Charitably, tariffs exist so POTUS can either lower taxes or increase jobs in US, but both would take time to pan out assuming things go well. So if a company is willing to onshore money or jobs, its achieving its intended purpose in their eyes.
No I think Mexico/Canada were largely about stopping immigrants and fentanyl smuggling. But China was targeted for not doing enough to stop manufacturing of fentanyl precursors.
Sorry to say but that's already been walked back on after Canada committed $1 billion dollars for extra northern border security and it made no difference in the tariffs discussions.
- According to CIS, the number of Canadian crime groups producing synthetic drugs doubled between 2023 and 2024
- There's a lack of Canadian agents who are tasked at preventing this and current legislations make it very inefficient between federal and provincial law agents
- There's an upward trend in Fentanyl seizures in Canada the last 2 years
- Fentanyl is now being produced domestically in Canada
All of that is within the control of Canada with better policies.
Let’s put it into perspective, because those numbers don’t give a baseline for what the problem is. Also they don’t necessarily have anything to do with trafficking.
Last year there were 45 lbs of fentanyl intercepted crossing into the US from Canada. Thats a backpack. There’s 500x as much coming from Mexico.
It’s unrealistic to expect that zero fentanyl will come into the US from Canada, and until that happens we will tariff all trade with them.
Zero fentanyl is a fantasy and will never be achieved. That thing is way too small and can be carried around too easily*
Tariffs are just a lever to get things done on the international front.
Canada has been neglecting security for a long time, so it's a wake-up call, and it's not a bad thing to put this out publicly to change things.
CBSA only inspects about 4% (some sources say even 1%) of all containers that ship in Vancouver. Quebec-Vermont* border control has been a joke for years.
Sure, Trump is using all kind of tricks to put pressure against his trade partners to secure some wins that will solidify him as a change agent to boost America, which will appeal to his electoral base. At the same time, it may actually bring good results to the US economy, bringing major investments in the country and negotiating better trade deals.
You may not agree with the means to get there, but you can't deny there's an argument to be made about his "America first" policies and why it could benefit the average people in the long run.
So therefore that allows the President to go back on a trade agreement he personally signed in his last term? I'm not going to disagree Canada should do more about reducing Fentanyl, nor that Canada can't control it with better policies. I am not clear on why this allows the United States to go back on agreements and allows the President to threaten with tariffs that seem to change weekly.
Yes this is one reason tariffs are so valuable to a corrupt POTUS. They have essentially unilateral and very fine-grained control over them, down to exempting specific companies or products outright.
Congress needs to step up on this, honestly. The entire idea that the President can unilaterally implement trade policy is as plain a violation of separation of powers I can think of, and SCOTUS is a fan of non-delegation doctrine.
Legislators step up when enough of their voting constituencies make it clear that they value something as a non-negotiable (assuming votes still matter).
Which means those who care about this are back to not only contacting legislators but also persuading a lot fellow voters that separation of powers is crucial and worth prioritizing over familiar well-handled and loved heuristics.
Yes a million times. For all the rhetoric about authoritarians, the Democrats never seem to want regin in Executive power when they are they majority. It is like a game of chicken where America winds up with a populist dictator from either the left or right.
Yes because populism is a reaction to government being generally unresponsive to people’s needs.
Congress has become increasingly unproductive and unresponsive. There are many popular policies that Congress essentially ignores, and many problems that go unsolved. So trust in government dwindles and people crave strongman solutions.
I’m not sure there is a solution. There are so many interlocking problems gumming up the process that any “we just need to fix X” solutions (where X is gerrymandering, money in elections, lobbying, the two party system, first past the post, corruption, income inequality, the electoral college, the slow death of journalism, consolidation of industries, etc) are nearly impossible and also probably insufficient because they all feed back into one another: they are both causes and effects.
So when people are mad about a downstream effect like the price of eggs and digging any deeper touches one of the topics above (“to fix egg price gouging you need to reinvent the political system” sounds a lot like “to make an omelette first you need to create the universe”), it’s really easy to throw your hands up.
A codebase accumulates messes during it's entire lifetime. Sometimes, it gets to the point to where a rewrite is a good option. Even if the rewrite doesn't have all of the features...Even if possible, it may be better not to keep all of the features. As some features aren't important enough to maintain. The same can be said about government structures.
That is a fair analogy of the problem. But the solution is inherently more complex.
1. The agents of political change are themselves subject to politics. (Unlike maintainers of a codebase, who are able to make top-down decisions about the code.) If you make a bad decision, it may be the last one you’re allowed to make.
2. There are no unit tests for politics. There is only history, which is an imperfect predictor.
Granted large political systems are uniquely complex. But complex & old software can share the attributes you outlined.
1. Politics does enter into programming teams. There's several articles of this genre. Where the most highly regarded programmer made bad decisions over a long period of time & exhibited hubris in doing so. This programmer was fired, but if he was a founder otherwise held some leverage, then he may not be fire-able. However, other staff can leave. It's more difficult to leave the impact of politics.
Entire industries can make bad decisions due to incentives. Such as I must learn technology X because companies hire for technology X. Companies choose technology X because developers know technology X. Technology X could have fundamentally flaws. Compounding complexity in the ecosystem as additional tech is made to fix the flaws...which will also have flaws.
These cycles of compounding bad strategic decisions yet good tactical decisions can last decades.
2. In some ways there are unit tests for politics. Geopolitical signals can be sent. So if X happens, there's a tacit agreement that Y will be the response. Unit tests are great for small units. However, complex systems can be difficult to comprehensively test. This is why there is fuzzing...which is effectively a monte carlo simulation. Monte Carlo simulations are widely used in political analysis.
3. There's non-deterministic inputs. And the system can be more complex than what's possible to model. Leading effectively to non-determinism in making decisions about how to modify the system.
Clearly a non-sequitur, but I'll bite anyways. Paul Pelosi is a VC, and I'm sure that most of the Pelosi net worth is due to his income, not hers. Since the laws preventing members of Congress from trading on information they receive as part of their duties, you can't say that the Pelosi's have violated any securities laws.
And both sides of the aisle benefit from this. Whether it's legalized insider trading or jumping to corporate jobs when out of office, it's a corrupting influence. All members of Congress, SCOTUS and POTUS should have to place their assets into blind trusts. That won't stop this corrosive influence, but it is the bare minimum.
> Since the laws preventing members of Congress from trading on information they receive as part of their duties, you can't say that the Pelosi's have violated any securities laws
The feds can and do go after people for using family members and friends to execute trades. So if Nancy Pelosi told her husband some material non-public info, and Paul Pelosi traded on it, that would still be insider trading.
There was a guy at Microsoft who was caught once using a friend to place trades. He said he talked himself past his ethical concerns by reasoning that members of Congress do it.
Edit: to be clear, the absence of a prosecution does not mean that the Pelosis did not insider trade. Nor that they did. We can't tell from this distance, only speculate.
"Paul Pelosi, 83, sold 30,000 shares of Google (GOOGL) stock in December 2022, just one month before the tech giant was sued over alleged antitrust violations."
> Since the laws preventing members of Congress from trading on information they receive as part of their duties, you can't say that the Pelosi's have violated any securities laws.
iirc as soon as anything becomes beyond the border the President holds the keys for various reasons including the ever-vague “national security” but also due to being prescribed as the primary negotiator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause
Tariffs are not treaties, they're taxes/duties - only Congress has the power to raise them. Article I is extremely clear on that. Historically, tariffs were always raised by acts of Congress, not by Presidential fiat.
Trump is using extremely misguided legislation from the 1960s/70s where Congress allowed the President to enact tariffs for national security and emergencies. There is a very strong argument (in the sense it resonates with the conservative SCOTUS majority) that Congress cannot delegate its fundamental powers to the executive by legislation alone.
I think people are just too cowardly to bring a case in front of the courts to challenge the constitutionality of it all. Non-delegation doctrine is what the Federal Society want to use to kneecap all federal regulation. Trump operates on a spoils system so it's not in the interest of conservatives or businesses to challenge him, for fear of retribution.
Trump is using tariffs not to raise revenue, but rather use it as a stick to force companies to invest in USA.
Previously they were outsourcing and offshoring as much as they could get away with it. Which led to transfer of advanced technologies outside USA and America losing its manufacturing and technology edge
So how's that going? Outsourcing seems to be going strong, the tarriffs instead pissed off allies who are preparing counter-tarriffs, and the CHIPS Act is being dismantle as we speak (there goes our investment.
Tariffs are a form of taxation. If I want to import say tea, and the government is placing a tariff on that imported tea, I am effectively taxed by the government. And only Congress can impose new taxes.
Not saying you're wrong, but... I have seen claims that tariffs are a source of government income that Congress doesn't control. You're claiming they do.
I haven't seen a citation from either side. Can you substantiate your position?
I have already explained my thinking up this comment chain. I'm mostly replying to GP who misunderstands that the intent of the tariffs is besides the point.
TL;DR read Article I section 8, read up about the Trade Expansion act of 1962 and Trade act of 1974, and "non-delegation doctrine", and you can trivially find legal debate about the constitutionality of IEEPA. Rather than listen to random nerds on HN you should seek out this information yourself.
There is no jobs problem in the US though. Unemployment is at 4% which is mostly just job churn. Long term unemployment is only 1%.
US consumers, that’s all of you, are being hammered with taxes on imported goods most of which can’t realistically be produced in the US anyway, to solve a problem you don’t have.
A commitment like this takes years to plan. It can’t possibly be a response to tariffs announced weeks ago. This is all optics.
I fully believe that the real ("main street not wall street") economy is in worse shape than government numbers on unemployment suggest and both sides are to blame for different aspects of this problem.
But nothing Trump is doing is going to fix your situation.
In fact he (or rather Elon/doge) is very actively making things worse for you with the massive government layoffs, flooding the market with even more people to compete with you for jobs making finding work more difficult and also eventually dropping all of our wages.
>But nothing Trump is doing is going to fix your situation.
I'm aware. I'm sure he's responsible for at least 3 job freezes I ran into mid-interview this year. He's literally costing me job opportunities because no one can budget around this chaotic government.
4% too many and probably understated. The BLS repeatedly underestimated unemployment during the previous administration. Also the labor participation rate, which is harder to game, still hasn't reached pre-Covid levels yet: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
In February 2020 it was 63.3% and in January 2025 it was 62.6%, for a difference of 0.7%. Also note the steady decline post-2008 and the multi-year plateau that jitters around 63%.
Having the plateau change from ~63% to ~62.5% isn't an unreasonable scenario.
False, USA has a big problem with manufacturing. All US jobs are service jobs to prop up consumer economy, that have no strategic benefit.
A lot of fake employment and low productivity jobs are in the government/NGO sector, paper pushers, DEI jobs, law/compliance type jobs - that should have been manufacturing jobs instead.
USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
if shipbuilders were not insulated from competition, they would have offshored their manufacturing long time ago and sold out to Hyundai or some other foreign conglomerate. (just like the rest of manufacturing left USA in 80s-90s)
Jones Act is the reason US has at least some form of domestic shipbuilding
The US domestic civilian shipbuilding doesn't exist. It's dead and already smelling.
For example, the Washington state needs new ferries, and their cost is literally almost 10x than the cost for the similar ferries produced in Turkey for the nearby Vancouver, BC. With this kind of cost gap, there is simply nobody who would buy the US ships unless they _have_ to.
Without the Jones Act, the shipbuilders would have adapted long ago to produce high-margin high-tech components for the ships for the international market. And likely in larger quantities than they do currently.
How is the Jones Act responsible for the failure of domestic ship building? Seems like the Jones Act didn't go far enough if we really cared about a strong domestic ship building industry.
The government determines the employment rate via surveys, i.e. they just go and ask people if they're employed. It's not a calculation from taxes or from employers or anything.
So it's up to the gig workers if they think they're employed or not. Presumably this depends on how often they do it.
Apparently, yes. I saw mention of discussion around the Trump administration potentially giving Apple a tariff waiver. And I believe in Trump’s last term, Apple did have some sort of waiver.
I’m on mobile but Googling for “Apple tariff waiver” and “Apple tariff exemption” will point you to several news items.
