Tag Archives: trade war

business news

Good news, then a trade war … nice!

Donald J. Trump has just managed to piddle on his own good-news report. This is weird, man.

The U.S. Labor Department this morning released some seriously positive news: 233,000 non-farm jobs were added to the payrolls in May, which is greater than what economists expected; the nation’s jobless rate fell to 3.8 percent, the lowest rate since 2000.

We’re cheering the news! Yes, the economy is showing signs of rocking along. The president deserves his share of credit for the serious uptick in employment activity.

But … wait!

The previous day, the president announced a huge tariff on imported steel and other goods. Who’s going to get slapped with this protectionist measure? Our major trading partners and allies: Canada, Mexico, the European Union.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a statement this week about how this policy might make sense to someone in Washington but at this moment he cannot figure out what Trump is trying to do.

I’m not an economist, but I know enough about global economics to understand that trade wars rarely produce winners. Everyone loses. The cost of manufacturing items goes up because companies — that are in the business for make maximum profit — must increase the price of what they produce to cover the cost of sending it to trading partners.

Who pays the cost? You do. So do I.

This is classic protectionist policy, favored by union leaders who understandably want to protect their members’ jobs against foreign competitors.

Free trade? It’s out the window, flushed down the crapper, tossed onto the trash heap.

I’m still unclear about what Trump is trying to do.

I’m delighted with the jobs report. The trade war might tamp down a lot of our enthusiasm.

Goofy.

business news

Donald Trump: RINO in chief

Donald J. Trump keeps proving that he’s a Republican In Name Only, but the real Republicans aren’t buying it. They remain attached to this guy as if it doesn’t what he says or does.

A trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure plan? Is that “fiscal conservatism”? Hardly.

How about the latest example? He has imposed protectionist tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Classic Republican ideology is supposed to oppose this kind of classic liberal protectionism. For the record, I am a free trade advocate, even though I am no GOP guy.

We keep hearing the roar of potential trade wars developing between the United States and our leading trading partners. China? Mexico? Canada? Western Europe? There might be retaliatory measures enacted to respond to the president’s desire to “protect American jobs.”

The president is a classic, categorical RINO. There can be no denying that he is the RINO in chief. I just cannot understand how his “base” keeps insisting he’s the real deal, when he clearly is not!

I have accepted the notion that Trump is succeeding in reshaping the Republican Party into a party of his own making, his own definition and of his own “ideology” — if we can just figure out what it is.

The president’s penchant for disclosing policy via tweet creates even more chaos than he brings simply through his revolving-door personnel changes. He is inclined to say one thing via Twitter, then change his mind when he talks to someone — anyone! — with a different point of view.

A true Republican — as well as a true Democrat — would stick to a set of governing principles and then perhaps tinker around the edges in the quest for common ground with the other party.

Trump’s trade war threats and constant berating of his foes tell me he doesn’t stand for the principles under the party banner on which he was elected to the presidency.

business news

Trump must have been sleeping in trade-policy class

Didn’t the president of the United States, Donald John “Smart Person” Trump learn a thing while getting his economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania?

Someone surely must have taught those econ students about the consequences of trade wars, of how badly many of those conflicts can go. If so, then what was Donald Trump doing when his prof offered that counsel? Was he asleep? Was he skipping class that day, spending his time chasing women and grabbing them in their private parts?

Trump reportedly got so out of sorts that he announced a decision to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum. Then he said that winning a trade would be “so easy.”

So easy? Is he out of what passes for his mind?

Trump has declared economic war on our closest allies. They are, oh let’s see, Canada, Mexico, Germany and Great Britain. Yet he seeks to punish China because, according to the president, they have stolen jobs from U.S. steelmakers.

He now is making mainstream Republican officeholders — those who adhere to the party’s policy of free trade and its opposition to protectionism — queasy in the extreme.

Trump’s decision has sent the stock market into a frenzy of unpredictability.

He thinks he knows what he is doing. Analysts who actually do know something about international economics and its impact on geopolitics have a different view.

They say the president doesn’t know a damn thing. He is acting out of pique. He doesn’t listen to the advice of economic advisers he has gathered around him — folks like the Treasury secretary and the head of his Government Economics Council — who oppose this tariff nonsense.

Hey, he told us in the summer of 2016 that “I, alone” can repair what he thinks ails the country. No, Mr. President. You, alone are making a shambles of our economic alliances.

business news, national news, political news

It’s true: Trump has stolen the GOP

As if we needed any more evidence on top of the mountain of it that has piled up, Donald Trump’s decision to impose steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum has proved what already has been known.

The president has co-opted the principles of the party under which he was elected. He is no more of a “Republican” than, um, I am.

And I am not.

What we have here is a man who has turned the Republican Party into the Trump Party. The right and far-right wing of the GOP stands behind this man — even though this protectionist trade policy flies in the face of traditional Republican principle.

This is a dangerous trend, folks.

I believe we are witnessing — and this is not an original thought; I didn’t think of this — the development of a “cult of personality.” This is the kind of tag one usually associates with dictators and despots.

Kim Jong Un? Pol Pot? Fidel Castro? Hugo Chavez? Francisco Franco? Adolf Hitler? Benito Mussolini? Juan Peron?

Is the president of the United States a despot and dictator in the mold of those men? No. However, I believe it is a legitimate concern that he has perverted the principles of a once-great political party and turned them into a political tactic.

I cannot pre-determine what Donald Trump has in store for the party for as long as he is president. I do believe that we are witnessing an evolution of sorts. The most fervent Republicans in this country should be aghast at the trade war that Trump seems willing to launch. Instead, they are standing by their man.

If that doesn’t define a cult of personality, then I don’t know what does. It’s a very good thing, indeed, to have two other co-equal government branches — Congress and the federal courts — on board to keep the president’s power grab in check.

But still … this is frightening.

business news, International news

POTUS ‘tells it like it is’ abroad

Donald J. Trump’s supporters like to say the president merely “tells it like it is.”

Others of us prefer to say he tells it like he thinks it is.

He is abroad, finishing up his first overseas trip as president and he’s managing — as only the president — to demonstrate a stunning lack of diplomatic skill.

Get this, his assessment of Germany, one of our nation’s strongest allies and trading partners: “The Germans are bad, very bad,” he said. “See the millions of cars they are selling to the U.S. Terrible. We will stop this.”

What? Stop it. How? He wants to start a trade war with Germany because it peddles cars to American consumers?

Vox.com is a known liberal-leaning website, but it offers an interesting analysis of how Trump’s lack of diplomatic skill is hurting him and the country he represents.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/26/15698824/trump-germany-bad-trade-cars

As Vox reports: “First, it’s worth noting that the language Trump reportedly used in the meeting is yet another example of his total lack of nuance or finesse. Trump likes to cast the world in black and white and use superlative language. Things are ‘terrific,’ or they are ‘terrible.’

“Trump speaks this way on domestic issues as well, but in international affairs his vulgarity as a speaker is amplified. Diplomacy requires gentle touches and subtle signaling that simultaneously maintains stable relationships while having the power to pressure or persuade. Slamming the Germans, a vital US ally, as ‘very bad’ and saying you need to ‘Stop’ them from selling cars to the US is, well, the opposite of that.”

Vox also notes that German automakers also operate many manufacturing plants in the United States, employing Americans and paying them well to produce these motor vehicles.

That the president wouldn’t recognize that is just another sign of his complete ignorance about the world and the inter-connectedness among nations.

business news

Get ready for economic ‘war,’ Texas cattle ranchers

The 45th president of the United States has launched a multi-front war: against the media and against our nation’s major trading partners.

I’ve discussed the media war already. The growing trade war is another critter altogether.

The Dallas Morning News has published an interesting essay that suggests the first victim of the trade war will be — get ready for this one! — the cattle producers from Texas, of all places.

Why is that so strange, so ironic? It could be that Donald J. Trump had no more loyal ballot-box supporters in the 2016 presidential election than those who produce beef in the Lone Star State.

So, what does the new president do? He goes straight after Mexico, a leading importer of Texas beef. He tells Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto that Mexico will pay for that “beautiful wall” Trump plans to build along our southern border; Pena Nieto says “no, we won’t!”

The irony is rich, indeed. Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have opened up another huge market for Texas red meat. That deal is a goner, too.

Much of the rest of Trump Country — throughout the agricultural Midwest — is going to feel the pain of the president’s trade war.

As Richard Parker’s essay in the DMN notes: “Texas ranchers, though, will not be alone for long. Beef producers from Nebraska to the Dakotas face the same problems. So do grain farmers in Kansas and the snow-covered corn fields of Iowa, just like tomato farmers in California and Florida and autoworkers in Michigan, longshoremen, truckers and railway workers in Miami and Houston and Long Beach. These will be the first casualties of a trade war.”

It’s amazing to some of us that the president would launch into this kind of blundering bluster without thinking of the consequences that his most loyal grassroots political allies will suffer as a result.

As Parker notes: “The irony, of course, is that states like Texas, the plains states and Michigan all helped put Trump in office. But the cows in pasture don’t care about politics. And cowboys rightly don’t care about irony, even if they are to be its first casualties.”