▪️It’s been an amazing week for the tariff defenders. They started off by backing the “reciprocal tariffs” which turned out not to be reciprocal at all but based on a nonsensical trade deficit formula, causing substantial tariffs to be put on many countries who had zero or extremely small tariffs on the US.
▪️Then, when the markets tanked we were told not to be “panicans.” The stock market wasn’t actually the economy, this time it’s Main St. over Wall St. The same people who wanted Covid lockdowns hate tariffs so screw them. It was time to finally stop the world from ripping us off, and tariffs were essential to bring back industry to the gutted US economy (even though US workers currently have the highest real wages in history).
▪️Then, Trump decided he didn’t like the markets tanking, backtracked and simply suspended most of the tariffs. Except for China, which he dramatically increased. This was the plan all along! It was 4D chess to play hardball with China.
▪️Then, late on a Friday, they exempted computer chips and essential electronics from the tariffs, the most important products we buy from China, and what all the tariff defenders said we desperately needed to reshore.
▪️At every step, the defenders had the rug pulled out from under them by none other than Trump himself. It’s been incredible to witness.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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