Trump's obsession with tariffs dates back to 1988 when he lost an auction for the piano from the movie Casablanca to a Japanese buyer. Afterwards, he started complaining about how all these other countries are ripping America off, and here we are.
And don’t forget the US’s own automated foreclosure schemes where banks automatically and fraudulently foreclosed on homeowners in good standing, literally stealing their houses and ruining their lives.
It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point. It started in 1970 with the Postal Reorganization Act, which transformed it from a government department to an independent government entity that was expected to fund its operations entirely through its own revenue. Then in 2006, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the PAEA which required the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits seventy-five years into the future¹. Congress even restricted the USPS's ability to set its own rates, expand its services or close unprofitable locations without political interference.
¹ The retiree funding requirement was only changed recently when Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 into law.
USPS does more or less teeter on the edge of solvent and sustainable depending on how you measure and when you measure. All things considered, I think that's pretty damn good. Pretty much no other government service can claim that. I think the retiree funding requirement is/was dumb and an unnecessary handicap but the way USPS runs itself should be a model for other government services. The only reason we don't look at USPS as a massive success is because the idiot left brains want it to be run like a charity and the idiot right brains want it gone entirely.
> Pretty much no other government service can claim that.
Sure there are, they just don't get the air time and political attention. Examples I'm familiar with: The minerals, oil, and gas regulatory agencies bring in billions of dollars. A single lease sale in the gulf would make BOEM as an agency incredibly profitable but instead the money just goes up to the federal government and is redistributed. National Parks already collect entry fees and the NPS could easily raise those prices to meet or exceed agency expenses, public demand would almost certainly pay it, and they could also teeter like the USPS. Social Security, if it were never fucked with, would have more money from just interest than most country's GDPs but we've robbed that piggy bank numerous times already.
There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China.
It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement with China Post (?) to get some of the money people pay for shipping
Sorry I responded to a comment which mentioned duty assessment. If this UPU/international postal union settlement rate stuff, that's not duty, it's a global model for cost reconciliation.
> Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.
Doing an inspection is going to take a moderately well paid government employee a little bit of their time. I'd be very, very surprised if the cost of their labor is less, in expectation, than the tariff collected on the average de minimus shipment from China.
"Everyone’s joining 小紅書 and getting fully Xi-pilled."
This shows that seo-speedwagon is opposed to mainland China. Writing the name in traditional characters, which are used in Taiwan, is another barb of seo-speedwagon against mainland China and its government.
Because that’s all you know! You are so myopically focused on every shitty thing that the US has ever done that you’ll believe anything that disparages the US, even when it comes from a foreign power trying to undermine you. For instance:
Imagine thinking the U.S. govt and corporate overlords are terrible because they’re banning TikTok and getting back at them by going to a Chinese app. China, the country which has a literal firewall preventing their people from getting information that isn’t vetted, bans nearly every external app because they don’t have control over it, and most ironically, never allowed TikTok, whose banning you think makes the U.S. govt terrible, in China in the first place.
It’s hilarious that all these Redpillers are going on about how they can now communicate with and learn from the Chinese people they’re meeting on Red Book without ever considering why they couldn’t meet those Chinese people on Tik Tok in the first place and coming to the conclusion that this shows that it was the U.S. govt that was bad…
Yeah, the lack of logical thinking in this one instance and your response to it only adds to the evidence that your generation is cooked.
1) the novelty of talking to entirely new people, which is a relative rarity since the early, heady days of MySpace when social media was new and gardens felt much less walled. For Gen Z, it might actually be a first given their average age; or
2) how the lives of average people compare to theirs and compare to their prior notions of what they thought life was like
These seem to go both ways btw, e.g. Chinese people being amazed that we really do need to pay for ambulance rides and that it’s not just govt propaganda. People are going where interesting things are happening, it’s plain and simple.
> These seem to go both ways btw, e.g. Chinese people being amazed that we really do need to pay for ambulance rides and that it’s not just govt propaganda. People are going where interesting things are happening, it’s plain and simple.
Sadly, since Rednote is monitored and censored by the CCP, the novelty and depth of those 'wow, your country is really like that?' conversations is rather one-sided. You can bet if the conversation is going to paint a country in a negative light (e.g. Ambulance rides), that country probably isn't going to be China.
Great point! I hope all those Americans who can't afford basic necessities in this so-called 'developed country' can take solace in the existence of Chinese censorship. Now they can even take solace in the expansion of American censorship!
In the end, what was the real revolutionary propaganda that the American establishment is afraid of? True cost of living statistics.
Actually I think you missed the point. The point wasn't that Americans can talk about anything we want; it's that the Chinese can't talk about the "bad" things that have happened in their country, and many (most?) don't even know about it. If you log into Rednote and ask "What happened on June 4th," you're going to get banned by Chinese censors.
Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities. The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
> The point wasn't that Americans can talk about anything we want
Did you even read my comment?
> it's that the Chinese can't talk about the "bad" things that have happened in their country
Wrong / highly misleading. Do you really think a country of 1.4 billion people can raise themselves out of poverty and overall dramatically raise the living standards for the masses without having a government that listens to the concerns of the people all across the country?
> If you log into Rednote and ask "What happened on June 4th," you're going to get banned by Chinese censors
I bet you the entire GDP of Canada that you don't know "what happened on June 4th".
What you are describing here, anti-establishment propaganda, is precisely the reasoning cited for the TikTok ban to begin with, and exactly the reason China has their firewall. So... uh... yeah?
Also VPN's are widely used in China so it really doesn't support your claim.
> Whereas most Americans know that health insurance is some babyback bullshit that might have worked at one time but doesn't work anymore; and that cost of living is too high in certain cities
Exactly! This proves how structurally powerless American freedom of speech is to enact real change. How is it that there were able to secure social services and unprecedented poverty reduction, or even had the political desire to?
> The fact that we're sitting here typing at each other about it is proof positive.
This proves precisely zero things. This isn't even related to anything you said.
"The fact that we're discussing how broken healthcare is proves everything is fine!"
There's plenty more evidence out there that answers your other questions. That's just to refute the main concept of a 'fish in a barrel' style massacre that's been fed to us. Media also don't tell you that the protests were largely due to economic inequality and corruption that came as a direct, predicted result of economic liberalization from Deng. Consider also that the masses were literally JUST mobilized to seek out capitalism and destroy it violently during the cultural revolution when suddenly the elites in their society opened up to capitalism and even participated. They also don't tell you about the soldiers who were burned alive or shot by protesters, prior to any gunfire. Of a million there, between 300-600 protesters and plenty of soldiers too, wheras the media pushes the narrative that thousands were slaughtered like fish in a barrel in the middle of the square. Overall a tragic event and why social stability is so important, but it's not the "spirit of an oppressed people" that we're always told it is, they're just building the pretext for a "war of liberation" or other hostilities.
This is active propaganda. You think the Gov spends billions on propaganda overseas and they make no effort internally? I mean think about it for a moment.
An American and a Chinese citizen are having a discussion on Rednote about freedom in their respective countries. The American proudly says:
"In America, we have true freedom! I can stand in front of the White House and shout, 'I don’t like the President!' and nothing will happen to me."
The Chinese citizen thoughtfully replies:
"We have the same freedom in China. I can stand in front of Tiananmen Square and shout, 'I don’t like the American President!' and nothing will happen to me either."
A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
"American propaganda techniques? Sounds conspiratorial" says the American.
Great anecdote, I really like it and I'll definitely be using it myself with the parties reversed or changed in the future. But I can't help but feel like we're veering even further off topic here, since nobody was talking about the Russians or propaganda. If you had maybe changed the Russians to Chinese it could've been a real zinger, but I can only assume you just wanted to get what you thought would be a quick dunk in on me with your off topic anecdote.
Three paragraphs of non-sequiturs. Yeah they are taking revenge on their own government because it’s their own government which is governing the country they live in. “But what about China” doesn’t matter since they don’t live in China and they don’t plan to move to China.
They want to use an app. These geopolitical-ideological fault-lines doesn’t matter.
I’m not trying to pick on you specifically but that is precisely the kind of neoliberal thinking that has caused such rot in the US (and more broadly, western) military.
Is spending a lot of money the goal or the measurement here? If your goal is actual effectiveness, then things such as force structure, results in recent conflicts, production rates, etc. are what you’d measure. If your goal is funneling money to capitalists then yeah sure budgets and adherence to “%GDP spending targets” from your vassals is what you’d measure.
