"Necessary"

Honestly, aggressive climate change would have a similar short-term impact, even if the net result is good, which is a large part of the reason we don't do aggressive changes like this.

That said, I'm not convinced the net result is good, so we'll instead have short-term suffering followed by longer-term suffering, all for a bit of protectionism for American businesses (which will probably leave them worse off in the long run anyway).

That graph is interesting. When was Reagan president again...?

Anyone that actually cares about the economy would see that every time the republicans get in they fuck it, and every time the democrats get in they fix it.

But they don't care about reality, only their feelings

That's why they're trying to take power. Billionaires would rather destroy the world and drive all life to extinction than to give up their private jets and yachts.

The worst part is--it's really not. These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system's worst distribution issues. Their biggest hardship could be dealing with not being The Guy With The Biggest Number when they go to their rich guy parties.

Personally I'm in favor of making them destitute and/or imprisoning them, but going that far really isn't strictly necessary.

Harder - lol. He'll have to settle for two 180 foot yachts instead of three.

Protectionism. Musk stands to gain a ton if there's less competition from imported EVs, and that's true for a lot of other products that American companies make. If you can just throw a few million at a presidential campaign and essentially guarantee your competitors will have a 10-60% disadvantage, those few millions can turn into billions in profit.

On paper, the goal seems to be to spur companies to return to the US, but I think the net impact will be higher prices for Americans and reduced trade w/ other countries due to retaliatory tariffs.

Your comment has the same energy as "states' rights to do what?", and I'm here for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

🔪🦢

In trump's case, we praise exceptional morons

He's never going to shut up. But people keep amplifying his pathetic voice by sharing what he says. There's a very large group of society that needs to stop sharing outrage fodder.

How are people like him and bezos controlling the world?

Capitalism

They literally want to end government. Aka, services for anyone who isn't wealthy.

This is why Worker and Consumer Cooperatives are so vital.

"designed" is a bit much but it sure does play into their hands.

What even is that face emoji doing?

I like how you improvised.

Edit: 🗡️🫠. I wanted to try and I like this.

I only heard the clip from here.. but it sounded like he said for long term prosperity, not necessary.

I assume what he was saying is that people will suffer while we force the market to move into isolation.

What he doesn't want to admit to the populous is that to have long term benefits of cheap labor, you have to have cheap labor.

So either you have that by being richer than other countries and outsourcing the labor, or isolating the country and subjugating a portion of the population so much that they are the cheap labor. That portion... Isn't going to be small if it's going to be able to provide everything for the rich who blast through resources like crazy.

I read recently "On Freedom" by Timothy Snyder and he mentions that. Billionaires are sucking or wealth and when we suffer, we are told that this is temporary and toward a greater good (which never comes).

Sadly it is successful and a lot of Americans believe that.

It opened my eyes seeing how we are set up to fight each other (blaming minorities) while oligarchs are making our lives more miserable by hoarding country's wealth.

He is, though he's wrong about Trump's plans being anything beneficial in the long term. But even what he's saying about any part of it being harmful is a contradiction of Trump's claims about the economy

He'll immediately blame Biden for all the suffering he causes.

They'll scream for blood, but it won't be the blood of billionaires.

They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that's fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They're cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.

They'll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be rookie shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they're indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet "experts" they're arguing with.

Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they're working hard to ensure that never happens.

In an alternate universe, conmen Trump and Musk used their sole talent of convincing fools to wear masks.

It's only going to be temporary though, see.. we starve everyone for 30 years as we force ourselves into isolation, then those who are left.. wait, who's left, we killed the work force.

They are pro free-market, so long as the market is contained and controlled in every measure by themselves. Okay so maybe not free, maybe more of an enslaved market. They are going to need to shop that name, stick with calling it what it isn't for now, free

As much as you possibly can. Remember that in a neoliberal utopia, each week you'd bring tens of thousands of dollars in for a company, be compensated with minimum wage and then hand those wages straight back to the nearest billionaire in exchange for food and shelter. If you have any money left at the end of the week, that's abhorrent to them.

Capitalism is a system that rewards sociopathic behavior, so sociopaths with no empathy or investment in anything other than themselves naturally rise to the top.

The oligarchs who control our nation are all mentally ill narcissistic sociopaths who don't care what happens to the country or to humanity or the earth after they're gone. Life to them is a story where they're the main character and everyone else is an expendable NPC.

This is why capitalism is considered unsustainable to anyone other than those who idolize the oligarchs and wish to become one themselves. This is why hierarchy and class is something we should be trying to eliminate from society, not lean into even further. When human ego and individualism is allowed to be the cornerstone of human society, it is a matter of when, not if, that society eventually crumbles to the long term effects of wealth inequality.

There's no such thing as the middle class. You either own means of production, you sell your labour to those who do, or you belong to the criminal class that doesn't contribute to the growth of capital. The middle class is a fairy tale capitalists tell us to keep us in the labour class instead of the far more sensible criminal class.

Decimation of the middle class is a natural tendency of capitalism, but politically its highly desirable to have a middle class. So the middle class in a highly capitalist society ends up being somewhat precarious. Billionaires aren't attacking the middle classes more than laboring classes, but the "answer" to almost every problem caused by overproduction bubbles is to somehow suppress wages. The government, which needs a strong middle class for political stability, now has to find a way to lower wages or ,in the case of business owning/managing middle class, make new capital investment difficult. There are different kind of middle class, so there are different ways of accomplishing this. But as a result, middle class people are class conscious to the extent that they feel always threatened, but often aren't able to link it to the economic system, or if so then they might not be able to link global economic problems to the actions that actually caused the problems.

They have all the money. Now they want more.