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Let’s Play “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
This could be a regular feature on R>, along the lines of Quote of the Day or Meme of the Day. This game invites you to predict “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” due to idiotic political proposals on the part of politicians and the voters who elect them. No fair making entries we’re already seeing the effects of, like printing and pumping massive amounts of funny money into the economy. That’s a game of “We Told You So.”
I’ll go first.
There’s a ballot initiative in Colorado that would eliminate the few hunting tags issued every year for cougars. The city dwellers will love this one, just like they did the reintroduction of wolves to Colorado. Because, you see, large areas of mostly uninhabited land (Canada) on which to sustain previously eliminated predators from Colorado are not enough. We must restore Nature to her former pristine glory. That’s the same b-b-b-witch that wants to kill you and everyone you love every chance she gets.
Allowing the mountain lion population to “naturally” expand will likely go wrong for hikers, ranchers, and Colorado’s legendary elk population. So, people who live off the land and actually go into the wilderness on occasion to hike and hunt and even photograph the wildlife will suffer the consequences — not to mention the elk. But, you do you, Blue Colorado.
On the national scene, the Harris administration would enact price controls on food. This entry could be better suited to “We Told You So,” for anyone old enough (or aware of any history) to predict what will happen. We could point to photos of the empty shelves and bread lines in the Soviet era, for example. But, lower food prices sound so good to a certain (large) portion of the electorate because our feminized, perpetually adolescent population lacks the intellectual curiosity to ask, “And then what?” What could possibly go wrong?
Your turn. Entries either local or national may be made and commented upon. Winners will be ranked in the “We Told You So” contest.
Published in General
What more information do we need? If anyone questions the need to take action, I’ll point them to your verdict!
The Chinese government subsidizes some products so they can be sold cheaper here, undercutting US-made products.
In that case, put tariffs on everything including U.S. products sold to other countries.
That isn’t what Trump did.
Targeted tariffs (a terrible idea in its own right) are exactly what Trump the economic illiterate isn’t proposing. He wants to tax all imports at 10% (or 20%, or whatever number enters his head when he’s speaking), except those from China which he’ll tax at 60%. This would result in an enormous increase in the cost of living, especially for the poor, but I don’t suppose that part has been explained to him yet. In the meantime, he’s happy to denounce the increase in the COL under Biden. Weird.
And the U.S. subsidizes a long list of products also, most notoriously in agriculture. Now what?
Precisely. Why would anyone ask farmers and ranchers about the effects of reintroducing apex predators into their neighborhood? Because the concern isn’t for people and their lives and livelihoods. It’s for NaTuRe — our loving mother goddess. It’s especially not a concern for widely dispersed rural folk who tend to vote Republican.
Wolves don’t observe park boundaries, btw.
Why is it I only ever hear about Trump’s destructive economic policy proposals from Trump-hating hysterics. People who apparently have never heard the phrase, “actions speak louder than words.” Or, Trump should be taken “seriously, not literally.” America’s enemies seem to understand this about him.
I absolute believe Donald Trump has more love of country and more economic sense in his little finger than the entire Democrat party. Unlike Democrats, he wants America and Americans to prosper.
Trump haters are invited to desist from posting on this thread. You’re sucking all the life and fun out of what was meant to mock Democrats and their brain-dead liberal voters. As the Critical Drinker would say, “Go away now.”
Here is a little experiment-go into Walmart and see where everything is made.
And even if a tariff creates a temporary inconvenience for us, sometimes one must look at the end goal and then ask if there is a less painless way. These “made in China” products are crap. Garden hoses and their attachments are becoming like Christmas tree lights…it is easier to toss them out rather than reuse them more than a year or two. A nozzle breaks and I try to unscrew it from the male end and I can’t, metal on dissimilar metal corrosion. Cut it off and mend the hose with a new male connector and it blows off under pressure. Last year, I tossed out an all metal nozzle that had served me several decades. This week, I couldn’t undo the nozzle I bought last year so I could attach a sprayer- had to get another hose. I hate cheap crap being dumped on us.
I disclaim your description of me as a “Trump-hating hysteric.” It’s true that I despise the loathsome con man, but I do so in rational, measured terms. The answer to your question is, because someone here should tell the truth about those destructive economic policy proposals. His supporters won’t, but I will. It is a burden I have reluctantly accepted for the duration of the 2024 campaign.
Trump is an economic illiterate, as evidenced by his recent statement that “A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. That’s the way it is. And a lot of people like to say, ‘Oh, it’s a tax on us.’ No, no, no, it’s a tax on a foreign country.” The abysmal ignorance on display therein about what tariffs are and who pays them is staggering, just mind-blowing in someone once responsible to some degree for the economic health of the country. It’s a child’s view of tariffs, and a stupid child at that.
No and no. Ricochet’s Trump supporters are invited to set up a GoFundMe to reward me appropriately for the enlightening and stimulating contributions I make to their remedial education in economics.
Rather then considering it a “tax” on us, consider it a tad inflationary but our small burden to prevent predatory dumping and the economic flow of cash from our country to a country that has imperial goals and a desire to replace us and our currency as the world’s foremost superpower. I prefer not to enrich a country that intends us harm.
You have been disinvited by the post author. Respectfully, go away now.
And who do you think is most grateful for Walmart’s low prices and would be hurt most by an insane tax of 60% on imports from China? Not the rich, that’s for sure, although recently upper-income households are responsible for an increasing share of Walmart’s revenues. Hate the poor? Stick it to them with a huge new tax. No wonder they say Republicans are cruel.
That’s nice. (Do you like hijacking your own conversations?)
Your garden hose experience, tragic and moving though it is, represents an invisibly small component of the over half-a-trillion dollars the U.S. spends on Chinese imports every year. By definition, the utility consumers obtain from those products must at least equal the value in U.S. dollars they exchange for them, so your experience is clearly not typical. For many, and certainly for the poor whose choices are limited, Chinese products are good enough.
There has been a video that went viral this summer that was the commentary of one chicken/egg producer in Great Britain. He was explaining that the giant firms that handle distribution of these products are offering up so little in terms of money per unit that the people raising chickens simply cannot afford to sell them at that price.
So now citizens in Great Britain are facing an additional 3 million egg per day deficit as the chicken farmers have had to throw in the towel.
Prior to this, there was already a serious egg shortage in Britain.
Of course, the Brits can always turn to eating bugs I guess.
When I was looking for more information on what’s happened to Peruvian sheepherders, I didn’t find much that was recent, i.e. from the last couple of years. I did, however, learn that they use Great Pyrenees guard dogs to protect the sheep from wolves. I wonder if those dogs were brought over to the U.S. by the Basque sheepherders who used to do the work the Peruvians have been doing more recently, and who are now more commonly the ranchers who own herds of sheep. I haven’t found anything yet on how the economy is going for them the last few years.
People do tend to get emotional about apex predators. While doing some research on the history of my workplace, I found some information from the 1920s on a guy who once had some contact with our people from that era who was devoted to the cause of campaigning against cats, because they were murderers of songbirds. Not killers, but murderers. He was not in favor of bringing those predators into our lives.
I’m not sure how accurate it is to call them apex predators, though some people do refer to them that way. Our cat is a killer, which is why we have her, but we don’t let her go outside when we hear coyotes yipping. She is 9 years old now, and not as lithe and nimble as she seems to think she is. I don’t have to bury the uneaten remains and hose down the porch as often as I used to.
Perhaps because you need to diversify your information sources? The WSJ editorial page often talks about Trump’s destructive economic policies and often gives him credit for other aspects of his policies and actions, especially in comparison to Democrats.
That’s not a very nice thing to say. Usually it’s the Democrats who close their ears and treat dissent harshly.
No, I’m not nice. Especially to people who hijack my thread and use it to exercise hatred against the one man/party standing in the way of the people determined to destroy everything I love about our country and who really are the greatest threat to my kids’ future peace and prosperity.
This thread was intended to be a bit of fun and maybe a little informative about policies local and national that the party of people who hate us and want to destroy western civilization are proposing and enacting. If you want to
form the circular firing squadtalk about something else, start your own thread. As the author of this post, I am exercising my prerogative to uninvite people who refuse to play in the spirit of the game as presented.Consider me an uninvited guest, then. If you don’t want to talk about the topics you raise, maybe others do.
I think if your tone were a little different, you would find more supporters of your Trump skeptical ideas on Ricochet.
I think it was about 1984 when we were last there. The elk were ubiquitous as I recall (quite tasty, though.)
The “illiterates” are the people who don’t understand Trump. Trump recognized past administrations had settled on unfair (to US) trade deals with allies and had not been able to correct the problem. One reason is that one expressed by Yorab, the blowback on consumers. He also knew threatening to implement tariffs without ever following through was toothless so he had to take steps to put teeth in the threat, actually implement a few targeted tariffs. Trump put people on his team who would argue both sides of the issue. Navarro, Bannon, Miller, Ross, Cohn, Mnuchin, and Hassett were some, per Hassett in The Drift. One side of the debate included those “who understood that if you slap tariffs Willy-nilly, you will hurt consumers and U.S. businesses large and small. I dismiss Yorabs Trump quote because it has no context and no citation. For all we know, it is a second-hand quote. Navarro was especially concerned about China while too many inside D.C.
-Korea implemented rules that hurt US car companies, the steel industry, and our pharmaceutical companies. Trump managed to get concessions that opened up the Korean market for our companies.
– Trump got concessions from Germany re the auto industry.
-Trump investigated “201, 301, and 337” violations and levied import restrictions. Per The Drift, some examples include washing machines, solar panels, trademark and property rights violations.
-He replaced NAFTA
Trump used his real threats of tariffs to renegotiated deals. That might be the real context of the Trump quote. The tariff wasn’t the endgame but the tool to get a better deal.
There is a difference between offering the poor cheaper choices and China’s flooding our market with subsidized cheap stuff that so undercuts our own companies until China forces them out of the marketplace and the workers lose their jobs. China steals our technology and doesn’t respect our copyrights. It can undercut our companies because it doesn’t have to recoup R&D costs. Our “poor” aren’t so poor that we need to import stuff created by slave labor. I like how Walmart uses efficient supply chain management to be more efficient and control costs. Neither I nor Trump wants to close off trade. It was always about fair trade. You argue generalities, Trump engaged in specifics.
I have not argued for eliminating all trade and imports. I want choices. I don’t want China cornering the market using unfair trade policies. Trump went after unfair policies. Tariffs weren’t to be the end state.
I think we were last there with the kids in 1986.
My brother-in-law likes to hunt elk (and used to be a hunting guide in Idaho in his younger days) so we get to munch on some once in a while. He wasn’t able to get a permit this year, though. I think it’s sort of a lottery system.
There are elk roaming through the yards and streets of his town in New Mexico to the point where they are almost a nuisance, so I have to wonder if enough permits are being issued. I’m no game-management expert, but I am somewhat suspicious of the priorities of those people who are.
Here in southwest Michigan, whitetail deer are an expensive nuisance, accounting for a lot of damage to vehicles and crop loss for farmers. Farmers can get permits to take extra deer, but it seems to me that the DNR isn’t willing to issue enough permits to really bring down the population to the point where it’s healthy for both deer and humans. Seems to me they are stuck in the old days when deer were rare and that nowadays hunting of them could be less regulated as to the number taken. But no government department likes to admit its services are less necessary than before. (PETA people from the nearby university town are also a problem.)
On last night’s 20-mile bike ride, I had to brake for deer a few times. Usually I see deer farther off the road, at the edges between fields and woods, but I let it get late last night (and the days are getting shorter). I’m an old guy and don’t ride very fast, but the deer weren’t getting out of the way fast enough for my taste. And some of the young ones just aren’t experienced enough to know what to do on roads. Even the older ones make stupid decisions about when to jump out in front of traffic. Deer have sharp, pointy parts on them that are capable of killing people, so I don’t care to run into them. It’s been bad enough colliding with raccoons and woodchucks (and there was one near-miss with a skunk).
The human population is high enough around here that I don’t think it would work to introduce people-averse apex predators. And fewer humans are interested in being predators themselves these days, so why not let those who are hunters take as many as they can use?
Back in the 80s one irate farmer wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that the Air National Guard base use helicopter gunships to thin out the deer. Nobody took him up on the idea, but the problem hasn’t lessened since then.
We are debating “what could go wrong. ” Yorab introduced tariffs as something that could go wrong then added the “illiterate Trump” personal attack which was uncalled for and dishonest. I’ve countered with an argument that tariffs don’t always fall under the “what could go wrong” debate because Trump used them and the realistic threat of them to gain leverage renegotiating trade deals. Once one has leverage, he doesn’t need tariffs except those targeting violations of our laws and deals. The real “what could go wrong” would be failing to use them to gain leverage and thus failing to negotiate a better trade deal. The fact that it worked most of the time is proof tariffs don’t just hurt our consumers but the other country, too.
And people think that, while the decline took maybe decades, any attempt to reverse it that does not produce INSTANT RESULTS cannot be allowed.
A lower-concentration, less convenient source of protein.
Versus: