By the way, if tariffs are directly sent back to the customer through tax reduction on the tariffed category of products, wouldn’t it be painless for the company/customers (if you forget the retaliation tariffs) while increasing you local insensitive to production? (all things equal if you imagine companies reduce the cost of the products properly etc which is not realistic)
That’s 2 if’s. Sure, IF both of those things were true, maybe it would net out, but still be a paperwork and cashflow delay for the company (pay the duty today, get the money back at some point in the future) which sucks liquidity out of the market and generally holds back growth and investment.
But that isn’t particularly relevant since neither of those two things will ever happen. The tax cuts will go to the top earners, and retaliatory tariffs are very much a thing and cannot be ignored.
Personally if I had to cut someone’s hours, all else being equal, the one who took 50 attempts to figure out tariffs would go before the one who took 2.
Trump & Co do love the uneducated.
I tell people that if they think other countries pay the tariffs they probably believe Mexico is paying for a wall
After brexit, the searches of “What is the European union” skyrocketed in Britain.
Most people are morons who don’t think for themselves.
This may be “unpopular opinion” stuff, but I frequently see highly upvoted populist pitches on Lemmy that are just the same; a supposed way of sticking it to the man that will quite obviously be borne by the little guy.
Yeah there are too many poorly educated lefties here. Or worse, well educated and deliberately deceptive.
He’s a sucker. And his news media knows it.
Next try telling him there’s no God with an EKG. The same part of his brain will be activated, guaranteed. Not to dock religion. But US conservatism is a religious cult basically.
Why else do Republicans love to defund education? Conservatism requires people to be ignorant about reality in order to have any chance at succeeding.
Dumbasses go from not believing everything a politician tells them to believing everything a politician tells them because he’s dRaInInG the SwAmP. Zero sympathy for anyone still buying their lies.
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.
You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult
Yeah, I can. It’s probably not productive or helpful or change inducing, but boy, can I. And some days I don’t have energy to waste on regulating my feelings towards intentful idiots and then I do get mad. It doesn’t change shit but at least I don’t have to bottle all that up.
Ive never been opposed to learning through experience rather than what others tell you. Dont trust anything you can’t verify yourself.
Delete Elon and Trump from existence and nothing will get better.
Why?
Because Americans are dumb as fuck and they’ll still be dumb as fuck when and if those two are gone.
I’m old enough to have seen the same pattern multiple times. Republican leadership fails spectacularly, even pissing off many conservatives in the process. But as soon as the next cycle begins, those conservatives are back onboard voting for the absolute shittiest candidates.
Because to them an actual, literal dictator is better than a Democrat as president.
Our society is circling the toilet and it almost certainly won’t get better within our lifetimes. Prepare yourselves for that.
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.
It took Rome 1000 years to collapse.
I mean, if you want to get extra snarky, Rome’s still there. Still one of the wealthiest cities on earth, to this day. The infrastructure is what makes the city and that can be repaired or rebuilt, improved even, as generations come to their senses.
More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.
I pin this far more on the toxic media atmosphere than COVID, although the pandemic definitely took its toll. That said, the current hysteria around migrants and Woke feels a lot more like the post-9/11 moment than COVID. Democrats rolling over sheepishly while a Republican wields unitary executive power to disappear dissidents and intimidate
What folks on here don’t want to accept is that this isn’t the first time we’ve had a President behave like this. Its not even the first time in our lifetimes (for the most part - sorry teenagers). This is more normal than not, in fact. Reagan’s War on Drugs, Nixon’s War on Crime, Eisenhower’s Red Scare, and FDR/Truman’s Japanese Internment echoed all the same fascist tendencies.
What’s really changed in 2025 is the abysmal long term economic outlook. Liberals in 1984 could duck their heads and glare at the rampant poverty around them and mutter “If those hippie slackers had earned an education rather than smoking dope and fucking around, they wouldn’t get picked on by the police”. But now… fucking kids at Columbia University are being targeted. Surgeons are getting targeted. Judges are getting targeted.
Literally the only thing you can do to avoid these purges is Be MAGA. And “Just be MAGA, you won’t get hurt” isn’t something liberals can quite bring themselves to do yet (although keep an eye on Gavin Newsom and Richie Torries and Andrew Cuomo, because its coming).
Dictatorship isn’t making people feel safe. It’s making them feel terrified and helpless.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not. That is the long term future of the us.
The brain drain is necessary for the dictatorship to fully take over. Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.
Dictatorship only scares the non maga. Maga feels safer with it.
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
There’s ignorance and there’s stupidity. Stupidity will stubbornly resist any attempt to correct its ignorance.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.
Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
…
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.
That’s willful ignorance. While the willfully ignorant can be stupid (lack of intelligence) more often it seems to be due to arrogance and/or just being an asshole in general
They’re symptoms, not the problem. Even if they were vanished from existing by will of a djinni or something, another would just take their place.
Plot twist: the person writing this is President Musk and the employee he’s referring to is Trump.
If you’re Republican it’s simple:
- A tariff is Trump’s special magic that saves you from foreigners and wokeness, and MexiCanada pays for it.
- Stuff costs more at the store because the Biden Crime Family hurt the economy so bad, not even Trump can fix it right away. In fact it might even take more than 4 years, so we better keep him in office forever.
I don’t think he’ll live more than 4 years anyway. Hopefully the movement collapses when he does
I’m really looking forward to the turmoil in the Trumpublican Party after he’s had his final Big Mac Attack. All the opportunists who’ve been using MAGA to advance themselves will be vying for position and clawing each other to pieces like the rats they are.
The r’s are going to replace one clown with another. Approval isn’t necessary if you’re a dictator.
If you’re a republican at this point you’re one of two classes:
-
Elite, business owner, capitalist. Out for yourself and with enough money and resources and support to do what you want and evade hardships with ease while blaming people below you for their own problems. These are the people who know that if the system changes, they will lose their benefits and comforts and have every motivation in the world to keep pushing right-wing ideology even if they don’t actually believe in it on some level. They have the luxury of not actually caring.
-
One of the people below the elite who work two or more jobs or can’t get ahead no matter what they do because the system is designed to keep the poor where they are and keep filtering the wealth upwards. These are the people without the time or education to learn why their lives are trash, and manage to watch 30 minutes of FOX or OAN news clips on facebook every Sunday night before bed so they truly, honestly believe that immigration and trans people are the source of all their problems and genuinely don’t understand why the good guys aren’t doing something about all the bad guys, because this is the extent of their mental strength.
In truth I’d bet most of these people in numbers 2 are watching this stuff on their phones far more often than 30 minutes on Sunday night.
The wildest stuff comes up on my coworkers and acquaintances apps while scrolling. Like they’ll be watching a cooking video then scroll down and a video about why this trans woman is the devil shows up. Usually they’ll scroll right by but it’s a constant stream of hate/disinformation on top of the usual low quality click bait.
-
And the people who voted for the orangetard will still be shafted by him and his mafia yet will continue to blame “obiden” for their economic woes. 🥱
