It’s really dangerous to assume your political enemies are stupid and incompetent, even when they likely are. Because if it turns out you are wrong, you can only cry wolf a few times at best.
The current administration has a stated goal to reindustrialize America, and even with modest success in that it’s natural for the economy to improve.
It's not really about assuming political opponents are stupid.
The current administration feels like a venture capital firm that's gotten control of the country with the intention of extracting as much value out of it as possible before jumping ship and leaving anyone not worth at least 8 figures to suffer the aftermath.
The current administration has proven you can cry wolf or lie 19 times a day and their support barely wavers. I take their stated goals as far as I can throw them, remember when they had a stated goal to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? lol. Don’t give them any respect they don’t deserve.
What legislation makes you think America is going to be re-industrialized? I'm not talking about executive orders on a whim (which appear to be illegal), but actual coherent policy that creates the foundation for businesses to invest in manufacturing plants here.
Your first link says they just extended provisions that already existed in the 2017 tax cuts. If those were big boosters, wouldn't we have seen a shift already in this re-industrialization effort?
Two of those bills (H.R.2480 and S.99) direct the Department of Commerce to conduct studies, work with states on existing programs, and report back to Congress with the results. It sounds quite hand-wavey to me and not like we're doing anything new or exciting there. Certainly not anything that will shake up the status-quo.
S.2411: SBA will match capital from private investment funds investing in US manufacturing businesses. Sounds reasonable, but there is a cap of $500M per fund, is that enough especially given the $250M minimum required to participate? It seems like a large scale effort to bring back everything would require billions with a B. It also mentions "qualifying manufacturing projects" but I can't find anything in the bill's text on what would qualify.
H.R.2652: Changes some IRS tax law to provide incentives for companies re-homing their plants in the US. Sure, sounds fine.
None of these address the current chaos around tariffs, which seem necessary if we're going to bring everything back. Moreover, we may have already soured a lot of relationships with other countries with these shenanigans. Who's to say that foreigners want to invest in a country that's proven we elect unqualified, unserious, and corrupt people who will sever relationships and change terms whenever we feel like it? Bringing everything back will also mean higher prices (because benefits, higher wages, etc.) and that runs counter to all the messaging we heard about "Biden's inflation" on the campaign trail. How do they plan to deal with that? Tell people that it's actually fine that they're paying more because it's made in America?
Not to mention that there are other factors at play here that don't involve handing out money: the unemployment rate, human capital, and the birth rate. I personally don't believe we have enough people to work these manufacturing jobs without immigration which this admin is staunchly against[0].
0: sorta, H-1B was kept alive because of corruption but they also deported South Korean workers for show which disrupted progress on a Hyundai plant in Georgia (just as two conflicting examples)
>>What legislation makes you think America is going to be re-industrialized?
>Several actually.
BBB passed. The others died. This Congress passed an historically low number of bills. If reindustrialization of America depends on Congress, we are doomed.
The original topic was whether we can trust anything they say, and we absolutely can’t. No one is wishing it fails, only either predicting it could, or assuming the goals are made in bad faith.
California is not a representative slice of America.
You could imagine turning a few smaller states’ economies to be more like China (from the current government subsidized agriculture business) without messing with the tech and finance industries.
I don’t understand the knee jerk reaction of assuming you have to burn something down to build something.
The small states aren’t going to become like China because nobody abroad will want to import their products that are artificially propped up by tariff barriers. It’s going to be more like 1980s Brazil joined at the hip to California and New York. Doesn’t sound like an obvious winning recipe.
This is outrageous. We can obviously call a spade a spade. The idea that we can never criticize any policy, no matter how ill conceived, because somehow it might work and then we'd have egg on our face is ridiculous. "Maybe the White House Ballroom construction project will unearth a huge deposit of gold and pay for itself so we cannot possibly talk about its cost."
The claim that it is bad political strategy is also bizarre. Like, the right has been lying about policies from the dems for ages. "They are coming to force your child to transition to the other gender." Has this hindered their electoral chances? No. They have more power now than almost any time in the past fifty years.
Trump can be bad for the economy and the economy can still be fine. The economy doing well doesn't mean Trump was good for the economy. At the end of the day the policies and actions that have been enacted have not been great tailwinds for the economy regardless of the outcome.
We’re one step from harvesting organs from people in rural areas, or hunting them for sport from helicopter, and they’ll cheer as long as “their side” is the one hunting them.
It’s really dangerous to assume your political enemies are stupid and incompetent, even when they likely are. Because if it turns out you are wrong, you can only cry wolf a few times at best.
The current administration has a stated goal to reindustrialize America, and even with modest success in that it’s natural for the economy to improve.