Today I Learned

Fun fact! - this is what Ben Stein is teaching in Ferris Bueller's day off.

Great depression, and 2/3rds drop in global trade resulted.

I present also 1828 dementia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations which started southern secessionist movements.

Unjustifiable trade attacks like all wars are bad for unity. If California or Texas has to pay $10k more per car so metal and auto workers elsewhere get high pay, national unity fractures. Everything being super expensive with no jobs because of global trade retaliations, means that Mexicans stop being a unifying problem, and those white Michigan and Pennsylvania blue collar workers cheering for Trump are the problem. Better cars elsewhere in the world become a bigger national unity factor the more protection $ is spent on inferior cars.

Well they had elections afterwards. Trump's nazis will just throw dissenters into KZs and invade their neighbours.

There will be no free elections anymore

We can't afford to waste this chance....

There is zero reason to settle for "not trump" we need to use Republican Inaptitude to get a decent progressive in power , there's zero reason to compromise with Republicans after this shit.

Someone has either never seen “Ferris Buller’s Day Off,” can’t remember it very well, or didn’t pay attention. This was covered in class!

We got a Progressive Era out of it, maybe we'll get another one?

Edit: To clarify, I'm talking about the New Deal and New Deal v2 Progressive Eras (and the era of Progressive Democratic supermajorities that dominated congress)

Proof yet again that "business leaders" typically don't know shit about shit.

something something people who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it

The thing about Smoot-Hawley is that when it happened everyone else also put up equal tariffs among one another.

this time the EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada are only putting tariffs on the US. Not amongst themselves.

Every day of my life is an economic crisis.

Tarrifs are billionaire cash grabs, nothing more. Nobody likes those. Except billionaires of course.

God let history repeating itself be a good thing for once.

There is some nuance here. Smoot-Hawley didn't cause the great depression, and there a lot of economists who say it didn't have that much of an effect at all.

Tarriffs can have some useful effects when used for protectionism, diplomatic coercion, or trade barrier reduction coercion. However, Trump's tariffs are way dumber than anything that came before, because he's trying to do all three of these at once. All of these have conflicting effects on each other, and it is literally impossible to design a tariff strategy that can accomplish all three, since raising a tariff for one purpose means that you need to lower tariffs for other purposes. All he's doing by raising across the board is causing instability in the economy and convincing all partners to ditch the US.

The largest Senate loss in history yet

Smoot-Hawley 2: Electric Boogaloo

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Just throwing this out there.

If you expect conservatives to learn anything from this experience, I can promise you on my life that they won't. They will not deviate from voting R under any circumstance in existence.

Best we can hope for is independents getting a clue and helping swing the next election, if there is one, back to the grownup party.

Not holding my breath though. This is a very, very stupid generation of Americans.

A hero of the right, Ronald Reagan, actually gave a speech condemning tariffs. Yup, I'm actually on Reagan's side here.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Mj6N-WBPrVw

If we don't get these paid actors out of Congress we're going to lose in ways most people really don't want to believe