We can't afford to waste this chance....
There is zero reason to settle for "not trump" we need to use Republican Inaptitude to get a decent progressive in power , there's zero reason to compromise with Republicans after this shit.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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They are already trying to setup Kamala for 2028. I have zero faith that the Democrats are going to learn anything from their failure
They don't want to win. At least not with someone who would bring change. Why would they, they are all multimillionaires.
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That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. So I'm sure they will do it.
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Someone has either never seen “Ferris Buller’s Day Off,” can’t remember it very well, or didn’t pay attention. This was covered in class!
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. Voodoo economics.
I watched this movie 3-4 times and even when reading this, I'm still spaced out.
Ben Stein just has a voice that makes me tune him out.
Such a great voice for comedy. Shame he's anti-abortion, pretty racist, pro-Regan and Trump, weirdly against evolution... So many awful perspectives.
weirdly against evolution
You can see his point. Look where it got us, we should have stayed in the sea.
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Planet Money interviewed the professor who wrote the book from which Ben Stein is reading in that scene.
It is an older episode they re-air periodically. I think this one:
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/11/1218506684/worst-tariffs-ever-update
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Proof yet again that "business leaders" typically don't know shit about shit.
It is all 1000% on purpose.
They intend to ride it out and profit from all of this, and we'll let them due to cowardice and division.
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There is some nuance here. Smoot-Hawley didn't cause the great depression, and there a lot of economists who say it didn't have that much of an effect at all.
Tarriffs can have some useful effects when used for protectionism, diplomatic coercion, or trade barrier reduction coercion. However, Trump's tariffs are way dumber than anything that came before, because he's trying to do all three of these at once. All of these have conflicting effects on each other, and it is literally impossible to design a tariff strategy that can accomplish all three, since raising a tariff for one purpose means that you need to lower tariffs for other purposes. All he's doing by raising across the board is causing instability in the economy and convincing all partners to ditch the US.
All he's doing is exactly what Putin wants. Systematically isolating and weakening America while weakening the West at large and any other competing countries to his power and new accumulation of wealth.
and there a lot of economists who say it didn’t have that much of an effect at all.
Source? To my knowledge Smoot-Hawley is pretty widely regarded as the worst possible move at the worst possible time. Protectionism doesn't work when domestic purchasing power is already collapsing. Agreed on the rest though.
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Fun fact! - this is what Ben Stein is teaching in Ferris Bueller's day off.
And then the conservative brain worms convinced him to support the people who did it again.
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Every day of my life is an economic crisis.
Is this implying if you with paycheck to paycheck it doesn't affect you? People playing with the stock market can afford to lose. This isn't going to hurt them nearly as much as those who can't afford to lose
No, it’s not saying people living paycheck-to-paycheck won’t be affected. I think the point is - scary threat isn’t scary, because such people already feel the constant threat of poverty every day. Being regularly pumped full of cortisol over worries of simply surviving, there are no fucks left to give when additional threats are piled on.
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The thing about Smoot-Hawley is that when it happened everyone else also put up equal tariffs among one another.
this time the EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada are only putting tariffs on the US. Not amongst themselves.
Great depression, and 2/3rds drop in global trade resulted.
I present also 1828 dementia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations which started southern secessionist movements.
Unjustifiable trade attacks like all wars are bad for unity. If California or Texas has to pay $10k more per car so metal and auto workers elsewhere get high pay, national unity fractures. Everything being super expensive with no jobs because of global trade retaliations, means that Mexicans stop being a unifying problem, and those white Michigan and Pennsylvania blue collar workers cheering for Trump are the problem. Better cars elsewhere in the world become a bigger national unity factor the more protection $ is spent on inferior cars.
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Well they had elections afterwards. Trump's nazis will just throw dissenters into KZs and invade their neighbours.
There will be no free elections anymore
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
I have a feeling they learned, and then said “what a great idea to crash the economy. It’s so easy, let’s do it.”
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Tarrifs are billionaire cash grabs, nothing more. Nobody likes those. Except billionaires of course.
Even the billionaires are going to lose money. It's just unjustifiably stupid.
They have enough money to coast along to buy and hoard failing companies and collect them for whenever the economy rebounds.
Billionaires have so much money, they could spend a few thousand a day and it wouldn't hurt their bank account for decades.
They could spend $100,000 a day for 50 years an not have spent through 2 Billion. Elon and musk both command 200 Billion ish. the interest alone is worth that 8 billion a year if it was in treasuries.
Every year the interest on Musks fortune could generate enough money to spend $2,100,000 a day without even losing a dollar of principle. on the theoretical interest of his fortune.
I lost 10% of my retirement today. Thats not even a fraction of any of these numbers 😂😭
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Every once-in-a-lifetime economic disaster I've personally witnessed has taught me that any economic loss for billionaires is only temporary.
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They also didn't have fox news at that time :/
They had newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, who pretty much invented the "yellow press". And whose story is eerily similar to Musk's, including a sudden swing from progressivism to far right nationalism.
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If we don't get these paid actors out of Congress we're going to lose in ways most people really don't want to believe
A hero of the right, Ronald Reagan, actually gave a speech condemning tariffs. Yup, I'm actually on Reagan's side here.
I think there's room for reasonable tariff policy, but unfortunately the US is a nuance-free land full of extremists so Trump's terrible implementation will make tariffs radioactive for another generation if there's a large public backlash.
It doesn't need to be absolutely free trade with slavers or tariff man hell. We could raise the standard of living by allowing free trade but imposing tariffs -- or even outright bans on imports -- from places legalizing slave labor and other close to slave labor conditions. But obviously none of that fits into Trump's dumbass worldview.
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something something people who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it
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Just throwing this out there.
If you expect conservatives to learn anything from this experience, I can promise you on my life that they won't. They will not deviate from voting R under any circumstance in existence.
Best we can hope for is independents getting a clue and helping swing the next election, if there is one, back to the grownup party.
Not holding my breath though. This is a very, very stupid generation of Americans.
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