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To be fair, in 1930 people had little education and no internet. Today you don’t need to remember to understand what’s wrong with tariffs.
Let me tell you a little something about ✨declining media literacy✨
You can leave out “media”.
There were radio, televisions, and books. And while people had overall poor quality of education back then because of lack of access, Noam Chomsky mentioned people still try to educate themselves through reading.
The problem then and now is that mass communication is used by bad faith actors to emotionally manipulate the public into voting against their own interests. Back then, yellow journalism riled up jingoism. Goebbels and the Nazis saw potential use of radio for mass indoctrination, and made conscious effort to make radio cheaper and widely available in Germany.
There were radio, televisions, and books.
The modern economic theory is too young for that to matter, and it also includes many lessons we’ve learnt since 1930s.
Not sure what you mean, but communication itself and its effect on human culture does not change, no matter the media. You can draw a painting to de-humanise and incite hatred towards a group, or you can go on radio and incite hatred towards a group. Either way, both methods can be used to incite hatred.
also includes many lessons we’ve learnt since 1930s.
Sorry I forgot to address this.
Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t see how we learnt since. As we speak, a used to be unknown far-right party gained massive electoral votes in Romania. It turns out that they have been making their presence in social media, where older establishment politicians have no familiarity with. The bigger lesson that democratic and liberal forces should do is knowing to use new forms of media instead. Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama knew this very well.
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Am I talking to a chatbot?
Friendly reminder that the rich love recessions. It’s their intent to cause one.
That’s when they amass greater property and wealth.
Wealth inequality always worsend following recessions.
There’s always a logical point where making more money becomes less efficient than making other people poorer.
It’s just buying the dip. The crazy part is that despite how rich they are, they still need to do it. At a certain level of wealth, you have infinite money for a certain level of lifestyle. So even though they’re crazy rich, they are still living beyond their means, and in order to maintain that lifestyle for future generations, then need to cause economic crashes and buy the dip. Wild shit.
$s never decrease - they just circulate… if nobody you know has any, and the tv is saying nobody like you has any, someone else has them
(kinda)
Not at all, that’s what neoliberalism wants you to believe. The government creates (by printing) and destroys (by taxing) money as wants
destroys (by taxing) money as wants
This is a great response to the prompt, “Tell us you’re a libertarian who doesn’t know anything about economics in fewer words.”
Would you prefer “puts into circulation” and “removes from circulation” as terms? That works as well. Governments (that control their own currency, so not EU member states for example) don’t need to run a balanced budget, as long as you don’t mind inflation of deflation. The idea that governments need to operate like a company is a profoundly misguided, neoliberal one.
Coincidentally, I am a libertarian, just not the kind Americans tend to think of.
tax doesn’t destroy money… tax money gets recirculated… tax money is part of the economy… it literally buys goods and services
where do you think it goes?!??? do you think governments just set fire to piles of cash?
yes printing cash is a thing that governments rarely do - mostly to replace physical cash that does get destroyed, but it’s generally a very bad economic policy for governments to print cash… it devalues their currency and has a lot of truly awful flow-on effects (like loss of confident in the currency as a whole) that are far worse than the effect of having the extra cash
… and also printing cash is the opposite of what we’re talking about
The money supply guess up and down, it’s ultimately a number that is open for manipulation to some extent.
This isn’t necessarily undesirable, when the number can’t be controlled at all bad things happen as the mass psychology of economic participants do things to the market that can’t easily be countered.
Tax absolutely does destroy money. You think the government has a bank account they collect tax dollars into? Taxation is one if the ways that the government removes money from the economy, and hence controls the amount of money in the economy.
Do you think there is a fundamental difference between you spending $20 at the grocery store vs the government spending $20 (through EBT/SNAP/WIC benefits) at the same store?
The only difference is how the money gets accounted for, it’s still circulating through people’s hands. It doesn’t just magically cease existing because it was collected via taxes.
There is a fundamental difference. If I want to buy $20 worth of stuff from the store, I need to have $20. The government just spends it, creates the money out of thin air. And it does, litteraly go back to thin air when the government takes it back. The is fundamental to the way the economy actually works - if the government had to actually physically have the money in an account in order to spend it, spending would become massively problematic and unweildly.
I don’t think you understand “the way the economy actually works” if that’s your take on how our money works and how govt spending works.
Also, if we’re talking about the USA, every state has some legal provisions regarding a balanced budget (except maybe VT?). So the state governments do account for having the budget balanced>
You’re right we run deficits in our budget but that doesn’t mean there isn’t debt being accounted for. You’re basically saying that our money magically ceases to exist when it’s collected as tax and that’s just wrong full send.
We’ve been deficit spending most of my life. That money, and then some, is going back into the economy.
What it does is make the middle class poorer and whoever the government gives it to richer.
Right, and deficit spending proves my point. The government spends money that doesn’t exist. They don’t collect taxes in April, count it all up, see how much they’ve got, then work out the deficit, then create that much extra money. They spend what they want/need to spend, then remove excess from the economy with taxes.
If only there were some way to record previous events, and then maybe (just maybe) have people learn this in a structured environment where they are allowed to ask questions. 🧐
People wrote down Trump abusing tariffs in 2016 and there are analyses about how they damaged the economy. But nobody on lemmy knows about it. People will point out economic theory for why tariffs are bad because they seemingly don’t remember the tariffs failing in the real world. Memes forgot 2016. There’s even articles about politicians/billionaires selling stock using insider knowledge because “how else would they know about the tariffs?”
It’s not like I read the entire fediverse but whenever tariffs are brought up I’m confused why people ignore 2016. It’s not trivia, it’s extremely relevant to what people are discussing.
Then this meme would have to acknowledge that the 1930’s depression already started in 1929
For those that don’t get the joke here…
This is an iconic scene that is intentionally designed to portray a very, very boring lecture from a teacher, which none of the kids want to pay attention to, that they are right to percieve this as boredom-torture.
The motherfucking actual literal topic of the lecture is how the Smoot Hawley tariffs of the 1930s massively worsened the Great Depression.
… god, Damnit.
Movie: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Actor: former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein
It’s important to have the audio for the full effect.
Voodoo Economics
Anyone…anyone…
But that would be… an academic pursuit!!! Oh the horror!! Can’t have the unwashed masses being all ‘edumacated’ and questioning authority!
The unwashed masses choose to remain unwashed.
Yes, a lot of them do. But quite a few others are having their critical thinking skills and understanding of the world deliberately starved by conniving politicians (usually in red states) who want to keep them as dumb as possible.
I’m sorry but if you’re a dumb adult in 2025 and you don’t have a physiological impairment that’s on you. There’s more free educational information on the internet today than you could find in the library at Harvard or Princeton 50 years ago. Choosing not to look at any of it isn’t someone else’s fault no matter how much they may benefit from you continuing on in your dumb ways.
That has to be the stupidest, most ignorant, and outright idiotic things I’ve ever read on the internet. Ironic.
Found one of the dumb ones
Put the mirror down.
Time to hose them down against their will then. They stink too much!
Unwashed asses
well obviously! education turns people woke!
I believe that is now called “DEI”
You mean social media?
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So every hundred years or so.
And here I thought The Great Depression started in 1929. I’m not saying tariffs in 1930 didn’t make it worse, but they didn’t cause it.
Yeah unregulated capitalist economy did that. Good thing we didn’t deregulate the economy since then though.
/s
2008 happened for the exact same reasons as 1929, because some of the protections put in place because of 1929 had been rolled back many years before. It wasn’t as deeply bad because (dare I say) the US had a reasonable executive branch very shortly after.
But none of those protections were reimplemented. Credit default swaps are still totally a thing, for example.
CDS markets are also, currently, right now, freaking the fuck out rofl.
Ive been saying this since Trump announced his tariff / deportation policies before he got elected:
Great Depression 2.0, with nukes and climate change this time!
The “reasonable executive branch” decided that bailing out Wall Street was a good idea instead of bailing out the people. Just more Reaganomics, which always leads to economic struggle.
There’s a reason why nobody under the age of 40 (and also above the age of 40) has been able to afford a house since 2008.
Obama just looks reasonable compared to the disasters of Bush Jr. and Trump.
even bush jr seemed reasonable compared to trump.
That’s a misunderstanding of the causes. Now, admittedly there’s a debate on this so what I will say is an opinion, but one that shows how the tariffs did cause the great depression.
The problem people have in understanding the great depression is the initial shock isn’t the cause so much as the trigger to the cause which is the tariffs.
Had the tariffs not come into play, the stock sell off and subsequent deflation could have been resolved with simple monetary easing, which is what we do today. This would have simply been a recession and we would move on. However, the tariffs following the stock sell off is why it’s the great depression and not just a simple recession.
In fairness, monetary easing policy didn’t really come into play until after Brenton wood agreement. That said, it would have been the right solution during the onset of the great depression.
So you can’t actually say that tariffs didn’t cause the great depression as again had it not been for tariffs we would have pulled through.
With that in mind, would monetary easing help us this time after the shock of tarrif-ing the hell out of everything?
No, the tariffs are actively preventing monetary easing. If you were wondering what the news about bond rates and the conflict between Bessent and Powell is about, it’s because they can’t ease.
At a core easing relies on borrowing money to fix the downturn. Usually, when a downturn happens, interest rates go down because there’s less to invest in. If you can’t get a 8% return on stocks, you buy bonds until bond returns go below 4% or so. Except, thanks to crazy man tariffs, no one trusts the bonds anymore. So USA can’t ease.
I also want to note, this was clearly Bessents original plan. Hurt the economy with tariffs, then do easing and pull more money back into the American Treasury. But oops, no one trusts USA anymore…
*Edit: Lol, god damn this happens fast. Powell is talking about what I’m talking about here literally just now.
https://lemmy.ml/post/29763814?scrollToComments=true
So the inflation he’s talking about is why they can’t ease. Normally when stocks go down, bonds go up it’s caused by deflation. People stop spending money so prices go down and thus, bond rates go down. But we’re not seeing deflation, we’re seeing inflation, which again is causing the inability to monetarily ease. It’s just funny to me we were just talking about this and bam, there’s a news article.
Sweet jebus, you’re not joking. That really was fast. Thanks for being ahead of the curve for us lonely souls on the Fediverse - even if it was only for a few hours or so. And thanks for answering my question.
This aligns strongly with some sentiment I’ve seen around here. That what we’re really up against is just a cadre of goons that are laser-focused on short term greed, a very simple playbook, and little else. I say “goon” only because I’m at a loss for a word that means: “dangerous like a cornered-and-hungry predator, yet piloted by weaponized levels of stupidity.”
The biggest issue I have isn’t that they’re evil. Though obviously that’s a huge issue, but that they are woefully incompetent. We’ve seen this type of evil before in the USA. Richard Nixon is obviously well known to be a greedy goon. But he did it in a way people didn’t really see it until after he was impeached. Trump is way too obvious for his own good. Though, maybe that’s a good thing… Burn it down asap
Holy cow!
Any guess as to what will happen? The US also has a debt ceiling issue coming up very soon too
That’s way too difficult a question to answer. But that said my theory is USA will have a lost decade like Japan. The distrust and broken agreements should have decades long effects. Can USA get back to where they were? Maybe, but no matter what now, it’s going to take decades.
I would say that the Tarrifs are a further attack on the working class as they were back then. Another tool to consolidate capital.
The largest difference today is the financialization of our economy (basically meaning every company runs like a bank). This had been a method of consistently allowing the contradictions of capitalism to be delayed and passed off through layoffs and stock buybacks to further sustain the bubble of this system.
It’s almost impressive at how well capitalism has adapted throughout the centuries to suck more and more away from the working class before it has to deal with a potential revolutionary “breaking point”. It’s definitely something Marx could have never predicted.
TLDR: I would not say that tarrifs are the cause of either of these events. I would say they are a tool of the ruling class to be used in times that capitalism hits a crisis. The cause is capitalisms contradictions itself. These extreme tarrifs are just a tool to attempt to deal with those contradictions.
Their luck’s gotta run out sometime
Things can have multiple causes spread out over time. The Great Depression didn’t become Great until 1932 and the first causes were a flurry of bad borrowing and over-valuing of stock that started in the early 1920s.
No, you’re right. 1929 came before 1930. There’s much to unpack on the subject, but Smoot-Hawley did not cause The Depression. Worsened? Maybe, probably? Sure.
Sure, bad things have happened every time we’ve tried tariffs.
But we have to do something to balance the budget!
The federal government has achieved fiscal balance (even surpluses) in just seven periods since 1776, bringing in enough revenue to cover all of its spending during 1817-21, 1823-36, 1852-57, 1867-73, 1880-93, 1920-30 and 1998-2001. We have also experienced six depressions. They began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929.
So old Billy Clinton was the only president to balance the budget without causing a depression? Interesting.
The one exception occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the dot-com and housing bubbles fueled a consumption binge that delayed the harmful effects of the Clinton surpluses until the Great Recession of 2007-09.
Heh, you can’t primarily blame Clinton for the thing that W had 8 years to fix. Have you watched The Big Short?
I’d say this is basically just the result of neoliberalism, something Clinton contributed to, but not Clinton alone.
It was very much a bipartisan economic policy that started from Carter, put on overdrive with Reagan, and continued into our economic policies today.
Oh, no problem then! The AI bubble will carry us through far enough until it all comes crashing down in… I want to say 2027?
Yes… The AI bubble. Which is definitely still a thing. Definitely.
- tugs nervously at collar *
Its the economy, stupid.
Just the idiotic part of our society. That’s more or less a third…
Hey they can always do a war again to get that sweet Keynesian macro economics flowing.
If there is a WWIII, I doubt America will be left alone as much as it was the last two times, especially since that led to America becoming the economic powerhouse it became.
There isn’t much the other powers can do short of a nuclear strike. At this point in time we know there is no way a Red Dawn style invasion of America could never happen. Possibly just take out satellites and gps systems for a time. Maybe bomb manufacturing bases if they get lucky.
See, this kind of bullshit is what actually gives some credibility to the various ‘cyclical’ or ‘generation based’ models of history.
Such models are often either unjustifiably bold/definitive/precise in their future predictions, or they are reasonably restrained, but the pop culture version of them neuters all the caveats and nuance.
… But goddamn if there isn’t some real merit to the idea of humans never learning from their own history being a consistent theme of human history.
Had to read up on the 1828 tariff that was basically enacted as a giant game of chicken, nobody expected it to pass… then it did.
Similar to Trump winning? Twice?
I really hate that we can’t collectively learn from our mistakes.
Always fat, stupid fucks that resemble McNuggets.
