Temporary Suspension of Acceptance of Mail to the United States

And, indeed, it could be argued that past administrations have done that. Congressional deadlock has been an issue in the US for quite some time, and the administration has to go on anyway. Off the top of my head, I am reminded of Obama essentially ceding control of marijuana policy to the states by making it clear to the ATF that prosecuting federal possession crime in states that had legalized the drug was legal, within their authority... And a short path to locking in a desk job at their current level indefinitely.

But when previous administrations did this, they (usually, as far as I know) consulted with domain experts on predictable consequences and set timelines to factor that in. This administration seems to have "effective immediately" as the only timeframe it's aware of.

> If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US

No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is.

> same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center

Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.

Exports have a country of origin declared.

If I post something from Denmark to Canada, they want to know the origin of the goods. If it's China, the China tariffs (if any) apply rather than the Denmark/EU ones.

If the declaration is incorrect, the goods can be siezed or returned.

Penguin Island is a nature preserve (the whole thing), no one is building anything.

Yes, that's why I wrote 'splitting shipments'. I don't think drop shipments to a bunch of different customers should be tariffed, that's why the de minimis exception exists in the first place.

One alternative that has been tried (and is, arguably, still being tried) is Constitutional Republic.

The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect.

Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on.

It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase.

It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).

Can’t get into details in a forum comment, but I’ll say that whatever we have in most of the Western world ain’t very democratic. It is a spectrum, that currently skews very hard towards plutarchy.

The positive thing about having a king is that there was only one head to cut when things got out of hand.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887634

I’m no monarchist, but it’s about time to have a serious discussion about political philosophy instead of hiding behind the “Western representative democracy is the best we can do” cliché.

"Democracy" is the form of government; you are speaking of voting systems, which are an implementation detail, and not in the same natural category. "Alternatives to democracy" are things like despotism, monarchy, communism, fascism etc.

> I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs.

Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.

I don't see how balancing with each individual country makes sense.

Suppose for example the US needs to buy some natural resource from country X, which the US uses to build something that it sells to country Y at a very large profit. Suppose that the US doesn't export anything that country X needs or wants.

Balancing trade with X would mean cutting back on importing that natural resource, which would cut back on how much the US can build to sell to Y.

There will almost certainly also be loops in the graph of imports and exports. Things like A exports to B exports to C exports to A, with A, B, and C all having net balanced trade, but with each have a trade surplus with one of the others and a trade deficit with one.

If they all tried to force balanced trade with tariffs they just all end up paying more with no actual change in trade except possibly a reduction all around in the volume of trade.

Untrue, Congress gave that power over to the executive branch.

Has he "ended" it? Does he have the discipline, intelligence, and patience to do the work to end things legislatively or just make executive orders that will be tied up in courts for years and rescinded as soon he's out of office?

>Trump has the power to do anything that people (especially Congress) does not push back against.

Elections are run at the state level, so it's not like Trump can direct state agencies to stop counting mail-in ballots. That said, the fact that elections are run at the state level, and the fact that only a handful of swing states matter means it only takes a few pliant election officials to change the outcome of the election. eg. if Georgia's governor caved in 2020.

Not really true. In this case he doesn’t have the power to do it because the federal government doesn’t operate elections. He has no lever to pull.

At most he can convince some friendly state legislatures to ban mail-in voting, but even that may not be an automatic process (e.g., maybe some states have requirements to change the constitutional or put the item up on a ballot measure).

Every Trump policy to this point has involved some kind of lever that the executive branch has had power over: tariffs, national guard deployments, and even in the case of ICE enforcement, Trump had to go to Congress to appropriate additional funding to make that viable long-term.

As an aside, I’m not personally too worried about the mail in voting as a hot button issue. I don’t think Republicans will touch it significantly because they need turnout, too, and they need it from key demographics that use absentee ballots like older voters and military members.

Some research seems to show that mail-in voting doesn’t really benefit a specific party.

https://www.dw.com/en/us-election-mail-in-voting-biden-trump...

Also, the ultimate court seems to favour his actions. Hell of a backup plan.

National security is one of the primary motivations for wanting to protect American industry in the first place; it’s hardly pretextual. And even if it was, the law states that whether or not national security is threatened is up to the judgment of the Secretary of Commerce.

It's bringing up an entirely unrelated topic as some sort of "gotcha". Cigarette taxes were not part of the GGP's comment. I.e. a red herring

> The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism, which may or may not be justified.

The UK sugary drink tax caused a reduction in sugar consumption, and reduced obesity and dental problems in children.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/09/uk-...

"We need demand more than supply" is a macro diagnosis.

But tariff incidence is a micro question. Elasticity analysis doesn’t care whether the world has a demand shortfall or a supply glut. It asks: when a tax raises transaction costs, which side is less able to change behavior? In the long run, suppliers usually have more flexibility than consumers.

You’re mixing up two different questions. "What the market will bear" is a monopoly pricing story.

Food is messy because it's a commodity with a whole lot of substitution-- consumers have a high elasticity as a result.

We are talking about elasticity's prediction for the share producers and consumers each pay when there is a cost structure or tax change. Incidence theory is well validated and fits observed evidence remarkably well, including in 2019 studies of the effects of the 2018 trade war.

If non imported goods were price competitive with imported goods then tariffs won't be needed in the first place. Tariff's are there for artificially force imported good to be more expensive so the previous more expensive domestically produced products become price competitive.