or Miniplenty
Elon Musk posted the other day naming several specific federal employees, describing them as essentially useless and without specific understanding what they do for a living. Those people are of course subject to harassment from assholes as a result.
The Trump administration is SPECTRE, Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion.
Special because Trump thinks everything related to him is special. He’s right, for certain uses of the word “special”.
Counterintelligence because the CIA under Tulsi Gabbard certainly couldn’t be intelligence.
Terrorism is ICE and whatever other agencies Trump ropes into his anti-immigrant efforts.
Revenge is Musk’s DOGE, going after departments, agencies, programs, and now individual civil servants that Trump perceives as having crossed him, with a lagniappe of cuts that clear the way for Musk to make money (NASA in his first proposed set of cuts so SpaceX gets all the business).
Extortion is Trump’s tariff policy: pay him and your company or industry gets a tariff loophole, like the one Trump will keep for his made-in-Jyna MAGA merch.
The only difference between fiction and reality is the weird billionaire with compounds full of concubines who expects flunkies to give their lives for him for tuppence and has visions of off-world colonies is in charge of the Revenge department and not all of SPECTRE.
“pay me tribute, or I will tell my goons to break my legs”
Bolding mine.
That works for me.
Let’s say Lipton goes over to China to buy a ton of tea. China will sell the tea to Lipton at the pre-tariff price, and then pay the tariff out of their own pocket. Is that how it works?
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not.
That’s how Trump thinks it works. Although he isn’t clear whether it is paid by the tea farms or the Government.
In reality the tariff will be paid by Lipton, who will raise their prices to recover the money.
Trump has had this explained to him 1000 times by very smart people. He rejects their advice and declares them all dumb and they don’t understand it like he does.
Yeah, I shoulda had a /s.,but that is the only way it could possibly not raise prices for the consumer. He’ll impose a few tariffs, mostly on things that won’t hurt his buddies, but use the threat of tariffs as leverage.
Yes, the companies involved could keep prices constant, if they were willing to pay the whole cost of the tariffs out of their profits.
Of course, if their profit margin is less than the tariff, this is actually impossible, as well as being laughably implausible when you consider the nature of greed.
On the tariff issue Trump is already laying the groundwork to claim victory without doing anything. He has said the Mexican president has agreed to his demands. Never mind she has denied saying that. Who do you think his followers are going to believe, Trump or a Mexican woman?
If he’s victorious before putting on the tariff he can throw himself a parade and not have to ruin the economy.
The foreign government could change the exchange rate. This would shield U.S. consumers from the price rise at the cost of raising the price of U.S. products in the foreign country.
I think 10 percent tariffs, while bad, might not be inflationary. If soybean farmers cannot sell their crop, that means less overall domestic consumption of what the farmers (and their suppliers) might buy and possibly a slightly lower overall U.S. price level.
Of course, you’d expect bugger all else that US consumers would expect the rest of the world to bear the costs imposed by the idiocy they have voted into office.
(and by the way, many foreign countries have floating currencies, the market sets the prevailing exchange rate)
The biggest cost impost of tariffs is not the duties paid but that local producers of the the levied commodity, or competing commodities or other products produced from that commodity raise their prices to match the price of the imported goods. It’s the protection and feather bedding of the local industry where the costs blow out.
I hardly think that’s fair.
Claudia Scheinbaum Pardo is a Mexican Jewish woman.
You’re welcome 
Haven’t there been allegations that other countries, particularly China, run certain iindustries at a loss in order to keep competitors out of the market? That sort of anti-competitive trade policy is one the cases where tariffs make sense.
Allegations? Well of course there are allegations made stateside, and almost all are both unfounded and from feather bedded US industries wanting a government hand out.
There are specific WTO definitions of what comprises dumping, and they relate to cost of production and domestic prices.
Putative tariffs are allowed to be imposed on dumped goods and all US manufacturers would be all over any suspected case like seagulls over chips. But they aren’t. So they remain unfounded allegations which neatly fit the current populist narrative.
Much has been written about anticompetitive trade practices that China engages in. China is the one place where a tough stance makes sense. Long before Trump, we were hearing about forced tech transfers, followed by knockoff products being produced within China. I wish I had a cite, but a few years ago I recall reading in the Economist that the number of times China’s courts had sided against a foreign company was literally in the single digits.
I can tell you that I was working on a pharmaceutical program back around 2010, and we were in P2. We learned that companies were selling our API to researchers, and our attorneys told us we shouldn’t waste our time, so don’t bother trying to do anything about it.
Point is, although I think Trump’s trade policies are utter stupidity, the broken clock is (IMO) right about China.
I wonder if Ro Khanna is going the Mayor Adams way…not just here, I saw him elsewhere too speak supportively of Elon Musk’s DOGE.
Oh, I agree that the idea of cutting wasteful government spending is a good one. Who doesn’t, it’s like agreeing that killing puppies is bad.* It’s just that I think that tasking Elon Musk with it is an idiot move.
They’ll go after sectors of government that bring in money, like enforcement agencies, and they seem posed to go after “woke” programs that assure safe respectful workplaces……which is going to get very expensive really fast once the legal liabilities kick in.
And they’ll cut programs that help individual citizens, because they’re socialism and the Republican Party has been gunning for those for years.
Then they’ll ignore the sectors that could do with actual reform, because those reforms will hurt the businesses that have been ripping off the government for years.
The “government should be run like a business” faction always seem to miss the key point…….businesses get to walk away if they are in a situation where there’s no winning solution to be negotiated. The government doesn’t have that option.
*ETA - Bad example, for a minute I forgot we were dealing with Republicans. I’m pretty sure Cricket was a closet Democrat, though.
This whole thing pisses me off. No I don’t work for the federal government. I work for county government.
We work our asses off. It’s to the point that I can’t do it anymore. I understand that. I’m gonna retire before I become detrimental to the team. My choice. I care about what we do and the people we support.
32 years in the job. A pretty good run. 38 years in mapping and GIS.
I’m mostly worried that they will go after education. Trump 1 tried to do it. And of course Medicare and Medicaid. And Social Security.
They’ve got theirs so, get rid of that.
Every time you hear the idiotic phrase deep state, think career civil servants, because that’s who they are targeting. Many toil for years for not a huge amount of money and little recognition but keep the wheels in motion. And many are going to be difficult to replace, if and when there is a return to normalcy.