Do you think congress may have forgotten how their job works? Like I remember learning the importance of congress in middle school. Power of purse and all that. Why is the congress petitioning the president for legislation? Can we please replace the congressmen who don’t understand what their job description is? Every day in the news its just “Legislator asking someone else to do their job” “Legislature confused on how laws are made” “legislator claiming the presidents office is just better at making laws”
Do American care about another few hundred billion in debt? The interest on past debt is a trillion dollars, Biden proposed a 4T Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which the interest on that would be more than 200b.
Every politician takes on more debt than the last, so I assumed Americans don’t care about debt loads.
Spending 1.2 Trillion fixing roads, airports and ports? Thats like literally the purpose of forming a government. Im not sure where you got the 4T from. That was the tax deficit spending included in the BBB 2025.
Yes we spend 900 billion a year on interest so where are we coming up with 200B for hand outs?
Yes the people keep voting morons into congress and have set up perverse incentives for them to rob us. Yes it still makes me upset every time.
So yes some of us Americans do care about the congress being able to pass a sensible budget. The debt won’t stop growing if they don’t stop giving everyone handouts. I deeply care that the next 3 generations will still be paying for the Iraq War and Bush Tax cuts, now they get Iran and trump tax cuts.
No I have no idea how to stop the insanity.
Are you sure you are the majority? I can empathize with people who do care about suitability of finances but are stuck with people who dont.
No if I were the majority we would not be here. They don’t really teach finance and economics in public school. Balanced budgets haven’t been a popular platform since 2001. They stopped talking about it in 2012.
The average American can barely fucking read, so you better believe they can’t do math well. They certainly don’t deal in complex problems or multiple orders of effects.
Our education system failed so hard so fast that the majority of the population is blissfully ignorant on monetary and fiscal policy. I mean, these people don’t even understand the progressive tax code they’re under. They will pay taxes for 40 years of their life without fully understanding how a tax bracket works.
I cannot defend the population that cannot understand that a tariff is consumption tax. But like maybe 20% of us still do. And that’s like 70 million people.
Well heres a far left economist who says they are basically a VAT tax. However he outlines that exporters do absorb some of the cost, but its mainly been US business absorbing the tariffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYqvK_oVN8
If you’re a left leaning person isnt that good, cant the government now distribute that money and cut less programs, as corporations absorb much of the cost? Obviously the Trump tax cuts are where much of it will be going, but if a left leaning politician did it and removed those tax cuts wouldnt it be a net positive?
TLDR tariffs have always existed to protect people like Elon Musk from having to compete with the hard working people of china. They are not beneficial to the working class unless you’re only focused on your countries working class, and not the global working class. Since it is a consumption tax the burden is unevenly spread upon the poor and working class who are living on fixed budgets that don’t have room for price changes. It’s easily paid by the rich and disproportionately hurts the poor.
VAT tax is basically a consumption tax with more steps. At the end of the day the cost gets transferred to the consumer who pays more for what they consume. I generally don’t have a problem with a consumption tax, but with all the other taxes targeting the poor and relieving the rich, the tariffs are a step too far. They are not making that much money from the tariffs. common economic theory is when you tax spending, it slows spending and thus generates less revenues. if businesses go to cut costs to absorb production, that usually hits labor and thus consumers.
Now let’s just say we did tariffs in a bubble which we used to do, yes tariffs are a valid way to balance competition and generate revenue. Consumption taxes are good because we probably should consume less. In this case they are being used to hoist up industrialists, and the revenues are not significant enough to deal with the current deficit.
So from a leftist perspective and the Neo-liberal perspective, absolutely not there’s way better ways to raise money that hurst the poor less. Taxing land, or capital gains, or inheritance, or any of the numbers of ways large amounts of money changes hands, is a stronger leftist position. You would have to use tariffs precisely to help the working class. The nature of a tariff is to restrict international trade, so you’d also have to forsake your brother over seas who’s also in the middle class. You’re putting national interests in front of human interests which is not a very commie thing to do.