If only there were some way to record previous events, and then maybe (just maybe) have people learn this in a structured environment where they are allowed to ask questions. 🧐
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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For those that don't get the joke here...
This is an iconic scene that is intentionally designed to portray a very, very boring lecture from a teacher, which none of the kids want to pay attention to, that they are right to percieve this as boredom-torture.
The motherfucking actual literal topic of the lecture is how the Smoot Hawley tariffs of the 1930s massively worsened the Great Depression.
... god, Damnit.
Movie: Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Actor: former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein
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Anyone...anyone..
But that would be... an academic pursuit!!! Oh the horror!! Can't have the unwashed masses being all 'edumacated' and questioning authority!
The unwashed masses choose to remain unwashed.
Yes, a lot of them do. But quite a few others are having their critical thinking skills and understanding of the world deliberately starved by conniving politicians (usually in red states) who want to keep them as dumb as possible.
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well obviously! education turns people woke!
I believe that is now called "DEI"
You mean social media?
People wrote down Trump abusing tariffs in 2016 and there are analyses about how they damaged the economy. But nobody on lemmy knows about it. People will point out economic theory for why tariffs are bad because they seemingly don't remember the tariffs failing in the real world. Memes forgot 2016. There's even articles about politicians/billionaires selling stock using insider knowledge because "how else would they know about the tariffs?"
It's not like I read the entire fediverse but whenever tariffs are brought up I'm confused why people ignore 2016. It's not trivia, it's extremely relevant to what people are discussing.
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Friendly reminder that the rich love recessions. It's their intent to cause one.
That's when they amass greater property and wealth.
Wealth inequality always worsend following recessions.
$s never decrease - they just circulate… if nobody you know has any, and the tv is saying nobody like you has any, someone else has them
(kinda)
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There's always a logical point where making more money becomes less efficient than making other people poorer.
And here I thought The Great Depression started in 1929. I'm not saying tariffs in 1930 didn't make it worse, but they didn't cause it.
Yeah unregulated capitalist economy did that. Good thing we didn't deregulate the economy since then though.
/s
2008 happened for the exact same reasons as 1929, because some of the protections put in place because of 1929 had been rolled back many years before. It wasn't as deeply bad because (dare I say) the US had a reasonable executive branch very shortly after.
But none of those protections were reimplemented. Credit default swaps are still totally a thing, for example.
CDS markets are also, currently, right now, freaking the fuck out rofl.
Ive been saying this since Trump announced his tariff / deportation policies before he got elected:
Great Depression 2.0, with nukes and climate change this time!
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To be fair, in 1930 people had little education and no internet. Today you don't need to remember to understand what's wrong with tariffs.
Let me tell you a little something about ✨declining media literacy✨
You can leave out "media".
There were radio, televisions, and books. And while people had overall poor quality of education back then because of lack of access, Noam Chomsky mentioned people still try to educate themselves through reading.
The problem then and now is that mass communication is used by bad faith actors to emotionally manipulate the public into voting against their own interests. Back then, yellow journalism riled up jingoism. Goebbels and the Nazis saw potential use of radio for mass indoctrination, and made conscious effort to make radio cheaper and widely available in Germany.
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To be fair, in 1930 people had little education and no internet. Today you don’t need to remember to understand what’s wrong with tariffs.
This makes the assumption that Internet usage makes one more intelligent. I am pretty sure there are plenty of counter-examples.
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Sure, bad things have happened every time we’ve tried tariffs.
But we have to do something to balance the budget!
The federal government has achieved fiscal balance (even surpluses) in just seven periods since 1776, bringing in enough revenue to cover all of its spending during 1817-21, 1823-36, 1852-57, 1867-73, 1880-93, 1920-30 and 1998-2001. We have also experienced six depressions. They began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929.
So old Billy Clinton was the only president to balance the budget without causing a depression? Interesting.
The one exception occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the dot-com and housing bubbles fueled a consumption binge that delayed the harmful effects of the Clinton surpluses until the Great Recession of 2007-09.
Heh, you can't primarily blame Clinton for the thing that W had 8 years to fix. Have you watched The Big Short?
Oh, no problem then! The AI bubble will carry us through far enough until it all comes crashing down in... I want to say 2027?
Yes... The AI bubble. Which is definitely still a thing. Definitely.
- tugs nervously at collar *
I'd say this is basically just the result of neoliberalism, something Clinton contributed to, but not Clinton alone.
It was very much a bipartisan economic policy that started from Carter, put on overdrive with Reagan, and continued into our economic policies today.
See, this kind of bullshit is what actually gives some credibility to the various 'cyclical' or 'generation based' models of history.
Such models are often either unjustifiably bold/definitive/precise in their future predictions, or they are reasonably restrained, but the pop culture version of them neuters all the caveats and nuance.
... But goddamn if there isn't some real merit to the idea of humans never learning from their own history being a consistent theme of human history.
Hey they can always do a war again to get that sweet Keynesian macro economics flowing.
If there is a WWIII, I doubt America will be left alone as much as it was the last two times, especially since that led to America becoming the economic powerhouse it became.
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Had to read up on the 1828 tariff that was basically enacted as a giant game of chicken, nobody expected it to pass... then it did.
Similar to Trump winning? Twice?
I really hate that we can’t collectively learn from our mistakes.
Just the idiotic part of our society. That's more or less a third...
Always fat, stupid fucks that resemble McNuggets.
So every hundred years or so.
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