I can't believe all the other responses to this question were either positive or from someone abroad! Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing. Awful. It feels like a bad dream that we're expecting to wake up from. And people are _afraid_ of what's to come from the administration, and of the attitude that the election has seemed to condone. The feeling is so strong here that it reminds me of riding public transit on a snow day -- you can generally make any remark to any random stranger about the snow and instantly relate to one another. That's how it is about Trump. His rhetoric does _not_ reflect the views of the majority of Americans (as the popular vote shows).
Note that the question was asked around 5-8 AM in the continental US on a Saturday morning, so early responses were likely to come from abroad. Like many others here, I'm an American who lives abroad. There are a lot of reasons for this, but part of it was concern about the direction the US has been taking in the last 16 years.
I'm horrified and terrified of what this government holds for the future. It seems like the US is quickly abdicating its role as guarantor of peace (flawed as it was in that role's execution) and I worry deeply about the possibility of a divided and poorly-armed Europe being overrun by Russian influence or the Russian military. In addition, there is a terrible human cost to GOP policies with regards to healthcare, the environment, and of course telling Iraqis who put their lives on the line for the US that they can just go home and get murdered.
I worry that Trump's bluster about voter fraud has less to do with his injured pride at losing the popular vote and more to do with claiming reason to annul any GOP failures in the 2018 or 2020 elections. I can imagine a GOP supreme court, GOP congress, and military with GOP sympathies might be willing to go along with it.
The world's democracies, under both conservative and liberal leadership, have been too willing to infringe on their people's privacy, and I wonder where this goes if you extrapolate the trend over the next decade or two. The closest thing we have to a leader of the free world is Angela Merkel, and she's suffered politically for her policies.
Yes, it is... mysterious. I'd expect the demographic here to be roughly similar to, say, the Ars Technica forums, and yet HN appears to be have many more Trump apologists. I wonder why that is.
This stuff makes me worry about family back 'home' - and whether I'll be able to get back out again. Do I risk not seeing my spouse or do I hold out on visiting family? My spouse, who is not American, refuses to go back with me if I do.
Edit: Some things I thought of after I hit send:
I realize this may be unfounded, but things are so... unsure ... right now that I don't trust the government at all. In addition, I'm relying on news and it looks pretty dire. This looks like the sort of policies that American's used to laugh at.
Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again.
It is sad that many illegal immigrants will be deported, but if we provide a path to citizenship, it sends a message to others thinking about coming illegally that if you come and wait long enough, you'll gain citizenship. That's a dangerous message in my opinion.
"Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again."
Or, you know, we'll just import whatever it is for 2 cents more instead of paying people to do it.
Unless you start to make it artificially expensive to do that through tariffs.
In which case, you are essentially trying to prop up the entire economy on a house of cards. Which is what got us into a mess in the first place.
You can't build a sustainable economy on pretending things aren't actually cheap and that people aren't willing to get paid next to nothing to do them.
It's the same thinking that, for example has us building m1 abrams tanks that we toss in the desert, never to be used again, because "these people need jobs", despite the military not actually wanting to build them anymore and desperately trying to get congress to let them cancel it.
In the best case, this kind of silliness lasts until things get automated.
In most cases, this kind of silliness lasts a lot shorter time period than that because your economy is not competitive with others who aren't pretending (IE China, et al).
So unless step 2 of this master plan is "somehow completely isolate ourselves from the rest of the world while making tons of money, ..."
> Or, you know, we'll just import whatever it is for 2 cents more instead of paying people to do it. Unless you start to make it artificially expensive to do that through tariffs. In which case, you are essentially trying to prop up the entire economy on a house of cards. Which is what got us into a mess in the first place.
What about the negative externalities that come when a country no longer has an industry that many others rely on? When it comes to things like quality and having a stable supply chain, those kinds of things can be glossed over when "it's always 2c cheaper from china".
Steel is a good example, the main reason why china is still banned from trading steel on the open market even though it's so much cheaper is their lack of QA and also their government's lack of market reforms which would prevent china from effectively pumping and dumping on the world market.
Or what about food? Sure you can just import 100% of your food and let all the farmers in your country go out of business to the subsidised farmers from other countries because it makes economic sense, but anyone could see the potential dangers that could occur in the long term that would make such a plan more trouble than it would be worth.
Adidas has moved almost all their textile production back to Germany, for example – it’s all automated now, cheaper than in China, and the QA is the best in the world.
There is no way the US can ever compete with that.
Wouldn't it be better for both the environment and local automation industries [0] if we produced goods within the countries that consume them?
Whether or not local manufacturing jobs never come back, I just don't see why you would want to continue with something which seemingly has so many negative externalities (ethical, environmental, as well as a loss of means to innovate).
Production in Germany (~30% renewable, ~20% nuclear) or France (~85% nuclear) or Norway (~100% renewable) is far better for the environment than in the US (~3% nuclear and renewable combined).
Additionally, you can’t produce everything in every country – so producing as much as possible at one place and then shipping it out will be better.
> You can't build a sustainable economy on pretending things aren't actually cheap and that people aren't willing to get paid next to nothing to do them.
I'll type this until I'm blue in the fingers, but the fundamental issue driving the wedge is that any savings is prevented from actually benefiting consumer prices, due to explicit national policy.
If Walmart comes in with imported goods and cuts prices in half, then people's cost of living should go down. Even though work is leaving, people should actually need to work less to support their same lifestyle.
But as market progress would cause the CPI to decrease, the federal reserve explicitly creates enough new money to compensate and then some. The new money inflates prices precisely where it can be injected into the consumer economy - anything that can be financialized (eg houses, cars, healthcare, education).
The people are correct to be upset about their economic position - they're bearing the downsides of market progress while sharing few of the gains, by policy. Unfortunately their ire is easily misdirected toward other unfortunate victims, to keep this society-scale wealth extraction scheme going.
You also can't build a sustainable economy by importing everything and expecting everyone to be highly educated. Not everyone is capable of earning a degree, and those in the lower class need to have the potential for a comfortable life.
Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain?
hence, the only real hope being basic income and friends, not sticking head in the sand and pretending world has not changed.
You simply aren't going to be able to provide a lower class a comfortable life by giving them work that doesn't actually need doing. Worse, trying probably ends very badly.
Ideally you are right, but instead of arguing about an ideal that will never happen in our two-party political system, I think we should try to think of a solution that will at least somewhat work in this country. At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system.
As for "until the system changes": How do you think the system changes if you try to band aid it?
Who is then fighting to change it?
Systems change not generally in smooth realization that things are not going to go well 50 years from now, but instead when things hit the breaking point and the lower class revolts.
> the only real hope being basic income and friends
This may the the only real hope. But what about these people until then?
Rather than doling out welfare, it looks like Trump is shifting wealth around by increasing the incentive to hire Americans at the cost of more expensive goods and slightly smaller margins.
> The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage.
It's just supply and demand isn't it? If you have a larger supply of workers due to laws around immigration being laxed, does it not stand to reason that the increased competition would lead to lower wages?
Especially when an economy is not at full employment, like the the US.
There are two important points in the comment above : (1) Immigration is "uncontrolled" in the U.S. and (2) Wages are artificially suppressed.
I'd like to see a source on both of those parts. Each and every word chosen in the comment above is critical to the claim being made (artificial and uncontrolled; in particular).
If you are taking uncontrolled in it's most literal definition then you won't find a source, otherwise all you need to do is look at situation in the US with sanctuary cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city
As an Australian, I find the whole concept a bit baffling. That a city just decides "If you make it to this city, we will protect you from immigration laws". I don't see how you could describe an immigration system as "under control" if all the rules can be thrown out the window if you get to a "safe zone".
I know this shooting has been referenced alot in the US and i think it's a good example of this, how can immigration be considered under control when a man can be deported 5 times and still get back in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Kathryn_Steinle
> (2) Wages are artificially suppressed.
Well again, like all things in politics definitions are not always a constant. Artificial in this case could describe a host of valid definitions from Any government action on a free economy to overly burdensome regulations and mandates that force a market obviously in one direction. I'm sure some people would argue that taxation itself is wage suppression.
(1) A "sanctuary city" does not prove that immigration to the U.S. is uncontrolled. At best, it shows that illegal immigrants are protected.
(2) I'm not looking for political definitions. I'm looking for facts via research and data which show that wages are "artificially" suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration.
So far, I've only seen are plausible theories and hypothesis. Now, I'm waiting for actual data and research to back it up via a credible independent process.
I'm not really an expert in Economics. I tried to read through it but couldn't quite understand the main take away. What exactly is the relevant take away wrt this discussion?
The best empirical research that tries to examine what has actually happened in the U.S. labor market aligns well with economy theory: An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages. This report focuses on the labor market impact of immigration.
I get what the report focuses on. The report has to be contextualized with two important phrases used in the parent comment "uncontrolled immigration" AND "artificial suppression" of wages.
Logic. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in a country of about 300 million. Assuming around 7 million of those work & assuming 6 million of those work at or below minimum wage, that means that 2 percent of the population is probably underpaid. That doesn't sound like much until you consider that almost all of that 2 percent is working in some sort of manual labor, whether it's agriculture, construction or housework.
If the logic is so sound, it should not be difficult to prove. So, I'd wait until you prove it via data and get accepted by an independent fora. Until then, this is one of the many plausible theories.
Tl;Dr - wages for lower class/lower educated minorities are hurt, but employers gain an advantage (lower labor costs). There's also a paper by professor in econ from Cornell about African Americans suffering the most from it, but my phone won't link to the PDF.
Outside of academia you just have to go to your local home depot to see how much cheaper you can get someone to come work for you for the day, or go to any massage shop charging $25 / hour instead of $60+ while employing illegal immigrants.
It's important to note what the original claim of the parent comment was. It was not "illegal immigrants" but "uncontrolled immigration" which includes both legal AND illegal immigrants.
For me and many many others I know, it's terrifying and enraging. Also I'm deeply ashamed.
Also wrt HN: like some others I am a bit surprised to see the strong Trump support here, but then, hate is so often over-represented behind the shield of anonymity.
Hacker News represents the American tech community, and the American tech community appears to be moving towards an embrace of right wing and neo-reactionary ideology, which is odd given the anarchist and leftist roots of hacker culture.
The mythology of Trump casts him in the mold of the Silicon Valley archetype of self-made Ubermenschen like Thiel, Bezos or Jobs, who render the state and the status quo obsolete through sheer force of personal will and aggression.
I despise Trump, but in a perverse way, I welcome the damage he will inevitably do. The harder he and his staff of racist oligarchs swing the pendulum of American politics to the right, the more swift and brutal the retribution will be when it swings back, as it must.
He's going to discredit the axioms of the alt-right, disgrace the Republican party and, hopefully, ruin the office of President so much that actual core political reforms take place if for no other reason than to prevent anything like that from happening again.
I've lived in Canada my whole life, but I'm also a born U.S. citizen.
I feel hopeful about the outcome of the election. I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government. The nice side effect of businesses not believing that he could become president, is that they didn't have as much time to buy favours.
The proposed rules for regulatory bodies (one in, two out) could considerably reduce the financial and emotional cost of doing business in the U.S. and perhaps finally undo some long-standing pay-for-play regulations.
As it stood, I would have felt terrified and uncertain if I were to start a business in the U.S. one year ago.
I don't think Donald Trump is necessarily any better of a person than the other candidates; but I think he has a better chance of doing good by accident. The alternatives seemed like they were trying to trick the U.S. into paying for their expensive lifestyles in spite of the consequences to the public.
I feel hopeful about the outcome of the election. I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government. The nice side effect of businesses not believing that he could become president, is that they didn't have as much time to buy favours.
Secretary of State: Exxon's chairman and CEO
Secretary of the Treasury: Goldman Sachs' CIO
Secretary of Commerce: The "King of Bankruptcy"
Secretary of Labor: CEO of Hardee's
Secretary of Education: From the Amway/Blackwater family
I could go on, but pray tell: What would be the point of buying favours when you are in the position of doling them out?
> I could go on, but pray tell: What would be the point of buying favours when you are in the position of doling them out?
I would say that your question is a loaded one, one that assumes the worst of each of the people you listed. That they are all corrupt and would put their own businesses above all else.
A question that I don't see asked often (and when it is the answer isn't very apparent) is who else would be better suited?
Considering the Obama administration was heavily weighted toward academia and political establishment figures, something which Trump campaigned hard against, who else would you pick other than the biggest business leaders?
There is a huge difference between the face of Exxon being secretary of state, and the secretary of state secretly representing Exxon.
It is a lot easier to tell when the CEO of Exxon is being transparently preferential to Exxon, than it is to say for sure that the secretary of state is being opaquely preferential.
And even if he can manage to slip Exxon-preferential policy through without rejection, I would argue that the United States of Exxon is far better for Americans than the United States of Saudi Oil Money. That's what you got with the last Secretary of State.
> I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government
I think that until now it is exactly the contrary you say
> The proposed rules for regulatory bodies (one in, two out) could considerably reduce the financial and emotional cost of doing business in the U.S.
And this is not in favour of the corporate sponsorship, is it?
I suppose outing all the evil environment regulations is very good for corporations and business but how about the actual people?
> I don't think Donald Trump is necessarily any better of a person than the other candidates; but I think he has a better chance of doing good by accident.
You seem to have a very specific definition of good. It only applies to corporations
I don't appreciate that you cropped my quote regarding regulations, but I'll address your statement.
Regulations are actively campaigned for by large businesses to create supply-side pressure (fewer, or no, new companies can meet the basic regulatory requirements of your business, therefore you control more of the market with more certainty).
If you want to talk about effective environmental regulations for people, we could start with strict liability for waste dumping. It took all too much time for Dow Chemical to see any pressure for water contamination scandals, and they still haven't faced much. The other major environmental case I can remember is U.S. EPA versus BMW, but that one is clearly preferential. If it were a U.S. car manufacturer, the penalties would be less dire with near certainty.
As for your last point, I'm sure you see the folly in it. Without getting too far into it, I'd like to point out that I gain nothing from the hegemony of established businesses. There's no reason to imagine that I'm out to make their lives easier.
If you're thinking that there are more corporate ties to the Trump administration than there would have been to the Clinton administration, I can only encourage you to reconsider. On top of corporate ties, there are even preferential ties to foreign governments.
