Hell, it's almost as if taxation without the ability of the people being taxed to give their input on said taxation is the whole reason the US exists in the first place.
This is the US swinging a club in an attempt at beating up the rest of the world and hitting itself on its head.
It’s raising them arbitrarily high on a whim - that’s the problem.
Republicans control Congress so they are complicit in what Trump is doing.
This is very much what we wanted. And we clicked "yes" on the question at every electoral level.
I understand everyone's got a little buyer's remorse. At the same time however, if someone clicked through 4 or 5 dialog boxes all saying "Are you sure you want to do X, Y, and Z?" And then, upon the system's execution of X, Y, and Z, suddenly complained that X, Y, and Z are not what they wanted?
I don't know?
I guess I'm just saying I'd be a bit surprised at their disappointment.
which... yeah, I could do without. I'm fine reaching parity with the level of market access in trade that other countries offer us, as well as the level of apathy in funding programs and conflicts that other countries have.
I do think its absurd to apply a different standard to the US, by people that don't really seem to notice what the standard other countries they respect are using.
I can also acknowledge that its disruptive. even at a blanket 10%, that's too much too fast for market forces to adjust adequately. but the overall idea of having domestic supply chains and velocity of wage payments and wage growth is something I like.
Like, I agree that more manufacturing in the US would be better overall, but the way in which this is being done seems really poorly thought through.
Now we have a system of bilateral agreements that encourage market fragmentation and are complicated and cumbersome to enforce, which is a big part of the reason we moved away from that system in the first place. Now, they're also created revoked on a whim by one man with a knack for giving exemptions to his pals and extracting big personal gifts from world leaders in exchange for favors. Even if you support moving back to a bilateral tariff system, the way it's being handled should concern you
International trade has never been a critical or essential component of the US economy -- or at least not during the last 170 years -- because there's always been a healthy domestic consumer market in the US. In the US, the consumer market has constituted close to 70% of all economic activity for over a century. In contrast, when China was starting to get rich in the 1990s and 2000s, the consumer market was tiny. Ditto postwar Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. International trade was way way more important to those countries in the post-WWII era that it has been to the US: the US would have remained a rich country even if there was zero international trade (although granted probably not quite as rich).
Free trade was used by the security establishment in Washington during the Cold War as a bribe to induce countries to side with the US against the USSR. The bribe was relatively easy to make because the US ended WWI with the world's dominant navy (needed to fight piracy and to guarantee that the smaller countries of the world could engage in international trade on the world's oceans).
Some Americans are "globalists", meaning they think the idea of the nation state is obsolete or undesirable, and of course they try to promote economic interdependence between countries as much as possible. Also, even though they have never been essential to the US economy, the big multinationals have significant influence on the public discourse in the US and on Washington. So, the general public estimates international trade as more important than it actually is to the US.
Additionally, the way Trump sets up tarrifs creates major uncertainty (which I can only assume is intentional), that can clearly be seen in the way the stocks develop. This also sets these tarrifs apart.
To be honest, this calls into any legitimate claims of using tariffs against China - the one country that I've seen logical, consistent arguments for enacting tariffs against - because they're implemented so haphazardly across the board there was no chance of building consensus with other countries, which would be a requirement for tariffs to actually work to change behavior.
It seems that the belief is that somehow because the US is the largest economy currently, that access to it is so desirable that countries will be falling over at the negotiation table to regain access to the US market and thereby willing to agree to new things that are supposedly 'more fair' (re: more desirable for what the current administration believes to be desirable).
Largely that doesn't seem to be happening, which is no surprise, but more over, when negotiations do happen, like we have seen with China, and now they're getting a better deal than we are, from everything I've read thus far. It seems this administration can't even stick to its own guns, because China called the bluff and the US capitulated to their core demands with relatively little resistance seemingly.
In general, tariffs which work out to >10% mean applied are only found in the poorest countries (where high tariffs arguably _can_ make sense if practically all industry is extractive/agricultural, on the basis that they may spur development of local secondary industry), or in weird micronations.
They worried the legal (and taxed, and higher quality) British tea would be, despite the tax, cheaper than the smuggled (untaxed) Dutch tea, which would destroy their smuggling businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act
> A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies.
> Reducing or eliminating the duties paid when the tea was landed in Britain (if it was shipped onward to the colonies) would further lower the final cost of tea in the colonies, undercutting the prices charged for smuggled tea. Colonists would willingly pay for cheaper Company tea, on which the Townshend tax was still collected, thus legitimizing Parliament's ability to tax the colonies.
Unless smuggled tea had to accept more losses due to…piracy?
Smuggling adds costs, and the Dutch/British product weren't identical in quality either. The Tax Act reduced the tax/cost burden (removing a requirement to go through London-based middlemen first, and lessening import duties) on legitimate tea.
> The shipping costs for both products would be the same (right?)
Not at all. The risk of seizure (of both cargo and ship) drives it way up.
"the British Parliament decreed that any American vessel selling goods in London had to purchase tea as part of its return freight to the colonies. Thus, the captains of the Rotch-owned Dartmouth and Beaver dutifully loaded consignments of tea for their journeys back to Boston."
The Rotches absorbed the loss of 2/3 of the £10,000 cargo, however due to their position in the whale oil monopoly, they were unpopular in the colonies and received little sympathy. The war destroyed much of their business and wealth, and they weren't welcome back home in Nantucket, where the community felt they were abandoned.
The colonies were Crown businesses. A clearer reason for the war was the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It reserved land west of the Appalachians for native peoples.
https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/ro...
Before '67, England paid very high taxes on tea imported from China (>25%). So tea smuggling was rampant - mostly in England. But the Dutch government didn't charge any tax on the imported tea sold in the Netherlands, so that was smuggled into America.
Then in '67, the Indemnity Acts basically removed the high taxes on the tea sold in Britain. But this was followed up by the Townshend Acts, which added more taxes - specifically to the Colonies.
As you can imagine, this seems a little fucked up.... except the Colonies were already paying practically zero taxes. To the British, it was the Colonies who had been getting away with highway robbery, and these new taxes leveled the playing field.
But of course the Colonists didn't want to pay taxes. So they claimed this was unfair because they had no representation. The representation wasn't really the crux of the issue though... it was just that they wanted to weasel out of paying taxes. Only a representative in Parliament could levy taxes.
The thing is.... by this time, the Colonists had already set up a sort of shadow-Parliament. They had British representatives who were supposed to be telling the Colonists what to do.... but the Colonists basically just ignored them. By the time of the Tea Party, the British had already lost control of governance.
After several years of boycotting tea to protest the Townshend Acts, the acts were repealed in 1770, except for taxes on Tea. Yet they began importing tea again, mostly to Boston, as New York and Philadelphia were still mostly smuggling tea.
The East India Company was undergoing severe hardship during this time, for a couple different reasons. But basically they had too much tea and not enough people were buying it. So in Britain they returned the duty to the company that had been charged to them. They still needed a way to get the Colonies to buy this tea, rather than the smuggled tea. So in 1773, the Tea Act was passed. It granted the Company a monopoly on imported tea, cut out the middlemen, and added a tax due on delivery. This made the tea cheaper than smuggled tea, but added a 3 pence surcharge for each pound of tea.
One of the big purposes of all these taxes was actually for the Colonial Governors to receive their pay from British Parliament, so that they'd be loyal to Britain instead of the Colonists. Several Parliamentarians warned that these extra taxes wouldn't be accepted by the Colonists, but they were overruled. Without Lord North being a dickhead and insisting on the taxes, we wouldn't have our own country now.
So basically the reason for the Tea Party was 1) years of resistance to taxes (even though Colonists basically hadn't been paying any tax), 2) they wanted to have more Colonial control over Governors, 3) it took away money from both smugglers and legal colonial importers.
But there were other reasons too, like the fact that at this time in history, the British army was incredibly weak, with something like 40,000 soldiers total, due to recent wars nearly bankrupting the country and diminishing their fighting force. The Colonists had been calling the Empire's bluff for years, doing largely whatever they wanted. The Tea Party was a big middle finger, and the British had to respond, and so led to the eventual confrontation.
That's the only leverage Congress has over the president.
Republicans control Congress and the presidency, so there's nobody else to blame here.
Those who were not paying attention last time shouldn't have been allowed to vote this time, but... That Would be Bad, mmmkay.
He also falsely claimed - and his supporters, as is typical, accepted those claims - that other countries would eat that cost.
They voted for tariffs. They were willfully ignorant on their being a tax.
Not on the channels they watch.
There's an entire separate Fox News Cinematic Universe safe space you can immerse yourself in exclusively.
Even when they bring on a sacrificial lib to yell at, humans in general are phenomenal at ignoring or explaining away clear evidence their strongly held beliefs are wrong.
No, it's not. Congress is the representation, not the executive. The executive is supposed to implement what Congress decides.
FWIW I agree that Congress has completely abdicated their duties, but by and large "the people" voted for this, it was not hidden or secret (for all his flaws Trump was very clear what he would do with respect to tariffs for a long time), and I think "taxation without representation" is an incredibly poor analogy.
Ironically I think this is one instance that sort of thing made sense, but they should have done their usual and made some sort of government agency to oversee it themselves. Neither congress nor the president are good managers of tariffs as they're unpopular in the short term, as we've seen, and need a long term outlook.
Yet, somehow, this implicit 'delegation' (where Congress is very actively doing nothing) is somehow kosher. As long as they won't impeach the leader of their party, anything goes! The man could drop a nuclear bomb on Ohio, and as long as he had 34 surviving votes in the Senate, he'd be fine.
If this kind of congressional silence is endorsement, why the hell did SCOTUS get involved to start legislating regulations from the bench in the first place?
That's right, the Republicans decided the rest of 2025 is just one long legal day.
What Trump is doing is unambiguously taxation without representation, as he is not the representative of the citizenry. For one, no single person can be the "representative of the citizenry".
Or, to put it another way, "representation" means that the people have a say in what's happening. With the executive branch, that's not the case. The mechanism for that is Congress.
Heck, the law that Trump is using to set tariff policy is designed to only be used in cases "of national emergency", and Trump has simply defined national emergency to mean whatever he wants it to mean. I think this article gives a good overview of the issues: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-usa-china-deal-is-bad-eco...
It's similar to how Trump has redefined the simple meaning of "foreign invasion" to give cover to his deportations (in some cases I'd call them abductions) without due process.
The people may have voted for this, but in the medium/long term it will be absolutely detrimental to our democracy.
None of which was unanticipated. People had been warning voters about the danger to our democracy long before the election and a huge number of Americans decided that they really didn't care about protecting our democracy.
It's just not important to them. If it were, they wouldn't have first primaried in, and then showed up for the guy in 2024[1].
---
[1] I can forgive 2016 and 2020, since at that point, his behavior wasn't that far out of bounds. Since then, he's moved on to conspiring with fraudulent electors, trying to rig vote counts, arresting and imprisoning people without trial, and looking to suspend habeas corpus. Not to mention pay-to-play for access, and treating the treasury like his own personal slush fund.
> He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
> For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
> For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
> For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
> For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
Incorrect. He is the executive. Congress is the representation.
The people of the US got what they asked for.
Campaigned on raising taxes? Not only would a citation be needed, I would defy you to find a single Trump voter who thinks taxes needed to be raised.
This whole “it’s what people voted for” meme isn’t always an appropriate answer, and is many times just lazy commenting IMO.
I am left wondering if Trump fully understands how tariffs work. He spoke at length on multiple occasions about how other countries were going to pay for the tariffs, which runs entirely counter to what a tariff is. The only conclusion I can reasonably make from this is that Trump didn't understand tariffs either
Experts were pretty clear in telling the public that it was a tax. The only people who can say they didn't understand that would have to be people who not only didn't know what tariffs were in the first place, but who also didn't bother to listen to the many many people trying their best to explain it to them.
I'm 100% convinced that trump doesn't understand them and refused to listen to the many many people who have tried to explain it to him, which is why he had to suddenly start walking them back. Only his ego is getting in the way now.
anti intellectual sentiment runs deep in many parts of US society. Having experts out explaining things - particularly via news media outlets - has unfortunately become an ineffective tactic as a result. There are many people, across different areas of US society, that reject any expert explanations in favor of their own beliefs, or things they read that re-enforce their beliefs.
We live in an age where 'vibes' and anecdotal experiences override facts based on well gathered evidence and history.
I believe quite strongly the average Republican voter is heavily weighted toward dismissing public experts out of hand.
All this is to say, I'm surprised that didn't have much impact. It should have completely destroyed his campaign to be honest, as many of his actions should have, but this was an indisputably bad idea from any reasonable economic standpoint.
>Only his ego is getting in the way now
I largely agree with this. I will only add that I can't tell where Trump ends and his donor class setting the agenda begins.
But in the end blind American exceptionalisim and surrounding himself with yes men seems to have made him at least publicly proclaim the exporters would bear the cost. Or Trump is just a liar.
Occam's Razor suggests an answer. Chances are this is just another instance of Trump lying and people eating it up.
Guy is a billionaire twice president of the US. He's many things (imho really bad things), but not ignorant.
I'm no Trump fan. Never voted for him. Really really disagree with his politics, but here's some things I think are observably true.
- He understands media
- He understands very well how to manipulate public sentiment and opinion
- He understands the power of celebrity
- He understands the importance of tailoring to audiences
- He's willing to say and do things others aren't. There's no line in the sand for him
You can be otherwise ignorant of a great many things (including tariffs, which he has a demonstrated lack of understanding going back decades) and still get elected based on these traits
Suggesting he was just tippy-toeing around the language is completely whitewashing his obvious widespread lies.
You're going to lose this one hard, because you chose the wrong tense. One exceptional thing about this cult is their ability to rationalize anything once Dear Leader has proclaimed it. This has been a general basic mechanism of mass media centralized democracy (eg the number of "liberals" eagerly supporting censorship ~10 years ago), but the Trump cult cranks it to 11 (eg "from my cold, dead hands" -> "blue lives matter")
Quit lying.
Voting in california and not voting in california are statistically identical, so if you don't move to a swing state, you're just voting for whoever wins, right?
"You voted for DJT, you're an evil person!" "Well actually, let me explain to you how the electoral college works..."
It has certainly happened before.
How does the electoral college system work in a way that encourages you to vote for someone you don't want?
You have two top candidates, by voting for a third party you are deferring to the popular vote on the top two and 'subtracting' a vote from your favorite of the top two.
Yes, I know that there are down ballot races on the same day that matter, but many don’t, for the same or similar reasons. We need elections that let everyone’s vote matter. Things like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, working to end gerrymandering, and open primaries would all be helpful reforms in different ways.
Effectively they are giving 1/2 votes to each of their candidates, resulting in no change in the final result.
But, if you really want to be analytic, the higher the turnout of disaffected voters, the more likely they vote for Trump.
That's why, since 2016 or so, Trump always overperforms in general elections, while Democrats overperform in special/mid-term elections where the turnout is low.
So, these liberal/democrats copium about turnouts and non-votes no longer hold true. pre-2016 "Get out to Vote" were implicit Democrat crying calls to rally votes for the Democratic party. You still see people who haven't understood the underlying shift using this as a "dog whistle" to campaign for democrats while appearing neutral
2024 turnout: 64.1%
Total Votes: 155,238,302
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
therefore
Total eligible voters: 242,181,438
Didn't vote: 86,943,136
Votes for Trump: 77,302,580
Kids should not have a vote, but I'd be willing to say parents should get two votes. No adult has a more visceral sense of societal consequences than someone concerned about creating the future their own child will hopefully thrive in.
This scrutiny isn't applied to other citizens.
There are plenty of parents who have absolutely no sense of this, and plenty of children who have a better sense of this than their parents, because they’ve had to learn the hard way.
Choosing to reproduce, or failing to use birth control, should not give you an extra vote.
So why not?
I mean, the argument against surely is not that having children is some existential horror or great evil, right? Civilization advances by our children doing better than we did, maybe materially, but morally, ethically, and hopefully in purpose.
Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
I agree with this statement and have commented as much elsewhere, but Congress could rein in Trump's tariff-setting ability any time they wanted to, and they have very explicitly chosen not to.
I agree with the parent comment - people in the US very clearly voted for this, buyer's remorse be damned.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/17/lisa-murkowski-trum...
Except that the whole US system is binary, and your vote is too - you get to vote either 1 or 0, with no more nuance than that.
So technically yes, people voted for this, but also many were forced to because it came in a bundle which was the only way they could vote for their non-negotiables such as gun rights and abortion restrictions.
Having said that, Republicans as a whole got a large number of votes, and they’re all well known to be Trump bootlickers that twice failed to convict him after impeachment, so it really shouldn’t come as a shock that he’s doing bad stuff.
There’s some point where Americans just have to take responsibility for their actions or inactions, and I think we’re well past that point.
Either of the two parties promoting voting reform would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
I don't know if America will ever be able to transition to proportional representation because of entrenched interests. But here in New Zealand it was having a trump-like character, Robert Muldoon, in control of our economy last century that led to MMP.
Having a single deranged (and occasionally drunk) person micromanaging the economy, arbitrarily imposing tariffs and trading rules and imposing price controls and freezing wage rises made people realize that we wanted our king to be symbolic and not interfering with our freedoms.
As for whether or not the people of the US got what they asked for, in a sense, that doesn't matter. Trump might think otherwise, but he is not a king. There's a document that he has to follow. This is a constitutional democratic republic, not just a democracy. The less he follows the rules, the more severe the repercussions could be for both him personally and the country at large.
The constitution specifically states: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises..." [0] (Article I, Section 8)
Congress. NOT the executive branch or the President.
Tariffs are taxes, full stop.
Just because congress is abdicating it's duty and there are not even a handful of Republicans who will stand up to take back their proper power of taxation, does not make it either legal or moral to mis-allocate the power further away from the people.
And yes, while people did vote for that POTUS, and he did mention tariffs in campaigning, he was both not explicit about seizing power from congress, and had such a reputation for lying that it was literally impossible to predict what he would actually do.
No, you can not claim this misapplication of power is the will of the people.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
Which might be a good thing, but we've long since abandoned making congress actually use the legislative process each time these decisions are made.
But I am guessing the neoclassical/neoliberal economists here did because they aspire to be like Peter Thiel (who has backed Trump and GOP since forever).
(( note it will _never_ happen and you folks vote against your own interests ))
> Investors are also growing wary of an overcapacity spike. As Bloomberg notes, tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon have adjusted their data center strategies, in some cases pulling back on construction projects.
Is "overcapacity" concern here bundling up all the other effects of disruptions by the current administration?
And are there significant concerns about Stargate and OpenAI specifically, separate from those traceable to the administration or economy?
Projects like this serve to create unattainable goals that practically hand peer powers a victory. Not because these peers are more powerful, but because they can define what they want and work towards a real goal and not handwavy vaporware nonsense.
Things that have so many question marks like that should be treated with a lot more pragmatism. But that's certainly not a language the Silicon Valley folks speak. Everybody's promising the next iPhone moment anytime they bring something out.
Probably should have stuck to his guns on Trump. Trump, serial liar and king of fraud, lies to these guys one time and they spontaneously develop amnesia and praise him. Naive and hilarious.
It's the same line of thought that gave us jumbo refrigerators, muscle cars and supersize meals.
In the American mind, bigger = better.
That that's not necessarily the best way to better results has been demonstrated by the Deepseek shock.
I do wonder if more foundational research would be a better investment.
If you have the best foundational research, but then find yourself blocked by compute, that’s a bad place to be in.
At the moment compute is a constraint too (at least for the smaller shops, maybe not OpenAI!)
We don’t necessarily know that the next AI breakthrough will need less compute either! A breakthrough that gives 5x performance for 20x training compute and 2x inference cost would still be a giant breakthrough and need a lot of hardware! Although this sort of breakthrough is unlikely, and it’s likely to be smaller steps forward - but I think it might be the case that models continue to get more computationally expensive even if there are breakthroughs that make models more efficient because we will want higher capability.
So you're saying a bigger amount of research is better?
If that's not what you meant my apologies. Reason I'm quick to point this out is I think some of the writing/headlines around are suggestive of this misconception.
I can agree that infrastructure generally has much lower margins than software businesses, but I don't know of any mega-projects that wouldn't turn out costlier during construction, and 15% is hardly something that stopped them.
There's plenty of wealth in the EU.
What they don't have is an appetite for risk. You could lower taxes to zero, but you'd still not get the level of speculative investment in the US without cultivating a much larger appetite for risk. Similar issue exists in places like Japan. Investor classes that are, at the median, more conservative than they are in the US. So in the US we "lose" bigger, but we also "win" bigger.
(Of course all of this was pre-Trump. Now, I'm not sure there is enough certainty out there for even the big risk takers. But, historically, we in the US have been more risk-phillic.)
In the US it's different. The secure sources are actually looking more secure. At the extreme you have just parking gargantuan amounts of money in TIPS right? I mean interest rates have gone up to even better compensate that kind of risk free behavior. Meanwhile the risky stuff in the US is a bit more risky due to the uncertainty.
Hopefully, Trump's people will convince him of the folly of the approach he's taking currently. If not, yeah, not sure? Uncharted waters really. I don't think anyone really knows what will happen.
So this article is just karma farming on the DT hate?
(FWIW, I oppose a lot of DJT initiatives/behavior, but I hope it is rational criticisms)
https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
Trying to get a journalist to understand numbers is like teaching a rock calculus.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-12/softbank-...
I'm sure tariffs are partly to blame, but it seems criminally misleading to be nowhere near ready to provide that $100 billion.
If it was well thought out we wouldn't be tariffing intermediary goods and inputs to domestic production. If any of this sticks at anything like the levels imposed, we will have shortages and job losses more than we have any impactful move of manufacturing jobs back to US>
It is ridiculous how rich people's money are just show off like their lifestyle.
toomuchtodo•3h ago
SoftBank Stargate Venture With OpenAI Snags on Tariff Fears - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-12/softbank-... | https://archive.today/Vi5Gr - May 12th, 2025