Tag Archives: politics

Trump is Right, and He’s Wrong

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President Donald Trump (R) delivered his State of the Union Speech Tuesday evening. In it, among a variety of topics (as is the nature of SOTU speeches), he touted the large improvement in our economy, from inflation down sharply, the stock market up strongly, manufacturing coming home, energy costs coming down, and so on. On all of this, Trump was absolutely correct: our economy is much better, much stronger, much more stable than it was under his predecessor Joe Biden (D). He also touted a number of projects and statutory proposals that would cement existing improvements and lead to further improvements.

Those, though, are national, population-as-a-whole, items. Our national population is made up of individuals, small clusters of individuals, and regional collections of individuals.

What Trump didn’t do was acknowledge the further work necessary to make those individual, cluster, and collections of Americans’ lives better in particular. He should have, he still needs to do, and what Republicans in Congress and running for Congress in Progressive-Democrat incumbent districts and States need to do, is talk to those folks specifically and directly about their economic situations and how Republican policies and proposals will help them in particular, how they’re already helping them (without talking down to them).

Failing that, both houses of Congress are in peril of falling to the Progressive-Democrats and the economic and security destruction they will inflict with their big, intrusive government; increasing taxation; and exploding spending policies.

One other thing: Trump got the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen to demonstrate, with their own behavior, how useless, if not dangerous, they are to our Republic. Trump challenged all of the Congressmen in the room (and it was most of them, as the threats of fully a third of Party’s House Representatives to boycott Trump’s SOTU speech proved empty words; they showed up instead) who agreed with the simple statement that the primary goal of the government is to protect American citizens and not illegal aliens to stand. To a man and woman, all of the Republicans stood. Nearly all of the Progressive-Democrats (there were a couple of exceptions) remained seated. They showed, thereby, that they don’t agree that protecting us American citizens is paramount.

Come to that, this was a Party that refused even to stand for the proposition that child transition hormonal or surgical treatments is wrong. This was a Party that refused even to stand for a little girl who survived a traffic collision caused by an illegal alien with an illegally granted Commercial Driver License driving a truck. This was a Party that refused even to stand for the mother of a young Ukrainian immigrant brutally murdered in a subway car.

This should be remembered in this primary season and in the fall elections.

A Cynically Irrelevant Argument

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Here’s the lede:

A coalition of climate and health organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday in an effort to combat its repeal of a landmark climate finding.

Because of course they do. The landmark climate “finding” that has been repealed is the finding that plant food in the form of atmospheric CO2 actually is a pollutant. That fiction has expanded costs of living for us American citizens for decades, and its removal is good riddance. Nevertheless, the climate funding industry is waxing hysterical over the nation’s turn toward rationality.

Their suit proceeds, cynically, from an irrelevancy. Peter Zalzal, of the Environmental Defense Fund:

Repealing the endangerment finding endangers all of us. People everywhere will face more pollution, higher costs, and thousands of avoidable deaths.

Even were that true—it isn’t—it’s irrelevant. The question is an economic, and so a political, one. Our courts have no jurisdiction for hearing this argument. Our judges and Justices are bound by our Constitution and their oaths of office to uphold and defend it, and by their oaths they’re further constrained to rule based on the text of any statute that comes before them. They cannot, legitimately, rule based on what they wished our Constitution and statutes said, nor can they, legitimately, rule based on their personal views of what’s good or bad for our society.

This sort of suit should be tossed at the outset, with prejudice, and with sanctions on the lawyers and their employing firms for bringing frivolous suits.

The Left’s Mantra

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And I offer an equally oft-repeated alternative.

The Left wants to ever more heavily tax the rich, and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians can’t conceive of any taxing or spending alternative. Conservatives want to lower taxes and cut government spending. A current example of the former is playing out in California.

Federal cuts to the state’s Medicaid program will leave its health system short of billions of dollars. A California healthcare union wants an emergency, one-time 5% levy on the wealth of any resident worth over $1 billion to plug the hole.

Those Federal cuts are a small and rare spending cut victory. Raising taxes on the rich (for those who truly think that 5% tax is a one-off, I might have some beachfront property north of Santa Fe that might interest you) is the only answer Progressive-Democrats and rent-seeking union managers can think of.

The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer is cut from the same cloth. She opened her piece with this:

The risk is that the US economy becomes increasingly dependent on a narrow group of very rich households, whose spending is tied to the performance of the stock market. This could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction.

It’s inconceivable to the denizens of the Left that alternatives exist. There are two—closely intertwined—that come readily to mind. In no particular order, they are cutting tax rates and cutting government spending.

Don’t just willy-nilly do allegedly targeted tax cuts, instead, lower the tax rates on the bottom 80% of us tax payers to the level paid by the top 20%. An easy, but all too difficult politically, way to do this is simply to reform our tax code to charge a single low flat rate on all income regardless of source—a rate in the range of 10%-15% on the sum of an individual’s income from all sources. Of course, that would include the market value of stock options on the date of an award’s vesting and other such moves to transfer income from W-2 forms into other venues. That guarantees all of us are paying the same rates and it eliminates the news writer’s plaint: that claimed dependency of the government on tax revenue from the rich.

The other component of the intertwining is to reduce government spending. Exercise true fiscal discipline, and spend taxpayers’ money only on those things truly, critically needed; stop spending on the nice-to-have goodies.

A wealth gap will still exist, but that’s neither good nor bad in itself. The gap—especially under the more equitable tax regime—is, and would be, the result of differences in luck, work ethic, and innate talent. The increased economic mobility that would obtain also would have folks on the lower rungs moving up the economic ladder as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it, and folks on the upper rungs moving down as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it.

Trumpian Tariffs, Who Pays Them, And So What?

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The Federal Reserve now is saying that us Americans are paying 90% of the tariffs put in place by President Donald Trump (R).

In an analysis on the [Federal Reserve] bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on US firms and consumers.”
They reach that conclusion by examining import data, to see whether foreign suppliers cut their prices in response to Mr Trump’s added tariff costs. Over the first eight months of 2025, “94 percent of the tariff incidence was borne by the US,” the analysis says, meaning “a 10 percent tariff caused only a 0.6 percentage point decline in foreign export prices.”

Say that’s accurate—and, frankly, I have no reason to dispute it—it seems that the tariffs’ impact on the prices us American consumers face has been effected already, that impact is minimal inflation, and that inflation seems to be coming under control. That’s the case even as individual items—furniture, for instance—do seem to have ongoing price increases that are more closely related to tariff rates.

Overall, that leaves other causes also impacting inflation at least as much, if not more, than tariffs: supply chains dependent on distant foreign nations with the attendant shipping costs, those shipping costs themselves dependent on container rates and fuel costs, and especially our dependency on critical items like rare earth ores and refined rare earths that are controlled by an enemy nation that already is squeezing our economy with greatly reduced and heavily controlled exports to us. Even those rising furniture prices are, in addition to tariffs, strongly impacted by Canadian charges for exporting timber to the US—which costs impact house construction costs as well as costs for the furniture to put into them.

Missed in the Discussion?

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The People’s Republic of China has a “national team” of investors who work at the government’s behest to maintain a measure of stability in the PRC’s stock market.

The group is known by market players as the “national team,” and it functions as a market stabilization fund. It has been a fixture in the Chinese stock market for more than a decade, usually buying exchange-traded funds, and was widely noted when it intervened to prop up prices during a 2015 crash. After Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs in April 2025, triggering a global stock selloff, the national team stepped in to relieve the pain as a buyer of index funds.

On the other hand,

The CSI 300 benchmark, which tracks shares listed in both Shanghai and Shenzhen, has risen more than 20% over the past year, despite the April dip. Last month, trading volume across mainland Chinese stock exchanges reached a record high.
…
“Substantial yet well-paced selling by the national team is curbing—but not killing—the positive market momentum,” analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note earlier this month.

Maybe this is the government doing a slow pump-and-dump, which is one way to make money (not legally in most western nations), maybe not. In any event, it’s also textbook investing: buy low and sell high. Either way, this is making a lot of money for the PRC government, which in turn provides serious money for subsidizing its cost of goods production and for offsetting the effects of foreign (mostly US) tariffs on PRC exports. More the former, most likely, since the PRC has been able to increase its exports to Europe and South America, to their economic dependency peril.