The people in cities and in blue states made this economic turn around happen. Trump does not deserve the credit he will claim. Burn it down.
Edit: If you leave this thread learning anything please let it be this one thing. Organic political movement isn’t schemed up in a board room or carefully planned and executed every step of the way. It starts inside of you and people like you and you lend your support not knowing the outcome but believing in the cause. If it’s not here, it’s not here. I don’t mean to supply you with fuel needed but only the spark to ignite flame waiting to be ignited.
I’m out though.
There’s no need.
Really.
If Trump does what he says he was going to do-and I don’t doubt he will–then the economy will crash on its own.
Tariffs will raise prices, and will drive inflation. Why will tariffs raise prices? Because the people selling will just add the price of the tariff to the goods sold. And unless the tariffs are the result of a new law, any incoming president can cancel them. That means that it would be a very risky environment to try and build domestic production in. The place I work for uses aluminum extrusion; we get it from a domestic supplier, and they get all their raw aluminum stock from China. When tariffs were enacted on Chinese aluminum, our supplier passed the cost on to us, and we had to raise our prices to account for our increased costs. So our customers had to pay more to get exactly the same product.
Deporting all of the undocumented immigrants will mean that we’ll suddenly have lots of jobs not getting done; most produce is picked by undocumented immigrants, a ton of general construction is done by undocumented immigrants, most meat-packing plants are full of undocumented immigrants laborers. We’ll suddenly be a negative unemployment; there won’t be enough workers in the workforce to fill demand. That means wages will have to rise, which will drive inflation, and housing costs will rise sharply because new construction will be so expensive with undocumented immigrants. One of the people I work with is undocumented; if he gets deported, then we’re up shit creek, because no one else can do his job as efficiently as he can, if anyone can do it at all (yay, lean manufacturing…).
I would place a financial bet on the economy crashing if Trump actually does what he says he will.
My expectation is that the “mass deportations” will quickly morph into “mass incarceration” will quickly morph into an enslaved workforce.
There will probably be one wave of deportations just to “show we mean business” or something and then the news will move onto the next distraction while the remaining undocumented immigrants are quietly sent back off to do the jobs they were doing only now the business don’t have to pay them.
Brexit was supposed to make farm workers’ wages higher. The EU workers left, and crops rotted on the fields, because Brits didn’t want those jobs, no matter what wages the farmers were offering. So they had to tell the EU workers they were welcome again and introduce special visas to lure them back.
There’s been a recession start in every single republican presidential term of my life. I’m over 40. Each of Reagan’s terms. HW Bush. Each of the second Bush (these were the worst, dot-com crash and the great recession starting in 2007/8). And then the great Covid bungling. As you point out: if they implement their agenda it’s likely to happen again.
There has never been a recession start during a democratic president in my lifetime (although Biden’s term came close).
The opposition needs to be ready to jump on this and yell from the figurative rooftops so conservatives can’t spin it away. And it needs to be most heavily broadcast where the electorate shifted to the right this election. The fact that people generally think republicans are better for the economy is a severe failure on the part of the democrats.
Something I just thought of today…
Industry has been outsourcing for more than 40 years now. Manufacturing has been gutted in the US, and that’s wrecked labor. With the loss of the power of organized labor, money has flowed up from the workers to the executives. We’ve seen labor unions making big gains under Biden, but there simply aren’t enough people covered by unions in the US to reverse this trend. Right now we have a smallish-number of higher-paid information workers, a somewhat larger number of people in manufacturing, and a LOT of people in service-sector jobs that aren’t organized, or can’t effectively organize. An economy built largely around large numbers of low-wage service-sector jobs, with a small number of higher paid information workers just isn’t sustainable.
Tariffs that went on long enough would force manufacturing to be done in the US. And wages would have to rise, because if the workers can’t afford the products they make, then an economy collapses completely (unless you are exporting a lot). Yeah, it would be super-rough until factories were back in the US, maybe 10+ years. But our thirst for more and cheaper plastic shit from Asia is gonna be the death of us. (…That is, if climate change doesn’t do it first.) In that respect, Trump is kind of right, but the tariffs are probably going to be so harmful in the short run that people will reject any attempts to restructure the economy. I don’t think that Trump is principled in this at all; I think that it’s populist, and he’s a broken clock on this issue.
When the tariff is on final consumer products, these are two opposing forces. Higher wages mean companies would more likely save money by paying the tariffs. Higher tariffs mean companies are more likely to purchase domestically.
But if the tariffs are on precursor products (e.g. steel, lumber, oil, etc …) rather than final consumer goods: the tariffs make it more expensive for domestic manufacturing. The US manufacturer has to pay the tariffs to use the materials they need to produce their final product, and have to pass those costs on. That means there’s less margin for wages.
Yes, definitely. It also forces the US to exploit more natural resources (which I oppose, since I like having forests and mountains). Things like 100% tariffs on electric cars or computer chips made in China would help the US catch up. Tariffs on lithium–I don’t think we have significant lithium deposits in the US–would just sharply raise prices. Tariffs on finished goods that are high enough make it cheaper to produce in the US.
Wages rising? Not if they can help it. Other people mentioned prison labor. But they’re overlooking child labor, which is already being brought back in multiple states. Throw in some pretty weakly disguised slave labor in the form of company stores, and there’s no reason to pay actual workers what they’re worth.
I doubt Trump is going to care enough to keep his promises. He ran to avoid jail and for the ego trip from winning - he got both, so he’s gonna coast and do whatever his handlers tell him just so long as they let him take full credit for anything positive.
They will tell him to do things that will benefit them by removing the guardrails on the economy so they can exploit the hell out of it in record time. As such, it’ll initially look good before it burns itself out, by which time most of his term will be up anyway. By that time he’ll have gotten his sycophants to ensure he is fully immune to prosecution, along with a more fully stacked Supreme Court to ensure it stays that way.
Need proof? How much has Mexico paid into the border wall, eh? Plenty of other unfulfilled promises from the first time around to point at, if you need more.
See, the issue is that most of Trump’s policies didn’t come from him in 2016 - he went out and hung out with dictators and played golf and held rallies while his Cabinet did almost all of the heavy lifting. Remember that several of his staffers said they couldn’t get him to pay attention to important things like briefings unless they had something positive ABOUT HIM PERSONALLY every two sentences.
That’s how a lot of this shit is gonna get done - dozens of Yes Men all implementing whatever part of The Plan they’re supposed to implement from their appointed office, so Trump doesn’t take the heat for it.
And his cabinet is there to exploit the people. Just like the Postmaster. these people will destroy safety and fairness in America. It will be a cuthtroat nation.
They paid the most to Trump for the right to be in a positon to fleece the people the watythey want to. Pelosi on steroids.
Hey, wages rising would at least be nice.
…not going to happen though, more likely to see an increase in prison labour
Wages rising? No.
Salaries rising? A little.
Executive pay and bonuses? Huge.
Maybe for some things, like working in fields. (Maybe. That would be a preeeeeettttttty good time for someone to pull a runner.) Probably not for construction, where you’d have to be giving inmates access to things that readily be used as weapons. Same with meat packing, where they’d literally be working with knives.
If people that are left of center can get their shit together some day, they really need to rewrite that amendment to ban all involuntary servitude.
Most inmates aren’t actually dangerous, and can probably be trusted with a framing nailer. The percentage of harmless inmates will probably increase, as the Republican administration encourages laws that serve no purpose besides locking up black people and leftists, and clamps down on states that oppose them.
If you live in a legal weed state, start legally buying weed with the intent to stash it for the next 4 years. Stoners are gonna be a great source of prison labour
Demand 4: no new tarrifs.