The 45th POTUS - Donald J. Trump

[verb_to_trust]

Are you worried about impeachment Josh?

[dimejinky99]

Bans political advertising on twitter. Totally ignores millions of bots and sock puppet accounts interfering with elections.
And trump

[BurtReynolds]

A win/win. Great news.

[dimejinky99]

A win/win. Great news.

It’s a pretty big fuck you to zuckerberg. That’s something.

[BurtReynolds]

A win/win. Great news.

It’s a pretty big fuck you to zuckerberg. That’s something.

Yeah I'd be surprised if Zuck followed suit.

[McParadigm]

[Green Habit]

Bans political advertising on twitter. Totally ignores millions of bots and sock puppet accounts interfering with elections.
And trump

Well said, dime.

[McParadigm]

Holy shit.

[tragabigzanda]

Big ag has been on the gov’t tit for decades, this is just a different type. And farm income has been in a steady decline since a peak around 2007 or so.

Trumps error here wasn’t creating trade wars and offering subsidies to farmers to get them through lean times; it was tackling every single commodity at once.

He’ll continue to see solid support from a large swath of farmers.

[Chris_H_2]

Holy shit.

it's a good thing republican lawmakers are on a righteous crusade to stop socialist policie . . . oh . . . wait.

[4/5]

Big ag has been on the gov’t tit for decades, this is just a different type. And farm income has been in a steady decline since a peak around 2007 or so.

Trumps error here wasn’t creating trade wars and offering subsidies to farmers to get them through lean times

Gotta keep them on that government tit, eh?

[bune]

[tragabigzanda]

A large modern tractor costs $150K+. Most large farmers will apply for a gov’t loan that obligates them to cultivate a specific crop and agree to certain pricing schemes; they get subsidies during off-years.

The farm bill is always a controversial and complicated issue that attempts to simultaneously reconcile commodity prices, food stamps availability, and gov’t food programs (like for public schools and armed services).

It’s an inherently broken system, without even getting into the bizarro foreign trade markets (would you believe we export 90% of our seafood and then buy cheaper seafood from other countries?)

I generally think a trump is an evil monster but reporting around this one issue has been woefully uninformed and biased.

[tragabigzanda]

Never mind we’re talkinf about cults now and that’s WAY more interesting. Holy shit!

[dimejinky99]

[dimejinky99]

Holy shit

Nigel Farage is right now doing an interview with trump and it’s going to be broadcast at 6pm our time so in an hour and twenty minutes.

It’s gonna be streaming on LBC’s site if you wanna hear it.

Satan meeting other Satan

[dimejinky99]

Oh wow

‘EU are very difficult to deal with. But I have a magic wand to make them make the deals I want’

[bune]

[4/5]

I generally think a trump is an evil monster but reporting around this one issue has been woefully uninformed and biased.

I think there are two issues here that may be related but are not the same. Tariffs and farm supports. I'm much less interested in discussing farm supports that have been around for a long, long time and that I view as a product of politically expedient policy that establishes concentrated benefits with dispersed costs, than the results of this trade war, of which there seems to be a consensus among economists that it has already been very costly and has the potential to get worse.

I think most of the reporting points out that:
-Tariffs are a tax on American consumers
-Tariff are anti-competitive and prices increase in tariff-affected industries
-Foreign nations retaliate with their own punitive tariffs against American exports (from our perspective)
-Foreign tariffs raise the price of the American exports, decreasing their quantity demanded
-Foreign markets search for substitutes, for example China buying soybeans from Brazil instead of the US
-Even after the trade war dissipates there are likely to be long-term effects, such as the US soybean industry being decimated as it is unlikely to recoup its market share that it had pre-tariffs now that Brazil has expanded its role in the market to such a degree
-Taxpayer money is used to bailout farmers who are negatively impacted by these policies, so American consumers are hit at least three different times as a result of this
-Lots of other stuff like the fact that tariff-related goods are often inputs for other US companies, who either have to produce less or charge higher prices, directly harming either employment or consumers, all the wasted resources used trying to avoid tariffs, companies producing outside of the US to avoid foreign tariffs, etc.


Are you disputing these sorts of things as being uninformed or biased, or are you arguing about farm aid more broadly or something else?

To be clear, my contention is that tariffs are a tax on consumers and impose lots of costs that outweigh the benefits, have lots of predictable unintended consequences, and are likely do as much harm to ourselves as they are to any foreign competitor.

[tragabigzanda]

Great post, 4/5.

I'm not arguing against anything you've said, per se. My initial response to the issue was itself a response to McP's "holy shit" post:

Spoiler: show

Holy shit.

I think those numbers really need some context to be of any use, and the quick headline is essentially useless and misleading, because it almost paints the picture that farmers were fine until Trump came along.

And then my followup point was only that while trade wars are largely unpopular for the very reasons you've shared, those are all very immediate impacts; and that Trump, for all his tomfuckery, has what many lifelong ag professionals see as a valid tactical approach (I do not necessarily subscribe to this belief): Dig in your heels and upend the markets in hopes of renegotiating trade deals down the line.

He's done a miserable job of implementing this tactic -- see my prior post re: a hammer vs. a scalpel -- but I think that the reporting around it has completely missed the fucking point of what seems to be a valid gripe for certain sectors: That trade deals dating back to the 1940s don't favor major U.S. export producers, and it's beyond time to renegotiate.