Who’s Leszek Balcerowicz? He was Poland’s Finance Minister in the country’s first non-communist government, then served twice as Deputy Prime Minister (1989–1991, 1997–2001) and as Chairman of the National Bank of Poland (2001–2007). He and his wife of 47 years, Ewa Balcerowicz, are economists. He oversaw Poland’s economic reforms from communist collectivism to free markets and democratic capitalism. By all accounts, it worked, while it failed in Russia, possibly owing to Russia’s penchant for sclerotic autocracy and state-empowered cronyism (let’s leave that for another time).
Why bring him up? He is the counterpoint to Trump and his bunch, the Fox News stable grafted onto the executive branch. I doubt seriously that Americans voted for isolationism and protectionism. Tariffs and withdrawal from the world didn’t show up in any polls of the public prior to November 4. Yet, those are what we are getting. Reluctance to defend the international order is evident in stories of Trump’s people pressuring Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and some voices in the administration expressing a willingness to cut Ukraine and NATO adrift. Protectionism is the sole remaining root for Trump’s tariff war on the world after every other explanation is reduced to incoherence. Balcerowicz’s story is a fresh breath of sanity in our domestic maelstrom of security and economic claptrap.
Balcerowicz faced a tall order in 1989 with the collapse of Poland’s communist regime. Collectivism, once begun, is like drug addiction. The recovery is hell, but eventually a healthier person is restored. Free market “shock therapy” was initiated, tough times ensued, Poland stuck with it, and today Poland is rivalling Japan in per capita income. It’s a lesson well worth remembering as we lurch toward Trump-inspired collectivist protectionism.
Heck, we can’t even reform our bankrupting entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) without a political bloodbath. Trump promises to do nothing about them, and is trying to centrally plan his autarkic economy through his “most beautiful word in the English language”, tariffs. Businesses are watching as their decades-long economic arrangements are hammered into rubble and markets tumble.
A marked contrast is Poland. Per capita (per person) GDP is a good measure of economic health. In 1990 it was Brazil-sized at $12,810, $4,000 behind Mexico’s. In 2023 it stands at $43,585, a mere $2,500 short of Japan’s (see #1). Japan, once the darling of industrial-policy Democrats with its state-management in The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), and an unacknowledged centerpiece of Trump’s economic outlook, has flatlined for three decades. Demographically, it is in the midst of social suicide with a 1.20 fertility rate, and now with an economy to match. Trump is eager to repeat the performance with his own MITI run out of the White House and his executive orders, something akin to imperial decrees.
Oh, 2026 is the year that Poland is projected to surpass Japan in per person wealth. Barring Trump dragging the world’s economy into the toilet, aka 1930, the future looks bright for a country near the front lines abutting Putin’s horde. Not so for us.
Poland shows the way forward, not Donald Trump. If only the Republicans had the guts to study the career of Leszek Balcerowicz. Instead, as they play footsie with Donald Trump, the tumbling securities markets forecast dark clouds. Sure, bear and bull markets do not always presage a nation’s future fortunes, but sometimes they do. All the elements of serious economic disruption are present: massive government meddling, Trump’s demand for irresponsible monetary policy to cover his tracks, shattered business relationships, mammoth uncertainty, and the beginning of the pullback of capital. If capital goes into hiding, we’re in serious trouble, Great Depression territory.
In the runup to our near future expect the demagoguery of all the Wall Street vs. Main Street blather to take center stage. The class warfare of J.D. Vance links rhetorical arms with AOC/Bernie Sanders. Is it all that inconceivable for our Vice-President to show up at AOC’s next “Fight Oligarchy” rally? One has to wonder. They might have to change the title to “Fight Wall Street”. Mmmmm, “Occupy Wall Street”? Are we there yet?
A simple economic lesson will be taught to our President and his palace coterie, while the rest of us live it. Wall Street and Main Street are as intertwined as Ford and its supply chain. They can’t occupy insular realms, bubbles, silos. A withholding of capital sets off dominoes that careen onto Main Street. Investors seek to avoid Trump-driven risks by not exposing their wealth (capital) to his whims. Following the inevitable chain of events, less capital means less maintenance and growth of enterprises which translates into less business for the diner and hardware store on Main Street.
It’s a lesson well understood by any economist worth their salt. Thank goodness Poland trusted theirs, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, and stayed the course. We, in America, would rather hitch our wagon to our erratic president, and his merry band of Fox News alumni, all adhering to his faulty presumptions. It’s great for Poland, bad for us.
RGraf
Sources:
1. Thanks to Dominic Pino of National Review for these insights in “The Stat: 2026” in National Review Magazine, May 2025, p.9.
Ford 2021 Bronco SUVs on the assembly line at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., June 14, 2021. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
Sometime in early 2027, President Trump will probably be impeached . . . again. Why? When the party in power botches things, they’re normally punished at the polls — “It’s the economy, stupid!” Inflation, shortages, business closings, people thrown out of work, recessions/depressions, etc., won’t make for a winning message. That bodes ill for the already impeachment-prone Trump, leaving aside the question of the legitimacy of any effort to remove him from office.
People are already lining up to do the favor, or predicting it. The reliably extremist Democrat Al Green (the one removed for disrupting President Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress) announced in February (see #1), “This president is unfit.” Further in the well of the House he said, “I rise to announce that I will bring articles of impeachment against the president for dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done.” Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon agrees. Four days after the November 4 election, Bannon augured (see #2),
“Hakeem Jeffries could be, will be, the speaker of the House in two years. And the first thing he will do in the early days of 2027 is move to impeach Donald Trump. Trust me. They’re gonna put $10 billion in back of him [to take the House]. They have nobody else.”
Trump is behaving in ways to prove them right. People vote their pocketbook. It’s more than a cliché. It’s true. Stake out a position that leads to harming the voters’ children and personal fortunes and they will send you packing. Biden and Kamala Harris, et al, are proof of concept. Trump is determined to join them.
I can’t think of a more politically self-destructive act than laying waste to a good portion of the economy just in time for the 2026 midterms. His tariff war – 10% across the board, 25% on our neighbors, potentially sky high on everybody else, and the concomitant uncertainty from all the flip flops – will wreak havoc on everything, maybe with the exception of most food processing. We’ll have food, but to hell with an affordable car, or truck, or SUV, or van, or 18-wheeler, if you can find one. Expect long lines at the grocery store filled with people holding food stamp (SNAP) EBT cards.
To bring home the consequences of the Trump foolishness, let’s just take a look at the rear undercarriage of an “American-made” SUV as it passes from the U.S. to Mexico, to Canada, and back to the U.S. The inputs for just the suspension strut towers go from Pennsylvania to Coahuila, Mexico, to Livonia, Michigan, for final assembly. The differential gearbox begins with aluminum from Quebec, then to casting in Coahuila, then for machining in Ontario, Canada, and then to North Carolina for assembly. The rubber bushings for the control arms starts with synthetic rubber from Monterrey, Mexico, and then to Iowa for their attachment to the control arms. The suspension’s cradle is from Kentucky, and other pieces such as the trailing blades and brackets emanate from Kentucky, Ontario, and Puebla, Mexico.
Assembly of the various parts into a rearend occurs at Vaughan, Ontario, and Detroit. Then it is rushed to Kansas City, Mo., Fort Wayne, Ind., and Windsor, Ontario, etc., for attachment to the final product. Under Trump’s tariff regime, the final product will be hemorrhaging blood from his tariffs. It’s insane.
Why the circuitous route? Doesn’t it seem unnecessarily complicated? Those questions would arise from your typically myopic and autarkic central planner, people like Peter Navarro and Donald Trump. This process pencils out in terms of value-added and cost-benefit according to the people with skin in the game. That’s what a market does when allowed to operate freely.
Why not just disentangle the various paths and make it all occur in the U.S.? Go ahead and try. Uprooting the suppliers and their plants will come at a terrible cost and take years. In the interim, people will be going to the polls to vote against the wreckage. The complexity of disentanglement was nicely expressed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, when he compared it to an omelet: “You can’t unscramble it once it’s done.”
Trump is Don Quixote charging windmills. Biden wanted to shove us into very expensive golf carts masquerading as family sedans. With Trump, even that screwball option may not be available. I don’t know about you but I’m keeping my 10-year-old Tundra and 9-year-old Venza. Buying new ones is likely to be a nightmare. Expect the entire auto industry to pull back as well. Now that’s the making of economic hard times.
Will the Democrats finally succeed in adding Donald Trump’s scalp to their lance this time? Well, as they say, third time is the charm.
RGraf
Sources:
1. “Donald Trump Faces New Impeachment Bid After Speech to Congress”, Martha McHardy, Newsweek, 3/5/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-al-green-2039765
2. “Steve Bannon Warns of Potential Third Donald Trump Impeachment”, Aila Slisco, Newsweek, 11/8/2024, at https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-warns-potential-third-donald-trump-impeachment-1983079
3. Thanks to Ryan Mills of National Review for his piece “North America’s Auto Supply Chain Took Decades to Build. Trump’s Tariffs Could Crush It” at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/north-americas-auto-supply-chain-took-decades-to-build-trumps-tariffs-could-crush-it/
President Donald Trump holds a “Foreign Trade Barriers” document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2025. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
“Lies and victimhood make evil possible.” — quote attributed to Dennis Prager
Well, maybe not evil, or maybe so, but lies and victimhood are certainly not a recipe for success. The Left has long been in the grip of victimhood. It’s the base alloy for its DEI, CRT, critical legal theory, and all its “systematic” ideologies that have plagued us since they became Democratic Party dogma in the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Now, the Right has its own version in MAGA. And as John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival sang, “I see a bad moon rising”.
Why the pessimism? The Right morphed from being a correction to the Left’s manias to a thoroughgoing embrace of one of their big ones, victimhood. It’s in the MAGA title – Make America Great Again – meaning that America is a victim of a dizzying array of charlatans and miscreants, foreign and domestic. It’s a recurring script, pathetic as it may be, nothing new in the history of the world.
In that sense, we are busy making ourselves not “exceptional”. It’s not inevitable. We choose to be that way by electing leaders and absorbing their dark frame of mind. Donald Trump’s tariff war on the world is a play on this depressing display of American victimhood.
What’s more, it is based on falsehoods. The villain is said to be free trade, whether under the initials NAFTA or TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) or GATT or WTO, and we are said to be chumps, patsies, and victims in the story. Yet, for allegedly being fools, we are outpacing the rest of the world. Trump’s “Great Again” schtick actually misses the boat, and is working feverishly to have us join the rest of the G7 in missing the boat.
Let’s count the ways. The UK, Germany, and Japan have flatlined in GDP growth for at least 5 years or more (three decades for Japan). China’s 30-year spurt of phenomenal growth is levelling off, which is not surprising since they started from essentially zero; they’re export reliant economy is highly cyclical; and the central planning of industrial policy is famous for spectacular highs followed by spectacular lows, like a meth addict. The Soviet Union had 80 years of it and it imploded in the course of a week in 1991.
As for “Great Again”, we are already great and getting greater as the others languish. So says The Economist in its October 2024 report titled, “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust” (see #1). How so? At the start of NAFTA, we were about 40% of total GDP of the G7 countries. Today, we’re 50%. Globally, we were 21% of the world’s economy in 2012; today finds us at 26%.
Personal measures of wealth show us to be unsurpassed. Back to The Economist (see #1 and #2), “Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.” We’re also more productive per worker. Canada’s is 70% of ours. China is a third (and falling). If this makes us “chumps”, we should pray for the condition to continue.
So, Trump’s answer is a tariff war on the world and more caterwauling about our victimhood. Go figure. On April 2, he marched up to the microphone waving a piece of agitprop titled “Foreign Trade Barriers” as if any of it matters. Ironically, these alleged foreign government manipulations of trade haven’t made them any richer as we sailed past them. “Foreign Trade Barriers” is irrelevant in the big yacht race of life.
Trump and MAGA world can’t accept the fact that our economy is different, as different as our 1890 economy was from colonial times. Ag shrunk dramatically as a slice of the American economy back then, so an 1890 Trump and Peter Navarro (Trump’s sage of trade) would be running around pushing William T. Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” as a plank in their “Make America Great Again” campaign. To heck with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Ford; and to heck with 21st-century Navarro’s craze for manufacturing. It would have been stillborn if this dynamic duo had their way at the dawn of American global economic dominance.
Peter Navarro at the White House
21st-century America isn’t a manufacturing basket case. The value of our manufacturing is larger today than it was 1990. We just employ fewer people as we manufacture more higher-end goods. As Rich Lowry puts it in his piece (see #2), “As we have lost jobs in manufacturing (5 million since 1990), we’ve picked them up in services (nearly 12 million) and in transportation and logistics (more than 3 million).” More tech and aerospace and less textiles and shoes. Those service jobs don’t concentrate around the burger-flipper sector. If they did, they’d be the most expensive burger-flippers since Ray Kroc, since the birth of the Whopper, that is Wagyu-paddied Whoppers.
Trade barriers or no, the proof is in the pudding. But Navarro doesn’t eat pudding, at least not the kind of pudding produced by our economy.
Navarro, Trump’s buddy in protectionism, has always been a loud advocate of central planning, government management of economic activity, in its reincarnation in Democrat neo-socialist “industrial policy”, and more. Before he joined the Trump circus, Navarro was part of the emerging California Democrat “establishment” in the 1990s that would come to dominate the state down to the present day.
By 1998, the Democrat tone for California was set in the words of people like Navarro (see #4). Eco-manias and growth-control was the zeitgeist of his campaigns for elective offices in San Diego in the 1990s. He headed an activist group called “Prevent Los Angelization Now (PLAN)”, of San Diego, and pushed almost any measure at hand to restrict the housing supply, such as preventing migration into the city, growth-control ordinances, tight controls on sewer and water hookups, fees, fees, and more fees, etc. It’s a familiar story that began in Petaluma in the 1960s and spread up and down the state’s populous coastal plain.
Navarro was hip deep in branding the word “developer” as something akin to “child molester”. Without his type of apparatchiks at the helm of local government power, according to Navarro, developers “will leave air pollution, overcrowded schools, underpoliced streets, sewer systems bursting at their seams, and traffic jams that can (and often do in California) make grown men cry.”
Today, Californians are crying, despondent over their inability to afford shelter and having to flee to other states not so beholden to the California Navarros. California has a serious housing shortage, duhhh! Getting approval to nail two studs together is a nightmare in the state. Decades of hostility to supply has attracted some roosting chickens. The chronically constrained supply has propelled the median rent in the state to $2,850, 33% higher than the national average (see #5).
Navarro’s legacy is Democrat Assemblyman Corey Jackson of Riverside. Jackson recently proposed a bill that would allow college students to sleep in their cars because many can’t afford California rent (see #7). People that think like Navarro have engineered a housing market that has relegated students to their cars. Expect student parking lots to resemble homeless encampments. What Navarro helped to bring about in California, he promises for the entire nation when Trump assigned to him the role of influencer to tinker around in the nation’s economic relations with the world.
It’s not that Trump is unaware of Navarro’s inclinations. He agrees with Navarro. Trump and Navarro have a childlike zero-sum view of the world. Bill Fulton, former head of San Diego planning, noticed the symmetry between Trump’s view of trade and slow-growthers like Navarro (see #3): “More development creates losers as well as winners, so you’d better box out the bad development or at least make those developers pay through the nose.” A rising tide raising all boats, or a growing pie that unavoidably means bigger slices for everyone, is inconceivable to someone like Navarro. Thanks to Trump, Navarro has the opportunity to muck up the nation’s economy like he helped to do for the housing supply in California.
Steve Bannon
And he’s doing it along with another fellow traveler in MAGA world, Steve Bannon. Navarro wants to centrally plan trade with his beloved tariffs. Bannon wants to bash the rich with tax increases. Here’s Bannon (see #6):
“That’s why it’s so important to not extend the tax cuts for the wealthy and actually do more tax cuts for working class people. We do this, that is a fundamental shift politically that will cement in the foundational elements for a 1932-type realignment.”
Update to Steve Bannon (see #8): the top 20% of income earners pay 83.6% of federal income taxes. As for the bottom rungs straying into the middle and working classes, the bottom 20% only get money out of the system. Their income tax rate is negative, -4.3%. The next 20% from the bottom pays essentially 0% at 0.1%. What does Bannon want, out and out income confiscation? That would place him in the company of Lenin.
Why not just vote for Democrats? MAGA is associated with the wrong party. Bannon believes, like Navarro, like Democrats, that government can micromanage us into utopia. Bannon opines on the tips, overtime, and Social Security pandering while bashing other Republicans as follows, “He’s [Trump] furthering the economics of working-class and middle-class America, and it cements the fact that the Republicans are not the country club Republicans of the Bush junta.” So, according to Bannon and any other socialist who has graced the public stage, government is the fount of all good things, and no need to pull the rug back on a ravaged housing supply and American economy as they feed The Wealth of Nations and Reaganomics into the shredder.
Such is the nature of Populism. It is the repository of crackpots, of anyone who wishes to steer government bennies to favored victims, while making real victims of those seen in a lesser light. Now we see the real home of zero-sum and it is in city hall, the state capitol, Washington, D.C., and the myriads of agencies and government offices scattered across the fruited plain. A favored few demographics are rewarded at the expense of the vast millions. None of it works, and results in the loaded U-Hauls exiting California and thousands thrown out of work by enterprises starved for capital and nonfunctioning supply chains.
Senator Russell B. Long put it best when he said in 1973, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” Welcome to the Populism of Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, and the erratic and incoherent Donald J. Trump.
It’s more than Populism that ties them together. It’s the pathetic wallowing in victimhood. It blinds a person to a reality that isn’t as dismal as these lunkheads make it out to be. It heaps blame on others and diminishes personal responsibility. In a nutshell, it is as Dennis Prager put it, “Lies and victimhood make evil possible.”
Yes, the pity party is getting tiresome.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust”, Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr, The Economist, October 14, 2024, at https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/the-american-economy-has-left-other-rich-countries-in-the-dust
2. Thanks to Rich Lowry for bringing these insights to my attention in “Guess What? We’re Already Rich”, National Review, 4/15/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/guess-what-were-already-rich/
3. “How San Diego’s housing wars helped Peter Navarro shape Trump’s trade wars”, Andrew Keatts, Anxios, 4/15/2025, at https://www.axios.com/local/san-diego/2025/04/15/san-diego-housing-war-peter-navarro-trump-trade-war-tariff
4. Check out Peter Navarro’s own words in his “Peter Navarro fights Lynn Schenk, Susan Golding, Nancy Casady to run for Congress”, authored in 1998 during his run for Congress, at https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1998/apr/23/san-diego-confidential/
5. “Rent drives up California’s cost of living”, Lynn La, Cal Matters, 8/2/2024, at https://calmatters.org/newsletter/california-cost-of-living-rent-increases/
6. “Republicans Weigh Raising Taxes on Highest Earners”, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review, 4/15/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/republicans-weigh-raising-taxes-on-highest-earners/
7. “California Bill Proposes Letting Students Sleep in Cars On Campus”, KFI 640 AM, 4/14/2025, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-bill-proposes-letting-students-sleep-in-cars-on-campus/ar-AA1CTKhM
8. “Is it True the Rich Don’t Pull Their Weight When it Comes to Paying Taxes?”, Amelia Kuntzman and Sara Wagoner, Economic Policy Innovation Center, 4/14/2025, at https://epicforamerica.org/federal-budget/is-it-true-the-rich-dont-pull-their-weight-when-it-comes-to-paying-taxes/
9 Much thanks to Dominic Pino at National Review for his socioeconomic breakdown of tax receipts in “Top 40 Percent of Earners Pay Nearly All Federal Income Taxes” at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/top-40-percent-of-earners-pay-nearly-all-federal-income-taxes/
President Donald Trump reacts as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2025. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
In a career in the public eye, Donald Trump hasn’t hesitated to brag about his IQ. In 2013, he posted on Twitter (see #1), “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” He’s repeated it often enough to not dismiss it as just a joke.
Which brings to mind Stephen Hawking’s quip about IQ braggarts (see #3): “People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.”
The fact of the matter is, no one, not even Donald Trump, knows his IQ. I can only conclude from his abundant public utterings that this is no “genius” at work. He may have some competence in a particular narrow field, but he is ill-informed or filled with coarse opinions outside of it. Typical of this form of Trump-speak is today’s jewel (4/7/2025) from Truth Social (see #4):
“Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION, and the long time abused USA is bringing in Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs that are already in place. This is despite the fact that the biggest abuser of them all, China, whose markets are crashing, just raised its Tariffs by 34%, on top of its long term ridiculously high Tariffs (Plus!), not acknowledging my warning for abusing countries not to retaliate. They’ve made enough, for decades, taking advantage of the Good OL’ USA! Our past ‘leaders’ are to blame for allowing this, and so much else, to happen to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Here’s a few takeaways. This is no “genius” at work. Declaring victory in his trade war against the world is a bit premature, only 4 days after he declared economic war on the world. Interesting side note: Where’s Congress as the president on his lonesome declares a trade war against the planet?
The purpose of tariffs is to punish foreigners and American consumers, not to rake in “Billions of Dollars” for subsidy boondoggles or to make the tax cuts and the tax-free tips, overtime, and Social Security pandering pencil-out for the Congressional Budget Office. As is likely, the overall economy will take a hit when the economic casualties from the trade war roll in: all tax revenue starts to slide, and business and personal spending begins to crater. Not more money but less is in the offing.
Littered throughout in this piece from the “genius” is the pathetic complaints of the constantly aggrieved, America as a victim of the entire world. If this came from one of my children, after the tantrum, I’d send the kid to their room after a serious come-to-Jesus moment. Instead, we make the guy president.
It says a lot about us, or does it? People vote for a person for any number of reasons. Nowhere, not in any pollsters’ surveys were tariffs on the list of most serious concerns of voters. It is for Trump, and they are a key to his understanding of the world. We weren’t necessarily bamboozled. We heard the tariff talk, but relegated it to the back of our mind, reminding ourselves of the pre-pandemic Trump I and the wreckage left by the Dems. We didn’t vote for Trump wreckage.
Trump may think himself a “genius”. Instead, what we got was your average, run-of-the-mill big blowhard. I’ve experienced such people throughout my life. You’ll find them in locker rooms, bars, among friends and family. We just happen to have one in the Oval Office. And he’s making us look pathetic. MAGA must be replaced with MAPA, Make America Pathetic Afterward.
RogerG
Sources:
1. This Trump IQ braggadocio can be found on X at https://x.com/realdonaldtrump/status/332308211321425920
2. More occasions for Trump’s bragging can be read at “Donald Trump’s IQ obsession, in 22 quotes”, Chris Cillizza, CNN, 10/10/2017, at https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/10/politics/donald-trump-tillerson-iq/index.html
3. The Hawking quote can be read at https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings/stephen-hawking-people-who-boast-about-their-i-q-are-losers
4. This example of Trump braggadocio can be read from his Truth Social account at https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114296287858068040
5. Thanks for the insights from the inestimable Jim Geraghty of National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/why-team-trump-is-so-gung-ho-about-tariffs/
Then-President-elect Donald Trump walks with Then-President Joe Biden at the White House on the inauguration day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term in Washington, D.C., January 20, 2025. (photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters)
Remember the Biden Left’s attempt to paste “greed”, “price gouging”, “greedflation”, and “price fixing” on the broad price jumps during his time in office? Biden’s head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, threatened FTC investigations and prosecutions for the assumed price gouging. Well, the little girl in front of the snowy tv screen in the movie “Poltergeist” put it best when she said, “They’re baaaack!” What’s baaaack? The Biden-type threats of investigations and prosecutions of American businesses for legitimately responding to price signals, this time by Trump and his people.
The scrambling by American businesses to reconstruct their elaborate supply chains and respond to Trump-induced demand pressures for wholly American-made goods and services will force our enterprises into a completely untenable position. Prices will have to rise, sometimes quite dramatically, to recover the costs of this increased burden or face serious economic injury. Businesses are in the jaws of the vice: crippling costs and Trump threats.
So, here comes the Bidenesque threats. On X, Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s FTC Chairman, posted this:
“President Trump is reorienting our nation’s economy to put Americans first. As we adjust to the new economic order, the @FTC will be watching closely to make sure American companies are vigorously competing on prices. These necessary tariffs should not be interpreted as a green light for price fixing or any other unlawful behavior. We will always protect American consumers.” (See #1)
Notice the continuity of jargon – “price fixing”? Notice the central planning instinct – “new economic order”?
Andrew Ferguson, FTC ChairmanLina Khan, Biden’s FTC Chair
And this on top of Trump’s earlier verbal dagger directed at auto CEOs to not raise prices in the wake of his auto tariffs. It came through a conference call with auto execs in early March (see #3).
Trump and his people are unintentionally acknowledging that his beloved tariffs are economic disasters. He may succeed for a time in dampening prices in sheer totalitarian intimidation, but the severe costs of monumental dislocation will ooze out anyway. Don’t expect “onshoring” to save our bacon. It may occur to some extent but it won’t make up for the massive losses throughout the broad reach of the economy. Save 1,000 jobs by sacrificing 75,000. GDP won’t grow in spite of the “onshoring”. It will fall and then stagnate. That’s the lesson of the 1930s.
On one thing, Trump was completely honest when he said, “I couldn’t care less if they [the auto companies] raise prices . . . .” It’s the mindset of a central planner. Do you think for a moment that Stalin cared about the individual Russian peasant or worker in his collectivization of agriculture into communes (“kolkhozes”) and the “Industrialization” of his Five Year Plans? Trump’s response is what one should expect from the emotionless gaze of the zealous ideologue with great power. Trump is a doctrinaire utopian, and that puts him in the same league with the eco-totalitarians of the Green New Deal.
You didn’t know it – me included – but you may have voted for Ross Perot (reincarnated, of course) and his Reform Party when you checked Trump’s box on the ballot. The tariff fetish was central to Perot and his Reform Party, and that’s where we found Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s where we find him today.
Trump and Ross Perot
Yep, Trump is a “disruptor”, as Lenin and Stalin were before him. The 20th century was littered with them. Sadly, it seems to come with so-called “change-agents” of whatever stripe.
RogerG
Sources:
1. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s threat can be found on X at https://x.com/AFergusonFTC/status/1907864397822787768
2. Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for alerting me to Ferguson’s X post in “Tariff Tales: Borrowing from the Biden Playbook?” in National Review’s The Corner of 4/5/2025 at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tariff-tales-borrowing-from-the-biden-playbook/
3. “Trump Warned U.S. Automakers Not to Raise Prices in Response to Tariffs”, Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton, Wall Street Journal, 3/27/2025, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-warned-us-automakers-not-to-raise-prices-in-response-to-tariffs/ar-AA1BOeKQ
Trump and his tariff executive order, April 2025Clash between Trump supporters and the radical Left in Washington, D.C., December 2020
Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” around the turn of the century, 1599 or 1600. In a story that loosely shadows the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the Bard of Avon presents a tale of hubris, sycophancy, cowardice, and vengeance. The timeline went from “crossing the Rubicon” to the “Ides of March” – “Et tu, Brute” – “Even you, Brutus”. The real story is one of overweening ambition for fame, glory, and power, a chief feature of the politics of the late Roman Republic. The Roman Senate had begun to neuter itself in destructive and self-negating factions. When it finally rose up, it was too late. In the end, after the ascension of Augustus, the empty shell of the republican form was kept, but the reality was an empire with an emperor, an emperator, an autocrat.
Was the rise and fall of Julius Caesar really the end of the republic? Actually, it could rightly be argued that the crisis had been building over the prior century in occasional civil wars and dictatorships. So, a single break point can be difficult to perceive. Murkiness is a constant problem in historical analysis. Nonetheless, a well-trodden path is discernable, and a superficial facade of government took shape. Are we there yet?
Emperor Augutus presiding over the Roman Senate
Appearances matter, but are false. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 was an exemplar of consensual governance and personal rights, in print form only. The reality was clearly different, as exemplified by the NKVD, purges, and a vast gulag archipelago. Adolph Hitler ruled under the emergency provisions of Article 48 of the democratic Weimar Constitution. He had no other constitution. He combined the executive offices of chancellor and president unto himself under an Article 48 “emergency” (the 1933 Reichstag fire, the “Jewish Menace”, the “Red Menace”, etc.) and he was off and running. Are we there yet?
“Emergencies” abound in these scenarios, and are frequently conjured, or grossly exaggerated, for political gain. Is America following a similar arc? Our arc could be said to have begun with the rise of a political movement, Progressivism, with a lot of late 19th century Populism thrown into the mix. The “messiness” of real consensual government with its localism, smelly back rooms, federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances was thought to be in need of streamlining by a strong chief executive and his administration of “experts”. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson laid out the rationale and FDR raised it to an art form, followed by a host of Democrats from JFK and his “best and brightest” (mostly Ivy League grads), LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, to Joe Biden. And, now, the Republicans add their own entrant to the list in the person of Donald Trump.
Congress delegated the tariff power to the president in “emergencies” – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – and sealed their fate by allowing him to define it. The seed was sown and our arc proceeded. A prior Republican president toyed with emergency-autocracy – Nixon and his wage-and-price controls in the “Nixon Shock” of 1971 – but none operated with such brashness and bravado, completely ignoring the legislative branch, as Donald Trump did in his edict of across-the-board tax increases, his tariff taxes on the world, literally the world. It’s breathtaking.
Congress is only left with a veto. But Congress is a shell of its former self, as the Roman Senate was in confronting Sulla or Julius Caesar. One faction, Trump’s fellow Republicans, have mostly fallen into Trump sycophancy (Caesar sycophancy?) and will prevent Congress from reasserting its Constitutional powers. A few Senate Republicans bucked the toadyism and voted with the minority Democrats to approve a resolution opposing the prior tariff edict on Canada. The House leadership, all Republicans, stonewalled the move to condemn Trump’s imperial decree. Thus, the proposal was relegated to irrelevancy. Evenly divided between Caesaristic sycophancy and neo-Marxism, Congress has cancelled itself.
The irony of it all is that the Democrats are not a responsible alternative. The picture resembles the street scenes of Berlin in 1920s Weimar Germany. Patriotic German war vets faced off against the Bolshevik-inspired Reds in street battles. Many vets were drawn to ultra-right rhetoric and its mythology of victimhood about the war (WWI) while the Reds were excited for headway in the international proletarian revolution. Today, the choice facing Americans is between neo-Marxism (the Democrats) and a mythology of perpetual American victimhood (the Trump Republicans).
The German Freikorps of the Right in 1920s BerlinThe Roter Frontkämpfer-Bund, the paramilitary of the Reds in Berlin, June 1927
The victimhood angle of the ultra-right in Germany – the “stab in the back” legend – strikingly parallels the trade victimhood of the Trump Right. Victimhood sold well in 1917 Russia, 1920s and 30s Germany, and apparently so in America of the 21st century’s third decade. Victimhood is embraced by both the left and right. Both have their competing oppressor/oppressed schticks.
History provides examples of these various appeals devolving into the leadership of a single person, the so-called cult of personality. The leader alone (Marx, Lenin, il Duce, etc.) are thought to possess the unique gifts of foresight to establish the “truth” and the “path forward”. Power accumulates in the hands of the leader and a select few around him. He is acclaimed to be the embodiment of wisdom.
Roman emperors carried the title of Augustus – exalted, venerable. Emperor was the reality, but they were construed to be the wise guarantors of the “rights” and “prosperity of the people”, and the nation’s “protector”. Their power need have no constitutional writ, but these suzerains still felt compelled to maintain the illusion of a republic.
At this point, the system falls victim to Hayek’s “knowledge problem”. Like all accurate insights into the human condition, it is rooted in human nature and thus a warning for all time. It’s a testament on how a professed victimhood can lead to a real and widespread victimhood. The movement’s scheme of centralized economic decision-making can’t work. Real functional knowledge is naturally dispersed among millions of actors in a free market. When that freedom is replaced by the “wisdom” of the one or a few, whether it be a politburo, a Soviet Gosplan, or handpicked toadies in the Council of Economic Advisers to reorder the entire world’s trading system, the wheels come off the cart. We’ve seen this play out time and time again. Well, here we go again.
Friedrich Hayek
The light hand of negotiations and trade deals is replaced by the heavy hand of Trump’s tariff Frankenstein. Your friends become cynical of you, and your enemies remain as they were, with a few more joining their ranks.
An examination of Trump’s tariff monster makes this clear. Who gets hit by Trump’s tariff truncheon? Everybody, friends and foes alike; well, no, not everybody, nor evenly. Friends get especially slammed because they are friends. We trade with them a lot and therefore they run the risk of having a “trade surplus” with us. The economic munchkins running the tariff show in Trump ll are fixated on “trade deficits” and “trade surpluses”. They are all that matters to these blinkered apparatchiks.
Their magic tariff formula is based on our “trade deficit” with that country, with a 10% floor, not that nation’s tariffs. So, the much-ballyhooed reciprocity argument is made mute. Others in the media, such as Hugh Hewitt, try to act as shaman of Trump’s brain like an ancient seer reading a flock birds before a battle, trying their best to make sense of Trump’s recklessness. Reciprocity was one angle. Then it was Trump implementing the Art of the Deal. When that couldn’t hold water, national security against the threat of the CCP jumped to the top of the shrinking list of rationales. Then the tariffs targeted the world, with or without the CCP, with no guarantee that they’ll be dropped, or if they’re negotiable.
That leaves my pet theory for Trump’s tariff fetish. Look no further than Trump’s 1990s dalliance with the Perot/Buchanan Reform Party and their fixation on Perot’s “great sucking sound” (jobs lost to Mexico). Vance alluded to it – self-sufficiency – in his recent verbal fusillade directed at RedState blogger Bonchie. The word for national self-sufficiency is autarky. The ancient, primitive drive for national or tribal self-sufficiency – autarky – has fueled the lust for conquest and empire for thousands of years. The peaceful trade to fill national or tribal needs and wants is seen as less ennobling than the thrill of military subjugation. The Mongols headed south to conquer China, then the Hun bands headed west to lay waste to Russia and the Hungarian plain, threatening the Roman Empire. Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941 was emblematic of autarky in the form of “lebensraum”. 19th century colonialism rode on its back. Don’t trade, seize, and in that way achieve self-sufficiency.
Attila and his Huns in their drive for autarky
For Trump, take the Panama Canal and Greenland, intimidate Canada into being a client state, and punish American consumers for preferring foreign goods while simultaneously terrorizing American firms from their overseas economic arrangements. Bring everybody home and lock up the country while expanding its territorial reach. Attila would be envious.
Autarky is a fool’s errand. Poor countries are self-sufficient. They never develop; they are stunted. Development requires freedom, not an empowered few implementing the errant beliefs of a hubristic leader and his claque. America under Trump is forsaking the decades-long web of peaceful and voluntary trade arrangements for the diktats of what has quickly come to resemble an imperial court. The spectacle would have been familiar to anyone given access to Attila’s tent.
The metamorphosis of the Right is shocking to behold. Former free traders when Reagan was around have morphed into full-blown protectionists in the reign of Trump. Take talk show host Hugh Hewitt. Yesterday, he announced his fealty to protectionism (4/3/2025), eliminating all pretense. The arguments are the same, old and worn out as those of 17th century French mercantilists (refuted by Adam Smith) and the central planners of the 1980s Democrats’ “industrial policy” (in opposition to Reagan’s tax cuts, free markets, and free trade). The Republican Hewitt is now a 1980s Democrat, or an acolyte of Louis XIV’s First Minster of State, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The operative catalyst of the flip-flop is the presence of Donald Trump. A mania builds around a person and others quickly fall in line. The Right and its media web are as busy discrediting themselves in their fealty as the legacy media in their fawning support of the Democrat Left.
Warning! Choose wisely the horse to hitch your wagon.
The big question remains. Are we now ruled by an imperator, a person powerful enough to dismantle with a single stroke of his pen the long-established and peaceful economic arrangements of millions of people? Are our choices limited to Caesarism or neo-Marxism? It seems to be so. It’s the 1920s Berlin street confrontations of extremists all over again. In such circumstances, can the republic long survive? I am beginning to have my doubts.
Pres. Trump and VP Vance criticize Zelenskyy in Oval Office on Feb.28, 2025
People have talked about disruption as if it was some kind of virtue. Disruption is like a kitchen knife. It is neither good nor bad. It depends on our purpose. It could be part of our plan to make a family meal or part of a plan to harm another person. Similarly, disruption could be used to break up malign nests in our administrative state, or it could turn friends and allies into enemies and enemies into friends. Such is the foreign policy of the second Trump circus.
Imagine it, the Republican Party is the party of George McGovern, and the Democrats sound like Ronald Reagan (see Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet’s speech below). Can “disruption” get any crazier? Democrats invoke Reagan, and the Trump foreign policy is run as if Jane Fonda and her 1972 consort, Tom Hayden, are in charge.
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda speak to press upon return from North Vietnam in 1972Jane Fonda at North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun during 1972 visit to North Vietnam
The whole of MAGA world follows in lockstep. It is as if the 1960s peace movement, fresh from their maligning of returning Vietnam War vets at San Francisco airport, had a political transgender moment five decades later and discovered their inner MAGA. Trump cannot find anything negative to say about Ho (Chi Minh) . . . er, Putin. After Ho . . . er, Putin . . . rejected making any serious counteroffer to the one Trump coerced out of the Ukrainians, Trump responded in his now usual Putin smiley-face way (see #1): “Based on the statements he made today, they were pretty positive, I think.”
Fox News plays an outsized role in the camp of the MAGA chattering classes. Andrew Napolitano, MAGA’s Jane Fonda/Tom Hayden, came back from Hanoi . . . er, Moscow . . . with a glowing report of the latest brutalitarian Shangri La. He visited Hanoi . . . er, Moscow . . . on invitation from his friend, Le Duc Tho, North Vietnamese Foreign Minister . . . er, Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s Foreign Minister.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview to the US bloggers Mario Nawfal, Larry C. Johnson and Andrew Napolitano, Moscow, March 12, 2025
It did not take long for Fonda/Hayden . . . er, Napolitano . . . to appear on Fox News to parrot Ho . . . er, Putin . . . propaganda. In an updated version of the old “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyn’ eyes?”, the Ukraine War according to Napoliano (or Fonda/Hayden, you choose) did not begin when Putin seized Crimea in 2014 or the 2022 invasion to capture Kyiv and the east and south of the country. Instead, Fonda/Hayden . . . er, Napolitano . . . blamed us. According to Napolitano, it “started in 2014 with a coup against a popularly elected president [Putin stooge Viktor Yanukovych] who sought neutrality for Ukraine. . . orchestrated by the U.S. State Department in conjunction with the CIA and British MI6.” In actuality, Yanukovych was corruptly elected and popularly deposed by millions of Ukrainians who hit the streets to protest his delivery of them into the arms of Putin. Yanukovych skedaddled to Moscow.
But do not let facts get in the way of a good smear on Ukraine. The sixties radical Left took over the Democratic Party, and with them they brought their peace-at-any-price plank which was part-and-parcel of their condemnation of western civilization. Do you remember “Hey, hey, ho, ho, western civ has to go”? Move over Democrats, now it is the Republicans with their own theatrical variant, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Ukraine has to go.” The sixties Left smeared the U.S. and then moved into the teaching profession and soon into the commanding heights of the culture. The Trump Right got bit by the same rabid animal and took over today’s GOP. The oval office scene of February 28 is what would have happened if President Tom Hayden and VP Jane Fonda had a meeting with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.
The sixties Left aped Ho’s propaganda and the Trump Right apes Putin’s. It is “de ja vu all over again”. Maybe we should not be surprised. Read Ecclesiastes 1:9:
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”
Please watch Sen. Bennet’s speech in the Senate.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for his insights in “Putin Flips Trump’s Cease-Fire the Bird”, National Review, 3/14/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/putin-flips-trumps-cease-fire-the-bird/
“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.” —- John Stuart Mill
The picture (below) captures my loyalties. If you will notice, I have flown both the flag of Israel and now Ukraine, both being beset by existential threats. I can do none other and remain true to my most fundamental convictions, something many Republican officeholders have abandoned (Mssrs. JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Tommy Tuberville, et al). I will not surrender mine to the Trump family or anybody else pursuing unGodly ends.
No, the issue is much more than Ukraine. It lies much deeper. Ukraine’s struggle represents the ages old struggle between the monstrous and the decent. If we cannot see the situation on the southeast European Plain in that light, we come close to being as corrupted as the people committing the crime. We are no different than the disinterested bystander during a rape who sets about to negotiate a settlement between the criminal and the ravaged victim in real time. This is transactionalism gone mad.
And a rape it is, or as close as one nation can perpetrate on another. One inescapable fact remains. One authoritarian regime invaded another popularly sovereign nation. Either they get away with it or they do not. The assumption of moral parity itself is a felony. The pretention of hiding behind “realities” is an insult to reality.
However, another reality lurks behind the actions of these compromised Republicans. Neo-isolationism permeates Trump world. That world is the cognitive eco-system that produces the rationales for the movement. Out of this seedy underworld of the MAGA chattering classes comes an acceptance of Putin propaganda as the factual baseline. Right off the bat, they joined the dark side – or at least decided to swim in it.
Source: New York Times
Putin is busy rebuilding the Soviet Empire. Putin is desperate for a legacy worthy of remembrance as is Trump for the few remaining years of his presidency. Thus, Trump’s frenzy for “wins”. Trump could possibly be angling for a Nobel Peace Prize. Der Fuehrer wanted his Third Reich to be firmly established in his lifetime. So are Putin and Trump ambitious for their own places in the history books. Trump has even less time to accomplish the feat.
For his part, Putin contrived an excuse to deny Ukraine’s right to exist in July 2021 before his invasion (see #4). Putin declared that Ukraine is not a nation deserving of an independent status. The muddled thinking is the well-worn cover for many of history’s aggressions. Poland faced extinction under it from 1772 to 1793 and again as part of the Ribbentrop-Stalin Pact of 1939. Hitler had a loathing for Czechs and Poles. So did Stalin. By Putin logic, Britian would have a right to reclaim Maine to Georgia.
Of course, it is nonsense, because a nation is not limited to a grouping traceable to prehistory. Russia and Ukraine developed along different paths and experiences. The desire for a separate identity stems from these past happenings. The word Ukraine stands for “borderlands” in the same manner as the 13 colonies and Canada were for Great Britain, giving rise to the aphorism, “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language.” Revolutions and acts of genocide (Holodomor) power the evolution of national distinctiveness.
Ukraine’s separate identity was obvious to everybody, even Putin’s Soviet ancestors. Lenin and Stalin drew borders for them. Stalin was aware of them enough to try to eradicate their unique identity in collectivization and a genocidal famine, outlawing the Ukrainian language and any other vestiges of Ukrainian culture, and an intense Russification campaign – a form of replacement theory. General Secretary Khrushchev was responsible for drawing the country’s current boundaries. What were all of them doing if not recognizing the existence of a unique people in that spot on the Eurasian plain?
If the Putin storyline does not prove persuasive, Putin sycophants in the Republican Party turn to another pretext in Putin’s playbook. Ukraine is responsible for the war. Get this, the rape victim is at fault for the rape. Go figure, but it sells to the brain-addled in the party.
This new angle heaps blame on Zelenskyy and Ukrainian leaders for rejecting “promising” Putin peace offers. How dare Ukraine’s leaders reject Putin’s demands for Ukraine to accept the conquests of parts of their country, disarm, not seek allies to help defend itself, and grant to Russia a veto on Ukraine’s longing for security (see #1). The whole disgrace took place from February to April 2022 at the infamous Istanbul conference. Putin spin dominates the thinking of many in the party and explains how a mentally compromised president (yes, we elected another one) can disgrace himself in calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” while ignoring an unquestionable one.
Circulating the rounds of the party’s brain-addled is pure Putin propaganda. The mental miasma reaches high and low. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R, Ala.) expounds on Twitter, now X, in February 2024 (see #5), “Last night’s @TuckerCarlson’s interview with Putin shows that Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war.”
Not sure if this is due to propaganda but it certainly reflects a ham-fisted disregard for strategic reasoning on the part of Sen. J.D. Vance, now VP, when he said to Steve Bannon in 2022 (see #6), “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” While groping for the defense of the incomprehensible, sometimes a person can forget that we are a superpower. Somehow, and inconceivable so, the idea persists that a superpower cannot control its borders and have a foreign policy at the same time. Is that the nature of superpowers? The party leaders range from the gullible to the simply dumb.
Not everyone in the party agrees with the stupid caucus. Occasionally, and bravely, one or another will step forward and say the obvious. Rep. Mike Turner (R, Oh.), former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, recognized Putin propaganda penetrating the Republican congressional caucus, “We see directly coming from Russia … communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” Rep. Michael McCaul (R, Tx.) put it more bluntly (see #7), “I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
The same corruption of some officeholders seeps right into the base. Just attend a MAGA rally (see #8). A sample of Putin apologia will include, “Putin killed thousands of people, that’s fine by me”; “I don’t think Putin is the problem, Zelenskyy is the problem”; or “Putin is trying to save his country”. No wonder we have a president who thinks Zelenskyy is a “dictator”, and not the real dictator. It is in the aquifer and air of MAGA world. This part of the base is as looney as the stupid caucus.
The worship of Trump has led to the denigration of other guideposts, such as Ronald Reagan. Trump boosters disparage Reagan’s influence by calling it zombie Reaganism when Reagan’s well-documented beliefs and practices stand athwart Trump’s attacks on the America-led world order. Well, the absence of rational thought typical of zombies is abundantly evident among the ranks of Trump acolytes. Listen to them, watch them. Welcome to zombie Trumpism.
My party, the GOP, is no longer grand. Trump and his followers have eviscerated it. For those of you incensed by the sight of the flag of Ukraine flying from my house, I ask you, “What is the difference between Ukraine and Israel?” Both are in an existential fight against this current axis of evil. I am consistent. I support both. What about you?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Ukraine Never Turned Down a Survivable Deal”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 3/13/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/ukraine-never-turned-down-a-survivable-deal/
2. “Trump Is Offering Putin Another Munich: Hitler didn’t want a peace deal, and neither does Putin.”, Robert Kagan, The Atlantic, 3/7/2025, at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/putin-hitler-munich-parallel/681973/
3. “Fact-checking Putin’s claims that Ukraine and Russia are ‘one people’”, Sandra Knipsel interview of Matthew Lenoe, professor of history, University of Rodchester, 3/3/2022, at https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/ukraine-history-fact-checking-putin-513812/
4. “On The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, Valdimir Putin, Wikisource, July 2021, at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
5. Sen. Tommy Tuberville on X, formerly Twitter, at https://x.com/SenTuberville/status/1756051756763521291?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1756051756763521291%7Ctwgr%5E7e627a2a2cf39149118ebec1706d60484e07641a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fcorner%2Fkremlin-propaganda-and-us%2F
6. “JD Vance gets his long-awaited moment to admonish Ukraine’s Zelenskyy”, Julie Carr Smyth, AP, 2/28/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-zelenskyy-ukraine-854b13006d0601223e5ac8d955b08a8b
7. “Mike Turner claims Russian propaganda has seeped onto House floor”, Annabella Rosciglione, Washington Examiner, 4/7/2024, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/mike-turner-claims-russian-propaganda-has-seeped-onto-house-floor/ar-BB1ldKxf
8. Watch and listen to these remarks by Trump rally attendees in February 2024 on X, @teoyaomiquu (Constantine, former Ukrainian soldier, supplier of drones and other military equipment to Ukraine) at https://x.com/Teoyaomiquu/status/1762648758217548156?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1762648758217548156%7Ctwgr%5E7e627a2a2cf39149118ebec1706d60484e07641a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fcorner%2Fkremlin-propaganda-and-us%2F
9. “Kremlin Propaganda and Us”, Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 4/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kremlin-propaganda-and-us/
I am starting to be convinced that DOGE should investigate public education, and many of the private schools to boot. Results are abysmal. We rank at the bottom of international educational measures for developed countries.
Falsehoods originating long before our birth are allowed to persist uncorrected. If education is enlightenment, then what we do is far from it. Misconceptions are understandable regarding policies and programs whose history is only weakly discerned. At this point, the falsehoods take on a life of their own and stretches into folklore.
No better example can be found than the folklore surrounding Social Security. It is assumed to be like a regular pension with contributions, investments, later payouts, and a cash-out option. I follow on social media “The Other 98%” page and found this rip-roaring delusion:
“Repeat after me: Social Security is our money, that we earned by working and paying into the fund – EACH paycheck and not an ‘entitlement’!”
But repeat after me: No, it is not treated as your money, and it is an “entitlement”. Fact.
Try this experiment: go into your local Social Security office and request the return of your contributions. It is an option with any other pension, like a teacher’s pension. After initial puzzlement, the clerk will inform you that it is impossible. Why? Your contributions have already passed into the checks of current retirees. The only way for you to receive any money from the program is to qualify and then wait for your monthly allotment to arrive in your bank account like any recipient.
The requirement of qualifying is what makes it an “entitlement”. You collect benefits when you meet the law’s qualifications. In other words, you are “entitled”, entitled by law.
Now, what about the claim that it is your money? Yes, it once was, till your employer, as required by law, took it away to be combined with his in the form of FICA, in like manner as income tax withholding. It is recorded by the Social Security Administration and then shipped off to a retiree. See, a Social Security pension operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. Yes, pay-as-you-go. Money goes in, money goes out. Like any tax, money that was once yours is now owned by the government (the Social Security Administration) and delivered into the possession of a qualifying recipient.
Pay-as-you-go explains the befuddlement of the government employee and the reason that it was once your money but not now. A retiree during your work life can now pay rent. The same opportunity will present itself to you when you qualify for the entitlement. Current workers pay for current retirees.
That was the nature of the program from the beginning. The Social Security Act passed in 1935, the collection of taxes began in 1937, and the receipt of benefits started in 1940. The first generation of recipients paid at most 3 years of taxes before qualifying, which is too little time for them to be just “getting their money back”. The pattern was set from this point on. Nobody is getting their money back. They are getting somebody else’s money.
Harsh but true. The whole scheme relies on a generational imbalance of many more contributing workers than recipients. The number of contributing workers per recipient may have been as high as 100 in 1940. By 1945, it was down to around 40 and has fallen ever since (see attached graph). Today, it hovers between 2 and 3. The burden to support one retiree falls on 3 people instead of 40. In other words, taxes must skyrocket or the national debt balloons. One has happened (tax increases) and the other is happening (inflation of the national debt).
Just looking at one year, 2020, Social Security ran up a deficit of $65 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to be $300 billion in arrears (see attached graph). The number is much bigger than a matter of waste, fraud, abuse, and illegals. We have a birth dearth. A fertility rate of 1.7 will not cut it. And people live longer to receive benefits. A generational pay-as-you-go gambit is only sacrificing the opportunities of your grandchildren as the growing national debt absorbs the capital for their future.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and nutritional assistance account for 65% of the federal budget. Defense garners 13%. Since 65% of the federal budget are entitlements – qualify and you get – there is no set amount for them. Payments on the national debt add another 16%. Their spending is on autopilot.
Defense is discretionary and requires a limit. Work this out in your head. So, what is essential to government’s reason for existence is constrained by a limit, and what is not is on autopilot with no limit.
Since people will holler bloody murder if there is talk of reforming the entitlements, that will leave only two options to avoid a 1970’s Argentina-style repudiation of debt. One is to not avoid it and let the debt balloon by wallowing in folklore. The other is to gut defense and ask government employees to work for free.
The thinking of “The Other 98%” is a national suicide pact.
RogerG
Sources:
1. A great primer on the federal budget can be found in “CATO Handbook for Policymakers: Social Security”, Michael Tanner, CATO, 2022, at https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policymakers-9th-edition-2022/social-security
Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, in 2024
All 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats are exposed in the 2026 midterm election. What will the political climate look like after another two years of Donald Trump? Midterms are not kind to incumbents, possibly due to the regular foot-in-mouth disease that breaks out at the dawn of a new administration. It provides additional advantages to an out-party motivated and keen to score hits. The blowback from the gaffe is compounded if it is an affront to the movement’s success in the first place.
Obama had his “… it’s not surprising … they [people in flyover country] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them ….” He added to his list of blunders with the howler, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”, which the reliably left-of-center PolitiFact honored with its 2013 Lie of the Year (see #1). It is much more than gaffes, but they work to illuminate policy goofs.
No wonder the Tea Party entered history, and in the 2010 midterms Democrats surrendered their 79-seat majority in the House and 14-seat advantage in the Senate to a Republican majority of 59 seats and whittled a Democrat edge in the Senate to 4. Republicans swept into control of more statehouses and governor’s mansions during the time of the Obama wrecking ball. The mouth has consequences.
Speed forward to 2025 and Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is tasting his toes with, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Certainly, that one is easy to demagogue, and Democrats will, but it is not as if he did not take the sock off and contort himself into position. The jump in the prices of everything – and state-sponsored teenage genital mutilation, XY girls in XX girls’ sports, and the Third World moving into the country en masse without restraint – was an affront in voters’ minds November 2024.
Bessent was twisting himself in knots to justify Trump’s tariffs. When an incoherent idea meets the spoken word, get ready for the speaker to be reminded of the need to wash their feet. Tariffs have inflation written all over them, unless they are mitigated by the economic growth hormones of deregulation, tax cuts, sane energy policy, and cheaper financial capital. How much will they limit the damage? Hard to say. Timing and reactions abroad matter a lot.
Trump acknowledges in a rhetorical sleight of hand the harm of the tariff poison. In his speech to Congress, he pandered to farmers and then asked them to bear with him because he knows their exports will be the first to be targeted in retaliation. He asked the rest of the economy to bear with him as well. The foreign reaction to his tariffs was swift. Justin Trudeau of Canada announced (see #2), “Our tariffs will remain in place until the U.S. trade action is withdrawn, and should U.S. tariffs not cease, we are in active and ongoing discussions with provinces and territories to pursue several non-tariff measures.” Mexico and China responded likewise.
Markets did not react any better. The S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq Composite fell dramatically on the news (see #2). With Trump injecting himself into trade relationships, it is bad for business, which means it is bad for workers and everyone with a retirement plan. Instability and government intervention are bad, bad.
Why must we cut Trump some slack? Price increases are on the way; that is how tariffs work. So, get ready, Trump’s chief complaint against Biden, inflation, will be magically turned into a blessing by those who flipped like a light switch on the cue of their Pied Piper.
Crony capitalism is not the answer. Government goodies in the form of handouts to highly organized special interests mean costs imposed on everybody else. Trump shovels bennies to the United Steelworkers or the United Auto Workers but nonunion competitors are left to languish, with the consumer left to scramble to balance the checkbook.
Mancur Olson
The acclaimed economist Mancur Olson staked his academic reputation to his discernment of the socio-economic physics of the naturally skewed incentives to raid the public trough because rewards are targeted but costs are diffuse (see #3). A tightly organized interest (for instance, a large business entity and its allied labor magnificos) will beat out broader and thus more scattered interests (such as competitors and business and personal consumers). Welcome to the Trump mind. He is all into it.
Add it all up and one is left to wonder, can our leaders get any more incoherent?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Lie of the Year: ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it’”, PolitiFact, at https://www.politifact.com/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/
2. “Trump trade war intensifies as tariffs go into place”, Ian Swanson, et al, The Hill, 3/4/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5174579-donald-trump-trade-war-intensifies/
3. Look to Mancur Olson’s seminal work, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, 1965. An exploration of the topic can be found in “The Power of Special Interests”, John Samples, CATO Institute, Fall 2010, at https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2010/book-review-lobbying-policy-change-case-gridlock
