US Politics, March 2018: Why do people leave the White House for good?

it's important to keep that in mind when it's time to decide whether to scream "Those dastardly Republicans!" or not.

Doing the right thing for an bad and terrible reason doesn't absolve you of being bad terrible person. If pedophile gives a homeless single mother money for rent and food, thinking it might help him molest her daughter, he is still evil.

It doesn’t exactly make GA look like a good destination for corporations

that and how the state senate just passed an anti-gay adoption bill

Loomis is rarely nuanced. Because he’s bad at it!

People, our positions should not be defined by knee-jerk reactions to fascists.

Aimless trying to hit the side of a barn door with that metaphor and still has to resort to a clause about intent

Oklahoma teachers might follow W VA's lead

good. socrates/plato/aristotle should shrug until our education system is properly funded. fuck atlas (and the koch brothers and the amway crew etc) with a cache of legally-purchased AR-15s

Is it raining in Florida?

If the E.U. wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on U.S. companies doing business there, we will simply apply a Tax on their Cars which freely pour into the U.S. They make it impossible for our cars (and more) to sell there. Big trade imbalance!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2018

i am not an economist but trump’s understanding of trade seems... limited at best to my mind

something tells me Japan may have an opinion on that

Delta already called their bluff

It wasn't a bluff? Passed 44-10 in the senate, 135-24 in the house.

I think what was meant was they had no intention of changing their mind so if it was being used as a measure to get Delta to reverse-course, it failed. not that they were bluffing to strip the tax advantages that would benefit Delta out of the bill.

He has no understanding of trade. He's merely repeating what crackpot economist Peter Navarro tells him and Wilbur Ross does not correct. He substitutes Navarro's views for any personal thought because he is too lazy and incurious to engage in any, but found Navarro (via Jared) to be someone who could give academic-sounding voice to his racist xenophobia as regards China in particular. Navarro's views have come to the fore more recently because the collection of people who would talk over and marginalize him have themselves been marginalized by personal rifts.

still has to resort to a clause about intent

resort to? judging their intent was my intent all along. I did not say the action was wrong in itself, because it isn't. but the actor is still worthy of scorn, despite, not because of the goodness of the action.

Navarro's views also appeal to his schoolyard-level zero-sum understanding of the world, which would also lead him to dismiss whatever exposure he may have had to standard trade theory

Nobody wants to buy American cars, they're hopelessly fuel inefficient...

"his schoolyard-level zero-sum understanding of the world"

A perspective we've come to learn has substantial electoral salience, especially among an an ideological-flexible but largely racially homogenous cohort of fellow members of the "poorly-educated"

Oh my god shut up

Wasn't it mentioned in this thread (for sure I read it somewhere) that since his first weeks in the White House people have been trying to explain trade to him, but it's just not taking.

Nobody wants to buy American cars, they're hopelessly fuel inefficient...

Actually, they've gotten much better, in part thanks to (yes) Obama.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions/u-s-vehicle-fuel-economy-rises-to-record-24-7-mpg-epa-idUSKBN1F02BX

Some better-educated too

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/87dt3pDAgu4/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEWCKgBEF5IWvKriqkDCQgBFQAAiEIYAQ==&rs=AOn4CLDSQexNmxbMADNCm6td6I5D6zumzw
Moo

Surprised it took so long for Trump to start with the trade war stuff. Surprised he’s doing it in the post-Bannon era.

Loomis is rarely nuanced. Because he’s bad at it!

The most confusing lib post of the year. I'd had my morning coffee, exercised, and couldn't square it with the guy who posts This Day in Labor History shit.

wonder who's pushing him in this direction. a donor or someone in the admin?

kinda seems like the sort of thing a president shouldn't be able to do unilaterally

Actually, they've gotten much better, in part thanks to (yes) Obama.

Nobody wants to buy them anyway.

donor(s)

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-carl-icahn-trump-tariffs-20180302-story.html

xpost

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/25/navarro-trump-trade-tariffs-423462
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/us/politics/peter-navarro-trade.html

the sort of thing a president shouldn't be able to do unilaterally

If tariffs on particular commodities were taken back to the sole discretion of Congress, it wouldn't be much, if any, better. Just ruminate a moment on how Congress works and this becomes more apparent. Once you've handed the decision over to the executive branch, it is unavoidably handed directly to the POTUS, because of how the executive branch works. The current POTUS is just an outlier when it comes to his tiny-handed grasp of economic policy -- or any other government policy, for that matter.

Of course, Trump doesn’t get that European cars sold in the states mainly built in Chattanooga (VW), Spartanburg (BMW)and Birmingham (Mercedes).

fuck VW for moving out of new stanton

And Sony and me for that matter. It started as a Chrysler plant but hey never even got as far as pouring concrete for the floors.

maybe they're sick of paying for their employees' health insurance in backassward USA

people don't buy american cars outside the US because, outside the amazon reviews for household gadgets written by people who are worried about "toxins", "made in the USA" is not a synonym for quality and hasn't been for 50+ years.

you guys actually bother to ever look stuff up?

This statistic illustrates the number of cars sold by Ford in the United Kingdom (UK) between January 2014 and December 2017. With more than 333 thousand units sold, Ford was the biggest car seller in the UK in 2015.In 2016, the sales numbers dropped from the previous year but Ford continued to perform as one of the strongest car manufacturer in the UK, selling more than 318 thousand cars in 2016. The much higher sales in March and September, as well as the lower sales in February and August, can be accounted for by the new registration plates which are issued in the former pair of months.
In 2017, Ford kicked of the year with a strong sales performance in January 2017, selling more than 22,700 cars in the UK. In March, they sold the most cars during the period in question, 71,837 cars.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/475637/vehicle-sales-of-ford-in-leading-countries/

Ford during the 2017 fiscal year, broken down by leading countries. In that year, China sold over 1.2 million Ford cars and trucks; it is the carmaker's second-largest market in terms of sales.

Interestingly Ford (like Heinz) is one of those American brands that has painted itself as British for generations. (Not that Ford has made any cars in the UK for years).

Is that American Ford though? Xp

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_of_Britain

iirc when I was there I remember seeing the Ford Fusion before it was in The US and some other UK specific models I'd never seen

Ford of Britain (officially Ford Motor Company Limited)[note 1] is a British wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Oval Holdings, itself a subsidiary of Ford International Capital LLC, which is a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company[2].

Yeah, but if I were to go out and buy a ford tomorrow, it wouldn't come from the US

And if I went out and bought a Toyota, it wouldn't come from Japan.

these last few posts of discussion are more than trump has thought about this

It’s almost like he automotive industry is a complex global structure that can only exist because of a complex international trade in goods and services.

🤯

Fucking globalist auto industry.

🤔 https://t.co/0GMU59wNau

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) March 3, 2018

That linked article is epic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/pure-madness-dark-days-inside-the-white-house-as-trump-shocks-and-rages/2018/03/03/9849867c-1e72-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html

"‘Pure madness’: Dark days inside the White House as Trump shocks and rages"

fwiw Fords are like the only American cars i see in London ever. i see a lot of them though.

fwiw ford of britain makes completely different vehicles to those ford makes in the US, and ford's UK marketing goes to lengths to disassociate it with the parent company, to the extent that it wouldn't occur to most british people that it's a company with a US connection unless you reminded them of "henry ford". same goes for vauxhall/opel, which was owned by GM until last year, but you wouldn't have known it from the cars they made or how they marketed them.

very very occasionally you'd see a PT cruiser in the UK but i think they gave up selling them.