Category Archives: politics

That Was No Gaffe

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Donald Trump, Jr, says The Washington Post is destroying its credibility with its gaffes.  Young Trump is correct on the first part (except, perhaps, for the tense), but he’s being generous with the last part.

This newspaper headlined its article purporting to be an obituary about Daesh’s head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, styling the…person…an austere religious scholar.  Earlier, the newspaper smeared a high school student, saying he’d mistreated in some way a Native American who had, in fact, accosted the boy, banging a drum in the boy’s face.

Trump said,

They don’t even pretend to be objective[.]

This is plain to see; however, the words of WaPo aren’t gaffes. The folks who lead and who write for the WaPo are professional, highly talented, thoroughly trained pressmen at the top of their game.  Words are their stock in trade.  They knew, and know, what they’re writing; they knew, and know, what they’re going to write as they form the thoughts.

They write what they write with careful deliberation.

A Strike “Template”

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That’s what the UAW hopes to use its bludgeon of GM as when the union turns to Ford and Fiat Chrysler.

The United Auto Workers will use the agreement at GM as a template that is expected to reach similar terms on wages and benefits in separate contract talks with Ford Motor Co and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles….

However, there’s no reason for Ford or Fiat Chrysler to succumb to this.  These are three separate companies, with separate goals, revenue streams, and cost structures; there should be three separate contracts with the UAW.

There’s also no reason for Ford or Fiat Chrysler to succumb to UAW’s move just because the union wants a common contract. What’s good for GM is not what’s good for Ford or Fiat Chrysler, especially since GM gave away so much of their farm, not just to end a strike, but to agree to higher costs solely to try to inflict those increased costs on their rivals. GM is well aware of the UAW’s auto industry “negotiating” pattern.

There’s also no reason for Ford or Fiat Chrysler to succumb to UAW’s move because the union’s anti-GM strike has drastically drawn down its strike fund and reduced its ability to pay its striking union members. UAW can’t hack, or can’t so easily hack, a prolonged strike against either company, much less both of them. The UAW also needs to consider the effects of its strike(s) on surrounding businesses: suppliers, suppliers of the suppliers, other businesses that serve the workers of those suppliers with recreation, restaurants, theaters, and the like.

Update: Since I wrote this, Ford has acceded to UAW demands, and they did so quickly.

Policing the World

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI) had an interesting campaign advertisement op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  One campaign promise she made in it jumped out at me.

A Gabbard presidency would mean the end of trying to police the world….

Who does Gabbard think would police the world if we don’t? Can she really believe that a police-less world would be benign, or that our enemies won’t divide up the policing among themselves explicitly for their benefit and just as explicitly for our detriment?  Or that their squabbling among themselves over the spoils won’t spill over into serious regional or even global conflict?

Doctorings

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And we have to learn about this from a German newspaper.  Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council functionary in the Trump administration, appeared in Congressman and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) Star Chamber earlier.  Among other things, he claimed, on the matter of asking Ukraine to investigate corruption, including Burisma’s and the Bidens’ possible roles in the corruption,

was “inappropriate.” It “had nothing to do with national security,” he said he told [US Ambassador to the EU Gordon] Sondland.

Because, to this NSC staffer, everything looks like a national security thing.  There couldn’t possibly be any other purpose to a suggestion, like, say, a law enforcement thing, where ordinary corruption might involve American citizens.

But here’s the bit that we have to read about in other nations first because the American NLMSM didn’t want to mention it until Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D, CA) leaked it from Vindman’s official secret testimony:

He [Vindman] added that he had tried to fill in the word “Burisma” which was omitted from the White House’s rough transcript of the telephone call.

Vindman confessed to trying to doctor the transcript of the call. And we’re supposed to believe his testimony.

Aside: there’s nothing “rough” about the transcript; it is a plain transcript, made from notes taken during the telecon and from notes made immediately after it with the express purpose of producing a transcript. That Vindman had access to it for his attempted doctoring is a demonstration that the transcript was circulated among those present at the telecon to confirm its accuracy. Just like a trial court transcript is agreed by both defense and prosecution/plaintiff council.

PRC Personal Savings Rate

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James Areddy had an extensive article on this in a recent Wall Street Journal.  It seems that the personal savings rate of People’s Republic of China’s citizens peaked around 2010 and has been trailing off ever since.  Areddy posited a number of reasons for this, and why it’s likely to continue.  Chief among them is the usual suspect of an increasingly less poor, if not increasingly prosperous, population wishing to live better rather than save more.  Another major reason seems to be the PRC’s one-child policy, lately relaxed legally, but not socially.  With fewer kids in the family, there’s less reason for parents to save against those kids’ future.

I see another reason, though, for the continuation of the fall-off in savings rate, and that continuation running to disastrously low levels, from a national economic perspective.  This is the aging of the PRC’s population.

That aging is driven by a couple of things. One is that folks get old before they die (duh), and today’s PRC population being healthier than yesterday’s, these folks are living longer.  The bookend to this is the shrinking—across generations—of the population of working age citizens.  This stems from that one-child policy, emplaced explicitly to shrink a population that had severe trouble feeding and housing itself and from the continued social lack of desire for more than one child in a family, and from the desire to live better materially today, now that folks are better off (or at least not so bad off).

With fewer folks working relatively to aging and retiring, this means there’ll be less public money to pay for old folks’ retirement (and retired) needs, so the old folks will need to spend their savings even faster than might be the case otherwise.

Another feedback loop likely is inflation.  This will accelerate the fall-off in personal savings. This inflation will be driven by that same shrinking labor force, this time reducing production output—the availability of goods and services—even as spending increases across all age demographics: a classic case of (relatively) too many yuan chasing (relatively) too few goods.