As a Latin American, I find it funnny it's basically impossible to tell if an American with this vocabulary and framing is like ultra MAGA or "communist".
> which our Western governments are invariably complicit in
You are not the center of the universe, my friend. People in the Global South have agency too. This sort of performative anti-imperialism goes around itself and becomes an Empire-centered account of world politics.
Yes, they do. Just ctrl+F "identification" if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.
In fact, this is such a common practice that it's nigh impossible to publich an empirical paper without discussing identification and employing an identification strategy.
You can always tell people who are not familiar with modern Economics because of it too, they will bring "but correlation is no causation" up and feel pretty good with themselves. Then you mention the identification strategy, and they just stare at you blankly without getting what you mean by that. I've seen this happen so many times.
Well, let's try to take a step back and approach this sort of stuff with a more scientific, less politically hysterical way. Models are simply mathematical fiction, useful in as much as they constrain our thinking and remove wordplay from it. They're ways of imposing some discipline on our thinking. When a paper pours over the data, makes the case for an identification strategy and its associated causality graph, and estimates some parameters, these are not Objective Truth. You get this, obviously, amazing. Ok, so, are they? Samples from a high-dimensionality probability distribution encoding the "real" parameters for the effects of immigration on any desired outcome.
So maybe try to consider this yet another data point. A paper estimating a certain effect size in a certain context shouldn't flip your entire mental model of a certain phenomenon, but it's also totally irrational to handwave away empirical results that don't match your intuition.
This is usually what's known in Econometrics as Identification. Any applied econ paper written in the last two or three decades has at least a short section discussing causality and making the case for its identification strategy.
I'm confident the people pursuing this mad agenda don't know the first thing about US budget laws and think they can just cut spending DOGE-style forever.
Baked in this plan is the idea that the revenue from tariffs will be much smaller than income tax revenues, and therefore that the federal government will also get smaller.
As a Latin American, I can't help but buy the American Exceptionalism thesis, and seeing you guys in this situation humanizes you so much. The US has such a strong bureaucracy and high bar for competence that you generally lack the immune system required for detecting con artists and social climbers - at least in politics. Ask a random Argentinian or Brazilian what politicians Trump reminds them of, and you'll get a seemingly endless lists of genuinely stupid, borderline sociopath populists. Follow up with a question on what are the consequences of having arbitrary, ever-changing tariffs on most goods for the purpose of industrialization, and you'll get a laugh, then a sad face.
Import-substitution is bad for econ 101 reasons that most people who have an axe to grind against Dems would've been absolutely capable of grasping only a few years ago. Now, it seems so many are willing to turn off a part of their brains for this short-sighted wishful thinking. "Well, the official narrative is that we're doing this to get manufacturing back, so let's wait and see" is something most people would immediately perceive as bs if a Dem was sitting in the Oval Office. Seeing a politician campaign on a stupid platform, and then getting surprised he actually shoots himself in the foot spending political capital pursuing is also very Latin American.
The good part is that the soon-to-be-coming recession the federal government just fabricated out of thin air is fully self-inflicted, and therefore somewhat easy to fix. The bad part is you have (at least) 4 more years of this lunacy, so it might take a while.
> which our Western governments are invariably complicit in
You are not the center of the universe, my friend. People in the Global South have agency too. This sort of performative anti-imperialism goes around itself and becomes an Empire-centered account of world politics.