When President Biden proposed a 10-year tax hike of about $3 trillion in 2021, I was very critical.
But my hostility was not because Biden is a Democrat. I’ve also condemned Republicans who support higher taxes (either overtly or covertly).
So it goes without saying that I’m going to be very critical now that President Trump is floating a massive tax increase (also potentially amounting to about $3 trillion over 10 years) on American consumers.
And it does not matter that Trump’s potential tax increase is on trade. His proposal is bad news (just like Biden’s tax increase is bad news) because the net effect would be to divert trillions of dollars from the private economy and give it to politicians.
Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reports on Trump’s big tax grab.
Trump’s plan to enact a “universal baseline tariff” on virtually all imports to the United States…could represent a massive escalation of global economic chaos, surpassing the international trade discord that marked much of his first administration. …On Fox Business on Thursday, the former president called for setting this tariff at 10 percent “automatically” for all countries, a move that experts warn could lead to higher prices for consumers… Economists of both parties said Trump’s tariff proposal is extremely dangerous.
As one might imagine, Trump’s idea is being ridiculed by all trade experts.
Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, called the idea “lunacy” and “horrifying”. …a 10 percent tariff would hurt the thousands of U.S. firms that depend on imports, while also crippling the thousands of U.S. firms that depend on foreign exports, Posen said. …Even former Trump economic officials were sharply critical of the idea. “A tariff of that scope and size would impose a massive tax on the folks who it intends to help,” said Paul Winfree, an economist who served as Trump’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council… Michael Strain, an economist at American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, said international trade restrictions enacted in 1930 are widely viewed as exacerbating the Great Depression. …“It would be a disaster for the U.S. economy. It would raise prices for consumers and be met with considerable retaliation from other nations, which would raise the costs facing U.S. businesses. It would reduce employment among manufacturing workers,” Strain said. “It would be very, very bad.”
For readers who want a refresher on why protectionism is bad news, I have four short videos that cover the key issues.
- The economic analysis of trade
- Trade and creative destruction
- Understanding trade deficits
- The World Trade Organization
While I’m an ardent opponent of protectionism, I’ll close with two ways that Trump could make his ideas more palatable.
- If he matched his $3 trillion tax hike on trade with $3 trillion of offsetting tax cuts, the fiscal argument against his plan – at least theoretically – largely would disappear (though the trade argument would remain).
- If he proposed protectionism solely against potentially hostile nations such as China, he would – at least theoretically – have a foreign policy-based argument for the plan (though the trade argument would remain).
But I don’t expect to hear these arguments.
The problem, dating all the way back to when Trump was campaigning in 2016, is that he simply does not understand trade.
P.S. Between Trump’s awful ideas on trade (echoed by Biden) and the European Union’s proposal for massive trade taxes, it’s hard to be optimistic about future prosperity.
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No comments on Trump’s 2025 tax increase
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Mike Masnick on the Canadian version of the proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act:
This is just so painfully obnoxious. The legacy news media, spurred on by a welfare system that pretend free market supporter Rupert Murdoch dreamed up and convinced governments to implement, whereby the government would force internet companies, which had innovated and created new business models that worked, to suddenly be required to pay for sending traffic to legacy news media organizations which failed to innovate. It’s extreme corporate welfare, egged on by a guy who pretends to be against all kinds of welfare.
Canada is the latest country that was convinced to go down this very stupid route, and even as everyone explained (repeatedly) to the Canadian government how this would flop, they still went forward with it. In response Meta and Google (the two targets the Canadian government were trying to extort with this new law) announced that they would no longer allow any news links in Canada. Meta has already begun phasing out links to news in Canada.
The legacy media, which promoted this without the slightest bit of critical analysis (after all they were going to get paid, so why spend any time exploring the downside to such a tax?) is now losing its remaining braincells over this. A bunch of legacy Canadian media orgs are demanding a regulatory investigation of Meta over this move.
CBC/Radio-Canada has joined other news publishers and broadcasters in requesting that Canada’s Competition Bureau investigate Meta’s decision to block news content on its digital platforms in Canada, describing the social media giant’s decision as “anticompetitive.”
Let’s just review this more clearly for the slow folks who work in Canadian media (and the Canadian government):
- Media whines that Meta and Google are unfair, because they’re making money on the internet while the media is not. They often claim that Google and Meta are “stealing” from them when all they’ve actually done is provide a better vehicle for advertisers.
- In particular, the media complains that these companies are “making money from our content,” never once considering that news is a very, very, very tiny part of both Meta and Google’s business (Google doesn’t even try to monetize it in much of the world), and the thing that both companies do is PROVIDE LINKS TO THOSE MEDIA ORGS. These are the same orgs that, I guarantee you, have people on staff whose job it is to try to get more traffic. And here, Google and Meta are giving them a ton of traffic for free and the media orgs are somehow complaining that all that traffic is unfair.
- They convince politicians to pass a law requiring the big internet companies to pay for links, even though that goes against the fundamental concept of an open web. If these media orgs don’t want traffic from Google or Meta, they can easily block it. The problem is that they want that traffic AND they want to get paid for it, which has the whole equation backwards.
- The law that they demanded gets passed and Meta and Google start blocking links exactly as they promised they would do, and which makes perfect economic sense as the money they’d have to pay far outweighs the value of posting news links.
- The legacy media orgs… whine that this is anticompetitive.
So… according to these media orgs, Meta and Google linking to news is anticompetitive. But also not linking to news is anticompetitive.
Of course, when you put it that way, you realize this has fuck all to do with links or competition. It’s just straight up corruption. Meta and Google have large bank accounts. The media orgs have smaller bank accounts. The only fair thing, according to these legacy media orgs, is that Meta and Google should be forced to give them money. I mean, this is just pathetic:
“Meta’s practices are clearly designed to discipline Canadian news companies, prevent them from participating in and accessing the advertising market, and significantly reduce their visibility to Canadians on social media channels,” the CBC said in a joint statement with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada, a trade organization that represents newspapers.
“Meta’s anticompetitive conduct, which has attracted the attention of regulators around the world, will strengthen its already dominant position in advertising and social media distribution and harm Canadian journalism,” the statement read.
“The applicants ask the Competition Bureau to use its investigative and prosecutorial tools to protect competition and prohibit Meta from continuing to block Canadians’ access to news content.”
So, linking to them in the first place was anticompetitive because it helped Meta get more advertising, and now not linking to them is anticompetitive because it helps Meta get more advertising, and holy shit how does anyone take these media orgs seriously any more?
Canadian politicians supporting this nonsense sound even worse:
“Facebook … would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations,” Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a statement Tuesday.
Again this is so out of touch that Canada should feel embarrassed that it has an elected official this clueless. The “fair share” to pay to send someone free traffic is zero. Zilch. Nada. There is no world in which anyone should ever have to pay to send someone free traffic on the internet. When you charge for such nonsense the only logical business move is to block all such links.
It’s got nothing to do with competition at all. It has to do with greedy media owners who are looking for a handout from the government, by asking them to tax internet companies on the media orgs’ behalf.
That prompted this comment:
In this case, the problem is less the politicians (every political Party whether “left/progressive” or “right/conservative” is supporting it) and more that the general public gets its information about it from the same large news media that are trying to pull this scam.
And Bill C-18 aside, the politicians are heavily dependent on those media for news coverage on them and their Parties for everything else, as well — uniformly irate editorial desks at every outlet can only be bad news for every politician that these media feel are hurting the media organizations income opportunities by opposing this grift.
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Today in 1963, Little Stevie Wonder became the first artist to have the number one pop single and album and to lead the R&B charts with his “Twelve-Year-Old Genius”:
Today in 1974, one week after the catchy but factually questionable number one single (where is the east side of Chicago?) …
… the previous week’s number one sounded like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony compared with the new number one:
Today in 1990, at the beginning of Operation Desert Shield, Sinead O’Connor refused to sing if the National Anthem was performed before her concert at the Garden State Arts Plaza in Homdel, N.J. Radio stations responded by pulling O’Connor’s music from their airwaves. To one’s surprise, her career never really recovered.
That was the same day that Iron Maiden won a lawsuit from the families of two people who committed suicide, claiming that subliminal messages in the group’s “Stained Class” album drove them to kill themselves.
As a member of the band pointed out, it would have made much more sense to insert a subliminal message telling listeners to buy the band’s albums instead of a message that, had it been followed, would have depleted the band’s fan base.
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The New York Times:
There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. But one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground is a belief that the country is headed toward failure.
Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
Fifty-six percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. This kind of outlook is more common among voters whose party is out of power. But it’s also noteworthy that fatalists, as we might call them, span the political spectrum. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.
Where they disagree is about what may have gotten us to this point.
Republican fatalists, much like Republican voters overall, overwhelmingly support Donald J. Trump. This group is largely older — two-thirds of Republicans over 65 say the country is on the verge of failure — and less educated. They are also more likely than Republican voters overall to get their news from non-Fox conservative media sources like Newsmax or The Epoch Times.
Many of these gloomy Republicans see the Biden administration’s policies as pushing the country to the verge of collapse.
“Things are turning very communistic,” said Margo Creamer, 72, a Trump supporter from Southern California. “The first day Biden became president he ripped up everything good that happened with Trump; he opened the border — let everyone and anyone in. It’s just insane.”
She added that there was only one way to reverse course: “In this next election if Trump doesn’t win, we’re going to fail as a nation.”
Many Republicans saw the pandemic, and the resulting economic impact, as playing a role in pushing the country toward failure.
“Covid gave everyone a wake-up call on what they can do to us as citizens,” said Dale Bowyer, a Republican in Fulton County, Ind. “Keeping us in our houses, not being allowed to go to certain places, it was complete control over the United States of America. They think we’re idiots and we wouldn’t notice.”
While fewer Democrats see the country as nearing collapse, gender is the defining characteristic associated with this pessimistic outlook. Democratic and Republican women are more likely than their male counterparts to feel this way.
“I have never seen things as bleak or as precarious as they have been the last few years,” said Ann Rubio, a Democrat and funeral director in New York City. “Saying it’s a stolen election plus Jan. 6, it’s terrifying. Now we’re taking away a woman’s right to choose. I feel like I’m watching the wheels come off something.”
For many Democrats, specific issues — especially abortion — are driving their concern about the country’s direction.
Brandon Thompson, 37, a Democrat and veteran living in Tampa, Fla., expressed a litany of concerns about the state of the country: “The regressive laws being passed; women don’t have abortion access in half the country; gerrymandering and stripping people’s rights to vote — stuff like this is happening literally all over the country.”
“If things continue to go this way, this young experiment, this young nation, is going to fall apart,” he said.
Pollsters have long asked a simple question to take the country’s temperature: Are things in the U.S. headed on the right track or are they off in the wrong direction?
Americans’ views on this question have become more polarized in recent years and are often closely tied to views of the party in power. So it is not surprising, for example, that currently 85 percent of Republicans said the country was on the wrong track, compared with 46 percent of Democrats. Those numbers are often the exact opposite when there’s a Republican in the White House.
Views on the country’s direction are also often closely linked to the economic environment. Currently, 65 percent of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. That’s relatively high historically, though down from last summer when inflation was peaking and 77 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the height of the recession in 2008, 81 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction.
What seems surprising, however, is the large share of voters who say we’re on the verge of breaking down as a nation.
“We’ve moved so far away from what this country was founded on,” said William Dickerson, a Republican from Linwood, N.C. “Society as a whole has become so self-aware that we’re infringing on people’s freedoms and the foundation of what makes America great.”
He added: “We tell people what they can and can’t do with their own property and we tell people that you’re wrong because you feel a certain way.”
Voters contacted for the Times/Siena survey were asked the “failing” question only if they already said things were headed in the wrong direction. And while this is the first time a question like this has been asked, the pessimistic responses still seem striking: Two-thirds of Republicans who said the country was headed in the wrong direction said things weren’t just bad — they were so bad that America was in danger of becoming a failed nation.
“Republicans have Trump and others in their party who have undermined their faith in the electoral system,” said Alia Braley, a researcher at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab who studies attitudes toward democracy. “And if Republicans believe democracy is crumbling, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that they will stop behaving like citizens of a democracy.”
She added, “Democrats are often surprised to learn that Republicans are just as afraid as they are about the future of U.S. democracy, and maybe more so.”
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Today in 1964, the Supremes reached number one by wondering …
Today in 1968, the Beatles briefly broke up when Ringo Starr quit during recording of their “White Album.” Starr rejoined the group Sept. 3, but in the meantime the remaining trio recorded “Back in the USSR” with Paul McCartney on drums and John Lennon on bass:
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Wisconsin’s kids are starting to return to classrooms, and I’ve been thinking about what a longtime school reformer told me a while back about the biggest challenge for the ones from poor neighborhoods.
Struggles with math and reading? Not enough teachers? Too many disruptive classmates? Unstable home lives?
Nope.
She said the biggest challenge is getting kids to believe they have “agency” — convincing them, in other words, that their efforts matter, that they can lift themselves up the way others before them have, that there is hope rather than systemic oppression.
Most Americans still believe that.
A survey a few months ago that the Archbridge Institute did with the University of Chicago found that 75% of Americans — regardless of age, race, income or education — believe they have either achieved the American Dream or are on the way to achieving it.
That’s not to say opportunity expands unabated — especially if you narrowly define the American Dream as a chance at economic success no matter one’s background.
Research “shows that children’s chances of earning more than their parents have been declining. Ninety percent of children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents. Today, only half of all children earn more than their parents did,” according to Harvard’s Opportunity Insights program.
Part of the reason, no doubt, is that the post World War II economic boom and its astronomical growth had to slow eventually. At any rate, defining the American Dream solely in economic terms is misleading. Most Americans have a much broader definition.
According to a Pew Research Center analysis from 2017, just 11% said “being wealthy” is essential to the American Dream. Large majorities cite “freedom of choice in how to live” (77%), having a good family life (70%) and retiring comfortably (60%). Over 40% also say making valuable community contributions, owning a home and having a successful career are essential to their view of the American Dream.
Most told Pew back then that they think the American Dream, as they define it, is attainable. More Whites than Blacks or Hispanics said they’ve achieved it, but more than 60% of Blacks, for instance, said they were on the way. Only 17% of Americans said it was out of reach (15% of White Americans, 19% of Black Americans and 17% of Hispanic Americans).
The survey a few months ago that the Archbridge Institute did with the University of Chicago is more troubling. Twenty-four percent of Americans now say the American Dream is out of reach, according to that poll, and poorer Americans are the most pessimistic.
While the results “continue to show large agreement and optimism across Americans of diverse age, race/ethnicity, education and income groups, there are signs of declining belief in the United States as the ‘land of opportunity,’” according to the Archbridge/University of Chicago analysis.
The report did not opine on possible causes for increased pessimism, but it seems likely the constant refrain from the left that America is a systemically racist and oppressive place is at least partly to blame. Horatio Alger stories are as likely to be criticized as celebrated — to wit, the New York Times recent scrutiny of Clarence Thomas’ membership in the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.
Thomas, as he noted in his concurrence to the decision striking down affirmative action, believes the Supreme Court should be “focusing on individuals as individuals” rather than the view that all Americans are “inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.”
He is the perfect fit for an association that still believes that “hard work, honesty and determination can conquer all obstacles.”
Lots of people on the left don’t like those sorts of stories — and we don’t tell enough of them. We need to change that.
Several Wisconsinites have been inducted into the Horatio Alger Association over the years, including Ben Marcus, a Polish immigrant who started from scratch and opened his first movie theater in Ripon in the 1930s — the beginning of the theater, hotel and restaurant conglomerate that became The Marcus Corporation.
Elmer Winter, one of the founders of Manpower, was also a member. Son of an immigrant, Winter’s first job in 1922 was delivering fruits and vegetables by horse-drawn cart to brewery workers. When he died in 2009, the New York Times reported that Manpower — the temporary staffing service — had 400,000 clients and 4,100 offices in 82 countries.
Hank Aaron (whom I count as an honorary Wisconsinite) was a member.
Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor from little Elroy who started out painting barns and polishing eggs, is one of 300 members still living.
The Times piece on Clarence Thomas described the Horatio Alger Association as a group of the “elite” with “unimaginable material privilege.” It also included a quote from somebody calling it America’s “true aristocracy.”
Quotes are quotes and the Times was, perhaps, just faithfully reporting one perspective, but that is off the mark. Aristocracies are usually hereditary; people like Thomas and Thompson and Winter and Marcus and Aaron didn’t inherit anything. They worked for it — and we need to do a better job telling stories of others, men and women, Black and White, who have done the same because without examples, without hope and aspiration, without belief, the American Dream really will be lost.
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We begin with two forlorn non-music anniversaries. Today in 1897, Oldsmobile began operation, eventually to become a division of General Motors Corp. … but not anymore.
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Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones released the song that would become their first number one hit, and yet Mick Jagger still claimed …
Today in 1967, the New York Times reported on a method of reducing the noise recording devices make during recording. The inventor, Ray Dolby, had pioneered the process for studio recordings, but the Times story mentioned its potential for home use.
Ray Dolby, by the way, is no known relation to the other Dolby …
Today in 1987, Lindsey Buckingham refused to go out on tour with Fleetwood Mac for its “Tango in the Night” album, perhaps thinking that the road would make him …
The band probably told him …
… but look who came back a few years later …
… only to be told don’t stop at the studio door.
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How much money would you have paid for tickets for this concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco today in 1964:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 