives.
And there are, yes, AWS, Google cloud and Azure are, in most use cases simply cheaper, more efficient and developed then anything you can do with European cloud companies, but it's not a huge leap, and if they were actually taxed properly that competitive advantage would go away and we'd get both more sovereignty over our data and infrastructure and a boost to our economies.
There are alternatives to everything, there are cities and municipalities in Europe that moved away from the Microsoft stack and started using Open Source alternatives, it is possible, the other way of doing things is just more convenient, until it isn't.
On July 31 2025 21:33 Jankisa wrote: The point of taxing digital services that come from the EU is that it's not hindering EU digital transformation, it's enabling us to do it in a healthy way where we aren't dependant on US companies and the whims of the US politics.
Microsoft just recently admitted that the data they keep in EU is subject to US laws, and not really private. Let's say that the next thing Trump wants form EU is for Denmark to cede Greenland to them, EU says no, Denmark says no and Trump says to Microsoft, Google and Amazon cut them off.
Huge swaths (92 %) of digital infrastructure in Europe is fucked. There are no backups, because they are in S3 on Amazon. Toll roads stop working because they are running through Azure kubernetes services. Spotify is instantly out of business. Millions of people have to move from WhatsApp to Viber, Signal and Telegram. All of these companies have to invest in European infrastructure in order to regain our digital sovereignty. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are created, huge investments need to happen. There is a period of suffering, but Europe comes out stronger on the other side.
This is why playing hardball with the US makes sense, this, given that US has shown to be an extremely unreliable partner needs to happen anyway, if they used it as a bargaining chip the things that could of happened are either Trump caves, we forget about tariffs and we continue on our merry way, or he says OK, tariffs are now 30 % and shoots himself in the chest as many have noted before.
People are forgetting that Europe is the biggest consumer market in the world, all of these companies are making immense wealth doing business with Europe. Trump is not immune to pressure, but someone needs to be willing to apply it.
You literally listed reasons why EU cant play hardball, and then said that playing hardball makes sense. When it comes to digital services EU cant play hardball because, as of now, they dont have the ball, they not even on the field, they are in the viewers seats. What do you think would happen if Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon withdraw from EU? Essentially you would have hordes of addicted zombies tearing apart government buildings in quest for daily dose of screen dopamine.
Those companies never even attempted to move away from Russia after the invasion, and there were a lot of very strong incentives to do that, why do you think Trump could make them do that?
Making these companies slightly less profitable by taxing them and giving that money to European investments is a net positive, and we aren't even willing to use it as leverage, for what reason, I don't know, I can speculate and say it would likely end up back at "money talks" and politicians are corrupt assholes.
On July 31 2025 23:51 Broetchenholer wrote: Not the worst thing to happen. But honestly companies would not like that and would try to circomvent it, but if Facebook had to choose between making Ad Money from Europe and having to tax it and not making money from Europe at all, they would chose the option where they make money. It's not like wthey are in a market where their service is limited and they can choose who will get that service. Doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea to tax them, but i think the argument that they could stop servicing the EU holds much weight.
Something akin to this is actually happening.
Meta is stopping its political advertisements in the EU by October because they consider the new transparency requirements from the EU unworkable.
Under the rules, political ads must carry a transparency label and clearly identify key information such as sponsors, the election to which they are linked, the amounts paid and targeting techniques.
Harris announced her new book, and that she isn't running for governor. According to a close source, she's keeping the door open for a 2028 run.
Washington — Former Vice President Kamala Harris won't run for California governor next year, she announced Wednesday afternoon in a statement.
"For now, my leadership—and public service—will not be in elected office,"...
"What the world saw on the campaign trail was only part of the story," she wrote. "My new book is a behind-the-scenes look at my experience leading the shortest presidential campaign in modern history. 107 Days is out on September 23. I can't wait for you to read it."
"She genuinely has not decided about a 2028 presidential run," the source said, adding the decision not to seek the governorship "keeps the door open" for a potential run in 2028.
On July 31 2025 23:51 Broetchenholer wrote: Not the worst thing to happen. But honestly companies would not like that and would try to circomvent it, but if Facebook had to choose between making Ad Money from Europe and having to tax it and not making money from Europe at all, they would chose the option where they make money. It's not like wthey are in a market where their service is limited and they can choose who will get that service. Doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea to tax them, but i think the argument that they could stop servicing the EU holds much weight.
Something akin to this is actually happening.
Meta is stopping its political advertisements in the EU by October because they consider the new transparency requirements from the EU unworkable.
Under the rules, political ads must carry a transparency label and clearly identify key information such as sponsors, the election to which they are linked, the amounts paid and targeting techniques.
Google has already announced they are stopping political ads in the EU last year.
But that does not mean they stop servicing the EU. They simply announced that they will not do targeted political ads anymore because that is blatantly undemocratic. Instead now political parties have to find ways to simulate their targeted user base without using words that describe religion, gender, sexual orientation, political orientation etc. unless something changed and they now refuse ads from parties all together. Which is a good thing. The last thing society needs is targeted and campaigning in the Internet, where a party tells every demographic exactly what they want to hear. Tell me when Facebook blocks their services to users in the EU though. They will simply do unpolitical ads. It's not like political parties in the EU are super rich and their ad portfolio is any meaningful percentage of overall Facebook income.
I don't think Trump has the power to stop companies from doing business in Europe, but if the relationship broke down all the way to where they treated the EU like Iran, we would absolutely be fucked.
That said, so would the US.
Taxing digital services fairly for the profit they extract from Europe is beyond necessary. But best to avoid doing it in a way that stops them from wanting to do any business in the EU. Between SAAS, financial services, and also just plain software, we're extremely dependent on US companies. Going cold turkey is idiotic for everyone involved.
There are two aspects of this problem. The EU is slowly addding more and more measures to deal with tax avoidance which covers the "taxing services fairly" part but sooner or later it will also add an additional "digital services tax" because it just makes sense. Digital services shouldn't be taxed like traditional business. Sooner or later the American government will want to have a digital tax too. They don't want to do that now because American companies disproportionately benefit from the current situation.
Trump being such a useless ally might accelerate the creation of European digital services tax because I'm sure the usual American allies would normally do their best to block the tax. Now the choice is going to be harder.
i don't think Trump's tariff policies are the right thing to do. However, if we get strong economic growth #s.... who cares what those opposed to tariffs think.
Congratz America... and enjoy.
Could you have more economic growth without tariffs?
If so, it would seem entirely relevant.
we will never know. one can't micromanage any world leader. all one can do is look at the overall picture and make choices based on that. personally, the last 17 years or so, my choices have been between Netanyahu, Trudeau/Carney, and Obama/Biden/Trump. I went with Obama/Biden/Trump. meh, i'm doing ok. Over those years perhaps Obama/Trump/Biden haven't been great... but they have been better than Netanyahu and Trudeau by a pretty big margin.
Regarding the US economic performance... I projected 2% growth this year for the USA. Q1 was -0.5% and Q2 was +3.0%. So far, it looks like i am close. I hope I'm wrong though ... I hope the USA has 7.3% growth this year.
I think you need either somewhat tangible evidence of policies affecting growth overall, or negatively impacting it to really give or take away credit
Unless you’re someone like FDR and do something as ambitious and obviously his specific baby as the New Deal, yeah maybe one can assess something like that.
Overall economic growth? Unless you’re atypically shit, or remarkably good, it’s probably not something a singular individual’s tenancy can swing all that much.
Distribution trends, absolutely something individual administrations can have a big impact on, budget deficits or surpluses as well.
Ya, that's why I went with Obama/Biden/Trump as a package. So, as a package over the past ~17 years, I think Obama/Biden/Trump have been better for the USA than Harper/Trudeau were for Canada and better than whatshisface who has run Israel for 87 bazillion years.
However, Reagan prolly had an impact on the US economy because he was Governor of California for 8 years and then Prez for 8. Right now, Trump is swinging for the fences. I give him credit for his ambitious unorthodox moves. This is a video game site so I'll put it this way: Let's hope Trump is creating the Nintendo Wii and not the Nintendo Virtual Boy.
It is going to be hard for Trump to attain his dreams of Reagan level growth as long as he is cutting government. The # of federal employees grew under Reagan.
There are reams of footage , tonnes of quotes, and unending written statements by both Reagan and Pierre Trudeau about their governing philosophies. You'd swear Reagan would be the guy who was fiscally responsible and cutting government activity in the economy to the bone. You'd think Pierre Trudeau was Captain Keysenian. In reality, Reagan was the bigger spender.
"A Time For Choosing" is one of the most emotionally stirring speeches I've ever heard. Reagan just oozes charisma. However, he never carried through on any of these views. In fact, he did the exact opposite. If you're feeling anti-effort or malaise... just watch this speech... LOL. At the end of it you'll be saying "Hand me a machine gun and tell me which commie to shoot first".
Haven't we talked about this before? Reagan fought for eveything he could, but blaming him for the growth of government when he never once had a compliant Congress is missing something. He tried to get rid of the Dept of Education for example, but was stopped by Congress. Reagan was great on domestic spending (as % of GDP) especially compared to his predecessors (and successors iirc). It's a little simplistic to say that the number of federal employees is reflective of how he ran the executive branch. The "Reagan Revolution" was more than just speeches.
Lol, its incredibly stupid to say that Reagon was "great on domestic spending" when he nearly tripled the national debt. No one has been worse for the national finances than him in peacetime. Supply side economics have lead to every major economic problem we see today from the debt, to home prices, to wages. Him breaking PATCO was the turning point in labor participation in unions causeing the wealth disparity we see today.
He wasn't as bad as lincoln but he was one of the most long term determental reigns we've seen from any leader.
On August 01 2025 00:50 Jankisa wrote: I specified the cold turkey scenario being in a very specific case where EU and US are basically in a severing ties situation, this, obviously, is neither likely or going to happen.
I also noted that this is something to be used as leverage, and in order for that leverage to be realistic EU should have already taken steps to move in to this direction, so far, we mostly have citizen incentives, again, mostly because our politicians are cowards who are afraid to anger daddy Trump.
As others said, putting a real, enforced tax on these services would increase revenue, make things actually equitable and more fair and allow EU companies to start filling the gaps and provide real competition to AWS, Azure etc. where they are now at severe disadvantage not only because of the economies of scale those companies enjoy but also the way that these companies skirt taxes.
I'm pretty sure that if Meta had to pay a tax on selling our data from WhatsApp or using it for AI training and reacted by putting adds or requiring a subscription services like Viber, Telegram and Signal would explode in popularity, new ones would also appear, it's a net positive and I doubt that people would have a problem with switching. Right now most people use them because it's convenient and everyone is on them.
One of the reasons I re-activated my account here was the Reddit boycott over the api changes, I went back but I'm posting and using it way less, I'm sure many would say goodbye to services like that if they tried to strongarm users or make them pay very quickly, especially if there are viable alternatives.
And there are, yes, AWS, Google cloud and Azure are, in most use cases simply cheaper, more efficient and developed then anything you can do with European cloud companies, but it's not a huge leap, and if they were actually taxed properly that competitive advantage would go away and we'd get both more sovereignty over our data and infrastructure and a boost to our economies.
There are alternatives to everything, there are cities and municipalities in Europe that moved away from the Microsoft stack and started using Open Source alternatives, it is possible, the other way of doing things is just more convenient, until it isn't.
On July 31 2025 21:33 Jankisa wrote: The point of taxing digital services that come from the EU is that it's not hindering EU digital transformation, it's enabling us to do it in a healthy way where we aren't dependant on US companies and the whims of the US politics.
Microsoft just recently admitted that the data they keep in EU is subject to US laws, and not really private. Let's say that the next thing Trump wants form EU is for Denmark to cede Greenland to them, EU says no, Denmark says no and Trump says to Microsoft, Google and Amazon cut them off.
Huge swaths (92 %) of digital infrastructure in Europe is fucked. There are no backups, because they are in S3 on Amazon. Toll roads stop working because they are running through Azure kubernetes services. Spotify is instantly out of business. Millions of people have to move from WhatsApp to Viber, Signal and Telegram. All of these companies have to invest in European infrastructure in order to regain our digital sovereignty. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are created, huge investments need to happen. There is a period of suffering, but Europe comes out stronger on the other side.
This is why playing hardball with the US makes sense, this, given that US has shown to be an extremely unreliable partner needs to happen anyway, if they used it as a bargaining chip the things that could of happened are either Trump caves, we forget about tariffs and we continue on our merry way, or he says OK, tariffs are now 30 % and shoots himself in the chest as many have noted before.
People are forgetting that Europe is the biggest consumer market in the world, all of these companies are making immense wealth doing business with Europe. Trump is not immune to pressure, but someone needs to be willing to apply it.
You literally listed reasons why EU cant play hardball, and then said that playing hardball makes sense. When it comes to digital services EU cant play hardball because, as of now, they dont have the ball, they not even on the field, they are in the viewers seats. What do you think would happen if Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon withdraw from EU? Essentially you would have hordes of addicted zombies tearing apart government buildings in quest for daily dose of screen dopamine.
Those companies never even attempted to move away from Russia after the invasion, and there were a lot of very strong incentives to do that, why do you think Trump could make them do that?
Making these companies slightly less profitable by taxing them and giving that money to European investments is a net positive, and we aren't even willing to use it as leverage, for what reason, I don't know, I can speculate and say it would likely end up back at "money talks" and politicians are corrupt assholes.
What you are missing is that corporations can count, and are rather willing to test/exercise power they have. What you are talking about is situation where EU has viable alternative for those services, which is widely known (because you wont be able to google it anymore). And yes it would be wildly beneficial for those companies to loose market for 2 months ( I am being overgenerous here) than agree for, lets say, 20% tax.
On August 01 2025 08:24 Sermokala wrote: Lol, its incredibly stupid to say that Reagon was "great on domestic spending" when he nearly tripled the national debt. No one has been worse for the national finances than him in peacetime. Supply side economics have lead to every major economic problem we see today from the debt, to home prices, to wages. Him breaking PATCO was the turning point in labor participation in unions causeing the wealth disparity we see today.
He wasn't as bad as lincoln but he was one of the most long term determental reigns we've seen from any leader.
Where to even begin.
1) If you are conservative who wants generally smaller government just holding domestic, non-military spending flat as a percentage of GDP is something you'll take.
2) "Supply side economics have lead to every major economic problem we see today from the debt, to home prices, to wages." No. A popular take, but generally the timings of when certain trends began to appear make things like "real wage" levels a more complicated story.
3) Union membership was declining for almost 3 decades before Reagan came into office.
4) "He wasn't as bad as lincoln but he was one of the most long term determental reigns we've seen from any leader."
This sentence breaks my brain in multiple ways, but I must say I prefer not to use the word "reign" about presidents. Kudos for being brave enough to still call Lincoln a bad president I guess? Horribly wrong, but brave.
Saw this on Youtube where the video goes into why the creator thinks GM is done for as a car manufacturer after 2027. Basically they have outsourced most R&D and production to China and the contract for that capacity expires 2027 and the Chinese party has little incentive to extend it in its current form.
The interesting point for me that doesn't follow US politics that much is the small part discussing tariffs. Trump first term tariffs against cars from China was suggested to have stopped GM from hitting the EV market since their plan was to produce in China.
They slowly transitioned that into producing in Mexico, which is then followed by a tariff against Chinese EV by Biden. Protecting that setup by letting GM get Chinese EVs produced in Mexico while the other Chinese brands couldn't muscle in as easily.
Finally the current tariff discussions against Mexico automotive sector could be seen as partially against Chinese EVs using this loophole. Though many brands from many regions do use Mexico due to lower salaries and low tariffs.
EPT
