[pupperino]

As a Latin American, I can't help but buy the American Exceptionalism thesis, and seeing you guys in this situation humanizes you so much. The US has such a strong bureaucracy and high bar for competence that you generally lack the immune system required for detecting con artists and social climbers - at least in politics. Ask a random Argentinian or Brazilian what politicians Trump reminds them of, and you'll get a seemingly endless lists of genuinely stupid, borderline sociopath populists. Follow up with a question on what are the consequences of having arbitrary, ever-changing tariffs on most goods for the purpose of industrialization, and you'll get a laugh, then a sad face.

Import-substitution is bad for econ 101 reasons that most people who have an axe to grind against Dems would've been absolutely capable of grasping only a few years ago. Now, it seems so many are willing to turn off a part of their brains for this short-sighted wishful thinking. "Well, the official narrative is that we're doing this to get manufacturing back, so let's wait and see" is something most people would immediately perceive as bs if a Dem was sitting in the Oval Office. Seeing a politician campaign on a stupid platform, and then getting surprised he actually shoots himself in the foot spending political capital pursuing is also very Latin American.

The good part is that the soon-to-be-coming recession the federal government just fabricated out of thin air is fully self-inflicted, and therefore somewhat easy to fix. The bad part is you have (at least) 4 more years of this lunacy, so it might take a while.

[shantara]

As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe, I had a completely identical reaction. We had so many similar populists and idiots in power, one cannot help but recognize the obvious pattern.

Many people in America seem to be convinced that their involvement in the democracy ended after voting in the elections, and cannot conceptualize how to deal with an adversarial government. The scale of the protests and pushback Trump administration has received is laughably small compared to the scale of America as a country. People are lacking a basic political immune system, or even a sense of self preservation.

And the most puzzling part is that the entire situation is 100% self-inflicted. It usually takes a major war or a sustained external campaign to inflict the kind of damage Trump administration has done to the country in such a short period of time.

[20after4]

There has been a sustained campaign of propaganda, stoking division and culture wars. There has also been a sustained class warfare and concentration of wealth at the very top as most people can't seem to get ahead. Both political parties sold out their constituents a long time ago and the supreme court has been stacked with several criminally corrupt and treacherous villains.

[smeg_it]

I'm definitely no economist but the current administration doesn't seem to listen to them anyway. To me, this is going to be an extremely high tax on lower and middle income people, as well as small businesses. Most of us buy Chinese products all the time or, at least, ones that have Chinese in the supply chain somewhere. I know there has been a trade imbalance and maybe tariffs is a tool that could have been used, but I learned in high school(maybe in collage too) that it's most effective when you present a united front with other allies. Unfortunately, we really don't have allies like we used to. The current admin has destroyed, or at least highly eroded trust and partnerships we had in the past. By attacking almost every country, we stand truly alone. There was an article about Vietnam recently which explained that because we have/are fighting with them too, they have great leverage to get what they want by leveraging the U.S. against China. To me, we've just given away all our leverage by not being trustworthy and attacking all other countries at once (figuratively, for now at least). I'm simply not hopeful for our future from a majority of citizens point of view. For our GDP per capita, we do absolutely horrible, in what seems like most international indexes, comparatively. The areas we do "well" are not good ones. Like number of our citizens incarcerated. I think we beat China, Russia, and most every country in that. From the perspective of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", I think we've failed. I don't know, exactly, but from what I've read our Cost/Benefit ratio on healthcare is one of the most dismal in the world. We don't rate well, in almost any category that is a positive for our populous, especially considering our GDP per capita.