Market Stability

How long will tariffs take for the US to create good jobs?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How long will it take for new companies to build in the US creating good jobs and bringing America back from foreign dependent markets after the tariffs take effect?”

There is no detangling from foreign suppliers in almost literally every market.

For instance, you may have a homegrown bakery that you want to grow into a nationwide franchise that employs several hundred, but can’t without relying on foreign markets for product ingredients, equipment, or supplies to allow your operation to grow.

International interdependence is how to streamline costs through the same economic principle of economies of scale that would solve the corrupt American healthcare scam.

For example, you may be able to source grain from American farmers, but there’s an upper limit to how much you could buy locally. That would create an upper limit on your franchise growth. You may not be able to source much or any of your yeast from local markets, and you’ll be stuck having to import it at exorbitant prices due to Trump’s tariffs.

As you retool your nation’s supply chains to meet the needs of thriving businesses, you would still have to rely on foreign markets until you’ve made the hard choices of pushing out some business activities to make way for the successful or chosen industries to grow. While your nation adjusts to rely on tea production, you would shut down coffee bean plantations to provide enough land to grow your tea.

In the long run, as the U.S. adjusts to an entirely different lifestyle, you would change your expectations for the luxuries you currently take for granted. You would lose some major industries to make way for others.

You would no longer have any Starbucks, or you’d have to pay $20.00 for a cup of coffee, which would dramatically reduce the availability of Starbucks in your nation. Instead of walking down the street for a cup of joe, you’d find yourself driving to another town.

The transitions implied by your question involve a radical reshaping of your economic landscape that will not be a smooth change into lifestyles you’ve grown used to. You must prepare yourself to experience a painfully jarring and volatile rush of disappointments and escalating costs that would guarantee you having to endure a decades-long depression while losing almost everything you now take for granted.

Assuming you can succeed in transitioning to a self-contained economy, your nation would more closely resemble North Korea than whatever it is today. You won’t live long enough to experience the “New America,” but your grandchildren might have fond memories of the last Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream sold at an auction for $10,000.00.

It seems too many MAGAts are utterly oblivious to how badly they’ve been conned by a con artist who should be rotting behind bars like every other convicted felon.

It’s heartbreaking that you’ll have to suffer so incredibly intensely to take back your nation and return it to a stable state of interdependent membership in a global community. You can forget global leadership, though. That’s gone forever.

Is it a good bet that no Republican will ever win the presidency again?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “With the stock market plummeting, market prices soaring, and unemployment on the rise, is it a good bet that no Republican will ever win the presidency again?”

One would think so. One would hope so.

However, history dispels that delusion.

If people remembered who was responsible for what, there would be few Republican members of Congress today.

DonOld Trump is considered “below water” in his numbers at an historical level, but that only means less than half of 350 million people support his performance.

Here are the daily results on Real Clear Politics, which aggregates results from multiple pollsters:

President Donald Trump Job Approval Ratings and Polls | RealClearPolling

47.8% Approve of his performance and 48.5% disapprove of his performance.

From a polling and historical perspective, these numbers are considered disastrous for this president. Still, the reality is that almost half of the nation, by extrapolation, supports this wrecking crew of an administration.

There are over 150 million people who should be paralyzed with fear over the prospects of their future who are cheering on the destruction engine as it wreaks havoc over every aspect of their lives that they count on to survive.

These people are more focused on politics as a team sport in which they view themselves winning even though they may be losing everything. As long as their team remains in power to hurt those they hate, they care for nothing more beyond that because they expect the lives they’ve grown accustomed to living to stay as they’ve expected. None can conceive of the great steamroller bearing down on them because they believe it’s meant to destroy only the neighbours they hate.

They won’t realize the horror of the situation they are creating for themselves until being directly confronted by it. Even then, they won’t admit to being responsible for making their fates and will deflect responsibility onto their ideological enemies.

The greatest lesson we are learning about modern humans that we have been able to overlook throughout history, primarily, is the impact of mental health on the stability of our societies.

We have been living with generational PTSD for thousands of generations and have accepted many toxic attitudes and behaviours as “normal,” while in today’s world, we’ve begun asserting a need to address these toxicities. The consequence has been an escalation of toxicity because those most afflicted cannot and will not seek help for their dysphoric conditions. They will escalate their rejection of responsibility for their destructive behaviours and attack those who seek to address those behaviours to help cure our species of their horrifyingly destructive impacts.

Anyone who has dealt with abusive behaviours understands how the abuser becomes most dangerous when they feel that their grip on power is loosening. They despise it when their victims become more capable of defending themselves against them. Their response is rarely an act of introspective self-awareness, leading to acknowledging how they are being asked to transcend their hatred. Their responses are almost always an escalation and a vicious attack against those who shine a light into their darkness to force them to confront its ugliness.

DonOld Trump will never acknowledge his responsibility for escalating international conflict because he sincerely believes himself to be victimized by his victims for not simply rolling over and capitulating to his demands.

Almost 150 million Americans think like he does to varying degrees and that means Americans will be plagued by Republican betrayals of basic human decency until, like addicts, they hit rock bottom and realize they won’t survive without acknowledging how much they depend upon the support of the international community in which they belong to and begin begging for assistance.

That won’t happen until at least after they trigger a deep depression.

That also won’t happen mainly because their opposition is also in denial over the severity of their problems. They still mistakenly believe that they can reason their way back to sanity.

The DNC is still primarily in denial that they and their nation are in a war that will destroy them unless they can stir up the passion of love of country to match the passion of destruction driving their opposition. They’re still trying to play by the rules of decorum while denying how those rules are irrelevant to a monster who ignores them at best and who weaponizes them against the DNC.

This approach turns off a large contingency of potential voters because it is construed as cowardice, and to a large degree, it is. They can’t help but continually lose against an aggressive enemy when they perpetually move toward compromise.

At some point, compromise is more toxically destructive than full-on aggression, and the DNC hasn’t yet realized that it has long passed that threshold. They lost the ability to compromise when they didn’t hold the Bush administration accountable for their war crimes and now the chickens have come home to roost.

This does not bode well for America’s future and spells hardship, at best, for the rest of the world.

This is a period in human history and global politics with at least as significant an impact on our international culture as WW2 has had. How much more severe the impacts will become is impossible to guess because we haven’t even come close to the horizon that will allow us to perceive, let alone acknowledge how massive the engine of destruction is that bears down upon us all.