Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "" video.

  1. "Trade balances don't matter" Trade balances used to matter more, before we went entirely to fiat currency. When another country could drain your entire previous metals reserve (what you used as a war chest, for example) then a huge trade deficit with them could cook you as a country. SIMILARLY though, if we are to allow countries to use their trade surplus with us to buy our capital goods -- say, our LAND, or passive rental income such as HOUSING -- trade balances start to matter again. If there were no such thing a capital goods or investments, and their holding more dollars just meant that those dollars could only be used to buy what our economy made, then I'd agree -- trade balances wouldn't matter. But that isn't the case by a long shot.
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  2. "Significant change is always going to cause significant uncertainty." NAILED IT! Our budget deficit is such that we need significant change. Our manufacturing base is such that we need significant change. Our place in the world -- which was originally designed when we were the only country that wasn't rubble -- is such that we need significant change. I'm old enough to remember when people would complain about politicians not being courageous enough to change what needed to be changed. Well, we need to back that courage when it shows up.
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  3. "This is an emergency" Yes, our budget deficit is a national emergency. $500B per year from tariffs would go a long way to solving it.
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  4. "Our nature is to be more concerned about a hangnail, than thousands perishing overseas" Well no one else is going to pay attention to that hangnail, and if no one paid attention to hangnails when others were perishing we would ignore those hangnails until they were so badly infected as to threaten our own lives. This is a silly way to prioritize things. Everyone in life has a duty to look after themselves, and will have a variety of experiences (some of them extremely dire) to deal with. If we only attend to those, no one will ever have the sort of transcendent experiences that are also possible in God's creation. Allocating according perfectly according to a hierarchy of suffering, even if our ignorance allowed it, would end human life as we know it. The thought experiment reduces to absurdity almost immediately.
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  5. @ Without tariffs, American industries can't afford to produce the things Americans want and need.
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  6. "No one is lining up to do manufacturing jobs" No one this guy thinks matters, is lining up to do those jobs. This is snobbery, American style, and it's how Trump got elected.
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  7. "Barack Obama - polished, sounded centrist but really pretty far-left guy, then Trump" who is more hilarious than polished, accused of being far-right but really pretty centrist. Oh, for an America that could elect a real Conservative again. Trump will help getting the most rotten fruits of the insanity out, but he won't get at the roots. That's for Vance, I think. And it's going to take the freedom that Elon has gotten for us to convince the rising generation (the boys especially are ready to accept it) that social conservatism has been right all along. Just wait until those boys start sharing stories about how the rainbow types in positions of authority (doctors, educators) got handsy with them. Mii2 will have NOTHING on how that upends our powerbrokers.
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  8. "If course we're all fat" As opposed to the Chinese, a significant percentage of whom are still starving.
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  9. "This is not really about gender" Er, yes it is. Men express leadership one way, women express it another. Both have gotten broken in the modern era. Men express leadership directly. Giving orders. Speaking freely. Running the idea up the flagpole, seeing who salutes. Women express leadership more communally. They put social pressure on other women to do the right thing, and withhold support form those who don't. We've got shy men, and a climate of social pressure amongst women that puts the pressure in EXACTLY the wrong direction. Men need to ignore social pressure from women and SPEAK OUT, and women need to get their heads straight about what is good and what is evil. That's the way we get out of the death spiral we're in.
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