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.
GENERAL STRIKE JAN 6
The voices of the workers will echo throughout the entire globe. Find a local left wing organization, organize, and when the day comes we fight like hell.
My plan is to stop participating in the economy as much as I can. Only the basic necessities now. The fun times are over. Let’s help crash the Trump economy.
a lot of us have been ‘existing’ on ‘only the basic necessities’ for years
That’s true. I guess I sounded privileged there.
Maybe to some, but that doesn’t minimize your stake in anything. We’re all in this together.
And to strike
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.
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.
Tariffs that went on long enough would force manufacturing to be done in the US. And wages would have to rise
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.
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.
