It’s going to be difficult to suss out a signal from employment data until October or November, by when we should have about half a year of post-tariff data [2] to compare with ‘24. (We may not know anything surely for a year.)
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/sa-methodology-...
[2] https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff...
People are already acting like Mamdani is responsible for everything that happens in NYC; they should pay more attention to the guy who's been in charge the past 3 years.
I personally think he should at least be impeached because I have the woke liberal opinion that people in power taking bribes is bad.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mayor-eric-adams-case-dismis...
You also failed to mention how popular Mamdahni is among every day, non-rich voters. They seem to agree with me.
Capital class wildly different than wealthier working class. But in all honesty, bring the taxes all the way down to me at least. Anyone making a million a year could be taxed a lot more and still live comfortably. The capital class above me could afford a LOT more taxation and still live lives of unbridled luxury.
Are there money games I am unaware of that means they are running brittle houses of cards and marginal percentage increases in taxes would topple their empires?
I just don't understand the fear or concern, but I am not ludicrously wealthy so I suppose I wouldn't.
If someone is truly strong then they have strength to spare for others. I guess I assume the same would be true of wealth, but perhaps you don't get ludicrously wealthy by being proportionally generous.
Notice your statement is a broad morale, and I'm presenting a consequence out here in the real world.
The math of booting wealthy people from the city doesn't play out well for the city.
It seems reasonable at first glance, but I’ve seen no proof of it. California, usually mentioned as having high taxes, still has a large percentage of the ultra-wealthy in the USA. Same with NYC. Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?
So while I admit to not providing you with a study in this comment [1], it is pretty obvious they have been done and I don't see what there is to challenge on the topic. Obviously there is an optimal tax rate for maximising revenue, this is an area where there has been a huge amount of research done and if a municipality pushes their rates beyond that point (which will happen with some regularity) it'll see its tax take go down. There isn't much to document, anywhere with taxing authority would be feeling out limits experimentally all the time.
> Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?
They moved states for tax reasons, so yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved. If notable people are starting to move then the system sounds like it is very close to the critical point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (not that it'd be total tax burden that needs is the limit, not just the slice imposed by one area).
[1] Wikipedia has a lot of sources though if you actually want to look it up.
This is what I mean when I say I'm not sure if you're actually interested in the answer. The Wikipedia article is a pretty thorough treatment. This isn't some new or unexplored area, it is about as well trodden ground as the economists have. There isn't any need to gather more evidence to retest it yet again, the numbers are well known.
The income-maximising tax rate is between 60 and 75% and depends a bit on local conditions (probably mostly migration and language barriers). Lots of places have gone beyond it, happens all the time, and they generally lower their tax rates when someone points out they could make more money that way. You'd probably find the California tax people do studies on this sort of thing fairly regularly; not that anyone particularly cares or that I'm going to try and look it up. The real question is whether the government should even be trying to maximise the tax take.
Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.
NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.
NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.
No, you're making baseless assertions / talking points / propaganda.
But if they do choose to leave, or at least stop expanding their businesses, you can’t deny the rational self interest
"If you tax the rich, they will leave" is a myth created by the rich so that you won't tax them.
In the middle of the 1900s, the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was 91%.
Nobody is going to leave over Mamdani's extremely modest proposal.
You forgot to mention that only half of capital gains were subject to tax. So the highest marginal rate was 45.5%.
In any case, this is all a major deflection resulting from the lie that the low job creation rate is due to "the threat" of a possible future mayor rather than tariffs.
We've done fine without them in the past, and we'd be better off without them now. At the end of the day, labor and its fruits are the primary origin of value in an economy, not the handful of individuals that have had the immense luck and/or dubious ethics required to capture that value for their personal gain.
1) That we're at the threshold for taxes that the wealthy will accept. I would bet many wealthy folks feel attached to their homes as their identity, and it would take some amount to price them out. Like, clearly a billionaire would leave if the cost to stay was a 100% of their wealth, but would probably stay if it was $10 more in taxes. So there's a very nebulous line somewhere in between. I suspect we are not close to that line.
2) That wealthy people living in an area are storing their wealth or declaring that area as their home. Plenty of ways to shield wealth from local taxes, and plenty of ways to claim a place as your home without being taxed by it.
3) That having wealthy people in your community is a net positive for the community. Wealthy people tend to use a lot more resources and distort local politics for their personal gain rather than the gain of the community. Maybe we'd be better off if they weren't around, and several families moved in to take their place. Wealthy people don't ride public transit, normal folks do. Wealthy people can push city council positions to reduce transit, normal folks don't have that influence. Maybe we need more normal folks around.
4) That businesses owned by the wealthy are a net positive compared to, e.g., workers co-ops. Maybe we could be a bit more collective in our approaches and a bit less lionizing towards the wealthy person who got lucky. Maybe we need more community oriented businesses run by members of the community they live in and fewer wealthy business owners racing to the bottom.
Oh good. Then we can ignore your baseless assertions / talking points / propaganda and outright [non-truths].
Also, on a purely pragmatic note, capital is mobile. If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.
This is a myth created by the rich so that you won't tax them.
Also keep in mind the US is a winner here. The UK loses the most millionaires and it's had an observable impact on their economy.
It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs
Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
the US has the highest class mobility among western nations
Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.
But yeah, some statistics indeed are just likelihood that the ranking order changes, or even self-reported...
It's like the definition of "middle class". Everyone thinks they're middle class. The OECD calls anyone with 75% to 200% of the average income "middle class". Classically the term means you are above the labour class but not noble.
AFAIK class mobility is measured by class at birth compared to adulthood (i believe as measured by net household wealth)
Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.
This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.
A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.
Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...
My priorities do not align with your postulating
Fine, then we can safely ignore anything you write.
> HN is beyond absurd
Because not everyone agrees with you.
Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.
Mississippi has a GDP per capita of $53k.
11% of Mississippi's population has no health insurance.
Mississippi is one of the highest inequality states in the US. Its median income is $30k. It's Gini Index is 49%.
It has poor physical and social infrastructure by advanced country standards.
Spain has a GDP per capita of $35k. Its median income is $20k.
Everyone in Spain is covered with modern healthcare.
Spain has a nationwide high speed rail network. A lot of its infrastructure is top-notch compared to Mississippi and even wealthy parts of the US.
This is despite Spain having some of the highest inequality in Europe, and undoubtedly a host of other problems, including decreasing affordability for average people. Yet it's inequality is far lower than Mississippi, with a 31% Gini Index.
So perhaps GDP per capita doesn't tell the full story. Also, I'm being fair by comparing Mississippi to one of the poorer countries in Europe, not one of the middle or wealthier countries.
Statistics might not be ideal, but making policy decisions based on anecdotes is far, far worse.
As do I. They all seem to have moved to cosmopolitan places with advanced economies, not Mississippi. I also have friends and relatives that have migrated to Spain. Overall, there is no mass migration in either direction.
> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
A high speed rail network and universal healthcare are not statistics, they are as real as it gets.
But I definitely agree that Spain is probably not a good place if you want to make an absolute shitload of money.
So you reject mathematics in favor of a few cherry-picked experiences.
I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.
I'll stay thanks.
The nation V. nation median ranking of class mobility is hardly the Nation V. {many nations} average of wealth.
Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.
Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.
And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.
You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.
What is the incremental value of having a rich person around? Increased yacht sales?
<meme>hahahaha no</meme>
There are countless places that are more than happy to accept capital with few questions asked. Including, funnily enough, the US itself.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-becomin...
>Individual studies have estimated absolute mobility rates for recent cohorts of roughly 50% in the US (Chetty et al. 2017), 53% in Canada (Ostrovsky 2017), 70% in Germany (Bönke, Harnack, and Luthen 2019; Stockhausen 2018), and 77% in Sweden (Liss, Korpi, and Wennberg 2019).
From https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2020/wp-2020-11-tren...
Look at this chart: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Look at the divergence from the US.
Canada's GDP per capita is barely above 2013 levels (~4%), meanwhile the US' is 60% higher. Wages in Canada have been stagnant, there is NO social mobility at all, it's completely fucked.
Where I came up with this statement? Actually knowing things about economics and following the CURRENT numbers. Not a 2017 study (which probably took a couple years and using data from 2015 or earlier) which is completely worthless in 2025.
Is it though?
For many of our current societies I would say that we have failed to distribute the available resources. And even more so if we look at how we have failed distributing resources between societies and countries.
> Capitalism is a morally reprehensible way to distribute resources
Agreed!
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45079542 and marked it off topic.
2% is hardly worth fleeing.
And Mamdani hasn’t even been elected yet.
That's true, but it didn't predate the election of a man who has made his understanding of tariffs and economics crystal clear in the months and years leading up to January 2025.
> Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.
Only all the people who voted for them and all the people who voted against them?
See also: Harris is an elite! (Trump is more elite), Trump knows business (he's a pretty bad business man), Harris did nothing in office! (She was VP), Trump is the underdog! (He's literally already been president)
https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/09/09/harris-policy-pl...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-harris-campaign-promises-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
All of the above were posted prior to the 2024 election.
Edit: did you read these links?
“ The American people lacked any concrete policy positions from the presumptive, and then official, Democratic presidential candidate for seven weeks following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.
Despite the absence of clarity on key issues, Vice President Kamala Harris quickly rose in the polls compared to Biden”
Or continue on with your willful ignorance.
It's no skin off my nose either way.
Trump was a terrible candidate and could've been beaten if a good candidate running against him.
My point being: at some point the American electorate has to take responsibility for picking the worst available person. The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
Perhaps i didn't make my point clear. Indeed ur statement is true. I was referring to those who hated Trump but also hated Harris and so DIDNT VOTE. My point being that if the Democrats had fielded a compelling candidate many of those who didn't vote may have voted for them. Enough to win. The Democrats learned nothing when they fielded Hilary Clinton and lost. Joe Biden barely won. And only because they were sick of Trump and also how he handled Covid. Also don't forget the Democrats tried to run with Joe for a second term when he was clearly unfit. Huge turn off.
So yes, my argument is the Democrat Party is partly at fault for Trump 2.0. They did not field a worthy candidate.
"Vote Blue no matter who" is a failed strategy. And rightly so.
That's a bit revisionist. He won the popular vote by almost 5 percentage points. That's a lot. He also got more electoral college votes than GWB (both times) and Trump in 2016.
I honestly don't blame the guy for believing it was his responsibility to the country to run for re-election and keep Trump out of office. His heart was in the right place, even if the rest of him wasn't up to the task anymore.
So anything a lot kess than that looks to me like ”barely". Perhaps im too harsh?
I get why Michelle Obama wont run but i think she would've trounced trump in 2020 or 2024.
The democrats need to field a candidate that has her kind of appeal to beat trump.
What is wrong with my logic?
It sounds like ur logic is: if u don't want trump then u have to vote for the (shitty) democrat candidate.
My point of view is based on those who DIDN'T vote at all, not people who voted for trump because they didn't like harris.
Oh wait, its entirely their (non voters) fault trump won, is what u would argue, correct?
So the democrats have no responsibility to field a candidate worthy of a vote except their not trump or Republican?
* Groups like Project 2025 spent years preparing an assault on our legal system
* This time Trump populated his administration with sycophants from day 1, instead of starting out with establishment figures
* The GOP has spent the last 8 years reconfiguring themselves into supplication
This time, Trump is fully unhinged and unfettered, and he knows the legal peril he faces if the White House isn’t GOP-held for the rest of his life.
This combined with the utter self-emasculation of the Republican Party to Trump's incoherent, or at best self-serving, garbage is the most worrisome thing of all.
People who actually understand politics and who realize that the extent to which politicians keep their campaign pledges is usually related to how their parties end up performing in the legislature, rather than just being dishonest.
That uncertainty makes it very hard to manufacture goods or buy raw materials.
You now have a situation where one week the cost of a commodity is X and the following week it could be 2X. The butterfly effect across industries also cannot be predicted.
Many industries also seem to be still recovering from the pandemic period with supply of spare parts still being de-prioritised over making parts available for new units. :/
Modi pissed Trump off by refusing to support a nomination for him to get the Nobel. And Trump hit India with tariffs. Unsurprising to anyone paying attention.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/trump-modi-in...
No one is so stupid they can’t follow this, and predict the aggregate consequence well in advance.
It’s only by willfully suspending rationality, that people convinced themselves the obvious wouldn’t happen. And one of those is an insistence that the only valid form of prediction is at an absurd level of prediction granularity, rather than the inevitable storyline as a consequence of Trump’s intrinsic corruption and ability to corrupt everyone around him (or else they discarded and flung far away).
Trump is famously a racist, a rapist, a felon, and a vile insurrectionist. Nothing good could possibly have followed his election. Indeed, we’re really lucky so far. It’s going to get much worse.
tl;dr Elect an abuser, get abused.
It is rather interesting to see the difference in standards of accountability for different presidents. Some are responsible for the economy even if its behavior is not sure to their actions. Others are not responsible for poor economic performance even when taking actions universally agreed to harm the economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
Before tariffs, in the post-pandemic recovery, we also didn't see hiring go back to pre-pandemic levels. There are other forces like AI adoption.
I don't have good intuition around the connection between tariffs and jobs. Yes, higher inflation may require cooling down the economy. But right now it looks like rates will be going down and anyways rates haven't really slowed down the economy that much. Inflation did come down. Inflation can have some benefits too for employers, it erodes the employee's salaries (and potentially other costs). If companies can raise prices and not pass that on to employees or to their suppliers (as they've seemingly done during this last inflation cycle) then it can be a win for them. A weaker dollar can also help US companies compete globally.
If companies are doing well and growing, and they seem to be, why aren't they hiring more? The largest US tech companies are sitting on piles of cash and making huge profits, for some time now. Is it just that they've become more productive and need less people? Maybe they don't have anywhere to put more people towards? Maybe they're hiring outside the US (this one is not a maybe- they are). Is the uncertainty related to progress in AI? to other macro factors?
How do you bid on a big project if you don't know what materials will cost next month, or 6 months, or a year from now? It's fucking impossible. And with inflation, labor cost is spiking. It's hard for people to get buy, so they're asking for more. It has investors and banks spooked to loan money for projects, because they could easily fail with so much volatility.
Nobody mentioned yet the drop of the dollar making every single import 10% more expensive since the start of the year. That is on top of every tariff and is inflationary.
Government spending went up by a surprising amount while tariff revenue rolls in. I suspect one reason there is no detailed budget is to create the space to move things around without much notice. If a large swath of the tariffs would be ruled illegal (already happened twice, one step to final) the situation could become interesting.
I imagine to make American exports cheaper.
It will take years to make America an exporting nation. In the meantime many many businesses will go bankrupt. This administration doesn't care as they just see it as a cost of fulfilling their longer term plan to make America an exporting nation.
For example in France their own Le-Trump aka Marine Le Pen had 41% votes last election cycle, so nothing really happened and system centrists won again, politics remained moderate and predictable. But if she or her ideological successor even takes 50%... hooboy, EU will see some Orbanification just like USA does today.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/22/trump-tariffs-replace-income...
Imagine trying to get a loan from a bank to make a USA manufacturing plant, pointing to the 150% Chinese tariff. A week later the tariff is 25%. Does your math still work? Probably not. Will that bank continue the loan? Nope. Will the bank even entertain a similar proposal from someone else right now? Nope.
If you want to grow USA manufacturing you need to subsidize it, or give private industry confidence it's not going to lose them money. If you can't do that, your relying on charity / non-profit / philanthropy... And I don't see many of those in manufacturing.
I don’t believe most if not all of us have experienced such an immature and erratic administration. We are taxing trade partners, flip flopping on rules and nobody knows what to make of it.
Also we need to remember that the guy responsible for the numbers was fired for allegedly political reason and that could have been political and no one will ever be sure. So how can one trust the numbers in that situation? It has been... Weird
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/sa-methodology-...
You can't wave this away with "NYC is a leading indicator for the US economy". To the extent that it's true at all, you could say it about any large city in the US.
[1] Like, say: interest rates, the business cycle, AI, the slowdown in software hiring, or the minimum wage increase that NYC implemented on January 1, 2025.
“Ignore this data point, NYC is special.” Color me skeptical.
I'll put it this way: if I were ignoring it, I'd be ignoring one more data point than you are in cherry-picking a single example.
The big, blinking, obvious YoY change for anyone here is tech employment.
> “Right now, we have zero bushels of soybeans on the books with China for this fall harvest that has begun in the Deep South,” Ragland said. “Normally by this time, close to 40% of our sales for the marketing year are on the books. And with zero on the books right now, it is alarming for American soybean farmers.”
https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/us-soybean-exports-to-c...
The first time that Trump screwed over with tariffs, they got tons of bailout money that we all paid for.
Not all sectors of the economy are so lucky. The big man at the top must be paid with either bribes or allegiance or both.
For example you can tariff bananas all you like, that won't spark widespread banana production in a climate that can't grow them.
Not arguing one way or another, but your reduction isn’t quite accurate with the affects tariffs can have
Also, shipping to continental US is limited by the Jones Act and the lack of capacity in US built, owned, and crewed shipping lines. Assuming a desire to produce things in the US, I don't think it's sensible to tarrif bananas to grow them in Hawaii, and then relax the Jones act so they can be shipped to the continental US on foreign carriers.
If there’s demand for 5 million units and supply of 4 million, prices will go up and 1 million will move out of the city
In your second case they increase rent and people are forced into having roommates.
The president and his defenders are playing us when they appear to want a growing economy. They don’t.
Source: Me trying to use it and encountering prior fraud. Light reading suggests many have experienced it.
Well run systems experience fraud. It's something you generally want to minimize, but like, it's not necessarily an indicator that the system is broken. Like... AWS has tons of fraud. AWS is still very much not a disaster. (Well, it kind of is a disaster, but mostly because it's a machine that chews up humans via oncall, which is unrelated to their fraud.)
"NY's COVID unemployment fraud topped $11B, partly due to system failures..."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nys-covid-unemployment-fraud-topp...
It looks like fraud rate was typically 5-10%, which might be high, might be "fine". In 2020-21 and 21-22 fraud rate jumped way up to 20%, which is obviously way too high.
But in 2023-24 fraud rate is back down below 10%. We don't have 24-25 data yet, but it looks to me like we had a couple of unusual years during the pandemic, but audit controls seem to have reigned a lot of that back in.
I'd say, evaluate this year's data and then decide if this was a blip or not, then revise your mental model with data.
One of the following is true:
- The numbers somewhat-accurately reflect the trend of employment
- Fraud levels were reduced 66x in one year
If it was the second one, that's a sufficiently massive reduction that news stories would be written about it. There would be stories about this great victory over fraud.
A quick search showed no particular anti-fraud measures or claims of effectiveness unique to that time period.
Edit: typo
(I am an immigrant myself (via the legal means) lest you take my observation as a xenophobic expression.)
Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Stat...
Why is Spanish singled out? Why was "bilingualism" being promoted so heavily? Meaning no offense, wtf has the Spanish speaking community contributed to American history to get this special perch? So yeah, there are all sorts of little pockets here and there, and grandpas and grandmas of various flavor speaking the old country's tongue but only one was promoted.
The phenomena is obviously political in nature and to construe is as anything else, including "prejudice" or "xenophobia", is disengenuous.
> Meaning no offense, wtf has the Spanish speaking community contributed to American history to get this special perch?
About half of the total land area of the US was formerly colonized by the Spanish. What “history” are you referring to?! And what “special perch”?
> The phenomena is obviously political in nature and to construe is as anything else, including "prejudice" or "xenophobia", is disengenuous.
This is innuendo. Say what you want to say, and don’t couch it behind a passive “political”. Who’s driving what outcome, and for what ends. Go on!
Special perch is clear: this is a nation of numerious ethnicities with an equal number of distinct 'mother tongues'. The special perch is the recent push to normalize having an entire subset of the society speak a langauge that many of us do not speak and have no desire to learn.
And again, this is pretty localized. Salt Lake City has less Spanish than Los Angeles. Flushing, Queens has more Mandarin than Spanish or English.
It remains unclear who is being harmed here. And what solutions are you advocating for?
Since these are online-only versions of the NYTimes, and immigration sources change throughout history, no. This particular market did not exist 100 years ago.
However, the portion of non-English speakers has remained about the same since the 1910 census began asking about this. ~100 years ago, German was the most prominent non-English language spoken in the U.S., and there were over 500 German-language newspapers in circulation. Yiddish newspapers were common in New York. And Spanish newspapers were widely read in Texas. In Chicago, Polish newspapers were common. San Francisco had the Chinese World (世界日報) newspaper.
Your idea that, 100 years ago, everyone spoke English, and we didn’t support non-English speaking is just flatly wrong.
> Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
I do not care if it is not a "good look" by some standard. What I care about is cultural and value system continuity and national cohesion.
Good news! We share the value of "be cool about it, we're all just trying our best"
Latino voters swung 20 points towards trump from 2020-2024 after being told that Trump would deport all of their illegal family members. A majority of latino men straight up voted for Trump and Latino women was like 47-53.
Legal immigrants hate illegal immigrants. Most legal immigrants are wealthy and well connected and have never had to do the shit jobs that their illegal brothers do. It's pretty hard to legally immigrate without lots of money/skills or at minimum beauty (i.e. for green card marriage). Illegals are usually dirt poor and will do anything for a better life.
I'm getting far more willing to defend making English the official language of the USA for this reason. You want to pretend like you're a WASP legal immigrants? Act like one then!
BTW - Americans don't see the distinction between "european latino" and "Mestizo". You're all Latinos and are treated the same way by WASPs.
I don't think not doing tariffs would have had much of an effect.
When you look at GDP, it's coming from California, NYC, etc. Even in red states, like Texas, it's Dallas and Austin carrying everyone else.
Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.
NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html