Item — HN Reader

Maybe, maybe not.

And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).

And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.

2 comments

> thus paying more in taxes

If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?

> Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.

Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.

> We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?

Well we all have our opinions on how our money is spent. I for one think we need a lot more missiles and a lot more folks working instead of living off of taxpayer dollars (labor participation rate is the lowest ever), broadly speaking. But we don't really have to have an either-or scenario here and it's unfortunate that politics has gotten this bad in America.

> Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.

Well, I'm not suggesting both sides are bad (though they are in their own ways - we should eject all communists and fascists from this country and planet).

I'm suggesting that Democrats agree with Donald Trump's economic policy even if some are politicking otherwise. If you look back to Trump's first term he began instituting tariff-like policies and other economic agenda items around restoring manufacturing capacity. Biden continued those policies, and then Trump has taken them a step further. Democrats today are campaigning on high inflation, but recall that inflation was also very high in 2022 and so forth, gas prices were even higher than during our support for Ukraine (I strongly support Ukraine), and so forth.

But if/when Democrats are elected it is unlikely they will roll back the Trump tariff scheme though perhaps negotiate more favorable deals with less bickering with our European friends and partners, and will maintain tariffs and other economic measures against countries such as China and perhaps others like Mexico and Canada.

global tariffs via ieepa or similar legislation - base flat tariffs against all imports from all countries - I think those will go. Biden kept some targeted tariffs, but didn't massive expand or do country-based tariffs.

I can see changes but I'm not sure about flat tariffs going away completely. One of the reasons for those is because what China will do to avoid American tariffs is to basically try and set up shop in a 3rd country, or just do some legal configuration to make the products they are dumping seem to come from the 3rd country instead. Kind of like a "final assembly" style loophole.

I agree Biden largely just kept the Trump regime in place, especially with respect to China, but I also think he was dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and so something like broad tariffs given the economic and political environment probably weren't really considered.

Personally I feel like it's a win-win for me. Either we re-shore more manufacturing, stop China from dumping, &c. which result in higher prices but have other benefits that I value, or we don't and prices go down and wages and such go down which means cheaper goods and services which is also nice.

Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs or the stupid Iran war. They wouldn't have passed anything like the BBB. Nor would they have tried to scare all the immigrants out of the country.

> Pretty sure the Democrats would not have done either the ridiculous tariffs

They may not have gone with that specific approach, but the direction was the same. Instead of tariffs the Biden Administration's BBB bill gave money to corporations instead. Two directionally aligned approaches there.

The rest of the comments (immigration policy or Iran) are irrelevant to this specific topic IMO

Directional alignment but completely different policy. Trying to claim they are the same is nonsense.

Sure it can end up with a different policy which may or may not be as effective, but the goals are the same.

So trying to divorce the two parties here is also a bit of nonsense.

You don't think those two things have any effect on the economy?

Sure they have an effect but are they economic policies? If you want to take the approach that everything is an economic policy I guess we could do that, but I think it's a bit limiting.

I guess also, what's the goal of economic policy? Does your economy matter much if you can't defend it, for example? If you have no industrial base does that matter?

Under sequential administrations all the way up and until at least the end of Mr. Obama's second term we had, broadly speaking, the same economic policy and we lost a lot of jobs under that regime, lost manufacturing capabilities, and more. People were really unhappy with that scheme which was supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe we should examine our policies even if there are temporary changes that are unfavorable. Should we be long-term oriented or short-term oriented?

It's a very complicated topic of course, but I think just "grr mad at Trump" is not only immature but just wrong and leads to no meaningful analysis of what our economic policies have been, the results, and what changes may produce.

Immigration is clearly economic policy. It was partially justified on immigrants taking American's jobs.

The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.

> Immigration is clearly economic policy.

Sure but it's not strictly an economic policy. If you want to just talk about the economics of immigration I'd be happy to discuss that. I think there are pros and cons to many different approaches.

> The war isn't strictly economic policy, but everybody could see it would have a bad effect on the economy, which is why everybody else was smart enough not to do it.

Similarly Europe and the United States could have been economically smart and unsanctioned Russian gas and let them take over Ukraine. Sometimes economic policy is trumped by other considerations.