Let them eat cake.
So, he’s expecting people to have 93% less purchasing power?
If America loses its purchasing power all it’ll have left is its military. Beyond being the world’s consumption epicenter and selling services, there’s not much else to stand on.
I have a feeling the US won’t be the country that makes the next legitimate AI breakthrough, even with Trump trying to remove all guardrails and onshore hardware production.
Yeah because financially strapped families really buy 30 dolls for their children. Rich people buy 30.
He was talking about options really. Even rich people don’t buy 30 dolls lol.
Maybe they’ll eat 1 meal a day instead of 3.
Not your point, but tropical fruits are one of the US’s major food imports, because we have high consumption of them and not as much tropical territory where they’ll grow. Thus, under tariffs, they’re going to be one of the things seeing more-substantial price rises.
https://www.thetakeout.com/1842020/foods-likely-impacted-by-tariffs/
14 Foods That Are Most Likely To Be Impacted By Tariffs
There are a lot of fruits you can buy locally or even grow at home, but some of America’s favorite fruits — like tropical fruits — are largely imported. Take, for example, bananas. The Banana Association of North America is warning that the total cost of bananas nationwide could go up by $250 million per year due to even just a 10% tariff rate. The large majority of bananas in the United States are sourced from Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
I remember a Milton Friedman lecture from the 1970s specifically using banana prices becoming exorbitant under high tariffs as an example of why protectionist trade policy is not a good idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0pl_FXt0eM
Friedman: You know, you could have a great employment in the city of Logan, Utah, of people growing bananas in hothouses. If we had a high-enough tariff on the import of bananas, it could become profitable to build hothouses and grow bananas in those hothouses. That would give employment! Would that be a sensible thing to do?
Since you mentioned him: I do want to point out that the Friedman Doctrine becoming the de rigueur policy of pretty much all corporate governance in the western world did a whole fucking lot to get us to this hellacious hypercapitalist profit-über-alles society with wildly rampant wealth disparity that we find ourselves in - and that western society developing in that direction played a core role in the authoritarian resurgence we’re seeing across the world today.
