Category Archives: political economy

This would be a Mistake

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President Donald Trump (R) laid significant tariffs and tariff rates on the People’s Republic of China. The PRC’s President Xi Jinping responded with matching tariff rates, but with escalatory moves added:

…restricted exports of certain rare-earth minerals, added US companies to trade blacklists, and aimed an antitrust probe at the China operations of US chemicals and materials company DuPont.

Then the WSJ‘s news writer posited this:

What lies ahead is likely to be a cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation, making it hard to even start negotiations in the near term.

If the Trump’s purpose with the tariffs is to (re)balance trade with the PRC’s tariffs, that would be one thing—his reciprocal tariff regime. However, if his purpose is to persuade the PRC to change its overall international trade behavior, particular vis-à-vis the US, then tit-for-tat would be a foolish mistake.

Tit-for-tat only gives the other side time to adapt and maintain. What’s necessary, if Trump’s move is persuasion rather than rebalancing, is to escalate tariffs (and other economic moves) higher and faster than the PRC can respond, and that’s what Xi will attempt as demonstrated by his opening response. Simply matching Xi—as tit-for-tat does generally—is surrender to Xi the initiative in this extension of the PRC’s long-running trade war, with its cyber aspects as well, against us.

I Have a Question

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NPR has said that if Federal funding is cut off, it may well see 180 local NPR stations forced to close due lack of funding.

NPR compiled a lengthy document in 2011 that outlined what would happen if the government cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed company that supports both NPR and PBS….

Neither NPR nor PBS appear to have updated that claim, or the underlying data, in the 14 years since.

Which raises my question: why have NPR and/or PBS not done anything in those 14 years to shore up their finances so as to keep those stations operational?

Bonus question: given that laziness or sloppiness or deliberate dependence on Uncle Sugar, on what basis would any rational American think Federal funding continue?

Reviewing Harvard’s Federal Funding

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The Trump administration has begun reviewing Harvard University’s $9 billion in Federal funding. The question I have is how badly does Harvard need any Federal funding?

Harvard’s endowment is some $53.2 billion as of last year, and the school got a 9.6% return on its endowment’s investments last year. That allowed its endowment to grow by nearly 5% year-on-year despite disbursements from the endowment.

Harvard claims $6.4 million in annual operating expenses as of last year, and it spent $749 million in scholarships and its own grants for its students.

With all of that, I ask again, how badly does Harvard need Federal funding? The school’s endowment doesn’t seem to be doing much more than collecting dust, investment returns, and net growth, while the school collects billions of average citizens’ tax money for its programs. Given that, why should citizens of Iowa, or Montana, or Utah—or New York, or Illinois, or California—pay for Massachusetts-domiciled Harvard’s spending decisions?

My answer: Harvard has little to no need for taxpayer monies.

Golden Dome

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William Forstchen, historian, author, and reputed EMP expert, wants us to build President Donald Trump’s (R) golden dome, an evolution of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative which was designed to destroy incoming ICBMs before they could reach their detonation locations in an attack on the United States. He’s right, but his emphasis is too narrow. His concern:

We have to defend the United States against an EMP attack, which could destroy us in a matter of minutes.

He cited studies, as summarized by Fox News, some statistics:

Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80%-90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike happened.

That would result from energy and water distribution network failure, power failure, financial system failure, transportation failure, and the resulting lack of food in the cities and the lack of water in urban areas from small to large.

The problem that’s not being addressed, though, is that an EMP does not need a nuclear detonation to generate it. Small EMP devices can be built relatively easily, and our destruction can be achieved with a collection of these small devices being used to destroy our financial and communications data centers, nodes in our energy distribution networks, nodes in our water distribution networks, nodes in our mass transportation and shipping centers.

All of these would aggregate to a nuclear EMP in their end result, and these smaller devices are much harder to detect. The several Departments in our Federal government and the several private companies in our tech industry need to get seriously involved, both in partnership with each other and separately, in figuring out how to detect and neutralize these devices, also.

A Cost of the Left’s Obstructionism

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This one is our national debt and the interest due on it.

• the average interest rate on debt will exceed the economic growth rate by 2045, sparking the beginning of a debt spiral
• Federal debt held by the public will rise from 100% of GDP in FY2025 to 156% of GDP by 2055
• annual deficits will grow from 6.2% of GDP in 2025 to 7.3% of GDP by 2055

The obstructionism of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party isn’t even centered on principle, only on anti-Trumpism and anti-Republicanism and anti-Conservatism.

Potentiating the economic disaster that our debt and associated interest payments portend, those things would accumulate into the loss of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. That, in turn, would feed back negatively into our economy, forcing it onto the vagaries of foreign currencies and currency exchange rates.

This is why the DOGE-led spending cuts must be enacted into law by Congress. This is what the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s obstructionism will cost us.