It's really remarkable how many former Democrats with populist Democrat positions are in powerful positions in this administration, e.g. RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Peter Navarro. But let's not forget the most powerful former Democrat in the administration: Donald Trump!
Am I the only one who feels that Batya’s credibility on just about everything is completely undermined by her total ignorance of one of the most blatant, far-reaching, and transparently corrupt schemes in modern history—committed by the very president she supports? If she’s not heard of the meme coin dinner, then in what remote corner of the Siberian tundra has she firmly and totally buried her Putin loving head?
Bro like she said she’s never heard of that. Like this is the first time she’s hearing of the $TRUMP meme coin. But like if it turns out to be a thing she’ll totally criticize dear leader for it. Like if he announces a top holder dinner 6 days after the first 10% vest/unlock causing the price to spike 50% in 50 minutes she’ll be on his ass about it.
It doesn't even make sense. She doesn't have to be kneejerk defend trump on everything. She would even gain credibility if she could just admit the executive branch shitcoin graft scam is bad
I do feel like this was the most daring section for Batya. Kmele tells her that Trump is giving carve outs to tariffs to billions so they can continue to do business with China. It's a refutation on of the entire perceived Trump agenda in a single example. She just pretends it's not happening.
The “working class“ should live their lives in walking-upright daily terror over the possibility that any of Batya‘s ideas would ever come to pass. I think it is because I have always liked her, but I have not been any more annoyed by any single Trump devotee that I’ve been listening to over the last three months. I think it is because I cannot believe that she is so unfathomably stupid that she believes what she is saying. And she does. She believes it. It’s really incredible to listen to her recite this fact free nonsense over and over again. But it’s not only her total misconception of how poor people in this country live. It’s not just her total misconception of the things that could be done to make things better for working class and lower income Americans. It is also her total inability to be critical of anything Trump does. That is one thing that has changed in her in the last year and a half or so. She is a friend, she is a friend of the podcast, and it is nice to have her on. But she is not a serious person, and She is not someone worth listening to anymore. This podcast talks to everyone. That’s why we like it and that’s why we listen to it, but there are only so many hours in the day. There are only so many days in this life.
“She is not someone worth listening to any more” sums it up well. I have spent years now aiming to encompass every point of view and strive for greater fairness and direction in our national politics. But I have now found a perspective that is without merit, and it’s someone purporting to be a champion of the working class who somehow imagines that Trump breaking everything magically evolves into better circumstances for the least fortunate Americans. She could not be more wrong, and her deaf ears make it so much worse.
I,too, found myself thinking, she really believes it. Then I realized she’s just very good at pretending she believes it. She’s in over her head and knows it.
The key point here is that she was very in over her head. When she’s howling her views uninterrupted, she’s loud and certain, but the moment she meets opposition or a hard question, her voice drops and everyone involved is treated to endless “ums”, an almost inaudible tone and the unsure sentence structure of a nervous 7yo kid that was just asked “who ate all the cookies?” by disapproving parents.
That's a tell of someone arguing from emotion. I had to check this tendency in myself when learning how to deliver convincing rebuttals in court, because otherwise you lose all your momentum and certainty during the opponent's reply and are left a stuttering mess.
All cults, religious or otherwise, produce fanatics. It's apparently a feature of human brains that I assume was of some use in our evolutionary history.
Batya’s ideas are very concerning to me as a working class person. I work in commercial construction and in my field at least, we’re terrified. When I talk to my parents, they tell me things like “trump is ripping off the band aid.” That sort of idea is terrifying. The policies they’re pursuing are literally taking away my life line. Imagine if the cost of copper rises by 100%? What does that mean for us? Our jobs are already bid! Budgets have been set and now the cost of inputs will just soar? How much construction will happen? You want to bring back manufacturing with no one being able to even build the factories you want because the cost of all materials makes it impossible without further government involvement! This isn’t pro America, I don’t even know who it benefits! But surely not the working class.
It is so telling that everyone defaults to her being wrong. I never hear exact facts refuted. It’s a different opinion on the interpretation from the start of any point she makes. There is no effort to even hear her out on the points…which I thought was why we listened to alternative sources like podcasts
There’s massive obvious holes in every position she takes! She’s openly claiming Trump’s working class supporters are going to be ok with rising prices and her theory of trade completely ignores the reality of integrated supply chains, or the fact that China has a concentration of manufacturing expertise/capacity that dwarfs what the US had at its absolute apex. Arguing for an effective “embargo” of China (her words!) is arguing for the US to become a poorer and weaker economy. And that’s before we get to her moronic view of the Ukraine war, where she cannot understand how Trump abandoning Ukraine is just as likely to prolong the war as it is likely to end it.
She is a maga philosopher and philosophy does not a logistician make. There is zero understanding in this entire administration of how the architecture of Global Supply chains are so intertwined that it is impossible to disentangle them, literally at the drop of a hat. If anyone thinks covid was bad and the hoarding and the empty shelves.... this is going to be calamities if allowed to continue. We are 2 weeks in. Wait till day 45.. trust me this is my business and she's a retard
I've been shot down for saying this here before, but inside of Batya's head is a coherent worldview and a set of real concerns for which she advocates.
I disagree with almost everything she says (and I think she's conveniently ignorant of facts, which is a broader critique about how we argue in this country), but I don't think she's operating in bad faith. I just happen to disagree.
That being said, the final nail in the "listening to Honestly" coffin for me (besides Michael moving on from hosting) was how often they had her on and specifically her very obvious strategy of employing fake laughter to deride people with whom she disagreed. Nails on the chalkboard to my ear. She tried it a few times here but I think most of it was genuine shock and delight at Michael shouting "both of you shut the fuck up" followed within the hour by "what are you talking about?!" when Kmele apologized on his behalf.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. more shouting (but maybe that's enough Batya).
I hadn't heard of Batya until recently, but suddenly she's on every podcast I listen to and I've been so confused about why she's being taken seriously. Now I know!
A swiss army knife is usually a sub-optimal yet mostly effective way to get the job done when you don't have better options. That's not tarriffs. As the meme goes: Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way.
If the swiss army knife bottle opener worked by smashing the bottle and pouring the wine into the open cuts caused by the bottle shards, then it would be a decent analogy.
There's so much to that comment too, between the elitist misunderstanding of how much things cost and how much the "working class" wants things to cost, theres also the economic ignorance of what will happen to the cost of Samsung phones the second their largest competitor can't make money...
Samsung's cost just as much as an iPhone. They do have lower tier phones but they're certainly not $300. Remove competition from the market, make it impossible for most to buy iphones, and what happens to the price? The in demand phones price will automatically go up because of said increased demand and because they can. Let alone the increase in tariffs with South Korea that Trump has already implemented.
not only that, why would we want the value of Apple to go down? it has so much presence in so many retirement portfolios held by the very people Batya professes to care about, and she doesn’t even realize it
Yes! That and the fact that it's not just the elite who buy iPhones. Almost everyone, including this mythic working class also has a smartphone. All give to us by free trade and markets.
Say what you will about Apple, but it will go down in history as one of the most innovative AMERICAN companies in the world. This kind of narrative is MAGA's wet dream. So she'll just buy a Samsung while her hero fights to save America.
To accept Batya’s premise? No, actually. Take the COVID vaccines coming from China. I’m going to need a cite for that because I just spent some time on Google and wasn’t able to find anything to support that assertion.
Or take shipbuilding. That’s a serious problem but it predates the rise of Chinese manufacturing or their entry into the WTO
And you know who could build ships for us? Allies like South Korea or Japan, who combined build more than China. That is, if you actually keep them as allies and don’t tariff their ships…
Yes! This was so annoying, she said it multiple times. Obviously we don't "all agree", kudos to the Fellas for pushing back as best they could, but she is just painful to listen to. It's similar to Moynihans idea that you cant debate a conspiracy theorist. Batya just loudly asserts so many platitudes and statistics that it is hard to even process them all fast enough and nearly impossible to refute or fact check in real time
Watching Mommy and Daddy argue is always pretty rough. But seeing that they still love each other afterwards, and that they still love you, that's a real life lesson right there. Plus the next episode recap by Arch is going to be a banger.
Around ten minutes in, I began to wonder if this was actually the podcast on which I would finally agree with Batya. Ten minutes later.... not so much.
Batya tends to fillibuster (one might even say mau mau) her way through criticism if the other person doesn't show some backbone so Moynihan's shouting really kept this thing on the rails. Kudos also to Matt for trying to get a metric for Trump's success or failure from her. It didn't work, but it was a valiant effort.
The guest is still wrong about nearly everything but I do like her more after hearing this.
She’s literally the most unlikable person I can imagine. A fucking retard who supports policies and a dear leader that is actually destroying the country.
Average doesn't tell the whole story. When the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the average income goes up, and people get fooled into thinking most people are doing great.
Post the numbers again, but with quartiles this time, with male labor participation rate, with U6 unemployment, with credit card debt, with comment debt, and with how many people are now forced to live at home because that $80k somehow can't buy a home.
People are not poor because there are rich. The gap between rich and poor means absolutely nothing via a vis the availability of opportunities for everyone to earn a proper living. One example; Jeff Bezos is not a multibillionaire because he is hoarding a stockpile of gold and keeping it from the rag wearing masses. He has general control (stewardship) of the massive job generating, economy lubricating entity called Amazon. If, say, Sens Sanders/Warren got their supremely misguided dreams enacted and take away a portion of Bezos “wealth” and redistribute to serve equity or whatnot, the result would not be redistribution but destruction of wealth making mechanisms currently making us all “wealthy” and making life better. We ALL become poorer.
I have personally sat on no less than fifteen interview boards to fill positions of good pay/ benefits requiring only driver’s license and High School diploma. Offers made but positions are still vacant at this very moment.
Tariffs are and economic drag with no benefit. As a social change mechanism, they are inept. They are close to only the nuclear football as way too much power for any one single chimp to wield.
The middle class is indeed shrinking but so is the lower class. The upper class is growing. Caveat: those numbers are a bit old at this point. But the trends are pretty steady, even through past recessions.
A few things....we don't want to be producing consumer goods that will sell in China. That's a race to the bottom. One of the primary costs that goes into any manufactured commodity is labor. Right now, at a plant in NC that makes t-shirts, labor costs are at least $6-8 per shirt. That's at $16/hr. Do we really want to go lower than that just to attempt to increase exports to China? Fuck no.
Second, it kills me that the people waxing romantic over manufacturing jobs have never actually held one of those jobs. My family had generations of men working blue collar jobs. My old man wanted nothing more for me than to NOT work in a factory. Work in production is mindless, repetitive, soul sucking work. My first job out of high school was in a factory that made auto replacement glass, swing shift. I spent 8 hours taking a piece of glass off of a pallet and placing it on a conveyor...every 8 seconds... And, I got slapped around by some Vietnamese dude who was the line foreman every time I placed a piece incorrectly. I left that job job and joined the military because that sounded like a much, much better gig. We have hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that remain unfilled in the US. Why? Because that work sucks.
Third, I don't think these people understand how long it takes to bring new capacity on line, especially in industries like automotive. The company needs the floor space. Then they need all the capital equipment. Then they need tooling. They'll need a new supply chain and, in many cases, they'll need to qualify new raw materials because they can't just drop in aluminum or titanium or even thread from a new supplier. It has to be qualified. In the case of the auto industry, that alone can be a months long process. Then....they need people to staff the plant. It'll be years before some of that capacity comes on line.
Lastly, their compassion for the "working class" is uniformed and kind of condescending. The "consumers are nimble" bit made me yell at my radio. Tell that to a "working class" parent shopping for school clothes finding that the cost of a pair of pants their 8 year old will outgrow in 6 months has doubled because the manufacturer "on-shored" their production.
She doesn’t even try to make sense of what she is herself saying. Why do we need tariffs? “To bring back working class jobs, because housing, education and healthcare are too expensive now”.
The working class, and everyone else (She thinks the US is 90% working class and 10% elites, I wonder where she thinks she falls) is going to have a big surprise in a few months when the last ships from China arrive (the are few on the way now and those are only 40% full), and the warehouses start to empty out. Shortages and price increases are a sure thing, and even if Trump caves it will take a few months for lower tariffed items to work their way through the supply chain, so it will be a long hot summer of pain.
And she believes that the companies bribing Trump for exceptions will follow through and make their products in new factories, when they can’t possibly do it in a reasonable time frame, and not only as Moynihan said, all the parts of most consumer electronics products are sourced from many different countries, and those will all be tariffed, as will the automated equipment the factories need. And it will be hard to find workers, who now consider Amazon warehouse work as too grueling and underpaid at $20/hour. If they can’t stand to simply put items in boxes, how will they be assembling miniature electronics components?
And her fixation on “Fordism”, by which I think she means how Henry Ford based his factory workers wages to be high enough to buy one Model T every two years, is strange. If Apple had that same policy, even if they doubled the price of a domestically produced iPhone, the equivalent wages would be less than $1/hour.
I made Bibles for two summers at a Donnellys factory where I grew up. It’s hard work, but you also get to clock out after your shift and be done. You used to be able to provide for your family working there, but now they hire temps, many of them don’t speak English, and you can no longer raise a family on that income. There’s a lot of truth to what Batya is saying.
I also worked for Alcoa one summer making plastic bottle caps. It was hard work and I hated that job. It motivated me to stay in college. Saying that people who promote manufacturing have never worked that job isn’t true. I worked it, and it sucks, but what sucks more is unemployment, not having a purpose, being addicted to substances, and being a drain on society. Americans used to understand that.
Why is it a binary choice between working in manufacturing line jobs and substance abuse, not having a purpose, etc.? There are plenty of office jobs that offer the same clock in / clock off schedule as the idealized mid 60s factory job. The skills tend to be more portable as well.
Also, if you are talking about the printing industry dear god that is a classic case of how technology, not foreign competition, reduced employment.
I'm familiar with Donnelly. I used to spend alot of time with their specialist financial printing division, and I'm old enough to remember them still using hot type for that with printing in financial centrers (and having really good beer selections...). All long gone due to email and digital. Before that they got caught in litigation after then closed a big Chicagoland plant for normal printing due to the *Sears Catalog* going away.
If you are bitching about changes at Donnelly, it has everything to do with digital printing requiring far less skilled hands and being far more amenable to centralization and rationalization. It has almost nothing to do with foreign competition. Tariffs will not bring back your lost imagined paradise of a bible printing middle class, and if you had looked around you would have heard old employees mourning the past and terrified of the future, because the writing was on the wall for that industry as soon as computers could print anything past dot matrix.
That was more fun than the stoned Sullivan episode. I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone who's not already a listener, but I highly enjoyed it.
I found the Sullivan Ep much worse as I was really looking forward to Him being on the show and it was (as He was too) wasted. Batya seems to be everywhere these days and saying the exact same things over and over .
The balls on this lady calling free trade a “RINO” position having been a Republican for 6 months and only after they embraced leftwing economics….
"Typical RINO positions like free trade and free markets". Literally screamed WHAT while listening.
It's really remarkable how many former Democrats with populist Democrat positions are in powerful positions in this administration, e.g. RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Peter Navarro. But let's not forget the most powerful former Democrat in the administration: Donald Trump!
Burying the lede a bit there, lol.
I know, the "rino" moniker from the Marxist damn near killed me
I don't think "RINO" us a valid term anymore. Small government, free trade, pro civil liberties types aren't even republicans in name anymore.
Agree. The term isn't really new. It used to refer to Republicans who frequently voted with Democrats, on certain issues anyway.
I’m unsurprised - Batya has made her socialist populist leanings known all the way back in her book on journalism
But also, it’s the most infuriatingly frustrating thing to hear “republicans” say the problem with the world is…free trade?!?
Batya demonstrated that "RINO" now means "Disagrees With Trump's Policies." Obviously, "DWTP" is hard to pronounce.
But in her cult who created the RINO term that’s exactly what that is…
Bat-no
Am I the only one who feels that Batya’s credibility on just about everything is completely undermined by her total ignorance of one of the most blatant, far-reaching, and transparently corrupt schemes in modern history—committed by the very president she supports? If she’s not heard of the meme coin dinner, then in what remote corner of the Siberian tundra has she firmly and totally buried her Putin loving head?
Bro like she said she’s never heard of that. Like this is the first time she’s hearing of the $TRUMP meme coin. But like if it turns out to be a thing she’ll totally criticize dear leader for it. Like if he announces a top holder dinner 6 days after the first 10% vest/unlock causing the price to spike 50% in 50 minutes she’ll be on his ass about it.
✅
It doesn't even make sense. She doesn't have to be kneejerk defend trump on everything. She would even gain credibility if she could just admit the executive branch shitcoin graft scam is bad
But, she’s a cultist. That’s the whole point.
A+ comment, my dude.
Putin pronounced "Putine" for some reason.
Poo-tin. That was so annoying.
It's related to the effort to make Canada a state.
Yeah, that was some ostrich shit for sure.
I do feel like this was the most daring section for Batya. Kmele tells her that Trump is giving carve outs to tariffs to billions so they can continue to do business with China. It's a refutation on of the entire perceived Trump agenda in a single example. She just pretends it's not happening.
Worse, she brings up sorros as a whataboutism.
Are you telling us, Batya, that you approve of the behavior of Sorros and your other whataboutisms?
I’m not a doctor, but I prescribe a fifth of liquor prior to listening to this podcast.
Not enough
I'm not trying to kill the new commenters.
It's better to die drinking liquor than cool aid
It's ok, the tariffs will
Two drink minimum on this one for sure.
What the hell is in your drinks? Everclear?
It’s literally in the name of the podcast
thatsthejoke.jpg
the common standard of care for a TFC podcast
But if you have a PhD in English you can pretend to be one on TV!
The “working class“ should live their lives in walking-upright daily terror over the possibility that any of Batya‘s ideas would ever come to pass. I think it is because I have always liked her, but I have not been any more annoyed by any single Trump devotee that I’ve been listening to over the last three months. I think it is because I cannot believe that she is so unfathomably stupid that she believes what she is saying. And she does. She believes it. It’s really incredible to listen to her recite this fact free nonsense over and over again. But it’s not only her total misconception of how poor people in this country live. It’s not just her total misconception of the things that could be done to make things better for working class and lower income Americans. It is also her total inability to be critical of anything Trump does. That is one thing that has changed in her in the last year and a half or so. She is a friend, she is a friend of the podcast, and it is nice to have her on. But she is not a serious person, and She is not someone worth listening to anymore. This podcast talks to everyone. That’s why we like it and that’s why we listen to it, but there are only so many hours in the day. There are only so many days in this life.
She seems to have this view of the working class as noble savages. It’s odd.
This is part of a long, long tradition on the left, dating back to the French Revolution when Rousseau's ideas were new.
Such a good observation- it rings fairly true after listening to this episode.
“She is not someone worth listening to any more” sums it up well. I have spent years now aiming to encompass every point of view and strive for greater fairness and direction in our national politics. But I have now found a perspective that is without merit, and it’s someone purporting to be a champion of the working class who somehow imagines that Trump breaking everything magically evolves into better circumstances for the least fortunate Americans. She could not be more wrong, and her deaf ears make it so much worse.
I,too, found myself thinking, she really believes it. Then I realized she’s just very good at pretending she believes it. She’s in over her head and knows it.
The key point here is that she was very in over her head. When she’s howling her views uninterrupted, she’s loud and certain, but the moment she meets opposition or a hard question, her voice drops and everyone involved is treated to endless “ums”, an almost inaudible tone and the unsure sentence structure of a nervous 7yo kid that was just asked “who ate all the cookies?” by disapproving parents.
That's a tell of someone arguing from emotion. I had to check this tendency in myself when learning how to deliver convincing rebuttals in court, because otherwise you lose all your momentum and certainty during the opponent's reply and are left a stuttering mess.
nope, I think she's a true believer. Marxism has alway been able to produce true fanaticism. I don't know why, but it does
All cults, religious or otherwise, produce fanatics. It's apparently a feature of human brains that I assume was of some use in our evolutionary history.
Totally agree re: her sincerity. I think the world makes sense in her head. It's not based on reality but it's real to her, for whatever that's worth
Batya’s ideas are very concerning to me as a working class person. I work in commercial construction and in my field at least, we’re terrified. When I talk to my parents, they tell me things like “trump is ripping off the band aid.” That sort of idea is terrifying. The policies they’re pursuing are literally taking away my life line. Imagine if the cost of copper rises by 100%? What does that mean for us? Our jobs are already bid! Budgets have been set and now the cost of inputs will just soar? How much construction will happen? You want to bring back manufacturing with no one being able to even build the factories you want because the cost of all materials makes it impossible without further government involvement! This isn’t pro America, I don’t even know who it benefits! But surely not the working class.
She’s a rich kid carpet bagger for the working class. Here’s the thesis she produced on an inflated out of state tuition at UC Berkeley not long ago:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt3538r0nv/qt3538r0nv_noSplash_c819ddce016cfa2c5ee39717d00c40b0.pdf?t=ny5wyj
My husband when he saw this episode title: "How can she be so hot and yet so wrong?"
I can fix her
Ahh yes, the magic penis theory.
LOL
The secret is that she is so hot, so that is why people let her be so wrong.
Didn’t even know people think she’s hot. She’s so retarded I just think of her as a mid 40 populist leftist turned maga cult member
It is so telling that everyone defaults to her being wrong. I never hear exact facts refuted. It’s a different opinion on the interpretation from the start of any point she makes. There is no effort to even hear her out on the points…which I thought was why we listened to alternative sources like podcasts
Well, that’s just it. She doesn’t really deal in facts, only feelings
There’s massive obvious holes in every position she takes! She’s openly claiming Trump’s working class supporters are going to be ok with rising prices and her theory of trade completely ignores the reality of integrated supply chains, or the fact that China has a concentration of manufacturing expertise/capacity that dwarfs what the US had at its absolute apex. Arguing for an effective “embargo” of China (her words!) is arguing for the US to become a poorer and weaker economy. And that’s before we get to her moronic view of the Ukraine war, where she cannot understand how Trump abandoning Ukraine is just as likely to prolong the war as it is likely to end it.
She is a maga philosopher and philosophy does not a logistician make. There is zero understanding in this entire administration of how the architecture of Global Supply chains are so intertwined that it is impossible to disentangle them, literally at the drop of a hat. If anyone thinks covid was bad and the hoarding and the empty shelves.... this is going to be calamities if allowed to continue. We are 2 weeks in. Wait till day 45.. trust me this is my business and she's a retard
I've been shot down for saying this here before, but inside of Batya's head is a coherent worldview and a set of real concerns for which she advocates.
I disagree with almost everything she says (and I think she's conveniently ignorant of facts, which is a broader critique about how we argue in this country), but I don't think she's operating in bad faith. I just happen to disagree.
That being said, the final nail in the "listening to Honestly" coffin for me (besides Michael moving on from hosting) was how often they had her on and specifically her very obvious strategy of employing fake laughter to deride people with whom she disagreed. Nails on the chalkboard to my ear. She tried it a few times here but I think most of it was genuine shock and delight at Michael shouting "both of you shut the fuck up" followed within the hour by "what are you talking about?!" when Kmele apologized on his behalf.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. more shouting (but maybe that's enough Batya).
Dude so true
See some of my comments below responding to some of the factual statements she made.
what facts?
As with Melania, her hotness is greatly exaggerated...
how dare you, Robert. Melania is a gorgeous national treasure and easily the hottest First Lady we have ever had
We need an inquiry into Gen X taste.
I'm 34. but curious, which First Lady would you post up over Melania?
To be clear I'm not saying she's ugly, just massively overrated.
But to answer the question:
Jackie Kennedy, Jill Biden, Nancy Reagan, Frances Cleveland
wait, in terms of "hotness"?? surely you jest. Only Jackie is in the ballpark
I will not tolerate this slander on Dolley Madison or Jacqueline Kennedy!
Ya, since this isn't a video podcast, I'm gonna have to tap out at the 50 minute mark. I cannot take her inane ramblings anymore.
Batya like 5 seconds into her first real contribution “Elon Musk in an agent of the CCCP” JFC.
*putting on a Johnny Rivers record* "Secret...ASIAN MAN! Secret...ASIAN MAN! They givin' you a Tesla...and takin' away your autonomy."
Eh
He’s a horndog. She’s better than average but not hot.
her sense of humor raises her looks higher. She sounds like she'd be a lot of fun
I hadn't heard of Batya until recently, but suddenly she's on every podcast I listen to and I've been so confused about why she's being taken seriously. Now I know!
Good God this is a tough listen
Tariffs as a swiss army knife almost broke me.
I agree with the comparison: they are absolutely useless doing a job that requires real tools and expertise.
A swiss army knife is usually a sub-optimal yet mostly effective way to get the job done when you don't have better options. That's not tarriffs. As the meme goes: Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way.
If the swiss army knife bottle opener worked by smashing the bottle and pouring the wine into the open cuts caused by the bottle shards, then it would be a decent analogy.
We need a cassingle of Moynihan and Livia trashing Meghan Markles Show.
i’m just stuck on “i’ll just buy a samsung” cuz i mean i can’t even
Also that she didn’t even know how much she paid for it 😂 FOUND THE ELITE!!!
Let them eat Samsung.
There's so much to that comment too, between the elitist misunderstanding of how much things cost and how much the "working class" wants things to cost, theres also the economic ignorance of what will happen to the cost of Samsung phones the second their largest competitor can't make money...
Samsung's cost just as much as an iPhone. They do have lower tier phones but they're certainly not $300. Remove competition from the market, make it impossible for most to buy iphones, and what happens to the price? The in demand phones price will automatically go up because of said increased demand and because they can. Let alone the increase in tariffs with South Korea that Trump has already implemented.
not only that, why would we want the value of Apple to go down? it has so much presence in so many retirement portfolios held by the very people Batya professes to care about, and she doesn’t even realize it
Omg, me too! So much subtext in that comment.
that was chef's kiss.
Yes! That and the fact that it's not just the elite who buy iPhones. Almost everyone, including this mythic working class also has a smartphone. All give to us by free trade and markets.
Say what you will about Apple, but it will go down in history as one of the most innovative AMERICAN companies in the world. This kind of narrative is MAGA's wet dream. So she'll just buy a Samsung while her hero fights to save America.
“Can we all just agree…”
To accept Batya’s premise? No, actually. Take the COVID vaccines coming from China. I’m going to need a cite for that because I just spent some time on Google and wasn’t able to find anything to support that assertion.
Or take shipbuilding. That’s a serious problem but it predates the rise of Chinese manufacturing or their entry into the WTO
http://shipbuildinghistory.com/statistics/decline.htm
And you know who could build ships for us? Allies like South Korea or Japan, who combined build more than China. That is, if you actually keep them as allies and don’t tariff their ships…
Yes! This was so annoying, she said it multiple times. Obviously we don't "all agree", kudos to the Fellas for pushing back as best they could, but she is just painful to listen to. It's similar to Moynihans idea that you cant debate a conspiracy theorist. Batya just loudly asserts so many platitudes and statistics that it is hard to even process them all fast enough and nearly impossible to refute or fact check in real time
I might be more excited for the comments
No lie I took a break a half hour in so I could just scroll through the comments and really ABSORB them as I read them.
“I mean, I like the whole faithfully execute the laws and swear on the Constitution stuff…” —Matt Welch (1:26ish). Well-said. 🙏
This comment was the shining moment of the whole interview for me.
Agreed. It put everything in perspective, as Matt’s off-the-cuff remarks often do.
Watching Mommy and Daddy argue is always pretty rough. But seeing that they still love each other afterwards, and that they still love you, that's a real life lesson right there. Plus the next episode recap by Arch is going to be a banger.
My head is spinning listening to this. So much material, so little time. And with a work deadline looming 😣
Sorry your mom is an industrial grade moron and ignoramus…
Judging by the political polarization by gender charts, this is not uncommon.
Maybe I'm just a bad liberal but I find this metaphor so so cringe...
Around ten minutes in, I began to wonder if this was actually the podcast on which I would finally agree with Batya. Ten minutes later.... not so much.
Batya tends to fillibuster (one might even say mau mau) her way through criticism if the other person doesn't show some backbone so Moynihan's shouting really kept this thing on the rails. Kudos also to Matt for trying to get a metric for Trump's success or failure from her. It didn't work, but it was a valiant effort.
The guest is still wrong about nearly everything but I do like her more after hearing this.
She’s literally the most unlikable person I can imagine. A fucking retard who supports policies and a dear leader that is actually destroying the country.
I am so mad and frustrated listening to this. Here are some relevant facts:
1992 Us households
~96,300,000 of them @ $61,450 avg income (2023 dollars)
2023 US households ~139,179,000 of them @ $80,610 avg income (2023 dollars)
Households from US Census data (StLouis Fed)
She’s economically illiterate
Average doesn't tell the whole story. When the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the average income goes up, and people get fooled into thinking most people are doing great.
Post the numbers again, but with quartiles this time, with male labor participation rate, with U6 unemployment, with credit card debt, with comment debt, and with how many people are now forced to live at home because that $80k somehow can't buy a home.
People are not poor because there are rich. The gap between rich and poor means absolutely nothing via a vis the availability of opportunities for everyone to earn a proper living. One example; Jeff Bezos is not a multibillionaire because he is hoarding a stockpile of gold and keeping it from the rag wearing masses. He has general control (stewardship) of the massive job generating, economy lubricating entity called Amazon. If, say, Sens Sanders/Warren got their supremely misguided dreams enacted and take away a portion of Bezos “wealth” and redistribute to serve equity or whatnot, the result would not be redistribution but destruction of wealth making mechanisms currently making us all “wealthy” and making life better. We ALL become poorer.
I have personally sat on no less than fifteen interview boards to fill positions of good pay/ benefits requiring only driver’s license and High School diploma. Offers made but positions are still vacant at this very moment.
Tariffs are and economic drag with no benefit. As a social change mechanism, they are inept. They are close to only the nuclear football as way too much power for any one single chimp to wield.
I think you may have replied to the wrong comment. It seems unrelated to mine.
I'm curious how you would respond to this?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2020/10/28/better-workforce-development-programs-are-undermined-by-government-policy/
The middle class is indeed shrinking but so is the lower class. The upper class is growing. Caveat: those numbers are a bit old at this point. But the trends are pretty steady, even through past recessions.
I'll take a look today
I think my answer is trying to imply that the poor are richer because of freer trade.
A few things....we don't want to be producing consumer goods that will sell in China. That's a race to the bottom. One of the primary costs that goes into any manufactured commodity is labor. Right now, at a plant in NC that makes t-shirts, labor costs are at least $6-8 per shirt. That's at $16/hr. Do we really want to go lower than that just to attempt to increase exports to China? Fuck no.
Second, it kills me that the people waxing romantic over manufacturing jobs have never actually held one of those jobs. My family had generations of men working blue collar jobs. My old man wanted nothing more for me than to NOT work in a factory. Work in production is mindless, repetitive, soul sucking work. My first job out of high school was in a factory that made auto replacement glass, swing shift. I spent 8 hours taking a piece of glass off of a pallet and placing it on a conveyor...every 8 seconds... And, I got slapped around by some Vietnamese dude who was the line foreman every time I placed a piece incorrectly. I left that job job and joined the military because that sounded like a much, much better gig. We have hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that remain unfilled in the US. Why? Because that work sucks.
Third, I don't think these people understand how long it takes to bring new capacity on line, especially in industries like automotive. The company needs the floor space. Then they need all the capital equipment. Then they need tooling. They'll need a new supply chain and, in many cases, they'll need to qualify new raw materials because they can't just drop in aluminum or titanium or even thread from a new supplier. It has to be qualified. In the case of the auto industry, that alone can be a months long process. Then....they need people to staff the plant. It'll be years before some of that capacity comes on line.
Lastly, their compassion for the "working class" is uniformed and kind of condescending. The "consumers are nimble" bit made me yell at my radio. Tell that to a "working class" parent shopping for school clothes finding that the cost of a pair of pants their 8 year old will outgrow in 6 months has doubled because the manufacturer "on-shored" their production.
She doesn’t even try to make sense of what she is herself saying. Why do we need tariffs? “To bring back working class jobs, because housing, education and healthcare are too expensive now”.
The working class, and everyone else (She thinks the US is 90% working class and 10% elites, I wonder where she thinks she falls) is going to have a big surprise in a few months when the last ships from China arrive (the are few on the way now and those are only 40% full), and the warehouses start to empty out. Shortages and price increases are a sure thing, and even if Trump caves it will take a few months for lower tariffed items to work their way through the supply chain, so it will be a long hot summer of pain.
And she believes that the companies bribing Trump for exceptions will follow through and make their products in new factories, when they can’t possibly do it in a reasonable time frame, and not only as Moynihan said, all the parts of most consumer electronics products are sourced from many different countries, and those will all be tariffed, as will the automated equipment the factories need. And it will be hard to find workers, who now consider Amazon warehouse work as too grueling and underpaid at $20/hour. If they can’t stand to simply put items in boxes, how will they be assembling miniature electronics components?
And her fixation on “Fordism”, by which I think she means how Henry Ford based his factory workers wages to be high enough to buy one Model T every two years, is strange. If Apple had that same policy, even if they doubled the price of a domestically produced iPhone, the equivalent wages would be less than $1/hour.
I think we all agree that a German Shepherd is a cat, therefore Putin is right.
I made Bibles for two summers at a Donnellys factory where I grew up. It’s hard work, but you also get to clock out after your shift and be done. You used to be able to provide for your family working there, but now they hire temps, many of them don’t speak English, and you can no longer raise a family on that income. There’s a lot of truth to what Batya is saying.
I also worked for Alcoa one summer making plastic bottle caps. It was hard work and I hated that job. It motivated me to stay in college. Saying that people who promote manufacturing have never worked that job isn’t true. I worked it, and it sucks, but what sucks more is unemployment, not having a purpose, being addicted to substances, and being a drain on society. Americans used to understand that.
Why is it a binary choice between working in manufacturing line jobs and substance abuse, not having a purpose, etc.? There are plenty of office jobs that offer the same clock in / clock off schedule as the idealized mid 60s factory job. The skills tend to be more portable as well.
Also, if you are talking about the printing industry dear god that is a classic case of how technology, not foreign competition, reduced employment.
I'm familiar with Donnelly. I used to spend alot of time with their specialist financial printing division, and I'm old enough to remember them still using hot type for that with printing in financial centrers (and having really good beer selections...). All long gone due to email and digital. Before that they got caught in litigation after then closed a big Chicagoland plant for normal printing due to the *Sears Catalog* going away.
If you are bitching about changes at Donnelly, it has everything to do with digital printing requiring far less skilled hands and being far more amenable to centralization and rationalization. It has almost nothing to do with foreign competition. Tariffs will not bring back your lost imagined paradise of a bible printing middle class, and if you had looked around you would have heard old employees mourning the past and terrified of the future, because the writing was on the wall for that industry as soon as computers could print anything past dot matrix.
That was more fun than the stoned Sullivan episode. I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone who's not already a listener, but I highly enjoyed it.
I found the Sullivan Ep much worse as I was really looking forward to Him being on the show and it was (as He was too) wasted. Batya seems to be everywhere these days and saying the exact same things over and over .