Aristippus the court philosopher to Dionysus the Tyrant spied Diogenes the Stoic cooking lentils for a meal. "O Diogenes,” he said “If you would only learn to flatter Dionysus, you wouldn't have to live on lentils."
“O Aristippus,” Diogenes replied, "If you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysus.”
Jesse's steelman is actually incorrect. The stated goal is not to bring *good* manufacturing jobs to the US, it's to bring *shitty* manufacturing jobs back. If you wanted *good* manufacturing jobs you would want to make it easy to import all the materials and components that your high-tech factories could turn into high value products which you would then want to be able to sell to the largest markets possible. Dumbing down and cheapening the american workforce is a core component of the ideology here.
1. Tariffs amount to taxes on goods at the border paid by businesses. It’s odd that the same crowd calling for higher corporate taxes doesn’t see tariffs as another valid lever. And while people assume a $1 tariff means $1 tacked onto the retail price, in reality that's not the case.
2. It’s interesting how quickly tariffs get called “inflationary” while corporate taxes generally don’t. Oren Cass made this point on a Yascha Mounk podcast. That doesn’t mean tariffs can’t affect prices, but there is a double standard.
3. The U.S.'s deindusrialization has caused a loss of critical manufacturing capacity, which we saw during COVID when even allies imposed export bans. As the pod points out, the loss of know-how is a genuine strategic risk. Over half the world’s ships are built by China. China’s massive shipbuilding industry (among others) underscores how their industrial policies, and US trade policy, have created real geopolitical risk for the US.
4. Comparative advantage is a bit of a lie. If a country’s “advantage” hinges on lax labor and environmental regulations, that’s different from a classic scenario of, say, Iceland trading cod for American corn. Simply saying “comparative advantage” paperovers those inequalities.
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That said, I don’t think the U.S. is positioned to succeed with such an erratic tariff strategy. Countries have their own domestic politics. Nobody in Canada, for instance, wants to negotiate if the administration is talking about annexation. A more strategic approach would be: “We’re putting a certain percentage tariff on Chinese goods; any country matching that against China gets exempt from ours.” Also, exempting raw materials (like oil or steel) could help keep domestic production costs low.
Neither steelman fits because the administration is simply inept. But at least they understand that higher tariffs are not necessarily bad for the United States. The Biden administration did massive subsidies instead and the result was higher inflation and public debt. In many key industries the US will benefit from higher tariffs, and I’m worried Dems are just going to do the “anything opposite of Trump is good” thing.
A corporate income tax is a tax in profits. So any decisions (like production level or pricing) that maximize pre-tax profits also generally maximize after-tax profits. So the tax redirects some profits to the government, but otherwise has minimizes any effects on incentives. Tariffs are not taxes on profits, which makes them highly distorotionary and destructive.
Also, this is a wildly misguided take on comparative advantage.
Wait are you actually suggesting corporate taxes have no inflationary effect? You aren't engaging with what I said. I don't have any issue with corporate taxes.
> Also, this is a wildly misguided take on comparative advantage.
Okay, but you’ll need to argue better than that. Explain how it’s “comparative advantage” when offshoring means rewarding countries that use coal, exploit labor, and suppress domestic consumption through aggressive industrial policy, while U.S. companies have stricter labor and environmental rules. That's a far from the Econ101 explanation of "comparative advantage" used to justify free trade.
I don't want to bother with the comparative advantage argument since that's already so thoroughly covered elsewhere.
But, on the corporate tax point, no corporate income taxes are not inflationary. To the extent it influuences behavior, it's discouraging economic activity so that reduces overall spending and holds down inflation. I don't think you understand why a tax on income is completely different from a tax on revenues or input costs. The tax incidence and the second order effects are not even remotely comparable.
Say you're charging $100 for a product, selling 100 units and making $10 per unit. That's the profit-maximizing price and production level. If you have a 20% tax on profits, that doesn't change the optimal price or production level. If your $90 of production costs goes up to $95 or $100, it absolutely does.
Re: 1. Tariffs are also paid by consumers who order a finished product from the tariffed origin.
Re: 1&2. Tariffs are also analogous to sales tax or VAT, meaning every individual transaction gets taxed instead of the end-of-year corporate profit. While VAT-like things may have their place, they're not particularly progressive compared to taxing profits. And the profit tax doesn't have the obvious one-to-one correspondence to each sale that tariffs do. It's much more straightforward for the firm to incorporate the tariff into the sale price, while adjusting prices in light of overall profit is more delicate, because of that whole demand curve thing.
Re: 3. This doesn't sound very leftist, but anyway you'd have to argue that tariffs would actually do the job here. The CHIPS Act made a lot more different incentives to bring semiconductors to the US instead of just a simple item-per-item import tax.
Re: 4. Obviously sometimes there really is comparative advantage like in agriculture. But if we're talking about countries with similar levels of development capable of supplying similar products, like say Canada vs. USA in many industries, I can't see how tariffs are justified. But yes if you want to impose a tax on the externalities like labor or environmental abuses, tariffs may be a good way to do that. Of course Trump doesn't think about it that way.
1a. I mentioned prices do raise for consumers but they don't bear the full cost.
1b. Good point. Tariffs are structurally closer to a VAT than a corporate tax. But my point was rhetorical. I’m reacting to a media narrative that treats all tariffs as catastrophic and inflationary, while ignoring the broader structural issues they’re meant to address. Tariffs are not a terrible lever to use and I'd go as far as to say the USA could use more of them (with some obvious nuance). Democrats and major outlets treat tariffs as a uniquely inflationary sin, while celebrating other taxes on business that also raise costs. There’s no economic law that says a profit tax is "good" inflation while a border tax is "bad" inflation.
3a. Not sure what you mean here honestly. I wasn’t making an imperialist point. I’m saying the U.S. has a clear geopolitical vulnerability in relying too heavily on overseas supply chains. COVID made that obvious. The CHIPS Act is a good start, but it’s not binary
4a. I agree with you (re: comparative advantage across peer countries). I’m not arguing for blanket protectionism. I think tariffs are most useful in targeted cases: key sectors, key trading partners, and where there's a strategic or environmental case. The Trump admin applied them erratically, which is part of my criticism too.
To reiterate my final point in the original comment: I’m reacting to a media narrative that treats all tariffs as catastrophic and inflationary, while ignoring the broader structural issues they’re meant to address. Tariffs aren’t some insane lever. They can be useful and the U.S. could probably use more of them (with some obvious nuance).
On point 1, let’s be clear on this actually microeconomic issue. If you’re ordering something from Japan directly to your house, like say a knife or some shrink wrapped pickled daikon, then yes, you will personally pay the US government the full tariff in order to complete the delivery.
Now, I agree with your broader point that it’s stupid to claim tariffs are categorically good or bad. It’s a simple tax mechanism.
On corporate profit tax vs. tariffs for companies, there is a structural difference here. Treated in isolation, theoretically profit tax shouldn’t really affect prices because the company has already done everything to maximize profit, including setting the price, and the tax just takes a percentage of that and sends it to the government. If the profit function is f(x,y,z), where the variables are price, employee wages, and supplies purchasing (just to keep it simple) and the government takes 20%, then maximizing the value of f also maximizes the value of 80% of f. Now of course things get more complicated when you acknowledge that it’s all part of an interacting economy. But in terms of the day to day decisions of a company, profit tax shouldn’t have much effect.
On the other hand, tariffs are changing the costs of supplies the company needs from overseas, so this changes how f balances out. The bonehead thing to do is to just add that to the price variable (which probably won’t be the same percentage increase as the tariff because probably not all supplies are from the same foreign country). Maybe the company will do this, or maybe they will be smarter and take into account the fact that fewer items will be sold at a higher price, so to maximize profit they don’t just match the change in cost and revenues. It’s complicated and most companies are not run by mathematical economists. But there should be some increase in prices that will partially ameliorate the increase in costs, though it may be hard to figure out what is optimal.
All in all, the burden is on the president to explain what these specific tariff rates are meant to achieve, which of course he didn’t do. The rate increases were very large and disruptive. It’s kind of like if President Bernie Sanders just decided to put a 100% tax on paper towels. It’s not that taxes are bad and paper towels are sacrosanct, nor vice versa, it’s that this huge change seems random and without specific rationale or objective. So yeah, people shouldn’t be reactionary about tariffs, but just monkeying around with the economy for no reason is ridiculous.
Yeah, this has been my take. I’d not be against a protectionist pro-worker/anti global exploitation strategy but that is so CLEARLY not what is happening here that it’s not worth debating.
Agree on point 3. Of course, if you want manufacturing to come back, you need stable long term policy that can attract investment. I think we would agree trump has not delivered that, but you’re not defending trump.
For point 1 you’re missing that tariffs are more regressive than other types of taxes. According to Matt Yglessius, haven’t looked into this myself further.
Point 2: taxing corporate profits means you tax those specific businesses that profited. Taxing inputs means you increase prices for everyone, including struggling manufacturers. It undermines the ability of companies across the economy to increase supply, so we should expect it to be more inflationary. Just speaking from first principles.
FYI - Most Corporations pay LESS than the average working American - via tax writeoffs, offshoring, and she'll companies. And with the proposed 21% reduction down to 15% will make sure that even the honest companies will be paying less on their profits than the majority of their workers. AND ALL Americans will be paying 10 to 150 % more on everything from clothing to food, to every F-ng else. Really?!
That is YOUR solution - bleed Americans dry for the 💩 policies of the govt, while being ripped off for our services. What are we supposed to pay for our our deportation to El Salvador now? At least they have they have an incentive to feed & give shelter to their slaves. While Trump rips off the whole country from decades of paying into Social Security to get called a Fraudster if they ask why their Social Security check has disappeared.
Ok sorry, I DO fault people for voting for Trump this time around. Everything he has done since Jan 20 was very much out in the open during the campaign. He promised tariffs, retribution and mass deportations. Project 2025 has been unfolding essentially as planned. Jan 6, 2021 should have been a huge wakeup call to anyone still on the fence about him that this is a dangerous, conspiracy theory addled narcissist. He wasn't going to have the same responsible adults this time around to keep him in check. Fine, I understand why people didn't like or trust Biden/Harris, but how could you not realize what you were signing up for by voting for Trump.
It was pretty clear during the campaign that for a lot of people he was a sort of Rorschach blot that turned into whatever they wanted; of course you shouldn't be seeing a blot when you've got an actual person's face in front of you but that's people for you.
Fairs fair though, even those of us that thought the remaining guardrails were weak hadn't realized they had ceased to exist at all (didn't anticipate *all* our corporate masters to bend a knee week one or that Elon would be eviscerating the government without any pushback). Tariffs we expected but not 150% or whatever it is on China. Canada, Our Great Northern Enemy was also outside anyone's expectations.
A lot of people thought he would be smarter about tariffs. Like maybe it was just going to be on China and only on select industries. Or maybe it would be used as a bargaining tool. We've grown accustomed to politicians not doing the things they promise on the campaign trail or watering down their positions when they are in power. Why should it be different this time? The stock market rally when he got elected is evidence of that. Lots of people were optimistic.
I don't forgive people for voting for Trump the first time. I wrote a longer comment on this - of all his failures - plenty covered during his term. Implausibly so many Americans go 🤷♀️🤷 when it comes to fact that we had the largest percentage of Covid Deaths per capita in Developed world. And earlier in his term he was fiercely focused on Depriving tens of millions of their healthcare. How many MORE would have died, or would be suffering MORE from the after effects of long Covid had he succeeded. The same people who seem to have forgotten all the death and mayhem during Trump's term FREAK OUT at the actual solution to Covid - the mass vaccination that not only stopped the spread of Covid in US but WORLDWIDE.
Honestly, I think those who voted must have Covid Brain - because a person capable of using Google for 5 minutes could see how incredibly VILE and incompetent a man he is in ALL areas of his life, Except grifting, conartistry, and getting away with his many crimes.
Struggling with BARpod these days. No better podcast in 2020-23. A rallying point for sanity. They rose to meet the moment. Now the times have changed and Jesse, who has many skills, is shoe-horning anti-Trump stuff to make the pod more like his dreadful X feed, on the theory that Trump's supporters use the internet a lot? OK sure. Anyway so much of it is now obvious and boring. (Yes Jack Poso is boring. Steve Bannon in contrast is interesting (but crazy).
So is BARpod becoming boring? Yeah I'm shocked but that's where I am heading. Jesse is very smart but politically he's a milquetoast Newton/Brooklyn liberal. In other words, a normie liberal. Totally fine. But having a normie liberal railing against Trump...that's just basic ubiquitous media content these days. Things get interesting when he's battling the near enemy. Liberal vs leftist? That's interesting bc there's a lot of energy there in both directions. Same is true on the right. The near-enemy battles are the most interesting, the most intense. So is Jesse just venting like on X, or is he trying to reestablish cred with Brooklyn leftists, which won't work? Or doing us a public service telling us the obvious ("this is not good")? I don't know. But my interest is kind of hanging on by a thread.
And no I'm not MAGA. I think we had the shittiest options in 2024 that I have seen in my lifetime. How the eff did we get here and how do we try to fix it? There have to be some funny and interesting stories there, on both sides? Or maybe not and maybe every cultural podcast has a finite lifespan.
I like my podcasts to be escapes from the frustrating everyday. I can read about the stupidity of tariffs in all my usual news outlets, but I come to BARpod for the ABDL/furry/YA drama/etc that broadens my world by opening up a whole universe of weird shit.
This seems exactly right. I am here for the obscure internet bullshit. Not to hear run-of-the-mill liberal critiques of Trump and his fans (or uninformed takes on American manufacturing capacity based on a podcast Katie listened to). They are treading awfully close to becoming boring, which would be a shame.
It’s not as if they can’t do serious (non-deviant weirdness) stories well - I found the “Mother Hunger” episode about surrogacy to be really thought-provoking. But ughghhhh I do not need more Trump stuff in my life.
It was interesting when they critiqued the Left--especially since general-media wasn't doing that critique, and even shutting it down. It was truly "blocked."
With Trump, the floodgates are and remain open by all for constant critique, but hearing it on B&R is just more of the same (from people I like and trust... but still more of the same thing I get from the general media).
We’ll be here when you’re ready to hear it lol gonna get harder and harder to hold that line buddy. It’s ok, I remember how hard it was for me when I started realising how fucking stupid a lot of what I’d blithely agreed with was, as a liberal.
Dude, you're hilarious. I was a never Trumper for a decade, a centrist Obama/Hillary/Biden voter. I still think Trump is mess. He had no business coming back in '24 as he did. What that required was libs/lefts/Dems being as bad at both governing and politics as I have ever seen. Top to bottom, blue cities, blue states, the federal government, media, elite universities. You guys gave us Trump again and you should think about that every time you see a piece of bad Trump-related news. Your cope is to mock the crazy too-online MAGAs. But you lost to those guys. Your team lost hugely and you can all blame it on Biden and sweep all the problems under the rug. But this is your collective doing and you're all repeating the mistakes. I would suggest from your tone that you haven't actually realized much.
Yeah - and Things ARE SO much better with the total evisceration of all the Agency budgets that were actually giving Americans bang for their tax dollars. I don't know like Cancer Research or School Lunchs or Education of any kind, Social Security. Just close your eyes and throw a dart & you will hit some necessary agency Trump has debilitated.
Oh and shipping people off to prison camps w/out due process against Judge orders. And totally flipping off SCOTUS regarding making an oopsie of sending a legal immigrants W/OUT evidence of ANY criminal history. Paving the way for sending "homegrown" criminals which are basically anyone that disagrees with Trump. Don't worry you are safe for now.
PLUS paying 10 to 150% taxes on Everything - but also getting a kick in the teeth in exchange for paying your income taxes. Because GUESS what Trump NEEDS to steal from you so he can shove MORE 💰 into the banks accounts of his Corporate Donors.
I didn't want Biden EVER, I was excited about Kamala - because at least she knew enough not to wipe her ass with the Constitution several times a day.
He was criticizing FP for not saying the US removing people for free-speech issues is wrong. But then FP published an Editors' editorial saying it was wrong.
I think Sullivan was targeting FP because it really focused on free speech when it launched.
Yeah, the issue is that if they’re not covering internet BS, them getting “political” is debunking the mainstream media narrative on things like Jacob Blake or “Karen” stories or trans kids fake science. This only works with Trump if they’re debunking mainstream stories about him. Except they can’t, so they’re just repeating the mainstream stories about Trump being wrong/stupid that we’ve all already heard everywhere else.
If you are looking for a interesting take on trump criticism, you should listen to sam harris talk to david french, a conservative christian. Hearing him explain why he think trump "works" for so many Christians who should abhor everything trump stands for
MAGA Maoism is an amusing turn of phrase, and definitely captures both the pure-personality cult that is America First, but also how their policies are consistently the dumbest possible ways to try to achieve what they claim they want to achieve. And no, Dems aren't remotely close to the same. If a Dem president had done even a fraction of what Trump has, we'd have already seen a dozen armed insurrections from Meal Team 6.
One minor gripe, but I don't understand where the whole "Trump 1.0 wasn't that bad" is coming from. Yeah the world didn't end. Yes, Trump 2.0 is substantially more corrupt and incompetent. But Trump 1.0 was an unmitigated clown fiesta that greatly tarnished America's image abroad, was insanely corrupt, and got a lot of people killed (COVID started during Trump, not Biden, and delaying testing for weeks because Trump didn't want the numbers to go up was an unrecoverable disaster). There were a handful of adults in the room, but not all that many. It is very much sanewashing to suggest Trump 1.0 was even close to normal or competent.
And despite that minor gripe, I do appreciate BARPod covering mainstream current events on occasion. Trump 2.0 is 8chan irl, but without the nuance and sophistication: It is very much Internet BS, and that is what this podcast is for. When I have occasion to disagree with BARPod, which I do from time to time (I think Jesse is wrong about the field studying disinfo for example, and Katie is wrong about Trump 1.0 as mentioned above). But I don't bemoan the "direction" of BARPod or "struggle" with it. Katie and Jesse have remained intellectually consistent, and quite frankly for those who don't realize that, BARPod ain't the one with the problem. Also, if you don't like the Trump stuff, the episodes are clearly labeled. Not hard to skip, but I guess complaining online is far more enjoyable...
Speaking of complaining, check your email Jesse, or I shall be forced to release the unedited 90 minute tape of you explaining your in-depth Vore fantasy during last month's DC event, a fantasy that involves a lot of pizza and chiding if I recall (for defamation purposes, that is clearly satire... it's actually two hours long).
Aaaargh the delay in testing was 100% on the CDC who refused to use the already working European test and the FDA exercised an Obama-era policy of banning anyone else from conducting tests. Trump may have screwed up everything else during the pandemic but this was a failure of the CDC and the FDA and it drives me crazy that nobody else remembers it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html
Yeah... so who appointed the heads of the CDC and FDA? Who had the authority to streamline those regulations in an emergency, as had been done before under the Obama presidency? It drives me crazy that no one seems to remember who was in charge at the time. Perhaps this guy? "But faced with the coronavirus, Mr. Trump chose not to have the White House lead the planning until nearly two months after it began." Or maybe the guy who later shared this brilliant thought: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,”
This is one of those things Marc Dunkelman, Francis Fukuyama, Ezra Klein, etc has been talking about right? The bureaucrats aren't the big problem, it's the ways they're constrained.
Elon's little groypers would've been better served tackling regulations (and y'know, working with Congress to do it) than installing backdoors and malware in the SSA.
I actually think that both sides of the American political spectrum are equally cult-y, it just comes down to what they focus on during their admins and how far they are willing to go to upend the status quo. I agree with Katie that if Bernie had gotten in and did the same thing Trump is doing, people on the left would be doing the same cope tweets as Trumpists.
Right now, the issue is Trump and his terrible policies and the threat to the global economy, but this is a bigger issue in politics overall. If people aren’t willing to speak out against their chosen political party, or can’t without being socially ostracized, then we will continue to return to a situation where a mad man can come in and destroy everything while his followers discuss how pretty his new clothes are (hint: he’s not wearing any).
Whether he was sharp or not - he surrounded himself with a competent cabinet who knew enough to NOT destroy the agencies they lead. This is the EXACT opposite of Trump - who prefers to surround himself with craven sycophants. His mission is to seem like the smartest guy in the room - which is near impossible unless he surrounds himself with a gang of slurping 🤡 s.
Biden clearly doesn’t have the same cult of personality that Trump has around him (though there was a very long period of time where questioning Biden’s mental capacity would result in a person being labeled a right wing lunatic, which was quite cult like). The cult-y aspects of the left tend to be in the demands for uniformity of opinions on certain topics (the trans issue, immigration, etc). This leaked into liberal dem spaces most during the Trump and Biden admins over the last 10 years or so. I don’t think Obama, nor Bush before him (for all of his faults), were very cultish at all - at least not in the ways we are seeing now.
They just aren't equally cult-y. Just look at how right-wing commenters and Republicans in congress criticize Trump about tariffs. It's pathetic. They grovel before him.
Yes, but as I said above there are different cult-y attributes for each side of the political spectrum. For the right wing it’s a belief that their dear leader can do no wrong, that every decision he makes, even if it hurts them, is done for the greater good (he works in mysterious ways!). For the left wing, it’s an obsession with purity - purity in language, in thought, even in the smallest micro gestures (remember the guy cancelled for making an okay symbol with his hand?).
I’m also not saying they are the same, I’m saying they both exhibit cult like aspects, though in different ways. I don’t think any sane person would say Trump is the same as any American president ever, for either party. He’s talking about deporting Americans to foreign prisons. Orange man is indeed bad.
I think some people are this thread are mistaking “cult-y” for “cult”. I try to be careful with my language for a reason.
I think of people who insist that TWAW are equally as cult-y as anyone on the right who think that Trump is the god emperor from whom all good things come.
Or perhaps people can point out cult-like attributes on both sides of the political spectrum that have led America to the point where they elected a man who conducts himself like a god emperor.
It would be better for the entire world if American political engagement stopped resembling religion and became focused on reasonable policies and laws to govern itself and conduct itself on the world stage. Or we can keep treating politics like team sports while the world continues to burn - whatever suits you.
Seriously, at the risk of being accused of clutching my pearls, I can't laugh at vore the way I could at daisychain running jokes. It's a sexually motivated sadistic murder fantasy. It isn't really fun edgy chuckle fodder.
So, I literally live in a town with two manufacturing plants that do a lot of tool and die work. Both pay very well and have robust apprenticeship programs. America very much does have both the infrastructure and skills training to do complex manufacturing, and does, in fact, do a lot of it. My town alone has these two factories, which also make auto parts, a custom brass forge, two cardboard factories, and a large paintbrush factory, just to name a few. There is just a whole lot of manufacturing already going on in America.
I work in manufacturing as well. I found the comments about tool and die to be super weird. We obviously have tool and die industry. Katie seemed to be referring to a podcast. I wonder if they were equally misinformed or if she is botching the message in some way.
Yea, it was super weird to have Katie going on about how we don’t manufacture things and that it would take a generation to change that, and then Jesse pointing out we are the second biggest manufacturing nation, and neither of them realizing that both of those things cannot be true.
Our peak (number of people employed in manufacturing... just that data point) was around 1979 with 19,000,000 employed in manufacturing. Starting around 2000 the numbers started to tumble, to ~13,000,000 today.
Considering that there have been some efficiencies in manufacturing over the last 45 years, I wonder how much of an actual decline in productivity that loss of 30% (6,000,000) workers has had on our actual output?
My understanding is that there have been ups and downs, but that our current output is basically equal to the all time high. So, the reduction in the manufacturing workforce has been totally offset by efficiency and automation. The US also has, by far, the largest “value added per worker” in the world. Seven times higher than China, for example.
It sounds like she took the fairly small, narrow experiment of the podcast she listened to, "Let's create a small, simple manufactured item *using only American inputs*" and blew that up to mean "the US no longer has any meaningful manufacturing capacity." Which is obviously extremely dumb. I live in Metro Detroit, there are like ten tool and die shops within five miles of me and practically everyone either has worked or knows someone who has worked in a factory.
Moments like this really cement that for all of her country-girl butch lesbian posturing, Katie is in many ways just as much of a coastal media class elitist as Jesse. She was so excited to share her newfound expertise and especially the cool new phrase she had just learned (tool and die) with her dumb liberal friend.
Isnt Katie the daughter of two college professors? I think if you somehow landed in the position that katie was some bluecollar rooted person thats solely on you. Being outdoorsy and enjoying nature is far different from having an intimate knowledge of the realities of manufacturing in america.
I know very much what Katie and Jesse's backgrounds are. Katie just speaks authoritatively on shit she doesn't know anything about with far greater frequency than Jesse.
Tooling is also a lot easier to make than it used to be since (I don't know the technicality of it all, I just work in a factory that does it when needed; think it involves 3D printers to an extent). Not so during WW2: Donald M. Nelson of the War Production Board bitches about it for something like thirty pages in his memoir, "Arsenal of Democracy".
The advent of cnc machining is what made this easier, 3d printers and additive manufacturing as a whole is great for prototyping but their usecase is extremely limited. Machining is what drives tool and die and what it really is to an extent.
just fyi. The podcast was PJ Vogt, "Search Engine", and they did an episode about someone trying to make a new BBQ grill scrubber, using *only* American-made parts and labor (as opposed to mostly American parts and labor). A link to Search engine episode is above in the show notes.
I get that. It is just odd that Katie’s take away was that no one in America does tool and die work and we don’t even have a way to train people to do it when that is just 100% not true.
Katie and Jesse are coastal media class people with pretty limited life experience. They're smart people, but both of them occasionally have sheltered moments like this. Jesse is more honest about it, Katie postures a lot.
I think Batya Ungar-Sargon is just a liar. She doesn't actually care about "working people", it's just an argumentative angle she likes to take in defending the new fascism.
I think she's genuinely unhinged and believes in her working class argument. She was on 5th Column a while ago (before the election) and was making the same tariff argument and seemed like a true believer. (They were trying to be nice, but she came across as basically just stupid.)
J & K neglected what makes the "MAGA Maoist" metaphor so telling -- i.e. that Mao was a communist, not a run of the mill right wing dictator. It's bizarre that a millionaire Republican strongman is being lauded as a champion of the working class against oppression. This was made possible by the cultural alienation between the Democratic Party and most working class voters, but it's still bizarre and requires remarkable powers of wish fulfillment to believe.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is a pure example of Maga Maoism and Matt Taibbi seems to be jumping on board. But Bill Ackman isn't an MM. He's like Musk. I don't know what they are, but they're something else.
Ron Vera is to Peter Navarro basically what Socrates was to Plato, not sure why everyone is making a big deal out of it. Next they'lll try to tell us Atlantis wasn't real either 🙄
Aristippus the court philosopher to Dionysus the Tyrant spied Diogenes the Stoic cooking lentils for a meal. "O Diogenes,” he said “If you would only learn to flatter Dionysus, you wouldn't have to live on lentils."
“O Aristippus,” Diogenes replied, "If you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysus.”
Jesse's steelman is actually incorrect. The stated goal is not to bring *good* manufacturing jobs to the US, it's to bring *shitty* manufacturing jobs back. If you wanted *good* manufacturing jobs you would want to make it easy to import all the materials and components that your high-tech factories could turn into high value products which you would then want to be able to sell to the largest markets possible. Dumbing down and cheapening the american workforce is a core component of the ideology here.
I’m a pro-tariff leftist.
1. Tariffs amount to taxes on goods at the border paid by businesses. It’s odd that the same crowd calling for higher corporate taxes doesn’t see tariffs as another valid lever. And while people assume a $1 tariff means $1 tacked onto the retail price, in reality that's not the case.
2. It’s interesting how quickly tariffs get called “inflationary” while corporate taxes generally don’t. Oren Cass made this point on a Yascha Mounk podcast. That doesn’t mean tariffs can’t affect prices, but there is a double standard.
3. The U.S.'s deindusrialization has caused a loss of critical manufacturing capacity, which we saw during COVID when even allies imposed export bans. As the pod points out, the loss of know-how is a genuine strategic risk. Over half the world’s ships are built by China. China’s massive shipbuilding industry (among others) underscores how their industrial policies, and US trade policy, have created real geopolitical risk for the US.
4. Comparative advantage is a bit of a lie. If a country’s “advantage” hinges on lax labor and environmental regulations, that’s different from a classic scenario of, say, Iceland trading cod for American corn. Simply saying “comparative advantage” paperovers those inequalities.
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That said, I don’t think the U.S. is positioned to succeed with such an erratic tariff strategy. Countries have their own domestic politics. Nobody in Canada, for instance, wants to negotiate if the administration is talking about annexation. A more strategic approach would be: “We’re putting a certain percentage tariff on Chinese goods; any country matching that against China gets exempt from ours.” Also, exempting raw materials (like oil or steel) could help keep domestic production costs low.
Neither steelman fits because the administration is simply inept. But at least they understand that higher tariffs are not necessarily bad for the United States. The Biden administration did massive subsidies instead and the result was higher inflation and public debt. In many key industries the US will benefit from higher tariffs, and I’m worried Dems are just going to do the “anything opposite of Trump is good” thing.
A corporate income tax is a tax in profits. So any decisions (like production level or pricing) that maximize pre-tax profits also generally maximize after-tax profits. So the tax redirects some profits to the government, but otherwise has minimizes any effects on incentives. Tariffs are not taxes on profits, which makes them highly distorotionary and destructive.
Also, this is a wildly misguided take on comparative advantage.
Wait are you actually suggesting corporate taxes have no inflationary effect? You aren't engaging with what I said. I don't have any issue with corporate taxes.
> Also, this is a wildly misguided take on comparative advantage.
Okay, but you’ll need to argue better than that. Explain how it’s “comparative advantage” when offshoring means rewarding countries that use coal, exploit labor, and suppress domestic consumption through aggressive industrial policy, while U.S. companies have stricter labor and environmental rules. That's a far from the Econ101 explanation of "comparative advantage" used to justify free trade.
I don't want to bother with the comparative advantage argument since that's already so thoroughly covered elsewhere.
But, on the corporate tax point, no corporate income taxes are not inflationary. To the extent it influuences behavior, it's discouraging economic activity so that reduces overall spending and holds down inflation. I don't think you understand why a tax on income is completely different from a tax on revenues or input costs. The tax incidence and the second order effects are not even remotely comparable.
Say you're charging $100 for a product, selling 100 units and making $10 per unit. That's the profit-maximizing price and production level. If you have a 20% tax on profits, that doesn't change the optimal price or production level. If your $90 of production costs goes up to $95 or $100, it absolutely does.
Re: 1. Tariffs are also paid by consumers who order a finished product from the tariffed origin.
Re: 1&2. Tariffs are also analogous to sales tax or VAT, meaning every individual transaction gets taxed instead of the end-of-year corporate profit. While VAT-like things may have their place, they're not particularly progressive compared to taxing profits. And the profit tax doesn't have the obvious one-to-one correspondence to each sale that tariffs do. It's much more straightforward for the firm to incorporate the tariff into the sale price, while adjusting prices in light of overall profit is more delicate, because of that whole demand curve thing.
Re: 3. This doesn't sound very leftist, but anyway you'd have to argue that tariffs would actually do the job here. The CHIPS Act made a lot more different incentives to bring semiconductors to the US instead of just a simple item-per-item import tax.
Re: 4. Obviously sometimes there really is comparative advantage like in agriculture. But if we're talking about countries with similar levels of development capable of supplying similar products, like say Canada vs. USA in many industries, I can't see how tariffs are justified. But yes if you want to impose a tax on the externalities like labor or environmental abuses, tariffs may be a good way to do that. Of course Trump doesn't think about it that way.
1a. I mentioned prices do raise for consumers but they don't bear the full cost.
1b. Good point. Tariffs are structurally closer to a VAT than a corporate tax. But my point was rhetorical. I’m reacting to a media narrative that treats all tariffs as catastrophic and inflationary, while ignoring the broader structural issues they’re meant to address. Tariffs are not a terrible lever to use and I'd go as far as to say the USA could use more of them (with some obvious nuance). Democrats and major outlets treat tariffs as a uniquely inflationary sin, while celebrating other taxes on business that also raise costs. There’s no economic law that says a profit tax is "good" inflation while a border tax is "bad" inflation.
3a. Not sure what you mean here honestly. I wasn’t making an imperialist point. I’m saying the U.S. has a clear geopolitical vulnerability in relying too heavily on overseas supply chains. COVID made that obvious. The CHIPS Act is a good start, but it’s not binary
4a. I agree with you (re: comparative advantage across peer countries). I’m not arguing for blanket protectionism. I think tariffs are most useful in targeted cases: key sectors, key trading partners, and where there's a strategic or environmental case. The Trump admin applied them erratically, which is part of my criticism too.
To reiterate my final point in the original comment: I’m reacting to a media narrative that treats all tariffs as catastrophic and inflationary, while ignoring the broader structural issues they’re meant to address. Tariffs aren’t some insane lever. They can be useful and the U.S. could probably use more of them (with some obvious nuance).
On point 1, let’s be clear on this actually microeconomic issue. If you’re ordering something from Japan directly to your house, like say a knife or some shrink wrapped pickled daikon, then yes, you will personally pay the US government the full tariff in order to complete the delivery.
Now, I agree with your broader point that it’s stupid to claim tariffs are categorically good or bad. It’s a simple tax mechanism.
On corporate profit tax vs. tariffs for companies, there is a structural difference here. Treated in isolation, theoretically profit tax shouldn’t really affect prices because the company has already done everything to maximize profit, including setting the price, and the tax just takes a percentage of that and sends it to the government. If the profit function is f(x,y,z), where the variables are price, employee wages, and supplies purchasing (just to keep it simple) and the government takes 20%, then maximizing the value of f also maximizes the value of 80% of f. Now of course things get more complicated when you acknowledge that it’s all part of an interacting economy. But in terms of the day to day decisions of a company, profit tax shouldn’t have much effect.
On the other hand, tariffs are changing the costs of supplies the company needs from overseas, so this changes how f balances out. The bonehead thing to do is to just add that to the price variable (which probably won’t be the same percentage increase as the tariff because probably not all supplies are from the same foreign country). Maybe the company will do this, or maybe they will be smarter and take into account the fact that fewer items will be sold at a higher price, so to maximize profit they don’t just match the change in cost and revenues. It’s complicated and most companies are not run by mathematical economists. But there should be some increase in prices that will partially ameliorate the increase in costs, though it may be hard to figure out what is optimal.
All in all, the burden is on the president to explain what these specific tariff rates are meant to achieve, which of course he didn’t do. The rate increases were very large and disruptive. It’s kind of like if President Bernie Sanders just decided to put a 100% tax on paper towels. It’s not that taxes are bad and paper towels are sacrosanct, nor vice versa, it’s that this huge change seems random and without specific rationale or objective. So yeah, people shouldn’t be reactionary about tariffs, but just monkeying around with the economy for no reason is ridiculous.
Yeah, this has been my take. I’d not be against a protectionist pro-worker/anti global exploitation strategy but that is so CLEARLY not what is happening here that it’s not worth debating.
Agree on point 3. Of course, if you want manufacturing to come back, you need stable long term policy that can attract investment. I think we would agree trump has not delivered that, but you’re not defending trump.
For point 1 you’re missing that tariffs are more regressive than other types of taxes. According to Matt Yglessius, haven’t looked into this myself further.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1911033794200469748?s=46
Point 2: taxing corporate profits means you tax those specific businesses that profited. Taxing inputs means you increase prices for everyone, including struggling manufacturers. It undermines the ability of companies across the economy to increase supply, so we should expect it to be more inflationary. Just speaking from first principles.
FYI - Most Corporations pay LESS than the average working American - via tax writeoffs, offshoring, and she'll companies. And with the proposed 21% reduction down to 15% will make sure that even the honest companies will be paying less on their profits than the majority of their workers. AND ALL Americans will be paying 10 to 150 % more on everything from clothing to food, to every F-ng else. Really?!
That is YOUR solution - bleed Americans dry for the 💩 policies of the govt, while being ripped off for our services. What are we supposed to pay for our our deportation to El Salvador now? At least they have they have an incentive to feed & give shelter to their slaves. While Trump rips off the whole country from decades of paying into Social Security to get called a Fraudster if they ask why their Social Security check has disappeared.
Ok sorry, I DO fault people for voting for Trump this time around. Everything he has done since Jan 20 was very much out in the open during the campaign. He promised tariffs, retribution and mass deportations. Project 2025 has been unfolding essentially as planned. Jan 6, 2021 should have been a huge wakeup call to anyone still on the fence about him that this is a dangerous, conspiracy theory addled narcissist. He wasn't going to have the same responsible adults this time around to keep him in check. Fine, I understand why people didn't like or trust Biden/Harris, but how could you not realize what you were signing up for by voting for Trump.
It was pretty clear during the campaign that for a lot of people he was a sort of Rorschach blot that turned into whatever they wanted; of course you shouldn't be seeing a blot when you've got an actual person's face in front of you but that's people for you.
Fairs fair though, even those of us that thought the remaining guardrails were weak hadn't realized they had ceased to exist at all (didn't anticipate *all* our corporate masters to bend a knee week one or that Elon would be eviscerating the government without any pushback). Tariffs we expected but not 150% or whatever it is on China. Canada, Our Great Northern Enemy was also outside anyone's expectations.
A lot of people thought he would be smarter about tariffs. Like maybe it was just going to be on China and only on select industries. Or maybe it would be used as a bargaining tool. We've grown accustomed to politicians not doing the things they promise on the campaign trail or watering down their positions when they are in power. Why should it be different this time? The stock market rally when he got elected is evidence of that. Lots of people were optimistic.
I don't forgive people for voting for Trump the first time. I wrote a longer comment on this - of all his failures - plenty covered during his term. Implausibly so many Americans go 🤷♀️🤷 when it comes to fact that we had the largest percentage of Covid Deaths per capita in Developed world. And earlier in his term he was fiercely focused on Depriving tens of millions of their healthcare. How many MORE would have died, or would be suffering MORE from the after effects of long Covid had he succeeded. The same people who seem to have forgotten all the death and mayhem during Trump's term FREAK OUT at the actual solution to Covid - the mass vaccination that not only stopped the spread of Covid in US but WORLDWIDE.
Honestly, I think those who voted must have Covid Brain - because a person capable of using Google for 5 minutes could see how incredibly VILE and incompetent a man he is in ALL areas of his life, Except grifting, conartistry, and getting away with his many crimes.
MAGA is DEI for dumb people who are white.
Struggling with BARpod these days. No better podcast in 2020-23. A rallying point for sanity. They rose to meet the moment. Now the times have changed and Jesse, who has many skills, is shoe-horning anti-Trump stuff to make the pod more like his dreadful X feed, on the theory that Trump's supporters use the internet a lot? OK sure. Anyway so much of it is now obvious and boring. (Yes Jack Poso is boring. Steve Bannon in contrast is interesting (but crazy).
So is BARpod becoming boring? Yeah I'm shocked but that's where I am heading. Jesse is very smart but politically he's a milquetoast Newton/Brooklyn liberal. In other words, a normie liberal. Totally fine. But having a normie liberal railing against Trump...that's just basic ubiquitous media content these days. Things get interesting when he's battling the near enemy. Liberal vs leftist? That's interesting bc there's a lot of energy there in both directions. Same is true on the right. The near-enemy battles are the most interesting, the most intense. So is Jesse just venting like on X, or is he trying to reestablish cred with Brooklyn leftists, which won't work? Or doing us a public service telling us the obvious ("this is not good")? I don't know. But my interest is kind of hanging on by a thread.
And no I'm not MAGA. I think we had the shittiest options in 2024 that I have seen in my lifetime. How the eff did we get here and how do we try to fix it? There have to be some funny and interesting stories there, on both sides? Or maybe not and maybe every cultural podcast has a finite lifespan.
I think Katie and Jesse are staying the same they have always been and are now covering a different media and political environment.
There's bound to be some resorting. Jesse has been critizing Michael Shellenberger. Andrew Sullivan has been mocking the Free Press.
Maybe their content isn't for you anymore.
I like my podcasts to be escapes from the frustrating everyday. I can read about the stupidity of tariffs in all my usual news outlets, but I come to BARpod for the ABDL/furry/YA drama/etc that broadens my world by opening up a whole universe of weird shit.
This seems exactly right. I am here for the obscure internet bullshit. Not to hear run-of-the-mill liberal critiques of Trump and his fans (or uninformed takes on American manufacturing capacity based on a podcast Katie listened to). They are treading awfully close to becoming boring, which would be a shame.
It’s not as if they can’t do serious (non-deviant weirdness) stories well - I found the “Mother Hunger” episode about surrogacy to be really thought-provoking. But ughghhhh I do not need more Trump stuff in my life.
It was interesting when they critiqued the Left--especially since general-media wasn't doing that critique, and even shutting it down. It was truly "blocked."
With Trump, the floodgates are and remain open by all for constant critique, but hearing it on B&R is just more of the same (from people I like and trust... but still more of the same thing I get from the general media).
Tbf hasn’t the majority of their content in the last 3-4 weeks been about internet dramas and people faking their death?
You nailed it. Thanks for saying what I've been feeling.
We’ll be here when you’re ready to hear it lol gonna get harder and harder to hold that line buddy. It’s ok, I remember how hard it was for me when I started realising how fucking stupid a lot of what I’d blithely agreed with was, as a liberal.
Dude, you're hilarious. I was a never Trumper for a decade, a centrist Obama/Hillary/Biden voter. I still think Trump is mess. He had no business coming back in '24 as he did. What that required was libs/lefts/Dems being as bad at both governing and politics as I have ever seen. Top to bottom, blue cities, blue states, the federal government, media, elite universities. You guys gave us Trump again and you should think about that every time you see a piece of bad Trump-related news. Your cope is to mock the crazy too-online MAGAs. But you lost to those guys. Your team lost hugely and you can all blame it on Biden and sweep all the problems under the rug. But this is your collective doing and you're all repeating the mistakes. I would suggest from your tone that you haven't actually realized much.
Yeah - and Things ARE SO much better with the total evisceration of all the Agency budgets that were actually giving Americans bang for their tax dollars. I don't know like Cancer Research or School Lunchs or Education of any kind, Social Security. Just close your eyes and throw a dart & you will hit some necessary agency Trump has debilitated.
Oh and shipping people off to prison camps w/out due process against Judge orders. And totally flipping off SCOTUS regarding making an oopsie of sending a legal immigrants W/OUT evidence of ANY criminal history. Paving the way for sending "homegrown" criminals which are basically anyone that disagrees with Trump. Don't worry you are safe for now.
PLUS paying 10 to 150% taxes on Everything - but also getting a kick in the teeth in exchange for paying your income taxes. Because GUESS what Trump NEEDS to steal from you so he can shove MORE 💰 into the banks accounts of his Corporate Donors.
I didn't want Biden EVER, I was excited about Kamala - because at least she knew enough not to wipe her ass with the Constitution several times a day.
The fact that Sullivan and the FP are both conservative makes it an especially interesting
He was criticizing FP for not saying the US removing people for free-speech issues is wrong. But then FP published an Editors' editorial saying it was wrong.
I think Sullivan was targeting FP because it really focused on free speech when it launched.
That Sullivan and the FP are considered “conservative” shows just how far the Overton window has shifted leftward.
Yeah, the issue is that if they’re not covering internet BS, them getting “political” is debunking the mainstream media narrative on things like Jacob Blake or “Karen” stories or trans kids fake science. This only works with Trump if they’re debunking mainstream stories about him. Except they can’t, so they’re just repeating the mainstream stories about Trump being wrong/stupid that we’ve all already heard everywhere else.
If you are looking for a interesting take on trump criticism, you should listen to sam harris talk to david french, a conservative christian. Hearing him explain why he think trump "works" for so many Christians who should abhor everything trump stands for
MAGA Maoism is an amusing turn of phrase, and definitely captures both the pure-personality cult that is America First, but also how their policies are consistently the dumbest possible ways to try to achieve what they claim they want to achieve. And no, Dems aren't remotely close to the same. If a Dem president had done even a fraction of what Trump has, we'd have already seen a dozen armed insurrections from Meal Team 6.
One minor gripe, but I don't understand where the whole "Trump 1.0 wasn't that bad" is coming from. Yeah the world didn't end. Yes, Trump 2.0 is substantially more corrupt and incompetent. But Trump 1.0 was an unmitigated clown fiesta that greatly tarnished America's image abroad, was insanely corrupt, and got a lot of people killed (COVID started during Trump, not Biden, and delaying testing for weeks because Trump didn't want the numbers to go up was an unrecoverable disaster). There were a handful of adults in the room, but not all that many. It is very much sanewashing to suggest Trump 1.0 was even close to normal or competent.
And despite that minor gripe, I do appreciate BARPod covering mainstream current events on occasion. Trump 2.0 is 8chan irl, but without the nuance and sophistication: It is very much Internet BS, and that is what this podcast is for. When I have occasion to disagree with BARPod, which I do from time to time (I think Jesse is wrong about the field studying disinfo for example, and Katie is wrong about Trump 1.0 as mentioned above). But I don't bemoan the "direction" of BARPod or "struggle" with it. Katie and Jesse have remained intellectually consistent, and quite frankly for those who don't realize that, BARPod ain't the one with the problem. Also, if you don't like the Trump stuff, the episodes are clearly labeled. Not hard to skip, but I guess complaining online is far more enjoyable...
Speaking of complaining, check your email Jesse, or I shall be forced to release the unedited 90 minute tape of you explaining your in-depth Vore fantasy during last month's DC event, a fantasy that involves a lot of pizza and chiding if I recall (for defamation purposes, that is clearly satire... it's actually two hours long).
Aaaargh the delay in testing was 100% on the CDC who refused to use the already working European test and the FDA exercised an Obama-era policy of banning anyone else from conducting tests. Trump may have screwed up everything else during the pandemic but this was a failure of the CDC and the FDA and it drives me crazy that nobody else remembers it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html
Yeah... so who appointed the heads of the CDC and FDA? Who had the authority to streamline those regulations in an emergency, as had been done before under the Obama presidency? It drives me crazy that no one seems to remember who was in charge at the time. Perhaps this guy? "But faced with the coronavirus, Mr. Trump chose not to have the White House lead the planning until nearly two months after it began." Or maybe the guy who later shared this brilliant thought: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html
This is one of those things Marc Dunkelman, Francis Fukuyama, Ezra Klein, etc has been talking about right? The bureaucrats aren't the big problem, it's the ways they're constrained.
Elon's little groypers would've been better served tackling regulations (and y'know, working with Congress to do it) than installing backdoors and malware in the SSA.
I actually think that both sides of the American political spectrum are equally cult-y, it just comes down to what they focus on during their admins and how far they are willing to go to upend the status quo. I agree with Katie that if Bernie had gotten in and did the same thing Trump is doing, people on the left would be doing the same cope tweets as Trumpists.
Right now, the issue is Trump and his terrible policies and the threat to the global economy, but this is a bigger issue in politics overall. If people aren’t willing to speak out against their chosen political party, or can’t without being socially ostracized, then we will continue to return to a situation where a mad man can come in and destroy everything while his followers discuss how pretty his new clothes are (hint: he’s not wearing any).
Eh. Bernie had cultists but who was culty about Biden? Even Obama was criticised quite heavily from the left…
The insistence that Biden was “sharp as ever” was pretty culty.
And Biden walked away. As a result of internal and external pressure. That he responded to.
I guess a mountain and a pebble might look vaguely the same if you put a microscope to one of them.
Bingo
Whether he was sharp or not - he surrounded himself with a competent cabinet who knew enough to NOT destroy the agencies they lead. This is the EXACT opposite of Trump - who prefers to surround himself with craven sycophants. His mission is to seem like the smartest guy in the room - which is near impossible unless he surrounds himself with a gang of slurping 🤡 s.
You seem to be engaging with an argument I did not make.
Biden clearly doesn’t have the same cult of personality that Trump has around him (though there was a very long period of time where questioning Biden’s mental capacity would result in a person being labeled a right wing lunatic, which was quite cult like). The cult-y aspects of the left tend to be in the demands for uniformity of opinions on certain topics (the trans issue, immigration, etc). This leaked into liberal dem spaces most during the Trump and Biden admins over the last 10 years or so. I don’t think Obama, nor Bush before him (for all of his faults), were very cultish at all - at least not in the ways we are seeing now.
The difference is bernie couldve never been president.
They just aren't equally cult-y. Just look at how right-wing commenters and Republicans in congress criticize Trump about tariffs. It's pathetic. They grovel before him.
Yes, but as I said above there are different cult-y attributes for each side of the political spectrum. For the right wing it’s a belief that their dear leader can do no wrong, that every decision he makes, even if it hurts them, is done for the greater good (he works in mysterious ways!). For the left wing, it’s an obsession with purity - purity in language, in thought, even in the smallest micro gestures (remember the guy cancelled for making an okay symbol with his hand?).
Well now you are comparing overactive Twitter users with siting members of Congress.
Overactive Twitter users who also have high profile and influential jobs in media, upper education, and the arts though.
But if both sides were the same, wouldn’t you expect the left to elect similarly extreme candidates?
I’m also not saying they are the same, I’m saying they both exhibit cult like aspects, though in different ways. I don’t think any sane person would say Trump is the same as any American president ever, for either party. He’s talking about deporting Americans to foreign prisons. Orange man is indeed bad.
I think some people are this thread are mistaking “cult-y” for “cult”. I try to be careful with my language for a reason.
I think of people who insist that TWAW are equally as cult-y as anyone on the right who think that Trump is the god emperor from whom all good things come.
Or perhaps people can point out cult-like attributes on both sides of the political spectrum that have led America to the point where they elected a man who conducts himself like a god emperor.
It would be better for the entire world if American political engagement stopped resembling religion and became focused on reasonable policies and laws to govern itself and conduct itself on the world stage. Or we can keep treating politics like team sports while the world continues to burn - whatever suits you.
Thanks to Katie, I now fully understand what Vore is.
Oddly enough, my life has not improved as a result.
Ignorance was truly bliss
Is this a vore podcast now?
It used to be a daisychain podcast.
I miss those days.
Whatever a daisy chain is, it seemed like everyone walked away hopefully having had a fun time.
Seriously, at the risk of being accused of clutching my pearls, I can't laugh at vore the way I could at daisychain running jokes. It's a sexually motivated sadistic murder fantasy. It isn't really fun edgy chuckle fodder.
This is what they took from you
Not sure it’s a good idea for Katie & Jesse to discuss economics without an adult present. Did you kids get Scott Lincicome on the phone or something?
Oh this will be a banger. Maga maoist is HILARIOUS. And also so true. These idiots love authoritarianism when it's got a fresh coat of red apparently
So, I literally live in a town with two manufacturing plants that do a lot of tool and die work. Both pay very well and have robust apprenticeship programs. America very much does have both the infrastructure and skills training to do complex manufacturing, and does, in fact, do a lot of it. My town alone has these two factories, which also make auto parts, a custom brass forge, two cardboard factories, and a large paintbrush factory, just to name a few. There is just a whole lot of manufacturing already going on in America.
I work in manufacturing as well. I found the comments about tool and die to be super weird. We obviously have tool and die industry. Katie seemed to be referring to a podcast. I wonder if they were equally misinformed or if she is botching the message in some way.
Yea, it was super weird to have Katie going on about how we don’t manufacture things and that it would take a generation to change that, and then Jesse pointing out we are the second biggest manufacturing nation, and neither of them realizing that both of those things cannot be true.
BLS employment in manufacturing over the years: https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
Our peak (number of people employed in manufacturing... just that data point) was around 1979 with 19,000,000 employed in manufacturing. Starting around 2000 the numbers started to tumble, to ~13,000,000 today.
Considering that there have been some efficiencies in manufacturing over the last 45 years, I wonder how much of an actual decline in productivity that loss of 30% (6,000,000) workers has had on our actual output?
My understanding is that there have been ups and downs, but that our current output is basically equal to the all time high. So, the reduction in the manufacturing workforce has been totally offset by efficiency and automation. The US also has, by far, the largest “value added per worker” in the world. Seven times higher than China, for example.
It sounds like she took the fairly small, narrow experiment of the podcast she listened to, "Let's create a small, simple manufactured item *using only American inputs*" and blew that up to mean "the US no longer has any meaningful manufacturing capacity." Which is obviously extremely dumb. I live in Metro Detroit, there are like ten tool and die shops within five miles of me and practically everyone either has worked or knows someone who has worked in a factory.
Moments like this really cement that for all of her country-girl butch lesbian posturing, Katie is in many ways just as much of a coastal media class elitist as Jesse. She was so excited to share her newfound expertise and especially the cool new phrase she had just learned (tool and die) with her dumb liberal friend.
Isnt Katie the daughter of two college professors? I think if you somehow landed in the position that katie was some bluecollar rooted person thats solely on you. Being outdoorsy and enjoying nature is far different from having an intimate knowledge of the realities of manufacturing in america.
I know very much what Katie and Jesse's backgrounds are. Katie just speaks authoritatively on shit she doesn't know anything about with far greater frequency than Jesse.
Tooling is also a lot easier to make than it used to be since (I don't know the technicality of it all, I just work in a factory that does it when needed; think it involves 3D printers to an extent). Not so during WW2: Donald M. Nelson of the War Production Board bitches about it for something like thirty pages in his memoir, "Arsenal of Democracy".
The advent of cnc machining is what made this easier, 3d printers and additive manufacturing as a whole is great for prototyping but their usecase is extremely limited. Machining is what drives tool and die and what it really is to an extent.
just fyi. The podcast was PJ Vogt, "Search Engine", and they did an episode about someone trying to make a new BBQ grill scrubber, using *only* American-made parts and labor (as opposed to mostly American parts and labor). A link to Search engine episode is above in the show notes.
The Search Engine Podcast subreddit had a mostly reasonable discussion about the episode in the comments, with several people who work in manufacturing pointing out, as you and McClain3000 also did, that the U.S. has lots of manufacturing. see https://www.reddit.com/r/SearchEnginePodcast/comments/1jbb4vo/episode_discussion_the_puzzle_of_the_allamerican/?sort=old
I get that. It is just odd that Katie’s take away was that no one in America does tool and die work and we don’t even have a way to train people to do it when that is just 100% not true.
Katie and Jesse are coastal media class people with pretty limited life experience. They're smart people, but both of them occasionally have sheltered moments like this. Jesse is more honest about it, Katie postures a lot.
That episode was great, for insights into US and other-country manufacturing. Very educational.
I think Batya Ungar-Sargon is just a liar. She doesn't actually care about "working people", it's just an argumentative angle she likes to take in defending the new fascism.
I think she's genuinely unhinged and believes in her working class argument. She was on 5th Column a while ago (before the election) and was making the same tariff argument and seemed like a true believer. (They were trying to be nice, but she came across as basically just stupid.)
Just looked her up, she seems to be a complete ideological mess.
Isn't she a Bibi bro like Weiss anyway?
She's trying to get a job in the Trump administration, by displaying the one and only criterion: complete loyalty to whatever Trump does.
J & K neglected what makes the "MAGA Maoist" metaphor so telling -- i.e. that Mao was a communist, not a run of the mill right wing dictator. It's bizarre that a millionaire Republican strongman is being lauded as a champion of the working class against oppression. This was made possible by the cultural alienation between the Democratic Party and most working class voters, but it's still bizarre and requires remarkable powers of wish fulfillment to believe.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is a pure example of Maga Maoism and Matt Taibbi seems to be jumping on board. But Bill Ackman isn't an MM. He's like Musk. I don't know what they are, but they're something else.
Ron Vera is to Peter Navarro basically what Socrates was to Plato, not sure why everyone is making a big deal out of it. Next they'lll try to tell us Atlantis wasn't real either 🙄
When we cancel social security and replace it with mandatory jobs in a shoe factory then America will truly be free!