This is basically self inflicted, as usual messing up in the Middle East always ends up with consumer paying the price for their ruler's stupidity

"Oh no, my drinking water tastes like crap after I pooped in the well"

We can’t afford healthcare because they revoked the subsidies but at least we now also can’t afford gasoline too!

> We can’t afford healthcare because they revoked the subsidies but at least we now also can’t afford gasoline too!

But we can easily affort 500+ million per day for faraway foreign wars! That, no problem.

Also apparently a $5000 “dividend” for everyone if we just “do the right thing”. I thought you had to be profitable to pay a dividend, but apparently not. Oh also, that $1.5T will magically not add to the debt or come from tax dollars.

Isn't that the textbook definition of buying votes?

Apparently not.

>In Brown v. Hartlage (1982), a Supreme Court case where a Kentucky county commissioner promised to reduce his salary if elected, the Court unanimously drew a line between policy promises and vote buying. “A candidate’s promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua taxpayer, citizen, or member of the general public, does not lie beyond the pale of First Amendment protection,” Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote. Given that precedent, Trump is almost certainly within the bounds of the law (you might remember Elon Musk wasn’t charged for handing out $1 million checks to people during a campaign rally in Wisconsin in exchange for “taking the time to vote.”).

https://www.readtangle.com/trump-dividend-midterm-promise/

Yeah. And? :)

While this isn't the best way to address the issue, the US is way too dependent on gasoline/diesel for transportation. It's not sustainable.

Being unsustainable isn’t the same as breaking within the lifetime of the people making the decisions. The average US senator is 66, and that’s young compared to the current Supreme Court or the sitting President.

Maybe Trump is secretly for "the green agenda" and this was all part of the plan to stop oil.

He had that big falling out with Elon so that he can't be accused of pandering to him when electric car sales go through the roof.

I have also heard that this is really "big oil's" plan, they always manage to cause a huge price spike just when green energy is about to take over the market, somehow this stops the green revolution and forces everyone to go back to using fossil fuels.

Well if that consoles you, the US government has just approved gifting mega-bombs to Israel for another $2.8 billion. Several news call it a "sale" but it's actually a gift since most of the money comes from the US government anyway.

It’s not “another” gift if it comes out of the same $3.8b already allocated.

But antisemite arithmetic allows double counting, and even reusing the same money several more times to also fund Israel’s free healthcare.

They did not revoke "the subsidies." The ACA subsidies are still in place. What was allowed to expire was the temporarily increased COVID subsidy levels, which were sold as a temporary emergency expansion. If they had originally passed a genuine and permanent ACA expansion, rather than an expiring one, there's likely nothing that could have been done to "revoke" it by those currently in power.

Maybe you mean this, but it's important to be clear about the distinctions we don't mislead people, and then someone tells them the whole truth, and then they wonder what else we were wrong about.

"Oh no, my drinking water tastes like ~~crap~~arsenic after I ~~pooped in the well~~deregulated business interests"

Except the person doing the pooping doesn't drink from the same well as he's got his own private reserve supply.

Oh, in the end, when the hoovervill goes marching- they do..

You mean he has his own private supply of poop that is involuntarily tapped into at any random moment?

But unlike in the old days, US wins from higher prices. Even consumers wins (because they make more money on average, and their imported goods are cheaper because balance of payments shifts in US favour because of oil exports).

Voters are furious because of psychological factor of gas prices (purely psychological, it has nothing to do with economy or people's purchasing power). It bites politician's asses real hard.

So, Trump undermined himself by launching that war - but others are fine.

All of that depends on the strength of the Dollar, If the US is to deindustrialise as it aims too it needs a weak dollar. Secondly theres the Petro-dollar which depends on the Middle East states Reinvesting their profits in the US to keep the dollar strong I don't know if you checked but I don't think they are going to be making any money in the near term. So looks like the dollar will be falling anyway. Further to that there is the global debt system which largely relies on buying US treasuries if countries get squeezed by the coming inflation, theres the chance these get dumped on the market and if that happens I believe the term is "Well, Fuck."

> If the US is to deindustrialise as it aims too it needs a weak dollar.

Typo for "reindustrialize"? Is the idea to move people from well paying comfortable services jobs to uncomfortable repetitive lower paid factory work by forcibly lowering their standard of living?

>"Typo for reindustialize" We invented the language first so I'll use it as intended. The plan is for the US to not be dependent on the rest of the world (China) for its needs.

Do they make more money on average? Does any additional income cover the increase in cost of living? Becoming psychologically poor is much harder than becoming psychologically rich. I doubt that balance of payments goes anywhere near your average Joe’s pocket.

It absolutely does because balance of payments = exchange rate, and average Joe is poor and consumes disproportional part of imported goods vs the rich.

This is just wrong.

The overwhelming amount of expenses is for domestic products; lumber, food, services, rent, etc. Cheaper foreign shit isn't going to be meaningfully felt by the majority.

The part where the rich come in, is that the rich will disproportionally feel the upside of selling the fuel. The people on below average wage are just going to see prices rise and meager savings dilute, long before their wages grow.

Thats not to say the US isn't going to be well of as history's largest energy producer ever, but the reshuffling is going to be extremely painful for a majority of Americans.

Imported goods which have been made more expensive by tariffs?

No, because the US are the slowest to electrify their grid and transportation.

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Eh, how is this self-inflicted, when you have a radical has-been-empire blocking a global arteries by waging relentless proxy wars. Stop it with the "only white people can be actors on the global stage"-ism, the us basically clashes with Iran once every president (directly or indirectly) - and not by choice.

> when you have a radical has-been-empire blocking a global arteries by waging relentless proxy wars.

Took me a while to understand that you were not referring to the US here.

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Iran is a pain in the ass, but the latest round of escalation was started by Israel and the USA.

I am no fan of Iran but the white people in question literally went there to wage war with the so called has-been-empire and got their butts spanked, despite EVERYBODY warning them for years this would have been an unwinnable war

It was blatantly obvious Iran would do that if attacked. This has been known for decades.

The only thing previously stopping them holding the strait "hostage" was the threat from the US of doing an "Operation Praying Mantis v2" and destroying their navy and attacking them.

And when the US did that anyway, they had nothing to lose.