On June 14, the Trump administration announced that it’s raising your taxes by $12.5 billion. On June 18, President Trump followed that announcement up with the threat of another $20 billion tax hike.
Trump didn’t put it that way, of course. Instead, he described both the actual and threatened tax increases as “tariffs” on “Chinese imports.”
Don’t be fooled. No matter how he gussies them up as correctives for “unfair competition” and “trade imbalances,” tariffs are taxes on American consumers, and that’s all they are. They aren’t paid by Chinese manufacturers. They’re paid by you, at the cash register, in the form of higher prices on the goods you shop for.
You can’t avoid the effects of those taxes by “buying American,” either. One of the main effects of tariffs — in fact, one of the primary PURPOSES of tariffs — is to let domestic producers jack up their own prices without worrying that foreign competitors might undersell them.
Nor is China the only front in Donald Trump’s war on your wallet. MarketWatch reports that Trump’s 20% tariff on Canadian lumber is beginning to hit the American housing market with rising lumber costs surpassing labor costs as the biggest pricing problem. If you’re thinking about buying a home in the near future, prepare to pay more for it than you should have had to.
For reasons I’ve never understood, protectionism almost always successfully disguises itself as “populism.” Foreigners, we’re told, are screwing us by selling us stuff cheap instead of charging us extra. American workers shouldn’t have to compete with foreign workers who accept lower wages. Trump, man of the people, is doing us a favor by making everything we buy more expensive.
In fact, tariffs and other protectionist policies are the very essence of elitism and the very opposite of populism. They benefit the stockholders of politically connected corporations at the expense of ordinary Americans. A few American workers may get (or keep) jobs in the affected industries, but as consumers those workers (and the rest of us) take it in the shorts to buy new yachts for the beautiful people with friends in Washington.
Some characterize Trump’s ascendance as a comeback victory for the “Tea Party” movement that briefly flourished during Barack Obama’s administration before establishment Republicans co-opted it and returned to business as usual.
One acronym powering that movement was TEA: Taxed Enough Already. True then, true now. Perhaps someone should remind Donald Trump.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
We shouldn’t need Cardinal Timothy Dolan to tell us this:
“If they want to take a baby from the arms of his mother and separate the two, that’s wrong. I don’t care where you’re at, what time and condition, that just goes against — you don’t have to read the Bible for that. That goes against human decency. That goes against human dignity. It goes against what’s most sacred in the human person.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he said it, as I’m far from sure I could have said it nearly as well. But I’m just completely floored by the idea that, in this day and age, Americans need the Archbishop of New York to remind us of something as obvious as the fact that it’s wrong to abduct children.
US law enforcement agencies aren’t trying to track down the kidnappers and bring them to justice. US law enforcement agencies ARE the kidnappers, and US Attorney General Jeff Sessions pretends, quoting the Bible, no less, that this IS justice.
As jaded as we’ve become since 9/11 — as accustomed to the government’s violations of our own rights and the rights of those abroad, whether it’s TSA thugs groping Americans at airports or the CIA torturing foreigners at foreign “black sites” — surely we can all agree that this time Washington has finally gone too far, right?
Well, no. The President of the United States, his chief of staff, the Attorney General, and even some members of Congress are actively defending the abduction of children. Not as an emergency measure for kids in immediate danger, but as policy for the purpose of punishing parents who cross an imaginary line on the ground without politicians’ permission.
It’s an evil policy. Officials who order it are loathsome creatures whose appeals to God in its defense are nothing short of blasphemy. They and those who enforce it are criminals. Both deserve short trials and long sentences.
Hint to Republicans: When your best defense of a policy is that you’re just escalating a practice that occurred under Democrats as well, you’ve got no defense at all.
Sessions quoted the Bible. Cardinal Dolan retorts. So does Thomas Jefferson:
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
Urban combat in Seoul, 1950, as US Marines fight North Koreans holding the city. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Which is worse: The specter of nuclear war, or giving US president Donald Trump credit for a significant diplomatic accomplishment?
In her official statement on Trump’s Singapore summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi makes it clear that a few million incinerated human beings are a small price to pay to keep the 68-year-old Korean War going. Maybe not forever, but at least until there’s a Democrat in the White House.
“[T]he President handed Kim Jong-un concessions in exchange for vague promises that do not approach a clear and comprehensive pathway to denuclearization and non-proliferation,” Pelosi complains.
What were these dangerous “concessions?”
First, the US armed forces will, conditional upon progress toward North Korean denuclearization, stop conducting the threatening military exercises that they’ve conducted on North Korea’s border and off its coast since the 1953 ceasefire. Some “concession.” If US and South Korean forces aren’t prepared for a new outbreak of hostilities after 65 years of training, they never will be.
Secondly, again conditional upon North Korea holding up its end of the developing bargain, the US will provide “security guarantees.” Which means, the US and South Korea won’t invade North Korea, just like they haven’t invaded North Korea since 1953. Again, some “concession.”
Would a Democratic president, at the kind of summit with North Korea’s ruler that Trump managed to swing — unlike any past president, Democrat or Republican — have refused those two obvious first-step “concessions?” Not a chance. They were the bare minimum, and if a Democrat had offered them, Pelosi would have publicly celebrated them as like unto the Second Coming.
“President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” Pelosi continues, ignoring the fact that every president since Eisenhower has “preserved the regime’s status quo” — until Trump, who recognized, diplomatically speaking and in relation to the issue at hand, that North Korea is already at “the level of the United States.”
If the Korean War is going to be sorted out, it will be the belligerents — North Korea, South Korea, China and the United States, likely with significant input from Russia — doing the sorting.
But Pelosi, the Democratic Party, and the party’s allies in the media, would rather it NOT get sorted out.
That’s disgusting.
Posturing America as “the exceptional nation,” Kim as a supplicant in rags, and those other governments as mere hangers-on could have had only two possible outcomes. One was the status quo ante. The other — a danger faced by then-president Barack Obama in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal — was those other parties negotiating their own deal, leaving a petulant, marginalized America to watch their parade from the sidelines.
A genuine and durable peace on the Korean peninsula may or may not be achievable, but Trump seems to be giving it the old college try. Pelosi and her party, having proven unable to lead and unwilling to follow on the matter, should at least have the decency to get the hell out of the way.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
