The tariffs really are about stupid men

Like most white, middle-aged, female resist-libs (but I repeat myself), I have a love/hate relationship with Ross Douthat. But I love a listen, so when the NYT app (leaning hard into the stereotype) served me this, I couldn’t help myself:

I gotta hand it to Cass here. It would be easy to miss what he’s actually saying. But as I’ve said before, since I don’t have NYT money or readers I’m going to summarize it for you in the most straightforward way I know how. If I accidentally misconstrue him substantively, please let me know. That is absolutely not my intention.

Cass is saying the main goal of the tariffs is to bring factories and factory jobs back to the US of A. The main benefit of reshoring factory jobs is that factory work pays more than stupid men could make doing care work or customer service and tend to be located in the rural areas where stupid men already live.

Relatedly:

Here’s how

Darrell Owens

put things recently:

Women are not settling for uneducated, emotionally unavailable and off-putting men, no matter how much they’re shamed. Trump’s whole tariff schtick is actually a masculinity issue: tank the educational and administrative economy which is disproportionately female and restore a fantasy of male-oriented blue collar jobs from the early 1900s. It’ll fail and cause a lot of misery.

The male resist lib class is skeptical that international trade has hollowed out working-class America. Most economists agree automation did more to reduce manufacturing employment in the US than outsourcing. But this newsletter is about politics, not facts. And the politics just seems really, really obvious here.

I am not good at math, but here’s my proposal. Let’s not self-immolate the entire global economy on the off chance that it will result in a couple hundred thousand Rust Belt male swing voters having a job that makes them feel manly. Let’s instead just write them all checks for $1,500 a month.

Rather than force everyone who has to buy things to pay more money for them, which disproportionately hurts the people who don’t have the option to save or invest but must instead spend more of their money buying stuff they need to live, I think it makes more sense to make it easier for them to buy stuff by keeping prices low through global trade and also giving them money.

“We can’t afford that!” Okay, well. I just think it’s telling that almost half of the federal budget currently goes to either literally writing people checks (Social Security) or subsidizing their healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid) right now.

Source

I also think it’s telling that Social Security and Medicare are regressive entitlement programs. They take from the relatively young and poor and give to the relatively old and wealthy. Not content to be merely fundamentally regressive, they’re funded so regressively that I have to hand it to Congress for sheer inventiveness.

The Payroll Tax, which funds both, takes about 15% out of a person’s first dollar earned, regardless of how little that is, and caps out somewhere under $200,000, depending on the year. So this year if you earn $176,101 you’ll pay the payroll tax on $176,100 and the extra dollar, and every extra dollar on top of that, is untaxed.

Don’t even get me started on the mortgage interest tax deduction.

So, somehow the US of A can afford several massive, regressive entitlement programs but can’t afford one progressive entitlement program aimed at the losers from trade and automation. Interesting.

It seems like a really obvious solution, yet Democrats are responding to the moment by speaking lovingly of tariffs and continuing to talk about the 1% despite their mathematical irrelevance to the federal budget. If AOC has discussed reforming existing entitlements or starting a new entitlement program for dumb rural and Rust Belt men, I missed it.

Later in the interview, Cass claims that tariffs are better than, say, industrial policy because broad tariffs involve less forecasting and picking winners and losers. My brother in Christ. Our sitting President just legalized bribery and announced he’s taking offers. There were no follow-up questions on this point from Douthat.

So instead of Democrats putting all their brains together to come up with something sane, humane, and workable, we’re just going to watch as stupid men burn the entire fucking global economy to the ground to win the votes of other stupid men. Brilliant.