Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,224]

2 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Gay liberation front is against Freud.

Anyone who believes in actual science and integrity is against Freud.

 

 

[Vesper 30,224]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

Freud was a hack, a liar, and a fraud

 

Freud Was a Fraud: A Triumph of Pseudoscience

Frederick Crews has written a reassessment of Freud based on newly available correspondence and re-evaluation of previously available materials. He shows that Freud was a fraud who deceived himself and succumbed to pseudoscience.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/freud-was-a-fraud-a-triumph-of-pseudoscience/

Psychiatry is arguably the least science-based of all the medical specialties, and Freudian psychoanalysis is arguably the least science-based psychotherapy. Freud’s theories have been widely criticized as unscientific, and treatment of mental disorders has increasingly turned to psychotropic medications and effective therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Freud’s impact on 20^th century thought is undeniable, but he got almost everything wrong. He was not only not scientific; he was a liar and a fraud. A new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick Crews, may put the final nail in his coffin.

Crews had access to material not available to previous biographers. The extensive early correspondence between Freud and his fiancée, Martha Bernays, has only recently been released, and it is very revealing of Freud’s character flaws, his sexist attitudes, and his regular use of cocaine.

Freud was trained as a scientist, but he went astray, following wild hunches, willfully descending into pseudoscience, covering up his mistakes, and establishing a cult of personality that long outlived him.

His early work in science was scattershot and lacked follow-through. He “deftly criticized premature conclusions reached by others but never crucially tested any of his own hypotheses.” He was lazy, reluctant to collect enough evidence to make sure a finding was not an anomaly; he generalized from single cases, even using himself as the single case. In an early article “On Coca” he demonstrated poor scholarship, omitting crucial references, citing references from another bibliography without reading them, and making careless errors (misstating names, dates, titles, and places of publication).

His advocacy of cocaine

His advocacy of cocaine was irrational. He wanted to justify his own use of the drug, which he took for migraines, indigestion, depression, fatigue, and many other complaints; and he presented it as a panacea. He claimed it was harmless, refusing to see clear evidence that it was addictive. When nasal applications resulted in tissue necrosis, he treated it by applying more cocaine! He used it to treat a friend’s morphine addiction and only succeeded in leaving the patient addicted to both morphine and cocaine. Then he claimed the treatment had been successful! And in his reports, he referred to other successful cases that never existed. There were many instances where it appeared that his own drug use affected his judgment.

He published a scientific study on the physiological effects of cocaine on reaction time and muscle strength. His only experimental subject was himself! In his write-up, he first tried to explain away his failure to test other subjects, and then claimed he had confirmed his results by testing colleagues, which was a lie. The study was riddled with other methodological flaws, and Crews comments that it “may rank among the most careless research studies ever to see print.”

Charcot and hysteria

Freud spent several months at Charcot’s Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Another observer, Delboeuf, spent only a week there and quickly realized patients were being sadistically abused and coerced into stereotyped hysterical performances through hypnosis, strong suggestion, peer pressure, and other influences. Freud saw the same evidence Delboeuf saw, but his hero worship of Charcot and his need to ingratiate himself with his mentor made him blind to what was really going on. He believed Charcot had understood and mastered hysteria. Crews comments, “Every stage magician hopes that his audience will consist of precisely such eyewitnesses as Freud.”

Before specializing in the treatment of hysteria and neuroses, he practiced general medicine and neurology. He practiced useless electrotherapy for at least two years and may have continued using it even after he realized it was bogus. But later he claimed to have “soon” realized it was placebo and to have promptly stopped using it. He sent patients to spas for immobility and fattening regimens. He prescribed hydrotherapy. He steered patients to a gynecologist who treated hysterical women with surgical procedures like hysterectomy and excision of the clitoris. He put patients in needless jeopardy, acting on impulsive, sometimes fatal misjudgments. He became so enthusiastic about cocaine that he tried it on everything, even on a case of diphtheria that he misdiagnosed as “throat croup;” he interpreted transient symptomatic improvements as cures and failed to do any follow-up. At one point, he admitted privately that he had yet to help any patients.

In the first years of his practice, he was preoccupied with the rank and status of his patients. He came to specialize in a “disease of the rich,” hysteria, which could never be cured and which generated a continuing stream of income. When some of his “hysteric” patients were subsequently shown to have organic diseases, he still maintained that hysteria was part of the clinical picture. He never admitted being wrong, in one case saying his diagnosis had not been incorrect but had not been correct either. Crews says, “He chose to remain deceived even after having been proven wrong.”

Evidence of dishonesty

He treated pampered, rich socialites. His attitude towards them was cynical; they provided a steady source of income by not being cured, and in one case he rushed back to see a patient in the fear that he might get well in his absence. He had little sympathy for his patients; he actively despised most people, especially those of the lower social orders. He was a misogynist who believed women were biologically inferior. He treated his wife abominably.

Few of his ideas were original. He plagiarized. He borrowed ideas from rivals but then backdated them and treated them as his own. His debts to others were originally acknowledged but “eventually suppressed in favor of the specious appeal to clinical experience. ”He was “actively evasive, malicious, and dishonest” in covering up his mistakes. Crews relates many instances where he re-wrote history, changing the story to put himself in a better light.

He made things up as he went along, constantly changing his theories and methods but not making any actual progress towards a successful treatment.

If a patient disagreed with his interpretation, (“No, I’m not in love with my brother-in-law.”) that only strengthened his conviction that he was right. He violated patient confidentiality. If a former patient improved after leaving his treatment, he took the credit. He was oblivious to the dangers of confirmation bias.

The editors of Freud’s letters and other papers were members of his cult and were dishonest. Comparison to the original documents shows that they changed words and omitted passages that they thought would have made him look bad. They “put the most damning evidence under the rug.” For example, “Out of 284 letters Freud wrote to Fliess, only 168 were represented, and all but 29 of them underwent diplomatic and often silent alteration.”

One of the foundational cases of psychoanalysis, the prototype of a cathartic cure, was the “Anna O” case reported in a book by Breuer and Freud. They said she had recovered after Breuer’s treatment, but that wasn’t true. In fact, she got worse and was hospitalized. After leaving psychoanalytic treatment, she improved on her own and eventually led a successful life as an activist opposing the sex trade. (This was interpreted in psychoanalytic terms as a means of unconsciously wishing to prevent her mother from having sex with her father!) She probably didn’t even have a psychiatric illness, but rather a physical, neurologic one, and many of her most troubling symptoms were caused by the morphine addiction Breuer had inflicted on her. Freud’s interpretation of the case contradicted the facts: he was either lying or venting a delusion of his own.

He found his true métier as a storyteller, using anecdotes from his own case history to illustrate how his mind was “cured” of bafflement over the origin of mysterious symptoms. He described adventures of the intellect. His orientation was more literary than scientific.

Crews says, “Freud was something of a specialist in gleaning precious admissions from people who couldn’t be reached for checking.” His “standard practice was to smear his former associates as soon as they posed an obstacle to his goals.”

Freud’s obsession with sex

He was preoccupied by sex, presumably because of his own problems in that area. His own wife called psychoanalysis “a form of pornography.” He saw everything an infant did as a source of sexual pleasure, from sucking milk to excreting. He was obsessed with masturbation and believed it was the cause of most mental illness. He developed a succession of questionable concepts like virginal anxiety, penis envy, and the Oedipus complex. He decided each hysterical symptom was a depiction of a sexual fantasy; he told one virginal patient that her cough was caused by her unconscious desire to suck her father’s penis.

At one point, he was convinced that sexual molestation in childhood was the cause of adult psychoneuroses. He believed everything patients told him, and even made things up for them and interpreted their dreams as distorted evidence of actual events. He failed to distinguish their fantasies from his own, even believing they had telepathically transmitted their thoughts to him. He thought his neurotic patients had repressed their memories of abuse, which he tried to bring to light. At first he thought nursemaids and governesses were the abusers, then he came to believe fathers were the abusers. Eventually he realized some of the stories about fathers were too outlandish to be real, so he switched gears. He decided patients were merely fantasizing about sex with fathers because of an Oedipal repressed yearning for paternal incest, or because they were trying to cover up the auto-erotic activities of early childhood sexuality. Some of the fantasies were bizarre, like an account of female circumcision where the little girl was forced to eat her own labia after it was excised. This prefigured the repressed memory witch-hunt of the 20^th century, with its many false accusations of child molestations and Satanic ritual abuses. At one point he entertained the possibility that he had forced daydreams of molestation upon his patients, but then quickly rejected the idea.

When he thought he could get away with it, he would align details of a case history to support his current theory. He “awarded himself a license to invent, suppress, alter, and rearrange facts in the interest of enhanced self-portraiture and theoretical vindication.”

Off the deep end

One whole section of Crews’ book is titled “Off the Deep End.” Freud developed into a “manic speculator,” who fantasized, interpreted, and guessed. And his speculations were often fueled by cocaine. In a damning admission that his editors suppressed, he once confessed:

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want it translated – with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

He displayed an expanding grandiosity, saying psychoanalysis was the only possible treatment for certain conditions and claiming impressive successes. In reality, he had not achieved a single cure. He knew his claims of healing lacked any basis in fact, and sometimes he said therapeutic success was not his primary aim; rather, he aimed only to give patients a conscious awareness of their unconscious wishes. He told a friend, “we do analysis for two reasons: to understand the unconscious and to make a living…we certainly cannot help [the patients].”

He claimed that his critics weren’t entitled to pass judgment on psychoanalysis because they didn’t understand it. His criterion for the truth of his ideas was internal consistency, not external reality.

He believed dreams could reveal arcane knowledge and were more accurate than conscious memories. He believed in the paranormal, in numerology, and in occultism.

Conclusion: A bad man, but a good book

Freud was a despicable person with multiple character flaws. He betrayed his scientific training in a tour-de-force of self-deception, succumbing to all sorts of irrational beliefs. His vaunted psychoanalyses never objectively helped a single patient. It is astounding that his ideas and his cult were so influential for so long. Freud was a fraud, a liar, a bad scientist, and a bad doctor; but Crews’ book about him is excellent. Crews’ detailed, well-referenced investigation of Freud’s descent into pseudoscience is a fascinating read. Readers familiar with the development of alternative medicine treatments will find many parallels.

 

Just wanted to drop this here, to ward off crackpot attacks that it is 'the left' and other 'usual suspects' (teh gays, teh commies, etc etc) who are somehow falsely trashing the fraud Freud.

This is the bias listing for the website (Science Based Medicine) my article above came from:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/science-based-medicine/

 

 

[Vesper 30,224]

Trump’s tariffs, explained

Let’s look at a family picnic to see how Trump’s policies could affect prices for you.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/26/how-trump-tariffs-work-explained-cost/

 

Tariffs have emerged as one of the most important flash points in the 2024 presidential election. Former president Donald Trump has promised massive new duties of at least 10 percent on all imports, characterizing tariffs as a solution to everything from paying off the federal debt to helping solve the nation’s child-care crisis. Vice President Kamala Harris has attacked Trump’s plan as a “national sales tax” that could send inflation soaring and cost the average American family thousands of dollars every year.

But how do tariffs work, and how would Trump’s plans affect the U.S. economy? Join us on a tariff picnic to see how.

 

 

In this theoretical scenario, we used the prices of real goods available online and the tariff schedule detailed online by the U.S. International Trade Commission. The estimation of how much a 20 percent universal tariff would cost a middle-class American family comes from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Edited October 26, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,224]

Elon Musk, enemy of ‘open borders,’ launched his career working illegally

Investors in Musk’s first company worried about “our founder being deported” and gave him a deadline for obtaining a work visa

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/26/elon-musk-immigration-status/

Elon Musk is seen at his desk on March 19, 2004, in El Segundo, California. (Paul Harris/Getty Images)

 

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Musk in recent months has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that “open borders” and undocumented immigrants are destroying America, broadcasting those views to more than 200 million followers on the site formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and later renamed X.

What Musk has not publicly disclosed is that he did not have the legal right to work while building the company that became Zip2, which sold for about $300 million in 1999. It was Musk’s steppingstone to Tesla and the other ventures that have made him the world’s wealthiest person — and arguably America’s most successful immigrant.

Musk and his brother, Kimbal, have often described their immigrant journey in romantic terms, as a time of personal austerity, undeterred ambition and a willingness to flout conventions. Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up.

Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to legal experts.

Foreign students cannot drop out of school to build a company, even if they are not immediately getting paid, said Leon Fresco, a former Justice Department immigration litigator.

“If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you’re in trouble,” Fresco said.

Musk’s freewheeling business approach soon conflicted with Zip2’s hopes of becoming a public company or entering a high-profile merger, which would have subjected it to scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to former associates.

When the venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures poured $3 million into Musk’s company in 1996, the funding agreement — a copy of which was obtained by The Post — stated that the Musk brothers and an associate had 45 days to obtain legal work status. Otherwise, the firm could reclaim its investment.

“Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S.,” said Derek Proudian, a Zip2 board member at the time who later became chief executive. Investors agreed, Proudian said: “We don’t want our founder being deported.”

Another large shareholder at the time, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said a minor problem drew additional attention to the Musk brothers’ unresolved immigration issues. Musk told co-workers he was in the country on a student visa, according to six former associates and Zip2 shareholders.

“We want to take care of this long before there’s anything that could screw up” the company’s path to an initial public offering, Proudian recalled.

In Elon Musk’s public retelling of his immigration story, he has never acknowledged having worked without proper legal status. In 2013, he joked about being in a “gray area” early in his career. And in 2020, Musk said he had a “student-work visa” after deferring his studies at Stanford.

“I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work,” he said in a 2020 podcast. “I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever.”

Musk, his attorney Alex Spiro and the manager of Musk’s family office did not respond to emailed requests for comment. U.S. immigration records generally are not open to the public, making it difficult to independently confirm a person’s legal status.

In 2005, Musk acknowledged in a late-night email that he did not have authorization to be in the United States when he founded Zip2. The email, from Musk to Tesla co-founders Martin Eberhard and JB Straubel, was submitted as evidence in a long-since-closed California defamation lawsuit and said he applied to Stanford so he could remain in the United States legally.

“Actually, I didn’t really care much for the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country, so that seemed like a good way to solve both issues,” Musk wrote. “Then the internet came along, which seemed like a much surer bet.”

Musk never enrolled at Stanford. In a May 2009 deposition, he said he called the department chair two days after the start of the semester to say he wasn’t going to attend. In the same deposition, he said he began working at Zip2 — originally called Global Link Information Network — in August or September 1995.

Upon not enrolling, Musk would have had to leave the country, according to legal experts and immigration laws at the time. He would not have been allowed to work.

While overstaying a student visa is somewhat common and officials have at times turned a blind eye to it, it remains illegal.

The revelation that Musk lacked the legal right to work in the United States stands at odds with his recent focus on undocumented immigrants and U.S. border security, among the issues that have led him to spend more than $100 million helping Trump return to the White House. If Trump wins on Nov. 5, both men have said Musk could have a high-profile role in his administration.

On X, Musk has become an avid booster of anti-immigrant rhetoric, falsely accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats of “importing voters.” Undocumented immigrants are legally barred from voting in state and federal elections. In February, he wrote that “illegals in America can get … insurance, driver’s licenses.”

Musk would have been required to have both to drive a vehicle, which associates attested he frequently did during the time he lacked a legal work permit.

U.S. university enrollment documents to U.S. border officers and enter the United States with student status, legal experts said.

Foreign students enrolled in U.S. degree programs may be authorized to work part time and for limited periods to complete their degree requirements. Adam Cohen, author of “The Academic Immigration Handbook” and an attorney who specializes in employment visas, said Musk could obtain work authorization as a student, but that would have required him to be engaged in a full course of study at Stanford.

Otherwise, “that would have been a violation,” Cohen said. If he didn’t go to school, “he wasn’t maintaining his status.”

Ira Kurzban, an immigration law expert and the author of a legal sourcebook used widely by attorneys and judges, agreed.

Kurzban said the brothers’ subsequent applications for work visas and to become U.S. permanent residents and naturalized citizens would have asked whether they worked in the United States without authorization. “If you tell them you worked illegally in the U.S., it’s highly unlikely you’d get approved,” Kurzban said.

Kimbal Musk leaves the stage after speaking at a blockchain event on Feb. 18, 2022, in Denver. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

Kimbal Musk has repeatedly acknowledged working in the United States without legal status — describing his experience as evidence of a dysfunctional U.S. system that blocks talented foreigners. In a 2013 onstage interview alongside his brother, he said they were sleeping in the office and showering at the YMCA when they joined the dot-com gold rush.

Then investors began offering them huge sums of money and buying them cars, he said, only to find out that the brothers had no legal permission to work in the United States.

“In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said in the 2013 interview.

“Well,” Elon said.

“Yes, we were,” Kimbal said.

“I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon replied, to audience laughter.

“We were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said flatly.

Kimbal has also said he misled U.S. federal agents to reenter the United States for a crucial investor meeting after visiting his mother in Canada. When U.S. officers searching his luggage at the airport discovered his business cards and California address, they realized he was traveling for work — without authorization.

After they turned him away, he said, he enlisted a friend to drive him over the border, telling officers they were headed to see David Letterman’s show. Officers waved them through, and Kimbal made it to the meeting.

“That’s fraud on entry,” said Kurzban, the immigration expert. “That would make him inadmissible and permanently barred from the United States,” he said, unless the penalties were waived.

Kimbal Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Last month, Elon Musk called himself “extremely pro immigrant, being one myself. However, just as when hiring for a company, we should confirm that anyone allowed into the country is talented, hardworking and ethical.”

But Musk appeared to have benefited from his backers’ initial inattention to his own status, according to former business associates.

“Perhaps naively we never examined whether he was a legal citizen,” said one key investor in Musk’s first company, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. “He had a burning desire to be successful. We were investing in him. … We felt that he was really driven.”

Musk’s fortune has its roots in this period, which fueled his rise in Silicon Valley and provided seed funding for later ventures, including X.com, a predecessor to PayPal. (Musk later revived the name when he bought Twitter.) Musk was chief executive of PayPal until September 2000, when board members ousted him. Two years later, eBay acquired PayPal, earning Musk roughly $176 million, which he used to make later bets on Tesla and SpaceX.

PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, left, and founder Elon Musk at its corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California, in 2000. (Paul Sakuma/AP)

A 2023 authorized biography by Walter Isaacson asserted that the Musks had needed visas and investors at Mohr Davidow Ventures lined them up with an attorney to secure them, but it included few further details. Biographer Ashlee Vance also reported that the investment firm got the brothers visas. Neither reported that Musk had been working without authorization.

Mohr Davidow Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.

Documents obtained by The Post show that Zip2’s executives met with immigration attorney Jocelyne Lew on Feb. 21, 1996, to discuss potential visa pathways for the Musk brothers and another Canadian co-founder. Lew advised the men to downplay their leadership roles with the company and scrub their résumés of U.S. addresses that might suggest they were already living and working in the United States, the documents show.

Lew encouraged Musk to seek another student visa from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had studied as an undergraduate, the documents show. She also directed him to obtain passport-size photos that would allow him to apply to the U.S. “visa lottery,” according to the files.

Lew did not respond to requests for comment.

Proudian, the former Zip2 board member and investor, said the board worried that the founders’ lack of legal immigration status would have to be disclosed in an SEC filing if the company were to go public. He recalled the Musks’ work authorizations coming through around 1997.

A person who joined Zip2’s human resources department in 1997 remembers processing work visas for the Musks and other family members under a category available to Canadians under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Legal experts said Elon Musk also might have violated the law by persuading his brother to come run the company. A 1986 federal law made it a crime to knowingly hire someone who does not have work authorization. Musk said in 2003 and 2009 that he “convinced” Kimbal to come from Canada to work for his company.

Records filed with the California secretary of state show Elon Musk was the registered agent for Global Link Information Network when it incorporated in November 1995. On Feb. 26, 1996, the company listed Kimbal as president and CEO and Elon as secretary.

“I tried to get a visa, but there’s just no visa you can get to do a start-up,” Kimbal said in a 2021 interview. “I was definitely illegal.”

[NikkiCFC 8,337]

 

[Vesper 30,224]

22 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

 

 

Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’

The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/

Trump said Hitler ‘did some good things’ and wanted generals like the Nazis, former chief of staff Kelly claims

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-some-good-things-and-wanted-generals-like-the-nazis-former-chief-of-staff-kelly-claims

 

 

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

The new psychology without Freud:
 

 

[robsblubot 3,595]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

Anyone who believes in actual science and integrity is against Freud.

 

 

Science does not require belief. Personally I think the use of the word "debunked" is unscientific: it implies a mere thought as opposed to the accepted science at some point. Science evolved from his time, but his theories and work were important at the time. Newton was wrong plenty, but there is no Einstein without him.

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

7 hours ago, Vesper said:

 

Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’

The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/

Trump said Hitler ‘did some good things’ and wanted generals like the Nazis, former chief of staff Kelly claims

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-some-good-things-and-wanted-generals-like-the-nazis-former-chief-of-staff-kelly-claims

 

 

 

But they were not such good generals.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

hard to think the election is next week.

 

Ready for the commercials to be over.

Edited October 27, 2024 by Sir Mikel OBE

[IMissEden 21]

In an effort to catch up with modern PsyOp the dems have long employed, Trump team finally aware they need to implement ideas by the teens for the teens, in other words, memes. The only part that was missing. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

 

[Vesper 30,224]

1 hour ago, robsblubot said:

Science does not require belief. Personally I think the use of the word "debunked" is unscientific: it implies a mere thought as opposed to the accepted science at some point. Science evolved from his time, but his theories and work were important at the time. Newton was wrong plenty, but there is no Einstein without him.

 

Freud was a charlatan, a crank, and a dishonest fraud. Your reply changes nothing about that.

[Vesper 30,224]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

But they were not such good generals.

Trump only cares about their obedience and submission to Hitler. That is what he craves.

[Fernando 6,585]

10 hours ago, Vesper said:

Trump’s tariffs, explained

Let’s look at a family picnic to see how Trump’s policies could affect prices for you.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/26/how-trump-tariffs-work-explained-cost/

 

Tariffs have emerged as one of the most important flash points in the 2024 presidential election. Former president Donald Trump has promised massive new duties of at least 10 percent on all imports, characterizing tariffs as a solution to everything from paying off the federal debt to helping solve the nation’s child-care crisis. Vice President Kamala Harris has attacked Trump’s plan as a “national sales tax” that could send inflation soaring and cost the average American family thousands of dollars every year.

But how do tariffs work, and how would Trump’s plans affect the U.S. economy? Join us on a tariff picnic to see how.

 

 

In this theoretical scenario, we used the prices of real goods available online and the tariff schedule detailed online by the U.S. International Trade Commission. The estimation of how much a 20 percent universal tariff would cost a middle-class American family comes from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

What is interesting about that article is that Biden kept trump tariff. If that one was so bad why didn't Biden took it down? 

But other than that I get the point the article is bringing. Just found that little part interesting. 

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

1 hour ago, IMissEden said:

In an effort to catch up with modern PsyOp the dems have long employed, Trump team finally aware they need to implement ideas by the teens for the teens, in other words, memes. The only part that was missing. 

So, to catch up to democrats, republicans should employ tactics for 18 and 19 year olds(the only teens who can vote)?

[Vesper 30,224]

34 minutes ago, Fernando said:

What is interesting about that article is that Biden kept trump tariff. If that one was so bad why didn't Biden took it down? 

But other than that I get the point the article is bringing. Just found that little part interesting. 

Biden kept some narrow, very specific, targeted tarrifs that were left over from Trump. I have no issue with certian targeted, reasonable tariffs.

Trump wants to implement across the board wide-ranging (and very high) ones. That would have a disastrous effect on prices and the economy there (plus impact other friendly nations who import to the US), and likely kick off serious trade wars.

[cosmicway 1,333]

The odds are now Trump = 1.53, Harris = 2.50.
It's hard lines for Harris.
The consensus of opinion is whoever wins Pennsylvania wins, but in Pennsylvania Trump is marginally ahead.
I don't know what she might have done better.
For me taxes. The dems ought to be lowering taxes by as much as they can not putting them up.
Because even the taxes on the rich are eventually hurting the poor people.
The money of the rich do not trickle down by as much as the Reaganomics theory suggests but taxes do trickle down:
Tax goes up by 3% - prices go up by 3% the next day.
It depends of course on what it is they sell and how essential it is but overall it is automatic - the extra cost goes to the consumer, it's a law of commerce.
Even nationalized companies do the same. The government finds it necessary to milk them some more, they raise their prices.
To have the pie and the dog one must fix prices as well - but this is more difficult, maybe unconstitutional as well.

[NikkiCFC 8,337]

3 hours ago, cosmicway said:

The odds are now Trump = 1.53, Harris = 2.50.

Hillary was 1.20 and lost. 

[cosmicway 1,333]

5 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

Hillary was 1.20 and lost. 

1.30 maybe but I not in the last days - in July, August.
In the last days it was something like 1.90 - 2.20 as I recall.
Anyway 1.50 is strong as elections go.