“Sanctions are a complicated bureaucratic knot to untangle. Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned on X that “people in [Trump’s] own administration are trying to stop it or slow it down severely.” And a Syrian government minister tells Reason that a U.S. delegation has come with a set of “requests” for Syria to fulfill.
The Caesar Civilian Protection Act, passed after Assad had fought a civil war against rebels to a standstill, punishes foreign investment in reconstructing areas under the Syrian government’s control. There is also a general U.S. trade embargo on Syria passed by executive order. And Sharaa himself is a designated terrorist because of his past fighting for Al Qaeda, which he later violently turned against.”
“A one-two punch from the United States risks shattering the already fragile trade war truce between Washington and Beijing, with Chinese tech companies and students both dealt shock blows by the Trump administration”
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“The first hit came in a Financial Times report on Wednesday that said moves by US President Donald Trump had effectively cut off some American companies from selling software used to design semiconductors to China.”
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“But it was the second blow from the White House that landed right in the living rooms of Chinese families, with US State Secretary Marco Rubio saying the US will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students” – especially those in critical fields or with connections to the Chinese Communist Party.”
“Stable power is retiring faster than its replacements can show up—stuck in queues, lawsuits, or supply chain hell. We’ve spent a decade subsidizing volatility, penalizing reliability, and crossing our fingers that storage will arrive on time. Meanwhile, the slow, steady, heavy machines that actually hold the grid together are being dismantled.”
“Americans today are vastly better off than they were 50 years ago. After adjusting for inflation, household incomes have risen by about 50 percent—more than double what raw census data suggest. Unemployment remains near historic lows. Over the past three decades, the private service sector has created about 40.5 million net new jobs, many in high-wage, high-skill fields like health care, finance, and professional services.
Meanwhile, U.S. industrial output has surged. It’s now at its all-time high but with fewer workers thanks to stunning productivity gains. As economist David Autor notes, the so-called hollowing out of the middle class involves many workers moving up into higher-skill, higher-paying occupations.
None of this means that the labor-force detachment problem should be ignored. It does mean that the story is more complicated than Trump’s “China stole our jobs” narrative suggests.”
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“The deeper problem exposed by the China shock wasn’t trade—it was America’s fading economic dynamism. In past generations, when industries declined, workers moved. They retrained. They found new opportunities. Today, many displaced workers simply stay put even as jobs emerge elsewhere.
Government policy plays an enormous role. Over time, policymakers have built a dense thicket of regulations and disincentives that trap people where they are and discourage adaptation.
Restrictive zoning and land-use legislations have sent housing costs in high-wage cities through the roof, pricing out workers who would otherwise migrate toward opportunity. Economists estimate that even modest housing deregulation would allow more Americans to live and work where their skills are most valued.
Another culprit is occupational licensing. Today, nearly one-third of U.S. workers must obtain some kind of government license to do their jobs, up from just 5 percent in the 1950s. These barriers disproportionately affect low-income workers and create huge hurdles to interstate mobility, effectively locking people into stagnant local economies.
Then there’s Social Security Disability Insurance. Reforms in the 1980s expanded eligibility with broader, more subjective criteria. Today, many prime-age men outside the labor force report being disabled even as overall health has improved and physically demanding jobs have declined. The effect is less labor-force reentry—and, thus, worse long-term prospects—for workers on the margin.”
“The US is a country of 340 million people, 71 interstate highways, more than 5,000 public airports, and currently no high-speed railways.
Yet with two high-speed rail (HSR) projects now under construction, and others planned, is the US finally on track to start catching up with the fast trains seen in China, Japan and Europe?”
Dollar dominance is a benefit to Americans. Even individuals could borrow cheaper because the U.S. dollar was the global reserve currency. The dollar losing its value hurts this benefit. Trump’s tariffs weakened U.S. dollar dominance by losing trust in the United States as a responsible leader.
The U.S. didn’t primarily lose some manufacturing due to the strength of the dollar.
U.S. problems are worse than just Trump. There are a lot of bad political ideas on both sides.
Asking what Xi wants is the wrong question because the appetite grows in the eating. Even if Xi just wants to dominate East and Southeast Asia right now, once China has gained that, their appetite will grow and they will want more.