Delete Elon and Trump from existence and nothing will get better.
Why?
Because Americans are dumb as fuck and they’ll still be dumb as fuck when and if those two are gone.
I’m old enough to have seen the same pattern multiple times. Republican leadership fails spectacularly, even pissing off many conservatives in the process. But as soon as the next cycle begins, those conservatives are back onboard voting for the absolute shittiest candidates.
Because to them an actual, literal dictator is better than a Democrat as president.
Our society is circling the toilet and it almost certainly won’t get better within our lifetimes. Prepare yourselves for that.
Even if it were a tax paid by foreign companies, what difference does it make? They would just increase the prices the goods are sold at.
So, lets say, a smartphone that is priced at $1000:
With the 20% tariff in place:
If the Chinese conpanies pay the $200 per device, they just sell each phone at $1200 to the US importer.
If the US importers pay the $200 per device, similarily, they would tack on the $200 (on top of the usual markups), making it $1200 per phone.
There is zero difference, the end consumer always foots the bill.
This is so simple to understand, how are people this stupid
The only difference would be that money we spent would be going to the companies instead of the government. Tarrifs are a government putting taxes on their people to strangle industries in other countries. In both scenarios we pay the same, but the flow of money is different
Not necessarily: the company can choose to absorb part or all the tariff, since the demand would drop at the higher price anyway, and they might make more overall profit at a lower margin per item. But generally yes, most of the cost will be passed on to the consumer and prices will increase on average.
Example:
didn’t understand why he was told the other countries pay the tariffs
that’s easy: you were willing to vote for a guy who lied over 30 thousand times in his first term so he realized you’re a fucking idiot and he could say anything without you thinking even half a second about it.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
The real Russian plot we’ve all missed completely has far, far less to do with paying Trump to sell them documents. That’s the 2-dimensional public face of a cold-war that never ended and has been devastatingly effective against the USA.
The real Russian attack that we may never fully comprehend is exactly what they’ve done in other countries that they’ve subsequently annexed, which is making the general population stop caring about what’s true or not. It’s frighteningly easy to poison the well of public knowledge. You simply pour funding into efforts to boost BOTH SIDES of every social issue. When social debates and your nation’s interests are ramped up and the rhetoric gets more and more extreme on both sides of an issue, when every story on both sides becomes suspect, people simply tune out or stop caring about what’s true or not, and this is exactly where we are. Most people are more willing to just throw their arms up and go find a distraction than try to sift through what’s real or not.
It was even easier to pull off in the USA than anywhere else because we have a built-in policy of fierce independence and individuality. We don’t have communities around us, we don’t have social circles that will make us want to step up our game, we don’t have groups of people we care about telling us we’re wrong, we don’t have help from anywhere but inside our own heads. And if you’ve never been taught how your own thoughts can be wrong, if you’ve been fed the “special birthday boy” narrative for so long that you think highly of yourself, truth will seem toxic and poison because it will tell you things about yourself that will hurt. We don’t seek out pain as a species, we use pain a signal to avoid a thing.
You can google “KGB tactics for destabilizing nations” and spend weeks reading about what’s being done to us right now. But most people who read my message here will immediately feel that sneaking doubt or words of caution because “how do we even know what’s real anymore.”
They willing pay the extra funbucks tariff monies for the privilege and honor of shipping it to America (at cost) on a chance some red-hatted half-wit will waste it.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
Yeah this is grade school level reasoning telling you that it obviously doesn’t work that way.
A country’s aluminum exports for example aren’t extra aluminum they want to get rid of because it’s junking up their basements and America is 1800-got-junk taking it off their hands at cost. It’s a fucking series of material production companies in a different country. They too are based on capitalism and they too require profits in order to function.
Omg. We’ve come full circle now that smart people are telling idiots to do your own research…
And the people who voted for the orangetard will still be shafted by him and his mafia yet will continue to blame “obiden” for their economic woes. 🥱
Plot twist: the person writing this is President Musk and the employee he’s referring to is Trump.
“Doing your own research” means watching one or two YouTube videos or Facebook posts as far as these people are concerned. No thought for themselves, just parrot what you hear.
I don’t understand why this even needs to be researched. I’m no economist and I don’t know much about tariffs, but: costs more to get product to me for any reason = product costs me more. When has that ever not been the case? What am I missing?
Hey, you have to factor in things like market capture! They could be operating entirely at a loss just to ensure no other competitor can operate in the same market.
(/s because duh more cost = more price)
I would like to ask them what happens when taffis are increased to 100%? Does that mean producers are giving stuff for free?
And then what happen when the tarris are at 200%? Do they have to send stuff for free and pay on top of that?
One more thing - don’t tell them they are wrong. Tell them they were lied to
literally googling tariffs, brings you to a government page that lists tariffs, duties, and taxes under the same fucking definition.
How people like this DO NOT understand this shit, is beyond me. I can respect the humility in changing your position after being that stupid though, please, due your due diligence before mindlessly repeating the shit other people tell you, so you don’t look stupid.
Some people genuinely are fucking dumber than a rock
Real answer is in the last line there. If 60% of people we’re capable of doing their own research (and arriving at the correct answer) then we wouldn’t have anti-vaxers, flat-earthers and non-billionaire/non-bigot/non-christian nationalist republicans.
The problem lies where they “find” their “research” when they see the answer they want to see on social media rather than an actual study or any factual references.
“He was told the other countries pay the tariffs”, by a bunch of liars and he believed the liars.
The real hard part is it’s a partial truth.
The sellers do pay the tariffs, they just don’t talk about what that does to the prices.
The other problem is it cuts both ways, and a number of the idiots will say as long as you’re hurting them too, fine.
And then we have retaliatory tariffs, which also cut both ways.
IMHO, our biggest issue is we’ve been using cheap Chinese products and labor as a crutch instead of increasing wages. They’ve been able to cut down wages because Amazon, Temu and Shein have been providing products WAY WAY under marketable US made prices.
I recently learned that almost 1 in 5 Americans are illiterate.
How many Americans do you think are reasonably well educated, so that they would understand somewhat complex issues like tariffs? Or could seek out information if they didn’t understand?
Important note - literacy isn’t simply about being able to recognize and pronounce letters and words. A person can sound out every word in English, and understand what each word says, and still be illiterate if they cannot comprehend the message the words express together.
That’s where this illiteracy arises - it’s a failure of reading comprehension. In this light, I imagine many of us have attempted conversation online with somebody functionally illiterate.
Literacy is also about English (at least as commonly reported in the US). About 1/3 of functionally illiterate adults in the US are foreign born. I have never seen literacy stats that measure “literate in any language”.
“Are you saying 1 fouth of Americans are removed?” “Yeah at least 1 fourth.”
Im still surprised by that , the quality of education in my country is low but holly fuck im stunned by the lack of education in the states
It is highly regional, too.
Despite the existence of the Department of Education (which Trump is trying to dismantle), there is no national standard for education in the US. In general, each state is free to decide upon its own policies and standards.
Some states, such as those in the northeast, have very high-performing school systems. So when that “1 in 5 are illiterate” statistic is mentioned (I actually have not verified that number, just quoting the prior claim as an example), it would be caused by low-performing states where the situation is much more dire dragging down the national average.
Here’s a general look at quality of education in the US by state, though recommend folks look up their own numbers because I haven’t validated the numbers pulled in the article I grabbed this from.
It’s not a perfect divide between red states and blue states (Florida appears good, California less so, as an example), but in general we see the lower performing states located mainly in the South where the Republicans have more support. Basically, a less educated populace is easier to manipulate.
For extra fun, look into where school districts allocate their funding and how it relates to their rankings. Some of the worst performing public schools spend a lot more on athletics than they spend on anything else. It’s like they want to be professional athlete mills instead of functioning adult mills.
I was reading into this recently and the reason Florida is so high on these lists is because post-secondary education is very cheap. Their K-12 education is on the garbage end of the spectrum.
It’s by design.
I wrote a comment explaining Tariffs on a Fox News YouTube video a few weeks back, and the entire reply chain was people arguing with eachother about how tariffs work because “Trump said it’s a tax on other countries, so that’s how they work”
You’re doing god’s work in the hellish trenches
That’s front line in “Trench Crusade” level of trenches.
The whole thing was very purposefully talked about using the word “tariff” and never ever its synonym “import tax” exactly so that the traditional Fascist technique of redefining the meaning of words could be easily used: if all the Fascists’ speech had been about “import taxes” they would not have been able to leverage most people’s ignorance anywhere near this level because the very words “import” and “tax” were already reasonably well understood by most - unlike “tariff” - so the opinion makers would not have been able to miseducate their targets anywhere as easily.
I’m not saying that the people who fell for this are to be excused - if there is something important enough for you to put the effort into educating yourself, it’s Politics - I’m saying it’s understandable how so many were so easy to swindle.
