Ask someone in a third world country to do some basic addition and they can do it pretty easily. Ask the average American, and they can’t. We’ve become dependent on calculators. AI may be like this for a much broader range of thinking and we risk turning ourselves into morons.
The China shock was actually quite minor compared to the size of the US population. Most lost jobs are due to automation, not China. Tariffs don’t solve this. Dumb tariffs, like Trump’s tariffs, make it worse.
The French riots started with typical left wing protesters that legitimately protest. Black bloc anarchists took advantage to skillfully attack police and other locations. As the protests dissipated, there were people everywhere, and it is hard for police to be everywhere at once. Once a level of chaos starts, young hoodlums realize they can get away with shit, and they come in to loot. They loot because they are poor, because looting is fun, and possibly because they are angry about something ideologically.
The protestors are mostly white, and so are the black bloc, but the hoodlums contain many minorities.
Many of these hoodlums were born in France. They were the children of immigrants, not recent immigrants. To the extent that they are angry, it is about historical oppression, failed integration, and anti-colonialist ideology.
The police were undermanned because they underestimated what would happen. A few weeks ago Paris had 15k cops when the Pope visited. For these protests, Paris had 5k.
The far right just want to blame recent immigration, which had nothing to do with the protest nor violence. The left wants to pretend like immigration and race played no role.
The level of crime, breaking into stores, breaking into residences, rioting, destruction…was really bad. Way worse than recent comparisons.
France needs to make serious fiscal cuts, but the people would likely rebel if they tried it…so the country is kind of fucked, and if a political solution is not found, eventually the bond market will sink France.
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.
CNN brings fake experts who are more dishonest propagandists than serious intellectuals just so they can have a conservative side in their 5-minute debates.
The Census Bureau is a respected data institution, and the Trump administration has used think tank hacks to produce an obviously bad report under the Census Bureau’s name. This is a dangerous corruption of our data agencies that we depend on to understand our country.
Trump repeatedly said that he would lower or eliminate the debt. He did the opposite.
Trump thinks a trade deficit means the US lost. This is false. Americans agreeing to buy goods from another country is a win for both sides.
Trade enlarges the pie, creating more total goods than we’d have without it. Consumers count too, and they benefit by buying foreign products, so do companies using foreign inputs to create goods and services in America.
The US needs to maintain its ability to produce military necessities, but the administration’s approach is to treat deficits generally as a lost. They broadly attack bilateral deficits without a sensible strategy–this hurts most people.
Lower prices aren’t necessarily “cheap”. They mean more. You can buy more; American businesses can produce more.
A lot of manufacturing jobs aren’t even good jobs anymore.
For a long time, a lot of people who really just wanted a smaller government pretended to care about debt (or fooled themselves into thinking they cared about debt).
Three quarters of US government spending make the federal government an insurance company with an army. As a percentage of the total spending, waste fraud and abuse is very small. DOGE was a failure because it didn’t understand the US federal government. If you want to significantly reduce spending, you have to stop sending Americans checks (like Medicare and Social Security), or/and have to weaken the military, although the check cutting part is much bigger than the military spending part.
Republican politicians used to lie, or be misinformed, by saying that tax cuts pay for themselves; now they lie, or are misinformed, by saying Trump won the 2020 election (he did not). It’s hard to make a tough compromise under such politics.