Economics Thread

All taxes should be consumption based and not on income. Would solve this “issue” which is not really an issue.

Ultimately, people are lazy and don’t want to do what’s necessary to better their lives so it’s just easier to say it’s successful people fault.
 
Haven’t heard much of a follow up after Trump threatened to shut off all trade to Spain when they didn’t let him use their bases in the way he wanted. Maybe he’ll still follow through, but it doesn’t look like it at this point.

Contrast that to what would’ve happened pre-SCOTUS tariff ruling. He certainly would’ve slapped an immediate massive tariff increase on Spain. Cost increases and uncertainty and lobbying for exceptions and general chaos would’ve followed. We were able to avoid it all.

And this is why, yes, process DOES matter.
 
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https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/03/why-is-the-usda-involved-in-housing.html

In yesterday’s post, The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, I wrote that Trump’s Executive Order “cuts off institutional home investors from FHA insurance, VA guarantees and USDA backing…”. The USDA is of course the United States Department of Agriculture. In the comments, Hazel Meade writes:

USDA? Wait, what????
Why is the USDA in any way involved in housing financing?
Are we humanly capable of organizing anything in a rational way?
Click to expand...
It’s a good question. The answer is a great illustration of the March of Dimes syndrome. The USDA got involved with housing in the late 1940s with the Farmers Home Administration. The original rationale was to support farmers, farm workers and agricultural communities with housing assistance on the theory that housing was needed for farming and the purpose of the USDA was to improve farming. Not great economic reasoning but I’ll let it pass.

Well U.S. farm productivity roughly tripled between 1948 and the 1990s as family farms became technologically sophisticated big businesses. So was the program ended? Of course not. Over time the program subtly shifted from farmers to “rural communities”–the shift happened over decades although it was officially recognized in 1994 when the Farmers Home Administration was renamed the Rural Housing Service. Today rural essentially means low population density which no longer has any strong connection to agriculture.

So that’s the story of how the US Department of Agriculture came to run a roughly $10 billion annual housing program for non-farmers in non-agricultural communities. And how does it do this? By supporting no-money-down direct lending and a 90 percent guarantee to approved private lenders. Lovely.

It’s a small program in the national totals, but an amusing example of the US government robbing Peter to pay Paul and then forgetting why Paul needed the money in the first place.

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Government.
 
https://twitter.com/x/status/2032192078546182577

Gotta say, I’m a bit surprised they stuck to their guns on. It was actually pretty effective policy if you consider the goal to have obviously been to reduce H1-B usage. I’m surprised they even bothered with the revenue lie. It becomes a hiring tool you can either use when you feel like it because you have a pile of cash or is effectively eliminated for you if you’re a small business. There’s no way any rational actor believed this wouldn’t result in this outcome.
 
Yep,
Iran has been preparing for this since the 1980s, if not the 1950s.

we've got is a weak vain carnival barker with a different story every 2 hours
 
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