A lot of supporters of the trade restrictions don't care. They're working people who don't own a lot of stocks and all they've seen is their jobs sent overseas.
To them, it doesn't even matter if things get "worse" for a while. Their life is already meeting every economic headwind imaginable.
> Their life is already meeting every economic headwind imaginable.
Then they’ve failed to imagine how much more difficult their life will become under excessive tariffs.
It’s also eye-opening to watch so many people in my extended family and social network cheer on DOGE and tariffs right until they impact their own jobs. Lot of people out there didn’t connect the dots about how their own jobs were going to be impacted by tariffs.
> Then they’ve failed to imagine how much more difficult their life will become under excessive tariffs.
Again, these workers don't have jobs. When the John Deere factory closes down in your town and moves to Mexico, tariffs sound good even if it's just to punish such companies and the abuse of their workers.
If you're unemployed and living on whatever odd jobs and government assistance you can get, tariffs won't make one bit of difference in your life. Factories may even return, and your life may improve. It's better than just accepting your situation.
> If you're unemployed and living on whatever odd jobs and government assistance you can get, tariffs won't make one bit of difference in your life.
Prices going up on everything will absolutely make a difference in their lives. Even with government assistance and very low income, they still have to buy things to live - and they'll be able to afford even less. The poorer you are, the harder this is going to hit you.
They are absolutely buying goods that are manufactured in countries subject to these tariffs. They have to buy clothes and all sorts of everyday items, and since they can't afford to buy things manufactured in the US (when that's even an option), it's very likely they buy things that are made in China/etc at a higher rate that wealthier people. Even going back to your examples, flour will be going up in price, as well as gas and car parts.
Your comment insinuates that people complaining about tariffs are disconnected from those living in poverty, but thinking that those living in poverty won't be affected by prices going up around the board is a much bigger disconnect.
Oil may go down. Flour? The combine to reap the wheat will go up, why would flour go down?
Poor people in the hood still wear clothes. Clothes will go up.
That car on the verge of breaking down? Car parts will go up.
Poor people still have a supply-chain footprint that has many branches outside the country. At least some of the things they need are going to get more expensive.
Do I have it right? The honest hard working American doesn't exist and won't feel it. Either we're criminally rich or just criminals? What a weird argument.
Yeah and when it does break down, the parts are going to cost more to fix it.
And what are they gonna do when their car breaks down catastrophically? Buy a used car? The prices of those will skyrocket once the price of new cars goes up.
Then really desperate people will steal cars as the value of them, and used parts start to skyrocket.
It doesn't even take half a brain cell to see how this works.
> They are not buying the latest igadget, or really anything chinese/gloablist for that matter, except for whatever junk at dollar tree. They buy flour, they buy gas and they pray their car doesn't break down.
You don’t understand how interconnected the economy is.
You don’t really think that flour appears on the shelves at the store without any coupling to internationally-sourced goods, do you? The parts for the farm equipment, the steel for the buildings it’s stored in, the vehicles that deliver it to the store.
This idea of the economy as an ultra-simplistic 1:1 line between raw product and the supermarket shelves is not how the world works.
Ignoring that, you conveniently glossed over the part about their car breaking down. What happens now when their car does need new parts? Tires wear out?
It’s also absurd to claim that poor people don’t enjoy things like access to cheap cellular phones.
Sure, I'll take you up on that offer. I grew up in a poor fishing family struggling to survive living in a trailer park so I'm very well aware of what it's like growing up in deep poverty.
Frankly I know more poor people than you pretend to know and the reality is that they are going to suffer far more under these tariffs than anyone else. All that stuff they buy at dollar tree because they have no other options are imported from all over the world because that's the cheapest stuff available.
You won't convince him, because he is not open to be convinced.
I think things will get ugly for the poorest people in society, but I am curious at how things will get ugly exactly.
I don't think price increases due to tariffs will be the worst if it. I think the perfect storm of higher prices, lower economic activity due to the halt in global trade, poor stock market perform performance, and ultimately economic contraction will result in mass layoffs, companies going out of business, and high unemployment rate.
Suddenly people won't even be able to find that odd job anymore.
Tariffs will have an larger impact on low income people because they act as a flat tax on goods. There is a certain fixed dollar value that everyone needs to survive the month, and that value just got larger while income remained the same. When you're poor the smallest increase in cost of living pushes you in to the red.
This is why inflation was such a huge issue. I fail to see how this is any different.
They’ll make things harder to afford but I get your point. They had one way to make money which was their factory and now it’s gone and orange man is promising he’ll bring it back. It’s a no brainer, of course you go all in on that one hope that you have.
> If you're unemployed and living on whatever odd jobs and government assistance you can get, tariffs won't make one bit of difference in your life.
That government assistance is also being threatened (often by adding work requirements to it), and those odd jobs can also go away or become much more scarce if the economy goes over the edge.
Finally, the cost of everything will go up, which will hit those that are scraping by with odd jobs and government assistance the hardest.
I hope it doesn’t happen, but when you assert things are as bad as they can get, that just doesn’t match the situation you described. They can get worse.
It does matter if things get worse and it's very uncaring to say otherwise. The import taxes are going to make wealth inequality much worse and significantly hurt not just almost all American's but large swathes of the world too.
labour participation rate is the number you want to be looking at - unemployment excludes people who have given up looking
anectdotally, you dont see people dropping out of universities en masse because businesses are desperate for workers and willing to make it worth students while to put off or skip the education.
you see that in and out in tech/software dev, but not across industries
> A lot of supporters of the trade restrictions don't care. They're working people who don't own a lot of stocks and all they've seen is their jobs sent overseas
A lot of us were also in the market before the pandemic (aka before 4 years ago), so we remain in the green.
Personally, it's a win-win.
1. Based on past tariff action, the current tariffs will not be repealed by any future administration - there is plenty of harsh feelings amongst some of us Dems who were IRA adjacent to France and Germany's lobbying against the Green New Deal and calling it "protectionism".
2. This plus DOGE has caused short term pain as reflected in the NY by-elections leading to Stefanik's nomination to the UN being pulled.
3. Those of us with some sympathy for economic nationalism but don't caucus GOP have been vindicated, but have a messaging tool now as well.
4. We can finally take the UAW and ILA national leadership behind a shed and pull a metaphorical old yeller. There's no point trying to make peace with National when much of their local leadership leans GOP. Makes it easier to concentrate on AZ, NV, and GA - states where the demographic and union makeup is completely orthogonal to the UAW and ILA's cadre. Makes it easier to help the AFL-CIO as well.
5. Sullivan and Raimondo's doctrine has been vindicated. Philippines, Brazil, Colombia, Malaysia, and India have now been made much more cost competitive than China or transshipment via Vietnam or Thailand - either you reduce transshipment from China or your competitors in apparel, textiles, and electronics are subsidized. Vietnam already has sent their Dy PM to negotiate as we speak to reduce tariffs.
Europe also has no option but to diversify away from China as well. Either you fund a state selling intermediate parts to Russia in Ukraine, or start building domestic defense and industrial capabilities like that which existed before the 2000s (which they are now doing).
-----
Already, some of my peers from my previous life have started testing the waters for a Dem equivalent of the Tea Party. Lot of realignment coming in the next 2 election cycles.
curious what the Dem equivalent of the tea party means? Does that mean a libertarian streak before populist takeover, or is that meant more in terms of a critical voting block to extract concessions?
As in a more populist or outsider type tinge (or vocalizing those positions).
I'd disagree with a number of their foreign policy choices, but the house doesn't really set foreign policy, and the hawkish policies I'd want will anyhow be pushed by this admin but not revoked by any incoming admin.
There's a pretty solid crop of state assembly members and outsiders who can competitively primary out a number of older generation Dems, assuming a model similar to Illinois and NY 2020 is followed.
Plenty of his supporters are SMB owners or people that work in trades/factories. This is not a revolution of the indigent. What these people don't realize is even if they make 200K a year and drive an 85K financed F-250, they are effectively in the same class as someone making 50K a year managing a Dollar General. These people have no class awareness and they voted in a representative of the ultra wealthy intent on pillaging our economy. Some may believe that Trump will usher in some era of economic prosperity but they are wrong.
On the other hand Trump will deliver on another, implicit promise to them, which is inflict pain and suffering on a great deal of people they dislike for whatever reason.
> What these people don't realize is even if they make 200K a year and drive an 85K financed F-250, they are effectively in the same class as someone making 50K a year managing a Dollar General.
More people making under 50K per year voted for Trump in 2024 than voted for Harris.
I didn't say people making under 50k weren't voting for Trump. I was saying it's not exclusively some revolution of the poor (statistically it can't be). My larger point is it doesn't matter whether his voters make 50k or 200k, they are the lowest class in American society and voting for Trump and his attendant policies is against their own economic interests.
And despite economic prosperity being the cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, somehow it isn't anymore. Now his supporters have pivoted to this idea that we must all live in a kind of austerity so that collectively (waves hands around) we enter a new age of American prosperity. Literally this sea change in MAGA sentiment has happened in the last six weeks. It's baffling.
> On the other hand Trump will deliver on another, implicit promise to them, which is inflict pain and suffering on a great deal of people they dislike for whatever reason.
Not so implicit, "I will be your retribution".
And this part is very much a normal Republican position. The realisation that Americans will vote for a policy which hurts them so long as it's positioned as hurting the people they hate was key to Republican success.
"Nobody gets kicked in the head" loses in American politics if it's up against "Everybody gets kicked in the head, yes those awful people you don't like will get kicked in the head"
And when your implementation "accidentally" forgets to kick the wealthy in the head? Well the important thing is you kicked people in the head - you're not one of those scum who don't want to kick the awful people in the head.
I don't particularly like the idea of tariffs, but it is what it is.
Having to put up with policies you don't like is simply the social consequence of applying unpopular policies for four years in the other direction.
If the opposing party supports outsourcing, importing of labor, no protections for domestic industry, then they should expect retaliation from people who don't like those policies and who have the means to vote in someone who will push for whatever they view as corrective action.
This is a democracy. If one party pushes unpopular policies (unpopular to the other side), don't be surprised with the opposition pushes back.
If people don't want things to continue to deteriorate, then the economic disenfranchisement of the American working class must be put to a stop. It's really pretty simple.
> Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
The problem is that the actual solution is taxes and redistribution but if you try that, they’ll lynch you (the very people who would benefit most from it). Better to have weird Trumponomics than that.
I don't think it's that simple. First, the US economy was supercharged by virtue of being the only economy left humming along after WW2.
Also, in the mid 20th century, the top income tax rate was 91%. Now it's 37%. Capital gains taxes were also much higher. The wealthy were taxed much more heavily during our economic boom times than now. It's not hard to think that having a more equitable distribution of wealth, not taxes, might have something to do with it.
They don’t have to own stocks. If they like eating and buying household goods then this will affect them negatively. It will help very few people for a long time, even if it goes perfectly to plan.
I’d be extremely surprised if other countries meekly do what Trump wants. There are many options on the table, and change is more likely in a crisis.
> To them, it doesn't even matter if things get "worse" for a while. Their life is already meeting every economic headwind imaginable.
Really? How do you even know that? You think another round of price hikes within the year is unimaginable, which what the economic consensus on immediate tariffs this high predicts?
The unemployment rate is 4%. The amount of liberation day tariff supporters is an order of magnitude higher than that. Pretending that things can't get worse is dangerous and stupid.
> Their life is already meeting every economic headwind imaginable
Horseshit. The most fervent Trump supporters are upper-middle class professionals who are bored with their lives. Hence the frequent boat parades for Trump. It's why the huge, expensive trucks are the ones flying the Trump flags. And practically all of them have 401ks, which means they are at least indirectly invested in stocks.
That may be your lived experience, but it doesn't match the data.[1]
The working class is shifting to Trump because his rhetoric matches what they want to see: trade restrictions, protections on domestic labor, and the return of good/stable manufacturing jobs.
Trump is almost certainly not the best representation of the American worker, but he's winning because he, at least, tells them what they want to hear.
The local food bank I donate to sends out a quarterly newsletter and the number of families it serves has more than quadrupled since 2020.
I think this is the primary reason the Democrats have been losing, clearly voters are feeling economic hardship in a big way, and ignoring it or belittling the point is what lost voters.
We can't focus on social issues when the hierarchy of needs isn't being met.
Historically a lot of Republicans have derided poverty statistics and poverty programs because the people on the programs “all have big screen TVs”[0]. I’m not sure the politics are as clear cut as you indicate.
I mean, I watched and participated in the US Election last year, it was extremely clear to me that Republicans focused on economy, and Democrats focused on social issues.
The Republicans won, which is an indictment on the Democrats messaging in my opinion.
I'm not even talking about the merits of which party has better ideas, or if people are voting against their own best interests. But I think the party that said they'd do "something" to make the economy better is the one that won.
Why Democrats don't hammer on retraining and education so that more people can participate in the services and information economy confuses me greatly. Manufacturing isn't coming back, at least not immediately.
> that Republicans focused on economy, and Democrats focused on social issues.
That impression is partially an artifact of the information space disparity. Republicans spent a ton of time talking about social issues and the Democrats talked about lot about economic issues, but coverage of those things was wildly uneven. If you had any exposure to the Hispanic communities affected by deportations now, ask how many of the people making “I didn’t know he’d deport hard-working people like …” comments spent 2024 hearing a ton about how trans were threatening women or drag queens were grooming kids to be gay on WhatsApp/Telegram, and not coverage of the many, many times widespread deportation was promised. It’s almost a cliche to find people who thought they were voting for lower prices and are just now realizing that tariffs are taxes they pay, and that’s a function of where they get their news.
Yeah I definitely didn't say I agree with the methods proposed, only that it's clear that it struck a chord with the population.
Dems really need to focus on messaging that can resonate with those people. Things like vouchers for trade school to boost higher end blue collar jobs, etc.
You're both painting polarized views. I'm from the rust belt where many of these disenfranchised can be found. Manufacturing isn't coming back. Tariffs are only going to increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
I think the point was that these tariffs are hurting stocks because it is hurting workers, which hurts consumer spending. These tariffs are against workers primarily. The next time you see someone digging up a water main check their boots, the supervisor might be wearing Carhartt and Redwing, if they are a hipster, but the people who are muddy are typically wearing much cheaper imported equipment.
Its a perspective thing. I saw an interview a couple weeks ago of a man in his 30s saying he finished high school and couldn't find a warehouse job like his father did and had been working odd jobs ever since.
To my parents that was an unacceptable thing, had I finished high school and not done college (or some vocational school) I'm sure they would have kicked me out of their place. So not continuing my education was never an option, I had to, because from their perspective that was the only way.
This other dude never had this, his dad worked an warehouse job at some big box store more likely, went up the chain there and made a decent living for his family. The expectation for the family was that if their kids had done the same, it would have been fine, he said his father never even finished high school, but that isn't reality anymore for most people and I don't think this has been a culturally set reality in the US.
People were very much still expecting this would continue to be a thing but its very hard for you to do that in a place where there is very little manufacture and with so much tech taking over brick and mortar stores.
The thing with tech taking over the world, is it's taking over the world everywhere and the last few places where labor is still cheap are employing humans.
In so much stuff involving process automation if you go about building a new factory you're going to minimize your labor costs as much as possible. The only dumb jobs that remain pay very low and/or are back breaking, and everything else is a high tech job. On top of that process efficiency means that a single factory somewhere could easily produce all the product needed to meet world demand, the most difficult part would be meeting regulations in other countries. We are past the days where you need 20+ factories building the same thing in the US for most products. You build it in one place and put it on a truck with fast and cheap shipping.
People will keep crying for a past that no longer exists while the world changes ever faster.
The US has a ton of manufacturing, but few manufacturing jobs, because they automated a lot of the aspects of production. This was one the biggest concerns by Andrew Yang when running for president, lack of good jobs because of automation takeover.
I don't think the parent is seriously describing these people as actually facing every economic headwind, but is instead pointing out the lack of imagination on the part of the people supporting this policy.
"Things are terrible, so we have to do something!" No, you have to do something that will help. Just "doing something" isn't good enough. And if you think "things can't get any worse", yeah, they can. A lot worse.
Don't make random changes just because things are bad. You need changes that will help, which is a lot harder.
To them, it doesn't even matter if things get "worse" for a while. Their life is already meeting every economic headwind imaginable.