There are stabilizing benefits in some cases. Traditions can be valuable, even just for show.

Even something as simple as suggesting “Hey, these figures are made in Vietnam instead of China, so they’re lower cost right now” is political. It is, as you said unavoidable.

The problem is that they’re actively impacting your ability to participate in many hobbies, or eating up funds on necessities that force you to forgo other things entirely. It’s not that we’re just repeating “tariffs bad” when talking about them, it’s that they’re actually factoring into decisions being made in order to live our life.

If people are forced to still spend an extra 30% on a wide variety of items, they’re going to have to save that money elsewhere by not buying something.

Maybe if some orange turd wasn’t busy fucking up everything from board games to airplanes politics wouldn’t come up so much.

Hard to have a conversation without it when there’s a massive tariff on every single product related to work, hobbies, and even just living.

This has happened, the girl was found guilty of manslaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Conrad_Roy?wprov=sfla1

“privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

That’s the wording in the constitution. They just say that undocumented migrants amount to an invasion and they can suspend it.

It’s not like the supreme court is going to override them on that.

It’s not even that entirely

You can’t build X here unless every component is also produced… here. The component factories can’t be built here here until there’s factories building the subcomponents for them, AND a buyer for them here.

A button up shirt needs cotton -> chemical treatment -> dyes -> fabric, base chemicals > plastic pellets -> buttons, AND the machines to do all of those processes. It’s like 7 or 8 different factories just to produce a shirt with buttons on it. Imagine how many factories it is for anything more complex.

Then in comes your point of needing commitment when it’s not even certain for more than a week, nobody is going to build out entire supply chains in that scenario.

Well this is pushing the boundaries of “No Stupid Questions”

The basic problem with this is that people aren’t equal.

1 hour of a doctors time isn’t the same as 1 out of a house cleaners time, because the doctor had to spend tens of thousands of hours ahead of time to be qualified for that job. Now each job and even experience levels within jobs need multipliers in order to reflect actual value.

That’s before we get into the fact that some people are smarter, faster, stronger, etc. Than other people and levelling the field provides no incentive for people to do anything more than the absolute minimum.

It’s a recipe for disaster.

America is a joke.

The rest of the world is actively rejecting your bullshit, and you are going to be worse off for it.

Unless there’s some method for you to help them become eligible to work in your country, you legally need to put the company’s safety first. If you give different reason to hide things you could be exposing your company to liability, so the safest option for both the company and for the applicant is for you to straight up ghost them.

I really hope you mean to say “hiring” instead of “hitting”

The simple answer is just don’t hire them, and don’t give any reason.

I do mean renters will have more leverage once home ownership rates drop.

We will never build enough homes to drop housing prices to affordable levels. Prices can’t just stop growing, they have to actually drop, and developers will run away from projects the moment prices start declining. We’ve already seen a slowdown in construction in the last year as home prices stagnated.

You’re right that this is a rock and a hard place. Which is why I don’t expect it to change anytime soon. What needs to happen is that home ownership rates need to drop, meaning more voters will be renters, then they will have the political clout to push through policies that make things more affordable for them by destroying home values for the now minority of owners.

I give it about 30 years or so before we see that.

Because when you look at the total ownership, individual home owners are making the vast majority of the profit from keeping prices high. Around 65% of homes are owned by the family that lives in them, and the second largest chunk of the market is dedicated rental apartments which need to be owned by corps or they would never get built in the first place and are a needed part of the economy, then a smaller chunk is the landlord who own their home plus one rental.

Corporate ownership of non-dedicated rental buildings (houses, townhouses, etc) is still a very small percentage of the overall market.

Should it be happening at all? Probably not, but at the end of the day most of the profits of housing and land appreciation are being reaped by single home owners.

There was a news article a few days ago about a new development land purchase that just went through in Vancouver, BC. 25ish lots were purchased from individual home owners, for a total of $100 million or about 4 million dollars per lot. That cost gets passed onto the people buying the new condos going in, and the profit is going to individual home owners who probably bought those lots for hundreds of thousands over the last twenty or thirty years.

It’s a very fundamental concept that almost everyone is missing.

If houses increase faster than wages, the price of them relative to incomes will slowly go up forever making them less and less affordable.

If housing prices go up less than wages (or even go down) then the people owning the houses are losing money each month, but the housing costs will stabilize at a price level that is balanced by how much money people are willing to lose each month just to have a home.

The second option isn’t as bad as most people think, it’s how cars work right now. You’re willing to buy a car and spend money each month because it benefits your life, not because it gives you money back.

How do we achieve prices going up less than wages? There are about a dozen different possible ways for the government to do it. Options include the Government owning all land and just renting/leasing it to people instead of selling it, putting a 100% capital gains tax on the land (not the buildings), or my personal favorite which is a yearly land value tax (not a property or building tax) and using that revenue to pay for a basic income leaving a net zero tax change for a person who uses an appropriate amount of land for a given area.

WE ARE THE PEOPLE CREATING THE EXTRACTIVE MARKETS

I mean, wages have been increasing at a fairly reasonable rate related to inflation, the cost of most things have gone down relative to incomes with the big exception being housing.

https://cepr.net/publications/in-the-good-old-days-one-fourth-of-income-went-to-food/ https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-price-income-ratio-reaches-record-high-0

Based on that, I’d say you’re wrong that it’s wage appreciation that’s the issue, it’s definitely housing costs that are the problem.

You really don’t understand finances at all.

Rich people borrow money at low rates all the time, in order to make larger returns on other investments. If I borrow 500,000 at 4%, and then invest it, I can make a lot of money. For example, If I had borrowed against my property in 2024 and invested it in the S&P 500, I would have made a 22.3% return, minus the 4%, so 18% profit on the value I pulled out of my house. There’s obviously risk involved, but this is not an uncommon practice. You can even re-invest it in real estate itself by borrowing the money to buy more properties.

Proportion doesn’t matter at all, If I had bought a million dollar house, and sell it for 1.7 million (70% increase) and downsize to a $600k house that went up to $1020k (also 70%) in that same time, I’ve made 700-420=$280k more than if I had just bought the smaller house to begin with, minus a bit of interest difference (much less than the $280k)

You say that renting it out is the problem, but both of the options above are also generating money by stripping wealth from other people (whoever buys the house, or whoever is buying houses that cause my house to appreciate in value)

Housing appreciation IS the problem, without housing appreciation, housing wouldn’t have become unaffordable in the first place and we wouldn’t be complaining about the current cost of living issues.

In order for us to have affordable housing, property cannot appreciate faster than wages. Otherwise over time, it will ALWAYS become unaffordable.