Almost all my money goes to mortgage, shit from China, food, and the occasional service. It does make me wonder some times how it all works. But it's been working like this for a long time now.
Real estate. The US economy floats on the perpetually-increasing cost of land. Thats where your mortgage money goes, to a series of finacial instruments to allow others to benifit from the eternally rising value of "your" property.
You should look at other countries where pay is much less and real estate is at similar levels of cost: from Europe, Canada, China, Australia and India.
Condos in Mumbai are priced similar to those in the major cities in the US.
It amuses me what's been true in the rest of the world (Vancouver, Sydney, Aukland and London come to mind but I'm sure it's not just the Anglosphere) for decades arrived in the US a couple of years ago and is suddenly a shocking new thing
If something hasn't happened in your area before, it is new to the experiencer regardless of it having occurred elsewhere. If an area experiences a flash flood are you likewise amused by their exasperation at the novelty of their situation, despite it having occurred to plenty of other people in other places?
Part of it is a hidden tax on the young and workers, by making currency less valuable (what young people and workers have, the ability to earn cash) and transferring that wealth to old people and asset owners (to pay for pensions and healthcare).
That is why mortgages are (future) taxpayer subsidized. Without the subsidies from the future, the real estate prices would not be able to rise so much.
There is also economic agglomeration to exacerbate the issue.
Working class old people (the kinds that need pensions and healthcare) are not accumulating your wealth. Pensions and healthcare are nice in that they're almost immediately consumed. Nobody gets rich from needing financial help for healthcare.
You should not look towards pensions and healthcare, but rather the actually wealthy old men. Those are who the ones stealing your future.
Productivity doesn't materialize out of thin air. If something is being consumed, it has to be produced. And lots of old people, presumably more than you implied via "wealthy old men", plan on being able to consume in combination of selling the assets they have (either directly, or via some defined benefit pension fund manager selling and distributing them cash), and by receiving direct wealth transfers via cash or healthcare services.
Apparently it's even hard to make molds in the US. China seems to be the top dog in the production chain. From design, to mold, to production, to packaging.
It's very difficult if not impossible to avoid. Just how many hours do you want to spend doing research for _every single_ household item? It'd be genuinely difficult, and even plenty of stuff which claims to be "made in the USA" is actually just assembled here. It's possible to look these things up, but that takes time and it's difficult to get absolute certainty. And not all stuff from China is terrible, either. It's just an opportunity cost which is nearly impossible to avoid given just how common so much of the crap from China is.
A normal person who doesn't want to upend their life might have a few easier baby-steps: buy as little stuff as possible, and buy used whenever possible. The original country doesn't see any real direct benefit when you buy used.
It just depends how important you think it is to chose who gets your money, where raw materials are coming from and how things are made. I happen to think it’s the most important global issue right now. Come at me.
Its very difficult to buy something "made in china" that is actually made there, not just assembled there.
Even if you get something like a DJI drone, you can do some quick research and find out the guts (SOC) is from a company in California using IP from Europe/USA (arm).
That's a good point as well: where do you draw the line? If I buy a car, were the screens made in China? Is that a sufficiently small portion of the car to render it acceptable? If so, what about every remaining part in the car?
Ripped off? I think it’s more that you are ripping off people from other countries, whilst undermining your own economy and draining your country of meaningful work. It’s nice to pay your neighbour properly for the work they do. How much clothes are you actually buying and why? The clothing industry is a horrible one, riddled with waste and slavery. You been to the factory where they’re making your clothes have you? Wake up man. This shit matters.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. What the heck are you people buying?! I mean, after some pots and pans and a couple of t-shirts what else is there?
I'm very frugal but I buy some electronic parts every now and then, last time I bought a titanium hiking pot, $12 instead of like $50 locally, same factory, the only difference is that the brand is not stamped on it
That's partially a euhpemism for imported stuff. But more to your general meaning the point of the article is that there's not a lot of slack. The US is pretty close to fully utilized and there's not a lot of slack to start making stuff here instead.
I am delighted to hear from the actual FedEx’s own Chuck Noland! Getting this post to appear on this website using only vellum and iron gall ink is an incredible feat. Could you share some about your process (in many months time obviously)?
See this can be the issue with posting on the internet without directly using Chinese-built electronics: you have to periodically remind your seneschal what your various shorthand terms mean or they will make mistakes like forgetting what “ctrl+D” means and assuming you meant “downvote” and not “bookmark”
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.
They have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Oh, come on. Why don't you mention the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)? Which actually stoked the inflation by increasing government spending when the labor market was very tight?
IRA's pie in the sky green energy cost reductions were going to take years at least to show any benefits - assuming there were any benefits.
High inflation belongs to Democrats just as much as it belongs to Republicans.
Please quote the exact part of my statement where I absolve any political party of blame for inflation-inducing measures.
The only two plausibly mainstream (by name, not votes) parties I am willing to absolve blame would be the Greens and Libertarians as they hold no power.
This isn't true. At 70k (much higher than the median income), the effective federal tax rate is under 10%. People generally spend more than 10% of their income on housing. If taxes are your number one expense you likely have a significantly larger than average income.
Pretty sure the stagnation has a cause beginning in 2025 and that has to do with things like: Canada refusing to buy ALL American liquor in retaliation. China refusing to buy ANY soy beans in retaliation. In retaliation for what you might ask?
I leave that as an exercise for the reader. If you are unable to answer that question honestly to yourself you need to seriously consider that your cognitive bias might be preventing you from thinking clearly.
depends, on which side, of the tarrifs an economy happens to be
and where, geopoliticaly.
AI, or whatever a mountain of processors churning all of the worlds data will be called later, still has no use case, other than total domination, for which it has brought a kind of lame service to all of the totaly dependent go along to get along types, but nothing approaching an actual guaranteed answer for anything usefull and profitable, lame, lame, infinite fucking lame tedious shit
that has prompted most people to.stop.even trying, and so a huge vast amount of genuine human
inspiration and effort is gone
Not just both sides, but infinite sides, every country border for anything that crosses the border. Making a pencil might requires dozens to thousands of mining/factories in the pencil supply chain and there is taxation at every level!
"Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.
That is why the operation of the free market is so essential. Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world."
This is tangential to your point about globalization, but the funny thing is that within a firm, especially a vertically integrated one, there really are commissars sending out orders from central offices, dictating production quotas and setting prices. Most companies resemble a command economy on the inside, much more than a market economy.
And almost all economic activity and production is mediated and coordinated by firms. Very few transactions happen between unaffiliated individuals independently making and trading goods according to direct market incentives.
Yeah but those commissars act upon market forces and market forces alone. They screw up and overproduce? Bam! And financial punishment comes. Underproduce? Bam! All the lost could-have-been profit went elsewhere.
Any attempt to not have market as part of the loop just leads to long term inefficiency, punished as it should be. I wont be buying overpriced pencils from bad planners unless they are the only ones in the world, and in such case I may be motivated to look for alternatives.
Right, but pertinent to the pencil example, there can indeed be a single company that makes everything from the brass ferrules and the machines that stamp them, to the rubber and the graphite and the wood, coordinating all of the people involved, with the market mechanisms only acting at the periphery. And often this ends up being a cheaper and more efficient way to coordinate the people involved in pencilmaking than rival ferrule-salesmen independently pitching their brass ferrules in a market, and soliciting unaffiliated day-laborers to run their presses, because of the significant savings on transaction costs.
It needs to be paired with an understanding that they do this _with their own money_ and with _their skin in the game_, which are fundamentally missing from broader command economies.
Farmers stand to benefit from the current administration's trade and immigration policy; bailouts are part of the program. Bailouts were given out during the trade wars in 2017-2020. Bailouts are expected to pay out in early 2026 as part of the annual farm aid bill due in November.
Not only bailouts, but GOP aligned farmers voted for Trump to remove 2024 H-2A visa reforms that addressed abuse of the system (seizing passports, etc).
They didn't want to pay for the H-2A paperwork, but didn't like that undocumented laborers would move from farm to farm depending on conditions.
They've had the education system they depend on attacked and weakened for generations, they've had fear and distrust of science, experts, and scholars drilled into them, and they've been told countless lies including very comforting lies about what tariffs would mean for them by the very people they were told were the only ones who could be trusted.
I can see the appeal of blaming farmers for getting exactly what they voted for, but honestly they were suckers who were victimized. My hope is that many of them will feel betrayed enough to break free from their indoctrination and start looking for truths and answers outside of the circles which have played them for fools, but that's not going to be an easy process since it'll mean challenging their closest held prejudices and the tearing down and rebuilding of core parts of their identity. That sort of thing is hard enough to do when your world isn't falling apart around you and the last thing the ones who are willing to try need is everyone telling them they deserved what was done to them and that they'll get no sympathy from anyone.
I feel as bad for the farmers who voted for this as I feel for the farmers who were hurt by the civil war and the ending of slavery. They knew what they were supporting, thought they would be unaffected and actually benefit from the result.
Not much sympathy for the dumb, whatever it means. Especially when they drag 8 billion people down such path.
It didnt require stellar IQ, private education or university degree to see clearly what was what. Just basic human decency and very basic moral compass. It went way beyond 'grabbing pussies'.
Stupidity in humanity is endless, literally the only correction system out there is punishment for it. If this is left out, stupidity grows over time and thats a proper doom spiral towards systemic collapse.
This ain't even about social system or cohesion or similar, just pure stupidity. Not losing my sleep for them, far from it. The more brutal examples would happen, the better and louder the correcting lesson will be. There is really no other way out of this, unfortunately. Otherwise next election cycle will result in same/worse and these will be viewed as good rosy times.
That's a very empathetic take. But it's also essentially "society made them do it". When they also clearly voted to root out all their farm labor. They support their own education system.
They've spent enough joy owning the libs and scorning education. It's just FAFO.
The US has one of the biggest propaganda machines in history keeping these people in their place, operating through multiple vectors of disinformation, including mainstream media, social media, podcasts, and churches.
There is zero chance most of them are going to wake up any time soon.
The bailouts will help some of them, but many are going to lose their farms to "investors" - who will be linked to Trump. And not even that will be enough to make them shift their opinions.
The one thing that could break the dam is a public release of the Epstein files. But that's a different topic.
> The one thing that could break the dam is a public release of the Epstein files.
It won't. Grabbing pussies, bribes, clear lies everywhere, cheating, felonies re taxes, attempt to overthrow government. Nothing, absolutely nothing.
Some added hebephilia charges wont convince anybody to change their mind. And that relationship is pretty clear, they were very good friends.
What you can do - start calling staunch supporters pedophilles supporters. You family, friends, colleagues, en masse. Change may come from the bottom, its still a toxic word that nobody wants to be associated with, even transitively. Nothing changes from the top.
I am not holding my breath, this is new bottom since we abandoned kings and warlords.
I'd bet farmers would much rather have repeat customers or the promise of future valuable repeat customers over bailouts. But with these tariffs and retaliations, their former buyers are finding new sources. Even after the trade war ends, inertia will be another hurdle for our farmers.
US farming already has extremely high levels of government intervention aimed at price stability. This leads to all sorts of things like the government paying some farmers not to grow crops, some farmers being prevented from selling their crops, farmers getting paid after a bad season, government minimum price guarantees, and so on. And the overwhelming majority (like 95%+) of all produce in the US is sold by farmers to commodity markets, at more or less fixed rates, who then process/distribute it.
Maybe they should not vote for guy who did exactly this already once and said repeatedly that he will do this.
Frankly, they voted for Trump, because they thought only liberals, trans and other people they hate will be harmed. It is really not the case that they would be victims on an unexpected event. They wanted this to happen, just kind of to everyone else.
