via @scaggs, watch techbros cure the trade deficit by insisting surplus countries use the trade proceeds to… buy US debt.
“So basically… buy our stuff, or buy our debt. Either way, you're paying up.”
https://xcancel.com/seanheilweil/status/1909590601386930427
brilliant disruptive novel ideas from our tech sector.
“A trillion comments have been wasted accusing the wrong people of Trump derangement syndrome. The real TDS afflicts those who keep seeing a rational actor, or an economic chess game, where none exists.” @edwardluce https://www.ft.com/content/9f5189b0-4857-4b7f-a8c4-5b6d77ece5e3 ht @antoniofatas
yesterday: “i read the news today, oh boy.”
today: “i read the news today, oh boy.”
tomorrow: “i read the news today, oh boy.”
“Kennedy and his nonprofit sued to prevent the Covid vaccines from ever coming to market. Those vaccines saved 3 million lives. If Kennedy’s lawsuit had been successful — or if in 2020 he held the position he holds now — the additional death toll from Covid would have been larger than the population of Chicago. This is what’s at stake if another pandemic hits.” @radleybalko https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/profiles-in-poltroonery-senator-bill ht @marick
i feel like Roberts + Barrett know the Court is violating core values they pretend to share, but don’t want to actually thwart the insurrection. so they take turns ineffectually joining dissents (while the other helps plunge the knife). they can present themselves as one of the good ones, i tried!
miserable.
from Justice Jackson dissenting https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a931_2c83.pdf
Text: At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong. See, e.g., Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944). With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today's Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.
@landley yes. definitely. the whole long-term thought exercise here is conceding the probably false point MAGA-ists pretend to believe (that all this mayhem will lead to long-term gain) and showing that what's been done is still dumb. in reality, the likelihood of long-term gain from this is low, and hysteresis/scarring is yet another reason it is unlikely and likely to deflect downward our long-term path, even relative to more autarkic policy if it had been sanely implemented.
@landley yes, but unlike sales taxes tariffs are a discriminatory tax on consumption. so they upend patterns and plans much more than, say, imposing a universal VAT would have.
this is such a delicious and true point.
https://xcancel.com/PhoenixWrightA1/status/1907661609717346468
ht @justinwolfers.bsky.social and the left-right-and-center podcast
Tweet from A. Ham, @PhoenixWrightA1: It's essentially Critical Trade Theory. Any trade imbalance between two countries is de facto evidence of systemic unfair trade practices.
@llimllib it seems like these two possibilities should be mutually exclusive, but there is a kind of quantum superposition of stupidity and canny malignancy to this administration, so i'll go with both.
Suppose Trump had crashed the stock market by sharply raising the corporate tax rate. In a certain sense, "wealth" would have been destroyed, but our actual prosperity would not be impaired. 1/
It would have been a purely distributional change, stockholders would have gotten poorer but the "pie" we share would have been unchanged. 2/
Highly disruptive tariff moves are not like that. The stock market is declining because long-term economic plans, on the production side as well as the sales side, have been upended. Firms that would have been productive will disappear. 3/
We will in aggregate be poorer. The change is not merely distributional. 4/
In the long-term, of course, if the policy environment stabilizes, um, somewhere, new production arrangements will be planned, and it's possible we find a new equilibrium more prosperous than the one we left, short-term pain for long-term gain. We have no evidence this is likely, but sure. 5/
But even if so, there was no need to so sharply destroy in-pipeline production. We could have telegraphed and gradually imposed over five years a more autarkic trade policy, if that's what we want. 6/
We'd have achieved the same putative long-term gain without throwing much of the existing pipeline and several years of aggregate prosperity, in the US and around the world, into the wood chipper. /fin
proletarianize the plutocrats.
i feel like upscale television is moving on from antiheroes to good people caught in overwhelmingly tragic situations.
@BenRossTransit I agree that just emphasizing the positive program that you share is better than trying to confront the crazies in another faction. If you are close to people in the other faction, you can privately encourage some housekeeping. But attempts at public cross-factional discipline often result in splitting apart the coalition.
@BenRossTransit i agree with respect to the crazies of your own faction. but be very careful, if you try to go after the crazies of a faction in coalition that is not your own, that you don’t slip into conflating their crazies with their faction. that’s a trick (of your opponents), to provoke interfactional warfare by getting “crazies” in each faction to start a food fights in which each faction slips into viewing the other in caricature.
a solidaristic tactic might be to just let the stupidest or most hurtful things said by the most ridiculous members of groups you mean to be in coalition with just wash off your backs rather than making a big deal of it. 1/
don’t imagine your opponents don’t encourage and finance the worst and most belligerent elements of every group that might join in coalition against them hoping you will take the bait. don’t. /fin
maybe we elected a new George III to remind ourselves why we did a revolution.
@VeroniqueB99 @admitsWrongIfProven@qoto.org 😜🧁
is “cringe” cringe now?
the Republicans are so concerned about election integrity, except where it’s actually threatened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/trump-loomer-haugh-cyberattacks-elections.html
ht @Noupside @thinkyparts.bsky.social
