Looking for bridges in views about the second Trump administration. I'm currently aware of four views:
Where are the middle grounds? I want to know how to build bridges in my personal connections when politics comes up these days.
Why does it have to be blue vs. red? Whatever happened to meeting in the middle on political issues? I am old enough to remember when American politicians were generally more moderate, not so partisan and seemingly unwilling to compromise as they have been recently. "Working across the aisle" sounds great in speeches but it is not being practiced by a majority of elected lawmakers and other officials. Why can't we have a legitimate third party that has some real support and influence. I believe that a majority of Americans would place themselves in the middle third of the political spectrum and we are not being represented accordingly.
A Plausible Oncoming Financial Storm. So, the economic situation might end up pretty dire if the following is correct. I'm posting this line-of-thought in case someone wants to sanity check it.
"To boost the British economy, I'd tax all foreigners living abroad."
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus
My read on the current economic order is that America is an empire. Now empires are supposed to extract tribute, and America might at first glance not appear to do that. But I claim it does. Instead of direct taxation the mechanism seems to be:
* Use a combination of diplomatic carrots and military sticks to make the dollar the world's reserve currency.
* Inflate the dollar by "borrowing" from the federal reserve (read: printing more dollars but with extra steps).
* Spend the printed money to subsidize American citizens in a bunch of ways to haphazardly offset the effect of the inflation being a pretty regressive taxation regime by default (medicaid, social security, food stamps, government jobs, etc.)
Now my fear is, if the Trump administration messes up our foreign policy badly enough (e.g. by unnecessarily hitting allies with the tariff stick, and showing signs that they will not in fact defend countries like Ukraine that the US had agreements with) the dollar might lose its reserve currency status. If this happens, we might be in for some pretty nasty levels of inflation (because, what happens if all those foreigners and corporations start dumping their dollar reserves?)
Anyway, I'm curious what people think of this line of reasoning.
#deeptakesonhottakes