It's clear that there was no reasoned thought behind the tariff push. Tariffs can work if implemented in a principled way and coupled with a complementary industrial policy to develop critical sectors of the economy.
Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.
The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.
When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?
The studies I’ve seen seem to indicate that tariffs can work but are like running with scissors.
The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.
Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.
There are better ways than tariffs. For instance, you can increase VAT and use the proceeds to decrease taxes on work, or cut taxes for specific sectors. This way your economy is more competitive internationally, while avoiding the distorsions of tariffs.
Tariffs can also be footguns as they increase costs on imports for upstream supplies, making downstream local producers less competitive. VAT is much better for this as it is refunded when you export.
Me being a non-US reader, it’s honestly a bit frustrating to see how often people from the US forget that a large portion of HN readers are from other countries and don’t share the same context for posts like this. It ends up assuming US context as universal.
And don’t get me wrong. I agree that corruption is horrible. I live in a country where corruption was and still is rampant. Political discussions related more closely to, let’s say, AI companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic when it comes to the Pentagon do spark interest, since they are somewhat more directly connected to decisions we can make as tech professionals in other countries, whether for moral, ethical, or practical reasons. That is not really the case for posts like these, however. To your point, I would love to see the tech/hacker community come up with ideas about solving corruption, even if it’s just philosophical discussion.
If my point still doesn’t make sense, imagine seeing posts about corruption cases from any other non-US country being posted on HN. What would you think about those?
When i browse sites based in other countries, i don't complain when there's a lot of talk specific to that country. I didn't know what Eurovision was until last week, but now LMNC is representing the UK. A lot of talk about how it should be boycotted because of Israel. How a bunch of people i never heard of are corrupt. i'm just there to cheer on LMNC, but i get why it's being overshadowed by the current politics.
I don't think the answer to that is to discourage posting US-centric stories about serious political issues. I think the answer is to encourage people from other countries to post theirs, too.
We need more understanding of each other and of each other's situations, not less. The more we tech people bury our heads in the sand about politics—every country's politics—the more likely we are to create more situations like the one we're in today.
Most dictators are elected democratically, once. What makes them a dictator is them not relinquishing power. It's too late to protest after a dictator is officially a dictator. They know what will come and are usually prepared with an armed force loyal only to them.
When the sitting president of the United states repeatedly states he would like to have an illegal third term, that elections are fraudulent and must be under his control, continually takes actions testing the limits of what he can get away with in terms of authoritarian behaviour, and only backs down temporarily when he faces massive backlash, you can forgive people for being alarmed.
Maybe the President should have taken that into account when lying publicly about the impacts that he admitted in private conversation, or mocking and undermining expert advice?
Excess death from Covid is a non-trivial topic. Sweden had a very different approach to covid response, and yet had a very average number of excess death. The post-covid investigation provider some clear insight of what was primary causes to excess deaths, and yet very little of those conclusions has became common knowledge.
The primary group that had excess death caused from covid was to people living in homes for elderly care, and the primary cause was a lack of initial process and gear by people who worked at those locations. They were not given enough time to keep up a higher standard of sanitation (often given less than 15 minutes between patients), and protective gear was lacking. They also heavily depended on mass transportation which was a primary location for the virus to spread. A better early response in that sector, including shutdown/restriction of mass transportation would had saved many elderly people from early death.
To note, this had nothing to do with masks, vaccines, or shutdown of schools, which is the main points usually brought up in popular discourse. Sweden would have had one of the lowest number of deaths, with the exact same use of masks/vaccines/shutdowns as it did, as long as the response in elderly care had been done better.
> while Israel usually says the truth, at least after running an investigation
You can't be serious about that statement. At best it reflects overwhelming naivete about how governments (let alone those engaged in war) work. At worst, its a deliberate attempt at misinformation.
Yes just like all the other places we have to maintain control congress would have to authorize boots on the ground, quite possibly for many years. Otherwise some other zealots just fill the voids.
Ben Franklin was asked what kind of govt would the newly formed United States have. He was sadly right when he replied 'A republic, if you can keep it'
One of the (many) pretexts for the war, at least from Trump seems to be that Iran 'interfered' in US elections. From the Washington post
'President Donald Trump shared an article about Iran seeking to interfere in U.S. elections on his Truth Social account a couple of hours after U.S. strikes began in Iran early Saturday.
“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” the post read, with a link to a piece from Just the News, a conservative website from which Trump frequently shares articles. Shortly after, the president posted another article from the site, albeit unrelated to Iran; it was about the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani T. Willis.'
Does the US even have a functioning Congress left? Who will even believe such a preposterous lie? Even the most die hard MAGA supporter will find it hard to believe this fabrication.
It's like Trump doesn't feel the need to even maintain the fig leaf of a causus belli. He must truly feel that he is now the king of the United States to be so emboldened.
Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) is a term that gained prominence in May 2025 after many threats and reversals during the trade war U.S. president Donald Trump initiated with his administration's "Liberation Day" tariffs.
The charitable explanation is that he chickens out when confronted with real backlash.The less charitable explanation is that he 'chickens' out after the appropriate bribe has been paid to him.
I think that the tariffs are what he said they were... a starting point for pushing (re)negotiation, and that has largely been successful. This ruling doesn't roll back all those trade deals.
1. That's transparently NOT what the white house said the tariffs were for.
2. There has been NO significant change (via negotiation or not) in non-tariff trade policy under this administration. Essentially all those "announcements" of "deals" were, were just the acts of rolling back the tariffs themselves. No one caved. We didn't get any advantage.
It's just absolutely amazing to me the degree of epistemological isolation the right has created for it in the modern US.
Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.
The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.
When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?
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