• Limonene@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    What they want is: to reduce the trade deficit. But they don’t know how to do that. The most straightforward way is to produce more American products that people in other countries want. But how can Japan do that for them?

    • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      Literally educate your populace, you dumb fucking sacks of shit.

      God. Why are conservatives so insulatedly stubbornly braindead fartingly fucking stupid??

      You want to compete on a global scale? Make your population better than the other ones: INVEST IN YOURSELVES.

      • yarr@feddit.nl
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        22 hours ago

        You want to compete on a global scale? Make your population better than the other ones: INVEST IN YOURSELVES.

        Educate the masses for free? Sounds like COMMUNISM. We won’t have any of that in the ol’ US of A. Get out of here with your Red Danger!

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        Republicans are incapable of doing that because they see anything that helps someone as a “Handout”

        • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 day ago

          I know. It’s wild. But if you want to compete, you still have to compete. Breaking your own legs in a race is what’s happening. LOOK WE’RE WINNING SO HARD

    • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      One of the primary criticisms of Atlas Shrugged is that the villains are so moustache-twistingly farcical in their incompetence and greed that all the workers of the world are morally justified in going on strike, killing most everyone.

      The book is full of what I thought were ridiculous strawman stories like what happened to the Japan delegation.

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      Japan said they might try to import more US rice, but they yen is still really weak right now (even if the dollar is trying to race it by jumping off a cliff). I don’t think the Japanese govt quite grasps how fucking stupid the Orange administration is yet.

      Maybe they need to start having those political satire shows like the Daily Show, but people mostly don’t get involved in politics to the same degree as the US.

      https://apnews.com/article/japan-trade-tariffs-trump-d23573689292edd7b3cea7496438a4a0

    • albert180@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      Is there really a trade deficit when you factor in services?

      That’s what Trump conveniently “forgets” when talking about Evil Europe. Once you compare trade and services balance it’s quite even

      • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        The US has a global trade surplus if you account for tech, financial and healthcare services.

        There is an argument to be made that being able to produce certain things domestically is important from a national security standpoint (semiconductors for example).

        Whether tariffs could actually produce that, no one actually knows.

        • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 day ago

          semiconductors for example

          Agreed. That makes the apparent dislike from the Republican administration of the chips act so weird. It would work well in tandem with a reasonable long term tariff precisely tailored to the goods you need to produce indigenously in future.

          • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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            24 hours ago

            Yeah, but the Chips Act happened under Biden, so it’s automatically bad. Can’t do anything that makes it look like Biden did anything positive.

          • caffinatedone@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            This would assume that their goal was to bolster American manufacturing in strategic areas or something along those lines. The evidence suggests that this isn’t their goal.

            What that goal might be aside from autarky is a good question.

            • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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              24 hours ago

              When it’s not working, it’s working. The destruction of American economic might was the objective from the start. Just look at who benefits the most by this.

              It’s Putin. Its always Putin, using Skum and HitlerPig as his muscle.

              When will people truly internalize that the two biggest foreign Sociopathic Oligarchs, have partnered up with the most prolific traitor in American history? None of them have any loyalty or patriotism toward America, and only see us as a big, rich, fat, lazy target to be ruthlessly exploited and looted, and it’s happening in real time before our eyes.

              All they care about is money, and either Putin is paying them directly out of the Russian Treasury (HitlerPig would rape and murder his own mother for far less than a billion bucks, and Putin could order a lot more than that), or they’ve cut a deal to split the booty like the pirates they are.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Building a service-based industrial economy would be good for capitalism.

        Unfortunately Trump does not serve capitalism. He serves fascism. And fascism requires factories that can be reconverted for a wartime effort once the immigrants and the queer start running out. That’s the fundamental lifecycle of fascism.

        Americans are sending us all on a path leading straight to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon if they don’t fix their shit but everybody’s too pussy to spell it out as if this demented ape doesn’t have unlimited control of the most powerful army on Earth and enough nukes to end civilization several times over.