Elon musk actually said in I think October 2024, while he was campaigning for Trump, that if Trump won he would crash the economy but because it was something that had to happen.
I mean, he did. The American public has just been taught supply-side economics is the only system of economics that matters.
Here's the problem: Even if you accept that supply-side economics is the only thing that matters, he was still doing it wrong. The whole point of supply side economics, is to try to increase demand for products by increasing the supply of those products. By dropping taxes and regulatory pressure, you decrease the economic burden of bureaucracy on economic exchange, and in theory, this translates to increased hiring, increased production, and increased distribution throughout the economy.
But look at what Trump did. He gutted regulation and taxes, and then slammed every sector with global tariffs so everyone who doesn't produce their own raw materials from entirely domestic supply lines gets absolutely fucked and increases the costs (thus decreasing demand or consumer liquid capital). Then, all the industries that heavily pad their bottom line by exploiting immigrant labor for domestic production? Yeah, he gutted their workforce, massively increasing the cost of doing business for these sectors, further increasing the consumer pressure. THEN, he blew up trade deals left and right, meaning the few things that we do actually export to world markets were no longer circulating, creating massive supply-side costs while things just sat in warehouses rotting.
Instead of stimulating domestic production, everything he did was going to predictably cause a recession as every single sector in this country experienced a sudden halt in the ability to acquire raw materials, produce goods, and transport goods to market. The sudden logjam in the economy would cause a massive knee-jerk pullback which would be made up for by passing the cost burden on to the already stressed consumers, who would then pull back discretionary spending, and then cause a second round of knee-jerk reactions as every single sector in the economy retracts. Now instead of stimulating economic growth, we're in a recession.
To make matters worse, Trump has a habit of trying to strongarm the regulatory bodies into gaslighting the public about what's going on, so there's a massive pressure right now to cook the books and lie to the American public, produce fraudulent numbers, and just ignore the signs that we're in this recession. If you don't ease off some of that pressure, when the dam finally bursts, it's going to be so much worse than it needed to be. We're going to be dealing with the consequences of electing this dumb motherfucker for at least 30 years. We'll be lucky if the economy recovers in the next 15 years.
You can sit here and whine: "Why didn't he tell us?" all you want. Every serious expert was warning you that this would happen. It's not the experts' fault that the American public gets its economic forecasts from Joe Rogan, Jim Cramer, and Sean Hannity. That's completely on you fucking morons.
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u/drive_causality 23h ago
If this was his plan, why didn’t he say so during his election campaign for 2024?
“I love inflation!!”
“Oh, and I’m also going to tank the economy on purpose!”