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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't every president do that, just to do different industries?

It's the rate of change. Things like NAFTA took many years to implement, and were debated and developed in the open. Everyone understood what would happen to the economy and that there would be a decade of transition.

Nobody announces the largest tariffs since the 1930s overnight, and selectively increases or dismantles them from week to week. Just look at this line graph: https://www.usfunds.com/resource/americas-tariff-rate-hits-t...

A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.

It could come back. Trump being removed, Vance returning to normal, then normal for the next decade and it would just be a crazy blip.

But it’s not just Trump. This is what America wants.

That's what I thought after the first Trump administration. But the fact that we re-elected him proves that it wasn’t a one-off, we will always be four years away from the possibility of a wild regime change.

That’s why it would jar to be Vance and this reigime, Kay without Trump. 10 more years of both red and blue and enough change to undo and prevent this in the future could get it out.

Germany was reformed, Japan was reforms. These things take time

But the problem is the American people want this. This isn’t some dictator in Korea or Iraq or Venezuela, this is someone with full democratic support. There are many checks and balances in the American system to avoid a single person doing this amount of damage without having widespread support.

> A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.

That is a big deal. The US has for a long time been seen as a stable economy that's easy to trade with because policy changes would take a long time to come into effect by which everyone had had the time to adjust.

Compared to the various stuff that was happening in Europe in the previous decades (at least here in the east) the US were a stable safe heaven where you could trust things wouldn't drastically change overnight.

"that's gone forever."

Your US history teacher failed you if you think even for a moment that is true.

No, not even close. The basis for most of these actions requires novel legal re-interpretations to claim power from Congress for the executive, ignore time or scope limits, and remove expert judgement from what are often supposed to be consensus decisions. The courts cases over tariffs are highlighting the unprecedented claims for both the nature of the purported emergency and the scope of the response, but this shows up in many other areas such as inventing a “power emergency” to force coal plants to stay open over the wishes of the owners, communities, and state governments. We’ve never had anything like this level of direct economic interference in the modern economy - even things like WWII policies were at least targeted and based on a real threat.

No, every President does not declare tariffs by fiat using specious emergency powers that change day to day depending on who kissed their ass most recently.

Not really.

Even setting aside whether the changes are good or not themselves, no President before has thrown away laws mandated by Congress the way the current President is.

Further, this wasn’t even considered a possibility and is only happening now due to a confluence of events… - the Supreme Court passing rulings that essentially make the President unaccountable

- the SC passing rulings preventing Congress from delegating powers which in practice means a lot of laws Congress had passed in the past have essentially disappeared (since the agencies tasked with making decisions related to them are no longer allowed to)

- Congress becoming completely supine and giving away as much power as they can

- a President that has accepted and is operating on what was until now a fringe legal theory of unbridled executive power ie “unitary executive” theory.

Yes they do. Not sure why you're being downvoted.

We don’t really do tariffs like this before Trump. At least not for a long time.

And never this sweeping: like when Japanese car manufacturers were threatening Detroit, the president negotiated with Congress and the response was targeted, not a random shotgun on other countries and industries.

True. I have not ordered a single product from the Heard Island and McDonald Islands since the tariffs were levied on them. I am champing at the bit for these to be reduced.

Haha, but every coffee, tea, snd chocolate provider I buy from has announced their prices going up and it’s not like there’s an American industry those taxes are supporting. Hawaii doesn’t have enough land to grow even a fraction of our domestic coffee consumption.

Reagon and Congress directly negotiated with the Japanese auto manufacturers. They were threatening major tarrifs.

This lead to the 1981 automobile voluntary export restraint.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8719/c8719.pdf

Yes: that’s kind of a textbook example of using tariffs strategically — there’s a valid argument that automobiles are a strategic industry worth protecting (just for military capacity alone) but they didn’t threaten to heavily tax coffee and chocolate from other continents at the same time or under the pretense that it would make those crops viable in the United States at scale.

No - not to anything like the same extent, and not through executive orders.

From someone who is close to the energy sector that's simply not true.

There's been so many EOs from Democrat presidents that cause hugely negative disruptions in the industry.

Weird that you felt the need to specify Democrats

Is this something Republicans have simply never done until now?

I was giving a specific example for one industry.

Noting the political party was just a detail.

But yeah plenty of examples of R presidents for other sectors in the past I'm sure too.

Can you give a few examples, please.

Also, I'm curious, what you feel you're getting out of your support of the Trump regime?

The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.

Would have been thousands of jobs, Canada wanted it too, it's safer than trucking/transporting by train. All just cancelled on a whim.

Then there's EO 14008 that put a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters. (fed land is 25% of oil production)

Regardless of your position on oil (I'm sure you have one), the point is those are two examples of disruption of an industry by EO from a previous president.

> The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.

> Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.

I'll admit to not being an expert on the Keystone XL Pipeline, but at least according to the timeline on wikipedia[1], the reason Biden was able to cancel it with an executive order was because Trump had approved it with an executive order, after people had tried and failed for years to get it approved the proper way (through the legislative and executive branches).

And even when Trump personally tried to make it happen, there were still years of court battles stopping construction, so when Biden came into office and ended it, it was in fact not "pretty much done" but apparently 8% done[2]

Seems like it again comes back to Trump just doing what he wants, and it was in fact him trying to unilaterally make it happen that caused that last four years or so of disruptions?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#History

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-keystonepipelinexl...

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