Not So Tariffic

 

For those paying attention, it’s old news: Trump’s devastating tariffs, like everything else he’s ever said or done, are based on lies. That they were allowed reflects the cowering fecklessness of Congressional Republicans, who, as in all things Trump, kneel before him (or is it behind?)

Our constitution gives tariffs to Congress, except, per a fairly recent law, in cases of national economic emergency. Which Trump declared. When the US was outpacing all other countries in a period of steady economic growth beginning when Joe Biden ran him out of office. The biggest lie, of course, is that tariffed countries pay.

His calculations for the amount of tariff applied have been greeted with laughter. Touting a formula leaving heads scratched and jaws dropped, later festooning it with symbols that changed nothing, he equated trade deficits to tariffs. But, whereas some countries have tariffs on American imports (Switzerland’s is about two percent, e.g.), that’s not the whole story.

Trade deficits exist because other countries make products Americans want at prices they like, while America makes fewer, reciprocally. Deficit is a misnomer. It’s commerce. Nor is it, as Trump says, a rip-off. They give us goods, we give them dollars. Should we not avail ourselves of better TVs?

Trump’s Commerce Secretary foresees tariffs allowing Americans to be the ones screwing tiny screws into iPhones. What other tiny delights await?  

There was no emergency. Trump has been fixated on deficits and tariffs since he was bankrupting casinos and scamming suckers. It’s his bumper-sticker understanding of economics and his desire to abuse power for its own sake. “Look what I did,” he must be saying, surveying the detritus of the world’s economies. “Trump. I did that!”

One thing he got right: White House toadies and Congressional weaklings immediately fell in line, even though most had previously decried tariffs, rightly, as dangerous and inflationary, causing expensive trade wars. Which, Trump hallucinated, are “easy to win.” Now, it’s “We need to suffer to make things right.” Well, not so much “we” as “you.” Millionaires and billionaires all, are they suffering? Perhaps we’ll learn, someday, how many sold their stocks before “Liberation Day.” 

Trump’s economic slaughter of the western world is exactly the quid to their quo that Russia expected from him, making well-spent their investments in his two elections. On Russian TV, they’re giddy. 

Back in the USSA, senseless, vindictive cutting continues. The National Weather Service will end its translations of weather warnings. Because who cares if “those” people are harmed? Not MAGAs. Trump (because, theoretically, Musk works for him, as opposed to reality) even fired the doctor at NIH who provided the unreleased Covid-19 treatment that saved his life when he was deathly ill. Gone, too, are cancer researchers, vaccine experts, and other medical leaders.

Trump’s impeachment backstop, J.D. Vance is lying Trumpically about their next target, Social Security. He's a liar among equals.

Announcing the end of American greatness, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last ended with this: “We have a deeply stupid government . . . But also, we have the government we deserve. The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.” 

Is he wrong? Maybe. Though far too few, half a million Americans gathered in cities across America to protest his trumpling of the Constitution, the cruelty, the flagitious destruction amok in Kingdom Trump. When big enough, protests still matter in what’s left of our democracy. After it was revealed that Trump’s vindictive, bicep-flexing DEI purge included removing Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad from the Parks Service website, the outrage led to reinstatement. But much of our important and teachable history remains gone. The not-white parts.

Outrage? How about the DOJ no longer investigating cryptocurrency fraud, now that Trump et ux have their own brand. Coincidence or contemptible corruption? Same with cuts to the IRS and the DOJ tax division. Live free and donate, prosperous tax-cheats.

Trump has expressed his shoot-‘em dislike of protestors, but, like all dictators, he loves military parades in his honor. Reportedly, he’s planning one for his birthday. A friend and I exchange topical limericks. Here’s mine on that subject:

 

“It’ll stretch out for over a mile, 

Some in bunches and some single file. 

The question they'll ask 

While marching on past 

Is “When’s the required Sieg Heil”?

DOGE Ball

 

When I was a surgical intern, we had a patient, a young girl, maybe eight years old, who’d had a severe infection in her leg, necessitating removing much of the skin of her thigh. Her bandages required regular changing; because of the pain and her young age, it was being done in the OR, under general anesthesia.

A new drug had just been approved, considered safe to use outside the OR, because it provided analgesia and anesthesia without suppressing breathing. We tried it, in her room. The dressing change proceeded without evident awareness or pain by the girl.

That was half a century ago, and I still can hear her fearful howl as she awoke, an unearthly wail, as if she’d been forced to look through open gates of Hell. It was horrifying. If she didn’t remember, it had to remain in her somewhere.

The drug was ketamine.

Elon Musk admits – brags of – using ketamine recreationally, frequently. The man supervising a post-adolescent team of tech nerds is canceling people and programs without applying anything close to cost/benefit analysis, firing thousands of government workers via boilerplate emails. The man claiming he’s uncovered massive fraud, without producing a single example, shows all the signs of ketamine abuse.

Quoting: “Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance...” Like barging into world politics, planning to colonize Mars, taking a chainsaw to US government. And calling Senator Mark Kelly, R-AZ, a traitor for supporting Ukraine. If, in his chemically-addled brain, Musk thinks he’s finding “waste, fraud, and abuse,” he’s not. It’s irrational, wholesale firings followed by serial re-hirings when the essential nature of the employees is realized.

Waste, fraud, and abuse exist in the federal government. In Trump’s administration, it’s everywhere. His golfing weekends waste millions of taxpayer dollars each time he takes one. DOGE itself is a fraud; so is his bitcoin scam. Abuse is the operating premise of Trump’s and Bondi’s DOJ. No one except Trump, who’s dismantling the means to investigate his own corruption, is against finding and weeding it out. But it wouldn’t be Musk’s version, which lacks meaningful scrutiny of targeted departments or the importance of their work.

Case in point: firing National Park and Forest Service workers. National parks add billions of dollars to the US economy. Maybe Elon doesn’t like trees or bison; but they more than pay for themselves. The daughter of a friend had her dream job as a park ranger, for which her education made her highly qualified. Her performance had received laudatory accolades. Yet she was fired via one of those impersonal, cruel emails, accusing her, without specifics, of poor performance and lack of qualifications. Clearly no one had bothered to look. Like most of the touted firings, it was seemingly only to impress impressionable MAGAs.

If Musk’s narcissistic grandiosity and lack of empathy (he considers it a weakness) might be drug-induced, Trump came by his honestly. Which is the only context in which that word can be applied to him. Nature or nurture, it’s who he’s always been. But, even notwithstanding his multiple business failures and scams, his current disastrous behavior beggars understanding.

Since re-assuming office, his domestic actions seem to have in common only “because I can.” After his empty praise of veterans, gutting the Veterans’ Administration is an unexpected example. Killing cancer research; censoring science; destroying the EPA and the Department of Education: those were expected, but no less disastrous and irrational. Promises to the contrary, it appears Medicaid is also on the block. Social Security, too? 

As to his on-again, off-again tariffs, the effects of which he’s never understood, were his “advisers” afraid to contradict him? Vengeful authoritarians have a way of throttling dissent. Example: The oft-professed holiness of Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House and God, would, you’d think, render him reluctant to lie as blatantly as he does. As the stock market continued its freefall, as prices rise and jobs disappear, Holy Mike shifted blame by saying it will take time to repair the damage caused by President Biden’s terrible economy. As if Trump’s bizarre bungling has nothing to do with it. As if historic job creation, unprecedented corporate profits, taming the pandemic, enormous stock market gains, and rebuilding rotting infrastructure equate to “terrible.” “Envy of the world,” people said. Because it was.

Gaslighting enough for a million hot-air balloons, Fox “news” is referring to the upcoming “Biden recession.”

When MAGA voters are convinced by Foxotrumpic disinformation that Trump is playing four-dimensional chess with our economy, when they prefer authoritarianism over democracy and are okay with weakening the US to the benefit of Russia, it’s hard to foresee a way out. If there were an obvious, brilliant plan behind all of this, stock markets would be rising, not tanking. Mismanagement does the opposite. 

The Idiot In Charge

It's obvious by now that the guy reportedly in charge of our economy is a fucking idiot.

Some will argue, depending on the direction of said economy and of which party a president (or "president") is a member, that everything or nothing, good or bad, can be attributed to the person behind the Resolute Desk. In this case, there can be no argument: Trump opens his McDonald's-hole about tariffs on China and markets crash like Trump Airlines.

The idiocy presents in two forms: first, he has no fucking clue how tariffs work; or if he does, he figures he can lie about it, like he does everything else, and the Trumpic wing of the Party of the Uncaring will down it like Trump Vodka, for the brief time it was available.

To wit: he keeps saying "China is paying for the tariffs." By now we all know that's false: importers do. Then, by downstream effects, the manufacturers who buy it from importers, and, finally, consumers, for whom prices are raised accordingly. It's a burden and, in effect, a tax. Doubly so for those of us in states with a sales tax. So there's that. Thanks, Obama.

Second: he doesn't give a shit. This isn't about the US, its consumers, its producers. It's about him. The guy with the best words, whose very big brain hires the best people, who understands more about everything than anyone. His pathetic, destructive, vindictive, mendacious, prematurely-ejaculating ego, is in charge. He's gotta see himself as a winner, and the other guy, a "loser." That's his game. It ain't about us. It's all about the mushroom dick floating around in his hydrocephalic ventricles.

The proof of it is the fact that he obviously has no fucking plan. He shoots off his mouth when his ego is threatened, makes a bunch of threats or dishonest pronouncements, or both. Then, as his flunkies scramble to explain away or deal with the fallout, he comes up with an idea: we'll pay our farmers even more billions than we already are. Buy their stuff. Give it to poor countries (not even our own poor.) Nothing, so far, about every other business sector, nor the consumers thereof, though.

And the thing is, I don't think any of this matters to China, because they DO have a plan. Unlike Trump, whose "plans" come and go with the flash of a couple of outraged, lonely neurons, they play a very, very long game. Slow and steady. Win the world economy. If they can play Trump like a China doll along the way, watch the US economy creak as its deficits become unsustainable, so much the better. The US really doesn't fit into their long-range plans: everywhere else on the planet does. So says I, China expert and macroeconomic whiz.

But, to quote a stable genius, "Trade wars are easy to win." Could be. If the person in charge weren't a loser businessman who hasn't the foggiest.

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