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Title: Oh My: Palin to Endorse Trump in Iowa Today?
Source:
Townhall
URL Source: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guyben ... bout-to-endorse-trump-n2106499
Published: Jan 19, 2016
Author: Guy Benson
Post Date: 2016-01-19 10:55:40 by cranky
Keywords: None
Views: 11539
Comments: 70
I'll admit it -- when this speculation began mounting yesterday, I wasn't remotely sold on the idea that Palin was poised jump aboard the Trump Train when so many influential figures within the conservative talk radio constellation are at long last blasting The Donald and rallying to Cruz. The Palin speculation seemed even less plausible when this rumor leaked: Multiple little birdies tell me Jerry Falwell, Jr. is going to endorse Trump for president and come to Iowa with him tomorrow.— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) January 18, 2016 Wow. Palin's jet following Trump campaign; endorsement imminent. Broken via flight records: https://t.co/BALN6KGFSE https://t.co/Z4rFX0mirY— Matt Popovich (@mpopv) January 19, 2016 @LPDonovan did you see it went to Tulsa next https://t.co/s6q4PMgPSG— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) January 19, 2016 Gonna watch the Trump/Palin rally with the largest bottle of bourbon I can find.— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 19, 2016
Falwell bestowed a fulsome introduction upon Donald "Two Corinthians" Trump just yesterday -- much to the dismay of many in the evangelical community -- so Deace's report made sense. Surely that's the big announcement and "special guest" Trump's been pumping on social media, right? Not so fast, my friends:
Interesting. But so what if there's a private jet bound from Anchorage to Iowa? That could be a coincidence. Or...uh, maybe not:
Oh my. The jet is headed to Ames, then hopping over to Tulsa? Exactly mirroring Trump's campaign itinerary? Dude. This might actually be happening. And what a splash it would make less than two weeks before Iowa. Should Palin's endorsement both come to fruition (there have been clues along the way), and push Trump over the top, emotionalist nationalistic populism will have officially supplanted principled, policy-driven, limited-government conservatism as the currently dominant strain within the American right-wing. I'll leave you with this, because why not at this point?
Buckle up, amigos. If you need me, I'll be passed out under my desk:
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#19. To: Jameson (#16)
What is his plan for punishing business owners who outsource jobs overseas? What will his approach be toward hedge fund managers? I'll answer them in order. Bring jobs home by protecting American workers with tariffs on foreign goods. That way our people don't have to compete with people who make a buck a day. That leads to low wages. Like Tomder supports. Tariffs. Tough enforcement of NAFTA, GATT etc. Tax them at the same rate as everyone. I'm not Trump but I believe those to be pretty much his position. At least a small part of it.
Facebook Twitter Reddit More #Socialism The author extends special thanks to Lawrence H. White and Ivan Pongracic, Sr., for their helpful comments. Few events in U.S. history can rival the Great Depression for its impact. The period from 1929 to 1941 saw fundamental changes in the landscape of American politics and economics, including such monumental events as America ‘s going off the gold standard and the founding of Social Security. It was a watershed for the growth of the federal government. The Great Depression created a widespread misconception that market economies are inherently unstable and must be managed by the government to avoid large macreconomic fluctuations, that is, business cycles. This view persists to this day despite the more than 40 years since Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz showed convincingly that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies were largely to blame for the severity of the Great Depression. In 2002 Ben Bernanke (then a Federal Reserve governor, today the chairman of the Board of Governors) made this startling admission in a speech given in honor of Friedman’s 90th birthday: “I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression, you’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry.” Friedman, the great free-market champion of the last 50 years and one of the most influential economists of the last 200 years, died in November 2006 at 94. He left us an immense intellectual legacy, including his explanation of the Great Depression, which, while persuading a majority of the economics profession, has yet to fully trickle down to the public. It is truly a great mystery why Friedman’s explanation has not been more widely recognized and accepted, especially given its influence among economists. Maybe the reason is that it does not lend itself to quick sound bites by politicians eager to justify more power. Or maybe it is usually presented in a way that makes it too difficult for the layperson to understand. Or maybe it is just that people find it easier to blame the “capitalists” rather than the hallowed Federal Reserve. Whatever the case, it would be beneficial to revisit Friedman’s argument. The standard explanation of the Great Depression, found in most American high-school history texts, is that it was created by the wild and irrational stock-market speculation that ultimately led to the Great Crash of October 1929. Investor speculations were so excessive—so the story goes—that once the bubble popped, it triggered the most severe decline in economic activity in U.S. history. The key point of this story is that the crash and the subsequent depression were due to factors that are innate to the capitalist system, unchecked under the supposedly laissez-faire policies of Herbert Hoover. It was only once Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office that the government jump-started the recovery. It is thus claimed that FDR’s policies were responsible not only for the recovery, but in fact for “saving capitalism from itself” when many Americans were willing to consider adopting full-blown socialism in the 1930s as a way to deal with the downturn. Most people do not realize how much of this explanation had been shaped by Keynesian economics, the dominant economic paradigm from the 1940s to the 1970s. Keynesian economics got its start with the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. There Keynes proposed a view of the Great Depression that was at odds with the rest of the economics profession at the time. Most economists of the era tended to agree that market economies are “self-adjusting” and that they cannot get stuck in a recession for very long. However, this view seemed to be at odds with the ugly reality of the time: persistent unemployment rates of 20 percent and more, even as high as 25 percent in 1933—with no end in sight. Keynes seemed to be the right man for the time as he was reflecting the increasingly common view that blamed the capitalists themselves for the situation. In the General Theory Keynes rejected the view that the boom-bust cycle was due to over-expansive government monetary policy and that the stubbornness of the Depression was due to government interference with market mechanisms. He labeled all economists who believed such views as “classical”—in other words, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Instead, Keynes proposed a “general theory” that he thought capable of explaining not only the good times but also the bad. According to Keynes, what drives the economy is aggregate demand or aggregate expenditures. Aggregate demand can be broken down into three main components: personal consumption (C), private investment (I), and government expenditures (G). The relationship can be summed up with this formula: AD = C + I + G. If Aggregate Demand is strong, the economy will be strong. However, if Aggregate Demand falters, businesses will end up with large unsold inventories and will cut back on production to avoid surpluses in the future. As they cut back they will of course need fewer inputs—including labor—and high unemployment will result. The culprit in this story, the element that throws the entire system out of whack, is private investment. Private investment consists of business expenditures on machines, buildings, factories, and so on. In other words, investment is capital formation. Keynes claimed that private investment is inherently unstable due to what he called the “animal spirits” of businessmen/capitalists. He believed that businessmen are ultimately irrational and prone to herd-like behavior. Like sheep that blindly follow other sheep in the herd, it is easy for businessmen to become “irrationally exuberant”—as well as irrationally lethargic. Investment lethargy would trigger a large decrease in private investment, thus decreasing aggregate expenditures and triggering an economic downturn. From Downturn to Depression How do we go from this downturn to a full-blown recession or even a depression? As the economy slows down, unemployment rises and leads to a loss of consumer confidence. Consumer pessimism will lead to more saving and less spending, thus decreasing the personal-consumption component of aggregate demand, exacerbating the downturn. Notice that both I and C are therefore driven by the expectations of private individuals (irrational in the case of business investors): if both investors and consumers become pessimistic and expect a recession, they will cut back on their expenditures and thus cause the aggregate demand to be too low to bring about full employment of available resources. According to Keynes, a recession is, in a nutshell, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Great Depression was therefore a long stubborn period of dismally low aggregate expenditures, and according to Keynes, there were no economic forces working to pull the economy out of this situation automatically. In other words, he thought there is no self-corrective mechanism (or invisible hand) in a free-market economy. Instead, irrational changes in expectations would regularly lead to wide and destructive fluctuations in the macroeconomy. So we see that the business cycle is the natural and expected consequence of the unfettered operation of a market economy. Therefore if an unfettered market economy results in depressions, it is clearly undesirable. It also should be obvious now that the standard high-school history-book explanation is basically just a simplified version of this Keynesian story. What is required to avoid a recession, then, is for the government to insure that the aggregate expenditures are enough to achieve full employment. The government can do that through either fiscal policy (taxation and government spending) or monetary policy (control of the money supply). Keynes favored fiscal policy and recommended that the government engage in massive deficit spending. Deficit spending would allow for an increase in government spending without an offsetting increase in the tax burden on private individuals and businesses. Thus increased government spending could neutralize any decreased expenditures in the private sector, preserving employment and incomes and ultimately reversing the pessimistic expectations that led to the downturn in the first place. Keynesian “demand management” clearly prescribed an important role for the government. Keynes’s explanation, in addition to creating a new way of analyzing the economy as a whole, heavily influenced policymakers and ordinary people around the world. It was soon accepted that the government must engage in a countercyclical policy of demand management to stabilize the market economy. Both FDR and Keynes were proclaimed the “saviors of capitalism”! Friedman Follows the Facts In the 1950s, Friedman and Anna Schwartz began compiling historical data on monetary variables without any particular agenda or intention of overturning the dominant explanation of the Great Depression. But it became obvious that the data were at odds with the standard Keynesian explanation. So in their 1963 book, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, they presented the empirical evidence that led them to a completely different explanation. As a result of examining more closely the key years between 1929 and 1933, Friedman and Schwartz first concluded that the Great Depression was not the necessary and direct result of the stock-market crash of October 1929, which they attribute to a speculative investment bubble. (The popping of the “bubble” may have been instigated by the Federal Reserve’s raising of the discount rate—the interest rate the Fed charges on loans to commercial banks —in August 1929. The cause of the speculative bubble that led to the crash is a somewhat controversial topic. Whereas Friedman and Schwartz accepted that the bubble was caused by investors, seemingly endorsing—at least partly —the Keynesian “animal spirits” explanation, Austrian economists have argued otherwise.) In fact, they believed that the economy could have recovered rather rapidly if only the Fed—the central bank of the United States —had not engaged in a series of disastrous policies in the aftermath of the crash. The Fed had only been in existence for 15 years at the time of the crash, having opened its doors in 1914. The United States had two central banks before the Fed (the Bank of United States, 1792–1812; and the Second Bank of the United States, 1816–1836), but had been without a central bank of any sort for over 75 years until the creation of the Fed. It was created primarily to act as a “lender of last resort” from which private banks could borrow money in times of crisis. The need for a lender of last resort in the U.S. banking system was due to a systemic weakness caused unintentionally by state and federal banking regulations. (Canada, with a freer banking system, had no such systemic weakness and no need for a lender of last resort.) Weak banks are subject to crisis when their depositors are no longer confident that their bank holds sufficient reserves to satisfy all withdrawal demands at a certain time. This can trigger a “bank run,” where depositors attempt to get to the bank before the other depositors in order to withdraw their money before the bank’s limited reserves run out. A run on a bank can easily generate other bank runs as depositors become worried about the financial health of their own similarly weak banks. The problem with bank runs is that when depositors withdraw money and stuff it under their mattresses rather than trust it to other banks, the money supply shrinks. To understand this phenomenon, we have to explain how we measure the money supply. The simplest measures include not only currency but also checking deposits, since they are commonly used to make payments. What complicates things is that fractional-reserve banking leads to a multiple expansion of deposits. When someone puts money in a bank his checking account reflects the deposit, but the bank does not keep all the money on hand—it’s not a warehouse. Instead, it keeps only a fraction as “reserves” and lends the rest to a borrower, who in turn buys goods or services. The seller then deposits her new income in a bank, where she gets a checking account. The money supply increases by the amount of the new deposit. This process will continue, though in ever-decreasing amounts since banks have to keep some part of the new deposits as reserves. Yet each cycle will increase the money supply by increasing the overall amount of deposits held at banks. This process works in reverse too. When banks lose reserves due to bank runs, the economy experiences a multiple contraction of deposits. The deposits that are removed from the economy greatly exceed the additional currency that the public now holds, so the money supply decreases. The stock-market crash of October 1929 made it more difficult for many businesses to repay their loans to the banks, and many banks found their balance sheets impaired as a result. But the most important cause of the bank runs that began in October 1930 was bad times in the farm belt, where the banks were especially weak and poorly diversified. The number of bank runs increased exponentially in December 1930—in that single month 352 banks failed. Most of the failing banks were in the Midwest , their failures caused by farmers who defaulted on their loans because they were hit hard by the economic downturn. No sooner did the first wave of bank runs subside than another got underway in the spring of 1931, creating what Friedman and Schwartz described as a “contagion of fear” among bank depositors. Bank crises continued to come in waves until the spring of 1933. Roosevelt Comes In FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, and two days later he declared a “bank holiday,” allowing banks legally to refuse withdrawals by depositors; it lasted ten days. With his famous phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he intended to dissuade depositors from running on their banks, but by then it was far too late. In 1929 there were a total of 25,000 banks in the United States. As the bank holiday ended, only 12,000 banks were operating (though another 3,000 were to reopen eventually). The effect on the money supply was equally dramatic. From 1929 to 1933 it fell by 27 percent—for every $3 in circulation in 1929 (whether in currency or deposits), only $2 was left in 1933. Such a drastic fall in the money supply inevitably led to a massive decrease in aggregate demand. People’s savings were wiped out so their natural response was to save more to compensate, leading to plummeting consumption spending. Naturally, total economic output also fell dramatically: GDP was 29 percent lower in 1933 than in 1929. And the unemployment rate hit its historic high of 25 percent in 1933. Friedman and Schwartz argued that all this was due to the Fed’s failure to carry out its assigned role as the lender of last resort. Rather than providing liquidity through loans, the Fed just watched as banks dropped like flies, seemingly oblivious to the effect this would have on the money supply. The Fed could have offset the decrease created by bank failures by engaging in bond purchases, but it did not. As Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in Free to Choose: The [Federal Reserve] System could have provided a far better solution by engaging in large-scale open market purchases of government bonds. That would have provided banks with additional cash to meet the demands of their depositors. That would have ended—or at least sharply reduced—the stream of bank failures and have prevented the public’s attempted conversion of deposits into currency from reducing the quantity of money. Unfortunately, the Fed’s actions were hesitant and small. In the main, it stood idly by and let the crisis take its course—a pattern of behavior that was to be repeated again and again during the next two years. According to Friedman and Schwartz, this was a complete abdication of the Fed’s core responsibilities—responsibilities it had taken away from the commercial bank clearinghouses that had acted to mitigate panics before 1914 —and was the primary cause of the Great Depression. The obvious question is: Why didn’t the Fed act? We don’t know for sure, but Friedman and Schwartz proposed several possible explanations: 1) the Fed officials did not fully understand the disastrous consequences of letting so many banks go under. Friedman and Schwartz wrote that Fed officials may have “tended to regard bank failures as regrettable consequences of bank management or bad banking practices, or as inevitable reactions to prior speculative excesses, or as a consequence but hardly a cause of the financial and economic collapse in process”; 2) Fed officials may have been acting out of their own self-interest since many of them were affiliated with large Northeastern banks. Bank failures, at least in the early stages, “were concentrated among smaller banks and since the most influential figures in the system were big-city bankers who deplored the existence of smaller banks, their disappearance may have been viewed with complacency”; 3) The inactivity may have been caused by political infighting between the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., and regional Fed banks, in particular the New York district bank, which was the most important part of the system at that time. But we may never know the real reason. Dangers of Centralized Power There is an important lesson to be learned from this episode: When we centralize great responsibility and power in one institution, its failure will have far-reaching and terrible consequences. The Fed was instituted to act decisively in the exact circumstances that occurred in 1930–33. Friedman and Schwartz pointed out that the Fed’s failure was all the more serious and difficult to understand given how easily it could have been avoided: At all times throughout the 1929–1933 contraction, alternative policies were available to the system by which it could have kept the stock of money from falling, and indeed could have increased it at almost any desired rate. Those policies did not involve radical innovations. They involved measures of a kind the system had taken in earlier years, of a kind explicitly contemplated by the founders of the system to meet precisely the kind of banking crisis that developed in late 1930 and persisted thereafter. They involved measures that were actually proposed and very likely would have been adopted under a slightly different bureaucratic structure or distribution of power, or even if the men in power had had somewhat different personalities. This is the most worrisome fact. The institution failed because of the people within it. And given the immense power and influence it had over the economy, its failure was disastrous. It is important to understand that the Great Depression could have been avoided if the Fed had not so badly botched its monetary policy. In fact, Friedman and Schwartz claimed that the depression would not have been a Great Depression if there had been no Federal Reserve in the first place: “[I]f the pre-1914 banking system rather than the Federal Reserve System had been in existence in 1929, the money stock almost certainly would not have undergone a decline comparable to the one that occurred.” That point was effectively elaborated by Milton and Rose Friedman in Free to Choose: Had the Federal Reserve System never been established, and had a similar series of runs started, there is little doubt that the same measures would have been taken as in 1907—a restriction of payments. That would have been more drastic than what actually occurred in the final months of 1930. However, by preventing the draining of reserves from good banks, restriction would almost certainly have prevented the subsequent series of bank failures in 1931, 1932, and 1933, just as restriction in 1907 quickly ended bank failures then. . . . The panic over, confidence restored, economic recovery would very likely have begun in early 1931, just as it had in early 1908. The existence of the Reserve System prevented the drastic therapeutic measure: directly, by reducing the concern of the stronger banks, who, mistakenly as it turned out, were confident that borrowing from the System offered them a reliable escape mechanism in case of difficulty; indirectly, by lulling the community as a whole, and the banking system in particular, into the belief that such drastic measures were no longer necessary now that the System was there to take care of such matters. In the February 15, 2007, New York Review of Books economist and columnist Paul Krugman charged Friedman with “intellectual dishonesty” because Friedman repeatedly called for a significant reduction of the Fed’s power or even its outright abolition as a result of his work on the Great Depression. Krugman, however, concluded that the real lesson to be learned from Friedman’s explanation is that government institutions should be more active, not less. Krugman believes his conclusion to be so obvious that he is convinced that Friedman’s contrary recommendation must be driven by an ideological agenda and thus is an example of intellectual dishonesty. However, Krugman is clearly missing the point. Friedman’s conclusion was perfectly logical given his belief that had the Fed not been created, the downturn of 1929 would not have become a major depression. Friedman claims in the paragraph above that without the Fed “the same measures would have been taken [in 1930] as in 1907—a restriction of payments,” which he believes would have prevented the crisis from spreading to “stronger banks,” those not guilty of overextending themselves through over-risky loans. Monetary economist Lawrence H. White of the University of Missouri-St. Louis filled in the blanks in Friedman’s “institutional counter-factual” on the Division of Labour blog (March 12, 2007): Friedman understood . . . that before the Federal Reserve Act financial panics in the US were mitigated by the actions of private commercial bank clearinghouses. Friedman and Schwartz’s view of the 1930′s was that the Fed, having nationalized the roles of the clearinghouse associations [CHAs], particularly the lender-of-last-resort role, did less to mitigate the panic than the CHAs had done in earlier panics like 1907 and 1893. In that sense, the economy would have been better off if the Fed had not been created. This position is perfectly consistent with the position that, provided we take the Fed’s nationalization of the clearinghouse roles for granted, the Fed was guilty of not doing its job. Thus the Fed’s failure in the early ’30s shows the dangers of excessive centralization of important market functions that were previously dispersed among multiple private institutions. Friedman’s bottom line remains intact: The Fed caused the Great Depression. The Perfect Storm In the decades following Friedman and Schwartz’s work economists started examining other government-policy failures in the aftermath of the crash. They have found an abundant supply of them. Here are several key examples of these bad policies: 1) In response to a sharp decrease in tax revenues in 1930 and 1931 (caused by a slowdown of economic activities), the federal government passed the largest peacetime tax increase in the history of the United States, which clearly applied the brakes on any recovery that could have taken place; 2) the federal government also passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, substantially increasing tariffs and leading to retaliatory restrictions by trading partners, which resulted in a considerable decrease in demand for U.S. exports and a further slowdown in production (not to mention a loss of mutually advantageous division of labor); 3) the federal government also instituted all sorts of “public works” programs, beginning under Herbert Hoover and increasing dramatically under FDR; the programs removed hundreds of thousands of people from the labor market and engaged them in economically wasteful activities, such as carving faces of dead presidents into the sides of a mountain, preventing or delaying necessary labor-market adjustments; 4) another federal policy that prevented (labor and other) market adjustments was the price and wage controls enacted under the National Recovery Administration and in effect from 1933 until 1935 (when ruled unconstitutional); this policy massively distorted relative market prices, impairing their ability to function as guides to entrepreneurs; 5) the Fed was not blameless after 1933 either. It increased bank-reserve requirements in three steps in 1936 and 1937, leading to another significant decrease in the money supply. The result was the 1937–38 recession within the Depression, adding insult to injury. Economists have come to understand the Great Depression as a “perfect storm” of policy failures. A truly frightening number of destructive policies were carried out nearly simultaneously. In retrospect it seems as though whenever the economy began showing the slightest inkling of recovery, a policy would be enacted that would put a quick stop to it. The better explanation of the Great Depression revealed it was not caused by unfettered market forces. There is nothing in the operation of free markets that would create depressions or even recessions. Rather, we now know that we must look for causes of these phenomena in mismanaged and erroneous government policies. And much of the credit for this change in the way economists look at the Depression must go to Friedman and Schwartz’s groundbreaking work on the Fed’s role. Friedman provided—and ultimately persuaded most economists of—this alternate explanation because of his insistence on honest intellectual inquiry, untainted by ideological biases. It was a courageous thing to do at the time of absolute Keynesian dominance of the economics profession, and it could have been damaging or even destructive to his career. But Friedman’s personal strength of character and intellectual honesty obliged him to stick to the truth, and we are all much better for it today. Ironically, as a result of the banking crisis of 1930–33, the Fed was granted more responsibilities and more control over banking. As is often the case in politics, failure was used to justify an expansion of power. That expansion of the Fed’s power resulted in a great amount of economic destruction through the subsequent decades. In 1980 Milton and Rose Friedman wrote of the Fed’s record over the 45 years after the banking crisis of 1930–33: Since 1935 the [Federal Reserve] System has presided over—and greatly contributed to—a major recession of 1937–38, a wartime and immediate postwar inflation, and a roller coaster economy since, with alternate rises and falls in inflation and decreases and increases in unemployment. Each inflationary peak and each temporary inflationary trough has been at a higher and higher level, and the average level of unemployment has gradually increased. The System has not made the same mistake that it made in 1929– 1933—of permitting or fostering a monetary collapse—but it has made the opposite mistake, of fostering an unduly rapid growth in the quantity of money and so promoting inflation. In addition, it has continued, by swinging from one extreme to another, to produce not only booms but also recessions, some mild, some sharp. The Fed’s performance has improved since 1980, but that does not mean it is no longer capable of mistakes that would have devastating consequences for our lives. Friedman’s work should serve as a warning of what can happen when so much power is artificially concentrated in one institution. It is for this reason that it is so vitally important that people today be taught the real story of the Great Depression. Their faith in government institutions might be considerably undermined if they understood what really happened.
NAFTA, GATT etc isn't free trade. That is a lie you bought. They are the genesis of global organizations to dictate trade terms. To force our congress to change our laws. You are an anti constitutionalist. Just like the establishment. I guess if I was like you and made my living selling out the American worker I would be for global government too.
Bring jobs home by protecting American workers with tariffs on foreign goods. That way our people don't have to compete with people who make a buck a day. That leads to low wages. Like Tomder supports. Tariffs. Tough enforcement of NAFTA, GATT etc. Tax them at the same rate as everyone. I'm not Trump but I believe those to be pretty much his position. At least a small part of it. You're right - those are Trump's positions. And Trump's right - that is the medicine we need if the American middle and working classes are to have a hope in hell of recovering the America we grew up in again. America ain't great when the middle class and working class is wiped out and can't get jobs.
They are the genesis of global organizations to dictate trade terms. To force our congress to change our laws. You are right once again. When people as diverse as you and I both look down our separate sight-lines and see that Trump is telling the truth and we need him, that spells "mandate".
"They are the genesis of global organizations to dictate trade terms." To force our congress to change our laws to feed and support a bunch of incompetent demanding parasites in other countries in a life to which they would like to become accustomed.
Free Trade with Canada makes sense, and with Western Europe. Both places have similar, or more strict, labor and environmental codes, and high standards of living . One doesn't put factories in Germany or France to take advantage of cheap labor. I don't mind that American car makers have to compete with Germans and Italians for the market. All make fine cars, and none have a "beggar the American worker" price advantage built into them. But when we start to talk about cheap stuff from China, we're talking about things that are artificially cheap, due to extremely low wages under working and environmental conditions that are illegal in America or Canada or Europe. OF COURSE our workers can't compete with that. And they should not HAVE to. Mexico is a special case because when Mexico has massive unemployment, it moves here. IF the American companies were exporting jobs to Mexico - just Mexico - not China, not Indonesia - some sort of arrangement could be found. We want a healthy Mexico to cut down on our immigration problems. But that's not what we have. We have these grandiose "world trade" ideas, which have been brought about by beggaring American workers. It's unacceptable, and with Trump, people are standing up to say "We're not going to take it anymore", and to elect somebody who will change the rules to something that will allow the American middle class to come back
It was the Reagan administration that launched the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1986 that lowered global tariffs and created the World Trade Organization. It was his administration that won approval of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1988. That agreement soon expanded to include Mexico in what became the North American Free Trade Agreement, realizing a vision that Reagan first articulated in the 1980 campaign. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcTPwHY-LpY It was Reagan who vetoed protectionist textile quota bills in 1985 and 1988. During Reagan’s eight years in office, Americans eagerly expanded their engagement in the global economy. In 1980, the year before Reagan became president, Americans spent a total of $334 billion on imported goods and services and payments on foreign investment in the United States. By 1988, his last year in office, American spending in the global economy had nearly doubled, to $663 billion. If Reagan was a “protectionist,” it had no discernable effect on the ability of Americans to spend freely in the global marketplace. Fittingly, one of the major federal buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue is named the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. “Voluntary” import quotas for steel and Japanese cars and imposing Section 201 tariffs on imported motorcycles to protect Harley-Davidson. were the exceptions and not the rule. They were tactical retreats designed to defuse rising protectionists pressures in Congress. The Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanans who claim to represent the conservative causes Reagan defined ignore the fact that he was very open to multilateral free trade agreements . Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I know history very well . Before the market crash there was protectionism . The stock market crash was caused by the increasing likelihood that the Smoot- Hawley tariff would pass (Hoover did not sign it until 1930 .It was winding it's way through committee long before eventual passage in June 1930 .The markets reacted to the likelyhood of the bill being passed and the subsequent trade wars ). You are talking New Deal Propaganda. Roosevelt was a liberal not a conservative That was businessman President Hoover who signed off on the bill. Much of the causes of the Depression were 'progressive' policies that Hoover intiated after the crash . The crash was in 1929 and Roosevelt did not become President until 1933. What Roosevelt did in the 'New Deal ' was just a double down on the socialist /statist polices that Hoover iniated in reaction to the Depression. Yes of course the Fed monitary policy had a role in it too just like it had in the crash in 2009 ;and the recent downturn in the markets . Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Yes it is unacceptable but if that is so you should stop and think what it means for people outside the US; you go protectionist, and we get our industries back because if you do it so will we. No more yank tanks on our roads, no more stupid american produced TV ads and we can throw away the TPP and the US Australia Free Trade Agreement, wasn't any good to us anyway. We will buy our planes from Europe, no stupid F35, we may even reopen our oil refineries, our steel mills, our aluminium smelters
Nobody "forces " Congress to change laws . That is the lie you bought . The Constitution, through the Commerce Clause, gives Congress exclusive power over trade activities with foreign countries. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Yep they never think that 'begger thy neighbor' has any impact on Americans. They claim I'm anti-American worker even though it is their policies that will have huge negative impacts on the typical American "middle class" consumer who will now have to pay more for the products they purchase . The same goes for Aussie consumers . Go ahead and raise the gasoline prices and other energy prices to the levels necessary to make your domestic industries competitive . Either that ;or like Trump you'll be calling for the Aussie tax payer to pay a fortune subsidizing your industries . Either way you pay. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
That's fine. It is more important for Americans, and Europeans, to have jobs than it is for American or European master traders to have more money while our fellow countrymen go without basics. "Free" trade with unfree nations such as China is PARTICULARLY galling, because the people in China are slaves to a system and CANNOT politically agitate to improve their environment or working conditions. Those profits are vested in the ChiCom leaders, who use part of it to build a Navy to kill us, and the people suffer worse than American workers, with no prospect whatever of changing their lot despite the money flowing into the country. Free trade with Communist China empowers the Communist leaders to maintain that system. Free trade with Europe ends up being an exchange of luxury goods, and that's not really a problem. Back when the British were the only industrial manufacturers (because they got there first), had the Americans, French and Germans not had the good sense to slap protectionist tariffs, the only major industrialized nation would still be Britain, and the whole world would be the British Empire.
It has that authority. And Congress is bought by the monied interest who exploit it to beggar the American workers.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/us-china-trade-reform Mr. Trump's website really doesn't address tariffs at all. Although his site does suggest lowering corporate tax rates... "we are tartets from evil doers!!!" [ and ] U looked up birfer on the dcitionary. It isn't a movie. "Listen piece of shit. Call me anti American again and your're banned. I don't like you." - aka stoned -
we can't pay more for gas than we do now, far more than you do, trade agreements haven't lowered the prices, so much LPG is exported the domestic price has risen. I'm sick of the cheap jack crap we get from China, washing machines that cause house fire, stuff that doesn't last, we are paying already. When I first bought a refrigerator it lasted 30 years, try buying one that will outlast the warranty, same with other appliances. The price of meat is now higher because so much is exported, we are already paying so we can export to you and others
then place the blame where it belongs ...with Congress ;and the American people who don't demand more . I don't see how voting for Trump ;a businessman who is very comfortable with the arrangement can change that .
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
and you would have been better off Pax Britannica was far better than Pax Americana. When we had close associations with Britain before they tied themselves to Europe our industries flourished, we really did have manufacturing industries and a high standard of living, not the poverty ridden situation many find themselves in just scrapping through. The goods we bought were quality, not crap and there was real nation building. Just remember that Marx promised that they would sell the last capitalist the rope to hang himself and it looks like you bought it
We don't have an immigration problem. What we have is a stupidity problem.
AMEN! to that
Build the the God damned wall. Indeed - the "stupidity problem" you mention, exists because the stupid think there will be a "wall" built. "we are tartets from evil doers!!!" [ and ] U looked up birfer on the dcitionary. It isn't a movie. "Listen piece of shit. Call me anti American again and your're banned. I don't like you." - aka stoned -
A “corporate court” has ruled that the U.S. must face $1 billion in tariff punishment because a law U.S. consumers wanted for protection of health and safety has cost foreign companies some profits. The U.S. Congress is being told they must repeal the law or we face billions in punishment. U.S. courts don’t get a say. We the People don’t, either. That’s what “free trade” agreements have done for us lately. COOL The U.S. has country of origin labeling (COOL) rules for meat labels as part of rules that notify customers about the source of certain foods. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has ruled that informing consumers “discriminates” against Mexican and Canadian companies, thereby violating the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The court decided that American consumers might, for one reason or another, prefer to buy meat born, raised, slaughtered and packaged in the U.S. to meat from other countries that might or might not have lower health and safety standards. Since this preference would hurt the profits of Canadian and Mexican corporations, it violates the agreement. The U.S. labeling effort began when “mad-cow disease” was discovered in cattle in other countries. That was pretty big news at the time. The rules also come out of concerns that some countries have lower health and standards than the U.S. So Congress passed a law requiring that meat and other foods be labeled so consumers can make up their minds about what to purchase. But NAFTA allows Mexican and Canadian companies to sue the U.S. if the U.S. passes laws and/or impose regulations that might hurt their profits. The WTO has decided giving consumers the ability to know where their food comes from can hurt the profits of non-U.S. corporations and is therefore a violation of NAFTA. It’s Out Of Our Hands (And Sovereignty) Ninety-two percent of the U.S. public wants the meat labeling rules. But what the WTO rules is what has to be, because we are a party to NAFTA. Congress has passed and the president has signed NAFTA, so We the People can’t do anything about this – not through our courts or our legislative bodies. No U.S. court can review this ruling. We cannot vote to overcome it. It is out of our hands and beyond our country’s sovereign ability to do anything about it because we signed that away – so corporations can increase profits. Congress is not required to change the law, but Canada and Mexico can now begin to impose tariffs that will hit U.S. jobs and communities. We cannot impose counter-tariffs to balance this out, so Canadian and Mexican goods will have an advantage in U.S. markets. (See: Taxation without representation.) How did we end up here? We were promised that NAFTA would benefit our economy, bring jobs and higher wages to U.S. workers, etc. Of course, that is not what happened. Our trade deficit increased. Manufacturing jobs went south, so shareholders and executives could pocket the wage differential (while Mexicans family farms were wiped out, forcing northward migration). And, of course, now we can’t even tell people where their meat is coming from so consumers can decide if they want to purchase it. TPP This ruling is a particular concern now, because the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is coming before Congress for approval. TPP has similar “corporate court” provisions, and would open up our country to lawsuits from corporations in many more countries – including subsidiaries of U.S. corporations. Giant multinational corporations and Wall Street stand to benefit from TPP, because it will enable even more offshoring so shareholders and executives can pocket the wage difference. Their lobbyists (both in and out of government) will tell you that TPP can’t make us change our laws. For example, in May President Obama gave a speech at Nike headquarters to promote TPP. He said that warnings that TPP could “undermine American regulation – food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations” was “just not true.” He said: “They’re making this stuff up. No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.” This is technically correct – but just barely. Congress doesn’t have to change the law. But the COOL case shows how we face tariff penalties that cost jobs and hit communities if Congress doesn’t. Perhaps billions of dollars of economic damage that we can’t do anything about won’t “force” Congress to change the COOL law. We should not sign way our sovereignty to corporate courts concerned only with corporate profit. This would be a good time to call your representative and senators and tell them you do not want them to vote to approve TPP. P.S.: Just last month the WTO ruled that our “dolphin-safe” tuna labels are a “technical barrier to trade.” So consumers won’t have information that lets them decide if they want to purchase tuna that is caught with or without killing dolphins. https://ourfuture.org/20151208/corporate-court-overrules-us-congress-public
Note: The World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled in favor of Canada and Mexico against the United States regarding the labeling of meat. This follows a recent decision on labeling of tuna. The US will be forced to change their laws or face large payments for these trade violatins. https://www.popularresistance.org/wto-rules-us-faces-1-billion-annually-for- meat-labeling/
WTO now stands for World Trade Outrage rather than its original name, World Trade Organization. The WTO just ruled that the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda can freely violate American copyrights and trademarks in order to punish the United States for our laws prohibiting internet gambling. Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006 after finding that "internet gambling is a growing cause of debt collection problems for insured depository institutions and the consumer credit industry." The social and financial costs of gambling would be greatly increased if we permit internet gambling. The WTO ordered this punishment because it says U.S. laws interfere with free trade in "recreational services." The foreign tribunal ranks free trade as more important than the intellectual property rights Americans have enjoyed since our Constitution was written. The WTO's 88-page decision issued in December contained the panel's remarkable admission that "we feel we are on shaky grounds." But that didn't stop the Geneva tribunal from issuing its ruling anyway. We have every right as a nation to protect our people against the corruption and loss of wealth that result from gambling on the internet. It is shocking for an unelected foreign tribunal to tell our 435-member House of Representatives, our 100-member Senate, and the President of the United States that they lack the power to protect our people. Even American supremacist judges would not have the nerve to authorize stealing copyrights and trademarks as a remedy for one side in an unrelated dispute. But the WTO granted what has been called a "piracy permit" that allows a small Caribbean nation to "pirate," or steal, U.S. property rights. The response in Washington was to announce an attempt to revise the conditions under which we joined the WTO in 1994. That's a non-starter because these changes in the WTO treaty would require the approval of all 151 members, most of whom don't like the U.S. anyway. The WTO has ruled against the United States in 40 out of 47 major cases, and against us in 30 out of 33 trade remedies cases. After the WTO ruled that the U.S. cannot divert tariff revenue to U.S. companies that are injured by foreign subsidies to their competitors, Vice President Dick Cheney provided the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on December 21, 2005 to kowtow to the WTO. For many years, opponents of the WTO have predicted that this foreign bureaucracy would massively interfere with our sovereignty. This new ruling is crazy, unjust and impertinent, but without a lot of public protest, it looks unlikely that our "free trade" President or Congress will do anything to protect us from the WTO. How is a foreign tribunal in Geneva able to put the United States in such a box? It's because the internationalist free-trade lobby cooked up a sleazy deal to force the WTO on us back in 1994 during the week after Thanksgiving when Americans were preoccupied with Christmas shopping and festivities. The deal to lock us into WTO consisted of three parts. First, the 14-page WTO agreement was surreptitiously added, without debate or publicity, to the 22,000-page revision of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) implementing legislation, and was voted on under "fast track" rules which allowed no amendments or changes, severely limited debate, and forbade any filibuster. Second, the Treaty Clause in the U.S. Constitution for ratification of treaties was ignored, and WTO was declared passed by Congress as a non- treaty. Third, the GATT/WTO agreement was passed in the December lame-duck session with the votes of dozens of Congressmen who were looking for lucrative jobs representing foreign interests because they had already been defeated in the Republican landslide of November 1994. The WTO is not "free trade" at all, but is a supra-national body in Geneva that sets, manages and enforces WTO-made rules to govern global trade. The WTO includes a one-country-one-vote legislature of 151 nations (we have the same one vote as Cuba), an unelected multinational bureaucracy, and a Dispute Settlement Board which deliberates and votes in secret and whose decisions cannot be appealed or vetoed. WTO is a direct attack on our sovereignty because it claims it can force us to change our laws to comply with WTO rulings. Article XVI, paragraph 4, states: "Each Member shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations, and administrative procedures with its obligations." The WTO has the final say about whether U.S. laws meet WTO requirements. In this presidential season, the WTO should make easy target practice for any candidate to speak up and defend our sovereignty against the globalists who, under the mantra of "free trade," willingly allow the WTO to tell us what laws we may or may not adopt.
https://books.google.com/books? id=dGNXPlidE3UC&pg=PA93&lpg=PA93&dq=wto+congress+change+law&source=bl&ots=beJA _ikec0&sig=NrBwJ9RohzGafPqwXx_9vw7AAps&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqpNCm_L7KAhWCCho KHazqBcs4ChDoAQg1MAU#v=onepage&q=wto%20congress%20change%20law&f=false
There were a lot of things. There was Coca Cola. So Coca Cola must have caused it. The Fed caused it on purpose. Had nothing to do with protectionism. Nothing at all. Not a smidgeon. Not even a tiny bit. Not a molecule. Not an atom. Not an electron. Nothing.
World Trade Organization/Date founded Image result for when was wto created January 1, 1995 https://www.google.com/search? q=when+was+wto+created&oq=when+was+wto+created&aqs=chrome..69i57.7054j0j7&so urceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 Because Reagan started some talks. Then Bush the cock sucker came to power and negotiated something else. Then Clinton the rapist came in and negotiated something else. That doesn't mean Reagan was going to do what they did. You're dishonest. Or a spinner at the least. Which is still dishonest.
We need a businessman. A capitalist. Not a commie or a socialist. You're really dense sometimes.
The World Trade Organization has just given Europe the right to hit the United States with $4 billion in tariff sanctions – to punish us for giving tax breaks to U.S. exporters like Boeing, Microsoft and GE. Under WTO rules, we are not permitted to retaliate. We must stand and take the EU sucker punch, however hard it wants to hit.
The World Trade Organization should have no jurisdiction over events in the United States.
The World Trade Organization should have no jurisdiction over events in the United States. People in the United States are not to be made subservient to a world government.
are you saying the United States should not be made to honour its agreements, that it should not comply with the rules. You see this is what makes you disengenous, what endears you to other nations, your over wheening superiority. You try to write agreements so we have to comply with US law, well stuff it, we don't need to comply! By saying this I am not saying I'm not in favour of country of origin labeling but you had the chance to have that argument in the negotiations and you passed that agreement into law.
Why does Boeing ,Microsoft and GE need tax breaks ? Talk about crony capitalism ! Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
So you were wrong. And you liked being wrong. You like the WTO telling Americans how to live. You're exactly what is wrong with this country. You definitely should not vote for Trump. Hillary is your candidate. Like you Obama and Hillary love treason and destroying America and replacing it with global government. If revolution ever comes you would be a target, like the establishment.
Just curious. Are you going to leave the country like Whoopi when Trump wins?
so you do like taxpayers subsidizing multi-national corporations . You like taxpayers subsidizing turning a food source into an expensive energy additive . Don't you worry . The GOPe is warming up to Trump ....as is the K Street crowd . They recognize one of their own. The K-Street establishment prefers Trump because with Trump everything is negotiable . “You can coach Donald,” Mr. Black said. “If he got nominated, he’d be scared to death. That’s the point he would call people in the party and say, ‘I just want to talk to you.’” “We can live with Trump,” said Richard F. Hohlt, a veteran lobbyist, reflecting his colleagues’ sentiment at a Republican National Committee meeting last week in Charleston, S.C. “Do they all love Trump? No. But there’s a feeling that he is not going to layer over the party or install his own person. Whereas Cruz will have his own people there.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/politics/donald-trump-ted-cruz-republican- establishment.html?_r=0 Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
No ,if Trump gets the nomination I'll hold my nose and vote for him just as I have done in the last 2 elections .He's still better than anyone the Dems are offering up...but that is a very low bar to hurdle . Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
are you saying the United States should not be made to honour its agreements, that it should not comply with the rules. T hgell with the God damned agreements. I don't want a bunch of douch bag destructive politicians making masochistic suicidal agreements that affect me.
That isn't the question. The question is who gets to make that decision Americans or foreign bureaucrats. You are willing to let foreign bureaucrats make the decision because you agree with them. A little bit ago you were denying that the WTO is telling congress what to do. You now have no problem with that fact.
The food comes from corn. From a seed. There is plenty of land for food and ethanol. Bush also supports it. But you like Bush. Rubio supports it but you like Rubio. Christie supports it but you like CHristie, they all support it except curz but you still like them all, except Trump. So that isn't the reason you don't like Trump. That is you just regurgitating talking points.
They have no choice. They will be out in the cold. They see the writing on the wall. Finally. Fox should hire me. I told you all Trump was going all they way from the beginning. All these talking heads were wrong and they make millions. I was right and I'm doing it for free. You're welcome.
Comments (60 - 70) not displayed.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestWhat specifically is Mr. Trump proposing to do assist American workers?
#20. To: tomder55 (#13)
#21. To: tomder55 (#15)
“The freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides for human progress and peace among nations.” REAGAN
#22. To: A K A Stone (#19)
(Edited)
I'll answer them in order.
#23. To: A K A Stone (#21)
(Edited)
NAFTA, GATT etc isn't free trade. That is a lie you bought.
#24. To: Vicomte13 (#23)
They are the genesis of global organizations to dictate trade terms. To force our congress to change our laws.
#25. To: rlk (#24)
#26. To: A K A Stone (#17)
Reagan didn't negotiate NAFTA. He didn't sign it. He didn't support it.
#27. To: A K A Stone (#18)
(Edited)
You should learn history.
#28. To: Vicomte13 (#25)
It's unacceptable, and with Trump, people are standing up to say "We're not going to take it anymore", and to elect somebody who will change the rules to something that will allow the American middle class to come back
#29. To: A K A Stone (#21)
To force our congress to change our laws.
#30. To: paraclete (#28)
Yes it is unacceptable but if that is so you should stop and think what it means for people outside the US; you go protectionist, and we get our industries back because if you do it so will we. No more yank tanks on our roads, no more stupid american produced TV ads and we can throw away the TPP and the US Australia Free Trade Agreement, wasn't any good to us anyway. We will buy our planes from Europe, no stupid F35, we may even reopen our oil refineries, our steel mills, our aluminium smelters.
#31. To: paraclete (#28)
(Edited)
Yes it is unacceptable but if that is so you should stop and think what it means for people outside the US; you go protectionist, and we get our industries back because if you do it so will we. No more yank tanks on our roads, no more stupid american produced TV ads and we can throw away the TPP and the US Australia Free Trade Agreement, wasn't any good to us anyway. We will buy our planes from Europe, no stupid F35, we may even reopen our oil refineries, our steel mills, our aluminium smelters
#32. To: tomder55 (#29)
Nobody "forces " Congress to change laws . That is the lie you bought . The Constitution, through the Commerce Clause, gives Congress exclusive power over trade activities with foreign countries.
#33. To: A K A Stone (#19)
Tariffs. Tough enforcement of NAFTA, GATT etc.
#34. To: tomder55 (#30)
Either way you pay.
#35. To: Vicomte13 (#32)
#36. To: Vicomte13 (#31)
the whole world would be the British Empire
#37. To: Vicomte13 (#25)
(Edited)
We want a healthy Mexico to cut down on our immigration problems.
Build the the God damned wall.
#38. To: rlk (#37)
What we have is a stupidity problem.
#39. To: rlk (#37)
We don't have an immigration problem. What we have is a stupidity problem.
#40. To: tomder55 (#29)
Nobody "forces " Congress to change laws . That is the lie you bought .
#41. To: tomder55 (#29)
Nobody "forces " Congress to change laws .
#42. To: tomder55 (#29)
Nobody "forces " Congress to change laws .
#43. To: tomder55, redleghunter, nolu chan (#29)
#44. To: tomder55 (#27)
I know history very well . Before the market crash there was protectionism .
#45. To: tomder55 (#26)
#46. To: tomder55 (#35)
I don't see how voting for Trump ;a businessman
#47. To: tomder55 (#29)
Nobody "forces " Congress to change laws .
#48. To: A K A Stone (#41)
The World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled in favor of Canada and Mexico against the United States regarding the labeling of meat.
#49. To: All (#48)
(Edited)
The World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled in favor of Canada and Mexico against the United States regarding the labeling of meat.
#50. To: rlk (#49)
(Edited)
People in the United States are not to be made subservient to a world government.
#51. To: A K A Stone (#47)
The World Trade Organization has just given Europe the right to hit the United States with $4 billion in tariff sanctions – to punish us for giving tax breaks to U.S. exporters like Boeing, Microsoft and GE.
#52. To: tomder55 (#51)
Why does Boeing ,Microsoft and GE need tax breaks ? Talk about crony capitalism !
#53. To: tomder55 (#51)
#54. To: A K A Stone (#52)
(Edited)
#55. To: A K A Stone (#53)
Just curious. Are you going to leave the country like Whoopi when Trump wins?
#56. To: paraclete (#50)
People in the United States are not to be made subservient to a world government.
#57. To: tomder55 (#54)
so you do like taxpayers subsidizing multi-national corporations .
#58. To: tomder55 (#54)
You like taxpayers subsidizing turning a food source into an expensive energy additive .
#59. To: tomder55 (#54)
Don't you worry . The GOPe is warming up to Trump ...
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