I will add, also, that Empires often exist for economic reasons. As a British person that our own was a massive economic boost for the country seems just a matter of fact in every history book on it you might read. As above I’m no economist, but if the US really has been running one at a loss since WW2 then it probably needs to take a long, hard look at itself.
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And then the questions of do benefits to US citizens outweigh the costs and benefits to the world at large outweigh the costs are separate questions. I think the latter is no but I’m not sure about the former.
I don’t know, because maybe they systematically attacked our elections, currently control US foreign policy and are in a hot war with Ukraine to name a few.
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Trump has often sued. How far it goes depends on whether his lawyers are willing to cheat, which they often are.
Also depends on how much money the other side has. His normal strategy is to wait out people who can’t afford litigation until they give up and settle for pennies.
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Every time Trump has made it even to the deposition stage of a lawsuit, it has gone terribly for him. He sued a journalist for accurately stating that he wasn’t very rich and lost - the tape of his deposition is publicly available and hilarious.
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Ah, so it’s Maddowian neo-cold war nonsense. Carry on.
Your trolling has really suffered since the diaspora, here’s to hoping you retain past form.
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Because they’re an ethno-fascist mafia state actively acting against our interests and those of our allies and biggest trading partners in Europe. Their propaganda is exacerbating the divisions in our societies and helping us make really enormously self-destructive collective decisions e.g. Brexit, Orban, Trump.
Sure, the USA may be the single most destabilising actor in the middle East but there is no world in whick a fascist Europe beholden to Russia for its energy supply is an improvement for anybody but the Russian 1%.
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Be wary of what you support, lest someday the meritocracy comes for you.
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So to answer this question:
Econ 101 tells you that trade flows result in countries trading with each other based on comparative advantage in producing different kinds of goods under free trade. This is largely true at the theoretical level but ignores what actually happened in trade between the US and developing countries since WW2.
First off ‘free trade’ is not an accurate representation of how things worked. In reality these countries had relatively protectionist trade policies toward the US and were granted free or nearly free access to US markets. The stuff they did import were things that they literally couldn’t make for themselves (stuff like semiconductors) and higher end services like consultants. Econ 101 would tell you that this would only hurt them because their citizens would pay a relatively high price for lots of goods that could be bought more cheaply in the US, but in real life the act of producing a product generates lots of economic activity in gathering the inputs plus assembling them and having the activity itself be domestic has very real multiplier effects that absolutely crush the additional cost. Value is what you get and price is what you pay. To an economy the act of creating something has very tangible value. For example an automotive assembly plant creates 3-5 jobs at vendors for every job it creates at the plant itself. Every single one of those jobs creates demand for local labor which improves the welfare of the local population, which can then be taxed to drive government revenue etc.
So what really happened is that US corporations were able to reduce their cost basis for producing stuff by off shoring manufacturing jobs to developing countries where the workers more resembled US workers before the labor movement happened. This was great for shareholders and the top 40% of the population in general because it allowed them to consume more stuff as that stuff was cheaper and increased the yield on their investment portfolio’s. For the bottom 60% though it’s been an unmitigated disaster as every exported job reduced aggregate demand for their services and damaged their ability to negotiate compensation for themselves. What they got in exchange was a bunch of cheap stuff for sale at very cheap prices at Walmart. A very poor trade off frankly as the price of housing, education, and healthcare have more than made up the difference.
Despite the negative ramifications for the bottom 60% of the economic ladder in the US I think our trade policy has been a massive win for the population of the world. In the rest of the world there are now way fewer people living in desperate poverty than there were when I was a kid, and there were already far fewer when I was a kid than when my dad was a kid. Capitalism has absolutely uplifted billions of people out of the third world type of poverty in my lifetime. On balance the fact that poor people in the US were made somewhat worse off is a price worth paying probably.
That being said their capacity to absorb pain is obviously running out and we’re experiencing the political consequences of that now. It was probably a huge error in the long run to bail out the banks instead of the middle class in 2008 and it definitely would have created a softer landing for all of us if government policy over the last 40 years had been oriented around helping the people impacted by global trade rather than helping the people most benefiting from it get even richer.
As to whether the whole thing has been a net win for the US economy… I feel like it’s probably been a net loss. But that’s harder to prove and much more debatable. What’s easy to prove is that it’s been a complete disaster for the bottom 60% or so of the population. A disaster that is now being hugely compounded by automation coming in and making sure that even after the death of late 20th-early 21st century global trade (which is almost mandatory because it’s a major driver of climate change because of transportation) they won’t have jobs to return to.
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This brings me joy.
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All those Bill Kristol and David Frum tweets you’ve been reading have rotted your brain. Sad!
This describes the US
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Yep, this smaller than the GDP of Canada non-sense is a complete non-sequitur. Sure, maybe Canada has the economic strength to go around targeting hospitals:
But, um, they aren’t, perhaps because Canada isn’t run by a sociopathic mob boss? Don’t understand the people who can’t take the small win and make the legitimate argument that American policy isn’t as benevolent as we claim and can be counterproductive even in the cases where we have good intentions.
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Russia didn’t elect Trump. Russia didn’t do the Brexit. It is absolute madness to think that. The people who want you to believe that narrative are the elites in the media and politics who actually caused Trump to be elected by ignoring for decades the actual issues that matter to Americans. Trump paid lip service to these issues and made it clear that he wasn’t one of those elites, and that was enough to stymie Robbie Mook and Hilldawg. So god help us if we don’t elect better politicians and down the road run into an actual talented demagogue rather than a deranged game show host. But it wasn’t Russia. MSNBC is far, far more responsible for Trump than Vladimir Putin. Don’t let Rachel and Larry and Chris tell you otherwise.
And a fascist, Russia-puppeted Europe? That’s lunacy. If Europe does become fascist again – and maybe, I doubt it, but who knows – it won’t be because of the immensely powerful Russian state (something like 1/10 the GDP of the EU). It will be because of their own internal politics, and I’m no expert on European politics, but I’ll bet the rise of the right in Europe has similar underpinnings to the rise of Trump in the US.
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