Posted on by rjonakait

                                                                           SOTU

The moderator for the current events discussion group is a great politician. Only after flattering me about past presentations did he ask me to comment on the State of the Union Address. Ego stroked, I agreed. Only later did I realize that no one in their right mind would consent to watch the hour-and-forty-seven-minute State of the Union speech, the longest in recorded history. You had to wring hard to get a few dollops of news out of it, and the views about it are predictable.

There is little new to report. Even if you have seen only a glimpse of Trump in the last months, you had already heard, probably many times, what he said in his address to Congress. According to him, he has turned around the disastrous economy into something wonderful. The worst inflation ever that he inherited (from Biden, of course) is now just about nonexistent. Prices are falling. My attention lapsed for a moment, but he may have said that eggs in some stores are free and at most a dollar a dozen. In Oklahoma and maybe Ohio, but definitely not Oregon, if you buy two Snicker bars at the filling station, the gas is gratis. (Subsequent events make this even more unlikely.) Job creation is better than ever, and manufacturing has rebounded. GDP is astounding as are wages, and the stock market is at an all-time high. Crime, on the other hand, is as low as it was at the Creation more than six thousand years ago. We are respected around the world like never before. We are in a Golden Age, a Golden Age he said, but definitely not in the Age of Aquarius. We have ended discrimination against white Americans, especially white males, by abolishing DEI.

I don’t possibly have room even to summarize what fact-checkers had to say, but to put it kindly, most of the State of the Union was fact-and-evidence-challenged. A rule of thumb: Just because Trump says it does not make it wrong, but that is a good starting point.

And there’s more. The Supreme Court, in what Trump has called a really, really bad decision, struck down tariffs, but customs duties will be brought back, Trump said. To the surprise of many, he was restrained and did not launch the kinds of verbal attacks on the Justices that he did immediately after the tariff decision. Similarly, he did not mention the low IQs of Republicans who sometimes have not agreed with him.  He did not create demeaning nicknames for anyone.  He did, however, attack Democrats in an unprecedented way. He said: Stand if you agree that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” All Republicans got to their feet, but only a few Democrats did. He then went on to say that Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for their continuing sittingness and that they were crazy and managing to destroy the country–apparently the only time opponents were labeled demented at a State of the Union.

A State of the Union has often been an opportunity to spell out a president’s legislative priorities. There was little of that from Trump. He did propose a new retirement account and suggested that tech companies will be required to build their own power plants for AI data centers, but he did not suggest any legislation to accomplish this. He did, however, tell the legislators to stop insider congressional trading, his one policy position that seemed to have gotten bipartisan cheers. Nevertheless, there was no grand policy proposal. To the disappointment of Republicans, I’m sure, he didn’t even propose another tax cut. But he did lobby for the passage of the SAVE Act, a solution in search of a problem, that would strip states of powers to regulate elections. He said that the only way Democrats can win is to cheat. He seemed to be foreshadowing what may happen next fall: If Democrats win in the midterms, he will claim that they had to have cheated.

Perhaps the speech was as noteworthy for what was not said as much as for what was. There was no mention of ICE, Jeffrey Epstein, plans for Gaza, healthcare, social media, Melania the movie, the Board of Peace, not even the ballroom. There was almost nothing about what once consumed conservatives–our federal debt. However, he announced a new war on fraud under the generalship of JD Vance (not Musk this time) that could supposedly end federal debt. The speech, however, did raise the now standard conservative attack on transgender people, but without any explanation of how this makes life better for our populace. (And, of course, his brief comments on Iran were quickly outpaced by his war.)

This was not just a speech. There was also stagecraft. At the fifteen-minute mark, when attention had already lagged, Trump had the Olympic gold-medal winning men’s hockey team–which did have a thrilling victory–march into the congressional arena. The women’s hockey team, also thrilling victors, were not there. He certainly did not mention that the majority of America’s medals were won by women or that America failed to win the most medals.

Was this address successful? We might like to think our elections are about persuasion. Who has the better policies? Who has the better candidates? But, especially for midterms, when fewer people vote, it is about gerrymandering and about turning out the vote of your side and suppressing the vote of the other side.

While Trump may do things to suppress votes of Democrats, this speech is not one of them, and I doubt that it changed the energy levels of his supporters. Fewer people watched this year’s State of the Union than last year’s. There were no new notable quotable lines to act as battle cries. Instead, it was mostly well-worn, well-known Trumpian tropes. It was less than a week ago and is already largely forgotten. There is much more important news.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets (Tariffs and Other Stuff)

Tariffs were controversial before the Civil War. Their benefits and detriments were not equal throughout the country. Brenda Wineapple reports in The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019) that in 1832 the South Carolina legislature said that, if not repealed, a federal tariff was null and void and a ground for secession.

Tariffs were also controversial after the Civil War. They were the chief source of federal revenues until the early twentieth century. The issue was not whether tariffs should be applied but at what rate. As Troy Senik wrote in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland (2023), tariffs had conflicting goals. Should they only be high enough to fund government or go further to protect American industry from ruinous foreign competition? Industry was best protected when tariffs were so high that almost no foreign goods were imported, but then little revenue was collected. On the other hand, tariffs set best for funding the government did not protect industry as much as higher taxes.

Troy Senik also says that Grover Cleveland correctly saw another conflict in tariffs: They helped to raise wages in protected industries, but this gain was offset by higher prices workers had to pay for goods

Friends talk about fleeing to Canada. But what is the point if Canada becomes the 51st state?

No friend talks about fleeing to Greenland. Perhaps that will be different when Trump builds Mar-a-Lago Northeast there.

Deputy Attorney Genereal Todd Blanche said recently that the Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into a leak of “inaccurate, but nevertheless classified” intelligence about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. It comes as a shock that anyone in the Trump administration wants to keep false information secret.

Present policies show that the Republican party has abandoned much of what Ronald Reagan stood for. Nicole Hemmer in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s states that Reagan, fueled by anticommunism, had “a preference for more open borders and higher immigration levels, for fewer tariffs[,] a stingier social net, [as well as] a more aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union.”

Under Reagan, the federal workforce grew by 200,000.

Because of tariffs, the United States has intervened militarily and politically in foreign countries. Sean Mirski in We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and Rise of the American Colossus (2023) maintains that our interventions in Latin America at the turn of 20th century and beyond were not primarily to protect American business interests but rather to keep European governments outside the hemisphere. Some Latin American countries borrowed profligately from Europe and often could not pay the money back. Under international law, the lender countries were entitled to use force to service the debts. This was often a simple procedure: Seize the customhouse and collect the tariffs. The United States was concerned about this potential European presence in the Americas and feared further that the Latin American countries would grant the Europeans concessions that would disfavor the United States. Consequently, the United States thought it was better to intervene in the debtor nations and use the customs revenues to pay the Europeans. Frequently, this was good for the invaded country since the Americans did not skim from the tariffs, or at least not as much as before, and the Latin American country often saw its revenues increase. Moreover, Europe learned that interventions in the Western Hemisphere were expensive. The European powers then often blustered about intervening to get America to do the expensive work. America soon recognized that the problems would recur unless the debtor countries became stable and lived within their means. As a result, the United States became more and more involved in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Future of America–Tennis Edition

          President Trump imposed tariffs on specialty steel products. A recent news story indicated that this action had benefited a Pennsylvania mill, which had added thirty or so workers and raised the question of whether President Biden would continue the tariffs. Meanwhile, the protection measures had increased the price of the steel and made it harder to get for American manufacturers, and this may decrease employment at some companies. I have no more than an Economics 101 understanding of macroeconomics, but all this made me think back to lectures on free trade that indicated such trade was good and that it increased wealth across the globe.

Assume you and I both raise cotton and make farm implements, but I am not in a good cotton-growing region and you are. You will grow more cotton than I will for the same effort. If you give up the tool business and devote yourself to the bolls, you could produce more cotton than you and I could together. I can devote myself to the hoe business, and we can both trade the fruits of our labor. The world is richer. It has both more cotton and at least the same number of hoes than without the trade.

That, of course, is the basic idea behind free trade. If each country does what it does best, and we can freely trade our outputs, then total productivity increases. Moreover, if the supply of cotton increases, then cotton should cost less, and those who purchase cotton have money left over to buy other things, increasing demand for more goods, benefiting the makers of other products as well.

          Cotton can be grown in some places more efficiently than in others because of natural conditions, but different factors are at work for the efficient production of cotton fabric, if by efficient we mean cost per unit of cloth. Manmade factors now become crucial. Local wages, the costs of safety measures and pollution controls, local electricity costs and so on can determine efficiency. Although other factors will come into play, whoever pays workers the lowest wage will most efficiently produce cotton cloth. Since the wages in Bangladesh are less than at North Carolina mills, the cost of products from Bangladesh will be less than products from North Carolina. We consumers benefit. I may pay a half dollar less when I buy, in a somewhat ludicrous attempt to be cool, those patterned socks made in Bangladesh compared to those made down South. With fewer people buying their product, North Carolina workers will lose their jobs. Even so, if we add up all those fifty-cent consumer savings, it may be a greater amount than the monetary losses suffered by the workers. Seen as a whole, American society is better off. But, then again, I don’t want to be the one to tell those who lost their jobs, “Buck up. Your loss was worth it for the rest of us.” With free trade, we often get small winners, the consumers, and big losers, the laid-off workers.

          Our free trade conversations now seem to center on those who have been harmed with little discussion of the benefits. To save the North Carolina cotton mills, we could put a tariff on those Bangladeshi socks, but while the tariff may be imposed on the foreign company, it really means that consumers will be charged more for the socks. If the tariff is high enough, the North Carolina mill will be competitive and will not have to shut down. Jobs are saved. But, of course, now consumers pay more for the product and have less disposable income for other stuff. If the country overall was better off economically when the foreign socks came in without a tariff, keeping them out with a tariff must mean overall the country is now worse off. 

          Besides a tariff or its equivalent, we should be discussing other ways to ameliorate the problems of those who have been the big losers to free trade. We should be thinking of a social net—health care, training, relocation assistance, infrastructure jobs, education incentives–if not generally, at least for those whose jobs have moved abroad. But this discussion is generally off the table. Such a social net is “Big Government,” and, goodness knows, we can’t have that. Meanwhile, a tariff–for reasons that have a mystifying logic–is somehow not considered to be Big Government even though it, in effect, is a widespread tax on consumers, a tax, like most consumer taxes, that is regressive leading to more income inequality.

          A discussion of how to help workers who lose their jobs because of systemic societal changes would be valuable since it would apply to more than just those workers who have lost out to free trade. So, for example, coal miners face unemployment not because of NAFTA or other such trade agreements. President Trump had suggested that declining mining jobs would come back once those Big Government regulations were rescinded. Perhaps some work would, but, of course, just as tariffs impose costs on the larger society, the deregulatory approach also imposes widespread costs. Many of those “regulations” are protections against industrial accidents and water and air pollution that impose costs not only on hurt individuals but on society in general. However, the removal of such protections is not going to bring back many of the mining jobs. Better technology has made competitors to coal more efficient, and better technology has led to the more efficient extraction of coal. Fewer miners are needed to mine the same amount of coal as were needed a generation ago, and natural gas competes better against coal than it did in the past. No matter what, all the coal mining jobs are not coming back.

          The coal industry is in illustration of an important fact: many jobs are not lost because of free trade or government over-regulation, but because of new technologies. Most of us do not see the dramatic effects of technology on employment, but in a minor way it was on display for millions in the recently completed U.S. Open tennis tournament. This sport has employed many officials for each match. In addition to the chair umpire, four officials make calls on the sidelines, one or two for the center lines, two for the baselines, two for the service lines, and one for calling lets when a serve clips the net…or, at least, it did. Through the years, an electronic device has replaced the human for let calls, and electronics were used when a player challenged a human’s line call. The Open, however, went further and dispensed with all human officials except for the chair umpire. All the in and out calls were determined not by people but by an electronic sensor and an electronic voice that sounded more human than Siri’s. This won’t make a huge difference in our employment statistics; the tournament lasts only two weeks. But a great many line callers lost their jobs.

          I may not have thought of technology changing employment in tennis tournaments until recently, but the fact that technology affects jobs in all parts of our economy has been apparent for quite some time. Another minor example, this time as-seen-on-TV: In a segment of the show This Old House, plans were shown for a house with intricate, curved, intersecting roof beams. The viewers were taken not to an old-fashioned woodworking shop, but to a modern factory that had Computer Numeric Control machines. The CNC devices, after some programming, quickly cut the beams and fabricated the complex joints. Norm, a carpenter on This Old House, was duly impressed and noted that it would have taken him days to produce one such beam, while one person operating a CNC machine for a few hours could make all of them. This technology may have had the benefit of making the costs lower for spectacular building designs, but, of course, fewer people with old-fashioned skills will be employed in the fashioning of some roof beams.

          Jobs are lost for many reasons, including international trade deals and technological advances. At least some of the time, I benefit because of lower costs. I have done nothing to deserve the benefit of free trade’s lower sock prices or roof beams made cheaper by technology. (On the other hand, the elimination of all those tennis lines people did not seem to translate into lower ticket prices. If the costs of the tournament were less, where did that money go?) And, of course, the mill worker, the carpenter, and the tennis line callers have done nothing to deserve a job loss. And this should lead to the societal question we don’t much discuss: Should I surrender at least part of my undeserved benefit to help those who got the punch in the gut?

Posted on by rjonakait

Principles and Partisanship

 

When Congress abandons legislating, power flows to the president, upsetting the separation of powers the founders sought to constitutionalize. Kaiser notes, “The preeminence of presidents had been a widely accepted proposition for half a century, despite the founders’ clear expectation that Congress would be the most influential branch of government.” We now expect that the president will set the agenda, legislative and otherwise, and the executive branch, not Congress, primarily drafts the legislation.

This accretion of presidential power has occurred no matter who occupies the White House, but this shift has also been pushed by a brand of conservativism. These ideologues speak of the “unitary executive.” On one level this is a constitutional truism. Our constitution does vest the executive power in a president, not in a group.  Section 1 of Article II of the Constitution states, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” But when these conservatives support the “unitary executive” they promote their theory that presidential power is expansive, perhaps unlimited, when it comes to national security and that Congress cannot interfere with what these conservatives consider to be executive power. This is not the place to explore these concepts and their apparent contradiction with constitutional originalism except to note that the president, who now has powers never dreamed of by the founders of our country, should have even more under the “unitary executive” theory.

Power has also flowed from Congress to the president because Congress has expressly ceded power to the president. An example came after 9/11 when Congress authorized the president to use force against anyone person or entity the president “determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the terrorist attacks. The president was granted the power to take warlike actions if the president found certain facts to be true—in this case that a country, organization, or a person was involved in 9/11. Congress placed no restriction on this presidential factfinding and provided for no review of the decision. Congress washed its hands of determining who or what is our enemy and left it to the president to tell us who we will try to kill and subvert. Instead of checks and balances, instead of separation of powers, Congress decided to honor Ricky Nelson: “I will follow you/Follow you wherever you may go. . . .”

We see a similar pattern in one of the significant present controversies—the setting of tariffs. Tariffs have been a recurrent issue in this country’s history, but these were congressional battles because the Constitution gives Congress the authority, and no other body, the power to set tariffs. Section 8 of Article I states, “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises. . . .”

However, today we have the president unilaterally determining the existence and level of tariffs. This is because Congress passed a law that grants the president tariff-setting power when it is necessary for “national security.” Congress neither told the president how to determine when the national security was at stake nor set up a review mechanism for that determination. The president apparently was granted total discretion. Congress may have assumed that a president would only exercise this power in good faith, but it did nothing to insure good faith. Instead, simply by invoking national security, the president can take over the legislative tariff authority. If, as apparently was determined by the president, Canadian pine boards and two by fours are a national security concern, then anything that we might levy a tariff on must be a national security issue. Congress may have thought that it made a limited grant of power to the president by including the national security limitation, but in fact, the way President Trump has used the authority, Congress has ceded its legislative power over tariffs to the president. In essence, Congress amended the Constitution with the act.

The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Section 9 of Article I states, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law. . . .” The border wall dispute raises the issue whether Congress has ceded this fundamental power to the president, too.

(concluded April 1)