Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left

China's economic situation right now is worse than the US. They have incredible debt (accounting for provincial debt which is essentially state debt, China is not a federation), a massive housing asset bubble, and an aged population that is expensive to care for. Never mind also being stuck in a deflationary cycle with a high youth unemployment rate. And this is just working with the self-reported numbers from an authoritarian regime.

The biggest crunch to the US will be to the consumer, the biggest crunch to China will be the worker. People in the US will need to buy less shit, and pay more for what they do buy. People in China will need to work fewer hours and bring home less money.

Of course, the situation is fractal and ridden with unknowns. But I think a lot of people have this view of China as being a young slick economic powerhouse and the US being a weak economy with old decrepit money pile. That's far from the truth.

In the mind of a serial bankrupcy expert being in debt gives one leverage. In reality all the piled up treasuries give China breathing room and their sell-off would put the US under stress. The US may be the largest customer of China but is dwarfed by internal customers and the rest of the world. Loosing customers hurts China but it can be compensated. Now as a supplier of volume goods China is much harder to substitute. And as a supplier of specialized high-tech goods China is impossible to substitute. Loosing suppliers in manufacturing breaks complete value-chains so there is colateral damage. On the other hand imagine some smaller critical US component breaking a supply chain in China - there will be fewer of such cases and bad cases can be handled with exceptions. Much different from the US situation where there are many more specialized components from all over the world are impacted.

Let's look at car head-lights. These are highly integrated components, designed and manufactured by third parties using tools made by forth parties with the knowledge not in the hands of the car manufacturer. Swapping them may well need re-designs and re-certification. Hard to put an estimate on the overall process but it won't be quick.

And last but not least how is new business attracted: The rule of law makes a country safe for an inherrently very risky process of overseas investments. Expats are critical resources for knowledge ramp-up and managing the first years. Billionairs with a seat on Trumps table may not care so much about the rule of law but SME business do. Expats who may move with their family need to be able to rely on visa, green cards and travel being safe. The opposite of what is needed to attract business is done as far as one can see from afar.

A trade war with no clear path for winning started from a position of weakness.

As much as China can prepare, it's still in a pretty vulnerable position and the whole "the Chinese people are more conditioned for hardship" is as much Chinese exceptionalism as any claim to American exceptionalism. At the end of the day they lose millions of jobs, factories shut down, and people suffer there too regardless of the CCP marketing about being "tough" and "prepared". Appear strong where you are weak or something like that. Meanwhile the US can see prices go up, but aside from a few specific items we can buy or make the things that China has been. At an increased cost, sure, but Americans can handle it.

> The US has benefitted for a couple generations by being the reserve currency, meaning that we can make big mistakes and not suffer for them, while any other country would suffer. This coming trade war, if it actually happens, may finally break this exceptional status.

Very doubtful. The main danger is lack of fortitude with continuing and enforcing policies, and letting ideological battles get the best of the Trump administration for cutting good and fair deals with the EU and others. You're welcome to invest in Chinese, Russian, or whatever capital markets, though.

> it does not have any Vietnam hawks

Only chickenhawks that dodged the draft

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Dugin envisions the fall of China. The People's Republic of China, which represents an extreme geopolitical danger as an ideological enemy to the independent Russian Federation, "must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled". Dugin suggests that Russia start by taking Tibet–Xinjiang–Inner Mongolia–Manchuria as a security belt.[1] Russia should offer China help "in a southern direction – Indochina (except Vietnam, whose people is already pro-Russia), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia" as geopolitical compensation.[9] Russia should manipulate Japanese politics by offering the Kuril Islands to Japan and provoking anti-Americanism, to "be a friend of Japan".[9] Mongolia should be absorbed into the Eurasian sphere.[9] The book emphasizes that Russia must spread geopolitical anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."

It kinda feels like they aren't taking time to consider the effects of their actions, and assume things will somehow work out.

If you read Marcy Wheeler [1], she points out that the Trump administration just can't figure out how to negotiate. All three failed "deals": Harvard, Ukraine, tariffs.. there's just no ask there.

You're going to start a hot war with China demanding....what? That they reload the container ships with Shein clothing?

[1] https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/04/29/mr-art-of-the-deal-str...

My theory is that by sufficiently pissing off allies, we get kicked out of alliances, and that lets Trump reduce military spending. Without the tit-for-tat of military spending for social programs, the federal government gets massively downsized. The end goal is shrinking the government back to levels not seen proportionally since before WW2.

I'd be willing to consider that, but he's doing a ton of things that very clearly have _no_ upside and obvious downsides. As one example, he literally fired entire departments that were _generating_ money for the government. It's too clear that he's just doing whatever he happens to think of without putting any thought into whether it will actually be helpful.

I am firmly of the opinion that his only goal is the be the center of attention, and the more outrageous the things he does are, the better. Ie, there's no such thing as negative publicity.

What is this “it” you speak of.

Is it the imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico? Or is it the rescinding of those tariffs a day later. Or is it the pause but when the pause was supposed to end nothing really changed?

Or is it the liberation day tariffs on everyone? Or the subsequent reduction of liberation day tariffs a few days later but an increase in tariffs against China.

Or is the “it” the fact that the administration reveals these major market moving actions a few hours before making them public to friends, family and donors?

Once anyone can figure out what “it” is supposed to be one can have a discussion about whether it’s good or not.

It is also reflective of the fact that mid-terms are in 2 years and election campaigning starts in 3. Even if you believe tariffs will work, there will be short term pain. Best to run through that now in the hope that economic indicators are improving come election time.

That’s a premise that would make me consider the wiseness of my actions.

> "do everything at once, without taking the time to do it right"

Testing tariffs in realtime is nothing like, say, fuzzing idempotent methods in a framework.

It is a lot more like testing sending out spam from a set of static IP addresses. It's not just that you could fail-- it's that you could end up fucking up those IP's ability to send email into the foreseeable future.

>without taking the time to do it right" is more reflective of his belief that whatever he tries [even just being president] will be fought, so his options [from his POV] are "do it now" or "don't do it at all", not "do it right"

This seems completely wrong and ascribes motivations to Trump he clearly doesn't have. I think his framing is much more "everything I do is correct therefore this will work." Everything he does makes sense when framed that way.

You’re being down voted because you’re not saying anything meaningful.

Yes, you can argue that [person] is [performing an action] because they believe, from their POV that [reason1, reason2, reason3].

> Or does [what person believes] not matter when they act upon it?

Yes.

What people choose to believe is distinct from fundamental baseline reality.

Let me put it another way for you; if I believe that fairies have invaded from space and I go out smashing peoples cars because, I personally, believe that this will make the fairies go home…

…does it help to argue about whether I believe in fairies or not?

It does not.

The arguement must be about whether fairies exist in baseline reality or not.

What I believe is not a point worth discussing.

…so, to take a step back to your argument:

Does he believe this will help? Who. Gives. A. Flying. Truck? Does it matter what he believes? Can we speculate what he thinks? It’s a useless and meaningless exercise and a logical fallacy; because anything can be justified if the only criteria are “you believe it will work”.

The discussion worth having is, in baseline reality, will it actually help?

Which is what the post you are replying to is addressing; but instead or following that up, you’ve moved this discussion into a meaningless sub thread of unprovable points about what people may or may not believe.

Which is why you’ve received my downvote.

It has to do with countries not buying US treasuries. That used to be how the dollar system worked. Now that countries aren’t, tariffs are being used as an alternative. You can read the war finance article series for some background: https://advisoranalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/zoltan...

Tell that to the Austrians, Italians or indeed the EU.

The Brenner tunnel is part of an EU-wide transport network called TEN, planned and built since he nineties. It hasn't taken 30 years because of delays, but rather because it required planning far ahead and a lot of execution.

China will just say they're not blocking products, the US just needs to remove the self-induced tariffs and their products will come back.

What of the theory that they just want to inflate their way out of a debt crisis?

You’re an optimist. I kind of expect the Trump Administration to roll over when China goes to take Taiwan.

Covid lab leak theory wasn’t enough?

> My brother would stay an Eagles fan even if they lost every game they played

Are you sure? People often claim this, but don't follow through. There's even an expression, "fair weather fan".

It's true some people seem to support some political parties beyond all reason. But to keep the support through personal hardship is different, and hasn't been tested as often. Worldwide, nothing particular to US.

This is a reasonable theory, but empirically we are already seeing a lot of defection from the "team", before the real pain has even begun.

There's a reason why Communist revolutions had a vanguard and political prisons.

It wasn't because they're ontologically evil. It's because order is a very delicate thing. As we've seen, it's incredibly easy to espouse reactionary sentiments and get a lot of people supporting things out of misplaced fear.

If for example you're trying to build a social/political project based on dialectical materialism, a particularly enigmatic liar is like a fire in a barn. You can't "Marketplace of ideas" your way out of a liar who serves to benefit off their lies.

So what do you do? You throw them in the gulag, shoot em, put them to work, put them into reeducation. One liar isn't worth sacrificing the project as a whole.

Cuba reached near 100% literacy, eradicated parasites in children, and took the mob bosses who ran the country out of power. Of course they had to show no mercy to the bay-of-pigs types. The people who benefited when children had feet full of worms and the laborers couldn't read. They were a fire hazard.

And there are people who love to use the term RINO who belong to what is essentially a re-badged Dixiecrat Party. Trent Lott, at the time head of the Republican Senate caucus badly embarrassed himself by letting people hear him say that Strom Thurmond was right in 1948.

Good point. Less enthusiastic Trump voters may not vote for a Democrat, but they might also sit out a midterm election. Even diehard Eagles fans probably attend fewer games during a losing year.

This is not every voter. For sure, there is the "4th generation Republican" or the "vote blue no matter who" crowd. But ~40 percent of the electorate considers themselves independent. I can speak from experience having folks who were registered GOP up until 2016, and then who started voting Democrat or third-party out of utter disgust with Trump.

That will only intensify if his policies go and tube the economy; the reason he got re-elected was because enough people wanted the 2019 economy back and thought his policies would do it better than Harris's.

I'm interested in hearing more about this. In my news sphere, there was a lot of doom over Brexit, it happened, and then the story stopped. What's it like and why aren't people connecting the dots?

>"Pass laws quickly" is, depending on who you ask, either not the right thing you want to optimize for, or the exact opposite of what you want.

Opinions on the filibuster are often also time dependent. If the person's preferred party has a majority in the Senate, then the filibuster is called an evil relic of the past that should be removed. If the other party has a majority, the filibuster is a sacred part of democracy and must not be touched.

> What does "senate reform" mean other than filibuster reform

Along with more conventional and familiar ideas, I like to toss in the occasional radical one like "abolish the senate" to stretch people's minds a little.

The Senate _itself_ is gerrymandering on the national level.

> third party

If you had open system (not one or two-party system) there would be more than three parties.

Democrats have instituted independent redistricting commissions, finance transparency laws, the popular vote compact, and many others.

Do not imply that both parties are the same on this. That is factually incorrect and Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated an interest in improving democracy.

The GOP, on the other hand, is cheering Trump on as he arrests judges and ignores due process.

I had hoped Trump getting elected the first time would trigger a wave of voter reform. Instead, it just made it trendy to be constantly apoplectic.

Sorry, to clarify: by "factory worker" I'm referring to the pre-offshoring state of your typical American factory job. A skilled employee who's closer to a plant operator and troubleshooter than an assembly-line drone is, of course, another case and can make very good wages.

Your parallel to ag is a good one: it's something we need to be here, and we wisely embraced automation to ensure 1. we could do it even in wartime, when our male population is needed elsewhere, and 2. that we could produce in a way that cost little for the average consumer and the export market. We need the same thing to happen here.

I mentioned the "factory jobs aren't coming back" point more because Trump is playing hard to a rust-belt base that wants those jobs back, doing this in some ways as a hand-out.

Recombinant insulin is exactly the kind of high value IP the US excels in producing.

Any casual glance at the finances of a health insurance company will quickly throw cold water on the "health insurance companies are greedy scamming dirt bags"

Then go look at the finances of those who take in insurance money.

Trust me, it's _very_ (read: very) clear who holds all the bargaining power in the healthcare market.

Is it? I know insurance bureaucracy has overhead but is it more than personnel or materials?

Is it?

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-the-...

What is the dollar amount for each component?

Absolutely. Right now, though, people haven't built nine-figure ultra-robotic t-shirt factories because they can "cheat" around the issue of tech advancement and requisite R&D investment because they can just offshore to avoid spending that money. And, when that happens, it will employ a dozen people rather than hundreds or thousands.

Perhaps, but I do see this as a mostly-disconnected issue. Companies in China are extremely profit-seeking. We're talking about countries that run literal sweatshops, so let's stipulate worker's rights and living wages aren't high in their considerations.

I agree that paying workers well is a good thing; I like that the advanced mfg model still allows people to give good salaries. But, I don't see how it's strongly tied to the issue of tariff policy in terms of economic outcomes.

This is a good point. Rep. Rogers' amendment to DOD for FY25, which just came out, includes:

- $1.53B for expansion of small unmanned surface vessel production.

- $1.8B for expansion of medium unmanned surface vessel production.

- $1.3B for expansion of unmanned underwater production.

- $188mm for development and testing of maritime robotic autonomous systems and enabling technologies.

- $174mm for the development of a Test Resource Management Center robotic autonomous systems proving ground.

- $250mm for development, production, and integration of wave-powered unmanned underwater vehicles.

Perhaps less-safe seas will mean it's better to on-shore, but we do seem to be focused on keeping them secure. If nothing else, while America is more capable of autarky than most, we still pull a lot of critical minerals and other feedstocks from other places.

The healthcare debate is really complicated. We do spend a ton, but we also demand an extraordinarily high standard of care. We don't tend to deny people anything and waitlists are very rare. Now while a universal healthcare policy is doable, a lot of Americans would demand some level of additional private care, which means net healthcare spending might rise between the two systems.

I tend to hear arguments for universal healthcare like "negotiating drug prices". While that could save some money, we spend less than one-tenth of total dollars on prescription drugs. Hospitals are still the largest chunk at ~30%, and I'm unsure how universal care would realistically save us money there. Doctors/clinics are about 20%, and I don't see obvious savings there, either. "Other health" is opaque but there's potential for savings here; it includes "durable and non-durable products, residential and personal care, net health insurance, and other state, private, and federal expenditures."

This is a very hard problem to solve, and is compounded by the fact that we have an incredibly unhealthy population. I also hesitate to attribute this to "lack of care": obesity is massively comorbid with heart disease (the leading cause of death in most states), diabetes (a large ongoing drain on the health system), and end-stage renal disease (dialysis accounts for ~2% of the entire federal budget.). And yet, obesity is strongly prevalent in every income group, across men and women both.

There are people who say we have a moral obligation to give free healthcare to everyone. I don't agree, but I understand that's moral position. But I am less sure that data bear out the idea that publicizing healthcare would magically save so many dollars.

I'm not "avoiding" criticizing the rich or capitalism. I'm just not motivated by my personal morality to do so. I understand you and others are, and can respect that too, but these are two separate conversations: on one hand, what is practically right and wrong with the current policies? On the other, how ought we to act? The latter underlies the former and, if you want to criticize the former on grounds of the latter, you've got a long row to hoe. It's probably easier to segment practical discussions to one place and moral dialogue to another.

Expenditure data: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

Obesity prevalence by income: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm

Agreed, and tariffs are an impediment to specialization, which is the basis for innovation that drives long-term economic growth.

Surgeons can push the limits of better and better surgery if they can spend their entire career focused on just that. If they’re required to farm or sew clothes half of every day, they will not be able to advance surgery as far.

The same specialization-driven innovation happens between companies who can trade freely, and between countries who can trade freely. Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize for exploring this idea.

It's important to be careful with value judgements like this.

Tariffs allow otherwise more expensive domestic products to compete against cheaper products from abroad.

In and of itself, that says nothing about quality one way or another. In practice, it often means the opposite of what you suggest: domestic goods are often of higher quality, and/or are made by workers in better conditions, because of stricter laws here than in the places manufacturing has moved to. (And not by coincidence—the cheaper labor and looser laws are exactly why manufacturing moved to those places.)

Of course, all of this only applies when tariffs are carefully considered, strategically applied, and left in place for a long and predictable length of time.

America’s trade surplus in services rose to $293 billion in 2024, up 5% from 2023 and up 25% from 2022, according to Commerce Department data.

My first reaction also but think about it. An airbrush isn’t an airbrush but a pneumatic system. An electronic toy isn’t a toy but an electronic system. At a large enough scale and over a long enough time frame.. lots of things are strategically important when you’re talking about the basic ability to manufacture stuff independently

These same workers, on the other hand, do enjoy the inexpensive consumer goods (clothes, electronics, home appliances, etc) produced in less expensive places like China or Bangladesh or Vietnam.

These countries also were lifted from poverty and into relative prosperity by this. It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day; the US would turn into an innovative economy producing high-tech gear, doing high-grade R&D and engineering, and producing software, all the stuff the Bangladeshi or even Chinese were not supposed to be able to do comparably well. It just turned out that the engineering and development thrive next to the actual production capacity, and can be studied and learned. Now Chinese electronic engineering rivals that of the US, same for mechanical, shipbuilding, even aircraft / space and weapons.

A similar thing once happened to Japan, then to South Korea: they turned from postwar ruins and poverty into high-tech giants competing successfully with the US by exporting inexpensive, good-quality stuff to the US. But these are politically aligned with the US and the West in general; places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, not so much, and China expressly is not.

Look at the Auto work force in 1960 and in 2025. Wages became so high that it drove automation/robots and created the Japanese/Korean/European auto industries. Had huge tariffs been enacted we would still have some of those jobs in the USA, but those lost to robotics would still be lost due to the basic economics of fabrication. Can this all be rolled back - All the King's men and all the King's horses can not put Humpty Dumpty together again. I can see a possible future where people are all paid the same $$ and you can not 'shop for slaves' as we do in Asia. This level field would take a while to achieve - even now wages in China have risen a lot and they are not the cheapest labor country now, but their assembled physical plant still dominates. China now has excess physical plant and must replace the USA as a large buyer. Other countries feel the same pressures and erect tariffs of their own. I see many years of this levelling to occur. USA will have to reduce these high tariffs because the USA needs many things and it will take 10+ years to create the physical plant that was allowed to rust away over the last 20-30 years - even now a little has returned, but the 'rust belt' has been melted down and it will return slowly.