Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:46 JST Nowhere Girl

   MAGA are obsessed with a one time, post-WW2 manufacturing boom that can't be replicated because the rest of the world was literally on fire at the time and the US had no competition. But they're also obsessed with the idea that white Americans didn't need to share these spoils because of Jim Crow and segregation. They want to bring all these things back, artificially, without understanding the circumstances that created them are dead.

   • Embed this notice
     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:44 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     What it comes down to is the US government has been captured by oligarchs, creating a top heavy, speculation driven economy where most money isn't being put to productive use. Not because of "government waste" but because the government is prevented from taxing and investing back into the country. The oligarchs thought Trump was a fellow traveler but in fact, he's a figurehead for a destructive ideological movement. And no one wants to be the first to pull the trigger on him.

   • Embed this notice
     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:45 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     The modern US economy is built on financialization, low trade barriers to buy and make goods at the lowest possible price, and relatively easy credit to sustain Americans' consumer lifestyles. It's unsustainable not because America doesn't manufacture things -- it does, a lot, productivity is extremely high -- but because profits and wealth have been consolidated steadily upwards under lax tax systems and deregulation, increasingly depriving ordinary working people of the means to live.

   • Embed this notice
     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:45 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     MAGA thinks it can tamp the flow of foreign imports and force a domestic jobs and manufacturing renaissance when a) factories don't need many people anymore because of automation, b) we can't source a lot of things locally, and c) it would take decades for companies to build that capacity -- which they won't as long as it's still cheaper to use international supply chains. You would have to isolate the US completely, at which time the economy would crash and no one would build anything.

   • Embed this notice
     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:45 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     But there's a reason MAGA true believers talk in terms of "short term pain for long term gain." They sincerely believe crashing the economy will eventually bring it about. But they seem to think of it as a 10 year plan instead of the US being impoverished and politically unstable for decades. The truly, truly deranged think that's okay, too, because it will help them build Gilead in the meantime. When in reality, most of them would be shot.

   • Embed this notice
     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:45 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     It's slowly dawning on the markets and the millionaires and billionaires who promoted Trump that this is the plan, this thing that no one wants, inasmuch as there is a plan and not just a stupid old man surrounded by incompetent yes-men making shit up as they go.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:46 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     World-changing economic booms are a once a nation thing, really, and depend entirely on who is in an advantageous position at the time, and particularly, who can be a source of cheap goods for the rest of the world. It was the US once because of a world war. Now it's not and it never will be again. That doesn't mean we don't make things, just that if we stop trading with the outside world out of spite, that trade merely goes elsewhere and enriches someone else. Global economics are inescapable.

   • Embed this notice
     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Apr-2025 03:29:46 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     The deranged parts of MAGA think they can incinerate the US economy, immiserate the country, and make it attractive as an exporter again without realizing that means mostly low-paying jobs in abusive conditions, which the US has imposed on poor countries around the world for decades to sustain its appetite for cheap consumer products. It can't work, and everybody will be worse off even if it does, and the top 10% who own everything don't want to set their wealth on fire anyway.