> How are businesses supposed to plan anything in this environment?
Who cares? Business leaders & the politicians they helped elect are stripping the copper from the country. Whatever's left when they're done is someone else's problem.
I care?? Much of my family works in trades, have their own small businesses with employees and are very much subject to tariffs for their supplies. They did not vote for any of this.
If they voted for Republicans, they did in fact vote for this. It doesn’t need to be like this, congress and specifically the Republican majority which controls it can act to reclaim the power of tariffs from the president _at any time_.
All of this chaos is specifically because they have chosen to be complicit instead of opposing the president. If you want the madness to stop, call your representatives. Speak to your family and ask them to do the same.
Also note that they could also impeach Trump at any time. The sort of crimes that justify impeachment are pretty easily demonstrable at this point so all they need are the votes. They'll have just under half in the House and Senate from the Democrats, so they only need a handful of Rs in the House and (the hard part) a bit over 1/3rd of the Rs in the Senate.
So if they can find like 20 R senators who realize that they no longer support a Mad King, they're all set.
If it passes under a Republican Congress and it's a simple bill (primarily revoking presidential emergency tariff authority), then it'll probably have enough bipartisan support in the Senate, but maybe not House, to be veto proof.
Democrats need about 4 GOP senators to get the bill passed.
Theyll need 19 or 20 to get the inevitable veto override. I guess we'll see how these events have shaken congress and if thars enough to take trumps toys away.
Trump has been spewing financially illiterate nonsense about tariffs for literally 40 years, and was very explicit that he wanted to do this in the election campaign.
I think the "who cares?" was rhetorical. I suspect the commenter you're responding to is in the same place that am - politically exhausted and, for the time being, apathetic.
We didn't vote for any of this to happen. We voted for the adult. But the reality is that this country held fair elections and the population democratically elected someone that is a somewhat ambiguous melange of amoral, stupid, craven, venal, and selfish.
Many of us knew shit like this was going to happen and that it's going to be a very long 4 years. We are getting exactly what we collectively asked for.
I'll poke my head out for the 2026 elections and see if there's anything worth saving...
I also presumed the elections were fair, but there is evidence that they weren't (beyond the usual tactics of disinformation and voter disenfranchisement). Analysis of voting patterns in swing states looks pretty suspicious, to the extent that a pretty simplistic algorithm could even be deduced[0].
Maybe not all of them as individuals, but them as a public. It's not just a fluke of the last election, over the past two decades the u.s. has given control of all branches of government to Trump.
Beyond that, IMO, the public doesn't really care about tariffs. Right now there is a lot of noise because this kind of capricious threat/application of tariffs is something new, but the tariff chaos will become boring background noise in a few months and people will move on to the next thing.
Yes, but the big problem is that these same business leaders and politicians are going to be the ones who get first bite at the apple. And so how they plan is going to impact what's left for everyone else.
I don't care because they burned the system to the ground, I care because they're gonna salvage what they need and nothing else.
I guarantee lots of people in The Swamp are getting word on planned announcements so they can make their stock market bets before the news is announced.
You should care because uncertainty leads to cancelled & deferred projects, which leads to reduced demand, which leads to reduced jobs.
If I don't know if Trump is literal or serious about re-shoring to normalize trade deficits, or its just a revenue gimmick, or if its all going to be delayed, or negotiated away ... am I moving any production back to the US? No.
Plants are cancelling orders as they are uncertain what the tariff might be by the time goods ship.
Woo, I get to vote for yet another slate of billionaire-picked, barely functional, walking corpses repeating the same bland pro-corporate slogans and accomplishing nothing of value for four years before we hand the country back over to the nutjobs for another round. So engaging.
If everyone who stayed home had voted for a third party that party would have won. Even if they split between two third parties, they would have sent a powerful message. Instead they made it clear they don't care. Now add in those who thought the major party was the only way to make a difference. BTW, if you votes for Harris you wouldn't have lost anything by voting third party and it would have sent a message to the Democrats.
If everyone who stayed home had voted for the same third party, it would have won. That's unlikely.
It's also unlikely that it would have been split between only two additional parties. In my state we had 5 parties on the ballot. Colorado (to pick one at random) had 12.
If there was any real movement to get non-voters to vote for a third party, there would likely be even more of them. As it is, each of those parties took a fair bit of effort to get on the ballot, knowing that at best they would "send a message".
If the message is "we don't like you", then the message has been received, for many years. But the reply is "OK, go get people to agree on somebody else", and that's the sticking point.
Oh, I looked. To my knowledge, Harris was the best choice even including third parties. Stein and West are both whackos and no one else even made it on enough ballots to win.
Who cares? Business leaders & the politicians they helped elect are stripping the copper from the country. Whatever's left when they're done is someone else's problem.