USA Economics - Protectionist Waste Management down 2pc

New American economics thread

would love to post here but need to spend the afternoon reviving beatles threads in order to make up for the current deficit

calstars just woke up, maybe we can see what he thinks about futures for imported beer

how bout that american economy yall

previous thread from the 2008 crash:
Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

USA: "hold my beer"

line go down

if you were in australia then line go up, makes u think 🤔

maaaate

that's a bloody outrage it is

I have had it up to here waiting for the US economics thread to get rebooted!

lol markets were up bigly this morning and took like a 2000 point swing to the negative by close

no one has any idea what going on or why theyre doing what theyre doing

we did it

idk shit about the market but the upticks right now are the admin trying to hold things up with twigs and bubblegum until the investors see through it and down she goes

Surely you can leak a story every morning about how tariffs are being clawed back and then say "nuh-uh" in the afternoon and the stock market will stay even forever.

lol markets were up bigly this morning and took like a 2000 point swing to the negative by close

Brokers clocking in saying to each other, "Surely he'll have given up on this insane bullshit, right?" Then realization that no, insane bullshit is pretty much his only mode now, and... down, down, down we go.

Public Image Ltd. Album Titles appropriate for the moment:

This is what you want…this is what you get
Happy?
The greatest hits, so far

I think it was the doubling down on China that punctured whatever hope helium there was. Or that plus just everyone trying to guess where the bottom's gonna be.

I alone can fix it.

cool thanks

Sorry, that was supposed to read “AI alone can fix it.”

damn

that's what you get for asking chatgpt to make yr posts ;)

I can call you Betty, and Betty when you call me you can call AI

Mr Krasnov, tear down that wall!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNrQOUtXYOo

I think it was the doubling down on China that punctured whatever hope helium there was. Or that plus just everyone trying to guess where the bottom's gonna be.

― paper plans (tipsy mothra)

we're in portland. we're _all_ in portland.

please send tops. don't worry about that hope helium, we're all _very_ good at blowing.

lol

Trump claims tariffs bringing in $2bn a day for US
Donald Trump has been speaking as he signed executive orders from the White House.

Trump claimed that the US is making $2bn a day from tariffs. He did not provide any details.

“The tariffs are on and money is pouring in at a level we’ve never seen,” he said.

“America is going to be very rich again very soon,” he said.

What can you even say...

“America is going to be very rich again very soon,” he said.

with U.S. taxpayers' money

I was just thinking if he was referring to people paying taxes which include higher capital gains in 2024 and more babby boomer RMDs

What can you even say...

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, April 8, 2025 4:03 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thread for Screaming Into the Void

Here is more details on who might be making that money.

https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/engineered-volatility

^^^

"buying the dip" but on AI steroids

An economic lesson from er, Ronald Reagan, tweeted by er, Chinese embassy US account.

Ronald Reagan vs. #tariffs : 1987 speech finds new relevance in 2025pic.twitter.com/CuAMw1eQXN

— Chinese Embassy in US (@ChineseEmbinUS) April 7, 2025

as one does

William Huo, Intel’s first rep in Beijing: “America got conned by its own elite. And now we’ve got the privilege of importing our own poverty in shiny containers labeled “Made in China. When a politician promises to bring back American manufacturing with tariffs, ask them: who’s going to rebuild the ecosystem Wall Street torched three decades ago? Tariffs won’t fix decades of deindustrialization driven by elite consensus. Only massive, consistent investment in R&D, education, and infrastructure ever could. But first we have to say the quiet part out loud: America was deindustrialized not by China or Mexico, but by its own ruling class chasing yield.”

Yep.. anything to get away from paying a living wage to American workers

on the other hand we got cheap tvs have you seen these things its like $300 for a big flat screen tv

theyre quasi disposable

my (much-older) cousin runs a small music store in a small CA town, and as much as he'd love to have his walls lined with shinty Fender, Martin & Gibson guitars, he just can't really afford to, so he orders guitars from Korea, China & Indonesia. He's shown me a few and I have to admit they seem pretty well constructed, probably using a lot of computer-assisted machinery. They're not 'rough' like we think of Japanese & Italian guitars from the 60's. And they actually sell, because he's not really selling to pros but to people just starting out.. same with brass & woodwinds

theyre quasi disposable

the alleys of Oakland are littered with them, I can attest

This passage from Bob Woodward's book Fear shows just how fucked we are:

Of course the United States manufactured things, but the reality did not match the vision in Trump’s mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America — locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines. [Gary] Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories...

Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president.

“See, the biggest leavers of jobs — people leaving voluntarily — was from manufacturing.”

“I don’t get it,” Trump said.

Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”

Cohn added, “people don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”

Trump wasn’t buying it.

Several times Cohn just asked the president, “why do you have these views?”

“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”

He really believes his insane bullshit, and no one can convince him otherwise.

far from the worst thing during this cursed time but can i just say that i’ve really been disliking seeing scott bessent’s stupid smug face

Cohn’s mistake was referring to other people, who don’t exist to Trump. Should have asked him do YOU want to shovel coal eight hours a day

People might actually take factory jobs over service industry/LVN/etc. jobs if they existed and the pay was decent, the idea that the two options are "blast furnace" or "incredibly easy e-mail job" isn't real life.

So many not-blast furnace trades jobs (HVAC tech, plumber who gets called out at midnight when the shitter is backed up, etc.) are a) highly demanding of overtime and b) now actually sales jobs because staying employed and making a living wage depends on upselling the person whose AC you're fixing in the middle of August.

From the old thread, ShariVari sez

Lots of angry chuds out there trying to Gamergate the fake, woke, feminised economy (in this specific case, a viral TikTok video from Australia they are all still mad about a year later).

And I was like wha? Like, doing office work is for women? Then why were they excluded from it, in living memory?

And lo, yes there are people saying things like this.

https://wapo.st/42nDYfR

Rotimi Adeoye

Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

oh we're talking about utah and utahns now! i have some thoughts. it sucks and they're dumb mutherfuckers. thanks for listening.

lol

My sister was paying I think $3k a month for two kids in a good pre-school. Incredible to me. Luckily one aged into Kindergarten so she's down to half that for a couple more years. O____o (There's no free pre-K in their rural town I don't think.)

I mean that's why they can't travel and can't fix their house up and have never had a new car and everything needs work.

Extended to a year I’d make about $66k this year which comfortably laps my previous high. Sometimes I do feel quite well off (no kids) but even still buying a house is not even a question, most new cars would be onerous, if I lost my sweetheart rent deal a nice 1 bedroom is $1300-1500/mo., I have health insurance but I’m scared to actually use it, etc.

I have health insurance but I’m scared to actually use it, etc.

Man, at least get a physical, seriously. Blood tests and the like.

^^

I think the substack author is right that the federal poverty line is way off. But as someone whose family of four is below the substack’s poverty line, I find the United Way’s work on this a lot more credible

https://www.unitedforalice.org/introducing-ALICE/illinois

sure, I mean the overall point is that the poverty line is way off

In Illinois, average basic costs in the ALICE Household Survival Budget were $27,864 for a single adult and $80,568 for a family of four with two adults and two children in child care — much higher than the FPL ($14,580 for an individual and $30,000 for a family of four).

Yeah I'm sure there are different ways to slice it, but the core insight is that the federal poverty measure — which most of our safety net programs are tied to in one way or another — is way too low. It ought to be completely recalibrated.

there are many alternatives to the OPM, but they mostly show a greater reduction in poverty, because OPM excludes things like food stamps, health insurance, refundable tax credits etc which have brought poverty down

We evaluate progress in President Johnson's War on Poverty relative to the 20 percent baseline poverty rate he established for 1963. No existing poverty measure fully captures poverty reductions based on these standards. We fill this gap by developing an absolute Full-income Poverty Measure (FPM) whose thresholds are established to obtain this same 20 percent official poverty rate in 1963 while using a fuller measure of income and updating thresholds each year only for inflation. While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 10.5 percent in 2019, our absolute FPM rate fell from 19.5 to 1.6 percent. This reflects increases in full income throughout the distribution, with real median income more than doubling between 1963 and 2019, together with the expansion of government transfers and tax benefits not fully captured by the official measure. It is also broadly consistent with the expectations of President Johnson and his Council of Economic Advisers, including Robert Lampman who predicted in 1971 that poverty based on these absolute standards would be eliminated by 1980. However, we also show that reductions in relative poverty since 1963 have been far more modest, falling from 19.5 to 16.0 percent in 2019.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26532/w26532.pdf

other alternatives some give higher numbers, like the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), but it's around 40k for a family of 4, so off by about 100k

https://www.bls.gov/pir/spm/spm_thresholds_2024.htm

In general, many benefits (as well as government grants and credits for stuff like affordable housing) are often determined regionally based on AMI and not the FPL metrics. So the ALICE numbers make sense in this context. In regions like SF-Silicon Valley, the family of 4 making under $140k do qualify for benefits and subsidies.

These are HUD numbers/tables fyi. But maybe substack bro who talks about “the gamma” isn’t that knowledgeable about these things.

sure, I mean the overall point is that the poverty line is way off

In Illinois, average basic costs in the ALICE Household Survival Budget were $27,864 for a single adult and $80,568 for a family of four with two adults and two children in child care — much higher than the FPL ($14,580 for an individual and $30,000 for a family of four).

― challopvious (sleeve), Wednesday, November 26, 2025 8:47 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

many transfers are expressed as multiples of the FPL (e.g. 180% of FPL for WIC, some of the ones in the ACA go up to 400%), where the level of the multipliers are set by politicians. which i see as an implicit admission that the line is too low

whether it's best to boost the poverty line or to just keep jacking up the multipliers, i don't have a strong opinion on. i suspect the reason they haven't forced census and HHS to change the FPL formula is because it requires an act of congress and so is challenging legislatively. and once you've increased the multipliers, it makes it harder to get the votes to increase the FPL. back in 2019, trump's OMB tried to force HHS to switch to using a chained cpi (a version of the cpi that takes into account substitution away from expensive goods) to calculate the FPL, which would've slowed its growth, but failed

there are also other transfers, like the CTC or EITC, who have income thresholds that don't depend on the FPL. a couple with a household income under 400k can still get the maximum CTC

conceptually, there's no real reason why transfer receipt should be linked to an arbitrary poverty line. it would probably be better if all the programs that are tied to FPL (wic, snap, medicaid) used thresholds

that's interesting and def shows an implicit admission.

my issue w/ the multiplier "solution" is that it's piecemeal at best, the more universal fed policy the US can enact the better, I'm so over legislative patchworks, in the US especially (see also: solar).

apologies to Alfred in advance for excessive comma usage there

think you could still have snuck another before "especially"

Kinda glad to see Costco suing the administration over the tariffs... it's gonna be a shitshow if they have to start sending refunds out

The CTC shouldn’t be compared to EITC, which is actually designed to benefit low income people. The CTC’s increasing increase is related to the fact that in 2017 they got rid of personal and dependent exemptions and just increased the standard deduction in order to “simplify” the tax code. It actually made it less simple for people with children, especially those with parents who aren’t a married couple happily cohabiting. It also fucked over people in high tax states within a certain middle class income range … anyway, I will refrain from nerdous rage at shitty Trump tax policy.

EITC, which is actually designed to benefit low income people

the EITC pays zero dollars to people with income equal to zero

the EITC is not actually designed to provide a guaranteed Basic Income. that's been talked about a lot, but I don't think a bill to implement it has ever been introduced in the US Congress. dream on, dream big.

xp- snark aside, the point i was making in my original post wasn't to compare EITC to CTC, just to point out that you can have programs with thresholds that aren't expressed as multiples of the FPL

as with any programs, both have their pros and cons. and the context you gave on TCJA reforms to CTC are interesting, thank you :)

the federal EITC phase out range for households with kids is 20-30k to about 50-60k (depending on number of kids and single/joint) (https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/2025-tax-brackets/), so the beginning of the phase out range is right around the current FPL

The E stands for Earned. It’s built on the 80s logic of “workfare not welfare” … anyway, I am reminded of something dayo said years ago to me when I was posting about US tax stuff … about how I should step back because I am “too close” to this topic to ilx well.

do you have a link to that post? i have no recollection lol

never stop taxposting

^ otm. you have cred there that few ilxors share

https://archive.is/20251215122129/https://www.thecut.com/article/daycare-childcare-nanny-nyc-cost.html

idk how true this rings for folks, a little bit quiddities for sure since it's nyc

Recently, a Manhattan father-to-be dipped into a local Facebook parenting group for an opinion on the “mind-boggling” $2,400 a month he had been quoted from a nearby day-care center for his baby due in March. But instead of shock or empathy, he was largely met with jaded mocking. “Sounds like a steal,” responded one parent. Another advised him to stay away from such “low-cost ones,” like she did. Still another let him know, “On the UES it’s $3,800, so …”
In New York City, “having it all” (a full-time job, one toddler, a full-time day-care spot) now requires, at minimum, an annual family income of $334,000 — assuming you don’t want to spend more than 7 percent of your income on child care, which is what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says is the federal standard for affordability. (This benchmark was derived by the Obama administration not through any careful equation, but rather by averaging out what parents paid for child care between 1997 and 2011, Elliot Haspel, a national child-care policy expert and author of Raising a Nation, has written.) It’s a flawed calculation, but it also reveals a hideous truth: Child care is unaffordable for 80 percent of NYC parents — a stat that many New Yorkers might find laughably absurd if it weren’t so debilitating. For a number of moms and dads I’ve talked to, paying a nanny’s salary, a monthly day-care bill, day-camp tuition, or fees for after-school programs easily consumes 25 to 50 percent of their family’s after-tax pay. I even talked to parents who tapped into savings for the privilege of keeping their careers afloat through some of the most hands-on parenting years.

Sheesh we were paying $2,400 a month in Manhattan 15 years ago. That was for a nanny for two kids, true, but nothing about that number should shock anyone.

Or maybe we were paying $2,000, I don't want to exaggerate. Still!

Somebody should run for mayor and do something about that

haha

I wonder how all the immigration crackdown is affecting child care (in New York and everywhere). I had two Polish nannies who were not working legally, and the parks were all full of Latino and Caribbean nannys with strollers who probably mostly weren't either.

(don't know how I managed to spell nannies two different ways in the same sentence but there we are)

just checked, 5 days of infant care at the center my daughter goes to is $2900/month (she does 3 days of preschool so it's much less now) and we are definitely not in or near manhattan

Now imagine having two to pay for 💀

god these are crazy numbers. I remember a lot of people complaining here when daycare fees were raised from 9$ to 15$ per day (the subsequent provincial government reverted it back to 9$ (with subsequent annual increases according to inflation iirc)).

Thank god for DCPS taxpayer funded PK3+ is all I’m saying

$2400/mo for a baby is not that expensive! Now think about how the maximum of employee dependent care benefits is $5000 … a year.

2400+ USD are Zurich/Geneva prices, arguably NYC salaries are comparable, but if you add rent, taxes, restaurant prices and general lifestyle... But to your point sarahell, yeah, not sure there are global hubs that escape this price inflation / speculation. We live an hour away from GE/ZU, and the economic reality is vastly different. Right now we pay very little for daycare, a little above 500$. Even inside those big cities.

My point, sorry if opaque, was that tax policy doesn’t keep up with inflation … if employer benefit limits were increased (they were temporarily during COVID through payroll tax credits), then it would be more likely that parents could have more of these costs subsidized by their jobs.

Also — while there is a large variance between costs of childcare in the US, it would be relatively easy to write regulations that could exclude excessive benefits paid to rich executives, as there are a lot of other tax code provisions that have similar rules.

Ah yes I didn't react to the tax thing. We can deduct 8000 USD per child (that's a flat rate), and up to 12'000 for daycare. Interestingly, a couple years ago we voted on extending the daycare fiscal advantage from 12 to 30k and the Swiss population... refused. Precisely because it would advantage the rich and would have represented a loss in fiscal revenue. I voted for.

Employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, the highest tally for the first month of the year since 2009, according to a report out Feb. 5, and a sign employers may be taking defensive steps against economic uncertainty.

going well

bitcoin having a month as well

The resident goldbug/silverbug/cryptobug guy at work has gotten reeeeeeeeeal quiet the last couple of weeks

and this: US Consumer Confidence ‘Collapsed’ Sharply in January

fake news, no doubt

A downbeat mood among US consumers is showing up in corporate results as companies that sell them food, drinks and household goods warn of soft sales.

The chocolate and biscuit maker Mondelez International pinned a drop in North American revenue on “economic anxiety and low consumer sentiment”, while Chipotle Mexican Grill chief executive Scott Boatwright said traffic to the US burrito chain fell for the fourth straight quarter as diners are “pulling back on overall restaurant spend”.

bitcoin having a month as well

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Thursday, February 5, 2026 2:57 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

its having a six hours

it was 97k mid Jan now at 63k

biscuit maker Mondelez International pinned a drop...

traffic to the US burrito chain fell...

bitcoin having a month...

Need to check in on other vital economic sectors such as bananas, bismuth, and barleycorns.

pork bellies are having a run though

what about bacon