You mean the “amazing deal” that is 95% the same as NAFTA lmao

He doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s so tiring that people assume that he is rational and he cares.

I’m sorry you’re getting the thoughts you didn’t vote, but I’ll admit I’m very much in the “Enjoy the collapse, losers!” territory so at least I’ll express mine, hopefully it helps make sense, and honestly, I appreciate your feeling to try to do better. If you figure out a way to move forward, fantastic. I just remember the top post of a comment when Trump won however and it so truly fits, “I’m tired, boss.”

I have been fighting to get people to vote for years, trying to keep them involved. Not trying to get to vote every 4 years, but every year, local stuff, this shit is important, people need to stay up on it. I’m considered a news hound amongst people I know… I listen to the morning news on the 30 minute commute to work, that’s how much time I put in to the news, that’s it. It’s not hard. Some days I say fuck it and listen to an audiobook.

People I’ve known who vote R, lets be honest, they went through the last Trump era and learned nothing. I remember back in the W. era people saying it should be illegal to speak against the president, who turned around and called Obama a muslim who should be deported. End of Trump era I knew republicans who were just starting to get it, maybe healthcare is fucked, maybe a lot of big corpo things are the problem… but immediately turned around and jumped right back in to Trumps circle the moment it came around “I couldn’t just vote for Kamala” just like “I just couldn’t vote for Hillary” and so on. Hell my state voted to repeal the strictest abortion ban and make abortion legal in the state, but still voted pretty much straight R despite a history of the party overturning ballot initiatives “Because the voters didn’t know what they were voting for.” So yes… after years of this, there’s the tribal “If you’re republican, you can go fuck yourself with a pineapple” especially as this collapse is coming.

On the non-voters. I’m sorry, I consider them just as culpable. In 2016 at least Trump was a… well anyone who paid fifteen minutes of attention knew what he was about but fuck it, I’ll give the people who said “Fuck it lets try something new” a bit of a pass. This time, there were no surprises on the table. You had Kamala, which yes was about as dead standard democrat as you got, and you got Project 2025 Trump back with a vengeance. Those that say “I didn’t vote for Trump” but by doing so stayed home gave their voice to “meh” and whatever happens they agreed to it. People I directly know who were in this, I know of one at least in a gay marriage, a few hispanic workers, and a trans individual, all who were “I’m just not interested in politics.” Well, suddenly they’re REALLY interested in politics. And many wanting to “rise up”, well I’m not going to trust someone who couldn’t be faffed to even do the basic fucking minimum to try to prevent things to watch my back when shit hits the fan.

So yes, we’re all hosed and anyone who didn’t see it coming had their heads so far up their own asses in the past 8 years they’ve proven they can’t be taught. I’m sitting in the fire too, I’m not going to like the collapse. But after years of the fighting and still witnessing the apathy, my empathy is dead. The tribalism is useful, these were the people who were willing to do the basic minimum to resist, so maybe we can actually help each other. I’ll help them as I can. The others I expressed about, no, I don’t want bad to happen… but at least the schadenfreude can be a little bit of light through some very dark times coming. Don’t weep for the stupid, you’ll be crying all day.

You should have voted then lmao

It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t get fucked by proxy of America electing an old senile fascist.

I am Canadian and I will feel Trump’s presidency for a while

Here you go

If they really wanted this to work it should be something like a steadily increasing tariff over time instead of 25% right off the bat. But I don’t think they really care about it working as intended.

And even if there were American made alternatives, they’d still be more expensive than importing.

Enjoy your higher prices, suckers.

We’re reaching the “find out” stage.

You aren’t already?

Seems like Trump is trying to get rid of the income tax. He can’t just do that with an EO order though, congress has to do it.

He can do all these tariffs though, which will act as a quasi sales tax. And when everything starts to become more expensive, which will be blamed on something else, he will say he’s not removing the tariffs and congress should just get rid of the income tax to help people. He will say, look we are making so much money off tariffs and we have reduced government jobs by so much, we don’t need an income tax anymore anyways!

i come from a tariff heavy country. you want a sneak peak? inflation. shit is gonna get more expensive. that’s it

Obviously I want to see Trump fail spectacularly, but it fucking sucks that would harm those of us who can least afford it.

I thought that was the plan…

Master of negotiations!

The way you increase productivity is via exports, not artificially increasing the cost of goods. A sin tax is when you want to stop people from doing things so you make it more expensive. If you want to increase American cement production, you subsidize production.
Adding a tarrif to Canadian cement imports increases cost for imported cement, and encourages domestic producers to increase costs to match. If the competition just got 15% more expensive, there’s no reason for me to not raise my prices 14%.
If the government comes in and says they’ll pay me $15/ton of cement I produce, that encourages me to produce more cement and lower the price to sell it. Now I’m producing more, and I need to hire another machine operator and the economy grows because the lowered cost of cement makes people more willing to do things that need cement.

Tariffs are really only good for counteracting other countries subsidies. If Canada were paying manufacturers $20 a ton to produce cement, then applying a $20/ton tarrif makes the prices unbiased.

It’s why our agricultural subsidies are viewed poorly by food scarce nations: we lower the overall market cost for food, and they can’t afford to subsidize their own production, and returning equilibrium on imports would starve people, so they’re trapped in a cycle of being dependent on imported subsidized food while living next to fallow farms.

Canada and Mexico aren’t subsidizing their export industries, and a lot of what we’re trading is in things we can’t or don’t want to handle. You can’t increase American uranium production, off the top of my head.

We had a position of trade strength, which meant that we could afford to import more than we produced because our intangibles were worth more, and what we exported was worth more. Import steel and export tractors. Now we’re saying we want to stop importing steel, making it harder to export tractors, so that we can bring back low paying dangerous jobs.

If you want to see productivity grow trumps way, go get a job as a farmhand picking spinach. Because his policy is basically that we need less engineers and more farm hands.

I think the problem is that these tariffs are, for the most part, untargeted. They aren’t a “tax” on “specific imports”. They’re a blanket tax on all imports from many countries.

The Simpsons have not been wrong yet…

Then you get to speedrun to a corporate theocracy with President Vance.

Man look at Kissinger and the Bush Family.

If you’ve got a high enough body count you just live forever.

It’s not like this buffoon being gone will stop the rest of the out-of-their-minds and now fascist Republicans or Muskrat from continuing the work.

Man have you seen him speak? I don’t know what concoction of drugs he is on or if he’s just showing his age but he’s definitely not the rager he was 5 years ago. Seems tired and much less coherant. Makes me optimistic he might be in mental decline more than I theorized previously. But if we go by the ‘asshole’ rule he’ll outlive most of the Senate just out of stubbornness and hatred. We definitely need a quick solution.

choked on a pretzel

I wonder how many people reading this remember that this actually happened to Bush the 2nd.

The thing is, I think that might be out of the frying pan and into the fryer at this point.

Vance is cooler under pressure in interviews and generally more coherent sounding. I think he does a far better job of saying ridiculous unreasonable things with a convincing tone of voice and demeanor than does Trump.

If Trump has one too many cheeseburgers tomorrow, then we’ve got young, clean-cut, smooth talking first-term President Vance to worry about, and I bet he won’t be threatened by the attention Musk gets as long he he gets his cut. (Hell, I’m not even sure having to take over for Trump in that circumstance would count as his first term.)

WAY more. We import a lot of food from Mexico as is, and the immigration and ethnic clensing the Trump goverment is engaging in is already forcing farmers to watch their crops rot on the ground with no one to harvest them. So we’re following in the great tradition of Stalin and Pol Pot, we have a dumb fucking asshole with a hard on for ‘‘strong man tactics’’ demanding we change how we get food in many extreme ways immediately, you know, instead of gradual change, so we’ll all get to see what an artifical famine looks like! Do you think Trump will let other nations send us emergency rations so we won’t die? Or will he confiscate them at a dock or border and have them dumped into the ocean so he doesn’t look weak? North Korea knows.

I can’t believe some people think that putting tariffs on a country means the country will just give the government 25% of everything and the merchants of that country are not just going to raise the prices to match the new expenses(or maybe even a little bit more since they have a good excuse to change prices).

I guess I can stand to eat a bit less, we can call it the economic collapse of the US diet! Just think of all the profits from the diet books! To bad they are going to cost 30% more now that my Mexican publisher is paying a tarrif to bring the books into the US. That’s OK, spending more money on the book just means that you won’t be able to afford as much food, making the diet work even better!

It will unless it can come from somewhere else.

Why the fuck would you want to go back to Ohio?

That state sucks balls.