Well if the prices rise due to tariffs, and then more money is released via income tax reductions, the two effects may offset each other from the perspective of the consumer.
Prices would rise, but the money available to the consumer would also increase. So I think it wouldn’t be the kind of inflation we usually see where prices rises but earnings don’t keep up.
Wealthy people don’t pay much income tax anyway, so the effect on asset prices would not be huge probably. The middle class would have more money to spend on housing, which would increase housing prices if middle class spending was dominating housing prices, but with investor housing purchases being such a large component of house purchasing buyer pool it may mostly just shift who is buying houses over to the middle class a bit (due to available money increase going disproportionately to middle class people who actually have their spending power substantially eroded by income tax).
Note that when I say wealthy people I mean independently wealthy, not high W2 earners, they aren’t wealthy IMO if their W2 job still generates most of their buying power.
Just stop trading manufactured products with Asia.
Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little.
Good for them. But in Europe we had this transition already and we became disillusioned with the lifestyle tradeoffs.
Having our people do nothing productive while all of our life objects are made by others is not sustainable and it is awful for the morale of our peoples. It needs to be stopped.
>Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little.
You don't find hordes of Chinese peasants in their dark factories.
Do you think that JLCPCB offer such prices because they have 2000000 lowly paid machinists drilling the pcb holes manually? China invests in all kinds of automation like crazy
There is huge difference indeed in transportation industry - China works their chineese drivers to the bone 18 hours a day, whereas Germany works eastern european drivers to the bone 18 hours a day.
While China is hardly a happy place and exploitation is rampant - there is less on the assembly floor - not because they care, but because even cheaper than exploiting people is not having to hire people at all. China installed in 2024 more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined and they seems to lead the innovation in home robots too.
We are at a fun point in history - for the first time the ability to automate seems to really outstrip the ability to create new jobs.
Of course they installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, most of the high volume factories are there.
I have nothing against the Chinese by the way, I just don’t think the fate of Europe should be so beholden to whatever they are doing with manufacturing. They are undercutting us in a way that hurts Europeans? Great, cut them off. Most Chinese products in the west are lower quality than what they replaced anyway.
The real answer is that the long period of Chinese outsourcing masked the inflationary impact of money supply expansion, which is super duper convenient for the people with power in the west. So this won’t happen absent some kind of revolution, or a recognition that the juice has been squeezed too much.
Can you please think through what would happen a bit further? What you say here is a first order analysis on a very short time scale. It does not capture the end state of such a change. The acceptable transition period for a change depends on the severity of the problem the change is targeting, and in this case here the problem is quite severe, so our acceptable transition period should at least be measured in half decades, not weeks.
The harsh reality is that the world as it is depends on what amounts to slave labor, and that is priced into (or out of, rather) the goods that are imported. The mental and economic gymnastics involved in justifying it or pretending otherwise are just window dressing.
A positive effect from regulation does not rebut the general argument against government regulation of industry.
The problem with regulation isn’t that there are never any positive effects, of course there are.
The problem is it’s impossible to reliably avoid adding substantial friction to life via overly broad regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, or outdated but still-in-effect regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, at least.
If this only bothered huge companies then I would say cost of doing business, who cares, etc, but it actually affects things like how cities and towns are designed, how expensive housing is, how expensive medical treatment is, etc.
It's unclear exactly what you're arguing, but I think if you are arguing that, because of the unavoidable substantial friction caused by regulation, we shouldn't have any regulation of industry at all... I think it's trivial to find examples where banning all regulation of industry would make the world a much, much worse place. Much worse than the friction.
Nope, he's not saying that at all. He's just saying that any regulation (no matter how necessary, well intended or even perfect it is) has a cost. And that cost is accumulating across all regulations.
Furthermore, that cost is easily supported by large incumbents (big fans of regulation, btw) but it hurts startups the most. Thus the more regulations a market has, the fewer startups will have. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means less innovation, fewer products and higher prices. We can easily see this effect unfolding in the housing, education or health markets.
Bottom line is: we must take those second order effects of regulation into consideration when talking about it.
Even though overly broad regulation is a risk, I don't believe little/no regulation is an option either. I don't think the US's consumer protection mechanisms work, and I'm happy to accept the downsides of the EU's systems that come with the upsides of regulation.
I really wish microeconomics was a high-school or secondary school required course. It's one of the most applicable to life and voters well-studied disciplines that describes the effects of certain actions towards or away from a competitive market, market elasticity and barriers to entry, explains positive and negative externalities of government action, and how those actions affect consumer pricing and supply (a lot of the topics here and below). Without studying this topic we view words with different underlying assumptions or definitions and it's a lot more effort / time / replies to not talk around each other. It's like two people who only use Windows for Instagram trying to argue about why Apt requiring Rust is good or bad. I'm not weighing in for or against the topic in this thread or its replies, just a plug to study Microeconomics if this stuff interests you!
I mean, housing and medical treatment are more expensive in the US because the market is unregulated and so the capital exploits the poor who can't do otherwise for those basic needs.
There is definitely a third option of "badly regulated through regulatory capture that favors incumbents, prevents competition and makes things worse for the public, while protecting actual malfesance". The US has a lot of this. The EU version tends just to protect the incumbent too much.
Pretty sure pricing isn't. Can't US medical companies essentially charge what they like? As long as they don't align with each other to price gouge customers...even though I imagine they do anyway (just very carefully).
These industries are objectively heavily regulated in the US. I don’t know what you are talking about. Maybe you would like them to be more regulated, and that’s a position one can hold, but that doesn’t make them unregulated today.
Is it possible your lawyer was just wrong when he told you that?
Like the interpretation of the situation seems to hinge on that, because if we didn’t know that it was usually fixed on the spot, then it could very well just be protocol to go through a correction process that takes awhile (for other dumb reasons but not because someone was wronging you personally).
> Anecdotes may be real or fictional; the anecdotal digression is a common feature of literary works and even oral anecdotes typically involve subtle exaggeration and dramatic shape designed to entertain the listener.
Western models can be lead off the reservation pretty easily, at least at this point. I’ve gotten some pretty gnarly un-PC “opinions” out of ChatGPT. So if people are influenced by that kind of stuff, it does seem to be hurting in the way the PRC is worried about.
That is such an unnecessary turn of phrase to use, "off the reservation", and it's time to stop using it. This society doesnt (generally) use rape terminology, or other terms associated with crime, deviancy, or other unpleasantness to talk about technology, so why do phrases stemming from Indigenous situations still persist?
Wasn’t puberty later back then too? Like people weren’t waiting around post puberty saving themselves for whatever, puberty just happened alongside full adult body maturation, not before as often happens today.
actually the later puberty ages may have been a temporary side-effect of malnutrition common during industrialization, there's some evidence that hunter-gatherers (and even people during medieval times) had good access to animal protein, fats, and other necessary vitamins and minerals from plant life (nutrition plays a big role in puberty onset)
Puberty even today has to do somewhat with body weight. You have to reach a certain level to get it. Malnutrition may have delayed it in prehistoric times.
So obviously this is big if true, but do we know it isn’t just that a lot of high profile type people on social media use VPNs? If I was a public figure or attempting to be one or anything like that I would definitely try to hide where I am actually located, regardless of whether I am doing anything nefarious, just because political harassment and violence is a thing.
No. I am considering home schooling my little one, but mostly due to the whole 2 Sigma problem rather than any perceived falsehood with public schooling.
I didn’t say it was fake, per se. What happens is undersampling that conveniently aliases with a supporting story for the present moral zeitgeist. It’s not hard to find samples that contradict the story. This happens primarily in history, but also in auxiliary classes that touch on history or morality such as various humanities courses and what little is covered of economics.
The Private Catholic school I attended was forced to teach a particular religious education curriculum by the state. However, that curriculum was highly modular, and the only testing of their methodology was final test scores. So we skipped the entire section on islam (Test was "Pick 2 religions and compare them, we were given catholicism and judaism), and we also skipped every chapter under catholicism that implied any wrongdoing, historically on the part of the catholic church, like the occupations of the holy land.
And this is in contrast to private schools how? Just that they may diverge from the current moral zeitgeist to insert their own morals in the same places?
I’m not contrasting with private schools, I’m just not sure 100% of private schools do this so I focused on what I know.
It’s kind of funny how everyone projects their own dialectic framing on statements, and assumes that a person opposing side A automatically supports whatever is side B in their own mind.
Yes everyone does do that. Most people will not take a tangential single sentence criticism of an institution to mean that you hold none of the typical accompanying political views and are just narrowly opining on your experience.
I would imagine a large majority of readers read your original post and immediately in their head thought, “are they one of those school voucher people” or something along those lines.
Prices would rise, but the money available to the consumer would also increase. So I think it wouldn’t be the kind of inflation we usually see where prices rises but earnings don’t keep up.
Wealthy people don’t pay much income tax anyway, so the effect on asset prices would not be huge probably. The middle class would have more money to spend on housing, which would increase housing prices if middle class spending was dominating housing prices, but with investor housing purchases being such a large component of house purchasing buyer pool it may mostly just shift who is buying houses over to the middle class a bit (due to available money increase going disproportionately to middle class people who actually have their spending power substantially eroded by income tax).
Note that when I say wealthy people I mean independently wealthy, not high W2 earners, they aren’t wealthy IMO if their W2 job still generates most of their buying power.