“Why aren’t progressives on Trump‘s side here? The issues of consumerism, labor conditions, slavery, and environmentalism are all on Trump‘s side, and we’ve got progressives crying over the drop in stock prices.”
—Bloggress Ann Althouse, neatly noting, regarding the Axis’s fury over tariffs, why Trump’s tariffs against China, the Left’s hypocrisy and incoherence.
Gee, thanks, Ann! I’ve been asking this exact question of my various Trump Deranged relatives and friends, though not on social media. No answers, of course, except this one, which isn’t exactly ennobling: “Because I just lost thousands of dollars in the value of my stock portfolio!” Wait, I thought it’s the bad guys that only care about their own wealth and everyone else be damned.
Ann adds Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s statement earlier this week: “I’m not happy with what’s going on in the market today, but the distribution of equities across households? The top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities. Eighty-eight percent of the stock market. The next 40% owns 12%. The bottom 50% has debt. They have credit card bills. They rent their homes. They have auto loans. And we’ve got to give them some relief.”
Political parties have never been known for integrity, but in a very long time of watching the Donkeys and the Elephants, I have never seen a party descend into such complete self-destructive chaos as today’s Democratic party.
Of course, wherever Democrats go, there goes MSNBC on metaphorical steroids, so they brought on this lunatic to rant about how the fact that Kamala Harris lost proves how racist Americans are…
Really? That’s what the take-away is on this election? Points:
- Has Prof. Glaude been paying attention to the embarrassing nonsense Knucklehead Tim Walz, AOC and Pernie Sanders have been spewing lately? He thinks fair and competent Americans should have voted for that?
- Why is someone like Glaude teaching at an “elite” school like Princeton? He’s been the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African-American Studies at the university for ten years: clearly, DEI was a thing long before the George Floyd Freakout made it a fad.
- All of a sudden the Axis media is admitting that Democrats not only saddled the nation with a senile POTUS, they lied to the public constantly to cover it up—and we still don’t know who was running the country. That is a betrayal, and would justify voting for an inanimate carbon rod over anyone the party ran for President even if she were not the worst Presidential candidate offered by a major U.S. political party since the 19th Century.
- Much as I hate to quote CNN’s Van Jones, like Bill Maher and others a cynical chameleon who tacks his public views to wherever he thinks the popular opinion winds are blowing, his observation last month was correct if not especially perceptive when he said that Democrats were “offending most people in the country, calling everybody sexist and racist and transphobic and every other name — and then say[ing] ‘please follow us.’ That’s not a good strategy, folks!” Ya think?
- The Left’s pathological hatred of Trump recalls the only memorable and positive quote uttered by Richard Nixon, his last as President:
“Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Finally, here’s an amusing compilation by the same social media wag featured above:
Ethics Alarms 
“Why aren’t progressives on Trump‘s side here? The issues of consumerism, labor conditions, slavery, and environmentalism are all on Trump‘s side, and we’ve got progressives crying over the drop in stock prices.”
Clearly the question is rhetorical.
1. We’re all very aware how Democrats promote things that fit their social justice and ideological niche, but it’s always been relatively conditional. It’s fine when their ideology negatively affects those who they oppose but those same negative effects can’t roll back on them and roost in their back yard or affect their pocket book.
2. We’re also very aware that there is nothing more important to the anti-Trump resistance crowd than resisting President Trump. It doesn’t matter what Trump does or says, the true anti-Trump resistance must resist regardless of public perception. Any level of agreement with President Trump is capitulating to the Devil.
Yes, it’s just that simple.
I’ve said variations of this for a while in Canada, we were experiencing (and still are) a particularly rough financial patch, and the Liberals talked about how the TSE was doing, or how our debt to GDP ratios were, and I always mocked it: Listen to that, folks: You can’t buy a home, you’re picking up food from the food bank, you have more consumer debt than you’ve ever had below in your life, but Stonk Market Line Went Up!
Obviously, the average person doesn’t feel fluctuations in the market quite like the guys at the top do, and the people at the bottom could care less. They care about results: What’s the cost of housing? Can they get a job? Is that job good? Can they afford food?
The problem with what Trump is doing is that it’s going to raise prices for them, in both the short and long terms, and it will only get worse if the plan is to actually attack sweatshops and child labor, because while 100%: That is ethical and people like you and me can pay this, there are a whole lot of Americans who are going to go cold and hungry because they can’t.
Like I said in the other thread: Democrat outrage is a kabuki theatre. They’re the party of NIMBYism. They want these things to happen, just not where they can see them, because Nancy’s constituents love their stock portfolio, and AOC’s need cheap food.
HT, I think you make one assumption most everyone seems to be making, in my opinion, mistakenly. This is a trade war, i.e., a negotiation conducted in public. I do not know why the Trump administration isn’t doing this behind closed doors. But I’m not sure many tariffs have actually been imposed. For the most part, tariffs have been proposed, and the other parties have said, “Hey! wait a minute. Let’s talk.” That’s what a trade war is. Surely, these trading “partners” have the wherewithal to make adjustments to satisfy the demands implicit in the threatened tariffs. Can’t we let the process play out? And would someone in Youngstown, Ohio rather have a slightly less expensive, relatively fully subsidized by the Korean government Kia, or a decent job in their hometown? Given Trump’s approval ratings, I have to believe most citizens are in favor of what’s going on while the AUC is peddling alarmism as if a tariff is about to be imposed on alarmism and they’re overstocked.
I’m sorry, Bill…. I get what you all are saying, I really do, but you’re wrong.
What you described is not a trade war, it’s a negotiation, and in a negotiation, you can find leverage in some pretty odd places, and I accept that there might be some 4D underwater chess going on.
The problem is that Trump is playing 4D underwater chess with other people’s pieces. Again: He ran on an economic platform, he campaigned on inflation. And he’s taking actions where the obvious, facial outcomes are going to be bad both for your people and for mine. And this is the part that I don’t think Michael understands: If Trump was targeting Canada in a way that made sense, and didn’t obviously hurt your people: I get it. I got it seven years ago when he reversed the trade inversion.
But your ask is exactly what I’ve articulated before: Let the man cook, see what happens. And again, it’s not like I have much of a choice, the President of the United States isn’t even going to see what I’m writing, never mind act on it. But this approach has two problems:
First is that all this might not have been necessary. Again… Most of what Trump asked Canada for, we were already willing to give him. So did he get his 10,000 border guards by imposing tariffs three months after the guards were hired, or did he get them by asking? If this succeeds, I have the impression that it will have succeeded despite a whole lot of stupidity, as opposed to because of it, and I think that sends an awful message for future negotiations. I think this has artificially made the entire world a much angrier place.
Second is that it might fail. And while different people are going to have different appetites for what is and is not a failure, if enough people deem this a failure, I think that it derails the rest of his administration. I’m a little frustrated because there was so much obvious good he was doing, so much low hanging fruit left to knock out, that choosing to risk the rest of his administration like this is just so fraught.
Because the alternative, what you’re hoping for, is not only that this is going to be a success, but that all the pain that we’re experiencing and going to experience: The lost relationships, the decrease in tourism and exports, the increase in domestic taxes, the price inflation in food and staples, were all exactly necessary to achieve that success.
And I just don’t think that has the benefit of being true.
With respect to “problem with what Trump is doing… in both the short and long terms”.
The only way to have money remaining in a bank account at the end of the year is to not spend it. Assume that we only spend on what we need and we have nothing remaining at the end of the year, there are only 2 ways to increase wealth: (1) Dig more out of the ground or increase external input, (2) efficientize.
With short term (1) I can become very wealthy overnight if I mine gold, but long term if that gold enters the market, the value of gold decreases so I am less wealthy than at the beginning of the short term. As well, if (2) I double the efficiency of my process I become effectively twice as wealthy. We still need relative stability in pricing such that a cabal of home builders don’t simply double the cost because they can extort homeless families in the middle of a Manitoba style winter, but cost controls don’t tend to work as intended.
If Trump is not making change that results in net wealth/efficiency increase, then what is happening looks like a shell game with no net gain, just turbulance. At the individual level it will spell unecessary disaster for many.
The issues of consumerism, labor conditions, slavery, and environmentalism are all on Trump‘s side
No they’re not. Trump’s tarrifs are not accomplishing or fixing any of those issues. Everyone is upset because Trump’s tariffs make no sense and are in danger of throwing us into a recession. Pretty simple.
This is right.
I made the same point to Michael in the other thread: While it’s possible that nations that have poor labor or environmental practices will be able to produce cheaper goods because of that and should tend to have a larger trade surpluses with America, and therefore be more taxed, that wasn’t the goal. And depending on other trade arrangements, if a country with bad practices happens to have a lower tariff than a country with good practices, this could actually incentivize purchases from those places with bad practices.
If a more moral world was the goal Trump could have controlled for it, he could have targeted nations with bad practices, as opposed to just ones with trade imbalances. At best, Republicans are hoping for a coincidental moral outcome, but it’s by no means guaranteed.
I realized after writing that the first time I’d already pointed an example out: Canada had a 25% tariff specifically attached to potash. Russia does not, despite having a larger (66%ish) trade deficit with America than Canada does. Of the two nations, who do you think pays better wages, has better worker protections, and better environmental regulations?
Thank you for your response. And I want mention again something you mentioned, that if this was Trump’s plan all along, why are you putting tariffs on countries who don’t tax American goods? The whole idea falls apart when you look at the entire tariff situation and not each tariff in isolation.
HT makes a reasoned arguments as does OB but all you do is use talking points spouted by those whose wealth is based on stock market fluctuations.
Buying and selling stock on the market unless it is an IPO or new offering, never creates an opportunity for expanding output. If an investment manager sells a security he holds to another investor the reasoning is not that the money will be used by the corporation for growth it simply means that the investment manager thinks the security is overvalued and potentially go down in price and the buyer thinks its under valued and will go up in price. The stock market is only a barometer of investor confidence in that market and lately only serves as a means to trigger behavior. It does not reflect actual fundamentals or real GDP.
Rome was not built in a day. Your comment suggests that you approve of using forced labor making subsistence wages elsewhere to make lower cost goods so you do not have to pay what they are actually worth. I am assuming that you would advocate for wage and price controls on American employees and the goods they produce. You seem to place more concern over a potential recession over offshoring jobs and pollution to other countries which was the point of that quote issues being on Trump’s side. If we reduce demand for foreign produced goods, irrespective of corporate ownership, it would mean they need to make fewer widgets for sale there which would translate into lower use of fossil fuels, and CO2 emissions, not to mention the other heavy metal pollutants that tend to aggregate in the ground and water systems. Are residents of foreign nations any less entitled to the same environmental and wage and job safety protections American enjoy? Do you believe we could just demand other nations do as we do?
The tariffs have not caused any prices to rise as of yet. Did you know that the CPI for the month was significantly down? Recessions, tend to hamper inflation unless domestic producers feel they cannot make a profit. The psychology behind tariffs is that higher prices for foreign goods shift consumers to buy more domestically produced goods that drives prices slightly up for those domestic goods which signals producers to make more domestically and offer fewer foreign made options. Choosing American made New Balance shoes over Asian mad Nike is an easy choice on a product for product shift but consumers buying fewer imports may choose to take a domestic vacation or buy something all together different which has little effect on GDP.
A little inflation is a good thing. However, inflation that makes our domestically produced goods more expensive makes makes foreign made goods more attractive which causes our manufacturers to seek profits by making those goods outside the US.
The government cannot continue to prop up a service based economy. It needs to expand our manufacturing base. To do so we need to find ways to make profitable in the near term (because that is how paid management evaluates opportunities) manufacturing. We also need to ensure that we have the ability to ramp up production in the event of an emergency. In Trump’s first term he got automakers to shift production to making ventilators because certain machinery is not simply for auto making. They can also shift gears into making a variety of national defense products.
We have been spending ourselves into bankruptcy because politicians get elected by giving other peoples money away. U.S. Debt by President: Dollar and Percentage 2025 | ConsumerAffairs®
Our electorate who pay the least are the ones unwilling to pay higher taxes (the bottom 50% pay a bit more than 2.3 to 3% of all income taxes) and scream that others are not paying their fair share. Musk paid $12 billion on 2021 while anti-Trump Mayor Bloomberg paid an effective rate of 4% on 2.5 billion in income.
From the Tax Foundation
Maybe we should be a little less consumer oriented and become more investment oriented. If real gross private domestic investment rises so that price level stability in housing, food, and energy will occur. Pumping billions of dollars into an economy without a corresponding amount of real value output is inflationary and spending most of it on imports that could have been made here had their competitors not had the privilege of government subsidies , lax regulations, and other costs our producers face is recessionary.
People want their cake and eat it too.
Addendum: I don’t care if if Trump intended any of the labor or environmental issues above or not. Those issues drive the end result of us being non-competitive due to differential rules on production. That is where I am coming from. I am advocating a position on tariffs in general.
You can make legitimate arguments about the approach he used but up to now there has been no alternate strategy promulgated by those who critique his process in realigning our trade with other nations. I am just willing to let this play out before I render judgement on its overall efficacy.
Other countries who enjoy surpluses with us are understandably upset but those countries are not being asked to protect the global trade environment so that they can prosper. I would be more than happy to let the other western nation patrol the seas to protect trade and we will focus on only the defense of the United States and will help allies if called upon we should let others take that lead and bear that cost.
I would like to pause at Jack’s comment “No answers, of course, except this one, which isn’t exactly ennobling: “Because I just lost thousands of dollars in the value of my stock portfolio!”.
As I am recently retired I am concerned about my stock portfolio as well. As readers of this blog know, I am not exactly a man of the left, and I hope that Trump succeeds in his policies. However I am a bit taken aback by conservative pundits and politicians who claim that they should worry about Main Street and not worry about Wall Street. Scott Bessent’s remarks about 10% of the households holding 88% of the equities is an example of this attitude. Who are these households Scott Bessent is referring too? These are households of regular people with normal jobs who live within their means, have money saved for a rainy day, and prepare themselves for a comfortable requirement by contributing to tax-qualified accounts such as a 401K or or Roth IRA. These are normal hard-working and financial prudent people. Often these are older people; younger people have not had the time to accumulate equities. But if you are retired you need to equities to live on; Social Security is not enough, and we also have worries about how long that Ponzi scheme stays solvent. When politicians start talking about taxing the rich, or start disparaging Wall Street, then middle-class people who are financially prudent have reason to worry. Because these politicians are not looking at billionaires like George Soros and Warren Buffett, they are looking at us. And I resent it when people who do everything right are always on the hook for solving other’s problems, such as bailing out banks and General Motors in 2008, various forms of welfare and debt relief, and now manufacturing.
Manufacturing is important for the USA. However it should be properly viewed as a special interest; the administration should be honest about that. And when the administration introduces policies to benefit that interest, then we should be aware that there are third parties that are have no say in the policies, but are still affected by these.
Via the “Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes (book about the Great Depression) I cam by the following quote from Sumner (link provided for entire lecture).
“It is when we come to the proposed measures of relief for the evils which have caught public attention that we reach the real subject which deserves our attention. As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X. As for A and B, who get a law to make themselves do for X what they are willing to do for him, we have nothing to say except that they might better have done it without any law, but what I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist…”
https://www1.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Sumner.Forgotten.html