I remember reading this a lot in 2000-2001 and 2007-2008
That said, overall I sort of agree with your assessment except for having any optimism that the US changes course.
The current looming problems with the US economy are almost entirely unforced errors of the Trump administration (they could have done basically nothing and taken credit for the Biden soft landing and economic growth) but they aren't going to course correct.
Trump has no ability to admit mistakes even to himself and he's now surrounded by lots of people who stand to enrich themselves from the chaos even as the average American is harmed greatly.
Admitting a mistake involves some amount of learning not to make the same mistake again.
The reason this is important practically speaking can be seen in situations like chaotic tariffs and threatening allies.
The TACO move might allow us to step back from the cliff in these situations but the fact that we keep being on the cliff on a weekly basis means every other world actor has no choice but to make plans to have us committed in the long term, and this is going to cause huge, long term problems for the US economy.
How much of America’s growth since the 40s is attributable to its hegemony, stability, and the emergence of USD as the reserve currency of the world? And where other developed, stable nations started dropping in population, the US continued growing thanks to immigration and its center as a research Mecca.
All of those are being unwound as we speak, and it’ll take decades to prove to the world that any trade policy and government agreements may be kept longer than 4 years.
Part of why Switzerland is so stable is because of its neutrality. Switzerland doesn't have to deal with Russia interfering in its elections the way the US does.
He'll be gone. The trust in the US won't come back. If your constitution and political system allow such a moron to wreak so much havoc in such a little time, why would we ever trust you again?
Trump, yes. The millions of people that voted for him multiple times despite no shortage of reports and credible allegations that he was a scumbag... Will not.
What you're missing is that America was always like that. And it's been extremely successful. For sure there have been some changes in social dynamics, not just in the US, but worldwide. But the recipe that made the US successful has not changed much. Market economy, geography, attracting talent, innovation, freedom.
The recent massive increase in the US governments direct and indirect involvement in business decisions changes things.
Trump is pushing/forcing countries and companies to invest in the US. He's added more restrictions on who they can sell their products. New significant widespread tariffs also exist that forces businesses to decide on how they can handle it while being pressured not to raise prices.
Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices and businesses and consumers make the decisions on their respective side.
There's also background pressure on businesses to avoid angering Trump and this affects their decision making process.
>attracting talent, innovation,
Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other. He also is removing legal status from many groups.
His inflammatory rhetoric and actions have harmed the international reputation of the US. There's also a prevalent anti-immigrant mood in the US and a much smaller
This decreases the pool of people who can choose to come here and for that smaller amount it increases the probability that smart and innovative people may look elsewhere to either study or start a company.
There are also those that had legal status, lost it, and must leave. These are another set of groups that could have contained some talented and innovative people.
Talented immigrants have done so much for our economy and standing in the world.
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He cut government funding for many scientific research endeavors and government programs. These may or may not be replaced by private industry. It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.
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I'm sure you can point to similar actions in the past but I believe the quantity, speed, and intensity are significantly different than in recent times.
I'm also not arguing that some changes weren't justified. I just believe it's a clear change in the ingredients for the worse.
> Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices and businesses and consumers make the decisions on their respective side.
This is true but not a novelty. The US has been doing all kinds of things to harm its markets for decades, e.g. artificially constraining the housing supply, using tax incentives and manipulating interest rates to goose consumer spending and in the process drive up consumer debt, and let's not even get into all the ways it molests the healthcare market.
That isn't to say that they're good -- those markets are very messed up -- but things like this are bad, not new.
> Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other.
The H1B program has been widely abused for a while now and in general the US is in need of significant immigration reform. Many of the things Trump does are stupid, because of course they are, but the general premise of "hey wasn't this supposed to be for researchers and scientists rather than mechanic-level IT work" seems to have something to it here.
You can't say we're importing the best and brightest while also doing everything possible to make it so that someone who is a doctor in another country with a world-class medical system has to basically start over from scratch in order to be a doctor in the US.
And then people will have much to criticize about what Trump is doing. But okay then, so do something better instead of all the doing nothing that was happening before.
> It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.
It clearly wasn't. The problem is we need some kind of structural reform -- a system that doesn't allow wasteful programs to accumulate and increase in number over time -- but that would require a functioning Congress, which has instead been doing everything it can for decades to abdicate their role to the executive branch. Which has term limits and therefore the attention span of a goldfish for those kinds of structural problems, and then we end up back in the situation where either no attempt is made to fix it or the attempt is amateur hour because it's attempting a contextual fix to a structural problem.
There are still huge incentives for doctors to go the US. They can make a lot more money and have a much higher quality of life. They also have access to the very latest equipment and technology and likely the best academic and research system as well. This is a problem in Canada where we have a shortage of doctors.
What's more likely, for a Canadian or European doctor to want to move to the US or for an American doctor to want to move to Europe or Canada? I would say that even with all the current "noise" (which certainly moves the needle a little bit) this is still very true. When we see doctors leaving the US in droves for better careers in China, Russia, Europe or Canada then I would say this is a real problem.
> There are still huge incentives for doctors to go the US. They can make a lot more money and have a much higher quality of life.
The US limits the supply of doctors by limiting the number of medical residency slots. Foreign doctors are then required to do a US medical residency even if they've already done the equivalent in their own country, which consumes one of the slots. The result is that you effectively can't increase the number of doctors in the US through immigration, you can only change the proportionality in the finite number of slots.
The way for any country to resolve a doctor shortage is to train more doctors, which is the exact thing the US prohibits.
>You can't say we're importing the best and brightest
I didn't say that and it's about the amount.
>from scratch in order to be a doctor in the US>>>
Usually no, they have to complete a residency. They are repeating some but it's not starting from scratch and it's probably done to sure about their quality.
If you think it should be changed to make it easier for people to come over that's fine. However this isn't a counter argument to Trump reducing the amount of intelligent and valuable people coming in. I'm not even sure why you mentioned this, it only makes your support of Trump's actions more confusing because it shows me your additional concern about losing innovative, intelligent immigrants
>And then people will have much to criticize about what Trump is doing. But okay then, so do something better instead of all the doing nothing that was happening before.
I'm not in power and unlikely to ever be. I can criticize others actions even if I don't have a solution because doing nothing is better than making it worse.
The average person in the US has a living standard higher than the vast majority of the world.
There's no need to make radical changes without careful study as if it's an emergency.
The reason people feel the need to do this is manipulation by the Republican party and it's media supporters that makes people believe their lives are far worse than they actually are compared to other countries.
> I can criticize others actions even if I don't have a solution because doing nothing is better than making it worse.
Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes messing up the status quo forces people to then go back and fix it properly and you ultimately get a better result than doing nothing.
> The average person in the US has a living standard higher than the vast majority of the world.
~20% of people in the US have a net worth of zero or negative. Housing costs are unsustainably increasing faster than wages:
The rest of the Republican Party is completely devoid of charisma, especially the kind that drew so many voters to Trump. There is no drop-in replacement.
Lots of money will be spent trying to manufacture a replacement, though. That will be fun to watch. If you thought the last-minute rally around Kamala was tough to watch…
Isn’t the VP generally the shoe-in nominee? Vance lacks charisma and gravitas, but he only has to be better than the Democratic candidate. For every Bill and Barack, the Democrats have also given us a Kamala, Hillary, and Al. Never underestimate their ability to pick a loser.
But what the republican party has, is a lot of isolationist voters who cannot be moved by appeals to markets or international trade. They don’t care about that stuff.
Sure, the republicans will look hilarious trying to replace Trump for a while … but those Americans aren’t going anywhere and will gladly vote for the next Trump whenever they show up, same as they voted for Reagan and Bush II.
The American attitude driving this current period is much deeper and wider than one man, and people thinking it will all go away when one old man steps down are going to be “surprised” when we’re dealing with this again in ten years or twenty years or three years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to jump up and say there’s a deep cultural rot in America that, if it weren’t for the fortune of incredible financial success, would have us be seen as a hellhole of antisocial maniacs.
That being said, I just don’t buy into the notion that the strategy of the party from 2016-2024 (maybe 100 Trump rallies per year?) can carry over into the late 2020s / early 2030s.
If anything, this is me saying everyone is aware that the current window for reactionary politics in America is closing as Trump loses his vigor and gets closer to being too old to do what he did between 2014 and 2024. The reactionaries in the government and behind the scenes may make one last desperate grab at maintaining power.
That's not the point: the point is America did this twice. The world is not going to deal with America radically flip flopping every policy position every 4 years, and escalating that every time.
The US has just finished (maybe?) threatening to invade a NATO allied country. The occurrence rate of that has gone from "never" to "at least once". The delta change on that is infinity: there will never be a world in several generations where that is not a strategic risk the world has to deal with every 4 years.
> That's not the point: the point is America did this twice. The world is not going to deal with America radically flip flopping every policy position every 4 years, and escalating that every time.
I’ll admit, I’m becoming confused about the point of our back-and-forth.
All I’m trying to express is that probably by the end of 2026, and definitely by 2028, the people who are trying to enact reactionary change (Stephen Miller, PayPal Mafia, Heritage Foundation, etc.) will have to adjust their strategy. They are losing their charismatic leader, if not because of constitutional limits on presidential terms, then by his very obvious reduced vigor (he will not be able to do 100 rallies in a calendar year again).
On the world stage, yes, America has stumbled. Maybe even worse, some international folks are realizing that the America that they thought existed was just a Hollywood mirage, and that we were always one recession and a few thousand votes in Florida from becoming a global pariah.
There's no law of nature that proves democracy can't be overthrown, but ICE is currently struggling against popular resistance to merely enforce immigration law in a single medium-sized city. Right now there's not much indication they have either the desire or operational capacity to pull off nationwide voter suppression. (And a number of special elections over the past year have defeated regime-backed candidates without ICE involvement.)
If they tried to merely immigration law, they would had no issue.
They were successful at creating fear and making conflict avoidant people stay home. Despite large amount of protesters, that is real effect.
And it would create real vote suppression. You would had people not voting out of fear. And the opposing side having less votes (even if they win, they win less)
You, I, and regime officials know that they're trying to do more than merely enforce immigration law. But that's not the story they're telling the staff. Your average immigration enforcement officer still believes they're doing nothing more than executing warrants on people who are unlawfully present in the country - indeed, even with all the chaos and murders, there may not even be a majority of officers who've personally performed any misconduct. I'm not saying they're "good apples", but neither will they necessarily go along with an election subversion scheme that has no plausible fig leaf.
Equally importantly, this is not an operation that could be planned in secret or at the drop of the hat. If the Trump regime tries to do something like this, we'll know weeks or months in advance, and there will be plenty of time to make it clear that anyone who participates will face swift and severe justice.
Definitely an odd duck out in the context of Trump, Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush, Reagan.
Also remember it’s not just being charismatic, but charismatic enough to keep people distracted from increasingly unpopular reactionary politics that defy even conservative beliefs (e.g. gun control, speech policing, deficit spending, plenary executive).
Gun control (for minorities), speech policing (for liberals), deficit spending (when they are in charge), and a plenary executive (when Obama isn't president) are core conservative beliefs.
They say that they don't like those things, but you can't listen to what politicians and talking heads on TV say. Politicians and talking heads lie all the fucking time. You have to look at what people do.
They aren't stupid in not understanding the hypocrisy.
We are... for thinking that they don't know that they are hypocrites.
I agree that the Democratic party has fumbled the ball (over and over) and deserves a lot of blame for where we are now, but all of the trans talk in 2024 was driven entirely by the right.
The Democratic party wasn't talking about trans people in 2024 (if anything the Democratic campaign was conspicuously avoiding the conversation entirely). The trans "debate" that people remember from that time period was driven entirely by right-wing ads and social media.
Obviously this is a pretty successful strategy considering how many people falsely remember who was actually talking about this.
Of the three references to men I found, one was counting Trump's judicial appointments and the others were "our brave men and women of the armed forces". No acknowledgement of the college enrollment gap nor illegal competition in several predominately-male fields having driven wages way down.
Lots of people know trans people (by which I mean people that have decided to take some visible action to transition) by now - the people in the boonies and flyover states have access to the same internet as everyone else, so a lot of people outside the most progressive cities have transitioned. You have to remember that trans had been at the front of the culture for 10 years (since Caitlyn Jenner) by the time of the 2024 election.
Crashing the economy? In the past year the S&P 500 rose 14%, unemployment is at 4.4%, and inflation is around 2.7%. There are many things to criticize Trump for but the economy has not actually crashed.
Trump ran on an explicit promise to bring down grocery prices on day 1.
Grocery prices have continued to climb.
Absolutely nothing he has done could remotely be said to be aimed at bringing them down.
He has also instituted massive attacks on the power of labor, and on the offices that report on things like the unemployment rate.
"The economy" is not just the stock market; unemployment numbers literally cannot be trusted coming from Trump's BLS; and an inflation of 2.7% is, in fact, fairly high (it's 35% higher than the "target" rate of 2%).
Yes, and also pushing identity politics down voters’ throats, selecting an inept candidate without a primary, their desperate attempts to buy votes with debt forgiveness, and opening the border, which escalated to a full-blown crisis leading into election season.
If we extrapolate Trump’s health today compared to where he was at just a year or two ago, I think Republicans will face the same dilemma the Democrats did soon. It will be interesting to see how they handle it.
No, it's because Obama disillusioned the left, and Biden just hammered it home. Those who thought the Democrats could actually represent the "big tent" have all been disappointed over and over again by sheepdogging and ignoring popular issues with bipartisan support in favor of corporate interests with only an occasional performative nod towards liberal ideals. That's why the right showed up to vote and the left stayed home.
Biden was by far the most effective and most progressive Democratic president of the post-WWII era.
What "hammered home" the disillusionment was not Biden's actions*, but rather the media narrative built around him, particularly by the newspaper most identified with the Democratic Party: the New York Times. They were angry that he didn't give them deference early on, and that, combined with the desire of their wealthy Republican owner to push his politics, led to the constant drumbeat of stories about Biden's supposed "cognitive decline", when he's still much sharper than Trump.
ETA: ...not to mention totally ignoring all his very real accomplishments, like forgiving the student debt of millions of people (yes, despite not getting as many as he wanted, he really did achieve that) and the infrastructure bill.
* His inaction, particularly on prosecuting Trump, was a separate matter.
No amount of writing could ever outweigh that debate performance he had. He should have declined to run and let a primary winner enter the race with some momentum.
I remember reading this a lot in 2000-2001 and 2007-2008
That said, overall I sort of agree with your assessment except for having any optimism that the US changes course.
The current looming problems with the US economy are almost entirely unforced errors of the Trump administration (they could have done basically nothing and taken credit for the Biden soft landing and economic growth) but they aren't going to course correct.
Trump has no ability to admit mistakes even to himself and he's now surrounded by lots of people who stand to enrich themselves from the chaos even as the average American is harmed greatly.