The EU and the US’ Tariffs

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Valdis Dombrovskis, European Commissioner for Trade, is demanding that we remove our WTO-sanctioned punitive tariffs on EU products, or he’ll start a trade/tariff war with us.

He isn’t even trying to be serious about trade. Leave aside the fact that the current tariffs have been explicitly approved by the WTO, and Dombrovskis’ own duplicity:

Of course, if the US is not withdrawing their tariffs we have no choice but to then introduce our tariffs[.]

Because it’s entirely appropriate for the EU to retaliate against WTO-approved punitive tariffs.

Consider, instead, the larger picture.

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Follow the Narrative–I Mean Science

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Here’s some science—the Great Barrington Declaration.

James Freeman, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal column, opened with this:

This week dozens of esteemed medical experts with blue-chip academic credentials published a warning about the destructive policies adopted to address Covid-19. Since the Sunday publication of this Great Barrington Declaration more than a thousand biological scientists and more than 1,500 medical practitioners have added their names to the petition. Yet it’s been almost entirely ignored by the media outlets that spend much of their days presenting themselves as obedient to science.

The declaration says this, in part:

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Cost of Living

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Here’s an interesting graph, produced by Oren Cass in American Affairs:

These are current dollars relative to current wages. Thus, the $13k total cost in 1985 was covered by a then-average $440 weekly wage, and the $54k total cost in 2018 was covered by that year’s $1,000 weekly wage.

Here are the underlying cost and wage data:

Notice which two costs ran up the hardest. Here’s a hint: health care exploded by a factor of 8; even college rose only by a factor of roughly 5; the others increased less than 3 times.

 

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“Sorting Error”

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Fifty thousand Franklin County, OH, voters were mailed the wrong ballots last week. It was a scanner sorting error. That’s what the county’s Board of Elections claimed last Friday.

The affected voters in Franklin County received ballots meant for residents elsewhere in the county and so contained incorrect information for local races[.]

That’s an interesting error. The local post office doing final sorting for the local final delivery routes didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes? The mailman doing the actual final delivery didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes as he put them in recipients’ mail boxes?

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Voting “Anti-fraud Measures”

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New Jersey is experiencing more voting…problems…on the heels of Paterson’s voter fraud that led to indictments of four city councilmen. Now, other voters

have received ballots meant for people who have moved out of the state and for deceased voters

Not to worry, though.

some election officials say they’re confident that anti-fraud measures will take care of it, according to local reports.

On the other hand, worry, though. If these election officials’ “anti-fraud measures” are adequate to the task, why didn’t they catch and prevent these ballots from being mailed to the wrong people? Why didn’t they prevent the graveyard ballots?

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Freedom of Speech

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Not here. Not ever.  You do not have permission to criticize us or any thing, subject, object, or … that we hold above reproach, especially that of your commoner selves.

According to a draft of the Loudoun County Public School district board’s proposed speech code, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, employees would not be allowed to criticize the school district’s “commitment to action-oriented equity practices” in all forms of public and personal communication.

And

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Risk Tradeoffs

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Economic business risks, that is.

Companies in the US and Europe are buying back bonds to reduce the cash piles they built up earlier this year, signaling expectations for more stable economic times ahead.
…
“The world still isn’t perfect, but there’s more visibility. A lot of companies who have overfunded, they sat there after a few months and said we don’t actually need all of this money,” said Frazer Ross, a regional head for Deutsche Bank’s investment-grade debt syndicate. “It’s like they took out an insurance policy, but now it’s too costly.”

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Some Jobs Data

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…from Stephen Moore via his Fox News op-ed. They compare the job creation performance of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) and then-Vice President and current Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s eight-year administration with the three years of performance of President Donald Trump’s administration prior to the current Wuhan Virus situation.

Manufacturing
Obama: -192,000—that’s jobs lost
Trump: 475,000—that’s jobs gained

Mining
Obama: -112,000
Trump: 63,000

Construction
Obama: 280,000
Trump: 746,000

Biden wants to “help” this growth along by dumping $4 trillion of new taxes and rescinded current tax cuts on our economy, on our jobs engine.

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Racism of the Progressive-Democratic Party—Again

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is at it again. Here’s another example of his utter contempt (not hatred, mind you) for blacks.

They’re saying, “Jeeze, the reason I was able to stay sequestered in my home is because some Black woman was able to stack the grocery shelf. Or a young Hispanic is out there, these dreamers are out there, 60,000 of them acting as first responders and nurses and docs.”

Not only are blacks incapable of thinking independently, as Biden said—twice—earlier in comparing them with Hispanics, now he’s saying they’re not even capable of doing anything more complex than shelf-stacking; certainly not capable of being first responders, nurses, doctors.

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The Racism of the Left

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Separate from the segregationist identity politics so loudly practiced by the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party is this. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two Arizona voting cases

Arizona Republican Party v Democratic National Committee and Brnovich v Democratic National Committee involving Arizona election laws that ban ballot harvesting and voting in other precincts.

As the Editorial Board puts it [emphasis added],

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