When it comes to the federal debt and deficit, the American voting public are children who want: candy, sugar soda, to stay up all night, and to skip school, and their politicians tell them: Yes. The politicians who have said they would prioritize debt and deficit who then got into office, didn’t fulfill those promises. And when we do reduce parts of spending, we do it on those who most need the government spending.
15 to 30 percent of grocery costs are diesel fuel. Groceries are moved with vehicles using diesel fuel.
By the end of the Biden administration, the US was approaching a full soft landing, but Trump ruined it with government spending, tariffs, war, and strict immigration policies.
An Iphone isn’t a tech product, it’s a luxury product. Owning an Apple means you should reproduce, owning an Android means your DNA should not move on.
Normally, if a group was taking territory to help them limit traffic in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait while also successfully striking an important Saudi pipeline, the US would intervene militarily to keep the oil flowing. That the US so far has chosen not to directly intervene, shows what hectic times we are in with the, so far, failed war in Iran.
Trump is hoping that an agreement with the Houthis where only Saudi tankers are affected will hold.
Saudi Arabia is under attack, where are its treaty allies Turkey and Pakistan?
Trump appears to be importing a bunch of potentially unsafe meat from Brazil based on a closed door meeting with a mega donor, without much serious consideration from meat safety experts or the economic impacts.
In interviews, AfD supporters spout straight up Russian fake news propaganda. Others have the same complaints heard by Trump supporters in the US.
Interviewer interviews AfD supporters and asks them what about your life personally is going wrong that makes you like the AfD, and they talk about immigrants, the EU, etc, but when he asks again about their life personally, they have nothing to say. Another interviewer had the same experience with Trump supporters–they rave about whatever concern is in the right-wing zeitgeist at the moment, but have nothing to say about how their life is bad that makes them want to vote for Trump.
Back to Germany, people often are concerned about immigrant crime, but outside of a few highly publicized attacks, these attacks are rare.
Interviewees are straight up ignorant about the horrible things Hitler did.
Some economists think tariffs never make sense. Others, think that with strategy, thinking carefully about where to apply them, to which countries, on which items, what the different impacts will be, and informing and working with your allies…then tariffs could be a net good despite the costs. That’s not what we got from Trump.
With Trump, we got hectic tariffs that require a daily chart to manage them all. It doesn’t make sense to build a factory based on a short-term tariff that could change at any moment due to a variety of reasons.
Putting tariffs on every country cuts your leverage over any particular one country.
If the goal is to get specific industries back in the US, then you want highly targeted tariffs.
Liberation day tariffs were based on a simple formula and they were absurd on their face. The administration just didn’t do their homework when coming up with tariffs.
Trump ignored free trade agreements that the US had made with countries.
Trump enacts tariffs for a variety of personal reasons that don’t make sense, like tariffing Canada for fentanyl, even though US fentanyl mostly comes through Mexico. If I’m another country watching erratic tariffs, I don’t really know what to do to avoid tariffs, and I’m going to start planning with other countries how to counter this erratic country called the Untied States of America.
Argentina raising their emphasis on the Falkland islands is caused primarily by two things: domestic politics where Melei wants to look tough compared to his political opponents, and Trump indicating that he may more support Argentina’s claim compared to America’s previous position. Trump makes such statements, seemingly not realizing the real world consequences they may have.
By making it extremely hard to gain standing, the Supreme Court has ruled that a president can blatantly act illegally and steal Congress’s power. The Court has deeply damaged a basic tenet of the Constitution by allowing a president to use governmental power in cases where he clearly has no such power. If the president wants to do something outside his core powers, he must have Congress authorize that power and spending. The Constitution is black and white on this, but most “Conservatives” on the Supreme Court don’t care.
The Golden Dome is a ridiculous project that would require the US converging the entire world in low-orbit satellites filled with missiles, meaning the US would be holding a loaded gun over every country on Earth that would potentially counter a country’s second strike capability, giving them the incentive to strike first with numbers that would overwhelm the golden dome. It’s not a realistic solution in the first place, if built it likely wouldn’t work as it’d have to hit every launched missile or missile site before a successful nuke hit the US where even a few nukes hitting the US is devastating, and if everything worked super well, global tensions would rise as the US would be pointing low-orbit missiles at every country on Earth.
Before becoming president, Trump regularly said the US should have taken Iraq’s oil, ignoring the sovereignty of Iraq and proposing that the US just take other countries’ national resources by force.
It would have been wrong to dismiss comments like this by taking Trump seriously not literally. Trump literally meant that, and as president he has implemented similar policies by using military force to remove Venezuela’s former leader and actively trying to take a percentage of Venezuela’s oil for the US.
Getting Venezuela’s oil production up and running will take a tremendous amount of investment, and its unlikely that right-minded investors will invest in such a thing because it is too much money and risk if political winds change in the US or Venezuela. This means, it will likely require taxpayer money or the president strong-arming US companies.