I'm sure the tariffs don't help, but might the fact that they're asking for Half A Trillion United States Dollars also have something to do with it? They already had one of the biggest funding rounds in history and that was an order of magnitude smaller than this, now we're talking about capital on the scale of upper-end national GDPs for a company which still isn't profitable and has no real moat to speak of. They may as well cut to the chase and ask for all of the money in the world.
To be clear, I'm pretty sure the half-trillion figure is the projected combined investment between SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. Not public, US tax-payer dollars.
If that's not what you meant my apologies. Reason I'm quick to point this out is I think some of the writing/headlines around are suggestive of this misconception.
> Investors are also growing wary of an overcapacity spike. As Bloomberg notes, tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon have adjusted their data center strategies, in some cases pulling back on construction projects.
Is "overcapacity" concern here bundling up all the other effects of disruptions by the current administration?
And are there significant concerns about Stargate and OpenAI specifically, separate from those traceable to the administration or economy?
Even before Trump's trade war, there was some pullback there. I'd assume that some of the hyperscalers are just getting nervous that the bubble may have peaked.
> Per an analysis by TD Cowen cited by Bloomberg, hiked prices for server racks, cooling systems, chips, and other components could contribute to overall build cost rises of 5-15% on average.
I can agree that infrastructure generally has much lower margins than software businesses, but I don't know of any mega-projects that wouldn't turn out costlier during construction, and 15% is hardly something that stopped them.
We, as in the rest of the world, need to get off our butts and take advantage of this self-own, forced-error of a presidency. It's the perfect time to build industry outside of the USA which has shown itself to be a bad partner, unreliable and willing to turn on all of us in the span of a few weeks in order to right perceived wrongs that may or may not exist (more likely the latter than former).
In the EU it just feels like big beaurocracy gets to make all the big decisions about doing things like this and small and medium orgs can't spring up to go against stumbling entities like this because we're taxed out of the wealth needed to do so.
I don’t agree with this sentiment. Over the past few years I’ve seen a lot of companies switch to EU based alternatives already because of the data regulations. This is a second wave. And now nobody trusts the US anymore the rest will follow.
What they don't have is an appetite for risk. You could lower taxes to zero, but you'd still not get the level of speculative investment in the US without cultivating a much larger appetite for risk. Similar issue exists in places like Japan. Investor classes that are, at the median, more conservative than they are in the US. So in the US we "lose" bigger, but we also "win" bigger.
(Of course all of this was pre-Trump. Now, I'm not sure there is enough certainty out there for even the big risk takers. But, historically, we in the US have been more risk-phillic.)
I wonder if paradoxically less certainty could lead to more risk taking. If the secure sources of wealth starts becoming shaky looking at other risky options starts feeling less scary (or equally scary/uncertain as the previously stable one). If there's already an easy path to winning on the other hand pre-trump, why take the risky one.
Problem is, in the EU, the secure sources of income are not becoming more shaky looking. At the same time though, in the EU, the risky stuff is becoming a bit less risky looking. The EU is clearly energized to decouple itself from US tech, defense, etc etc. It's probably a good time to look into those kinds of enterprises if you're in the EU.
In the US it's different. The secure sources are actually looking more secure. At the extreme you have just parking gargantuan amounts of money in TIPS right? I mean interest rates have gone up to even better compensate that kind of risk free behavior. Meanwhile the risky stuff in the US is a bit more risky due to the uncertainty.
Hopefully, Trump's people will convince him of the folly of the approach he's taking currently. If not, yeah, not sure? Uncharted waters really. I don't think anyone really knows what will happen.
You have plenty of time. Even if Trump leaves office right now, his damage will last for decades (eg look at the supreme court). And speaking as someone on the ground, ordinary Americans are very far from learning the right lessons. They'll just elect someone like him again after 1 democrat tries to clean up the mess.
It's notable that while the initial announcement promised an "immediate" investment of $100 billion, nearly 4 months later SoftBank "has yet to develop a financing template or begin detailed discussions with potential backers."
I'm sure tariffs are partly to blame, but it seems criminally misleading to be nowhere near ready to provide that $100 billion.
If you have the best foundational research, but then find yourself blocked by compute, that’s a bad place to be in.
At the moment compute is a constraint too (at least for the smaller shops, maybe not OpenAI!)
We don’t necessarily know that the next AI breakthrough will need less compute either! A breakthrough that gives 5x performance for 20x training compute and 2x inference cost would still be a giant breakthrough and need a lot of hardware! Although this sort of breakthrough is unlikely, and it’s likely to be smaller steps forward - but I think it might be the case that models continue to get more computationally expensive even if there are breakthroughs that make models more efficient because we will want higher capability.
I think it's often been shown that constraints are what brings out true breakthroughs, so I'm skeptical of scaling up throw brute force - to me it seems like a lazy way out that will prevent you from challenging your base assumptions and figuring out better ways of doing things.
But those damnable universities are just left wing brainwashing facilities, very little room for profit there. Cut their funding, educated people don't vote right /s
Who can act surprised? "Sparks of AGI" is what, 2 years old now? Meanwhile Masayoshi Son is promising AI "10,000 times smarter” than humans in a decade. It's a ruse by hardware manufacturers to bolster sales of niche IP. It's dumbfounding that corporate America, much less American politics, fell for the scheme.
Projects like this serve to create unattainable goals that practically hand peer powers a victory. Not because these peers are more powerful, but because they can define what they want and work towards a real goal and not handwavy vaporware nonsense.
They're gonna say this at a time where people are starting to question how farther we can scale hardware with the scientific knowledge that we've had? It doesn't even take researchers to know that GPU capabilities aren't scaling as much as it used to. And then what's clearer lately is that it seems hardware scaling isn't helping AI companies as much as it used to anymore.
Things that have so many question marks like that should be treated with a lot more pragmatism. But that's certainly not a language the Silicon Valley folks speak. Everybody's promising the next iPhone moment anytime they bring something out.
“I'm not going to agree with [Trump] on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” - Altman
Probably should have stuck to his guns on Trump. Trump, serial liar and king of fraud, lies to these guys one time and they spontaneously develop amnesia and praise him. Naive and hilarious.
Stuff like this is a reminder that none of this is strategic and well thought out. It's just reactive, tactical, lurching from one self made crisis to the next. From doubling down to then folding on his own unilaterally imposed tariff levels while getting nothing in return.. it's all reaction.
If it was well thought out we wouldn't be tariffing intermediary goods and inputs to domestic production. If any of this sticks at anything like the levels imposed, we will have shortages and job losses more than we have any impactful move of manufacturing jobs back to US>
It's almost as if we shouldn't have one person arbitrarily raising taxes on a whim.
Hell, it's almost as if taxation without the ability of the people being taxed to give their input on said taxation is the whole reason the US exists in the first place.
Fun fact: That slogan is only half of the story. Smuggling was prolific in those days, with John Hancock and Samuel Adams were among them. They were involved with smuggling cheaper Dutch tea and the Sons of Liberty were protecting their own economic interests. Aka those taxes would ruin their smuggling business because the Tea Act of 1773 would let the British sell their tea for cheaper than the smugglers, and the protests were because that threatened their ability to sell their smuggled, but more expensive Dutch Tea.
The owner of two of the three ships was William Rotch, a Nantucket-born colonist and merchant.
"the British Parliament decreed that any American vessel selling goods in London had to purchase tea as part of its return freight to the colonies. Thus, the captains of the Rotch-owned Dartmouth and Beaver dutifully loaded consignments of tea for their journeys back to Boston."
The Rotches absorbed the loss of 2/3 of the £10,000 cargo, however due to their position in the whale oil monopoly, they were unpopular in the colonies and received little sympathy. The war destroyed much of their business and wealth, and they weren't welcome back home in Nantucket, where the community felt they were abandoned.
The colonies were Crown businesses. A clearer reason for the war was the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It reserved land west of the Appalachians for native peoples.
I don't think it's called smuggling if you're paying taxes on it. If anything, actual smugglers would've supported the taxes because it gives them an edge over legal importers
They worried the legal (and taxed, and higher quality) British tea would be, despite the tax, cheaper than the smuggled (untaxed) Dutch tea, which would destroy their smuggling businesses.
> A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies.
> Reducing or eliminating the duties paid when the tea was landed in Britain (if it was shipped onward to the colonies) would further lower the final cost of tea in the colonies, undercutting the prices charged for smuggled tea. Colonists would willingly pay for cheaper Company tea, on which the Townshend tax was still collected, thus legitimizing Parliament's ability to tax the colonies.
How was smuggled tea more expensive? The shipping costs for both products would be the same (right?), so the price differentiator should be the presence/absence of additional government charges.
Unless smuggled tea had to accept more losses due to…piracy?
Smuggling adds costs, and the Dutch/British product weren't identical in quality either. The Tax Act reduced the tax/cost burden (removing a requirement to go through London-based middlemen first, and lessening import duties) on legitimate tea.
> The shipping costs for both products would be the same (right?)
Not at all. The risk of seizure (of both cargo and ship) drives it way up.
Economies of scale can make a legal product much cheaper even with heavy taxation. See cigarettes for example. No one runs an illicit tobacco farm in the US because you just can't match the scale to make it profitable. Similar things happening with cannabis now; in parts of the west coast supply is so high that it would be more profitable for small time operators to grow heirloom tomatoes at this point.
Cigarettes is exactly what I was thinking of for comparison. Most of the price is sin taxes. Remove those and the actual product costs nearly nothing to make. Sales of loose cigarettes is still a thing today where people are moving them from reservations or foreign countries.
> Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.
That's not the case for cigarettes. If it were anything like that percentage, you can bet the Feds would care more.
Really the cause was the Indemnity Act and the Townshend Acts of 1766/67.
Before '67, England paid very high taxes on tea imported from China (>25%). So tea smuggling was rampant - mostly in England. But the Dutch government didn't charge any tax on the imported tea sold in the Netherlands, so that was smuggled into America.
Then in '67, the Indemnity Acts basically removed the high taxes on the tea sold in Britain. But this was followed up by the Townshend Acts, which added more taxes - specifically to the Colonies.
As you can imagine, this seems a little fucked up.... except the Colonies were already paying practically zero taxes. To the British, it was the Colonies who had been getting away with highway robbery, and these new taxes leveled the playing field.
But of course the Colonists didn't want to pay taxes. So they claimed this was unfair because they had no representation. The representation wasn't really the crux of the issue though... it was just that they wanted to weasel out of paying taxes. Only a representative in Parliament could levy taxes.
The thing is.... by this time, the Colonists had already set up a sort of shadow-Parliament. They had British representatives who were supposed to be telling the Colonists what to do.... but the Colonists basically just ignored them. By the time of the Tea Party, the British had already lost control of governance.
After several years of boycotting tea to protest the Townshend Acts, the acts were repealed in 1770, except for taxes on Tea. Yet they began importing tea again, mostly to Boston, as New York and Philadelphia were still mostly smuggling tea.
The East India Company was undergoing severe hardship during this time, for a couple different reasons. But basically they had too much tea and not enough people were buying it. So in Britain they returned the duty to the company that had been charged to them. They still needed a way to get the Colonies to buy this tea, rather than the smuggled tea. So in 1773, the Tea Act was passed. It granted the Company a monopoly on imported tea, cut out the middlemen, and added a tax due on delivery. This made the tea cheaper than smuggled tea, but added a 3 pence surcharge for each pound of tea.
One of the big purposes of all these taxes was actually for the Colonial Governors to receive their pay from British Parliament, so that they'd be loyal to Britain instead of the Colonists. Several Parliamentarians warned that these extra taxes wouldn't be accepted by the Colonists, but they were overruled. Without Lord North being a dickhead and insisting on the taxes, we wouldn't have our own country now.
So basically the reason for the Tea Party was 1) years of resistance to taxes (even though Colonists basically hadn't been paying any tax), 2) they wanted to have more Colonial control over Governors, 3) it took away money from both smugglers and legal colonial importers.
But there were other reasons too, like the fact that at this time in history, the British army was incredibly weak, with something like 40,000 soldiers total, due to recent wars nearly bankrupting the country and diminishing their fighting force. The Colonists had been calling the Empire's bluff for years, doing largely whatever they wanted. The Tea Party was a big middle finger, and the British had to respond, and so led to the eventual confrontation.
Sort of. Campaigning on vague slogans about something doesn't mean you have democratic legitimacy to avoid the whole process by which that something is supposed to get turned into law.
Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
> Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
I agree with this statement and have commented as much elsewhere, but Congress could rein in Trump's tariff-setting ability any time they wanted to, and they have very explicitly chosen not to.
I agree with the parent comment - people in the US very clearly voted for this, buyer's remorse be damned.
Part of that is Congresspeople receiving retaliation and death threats from MAGA, which is not really how democracies are supposed to work, and generally not a valid mandate the voting public is able to produce.
Except that the whole US system is binary, and your vote is too - you get to vote either 1 or 0, with no more nuance than that.
So technically yes, people voted for this, but also many were forced to because it came in a bundle which was the only way they could vote for their non-negotiables such as gun rights and abortion restrictions.
Completely agree, but I haven’t really heard much about anyone running on a platform of fixing the voting system. It’s fairly straightforward to at least improve, tons of countries have many different parties with all sorts of nuance.
Having said that, Republicans as a whole got a large number of votes, and they’re all well known to be Trump bootlickers that twice failed to convict him after impeachment, so it really shouldn’t come as a shock that he’s doing bad stuff.
There’s some point where Americans just have to take responsibility for their actions or inactions, and I think we’re well past that point.
Maybe so, but from the outside voting as an American looks stifling. I wouldn't want to vote for either of the two parties, although both hold some positions that I agree with more than the other.
Either of the two parties promoting voting reform would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
I don't know if America will ever be able to transition to proportional representation because of entrenched interests. But here in New Zealand it was having a trump-like character, Robert Muldoon, in control of our economy last century that led to MMP.
Having a single deranged (and occasionally drunk) person micromanaging the economy, arbitrarily imposing tariffs and trading rules and imposing price controls and freezing wage rises made people realize that we wanted our king to be symbolic and not interfering with our freedoms.
Revenue raising is supposed to be the purview of Congress, mainly because it's best for everyone involved if it's a known policy and not subject to personal whims. We're now seeing the effects of that; it's impossible to make good-faith business investments if you don't know if the investment will be heavily taxed a week after the first hires are made.
As for whether or not the people of the US got what they asked for, in a sense, that doesn't matter. Trump might think otherwise, but he is not a king. There's a document that he has to follow. This is a constitutional democratic republic, not just a democracy. The less he follows the rules, the more severe the repercussions could be for both him personally and the country at large.
NO. People also voted for every other authoritarian who converted their democracy into an autocracy. That does not mean they endorsed in advance every subsequent action by that dictator.
The constitution specifically states: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises..." [0] (Article I, Section 8)
Congress. NOT the executive branch or the President.
Tariffs are taxes, full stop.
Just because congress is abdicating it's duty and there are not even a handful of Republicans who will stand up to take back their proper power of taxation, does not make it either legal or moral to mis-allocate the power further away from the people.
And yes, while people did vote for that POTUS, and he did mention tariffs in campaigning, he was both not explicit about seizing power from congress, and had such a reputation for lying that it was literally impossible to predict what he would actually do.
No, you can not claim this misapplication of power is the will of the people.
No, they shouldn't. While being an adult is no guarantee of making wise decisions, we have widely studied the failure of children to comprehend long-term consequences. We know better.
Kids should not have a vote, but I'd be willing to say parents should get two votes. No adult has a more visceral sense of societal consequences than someone concerned about creating the future their own child will hopefully thrive in.
> No adult has a more visceral sense of societal consequences than someone concerned about creating the future their own child will hopefully thrive in.
There are plenty of parents who have absolutely no sense of this, and plenty of children who have a better sense of this than their parents, because they’ve had to learn the hard way.
Choosing to reproduce, or failing to use birth control, should not give you an extra vote.
But it does. The house of representation is based on relative population, so places like Texas end up getting more representation as their voters high some of the highest fertility and their children get counted in the census.
If our biggest issues are the state of education, the environment, the state of the economy, the security of the nation, the safety of our neighborhoods, and the civility of the society we live in, who has a bigger stake in all of these outcomes than parents?
So why not?
I mean, the argument against surely is not that having children is some existential horror or great evil, right? Civilization advances by our children doing better than we did, maybe materially, but morally, ethically, and hopefully in purpose.
If you live in a non-swing state, like California, not moving to a swing state is effectively a vote for whoever wins.
Voting in california and not voting in california are statistically identical, so if you don't move to a swing state, you're just voting for whoever wins, right?
The electoral college doesn't even have to vote for what their state wanted. They can go rogue, and possibly end up with criminal charges in a few states, but the vote still stands.
Because voting third party is also a vote for whoever wins, using this logic. Libertarians, Green, etc party voters constantly get accosted over this.
You have two top candidates, by voting for a third party you are deferring to the popular vote on the top two and 'subtracting' a vote from your favorite of the top two.
Well, it is a vote for whoever wins their state. I know several people who didn’t vote back in my home state because the outcome for that state was already a given. The current way the electoral college works effectively disenfranchises people living in “solid” D or R states.
Yes, I know that there are down ballot races on the same day that matter, but many don’t, for the same or similar reasons. We need elections that let everyone’s vote matter. Things like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, working to end gerrymandering, and open primaries would all be helpful reforms in different ways.
"Didn't vote" implicitly give their vote by saying that they don't care if any of them win.
Effectively they are giving 1/2 votes to each of their candidates, resulting in no change in the final result.
But, if you really want to be analytic, the higher the turnout of disaffected voters, the more likely they vote for Trump.
That's why, since 2016 or so, Trump always overperforms in general elections, while Democrats overperform in special/mid-term elections where the turnout is low.
So, these liberal/democrats copium about turnouts and non-votes no longer hold true. pre-2016 "Get out to Vote" were implicit Democrat crying calls to rally votes for the Democratic party. You still see people who haven't understood the underlying shift using this as a "dog whistle" to campaign for democrats while appearing neutral
He absolutely did campaign on tariffs. He talked about them at tons of campaign rallies. It was called out constantly that they were taxes. This whole denying obvious and recent history is just lazy commenting IMO.
Not taxes, tariffs - which is of course a tax - which the general public did not, by all available evidence, understand was a tax. Trump campaigned on raising tariffs quite heavily, and Trump voters by a wide margin really thought they were a good idea, largely because they didn't seem to actually understand how they work.
I am left wondering if Trump fully understands how tariffs work. He spoke at length on multiple occasions about how other countries were going to pay for the tariffs, which runs entirely counter to what a tariff is. The only conclusion I can reasonably make from this is that Trump didn't understand tariffs either
> Not taxes, tariffs - which is of course a tax - which the general public did not, by all available evidence, understand was a tax.
Experts were pretty clear in telling the public that it was a tax. The only people who can say they didn't understand that would have to be people who not only didn't know what tariffs were in the first place, but who also didn't bother to listen to the many many people trying their best to explain it to them.
I'm 100% convinced that trump doesn't understand them and refused to listen to the many many people who have tried to explain it to him, which is why he had to suddenly start walking them back. Only his ego is getting in the way now.
"Who pays the tariffs" can potentially be a complicated question. There is a certain amount of elasticity of demand, the breadth of choice of supply, and more that can influence if a supplier chooses to eat the cost or if the price goes up. It's totally possible to draw up a scenario where it's the exporter that does bear the majority or all the cost of a tariff. Highly unlikely in the real world, but technically possible.
But in the end blind American exceptionalisim and surrounding himself with yes men seems to have made him at least publicly proclaim the exporters would bear the cost. Or Trump is just a liar.
Occam's Razor suggests an answer. Chances are this is just another instance of Trump lying and people eating it up.
>The only people who can say they didn't understand that would have to be people who not only didn't know what tariffs were in the first place, but who also didn't bother to listen to the many many people trying their best to explain it to them
anti intellectual sentiment runs deep in many parts of US society. Having experts out explaining things - particularly via news media outlets - has unfortunately become an ineffective tactic as a result. There are many people, across different areas of US society, that reject any expert explanations in favor of their own beliefs, or things they read that re-enforce their beliefs.
We live in an age where 'vibes' and anecdotal experiences override facts based on well gathered evidence and history.
I believe quite strongly the average Republican voter is heavily weighted toward dismissing public experts out of hand.
All this is to say, I'm surprised that didn't have much impact. It should have completely destroyed his campaign to be honest, as many of his actions should have, but this was an indisputably bad idea from any reasonable economic standpoint.
>Only his ego is getting in the way now
I largely agree with this. I will only add that I can't tell where Trump ends and his donor class setting the agenda begins.
>Guy is a billionaire twice president of the US. He's many things (imho really bad things), but not ignorant.
I'm no Trump fan. Never voted for him. Really really disagree with his politics, but here's some things I think are observably true.
- He understands media
- He understands very well how to manipulate public sentiment and opinion
- He understands the power of celebrity
- He understands the importance of tailoring to audiences
- He's willing to say and do things others aren't. There's no line in the sand for him
You can be otherwise ignorant of a great many things (including tariffs, which he has a demonstrated lack of understanding going back decades) and still get elected based on these traits
> would defy you to find a single Trump voter who thinks taxes needed to be raised
You're going to lose this one hard, because you chose the wrong tense. One exceptional thing about this cult is their ability to rationalize anything once Dear Leader has proclaimed it. This has been a general basic mechanism of mass media centralized democracy (eg the number of "liberals" eagerly supporting censorship ~10 years ago), but the Trump cult cranks it to 11 (eg "from my cold, dead hands" -> "blue lives matter")
Mmmmmm this is incomplete .. and is similar to the overly-reductionistic morbid / cruel quip "Palestinians voted for Hamas so the 30,000+ new post-Israel-Gaza-invasion dead Palestinians got what they asked for." See how cruel it is to be overly reductionistic. It is bad to be cruel unnecessarily, IMO.
Who was most responsible for preventing Hamas, second to Hamas? Who was most responsible for stopping Trump second to Trump? I’m not saying that people are responsible for other people’s actions directly, but if through your inaction, bad things continually happen, surely you must have to accept some amount of responsibility, no?
The phrase is "taxation without representation", and Trump is the representation. The original founders were upset England could raise taxes and they couldn't vote or do anything about it. We now have elected officials who decide taxes
People in DC have a legit complaint about "taxation without representation". Realistically, most people do too since corporations and industry are the only ones whose interests are typically represented, but that's more of a failure on our part for not firing the people who refuse to work for us. We elect them after all.
I agree with you, but I would still argue that what is going on now is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent: rule by executive fiat. Congress controls fiscal policy, and they have complete given up any semblance of their duties in fealty to Trump.
Heck, the law that Trump is using to set tariff policy is designed to only be used in cases "of national emergency", and Trump has simply defined national emergency to mean whatever he wants it to mean. I think this article gives a good overview of the issues: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-usa-china-deal-is-bad-eco...
It's similar to how Trump has redefined the simple meaning of "foreign invasion" to give cover to his deportations (in some cases I'd call them abductions) without due process.
The people may have voted for this, but in the medium/long term it will be absolutely detrimental to our democracy.
Yeah, the basis for the modern authoritarianism is "the president alone represents the will of the people". As if Congress and Senate weren't elected as well. As if the public workers didn't have their work created and regulated by the laws the elected Legislative imposes.
> The people may have voted for this, but in the medium/long term it will be absolutely detrimental to our democracy.
None of which was unanticipated. People had been warning voters about the danger to our democracy long before the election and a huge number of Americans decided that they really didn't care about protecting our democracy.
Look, if you're going to make voters in Red America choose between democracy and voting for a Republican, they are going to pick the latter 100% of the time.
It's just not important to them. If it were, they wouldn't have first primaried in, and then showed up for the guy in 2024[1].
---
[1] I can forgive 2016 and 2020, since at that point, his behavior wasn't that far out of bounds. Since then, he's moved on to conspiring with fraudulent electors, trying to rig vote counts, arresting and imprisoning people without trial, and looking to suspend habeas corpus. Not to mention pay-to-play for access, and treating the treasury like his own personal slush fund.
Did they really make a conscious decision or was it we want a guy that runs the government like a Reality TV show. Ooops Donny doesn't like Mike (Waltz) any more so time to leave the Island. Pete sure is good at owning the libs - he gets to stay.
But the executive branch isn't supposed to be able to raise taxes and he's blatantly using a loophole to do all of this. Your point would be true if it was congress doing this.
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United"
And congress decided that the president can raise tariffs himself. Congress has given away a lot of power, of the years.
Ironically I think this is one instance that sort of thing made sense, but they should have done their usual and made some sort of government agency to oversee it themselves. Neither congress nor the president are good managers of tariffs as they're unpopular in the short term, as we've seen, and need a long term outlook.
It's fascinating that just last year, SCOTUS has determined that Congress couldn't delegate its powers to rulemaking agencies that Congress explicitly creates, charters, and funds.
Yet, somehow, this implicit 'delegation' (where Congress is very actively doing nothing) is somehow kosher. As long as they won't impeach the leader of their party, anything goes! The man could drop a nuclear bomb on Ohio, and as long as he had 34 surviving votes in the Senate, he'd be fine.
If this kind of congressional silence is endorsement, why the hell did SCOTUS get involved to start legislating regulations from the bench in the first place?
It's not implicit, they're directly doing it. They made a law giving the executive this exact power. They then passed a law redefining the length of a day so they would prevent the countdown in that law from them actually reviewing these.
That's right, the Republicans decided the rest of 2025 is just one long legal day.
Well, the people voted for Congress, and Congress could curtail Trump's tariff-setting ability anytime they want to, and they have chosen not to.
FWIW I agree that Congress has completely abdicated their duties, but by and large "the people" voted for this, it was not hidden or secret (for all his flaws Trump was very clear what he would do with respect to tariffs for a long time), and I think "taxation without representation" is an incredibly poor analogy.
The president is elected to enact the will of congress and to represent the US internationally. He is not elected to be the people's representative in government. That's what congress is for, and that's one of the reasons why the executive is not supposed to have the ability to impose taxes.
What Trump is doing is unambiguously taxation without representation, as he is not the representative of the citizenry. For one, no single person can be the "representative of the citizenry".
Or, to put it another way, "representation" means that the people have a say in what's happening. With the executive branch, that's not the case. The mechanism for that is Congress.
Yes they did. He made it very clear that he wanted massive tariffs which by necessity would mean that people would have to pay massive taxes on everything they want to buy. Before the election experts were very clear that those tariffs would cost the consumer and importer. People were told that he wanted to go crazy with tariffs, they were repeatedly told that tariffs would take money out of their pockets, and they voted for that. Nobody should be surprised by that now.
> He made it very clear that he wanted massive tariffs which by necessity would mean that people would have to pay massive taxes on everything they want to buy.
He also falsely claimed - and his supporters, as is typical, accepted those claims - that other countries would eat that cost.
They voted for tariffs. They were willfully ignorant on their being a tax.
> Everyone was really quick to call out that lie though.
Not on the channels they watch.
There's an entire separate Fox News Cinematic Universe safe space you can immerse yourself in exclusively.
Even when they bring on a sacrificial lib to yell at, humans in general are phenomenal at ignoring or explaining away clear evidence their strongly held beliefs are wrong.
But I am guessing the neoclassical/neoliberal economists here did because they aspire to be like Peter Thiel (who has backed Trump and GOP since forever).
(( note it will _never_ happen and you folks vote against your own interests ))
I hope you understand that this whole binary us versus them is a very large part of why many people voted for the government you guys have today. If you say everyone who doesn't vote like you want is a racist, that's bound to get a counter reaction. I'm European, so no horse in the race outside of the global economy.
The parent isn't objecting to tariffs, as far as I can tell. They're objecting that tariffs, which are a power vested in Congress, are being driven by one man (the President) in the executive branch.
Totally, they have the ability to rein in the executive branch for sure! I think the parent's frustration is very justified (and might even be more valid -- there exists a clear path to not have tariffs imposed by edict, and our representatives just aren't taking it).
If the people wanted congress to rein in Trump they would not have voted the opposition out.
This is very much what we wanted. And we clicked "yes" on the question at every electoral level.
I understand everyone's got a little buyer's remorse. At the same time however, if someone clicked through 4 or 5 dialog boxes all saying "Are you sure you want to do X, Y, and Z?" And then, upon the system's execution of X, Y, and Z, suddenly complained that X, Y, and Z are not what they wanted?
I don't know?
I guess I'm just saying I'd be a bit surprised at their disappointment.
Weighted mean applied tariffs in developed countries are normally in the 0.5-3% range; the US was a little under 2% pre-minihands, Europe's a little less than that, as was China pre-minihands.
In general, tariffs which work out to >10% mean applied are only found in the poorest countries (where high tariffs arguably _can_ make sense if practically all industry is extractive/agricultural, on the basis that they may spur development of local secondary industry), or in weird micronations.
The US tarrifs against the EU were not retaliatory, they were proactive (unless you want to consider them retaliatory tarrifs because of the EU's retaliatory tarrfis. However, this dispute was, again, initiated by the USA). I'm sure some of the countries hit did attack first, but many didn't.
Additionally, the way Trump sets up tarrifs creates major uncertainty (which I can only assume is intentional), that can clearly be seen in the way the stocks develop. This also sets these tarrifs apart.
I have yet to hear a logical argument as to why we needed tariffs against Canada, Mexico, EU member states, the UK and basically every other ally we've had existing trade agreements with for decades.
To be honest, this calls into any legitimate claims of using tariffs against China - the one country that I've seen logical, consistent arguments for enacting tariffs against - because they're implemented so haphazardly across the board there was no chance of building consensus with other countries, which would be a requirement for tariffs to actually work to change behavior.
It seems that the belief is that somehow because the US is the largest economy currently, that access to it is so desirable that countries will be falling over at the negotiation table to regain access to the US market and thereby willing to agree to new things that are supposedly 'more fair' (re: more desirable for what the current administration believes to be desirable).
Largely that doesn't seem to be happening, which is no surprise, but more over, when negotiations do happen, like we have seen with China, and now they're getting a better deal than we are, from everything I've read thus far. It seems this administration can't even stick to its own guns, because China called the bluff and the US capitulated to their core demands with relatively little resistance seemingly.
the goal post typically moves to "but our soft power as a world leaaaaderrrr"
which... yeah, I could do without. I'm fine reaching parity with the level of market access in trade that other countries offer us, as well as the level of apathy in funding programs and conflicts that other countries have.
I do think its absurd to apply a different standard to the US, by people that don't really seem to notice what the standard other countries they respect are using.
I can also acknowledge that its disruptive. even at a blanket 10%, that's too much too fast for market forces to adjust adequately. but the overall idea of having domestic supply chains and velocity of wage payments and wage growth is something I like.
I think that the really weird (economically speaking) thing is that the US has built a global order that has made them incredibly successful at an aggregate level, and it's all being thrown away carelessly for goods production.
Like, I agree that more manufacturing in the US would be better overall, but the way in which this is being done seems really poorly thought through.
The prevailing trade doctrine pre-Trump is called the most favored nation system, by which the countries of the WTO agreed to treat all other members by the same rules. That didn't preclude tariffs at all, but for instance China could not apply a tariff on America without also applying the same tariff on all other WTO members. American multinationals flourished under this system far more than the companies of any other country, including China.
Now we have a system of bilateral agreements that encourage market fragmentation and are complicated and cumbersome to enforce, which is a big part of the reason we moved away from that system in the first place. Now, they're also created revoked on a whim by one man with a knack for giving exemptions to his pals and extracting big personal gifts from world leaders in exchange for favors. Even if you support moving back to a bilateral tariff system, the way it's being handled should concern you
>American multinationals flourished under this system far more than the companies of any other country, including China.
International trade has never been a critical or essential component of the US economy -- or at least not during the last 170 years -- because there's always been a healthy domestic consumer market in the US. In the US, the consumer market has constituted close to 70% of all economic activity for over a century. In contrast, when China was starting to get rich in the 1990s and 2000s, the consumer market was tiny. Ditto postwar Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. International trade was way way more important to those countries in the post-WWII era that it has been to the US: the US would have remained a rich country even if there was zero international trade (although granted probably not quite as rich).
Free trade was used by the security establishment in Washington during the Cold War as a bribe to induce countries to side with the US against the USSR. The bribe was relatively easy to make because the US ended WWI with the world's dominant navy (needed to fight piracy and to guarantee that the smaller countries of the world could engage in international trade on the world's oceans).
Some Americans are "globalists", meaning they think the idea of the nation state is obsolete or undesirable, and of course they try to promote economic interdependence between countries as much as possible. Also, even though they have never been essential to the US economy, the big multinationals have significant influence on the public discourse in the US and on Washington. So, the general public estimates international trade as more important than it actually is to the US.
That would be a strange motivation, since American colonists actually paid lower taxes than British citizens, until the American tax rate duly went up after the revolution.
Tbf, back then as well as now it's not like the average working class had any input. It's because a certain group of super-wealthy individuals wanted to become even more rich and thought that a radical change in governance might get them to pay fewer taxes. And to be honest, their chances originally looked much better with Trump than they did with George Washington.
100%. If you combine the massive AI-hate with irrational DJT hate you'll get articles exactly like this. Unfortunately, many of self-proclaimed intelligent beings fall for this.
(FWIW, I oppose a lot of DJT initiatives/behavior, but I hope it is rational criticisms)
I'm sure the tariffs don't help, but might the fact that they're asking for Half A Trillion United States Dollars also have something to do with it? They already had one of the biggest funding rounds in history and that was an order of magnitude smaller than this, now we're talking about capital on the scale of upper-end national GDPs for a company which still isn't profitable and has no real moat to speak of. They may as well cut to the chase and ask for all of the money in the world.
To be clear, I'm pretty sure the half-trillion figure is the projected combined investment between SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. Not public, US tax-payer dollars.
If that's not what you meant my apologies. Reason I'm quick to point this out is I think some of the writing/headlines around are suggestive of this misconception.
Deepseek was one nail in the coffin. The tariffs the second. More will follow.
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Stargate is $500 billion, not $500 million - surprised the article is off by a factor of 1000x
It’s such a ridiculous number that the author probably thought the source had the typo.
The cynical part of me thinks it could be engagement bait. It's absolutely the type of typo someone would make in a tweet to help it go viral.
Besides the tariffs added to buildout cost...
> Investors are also growing wary of an overcapacity spike. As Bloomberg notes, tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon have adjusted their data center strategies, in some cases pulling back on construction projects.
Is "overcapacity" concern here bundling up all the other effects of disruptions by the current administration?
And are there significant concerns about Stargate and OpenAI specifically, separate from those traceable to the administration or economy?
Even before Trump's trade war, there was some pullback there. I'd assume that some of the hyperscalers are just getting nervous that the bubble may have peaked.
> Per an analysis by TD Cowen cited by Bloomberg, hiked prices for server racks, cooling systems, chips, and other components could contribute to overall build cost rises of 5-15% on average.
I can agree that infrastructure generally has much lower margins than software businesses, but I don't know of any mega-projects that wouldn't turn out costlier during construction, and 15% is hardly something that stopped them.
Related:
SoftBank Stargate Venture With OpenAI Snags on Tariff Fears - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-12/softbank-... | https://archive.today/Vi5Gr - May 12th, 2025
Stargate wants to raise $500B not the paltry $500M as mentioned in the article.
We, as in the rest of the world, need to get off our butts and take advantage of this self-own, forced-error of a presidency. It's the perfect time to build industry outside of the USA which has shown itself to be a bad partner, unreliable and willing to turn on all of us in the span of a few weeks in order to right perceived wrongs that may or may not exist (more likely the latter than former).
In the EU it just feels like big beaurocracy gets to make all the big decisions about doing things like this and small and medium orgs can't spring up to go against stumbling entities like this because we're taxed out of the wealth needed to do so.
I don’t agree with this sentiment. Over the past few years I’ve seen a lot of companies switch to EU based alternatives already because of the data regulations. This is a second wave. And now nobody trusts the US anymore the rest will follow.
What switches have you seen. Very curious to know what EU based alternatives are gaining steam.
Not really.
There's plenty of wealth in the EU.
What they don't have is an appetite for risk. You could lower taxes to zero, but you'd still not get the level of speculative investment in the US without cultivating a much larger appetite for risk. Similar issue exists in places like Japan. Investor classes that are, at the median, more conservative than they are in the US. So in the US we "lose" bigger, but we also "win" bigger.
(Of course all of this was pre-Trump. Now, I'm not sure there is enough certainty out there for even the big risk takers. But, historically, we in the US have been more risk-phillic.)
I wonder if paradoxically less certainty could lead to more risk taking. If the secure sources of wealth starts becoming shaky looking at other risky options starts feeling less scary (or equally scary/uncertain as the previously stable one). If there's already an easy path to winning on the other hand pre-trump, why take the risky one.
Problem is, in the EU, the secure sources of income are not becoming more shaky looking. At the same time though, in the EU, the risky stuff is becoming a bit less risky looking. The EU is clearly energized to decouple itself from US tech, defense, etc etc. It's probably a good time to look into those kinds of enterprises if you're in the EU.
In the US it's different. The secure sources are actually looking more secure. At the extreme you have just parking gargantuan amounts of money in TIPS right? I mean interest rates have gone up to even better compensate that kind of risk free behavior. Meanwhile the risky stuff in the US is a bit more risky due to the uncertainty.
Hopefully, Trump's people will convince him of the folly of the approach he's taking currently. If not, yeah, not sure? Uncharted waters really. I don't think anyone really knows what will happen.
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You have plenty of time. Even if Trump leaves office right now, his damage will last for decades (eg look at the supreme court). And speaking as someone on the ground, ordinary Americans are very far from learning the right lessons. They'll just elect someone like him again after 1 democrat tries to clean up the mess.
It's notable that while the initial announcement promised an "immediate" investment of $100 billion, nearly 4 months later SoftBank "has yet to develop a financing template or begin detailed discussions with potential backers."
I'm sure tariffs are partly to blame, but it seems criminally misleading to be nowhere near ready to provide that $100 billion.
Is Stargate a real thing? I thought it was just a PR stunt.
This is a techcrunch link arbitrage to the actual article if we can update
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-12/softbank-...
I can't help but think this fixation on ever-bigger data centers with ever-more compute is a very American approach.
It's the same line of thought that gave us jumbo refrigerators, muscle cars and supersize meals.
In the American mind, bigger = better.
That that's not necessarily the best way to better results has been demonstrated by the Deepseek shock.
I do wonder if more foundational research would be a better investment.
It’s not an either/or - it can be both!
If you have the best foundational research, but then find yourself blocked by compute, that’s a bad place to be in.
At the moment compute is a constraint too (at least for the smaller shops, maybe not OpenAI!)
We don’t necessarily know that the next AI breakthrough will need less compute either! A breakthrough that gives 5x performance for 20x training compute and 2x inference cost would still be a giant breakthrough and need a lot of hardware! Although this sort of breakthrough is unlikely, and it’s likely to be smaller steps forward - but I think it might be the case that models continue to get more computationally expensive even if there are breakthroughs that make models more efficient because we will want higher capability.
I think it's often been shown that constraints are what brings out true breakthroughs, so I'm skeptical of scaling up throw brute force - to me it seems like a lazy way out that will prevent you from challenging your base assumptions and figuring out better ways of doing things.
> more foundational research
So you're saying a bigger amount of research is better?
I do. I'm saying more thinking, less throwing raw material at a problem.
But those damnable universities are just left wing brainwashing facilities, very little room for profit there. Cut their funding, educated people don't vote right /s
Who can act surprised? "Sparks of AGI" is what, 2 years old now? Meanwhile Masayoshi Son is promising AI "10,000 times smarter” than humans in a decade. It's a ruse by hardware manufacturers to bolster sales of niche IP. It's dumbfounding that corporate America, much less American politics, fell for the scheme.
Projects like this serve to create unattainable goals that practically hand peer powers a victory. Not because these peers are more powerful, but because they can define what they want and work towards a real goal and not handwavy vaporware nonsense.
They're gonna say this at a time where people are starting to question how farther we can scale hardware with the scientific knowledge that we've had? It doesn't even take researchers to know that GPU capabilities aren't scaling as much as it used to. And then what's clearer lately is that it seems hardware scaling isn't helping AI companies as much as it used to anymore.
Things that have so many question marks like that should be treated with a lot more pragmatism. But that's certainly not a language the Silicon Valley folks speak. Everybody's promising the next iPhone moment anytime they bring something out.
What would they have said if they didn't have tariffs to blame?
“I'm not going to agree with [Trump] on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” - Altman
Probably should have stuck to his guns on Trump. Trump, serial liar and king of fraud, lies to these guys one time and they spontaneously develop amnesia and praise him. Naive and hilarious.
Stuff like this is a reminder that none of this is strategic and well thought out. It's just reactive, tactical, lurching from one self made crisis to the next. From doubling down to then folding on his own unilaterally imposed tariff levels while getting nothing in return.. it's all reaction.
If it was well thought out we wouldn't be tariffing intermediary goods and inputs to domestic production. If any of this sticks at anything like the levels imposed, we will have shortages and job losses more than we have any impactful move of manufacturing jobs back to US>
OpenAI is stuggling in general. They no longer have any technological edge over competitors.
It's almost as if we shouldn't have one person arbitrarily raising taxes on a whim.
Hell, it's almost as if taxation without the ability of the people being taxed to give their input on said taxation is the whole reason the US exists in the first place.
Not again already. We're still cleaning tea out of harbor here in Boston.
I don't think that's tea
You've had, like, a couple of centuries. I know that public works programs take time in Massachusetts, but...
Sounds like there's not enough tax revenue!
The resources were reallocated for the Big Dig.
Fun fact: That slogan is only half of the story. Smuggling was prolific in those days, with John Hancock and Samuel Adams were among them. They were involved with smuggling cheaper Dutch tea and the Sons of Liberty were protecting their own economic interests. Aka those taxes would ruin their smuggling business because the Tea Act of 1773 would let the British sell their tea for cheaper than the smugglers, and the protests were because that threatened their ability to sell their smuggled, but more expensive Dutch Tea.
The owner of two of the three ships was William Rotch, a Nantucket-born colonist and merchant.
"the British Parliament decreed that any American vessel selling goods in London had to purchase tea as part of its return freight to the colonies. Thus, the captains of the Rotch-owned Dartmouth and Beaver dutifully loaded consignments of tea for their journeys back to Boston."
The Rotches absorbed the loss of 2/3 of the £10,000 cargo, however due to their position in the whale oil monopoly, they were unpopular in the colonies and received little sympathy. The war destroyed much of their business and wealth, and they weren't welcome back home in Nantucket, where the community felt they were abandoned.
The colonies were Crown businesses. A clearer reason for the war was the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It reserved land west of the Appalachians for native peoples.
https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/ro...
I don't think it's called smuggling if you're paying taxes on it. If anything, actual smugglers would've supported the taxes because it gives them an edge over legal importers
They weren't paying taxes on it.
They worried the legal (and taxed, and higher quality) British tea would be, despite the tax, cheaper than the smuggled (untaxed) Dutch tea, which would destroy their smuggling businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act
> A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies.
> Reducing or eliminating the duties paid when the tea was landed in Britain (if it was shipped onward to the colonies) would further lower the final cost of tea in the colonies, undercutting the prices charged for smuggled tea. Colonists would willingly pay for cheaper Company tea, on which the Townshend tax was still collected, thus legitimizing Parliament's ability to tax the colonies.
How was smuggled tea more expensive? The shipping costs for both products would be the same (right?), so the price differentiator should be the presence/absence of additional government charges.
Unless smuggled tea had to accept more losses due to…piracy?
> How was smuggled tea more expensive?
Smuggling adds costs, and the Dutch/British product weren't identical in quality either. The Tax Act reduced the tax/cost burden (removing a requirement to go through London-based middlemen first, and lessening import duties) on legitimate tea.
> The shipping costs for both products would be the same (right?)
Not at all. The risk of seizure (of both cargo and ship) drives it way up.
Economies of scale can make a legal product much cheaper even with heavy taxation. See cigarettes for example. No one runs an illicit tobacco farm in the US because you just can't match the scale to make it profitable. Similar things happening with cannabis now; in parts of the west coast supply is so high that it would be more profitable for small time operators to grow heirloom tomatoes at this point.
Cigarettes is exactly what I was thinking of for comparison. Most of the price is sin taxes. Remove those and the actual product costs nearly nothing to make. Sales of loose cigarettes is still a thing today where people are moving them from reservations or foreign countries.
Smuggled Dutch tea was something like 80% of the tea on the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act
> Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.
That's not the case for cigarettes. If it were anything like that percentage, you can bet the Feds would care more.
Really the cause was the Indemnity Act and the Townshend Acts of 1766/67.
Before '67, England paid very high taxes on tea imported from China (>25%). So tea smuggling was rampant - mostly in England. But the Dutch government didn't charge any tax on the imported tea sold in the Netherlands, so that was smuggled into America.
Then in '67, the Indemnity Acts basically removed the high taxes on the tea sold in Britain. But this was followed up by the Townshend Acts, which added more taxes - specifically to the Colonies.
As you can imagine, this seems a little fucked up.... except the Colonies were already paying practically zero taxes. To the British, it was the Colonies who had been getting away with highway robbery, and these new taxes leveled the playing field.
But of course the Colonists didn't want to pay taxes. So they claimed this was unfair because they had no representation. The representation wasn't really the crux of the issue though... it was just that they wanted to weasel out of paying taxes. Only a representative in Parliament could levy taxes.
The thing is.... by this time, the Colonists had already set up a sort of shadow-Parliament. They had British representatives who were supposed to be telling the Colonists what to do.... but the Colonists basically just ignored them. By the time of the Tea Party, the British had already lost control of governance.
After several years of boycotting tea to protest the Townshend Acts, the acts were repealed in 1770, except for taxes on Tea. Yet they began importing tea again, mostly to Boston, as New York and Philadelphia were still mostly smuggling tea.
The East India Company was undergoing severe hardship during this time, for a couple different reasons. But basically they had too much tea and not enough people were buying it. So in Britain they returned the duty to the company that had been charged to them. They still needed a way to get the Colonies to buy this tea, rather than the smuggled tea. So in 1773, the Tea Act was passed. It granted the Company a monopoly on imported tea, cut out the middlemen, and added a tax due on delivery. This made the tea cheaper than smuggled tea, but added a 3 pence surcharge for each pound of tea.
One of the big purposes of all these taxes was actually for the Colonial Governors to receive their pay from British Parliament, so that they'd be loyal to Britain instead of the Colonists. Several Parliamentarians warned that these extra taxes wouldn't be accepted by the Colonists, but they were overruled. Without Lord North being a dickhead and insisting on the taxes, we wouldn't have our own country now.
So basically the reason for the Tea Party was 1) years of resistance to taxes (even though Colonists basically hadn't been paying any tax), 2) they wanted to have more Colonial control over Governors, 3) it took away money from both smugglers and legal colonial importers.
But there were other reasons too, like the fact that at this time in history, the British army was incredibly weak, with something like 40,000 soldiers total, due to recent wars nearly bankrupting the country and diminishing their fighting force. The Colonists had been calling the Empire's bluff for years, doing largely whatever they wanted. The Tea Party was a big middle finger, and the British had to respond, and so led to the eventual confrontation.
The US did give their input. The US voted for Trump who explicitly campaigned on this.
The people of the US got what they asked for.
Sort of. Campaigning on vague slogans about something doesn't mean you have democratic legitimacy to avoid the whole process by which that something is supposed to get turned into law.
Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
> Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
I agree with this statement and have commented as much elsewhere, but Congress could rein in Trump's tariff-setting ability any time they wanted to, and they have very explicitly chosen not to.
I agree with the parent comment - people in the US very clearly voted for this, buyer's remorse be damned.
Part of that is Congresspeople receiving retaliation and death threats from MAGA, which is not really how democracies are supposed to work, and generally not a valid mandate the voting public is able to produce.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/17/lisa-murkowski-trum...
Simplistically, yes.
Except that the whole US system is binary, and your vote is too - you get to vote either 1 or 0, with no more nuance than that.
So technically yes, people voted for this, but also many were forced to because it came in a bundle which was the only way they could vote for their non-negotiables such as gun rights and abortion restrictions.
Completely agree, but I haven’t really heard much about anyone running on a platform of fixing the voting system. It’s fairly straightforward to at least improve, tons of countries have many different parties with all sorts of nuance.
Having said that, Republicans as a whole got a large number of votes, and they’re all well known to be Trump bootlickers that twice failed to convict him after impeachment, so it really shouldn’t come as a shock that he’s doing bad stuff.
There’s some point where Americans just have to take responsibility for their actions or inactions, and I think we’re well past that point.
Maybe so, but from the outside voting as an American looks stifling. I wouldn't want to vote for either of the two parties, although both hold some positions that I agree with more than the other.
Either of the two parties promoting voting reform would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
I don't know if America will ever be able to transition to proportional representation because of entrenched interests. But here in New Zealand it was having a trump-like character, Robert Muldoon, in control of our economy last century that led to MMP.
Having a single deranged (and occasionally drunk) person micromanaging the economy, arbitrarily imposing tariffs and trading rules and imposing price controls and freezing wage rises made people realize that we wanted our king to be symbolic and not interfering with our freedoms.
Revenue raising is supposed to be the purview of Congress, mainly because it's best for everyone involved if it's a known policy and not subject to personal whims. We're now seeing the effects of that; it's impossible to make good-faith business investments if you don't know if the investment will be heavily taxed a week after the first hires are made.
As for whether or not the people of the US got what they asked for, in a sense, that doesn't matter. Trump might think otherwise, but he is not a king. There's a document that he has to follow. This is a constitutional democratic republic, not just a democracy. The less he follows the rules, the more severe the repercussions could be for both him personally and the country at large.
NO. People also voted for every other authoritarian who converted their democracy into an autocracy. That does not mean they endorsed in advance every subsequent action by that dictator.
The constitution specifically states: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises..." [0] (Article I, Section 8)
Congress. NOT the executive branch or the President.
Tariffs are taxes, full stop.
Just because congress is abdicating it's duty and there are not even a handful of Republicans who will stand up to take back their proper power of taxation, does not make it either legal or moral to mis-allocate the power further away from the people.
And yes, while people did vote for that POTUS, and he did mention tariffs in campaigning, he was both not explicit about seizing power from congress, and had such a reputation for lying that it was literally impossible to predict what he would actually do.
No, you can not claim this misapplication of power is the will of the people.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
If congress cannot delegate A1 S8 powers to the executive then the EPA, ATF, DEA, etc and most the regulatory apparatus all come crashing down.
Which might be a good thing, but we've long since abandoned making congress actually use the legislative process each time these decisions are made.
If we're considering all residents of the US, "didn't vote" won the election
Kids should be allowed to vote. They are residents with a real interest in the future of the nation.
No, they shouldn't. While being an adult is no guarantee of making wise decisions, we have widely studied the failure of children to comprehend long-term consequences. We know better.
Kids should not have a vote, but I'd be willing to say parents should get two votes. No adult has a more visceral sense of societal consequences than someone concerned about creating the future their own child will hopefully thrive in.
> No adult has a more visceral sense of societal consequences than someone concerned about creating the future their own child will hopefully thrive in.
There are plenty of parents who have absolutely no sense of this, and plenty of children who have a better sense of this than their parents, because they’ve had to learn the hard way.
Choosing to reproduce, or failing to use birth control, should not give you an extra vote.
But it does. The house of representation is based on relative population, so places like Texas end up getting more representation as their voters high some of the highest fertility and their children get counted in the census.
If our biggest issues are the state of education, the environment, the state of the economy, the security of the nation, the safety of our neighborhoods, and the civility of the society we live in, who has a bigger stake in all of these outcomes than parents?
So why not?
I mean, the argument against surely is not that having children is some existential horror or great evil, right? Civilization advances by our children doing better than we did, maybe materially, but morally, ethically, and hopefully in purpose.
Isn't that effectively incentivising giving birth for political gain? I can't see that being controversial at all.
> we have widely studied the failure of...
This scrutiny isn't applied to other citizens.
Not voting is a vote for whomever wins.
If you live in a non-swing state, like California, not moving to a swing state is effectively a vote for whoever wins.
Voting in california and not voting in california are statistically identical, so if you don't move to a swing state, you're just voting for whoever wins, right?
Thank you for phrasing this as such. Every time this topic comes up I want to try and make this point, I wish it were more prominent.
"You voted for DJT, you're an evil person!" "Well actually, let me explain to you how the electoral college works..."
The electoral college doesn't even have to vote for what their state wanted. They can go rogue, and possibly end up with criminal charges in a few states, but the vote still stands.
It has certainly happened before.
How can voting for someone ever not be a sign that you support them over the other options?
How does the electoral college system work in a way that encourages you to vote for someone you don't want?
Because voting third party is also a vote for whoever wins, using this logic. Libertarians, Green, etc party voters constantly get accosted over this.
You have two top candidates, by voting for a third party you are deferring to the popular vote on the top two and 'subtracting' a vote from your favorite of the top two.
https://i.redd.it/qdg4kntdh3jc1.jpeg
Well, it is a vote for whoever wins their state. I know several people who didn’t vote back in my home state because the outcome for that state was already a given. The current way the electoral college works effectively disenfranchises people living in “solid” D or R states.
Yes, I know that there are down ballot races on the same day that matter, but many don’t, for the same or similar reasons. We need elections that let everyone’s vote matter. Things like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, working to end gerrymandering, and open primaries would all be helpful reforms in different ways.
Lysander Spooner wrote a significant works on why he believes this viewpoint is discredited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason
Not voting is by nature not a vote for anyone
Tough shit. People who didn't vote explicitly transferred their rights to those who did vote.
then it's not a right
I didn't believe you so I did the math and you are right:
2024 turnout: 64.1%
Total Votes: 155,238,302
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
therefore
Total eligible voters: 242,181,438
Didn't vote: 86,943,136
Votes for Trump: 77,302,580
"Didn't vote" implicitly give their vote by saying that they don't care if any of them win.
Effectively they are giving 1/2 votes to each of their candidates, resulting in no change in the final result.
But, if you really want to be analytic, the higher the turnout of disaffected voters, the more likely they vote for Trump.
That's why, since 2016 or so, Trump always overperforms in general elections, while Democrats overperform in special/mid-term elections where the turnout is low.
So, these liberal/democrats copium about turnouts and non-votes no longer hold true. pre-2016 "Get out to Vote" were implicit Democrat crying calls to rally votes for the Democratic party. You still see people who haven't understood the underlying shift using this as a "dog whistle" to campaign for democrats while appearing neutral
The US voted for Trump who explicitly campaigned on this.
Campaigned on raising taxes? Not only would a citation be needed, I would defy you to find a single Trump voter who thinks taxes needed to be raised.
This whole “it’s what people voted for” meme isn’t always an appropriate answer, and is many times just lazy commenting IMO.
He absolutely did campaign on tariffs. He talked about them at tons of campaign rallies. It was called out constantly that they were taxes. This whole denying obvious and recent history is just lazy commenting IMO.
Quit lying.
He campaigned on tariffs, which are taxes.
In the first question of the debate, Harris pointed out that Trump's promises would increase taxes on the average American by $4000.
Not taxes, tariffs - which is of course a tax - which the general public did not, by all available evidence, understand was a tax. Trump campaigned on raising tariffs quite heavily, and Trump voters by a wide margin really thought they were a good idea, largely because they didn't seem to actually understand how they work.
I am left wondering if Trump fully understands how tariffs work. He spoke at length on multiple occasions about how other countries were going to pay for the tariffs, which runs entirely counter to what a tariff is. The only conclusion I can reasonably make from this is that Trump didn't understand tariffs either
> Not taxes, tariffs - which is of course a tax - which the general public did not, by all available evidence, understand was a tax.
Experts were pretty clear in telling the public that it was a tax. The only people who can say they didn't understand that would have to be people who not only didn't know what tariffs were in the first place, but who also didn't bother to listen to the many many people trying their best to explain it to them.
I'm 100% convinced that trump doesn't understand them and refused to listen to the many many people who have tried to explain it to him, which is why he had to suddenly start walking them back. Only his ego is getting in the way now.
"Who pays the tariffs" can potentially be a complicated question. There is a certain amount of elasticity of demand, the breadth of choice of supply, and more that can influence if a supplier chooses to eat the cost or if the price goes up. It's totally possible to draw up a scenario where it's the exporter that does bear the majority or all the cost of a tariff. Highly unlikely in the real world, but technically possible.
But in the end blind American exceptionalisim and surrounding himself with yes men seems to have made him at least publicly proclaim the exporters would bear the cost. Or Trump is just a liar.
Occam's Razor suggests an answer. Chances are this is just another instance of Trump lying and people eating it up.
In what scenario does the other country - the one being tariffed, to be absolutely clear - does that country pay the tariff?
That was the exact scenario he iterated over and over on the campaign trail. What technically possible scenario exists for this to happen?
>The only people who can say they didn't understand that would have to be people who not only didn't know what tariffs were in the first place, but who also didn't bother to listen to the many many people trying their best to explain it to them
anti intellectual sentiment runs deep in many parts of US society. Having experts out explaining things - particularly via news media outlets - has unfortunately become an ineffective tactic as a result. There are many people, across different areas of US society, that reject any expert explanations in favor of their own beliefs, or things they read that re-enforce their beliefs.
We live in an age where 'vibes' and anecdotal experiences override facts based on well gathered evidence and history.
I believe quite strongly the average Republican voter is heavily weighted toward dismissing public experts out of hand.
All this is to say, I'm surprised that didn't have much impact. It should have completely destroyed his campaign to be honest, as many of his actions should have, but this was an indisputably bad idea from any reasonable economic standpoint.
>Only his ego is getting in the way now
I largely agree with this. I will only add that I can't tell where Trump ends and his donor class setting the agenda begins.
Or that he does understand, but avoids calling it a tax because Americans in general hate that? It's wordsmithing politics 101.
Guy is a billionaire twice president of the US. He's many things (imho really bad things), but not ignorant.
He wasn't avoiding "calling it a tax", he said calling it that was fake news and that everyone else but US would be paying for it.
Suggesting he was just tippy-toeing around the language is completely whitewashing his obvious widespread lies.
>Guy is a billionaire twice president of the US. He's many things (imho really bad things), but not ignorant.
I'm no Trump fan. Never voted for him. Really really disagree with his politics, but here's some things I think are observably true.
- He understands media
- He understands very well how to manipulate public sentiment and opinion
- He understands the power of celebrity
- He understands the importance of tailoring to audiences
- He's willing to say and do things others aren't. There's no line in the sand for him
You can be otherwise ignorant of a great many things (including tariffs, which he has a demonstrated lack of understanding going back decades) and still get elected based on these traits
> would defy you to find a single Trump voter who thinks taxes needed to be raised
You're going to lose this one hard, because you chose the wrong tense. One exceptional thing about this cult is their ability to rationalize anything once Dear Leader has proclaimed it. This has been a general basic mechanism of mass media centralized democracy (eg the number of "liberals" eagerly supporting censorship ~10 years ago), but the Trump cult cranks it to 11 (eg "from my cold, dead hands" -> "blue lives matter")
Mmmmmm this is incomplete .. and is similar to the overly-reductionistic morbid / cruel quip "Palestinians voted for Hamas so the 30,000+ new post-Israel-Gaza-invasion dead Palestinians got what they asked for." See how cruel it is to be overly reductionistic. It is bad to be cruel unnecessarily, IMO.
The people who chose to do nothing absolutely bear some of the responsibilities of what happens from their non-choice.
Who was most responsible for preventing Hamas, second to Hamas? Who was most responsible for stopping Trump second to Trump? I’m not saying that people are responsible for other people’s actions directly, but if through your inaction, bad things continually happen, surely you must have to accept some amount of responsibility, no?
The phrase is "taxation without representation", and Trump is the representation. The original founders were upset England could raise taxes and they couldn't vote or do anything about it. We now have elected officials who decide taxes
Yeah, and they're called "Congress."
People in DC have a legit complaint about "taxation without representation". Realistically, most people do too since corporations and industry are the only ones whose interests are typically represented, but that's more of a failure on our part for not firing the people who refuse to work for us. We elect them after all.
I agree with you, but I would still argue that what is going on now is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent: rule by executive fiat. Congress controls fiscal policy, and they have complete given up any semblance of their duties in fealty to Trump.
Heck, the law that Trump is using to set tariff policy is designed to only be used in cases "of national emergency", and Trump has simply defined national emergency to mean whatever he wants it to mean. I think this article gives a good overview of the issues: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-usa-china-deal-is-bad-eco...
It's similar to how Trump has redefined the simple meaning of "foreign invasion" to give cover to his deportations (in some cases I'd call them abductions) without due process.
The people may have voted for this, but in the medium/long term it will be absolutely detrimental to our democracy.
Yeah, the basis for the modern authoritarianism is "the president alone represents the will of the people". As if Congress and Senate weren't elected as well. As if the public workers didn't have their work created and regulated by the laws the elected Legislative imposes.
> The people may have voted for this, but in the medium/long term it will be absolutely detrimental to our democracy.
None of which was unanticipated. People had been warning voters about the danger to our democracy long before the election and a huge number of Americans decided that they really didn't care about protecting our democracy.
Look, if you're going to make voters in Red America choose between democracy and voting for a Republican, they are going to pick the latter 100% of the time.
It's just not important to them. If it were, they wouldn't have first primaried in, and then showed up for the guy in 2024[1].
---
[1] I can forgive 2016 and 2020, since at that point, his behavior wasn't that far out of bounds. Since then, he's moved on to conspiring with fraudulent electors, trying to rig vote counts, arresting and imprisoning people without trial, and looking to suspend habeas corpus. Not to mention pay-to-play for access, and treating the treasury like his own personal slush fund.
Did they really make a conscious decision or was it we want a guy that runs the government like a Reality TV show. Ooops Donny doesn't like Mike (Waltz) any more so time to leave the Island. Pete sure is good at owning the libs - he gets to stay.
I mean, look at the Declaration of Independence. It has a list of greivances against the King. Several are pretty relevant:
> He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
> For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
> For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
> For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
> For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
But the executive branch isn't supposed to be able to raise taxes and he's blatantly using a loophole to do all of this. Your point would be true if it was congress doing this.
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United"
> The phrase is "taxation without representation", and Trump is the representation.
Incorrect. He is the executive. Congress is the representation.
> Trump is the representation
No, it's not. Congress is the representation, not the executive. The executive is supposed to implement what Congress decides.
And congress decided that the president can raise tariffs himself. Congress has given away a lot of power, of the years.
Ironically I think this is one instance that sort of thing made sense, but they should have done their usual and made some sort of government agency to oversee it themselves. Neither congress nor the president are good managers of tariffs as they're unpopular in the short term, as we've seen, and need a long term outlook.
It's fascinating that just last year, SCOTUS has determined that Congress couldn't delegate its powers to rulemaking agencies that Congress explicitly creates, charters, and funds.
Yet, somehow, this implicit 'delegation' (where Congress is very actively doing nothing) is somehow kosher. As long as they won't impeach the leader of their party, anything goes! The man could drop a nuclear bomb on Ohio, and as long as he had 34 surviving votes in the Senate, he'd be fine.
If this kind of congressional silence is endorsement, why the hell did SCOTUS get involved to start legislating regulations from the bench in the first place?
It's not implicit, they're directly doing it. They made a law giving the executive this exact power. They then passed a law redefining the length of a day so they would prevent the countdown in that law from them actually reviewing these.
That's right, the Republicans decided the rest of 2025 is just one long legal day.
Well, the people voted for Congress, and Congress could curtail Trump's tariff-setting ability anytime they want to, and they have chosen not to.
FWIW I agree that Congress has completely abdicated their duties, but by and large "the people" voted for this, it was not hidden or secret (for all his flaws Trump was very clear what he would do with respect to tariffs for a long time), and I think "taxation without representation" is an incredibly poor analogy.
Then why must the president be elected into his position?
The president is elected to enact the will of congress and to represent the US internationally. He is not elected to be the people's representative in government. That's what congress is for, and that's one of the reasons why the executive is not supposed to have the ability to impose taxes.
What Trump is doing is unambiguously taxation without representation, as he is not the representative of the citizenry. For one, no single person can be the "representative of the citizenry".
Or, to put it another way, "representation" means that the people have a say in what's happening. With the executive branch, that's not the case. The mechanism for that is Congress.
gtfo. Nobody voted Trump to _raise_ taxes.
Yes they did. He made it very clear that he wanted massive tariffs which by necessity would mean that people would have to pay massive taxes on everything they want to buy. Before the election experts were very clear that those tariffs would cost the consumer and importer. People were told that he wanted to go crazy with tariffs, they were repeatedly told that tariffs would take money out of their pockets, and they voted for that. Nobody should be surprised by that now.
> He made it very clear that he wanted massive tariffs which by necessity would mean that people would have to pay massive taxes on everything they want to buy.
He also falsely claimed - and his supporters, as is typical, accepted those claims - that other countries would eat that cost.
They voted for tariffs. They were willfully ignorant on their being a tax.
That's true, he did (no surprise) lie to them about it. Everyone was really quick to call out that lie though. This was seen coming for miles.
> Everyone was really quick to call out that lie though.
Not on the channels they watch.
There's an entire separate Fox News Cinematic Universe safe space you can immerse yourself in exclusively.
Even when they bring on a sacrificial lib to yell at, humans in general are phenomenal at ignoring or explaining away clear evidence their strongly held beliefs are wrong.
If republicans don't like Trump's behavior they should call their senators and tell them to threaten Trump with impeachment and conviction.
That's the only leverage Congress has over the president.
Republicans control Congress and the presidency, so there's nobody else to blame here.
Congress voted for him to do exactly that.
Those who were paying attention the first time and still voted for Republicans voted for exactly that outcome (SALT, anyone?)
Those who were not paying attention last time shouldn't have been allowed to vote this time, but... That Would be Bad, mmmkay.
I didn’t vote for this cunt.
But I am guessing the neoclassical/neoliberal economists here did because they aspire to be like Peter Thiel (who has backed Trump and GOP since forever).
(( note it will _never_ happen and you folks vote against your own interests ))
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I hope you understand that this whole binary us versus them is a very large part of why many people voted for the government you guys have today. If you say everyone who doesn't vote like you want is a racist, that's bound to get a counter reaction. I'm European, so no horse in the race outside of the global economy.
I'm British. No, respectfully, that's bullshit. People get the government they deserve.
Well Great Britain sure does, based on this interaction.
Well done. You win.
Do other countries not have tariffs? Is it only when the U.S. chooses to retaliate that it enrages certain people?
This isn't the US "retaliating" (retaliating against what?).
This is the US swinging a club in an attempt at beating up the rest of the world and hitting itself on its head.
The parent isn't objecting to tariffs, as far as I can tell. They're objecting that tariffs, which are a power vested in Congress, are being driven by one man (the President) in the executive branch.
Congress has the ability to rein in presidential power. In extreme they can threaten impeachment.
Republicans control Congress so they are complicit in what Trump is doing.
Totally, they have the ability to rein in the executive branch for sure! I think the parent's frustration is very justified (and might even be more valid -- there exists a clear path to not have tariffs imposed by edict, and our representatives just aren't taking it).
If the people wanted congress to rein in Trump they would not have voted the opposition out.
This is very much what we wanted. And we clicked "yes" on the question at every electoral level.
I understand everyone's got a little buyer's remorse. At the same time however, if someone clicked through 4 or 5 dialog boxes all saying "Are you sure you want to do X, Y, and Z?" And then, upon the system's execution of X, Y, and Z, suddenly complained that X, Y, and Z are not what they wanted?
I don't know?
I guess I'm just saying I'd be a bit surprised at their disappointment.
Weighted mean applied tariffs in developed countries are normally in the 0.5-3% range; the US was a little under 2% pre-minihands, Europe's a little less than that, as was China pre-minihands.
In general, tariffs which work out to >10% mean applied are only found in the poorest countries (where high tariffs arguably _can_ make sense if practically all industry is extractive/agricultural, on the basis that they may spur development of local secondary industry), or in weird micronations.
The US tarrifs against the EU were not retaliatory, they were proactive (unless you want to consider them retaliatory tarrifs because of the EU's retaliatory tarrfis. However, this dispute was, again, initiated by the USA). I'm sure some of the countries hit did attack first, but many didn't.
Additionally, the way Trump sets up tarrifs creates major uncertainty (which I can only assume is intentional), that can clearly be seen in the way the stocks develop. This also sets these tarrifs apart.
I have yet to hear a logical argument as to why we needed tariffs against Canada, Mexico, EU member states, the UK and basically every other ally we've had existing trade agreements with for decades.
To be honest, this calls into any legitimate claims of using tariffs against China - the one country that I've seen logical, consistent arguments for enacting tariffs against - because they're implemented so haphazardly across the board there was no chance of building consensus with other countries, which would be a requirement for tariffs to actually work to change behavior.
It seems that the belief is that somehow because the US is the largest economy currently, that access to it is so desirable that countries will be falling over at the negotiation table to regain access to the US market and thereby willing to agree to new things that are supposedly 'more fair' (re: more desirable for what the current administration believes to be desirable).
Largely that doesn't seem to be happening, which is no surprise, but more over, when negotiations do happen, like we have seen with China, and now they're getting a better deal than we are, from everything I've read thus far. It seems this administration can't even stick to its own guns, because China called the bluff and the US capitulated to their core demands with relatively little resistance seemingly.
You mean the certain people that are affected by those tarrifs? How enraged do you get by something that doesn't affect you?
It’s not they exist. We’ve had tariffs. They’ve had tariffs.
It’s raising them arbitrarily high on a whim - that’s the problem.
the goal post typically moves to "but our soft power as a world leaaaaderrrr"
which... yeah, I could do without. I'm fine reaching parity with the level of market access in trade that other countries offer us, as well as the level of apathy in funding programs and conflicts that other countries have.
I do think its absurd to apply a different standard to the US, by people that don't really seem to notice what the standard other countries they respect are using.
I can also acknowledge that its disruptive. even at a blanket 10%, that's too much too fast for market forces to adjust adequately. but the overall idea of having domestic supply chains and velocity of wage payments and wage growth is something I like.
I think that the really weird (economically speaking) thing is that the US has built a global order that has made them incredibly successful at an aggregate level, and it's all being thrown away carelessly for goods production.
Like, I agree that more manufacturing in the US would be better overall, but the way in which this is being done seems really poorly thought through.
The prevailing trade doctrine pre-Trump is called the most favored nation system, by which the countries of the WTO agreed to treat all other members by the same rules. That didn't preclude tariffs at all, but for instance China could not apply a tariff on America without also applying the same tariff on all other WTO members. American multinationals flourished under this system far more than the companies of any other country, including China.
Now we have a system of bilateral agreements that encourage market fragmentation and are complicated and cumbersome to enforce, which is a big part of the reason we moved away from that system in the first place. Now, they're also created revoked on a whim by one man with a knack for giving exemptions to his pals and extracting big personal gifts from world leaders in exchange for favors. Even if you support moving back to a bilateral tariff system, the way it's being handled should concern you
>American multinationals flourished under this system far more than the companies of any other country, including China.
International trade has never been a critical or essential component of the US economy -- or at least not during the last 170 years -- because there's always been a healthy domestic consumer market in the US. In the US, the consumer market has constituted close to 70% of all economic activity for over a century. In contrast, when China was starting to get rich in the 1990s and 2000s, the consumer market was tiny. Ditto postwar Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. International trade was way way more important to those countries in the post-WWII era that it has been to the US: the US would have remained a rich country even if there was zero international trade (although granted probably not quite as rich).
Free trade was used by the security establishment in Washington during the Cold War as a bribe to induce countries to side with the US against the USSR. The bribe was relatively easy to make because the US ended WWI with the world's dominant navy (needed to fight piracy and to guarantee that the smaller countries of the world could engage in international trade on the world's oceans).
Some Americans are "globalists", meaning they think the idea of the nation state is obsolete or undesirable, and of course they try to promote economic interdependence between countries as much as possible. Also, even though they have never been essential to the US economy, the big multinationals have significant influence on the public discourse in the US and on Washington. So, the general public estimates international trade as more important than it actually is to the US.
Wasn't it just some rich people that didn't want to pay taxes ?
That would be a strange motivation, since American colonists actually paid lower taxes than British citizens, until the American tax rate duly went up after the revolution.
Tbf, back then as well as now it's not like the average working class had any input. It's because a certain group of super-wealthy individuals wanted to become even more rich and thought that a radical change in governance might get them to pay fewer taxes. And to be honest, their chances originally looked much better with Trump than they did with George Washington.
Although we don't have enough data to make a confident statement on the matter, it would seem election spending doesn't have a statistically significant impact on presidential elections https://thomashansen.xyz/blog/election-spending-isnt-statist...
>Tariffs *could* greatly increase the cost of data center buildouts
So this article is just karma farming on the DT hate?
100%. If you combine the massive AI-hate with irrational DJT hate you'll get articles exactly like this. Unfortunately, many of self-proclaimed intelligent beings fall for this.
(FWIW, I oppose a lot of DJT initiatives/behavior, but I hope it is rational criticisms)
Move it to Saudi HUMAIN ???. It will work out stunningly as NEOM :).
Elon musk can contribute 400 Billion alone, maybe whole 500 billion by the time it is completed (joking).
It is ridiculous how rich people's money are just show off like their lifestyle.
Bro, it's $500 billion not $500 million. $500 million is very easy to invest. That's not Stargate - that's IncandescentBulbGate.
https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
Trying to get a journalist to understand numbers is like teaching a rock calculus.