7 ms·

I think that those in command are also waiting for the next President to undo all that but it is going to have a tremendous effect for a decade or more. Hopeful

I think that those in command are also waiting for the next President to undo all that but it is going to have a tremendous effect for a decade or more. Hopefully for the US they won't go in a similar crisis like the UK is going through... Cutting off countries like Japan or Taiwan like that when we know their geopolitical situation with China and how critical their economy is to the US is quite crazy.

OhioMan2943 2y ago
On top of all of their other preexisting and pending crises..
OJFord 2y ago
> Hopefully for the US they won't go in a similar crisis like the UK is going through... Err.. do tell about the UK's larger crisis than US'?
- Gregaros 2y ago
  I’ve been seeing people call this GEXIT, or global exit.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    As a comparison to Brexit? At what point even momentarily was that in a worse situation, nevermind as an ongoing matter?
    - losvedir 2y ago
      Are you pretty young? The narrative when it was happening was pretty catastrophic. I remember reading about people not being able to get prescriptions, for example, because no one knew how imports worked. I don't know how things panned out, but the discussions in the early days around Brexit were absolutely on par or even worse than what we're seeing in these two days of discussions around tariffs.
      - OJFord 2y ago
        I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, so I remember as well as you do I imagine. Regardless of contemporaneous comparisons, the up-thread comment I initially replied to suggested there was some ongoing worse 'crisis' in the UK than the current situation in the US, if they meant to refer to Brexit it was not clear at all, regardless of whether anyone things that's an ongoing worse situation. (Except that the fact it's not clear really suggests it isn't...)
        Gregaros 2y ago
        Sorry, the implication is that this is far worse than Brexit, but that this is the US’s Global Exit, riffing off the strong negative connotations in te US. I saw it from on Bluesky, but that linked here https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactionary-exit https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactiona... - so, being framed as much worse than Brexit.
        OJFord 2y ago
        No worries, yours was clearer, it was the first indication I had that anyone meant to compare to Brexit, I just asked to clarify. 'up-thread comment' I meant was the bdelmas one I replied to that referred only to 'crisis like the UK is going through' without elaboration.
        lunarlull 2y ago
        > I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, 'Pretty young' would imply maybe you haven't been voting for very long, and are likely under 25.
        OJFord 2y ago
        (if they share the same definition) then no, I am not. An under 25 year old today wouldn't have been able to have voted on the 2016 referendum anyway.
      - 2y ago
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Currently, Trump’s tariffs have kinda broken the stock markets, and caused some difficult-to-measure economic damage (investments will have been delayed or cancelled, that sort of thing). If, tomorrow, Trump chokes on a well-done steak, or Congress puts him back in his box (remember, his ability to do _anything_ with tariffs is entirely within the gift of Congress), or otherwise the tariffs go away, then the markets will pretty much spring back, and the economic hit will be small enough that it’s hard to measure. While estimates of the damage done by Brexit are of course very politically sensitive, nearly everyone agrees that some substantial damage has been done, particularly to trade and jobs (one estimate has the UK with _over 2 million_ fewer jobs today than it would otherwise have, Goldman Sachs says that the UK economy is 5% smaller than it ‘should’ be, etc etc)
- bdelmas 2y ago
  Well before what's happening now the US still was doing very strong on the economy (plus their advantage to be that big, their military advantage, them owning half of their continent, etc...). But with what is unfolding now... If you want to know more about the current situation in the UK I would recommend this video [1]. His channel is amazing for geopolitical content. [1] https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I
  - OJFord 2y ago
    If you can't give me any words that indicate what kind of crisis the UK is facing, while there's general agreement on 'Trump', 'tariffs', '(especially US) equities', 'the US dollar', 'global recession fears'... then I don't have time for your video recommendation.
  - tdeck 2y ago
    It's interesting that this video is so focused on productivity since 2008, when a worker's income has been decoupled from productivity for decades.
  - Centigonal 2y ago
    Some stats from this video: - The UK has one of the worst homelessness problems in Europe, with about 1 in 50 Londoners experiencing homelessness. - The UK economy stagnated for 10 years following 2008, resulting in a "lost decade" - The median disposable income in the UK was slightly lower than the US and Norway before the GFC by 6-8%, not it's 16-20% behind. IDK if I'd call this a crisis, i.e. people aren't rioting in the streets. That said, this is not the direction you want to be moving in as a developed country. The trend of people in formerly dominant countries electing leaders who keep making stupid own goals (increasing economic inequality, Brexit, gutting the NHS, gutting US foreign aid, tariff-pocalypse) is very worrying.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Ten times? More like two times: US population is around 340 000 000, 770 000 homeless. UK population is around 68 000 000, 354 000 homeless. (Possibly calculated more inclusively.) That's 0.23 % and 0.52 %. (Numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kin... or more specifically from a govt department and a homelessness charity. The US figure "does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own".)
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Reading the parent's comment I was expecting the UK GDP to have been plunging since Brexit, but that's not the case apparently[0]. Some sectors clearly profited from it, compensating for those who went down the drain. GDP isn't everything and from the outside the UK feel like in a very bad place, but I wonder what's the metric that really captures that status. Inequalities aren't getting that much wider as well. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/united-kingdom/gdp-gross-domestic-product https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
  - bdelmas 2y ago
    There is a lot of data to talk about that's why I linked the video directly in the other comment. Maybe check it out. For the GDP it may not look bad but compared to other countries and especially the US, the UK is going through what we call a "lost decade". Their GDP should be +25% higher than right now... That's just one (huge) metric talked about in the video.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Yup. Sadly, discussion of Brexit on HN is trash tier. Almost every claim about it you'll find here is completely wrong. Not in the sense of differing values or priorities, but in a "this is totally made up" kind of way. It's really concerning that so many people's understanding of the UK and Europe have suffered such a huge rupture with reality. The map is not the territory! Leaving the EU had no effect on the British economy. Not positive, not negative. Even the trade balance with the EU merely continued along its long term trend, so apparently the single market wasn't delivering any value in the end. The closest thing you can find to an economic impact was the currency dump that happened the moment the result was called, but the economy did fine in the post-referendum years and so those traders who panicked just took a bath and the currency recovered later. Not that a currency devaluation is such a bad thing for the UK anyway, its exports could use the help. Even some non-economic impacts failed to materialize, in both directions. The UK rejoined the Horizon research programme (supposedly a "cherry" that would be lost), but also the reduction in immigration that voters were promised didn't happen either, in fact immigration went into overdrive. A lot of people who support the EU don't realize any of this, partly because the news doesn't report on things that don't happen so they never hear about it. But mostly it's because they conflate predictions with reality. For example, there's someone saying in this thread that "the narrative was pretty catastrophic" followed by "I don't know how things panned out". And when I pointed out this lack of impact less than two weeks ago here, I got a reply that cited another pile of predictions as a refutation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 It's a systemic problem that crops up in other areas too. During COVID modeling predictions were regularly repeated as if they'd already happened, and you see the same mental slippage in climate change discourse. The line between "we think this might happen", "this will happen" and "this has already happened" blurs to nothing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Brexit was pretty bad for the UK proportional to the size of their population/economy, and is still causing problems even though the initial dislocation is over. If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I haven't done the numbers to make an exact comparison, but they both have the qualities of being being abrupt, severe, and self-inflicted.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    > If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I do, but the principal reason I didn't say that is that I had no idea it's what the commenter I replied to was referring to. 'Brexit' feels mostly completely irrelevant / not a topic of concern or debate since at least the beginning of the pandemic five years ago. The vote was almost a decade ago. 'If bdelmas thinks it's like Brexit, they could just say that', to paraphrase your own comment.
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      The vote didn’t implement anything. Britain didn’t actually leave the EU until 2020. Brexit is as of much concern in Britain, still, as Trump is - because it underlies their entire shaken economy. You think some tariffs are bad? Ok now what if Trump simultaneously tore up every trade agreement? And cancelled the visas of every European citizen in the country, who happened to make up 10% of the medical sector?
      - lazyasciiart 2y ago
        Oh, you’re actually British, how surprising. Perhaps it’s only still a topic among people who understood what was going to happen.
      - OJFord 2y ago
        Alright take 2020 then: year started $1.32/£, ended at 1.37. The world was shaken by SARS-nCoV-2019, but I do not remember us feeling particularly extra shaken by Brexit crisis. That is not really relevant anyway, the up-thread suggestion was that there was some current ongoing crisis more significant than anything happening in the US. That user didn't even mention Brexit, but if that is what they meant, no, I assure you it's predominantly Trump and tax year end stuff in our news.
darksaints 2y ago
This. There is no reason why any country should trust us anymore if entire trade relations can be destroyed by a presidential whim. Even if Trump fell out of a window today and we got a pro-trade president tomorrow, we’re not fixing this damage for a very long time. We probably would have to amend the constitution to insulate foreign policy from the whims of a single person if we want any chance of fixing this in our lifetime.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  It doesn't require a constitutional amendment, we can just repeal the law [0] being used, which would ironically involve the same number of votes as keeping the law but slapping down Trump's particular usage of it. (That's now how it originally worked, but the easy-slapdown route got ruled unconstitutional.) Military alliance stuff might be harder. Some stuff like NATO is supported by actual legislation, but other stuff was set up as a kind of gentleman's agreement with the US President-du-jour on the assumption that successors wouldn't be crazy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Economic_Powers_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > we can just repeal the law [0] being used Only with a veto-proof majority in both chambers.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      Maybe, but vetoes are politically very expensive. Even if he threatens to veto, Congress should still do it. Not doing obvious things because they might run into opposition/problems is a recipe for more and worse of the same.
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        > Maybe, but vetoes are politically very expensive. As are felony convictions, top secret docs in a bathroom at your house, sexual assault settlements, and the hundred other career-ending scandals the guy has survived without a scratch so far.
paxys 2y ago
The next president is going to be Trump. If people don't think that's at least a serious possibity they are extremely deluded about the situation the country is in right now.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  We have repeatedly seen Trump say something that sounds ridiculous, and his supporters say "that won't actually happen, and if it does I won't support it", and then he does it and his supporters support it. He has recently said he may try for another term as president, and confirmed "No, no I'm not joking". If you don't take his threats seriously by now, and the willingness of the GOP to get behind whatever he wants, then you are not paying attention - it has happened over, and over, and over.
  - lovecg 2y ago
    Wouldn’t he have to get on the ballot in all the swing states at least? What if some states refuse to let him run? I can’t see California registering him for example, but that wouldn’t really matter of course.
    - Vegenoid 2y ago
      Only if he tries to get a 3rd term by a fair election. The more realistic way to it happening is by hijacking the electoral process. There are a number of ways to do this, such as by claiming there was fraud and thereby having the justification to modify how "electors" [0] should cast their vote. This is exactly what was tried in the 2020 election. Really, it's just an "if enough people in power and in general go along with it, then it works" kind of thing. The current trend in the GOP is to whip and/or expel those who do not fully support Trump. What happens if half of the elected politicians, most of their constituents, and most of the appointed government officials, decide that Trump is staying in office? No one knows. The power of words on paper only goes as far as people let it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
Jtsummers 2y ago
The US wasn't even in a crisis until 2025. We weren't in a stellar position (high deficits and debt, low unemployment but high underemployment). It was all recoverable before Trump started this trade war and doing things like cutting departments that actually brought in revenue.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  > was all recoverable The debt was never recoverable
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    Well, I disagree but the current policies guarantee it's not recoverable so a debate would mostly be around hypotheticals. We're reducing revenue but not spending (or not enough to offset the reduction in revenue so the deficit will rise), so the debt will only continue to rise at an increasing rate. Ironically, Trump has the record for the highest deficit ever in US history. He's on track to beat it though and with a reasonably strong economy when he took office (again, not an ideal economy, underemployment is a major issue, but not a weak economy by any stretch).
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      > Ironically, Trump has the record for the highest deficit ever in US history. hardly relevant comment since all presidents left and right have been pushing the button to increase deficits (and congress is completely responsible as well for not trying to balance the budget) so this is a systemic problem that will bring the downfall of America no matter what. It's just a matter of time, and with that level of debt, the time bomb keeps ticking faster and faster.
      - roxolotl 2y ago
        It’s relevant because republicans campaign on it. If neither party claimed to be fiscally responsible I’d agree. However one does and isn’t. That makes the relative debt load under that party compared to the other fair game.
baranul 2y ago
Things are easier to break than they are to fix. The next president, if there will be another, will not be able to easily glue the pieces back together.
- swat535 2y ago
  Yeah, this is the core issue. How can any ally fully trust the U.S. when major foreign policy commitments can be reversed every 4 years? One administration signs on, the next tears it up. It's starting to look like U.S. agreements aren't really with the country, but with whoever happens to be in office. US allies is isolating itself and it's allies are going to hedge. The trend is already starting and it's going to be hard to reverse. Restoring that trust isn’t just a matter of electing the "right" leadership, either, at this juncture, I think that it would require institutional reforms and a consensus on foreign policy that transcends the electoral cycle. I'm not going to cheer for the "downfall of US", but America is doing it to itself.

OhioMan2943 2y ago

On top of all of their other preexisting and pending crises..

OJFord 2y ago

> Hopefully for the US they won't go in a similar crisis like the UK is going through... Err.. do tell about the UK's larger crisis than US'?

Gregaros 2y ago
I’ve been seeing people call this GEXIT, or global exit.
- OJFord 2y ago
  As a comparison to Brexit? At what point even momentarily was that in a worse situation, nevermind as an ongoing matter?
  - losvedir 2y ago
    Are you pretty young? The narrative when it was happening was pretty catastrophic. I remember reading about people not being able to get prescriptions, for example, because no one knew how imports worked. I don't know how things panned out, but the discussions in the early days around Brexit were absolutely on par or even worse than what we're seeing in these two days of discussions around tariffs.
    - OJFord 2y ago
      I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, so I remember as well as you do I imagine. Regardless of contemporaneous comparisons, the up-thread comment I initially replied to suggested there was some ongoing worse 'crisis' in the UK than the current situation in the US, if they meant to refer to Brexit it was not clear at all, regardless of whether anyone things that's an ongoing worse situation. (Except that the fact it's not clear really suggests it isn't...)
      - Gregaros 2y ago
        Sorry, the implication is that this is far worse than Brexit, but that this is the US’s Global Exit, riffing off the strong negative connotations in te US. I saw it from on Bluesky, but that linked here https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactionary-exit https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactiona... - so, being framed as much worse than Brexit.
        OJFord 2y ago
        No worries, yours was clearer, it was the first indication I had that anyone meant to compare to Brexit, I just asked to clarify. 'up-thread comment' I meant was the bdelmas one I replied to that referred only to 'crisis like the UK is going through' without elaboration.
      - lunarlull 2y ago
        > I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, 'Pretty young' would imply maybe you haven't been voting for very long, and are likely under 25.
        OJFord 2y ago
        (if they share the same definition) then no, I am not. An under 25 year old today wouldn't have been able to have voted on the 2016 referendum anyway.
    - 2y ago
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Currently, Trump’s tariffs have kinda broken the stock markets, and caused some difficult-to-measure economic damage (investments will have been delayed or cancelled, that sort of thing). If, tomorrow, Trump chokes on a well-done steak, or Congress puts him back in his box (remember, his ability to do _anything_ with tariffs is entirely within the gift of Congress), or otherwise the tariffs go away, then the markets will pretty much spring back, and the economic hit will be small enough that it’s hard to measure. While estimates of the damage done by Brexit are of course very politically sensitive, nearly everyone agrees that some substantial damage has been done, particularly to trade and jobs (one estimate has the UK with _over 2 million_ fewer jobs today than it would otherwise have, Goldman Sachs says that the UK economy is 5% smaller than it ‘should’ be, etc etc)
bdelmas 2y ago
Well before what's happening now the US still was doing very strong on the economy (plus their advantage to be that big, their military advantage, them owning half of their continent, etc...). But with what is unfolding now... If you want to know more about the current situation in the UK I would recommend this video [1]. His channel is amazing for geopolitical content. [1] https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I
- OJFord 2y ago
  If you can't give me any words that indicate what kind of crisis the UK is facing, while there's general agreement on 'Trump', 'tariffs', '(especially US) equities', 'the US dollar', 'global recession fears'... then I don't have time for your video recommendation.
- tdeck 2y ago
  It's interesting that this video is so focused on productivity since 2008, when a worker's income has been decoupled from productivity for decades.
- Centigonal 2y ago
  Some stats from this video: - The UK has one of the worst homelessness problems in Europe, with about 1 in 50 Londoners experiencing homelessness. - The UK economy stagnated for 10 years following 2008, resulting in a "lost decade" - The median disposable income in the UK was slightly lower than the US and Norway before the GFC by 6-8%, not it's 16-20% behind. IDK if I'd call this a crisis, i.e. people aren't rioting in the streets. That said, this is not the direction you want to be moving in as a developed country. The trend of people in formerly dominant countries electing leaders who keep making stupid own goals (increasing economic inequality, Brexit, gutting the NHS, gutting US foreign aid, tariff-pocalypse) is very worrying.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Ten times? More like two times: US population is around 340 000 000, 770 000 homeless. UK population is around 68 000 000, 354 000 homeless. (Possibly calculated more inclusively.) That's 0.23 % and 0.52 %. (Numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kin... or more specifically from a govt department and a homelessness charity. The US figure "does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own".)
makeitdouble 2y ago
Reading the parent's comment I was expecting the UK GDP to have been plunging since Brexit, but that's not the case apparently[0]. Some sectors clearly profited from it, compensating for those who went down the drain. GDP isn't everything and from the outside the UK feel like in a very bad place, but I wonder what's the metric that really captures that status. Inequalities aren't getting that much wider as well. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/united-kingdom/gdp-gross-domestic-product https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
- bdelmas 2y ago
  There is a lot of data to talk about that's why I linked the video directly in the other comment. Maybe check it out. For the GDP it may not look bad but compared to other countries and especially the US, the UK is going through what we call a "lost decade". Their GDP should be +25% higher than right now... That's just one (huge) metric talked about in the video.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Yup. Sadly, discussion of Brexit on HN is trash tier. Almost every claim about it you'll find here is completely wrong. Not in the sense of differing values or priorities, but in a "this is totally made up" kind of way. It's really concerning that so many people's understanding of the UK and Europe have suffered such a huge rupture with reality. The map is not the territory! Leaving the EU had no effect on the British economy. Not positive, not negative. Even the trade balance with the EU merely continued along its long term trend, so apparently the single market wasn't delivering any value in the end. The closest thing you can find to an economic impact was the currency dump that happened the moment the result was called, but the economy did fine in the post-referendum years and so those traders who panicked just took a bath and the currency recovered later. Not that a currency devaluation is such a bad thing for the UK anyway, its exports could use the help. Even some non-economic impacts failed to materialize, in both directions. The UK rejoined the Horizon research programme (supposedly a "cherry" that would be lost), but also the reduction in immigration that voters were promised didn't happen either, in fact immigration went into overdrive. A lot of people who support the EU don't realize any of this, partly because the news doesn't report on things that don't happen so they never hear about it. But mostly it's because they conflate predictions with reality. For example, there's someone saying in this thread that "the narrative was pretty catastrophic" followed by "I don't know how things panned out". And when I pointed out this lack of impact less than two weeks ago here, I got a reply that cited another pile of predictions as a refutation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469356 It's a systemic problem that crops up in other areas too. During COVID modeling predictions were regularly repeated as if they'd already happened, and you see the same mental slippage in climate change discourse. The line between "we think this might happen", "this will happen" and "this has already happened" blurs to nothing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 2y ago
Brexit was pretty bad for the UK proportional to the size of their population/economy, and is still causing problems even though the initial dislocation is over. If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I haven't done the numbers to make an exact comparison, but they both have the qualities of being being abrupt, severe, and self-inflicted.
- OJFord 2y ago
  > If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I do, but the principal reason I didn't say that is that I had no idea it's what the commenter I replied to was referring to. 'Brexit' feels mostly completely irrelevant / not a topic of concern or debate since at least the beginning of the pandemic five years ago. The vote was almost a decade ago. 'If bdelmas thinks it's like Brexit, they could just say that', to paraphrase your own comment.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    The vote didn’t implement anything. Britain didn’t actually leave the EU until 2020. Brexit is as of much concern in Britain, still, as Trump is - because it underlies their entire shaken economy. You think some tariffs are bad? Ok now what if Trump simultaneously tore up every trade agreement? And cancelled the visas of every European citizen in the country, who happened to make up 10% of the medical sector?
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      Oh, you’re actually British, how surprising. Perhaps it’s only still a topic among people who understood what was going to happen.
    - OJFord 2y ago
      Alright take 2020 then: year started $1.32/£, ended at 1.37. The world was shaken by SARS-nCoV-2019, but I do not remember us feeling particularly extra shaken by Brexit crisis. That is not really relevant anyway, the up-thread suggestion was that there was some current ongoing crisis more significant than anything happening in the US. That user didn't even mention Brexit, but if that is what they meant, no, I assure you it's predominantly Trump and tax year end stuff in our news.

darksaints 2y ago

This. There is no reason why any country should trust us anymore if entire trade relations can be destroyed by a presidential whim. Even if Trump fell out of a window today and we got a pro-trade president tomorrow, we’re not fixing this damage for a very long time. We probably would have to amend the constitution to insulate foreign policy from the whims of a single person if we want any chance of fixing this in our lifetime.

Terr_ 2y ago
It doesn't require a constitutional amendment, we can just repeal the law [0] being used, which would ironically involve the same number of votes as keeping the law but slapping down Trump's particular usage of it. (That's now how it originally worked, but the easy-slapdown route got ruled unconstitutional.) Military alliance stuff might be harder. Some stuff like NATO is supported by actual legislation, but other stuff was set up as a kind of gentleman's agreement with the US President-du-jour on the assumption that successors wouldn't be crazy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Economic_Powers_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > we can just repeal the law [0] being used Only with a veto-proof majority in both chambers.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    Maybe, but vetoes are politically very expensive. Even if he threatens to veto, Congress should still do it. Not doing obvious things because they might run into opposition/problems is a recipe for more and worse of the same.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      > Maybe, but vetoes are politically very expensive. As are felony convictions, top secret docs in a bathroom at your house, sexual assault settlements, and the hundred other career-ending scandals the guy has survived without a scratch so far.

paxys 2y ago

The next president is going to be Trump. If people don't think that's at least a serious possibity they are extremely deluded about the situation the country is in right now.

Vegenoid 2y ago
We have repeatedly seen Trump say something that sounds ridiculous, and his supporters say "that won't actually happen, and if it does I won't support it", and then he does it and his supporters support it. He has recently said he may try for another term as president, and confirmed "No, no I'm not joking". If you don't take his threats seriously by now, and the willingness of the GOP to get behind whatever he wants, then you are not paying attention - it has happened over, and over, and over.
- lovecg 2y ago
  Wouldn’t he have to get on the ballot in all the swing states at least? What if some states refuse to let him run? I can’t see California registering him for example, but that wouldn’t really matter of course.
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    Only if he tries to get a 3rd term by a fair election. The more realistic way to it happening is by hijacking the electoral process. There are a number of ways to do this, such as by claiming there was fraud and thereby having the justification to modify how "electors" [0] should cast their vote. This is exactly what was tried in the 2020 election. Really, it's just an "if enough people in power and in general go along with it, then it works" kind of thing. The current trend in the GOP is to whip and/or expel those who do not fully support Trump. What happens if half of the elected politicians, most of their constituents, and most of the appointed government officials, decide that Trump is staying in office? No one knows. The power of words on paper only goes as far as people let it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago

Jtsummers 2y ago

The US wasn't even in a crisis until 2025. We weren't in a stellar position (high deficits and debt, low unemployment but high underemployment). It was all recoverable before Trump started this trade war and doing things like cutting departments that actually brought in revenue.

ekianjo 2y ago
> was all recoverable The debt was never recoverable
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Well, I disagree but the current policies guarantee it's not recoverable so a debate would mostly be around hypotheticals. We're reducing revenue but not spending (or not enough to offset the reduction in revenue so the deficit will rise), so the debt will only continue to rise at an increasing rate. Ironically, Trump has the record for the highest deficit ever in US history. He's on track to beat it though and with a reasonably strong economy when he took office (again, not an ideal economy, underemployment is a major issue, but not a weak economy by any stretch).
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    > Ironically, Trump has the record for the highest deficit ever in US history. hardly relevant comment since all presidents left and right have been pushing the button to increase deficits (and congress is completely responsible as well for not trying to balance the budget) so this is a systemic problem that will bring the downfall of America no matter what. It's just a matter of time, and with that level of debt, the time bomb keeps ticking faster and faster.
    - roxolotl 2y ago
      It’s relevant because republicans campaign on it. If neither party claimed to be fiscally responsible I’d agree. However one does and isn’t. That makes the relative debt load under that party compared to the other fair game.

baranul 2y ago

Things are easier to break than they are to fix. The next president, if there will be another, will not be able to easily glue the pieces back together.

swat535 2y ago
Yeah, this is the core issue. How can any ally fully trust the U.S. when major foreign policy commitments can be reversed every 4 years? One administration signs on, the next tears it up. It's starting to look like U.S. agreements aren't really with the country, but with whoever happens to be in office. US allies is isolating itself and it's allies are going to hedge. The trend is already starting and it's going to be hard to reverse. Restoring that trust isn’t just a matter of electing the "right" leadership, either, at this juncture, I think that it would require institutional reforms and a consensus on foreign policy that transcends the electoral cycle. I'm not going to cheer for the "downfall of US", but America is doing it to itself.