Folks, the obvious answer is that they are that dense, and they are that stupid, and they are that evil. Trump isn't playing 4-d chess; conservative media is the one who can spin any move he makes as 4-d chess.
Your point is well taken, rolexian. Trump is a moron. No question. The reason I'm responding is because there is an important idea behind your post. How many CEOs have much micro knowledge about their industry and their company? Maybe a handful? And yet, they nearly all make micro decisions every day. It's not just Trump. It's essentially every CEO and it's an absolutely terrible, toxic, wasteful behavior. Like everyone, it's extremely difficult for CEOs to focus on the macro perspective and stay within their zone of expertise. We have all worked at that horribly, horribly run company. Every single one of us. It's nearly every company. "Hey, let's get an alcohol wash station to clean these circuit boards. It's far cheaper, far less toxic than hexane, safer, not considered hazardous so no hazmat overhead, and we have successfully tested alcohol cleaning a bunch of our parts in the supplier's demo equipment. ROI will be three weeks." "No. There's no budget. Have your people back up their computer systems. We're switching from Dell to HP. I just read an article in CEO Magazine that shows HP has 5% higher market share." Consider Elon Musk. He is a son-of-a-bitch to work for. He's mostly civil but goes on power tripping tirades that defy logic and are documented to occur more frequently over time. Elon is one of the few CEOs who knows his business, down to the micro level. He is the only CEO I know who has arguably built a successful company using aggressive micromanagement. As time goes on, Elon's micromanagement gets heavier handed while the relevance of his knowledge wanes. He is still a very, very smart man, perhaps the most in-house process aware CEO on Earth, but he drifts further away from being current over time. As best I can tell, the people who work directly with Elon appreciate the reprieve when he is busy following a rolling quarter across the floor at a Bar Mitzvah. Trump might be particularly susceptible to ignorance and micromanagement. His behavior represents the worst aspect of our work life. This is triggering for people. Still, if every organization with a micromanaging leader was a bad organization, we would be eating bugs in the forrest right now. I think it's important to try to see the intention of the tariffs and how they might help, without getting caught up in our universal hatred of top down ignorance.
Your point about CEOs mostly having a surface knowledge of the company they work for is well taken, but pretty much every move he makes is boneheaded and shortsighted. It shows a complete lack of education for macroeconomics, and the fact that he has access to the best and brightest people to help guide his actions, and he listens to absolute idiot "yes" people is inexcusable. That is the bare minimum to ask of a president: To know how their actions affect everyone else. At this point, the only logical conclusion to be made is the one rolexian made: He's a bullheaded moron surrounded by evil blood sucking sycophants. That was his choice. He learned nothing of any value from his first term. He only got worse. That is the hallmark of a narcissist who is used to getting their way. I see the merit of tariffs. I see the value in wanting to take back more control of our supply chain. I share a lot of those concerns for how globalism has made us particularly vulnerable to geopolitical issues with raw and manufactured materials. The problem is that there are wishes and there is reality: Our comfortable way of life has pushed labor costs beyond what the market will bear. Menial manufacturing jobs are not coming back en masse. That leaves us with those options that economically make sense to have on our soil. If Trump had a plan (a real plan) to address that, one kind of like TOrm3nted laid out, he might even be successful, incompetent as he is. But time and time again he has announced his intentions: Bully the world until he gets what he wants, even if what he wants makes no fiscal sense. That's not a recipe for success when we are losing ground on being the sole superpower. And don't get me wrong: I really want him to succeed. His wins are our wins. But no matter hard I look, all I am seeing amateur hour. Nothing but amateur hour. Again.
Moreover, the most important skill a CEO can have is hiring and listening to the right people. But Trump is famous for firing people! He's clearly surrounded himself with gormless yes men; unqualified idiots who are personally loyal to Trump. He's a symbol of the death of expertise in this country. Not to mention that Trump never takes accountability for anything.
Gentlemen. I love posting with you guys because I respect both of you but please see if you can spot where the value of the following, purely hypothetical, exchange starts to diminish. Subject - Tariff Discussion Person A - Tariffs might be necessary and helpful, if implemented differently, but are a huge liability in their current state. Because of this, they probably won't be around for long so I am going to invest as though tariffs do not exist. Person B - Trump is a moron. Person C - Yep. Trump is a moron.
Ahem, "Let's stop walking on egg shells about politics." Now who was that again? You are right though. No gain to be had by going further down that path. My views are out there. No need to
So, what happens now? 1) Tariffs work, deals are signed, put a fresh coat of orange paint on the Trump bust at the Smithsonian. 2) Tariffs partially work, some deals are signed, tariffs are scuttled and we move on, with some change but mostly the same. 3) Tariffs fail and are scrapped. We move on as though nothing happen. 4) Tariffs cause massive consumer goods shortages, inflation, and are scrapped an abject failure. 5) Other?
If I had to guess, I believe one deal is going to be announced today. It will probably be with some country like the UK that we already had a trade surplus with and it will change literally nothing of any sort of substance, but it will be claimed a win for the master negotiator. He will probably then start rolling out "deals" with lots of other nations that again change nothing but he says "look another deal" and everyone just believes it and acts like we have all these new trade deals, but they're just business as usual. He sort of did this with NAFTA 2.0 which he negotiated in his last term as USMCA, which he called a great deal at the time. It changed very little as I remember it. He then got reelected and claimed we're getting bent over by Mexico and Canada even though he negotiated the trade deals with them. I believe we've seen the playbook for how he will get out of the tariff situation, and it's just basically verbally stating "we have a deal" and nobody with significance caring that we never see a 500 page document about trade with them and see any massive changes in there. So basically business as usual, which is good for the average American in that nothing changed and we're all (or at least most of us are) much better off than we're told. China I'm unsure about though. Most leaders will just roll their eyes and nod and be like "oh ya we came to a great fair deal" even though they know nothing changed. Xi can't really do that as easy. Long-term, who knows the ramifications though. I think we'll finally see in the next 4-6 weeks or so some of the downstream effects of slowed/stopped imports from China and maybe some others and reality might actually catch up. The problem with most of the tariff situation is that it takes months to feel the results of them. An easy comparable would be the auto industry. If X Plant stopped making vehicles, you probably wouldn't notice the lots looking much different for a few months because selling out of inventory takes awhile. It then takes awhile to start the rebuilding and getting those vehicles back out to all the dealers (or grocery stores, or pharmacies, etc. for everything we import. The reason I opened this specific paragraph with "long-term" is because I don't think we know what the tariff position will be until actual tariff pain is felt by the American public so we can see media report on it and how Trump responds once we actually feel the tariffs.
An article which kind of touches a bit on why the "reshoring" idea will likely never be implemented in the way some folks think it will. It also has been discussed in a few posts in the thread. Mike Rowe, known by many as host of the popular show "Dirty Jobs" and the CEO of the MikeRoweWorks Foundation, is raising concerns about a growing segment of the U.S. population: men in their prime working years who are neither employed nor looking for work. "There are able-bodied men in their working ages not only not working, but not looking," Rowe said during an interview on "Varney & Co." "That, to me, is one of the greatest alarm bells going on in the country. We've never seen that before, not in peacetime anyway." Rowe pointed to research from economist Nicholas Eberstadt in his book "Men Without Work," who has long warned about the troubling trend. According to Eberstadt, more than 7 million men of prime working age have dropped out of the labor force entirely. Rowe believes this problem is being made worse by a cultural overemphasis on traditional higher education, which he says steers people away from skilled trades, even as thousands of trade jobs remain unfilled. "Compare that to the open positions, and then just sprinkle on $1.7 trillion of student loans that are still outstanding," Rowe said. "You can see we’ve still got our thumb on the scale." A study from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) supports Rowe’s concern. It found that the share of U.S.-born men aged 16 to 64 not participating in the labor force has nearly doubled over the last six decades, from 11.3% in 1960 to 22.1% in 2024. Industries like manufacturing, maritime and automotive are feeling the impact, Rowe pointed out, struggling to fill roles that require hands-on, technical skills. "We're still pushing a lot of kids toward a very expensive path, while the skills gap widens," he added. "The skills gap is real, but there's a will gap as well." Rowe has long advocated for vocational training and trade careers as a viable, and often more practical, alternative to four-year degrees. He points to recent trends suggesting that younger generations may be starting to agree. "The four-year degrees are trending down in that cohort," Rowe said, referring to Gen Z. "There’s a lot more interest in electricians, and plumbers, and steamfitters, and welders and pipefitters." Rowe argues that this is not only promising, but essential to the country’s long-term economic health. He urges a cultural shift: instead of pressuring every student into college, society should encourage and support those who want to pursue skilled trades.
Speaking of trade deals. The UK just completed one with India. No, it was not the 90 deals in 90 days that the US is so efficient at. This deal between the UK and India took about three years to get done. That is probably about average for a "real" trade agreement. I think the last stats I read, it is about a year and half for negotiations and about three and a half for implementation. These are actual trade agreements. So, I'm not sure what we are actually working on, but it seems to me what they are referring to is not even possible in theory.
Here is this between US-UK... Trump's deal with the UK will be limited in scope and maintain America's 10% universal tariff President Donald Trump’s trade announcement with the UK will be limited in scope, heavy on future commitments and leave the existing 10% universal tariffs in place, according to a US and UK official. The officials stressed that there were still some details in flux and nothing would be finalized until Trump’s announcement. But the outlines include a move to ease Trump’s auto and steel tariffs and a more defined pathway to a broader trade pact. US and UK officials have been in regular contact about pathways to a trade agreement for several months — even before Trump’s April 2 “reciprocal” tariff announcement, a US and UK official with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made the pursuit of a deal with Trump a key component of the bilateral relationship and made a point of elevating trade as key focus in his closed-door discussions with Trump during a visit to the White House in February.
Quoting the Center for Immigration Studies? Was the Goebbels foundation available? What about the institute of KKK studies? The CIS is a think tank; its studies are tendentious, politically driven garbage, not peer-reviewed scientific work. I don't quote the CATO institute talking about why immigration is awesome and labor unions are terrible... Not to mention, I have issues with quoting Mike Rowe, who's a good TV personality but is not at all an expert. Plenty of academic studies talk about the declining LFPR, contextualizing the changes over the years. Why not quote those?
Geez...while skimming through some articles I noticed it and recalled some prior posts generally speaking about some of the US labor issues and the problem associated with reshoring. That was really the point/reason for it as it related a bit to some prior discussion. That was it and nothing else. No point in being rude about it, but duly noted.
Maybe a bit of #2....but with some of #4 sprinkled in for good measure. Time is going to provide us a bit clearer picture of the effects and results. The US/China one could move the needle more one way or the other in a number of the above scenarios. Data coming in later may also influence movement that is not yet being factored in by all parties.
Sorry, I was not intending to attack you. Was criticizing the writers of the article for doing a bad job (after all, YOU didn't quote CIS). Of course, that was probably their intent...not real journalism, but hack journalism.
I am not familiar with CIS and know very little about Mike Rowe other than from his show, but I must say, whatever partisan slants there are with either of them, I do fully agree with the points of this article. Too many kids are going to college for degrees that are worth less than the paper they are printed on, and too few kids are being taught to be good with their hands and be able to fix things. Some goood money in the trades if one is willing to put in the effort. There needs to be a balance, as both kinds of people are necessary.
How do you define "too many kids are going to college for degrees that are worth less than the paper they are printed on"? Last I saw, roughly 40-45% of majors are non-STEM (not that non-STEM is inherently non-useful), and of those majors, ~85% go to graduate school (the vast majority to business and law). I think the US needs more people going into white-collar, high-skilled labor. Most kids don't go for college degrees. The idea that we don't have enough tradesmen has a kind of narrative merit, but what's stopping more people from doing that? If the pay is really that good, why wouldn't people respond to that incentive?
It's simple: There are majors that provide very little in the way of actual job prospects. Those topics are nice side hobbies, but to spend big money on it them fiscally irresponsible, especially if it is through a private school that costs considerably more than a state school. In addition, far too many people pay a lot for tuition only to land jobs that take longer to pay off the debt than before. In my opinion, there are far too many jobs that should not require a four year degree when only a tiny fraction of it is actually utilized. Unfortunately, I have taken on a more cynical view of colleges recently, and I view them more as businesses seeking more revenue rather than institutions of higher learning. Where I live, it is a very strongly held belief that if you do not go to college, you will struggle financially with a poor job. That's absolute nonsense, and I rejoice when a former student of mine who I was unsure of their future says they are training to be a welder or plumber. The only thing stopping people from landing more of these jobs is the stigma attached keeping them from seeing that they are viable alternatives immune to offshoring and people wanting to work hard enough physically/mentally to succeed in them. Far too many people have become lazy and entitled. That's a side effect of having a stable, comfortable living style for many here.
A lower 10 percentage point tariff increase, combined with the economic effects and foreign retaliation, would generate a net revenue gain of $1.6 trillion 10 years. Higher tariffs do not necessarily yield more revenue. UK deal we are at 10%. That level trade. If we kept all countries with level trade at 10% lowest we would rake in trillions. Keep in mind exports 5 billion ADD IT UP REAL DONALD TRUMP AMAZING.
OK, I this is the core of what I am asking. What majors, and how many students get degrees in this each year (without going on to graduate school)? Is this a real problem?
