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I think, for 'lefties,' the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.
It's schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They're still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.
Right, that was a point I made in there somewhere. That the reality is that this will make billionaires more money which tracks with Trump. But even if that were somehow addressed the last part would still happen, it is a feature not a bug. The economic depression is necessary to burst all bubbles, and we have a lot of them, which in turn will make domestic production cheap enough that it is actually feasible. It does require the absolute implosion of markets and the destruction of all speculative wealth that exists in the system. The middle class will be the one to take the hardest hit in fact, not only because they will lose the value of their spending money, and their good paying jobs, but their retirement funds will be in tatters. Buuut if you see it through, at the end of the depression we should have a better functioning economy than what we have now. The problem is Trump simply does not have the spine nor the time to see it through and people really hate sacrificing the short term for an uncertain long term that doesn’t necessarily benefit them directly.
Anyways I think I rambled but I think the tariffs are actually a good very long term play if you are willing to cause a lot of shock and pain in the short term. We just don’t have the stomach for it, so maybe the artificially inflated economy is better. At least until the balloon pops anyways and we have no other choice but to suffer through the same depression but it is easier to stomach because there’s literally no other choice.
I mean, if you're starting from the view that we have too many poor people for the number of billionaires, then killing off a bunch of plebs in a massive economic depression is definitely one way to balance the field. Just seems a little psychopathic to me, is all.
It's definitely a MAGA theme, though: let bird flu run wild and all the survivors will be immune; crash the economy and all the survivors will be better off; throw out all the immigrants and every that remains will be comfortably English-speaking; jail all the protesters and everyone that remains will agree.
Funny enough, "Eliminate all competition" is what will turn a capitalist society into a dystopia. The free market isn't so free when all the competition is gone.