Election 2024 Part III: Out with the old!

[Snowygerry]

Who said there is no fun to be had in US politics

 

[uppi]

Not those kinds of tariffs, according to Trump. He claims a 100% tariff is inflationary, but a 2000% tariff makes Volkswagen drop whatever they are doing and move manufacturing plant to the USA within a very short time span, so that they can avoid the exorbitant tariff. Because no end consumer will realistically pay the 2000% markup. That's the way he explained his understanding of tariffs to the Bloomberg interviewer very recently. I think this strategy can work in several cases. EU has been bled by many things, for a number of years, particularly by the rising Chinese electro car industry. VW is one the brink of bankruptcy with close to $200 bn in debt. For two years VW has been falling in value on the stock exchange. So, it might turn out that instead of playing a 2000% tariff game it will indeed be much easier to just relocate a couple of factories to the USA. Trump is planning to use EU auto sector weakness against it, winning new factories for the USA, new work places in these factories.

You cannot just easily relocate a car factory, especially when you are strapped for cash. And Trump being president makes foreign investment in the US a risky business.

And even if VW decided to build those factories, the tariff would be inflationary until those factories run. If supply drops because VWs cannot be sold at any competitive price, prices for other cars will rise.

 

[Snowygerry]

But it all depends on US Americans buying the Volkswagens does it not ?

 

[Samson]

A neighbor owns one. You can actually see it dip half an inch when she sits in it. Her gigantic behind got a tiny Euro car.

I would like to know which model VW you consider tiny? I guess the golf, but that is not that small.

But it all depends on US Americans buying the Volkswagens does it not ?

It seems they do not sell so many. The below says only 3.75% of US sales.

Looking that up it struck me how the global car market has changed over the last few years (actually the 4 years 2018-2022). [EDIT] This is wrong, see below.

Spoiler Graphs :

 

[Voidwalkin]

I would like to know which model VW you consider tiny? I guess the golf, but that is not that small

I know next to nothing of cars. It just has Volkswagen on it. VW.

Only use my car for very long distance travel. Trips of 60 miles or more. I ride a bicycle for most everything beneath that, rain or snow.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I would like to know which model VW you consider tiny? I guess the golf, but that is not that small.

It seems they do not sell so many. The below says only 3.75% of US sales.

Looking that up it struck me how the global car market has changed over the last few years (actually the 4 years 2018-2022).

Spoiler Graphs :

While The first chart you posted is units sales of all kind of cars the second one is about electric cars only and sales share (don't know what that means exactly). This chart for 2023 shows things have not changed that much though:

Which comes to show Tesla is probably the most overvalued company in world history.

 

[Samson]

While The first chart is units sales of all kind of cars the second one is about electric cars only and sales share (don't know what that means exactly). This chart for 2023 shows things have not changed that much:

Which comes to show Tesla is probably the most overvalued company in world history.

Thanks for spotting that, I had missed it and got quite the wrong message.

 

[Gorbles]

Bluesky

bsky.app

Democrats Need To Compete In The New Media Landscape — Or Keep Paying The Price

As always happens after a bad election loss — and is compounded...

talkingpointsmemo.com

 

[Narz]

In States? What is this the 1800s? Just go on all the podcasts next time (not that they'll be a next time for Harris)

 

[Gorbles]

In States? What is this the 1800s? Just go on all the podcasts next time (not that they'll be a next time for Harris)

It says in the article (she allegedly underperformed least in battleground states), but don't let me posting articles interfere with your own personal truth.

EDIT

My bad, I read you as asking "in what states". You seem to be saying something else entirely.

 

[E.man]

I would like to know which model VW you consider tiny? I guess the golf, but that is not that small.

It seems they do not sell so many. The below says only 3.75% of US sales.

Looking that up it struck me how the global car market has changed over the last few years (actually the 4 years 2018-2022). [EDIT] This is wrong, see below.

Spoiler Graphs :

By US standards maybe a Tiguan?

 

[Joij21]

Not really. Not every eligible American/USian voted, so this isn't a clear view of what the country wants.

And this is a big problem, alongside all of the other big problems.

~150 million Usians vote. Almost as many don't vote. If 75 million voted for Trump, 260 or so didn't. (you have to subtract the underage from that number, but it is still pretty big.)

Well clearly that just means the population is okay enough either way it goes to not vote. Including okay with the idea of a Trump victory.

 

[Estebonrober]

This is true. But what other path is there if the US wants to have a policy of re-industralization? What possible path can be deployed that doesn't include also selective tariffs and an increase of the price of locally-produced goods?

You can argue about the exact shape of an industrial policy. But you cannot pretend that a country with a high cost of living can manufacture goods competitively with others with lower costs in an international market without tariffs. And you are experience enough to know that engineering follows industry, and science follows engineering. A de-industralized US will get more and more backwards in those fields over time. Selling "intellectual property" won't work because the rest of the world is quite capable of producing its own, that you very much. And there is nowhere to "climb in the value scale" when the base is thrown away. The whole thing crumbles without a foundation of material production. It can take a long, long time but it crumbles. Smaller countries can manage that decline better than larger ones, some (like the netherlands, for an example) can try speacializing in trade to compensate for deindustralization. The US is too big for that strategy. Its currentl specialization is "exporting dollars". The rest of the world is losing interest on the dollar. It would eventually, but certain recent moves (sanctions...) brought that moment forward.

The fact is that productivity in the US, mis-measured (over-estimanted!) though it is, has been declining since the great financial crisis. A make-believe economy where medical debt inflates GDP is just that, make believe. The hufe corporate bureaucracies spending their lives processing finance are not producting anything real. Your country is already in deep crisis, whatever the official statistics say. People there certainly know it.

So the possible paths to invert, arrest or at least slow decline involve reindustrialization by either:
- tariffs and increased costs of material goods
- lowering production sosts to again have competitive industries, for which it is also absolutely necessary to lower the cost of living (thereby wages) and the financial rents extracted on all kinds of industry

The first is much easier to do. The second is politically impossible to do without an outright revolution, and wholesale nationalization of healthcare, housing, education and finance. At the least.

If you ask me, I will of course tell you that ideally the US should go communist and make all those basics public goods, to be managed by the state or states, somehow to be chosen) and apportioned more or less equally to the population in need. But you know and I know that is not going to happen before a complete collapse of the current system.

So if the US wants any industry back, it will have to do tariffs as part of an industrial policy (part, won't work alone). Do not call ignorants to the voters who voted for the guy talking about tariffs. They see what is really happening and they're backing the only stategy they believe possible to at least attempt to adress it. I won't opine here whether it may ever work or not, that's make for a much longer argument, on economics and politics. What I am saying is that your fellow contrymen are not acting irrational. That majority was not acting on mis-information or against their own long-term interests. Those others who believe the economy is prosperous and nothing needs be done, the professional and manegarial classes who so far felt little pain, are the uninformed ones! Just because they had it good so far they think the decay won't thouch them in the future. They're wrong.

All this is true also of western of Europe, whose PMC have been aping the worse that the american ones did. Up to and including creating a phony "union" they would have be federal with a "constitution" (the people were smarter and voted it down), and copying political arrangements like the italians with their "partito democratico". The "western" countries most of us here live in, europeans and americans, have long been run by fools in their own bubble without a care for the future. When they "fail" they fail upwards or laterally, like the incapable former german fdefense minister promoted to EU commisssion president. They never get punished and collectively never learn anything. Why, theirs is the best possible world. Collectively, the people they rule seem at least recently more aware of the reality than the rulers. Despite massive doses of propaganda/circus deployed against the people daily on the media.

I think this is an instance of what Polanyi described as a society reacting in self-defence when capitalism is causing it to crumble. You got Trump, not an FDR. It will suck. But it's already part of the reaction. This reaction is always anti-iberal, because the rot is always politically caused by the liberal* I-got-mine-screw-you ideology.

*talking about the 19th century political liberalism, which can be pretty much summarized as the ideology capitalists had to create to face the new era of democratic politics.

I agree with most of this, but very few voters here, understand tariffs and most jsut thought it would not cost them anything where the reality is that all those phones and PCs are likely to double in price over a couple of years... thats just the gamer side of things, Trump is talking like he is throwing 60% tariffs around like frisbees at a hippy festival...

You know you and I disagree about the deconstruction of the bigger "tribes" back into tiny "cultural" blocks that segregate humans more from each other... its lead back to WW too imo.

 

[Estebonrober]

Their market is mainly Western Europe and China, how many US Americans here have ever driven a Volkswagen?

I own a Jetta atm... lol

 

[Birdjaguar]

Well clearly that just means the population is okay enough either way it goes to not vote. Including okay with the idea of a Trump victory.

You can try to spin it that way.

 

[EnglishEdward]

.. but very few voters here, understand tariffs and most just thought it would not cost them anything where the reality is that all those phones and PCs are likely to double in price over a couple o

That is your perception of, and it may be correct depending upon where your "here" is.

More generally I tend to disagree on this. I think that most voters know import tariffs will put up prices.
And many may think it a worthwhile price to try to reverse the de-industrialisation of western countries.

Where I live (UK), the problems are housing costs, utility costs, getting a job, not the cost of phones.

 

[innonimatu]

I agree with most of this, but very few voters here, understand tariffs and most jsut thought it would not cost them anything where the reality is that all those phones and PCs are likely to double in price over a couple of years... thats just the gamer side of things, Trump is talking like he is throwing 60% tariffs around like frisbees at a hippy festival...

You know you and I disagree about the deconstruction of the bigger "tribes" back into tiny "cultural" blocks that segregate humans more from each other... its lead back to WW too imo.

Imo true internationalism is done through good diplomacy between contries, and mutual help towards the good of all.

The US suffers two huge problems, and I only talked about one in the context of tariffs because I lacked (and lack now) the time to go into the other. But in short, it has:
- the liberal/capitalist problem - an oligarchy without a nation, "citizens of teh world" who expect to be able to move their assets intantly (all that liquidity provided by financial markets, how they love both these things so much) to another country. And thereforw will seer to exploit each and every place they can get their beaks into, iunto collapse. I'm going with the giagnt vampire quid image. Including the countries they originated in.
- the imperial bureaucracy problem, which could easily be seen in the terminal days of the British empire, but can be seen in pretty much every empire even before their end. A whole class of people whose careers and socila position depend on there being imperial insteretss to manage, on behalf of the state. These, unlike the first, care about having a strong state. But the kind of state they need is a huge drag on the national economy, and all the empire can provide is financing by, indirectly, forcing those foreign populations under empire p«mannagement to pay tribute.

The way these two combined produced what the US is now. Sorry, I will try to write something clearer about these things later. But what I wanted to say is that tariffs, simply, won't work for the US. To strenghten the state and salvage the imperial capabilities the US would have to put an end to the ease with which the capitalists can move their loot to other countries. But to do so would break the tribute system the empire depends on. And to quit the empire would put an end to the liberal ease to do ecconiomic hit-and-runs.
That is why US politics has been without a proposed solution for known structural problems. There must be people who see them. There is just to way to fix one thing without blowing the other. And everybody in a position of power has been in either the capitalist caste or the imperial caste. Each caste knows it's running out of time but can't save itself by sacrifing the other. A change can't come from these two groups.

 

[aelf]

More generally I tend to disagree on this. I think that most voters know import tariffs will put up prices.
And many may think it a worthwhile price to try to reverse the de-industrialisation of western countries.

Oh my sweet summer child.

 

[Zardnaar]

Oh my sweet summer child.

I think that's the general gist of what Trump's saying. At least what sone people ate hearing.

I'm not sure they realize prices will go up and if they're willing to pay them.

I do remember consumer goods cost a lot more but housing and the basics were comparatively cheap.

Personally I think luxuries like phones could cost more if the basics are fixed. I don't think Trump will fix things but he's at least talking about it.

And yeah it was the Democrats who signed Nafta.

With Trump don't listen to what he says. Pay attention to what he's talking about. Specifics don't matter eg build that wall.

 

[Gori the Grey]

With Trump don't listen to what he says. Pay attention to what he's talking about.