SectionC3

Douglas has a far a better chance of doing that than does white.

He's going to make the country "leftist" when this foolish tariff gambit fails. A third way Democract should win in 2028. But it won't be a Bill Clinton third way. It's going to be a new third way--new blood, new economic ideas, etc. Get ready for AOC/Bernie. (I'm not saying I'll vote for AOC, or for Bernie, in a primary. I believe in capitalism, and ruggedness, as well as equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome. But I will damn sure vote for them with bells on in a general if they're running again Ted Cruz, JD, or a different Trump acolyte.)

Ask yourself this - why do companies like WalMart and Amazon work so hard to keep unions out? It's because unions are good for workers and bad for owners. Unions are why we have benefits, and higher wages, and labor protections for the working class. Meanwhile, at Amazon, we have workers enduring "super shifts" or whatever they're called delivering packages from 10a to 10p four days a week. The conditions are horrible. They're no better at WalMart, where people are "surviving" on $12/hour and mollifying themselves into obesity with processed food and other salves designed to make their crappy lives a little less intolerable. Those companies are awful for labor. And this is coming from a guy who is a huge investor in Amazon. I acknowledge it makes me a little hypocritical. But that company can still make gobs of money even if it treats its employees better, which it should.

How do you measure trade deficits? And, are trade deficits with a given country always a bad thing? What I don't believe is measured in the trade deficit calculus employed by the Trump administration is the export of services. I'd rather have us exporting services--educating our populous to do smart things, like engineering, for example--than making socks and ball point pens. Let the Chinese and other countries do the menial stuff, and let's get our population trained up to do the more valuable things while they waste their time making our disposable junk. And, if you're so concerned about helping the biggest threat to our country, maybe, just maybe, the group of idiots in charge in the White House shouldn't be alienating our allies and pushing them into the embrace of that enemy.

Looks like they studied well at Trump University. Maybe they were taking lessons from us on our treatment of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, too. I find most interesting your point about the exploitation of labor. I agree that it happens, and that we (the American consumer) benefit from it. Nobody domestically has ever cared about that issue until now. And I find it hard to believe that those who care about the issue do so legitimately, and are willing to endure the pain of what effectively is Trump's new national sales tax, to change wages and conditions in a distant land with a vastly different economy and value per hour of labor. Even assuming that's the case, the next question would be whether these newfound domestic supporters of labor fairness feel the same about labor unions, and wages at WalMart (where many of them undoubtedly shop), and wages and conditions at Amazon (where many of them undoubtedly shop as well). I'm going to guess the answer to the WalMart/Amazon issues is no, and that these points about exploitation of labor are made simply to justify support for the moronic new tariff taxes that the Trump II administration has imposed.

The more I think about it, the more it's not a completely unreasonable number. Shakir got $15m, with 2024 stats of 102 "targets" (here, actual targets and two carries), 8.2 yards of production per target, four TDs, a long of 52, and 35 first downs. Cook, in comparison, had 245 "targets" (same metric as Shakir), 5.2 yards of production per target, 18TDs, a long of 65, and 62 first downs. He's not as efficient as Shakir, but it's hard to argue that he doesn't produce well. And, I appreciate that some will say that it's easier to produce from RB than it is from the slot. Agreed, and Shakir should make more than Cook. But there's an argument that Cook is worth fairly close to what Shakir is getting, perhaps on a shorter deal. Even based on efficiency only, he's a $10m player gauged against Shakir's contract. (He's about 65% as efficient as Shakir.) I appreciate that he vultures a lot of TDs and FDs, but those numbers, as well as the explosiveness, are what they are, and there's a legitimate argument for paying him more than $10m based on those factors. I don't think it gets him to $15m, but I don't think it's outlandish to say that $12m would be a fair number.

In other marginally related news, Von Miller’s house popped up on a Zillow notification as I was reading this thread.

Liquidity lockup. Look at bond yields. Out debt is not attractive. It’s like the plumbing of the economy. Who buys this stuff? China. Japan. Europe. All the people were pissing off. I have no desire to relive 2008. We can’t afford it. But this fool and his tariffs (for what purpose again?) have us headed precisely in that direction.

But does it matter? The country was doing well when he left. Maybe not perfect, but well. And now, it's arguably days from veritable economic disaster. Maybe, just maybe, we should stop worrying about old news and begin to have a *little* concern about the ability and wherewithal of the fool who is driving this country toward an economic abyss.

We disagree. Airports in the Revolutionary War? Tariffing penguins? Thinking Venezuela is a person? This guy has watery eggs for brains.

They're both demented, quote honestly. Biden was slow. Maybe his judgment was good, but he was slow, for sure. Trump talks fast, but he's declined significantly as well.

I always knew I didn’t like penguins. Bunch of MFers who don’t buy our stuff.

What’s his stance on North Korea?

Also poorer. Don't forget that. He's making America poorer again.

So, more QE and more inflation on the way? At least MAGA owned the libs.

And still nothing done about inflation. The war in Ukraine rages on. Major stock indices down approximately 10pc. No reshoring of jobs. But he won a senior club championship and took care of a water pressure "problem." What a joke.

I'll trade a 1 for three years of Addison. All day long.

Looks like Trump leads this party. What a wimp. He caved in a matter of hours. Iraq held out longer during the ground phase of the first Persian gulf war. If tariffs are so beautiful and good and such an excellent source of leverage, why walk away from them in a matter of hours? The old man panicked, plain and simple.

So now you want more inflation? To what end? And I take your point to be that the market won't fail, but things will still be more expensive if this gambit doesn't work. It's a moving target with MAGA. One day it's fentanyl. The next day it's a trade imbalance. Then tariffs are most beautiful. Then they're not. Things were bad under Biden, but we're cool with making them worse for middle America under Trump and raising taxes at the same time. This is just a stupid, pointless fiscal policy untethered to reality or any kind of reasonable economic theory. Nobody knows the answer to that question. Not even Trump in that scrambled egg brain of his. It's pointless to ask. This one isn't going away. The problem we now have is that foreign leaders are much smarter than our leader. They're not going to forget about his whimsy and his willingness to break agreements and to screw with their economies. Underestimated in this whole thing is how badly Trump has damaged relationships with our trading partners. And, if the MAGA response is that they aren't good partners or that we don't want them, then why pull the tariffs before a deal is cut? Normally one keeps that pressure point if it's bad for the adversary and good for us. But I guess it must be pretty crappy and pointless for us because he caved.

I think China leaving the T-bills is one of their nukes in the whole thing. What MAGA would learn, if it wasn't wrapped up in video games and porn, is that the world economy is a lot more interconnected than it would like to admit. Also, with respect to someone else's comment about tariffs working as planned, I'm still confused as to what the point of all of this is. (I suspect Trump is, too.) I thought tariffs were supposed to re-shore American jobs. Or maybe they were to stem the flow of fentanyl. Or maybe it's to rebalance trade. It seems like none of those things is accomplished through this pause. Which makes me think that there was no point to the tariffs in the first instance. Here's the prediction. In the end, Trump will extract some trade concessions from some of the countries (maybe even the place inhabited by the penguins). But they won't do a thing to re-shore American jobs, or stop fentanyl, or even rebalance trade because I understand his worries to be with respect to the flow of American goods, not American services. And, what will happen, to the extent we still have some degree of reciprocal tariffs, is that middle America still will face a Trump tax increase.

That’s where they’re going to hit us, and that’s why debt can be a national security risk. Of course, Trump added more to the debt than Biden, or Obama, and probably further exacerbated the problem with his tax cuts for the rich. A Republican I know at one of those places just summed up Trump in two words: “an idiot.”

I think it’s coming now even after he backed down. Too much belt tightening ahead. Nobody trusts this guy.

The market is still down what, 8pc since the start of the year? Based on uncertainty, because nobody wants to invest here given the day to day uncertainty of the policy of this fool of a president. The soft coat of this is going to be the economic flight of foreign capital that follows. So I wouldn’t count the “no recession” chickens just yet.

Apparently the absurdity of the tariff gambit.

The largest tax increase in American history isn’t going to help with that. But that’s what Trump just did.