A Reminder of where America is heading

And now, after being saved by an angel second-class, he will see what his life would have been like without being on that ship.

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Deeper look at the state of the US economy.

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So, page one of every economics book ever was right all along? shocker!

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What has struck me most about the Trump tariff war is that it hurts all countries involved. If there was a demonstrable advantage to the US I could begin to understand it.

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Art of the Deal.

You can see how he bankrupted multiple casinos and other business. How he continues to con rubes into giving him more money to burn is a mystery to me.

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"There’s a sucker born every minute."

Or one of Mencken’s many quotes.

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Fixed. Because he cheats.

Transformers sound like a high value item that the US should be building rather than imposing high tariffs on their ingredients?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-electricity-outage.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8lA.RqSn.9PQsJ4lTtFmy&smid=url-share

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/17/magazine/transformers-power-electric-grid.html?searchResultPosition=1

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It is the desire to eliminate income tax.

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Girls Gone Bible popular with Gen Z.

Replacing personal income taxes with tariffs would certainly appeal to the billionaires.

Imports are about 14% of US GDP so a duty of 50%+ on all imports would raise about the same amount of tax revenue as personal income taxes currently do.

The math is different for Canada as Canadian imports are about a third of our GDP but personal income taxes represent a similar percentage of GDP as for the US.

Ceteris paribus applies here, of course!

My former officemate living in Wyoming is in love with the idea of replacing income tax with tariffs.

While I dislike tariffs for the usual reasons, I’d partially tolerate them if the administration had pitched them as “we have to bring revenues more in line with expenditures somehow, and there’s no way anything meaningfully better is going to get through Congress”.

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Wouldn’t work long-term in the US as the prices for imports would rise (due to tariffs) leading to a substitution effect where more expensive imports were replaced by less expensive goods (with no tariffs or locally produced).

You would (realistically) only be able to replace a % of the lost income taxes due to dynamic effects. You would need some kind of federal sales tax to make up the difference in the US.

What they might want though is:

Cut taxes even more at the top end and replace those taxes with tariffs. That would definitely benefit the ultra-wealthy in the US (at the expense of everybody else).

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The wealthy don’t pay income tax anyway, they pay some pittance from capital gains.