The politics are important, and that effort must continue, but also directly targeting conservative voters economically. When they have distressed assets to sell, farmland, homes, businesses, I am ready to buy at a substantial discount. I have prepared to lever up with access to debt for this opportunity, and I recommend others who can do so. I want to buy when there is blood in the streets (economically), but only taking from those who caused this.
People expect to be able to take advantage of events like this, but if you're working for a living when there's blood in the streets, it's your blood. If you're an investor who wasn't correctly catching the falling knife (or insider trading) it's also your blood in the streets.
The Peter Thiels of the world are who this move is for, not us plebes who spend time posting on HN.
Retaliatory tariffs from the EU have repeatedly targeted things like Bourbon, in order to target specific parts of the US (likely mostly aimed at certain politicians, but also at voters I imagine).
“How do you feel about this economic path? Are you concerned at all about the harm this will cause?”
“It’ll hurt but I’d vote for him again in a heartbeat.”
Certainly, always compassion and empathy for compassionate people. I am a very empathetic and compassionate person myself, I will give you the shirt off my back. For everyone else? Hard times ahead, as compassion and empathy have limits. Kindness is not weakness.
> “How do you feel about this economic path? Are you concerned at all about the harm this will cause?”
> “It’ll hurt but I’d vote for him again in a heartbeat.”
What was done when the steel belt became the rust belt? Mostly finger wagging. I'm sure a lot of free traders would have the same response about all the harm their chosen polices caused.
But of course, more compassion is expected from some poor guy in a rust belt town, even after he's gotten very little compassion himself. How dare he not think about the rich coastal software engineers when he's in the ballot box!
I am not a software engineer. I don’t live on a coast. I grew up intermittently poor before I did well.
I am not unsympathetic to someone in the rust belt, anywhere really, who needs help. I don’t expect them to be a software engineer. We should provide robust social safety nets, guarantees of remote work in some fashion, whatever it takes to help these people live good lives until they retire or die. Tax me more, I insist. But, I don’t think that’ll make them happy nor what is on offer with this administration. It’s certainly not what they’re voting for. To reconfigure domestic manufacturing will take 5-10 years at least, and the evidence is robust the electorate is too unsophisticated and impatient for that.
> ...but also directly targeting conservative voters economically.
That's kind of an asshole move. Did people react to having their communities and livelihoods damaged by neoliberalism, in a way not approved by economically advantaged software engineers? Don't try to solve their problems in a better way, try to fuck them even harder instead! We should teach 'em to get fucked and not complain!
If you want to target anyone, you should target the people who made a shit-ton of money off of neoliberalism, in a way that paved the path for Trump.
That's not why they're targeting conservative voters. They're targeting the states & districts of senators and congressmen who are voting for Trump's agenda in an effort to get them to change their vote.
> That's not why they're targeting conservative voters. They're targeting the states & districts of senators and congressmen who are voting for Trump's agenda in an effort to get them to change their vote.
No. The post I was responding to literally was talking about personally taking advantage of conservative voters, not their representatives. The post above that talked about "punishing everyone involved in this tax hike to the maximum extent. It's pretty clear it's just a "fuck you," aimed at regular people.
No introspection, no proposals for solving the problems that would cause people to give tariffs a chance, just punishment. It's neoliberals saying, "we don't give two shit about you, if you resist our beatings, we'll just beat your harder for being uppity."
Interesting the way you framed this. Especially the part about liberals doing the beatings and threatening more of them.
One party had a message and large portion of it's voter base focused on messages and policies that can only be described as hateful and harmful. Now that it seems like that harm is transpiring and surprise surprise just as the "we don't give two shits about you" liberals warned that harm is at best indiscriminate and at worst going to impact those spiteful voters the most.
Trump is doing exactly what he said he'd do, tariff all the things, these people proudly and loudly voted for the (self-inflicted) punishment you're describing.
