Showing posts with label Donald Trump 2025. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donald Trump 2025. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Trump nominates Heritage Project 2025 economist to BLS, the very guy who had openly called for the firing of Erika McEntarfer at BLS after the disastrous July jobs numbers came out
If you thought the jobs numbers were unbelievable before, just wait.
... Antoni is the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and has been a longtime critic of the BLS. ...
Remember when Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025?
Yeah, that was a good one.
Monday, August 11, 2025
The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip observes America under Trump becoming more like China under Xi
Greg Ip
Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former President Joe Biden went further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that, $8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden overrode U.S. Steel’s management and shareholders to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, though his staff saw no national-security risk. Trump reversed that veto while extracting the “golden share” that he can use to influence the company’s decisions. In design and name it mimics the golden shares that private Chinese companies must issue to the CCP.
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would take a 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” author Dan Wang writes: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
The U.S. hasn’t fared any better. Interventions made in the name of national security or kick-starting infant industries lead to boondoggles like Foxconn’s promised factory in Wisconsin or Tesla’s solar-panel factory in Buffalo, N.Y.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulators canceled the initial public offering of Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventually fined it $2.8 billion for anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
Trump invokes emergency powers yet again, takes over DC police for 30 days under Home Rule Act over non-existent crime surge except against his own people, deploys National Guard
This is pissing-match security theatre: "If Biden can do it so can I".
... his emergency control is set to expire after a maximum of 30 days,
according to the statute. That can be extended, but only if Congress
passes a law authorizing it.
While Trump has frequently complained about crime in the district, violent crime there has fallen to a 30-year low as of January, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. ...
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Andrew Sullivan makes Trump subhuman the way Mark Levin and Michael Savage have made their enemies subhuman, says the American people no longer want to govern themselves
They shoot wild boar in Texas from helicopters, don't they?
... Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit. ...
I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise. ...
Andrew Sullivan intimately knows all about not governing oneself. If only the Democrats did, who relentlessly persecuted and prosecuted Trump while in office and out. That's why we are here.
Republican Ralph Norman (SC-5), who wants to be South Carolina's next governor, says higher prices due to Trump's tariffs are for the good of the country
You be happy paying more.
... Notably, Norman was one of the few House lawmakers not to endorse Trump in 2024, backing former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley instead.
In his late July announcement of his upcoming gubernatorial bid, however, he praised Trump, predicting “what he did [in Iran] is going to put him in the annals of the greatest presidents we have ever had.” ...
More.
There are already five Republicans running for governor in South Carolina.
Saturday, August 9, 2025
Zelenskyy again says Nyet lol
Like everyone expected, except for Donald Trump, who has never been to Realville.
... "Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.” ...
Meanwhile . . .
Friday, August 8, 2025
Mad King Ludwig tariffs gold bars, making liquidity more expensive for big banks
Gold futures climbed to a record high on Friday after a report that the United States had imposed tariffs on imports of 1-kg gold bars, while spot gold stayed on track for a second straight weekly gain on tariff turmoil and U.S. interest rate-cut hopes. ...
U.S. gold futures for December delivery were up 0.9% at $3,484.10, after hitting an all-time high of $3,534.10.
The price spread between New York futures and spot prices widened by more than $100 after the Financial Times reported on Thursday that the United States had imposed tariffs on imports of 1-kg gold bars, citing a letter from Customs and Border Protection.
The letter, dated July 31, said 1-kg and 100-ounce gold bars should be classified under a customs code subject to higher tariffs, a move that could impact Switzerland, the world’s largest gold refining hub.
The tariffs on gold bars “will create a dislocation or rather some issues in terms of settlement by big banks” and this was reflected in liquidity prices this morning, with prices jumping everywhere, said Brian Lan, managing director at GoldSilver Central, Singapore. ...
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Sunday, August 3, 2025
Saturday, August 2, 2025
Mike Shedlock, veteran critic of the BLS since the Great Recession: This is a clear case of shoot the messenger
Did Trump Fire the BLS Head for Cause, Being the Messenger, or Something Else?
... “The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference.”
Trump wants you to believe hundreds if not thousands of people are in on the scheme and they are all silent.
The Cult sucks it up as if that makes sense.
I do not defend the antiquated procedures of the BLS. I have been writing about the flaws for years.
Yet, I can say that in all my conversations with BLS technicians (dozens over the years), I have found BLS [personnel] to be knowledgeable, courteous, and helpful. ...
Sorry Cultists and conspiracy theorists, the data is not rigged. And don’t pee your panties because it won’t be under Trump either (or someone will point it out).
Regardless, Trump’s tariffs ensure it will get worse. I expect many small businesses will go under. Trump has only himself to blame.
Friday, August 1, 2025
Mad King Ludwig fires BLS commissioner in a fit of rage over his bad jobs numbers, blaming the messenger
I don't recall Obama firing anybody at BLS in 2011 when there were ZERO jobs created in August.
Banana republic stuff from the Banana Republican.
Trump is unfit to be president.
Trump fires commissioner of labor statistics after weaker-than-expected jobs figures slam markets
... “I can’t believe what I just saw,” said Peter Mallouk, president and
chief investment officer of Creative Planning. Trump’s social media post
seemed like a parody or satire at first, Mallouk said.
“This is
not healthy,” he added. “We can’t have a set of numbers come out and
fire somebody that served under numerous administrations in various
roles because you don’t like the numbers.”
William Beach, a 2017 Trump appointee and McEntarfer’s immediate predecessor at BLS, also sharply criticized her firing.
“The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau,” Beach posted on X.
“This escalates the President’s unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system,” Beach added in a statement. “The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news.” ...
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Trump's $170 billion tax hike on the American consumer
The seasonally-adjusted annual rate of Trump's tariffs leaped from $96 billion in 1Q to $266 billion in 2Q.
The federal government farts through $20 billion every day, so this annualized tariff revenue goes Poof in less than two weeks, matching just 3.6% of federal outlays.
The numbskulls in the US Senate like Josh Hawley want to redistribute these tax revenues in the form of rebate checks to the taxpayers.
Wouldn't it have been easier and more efficient and more fair not to have taxed us in the first place?
Note that Donald Trump's Bureau of Economic Analysis, run by Howard Lutnick, still must call this what it is, taxes on imports lol, despite what his Treasury Secretary was still saying in June:
Bessent claims tariffs aren’t taxes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)