The Real timschochet

Damn if you guys think I’m a fearmonger watch this dude Ray Dalio (largest hedge fund manager) on Meet the Press! Next to him I’m pretty mild; he’s predicting economic armagedddon. Scary stuff!

Agreed! Question: by all reports Trump continues to put ketchup on his steaks. Do you think that Linda McMahon’s statement will be the start of a concerted effort to change his mind about this?

Nobody is 100% accurate all of the time. But when I use the term “vast majority” I am pretty confident of my assertions. Still am, especially about the subject you just raised.

Many people here consider ME an ideologue. Even more here consider me a dishonest fool. Personally, if I ever achieved majority approval or affirmation of my views in this forum I would have to question myself deeply as there would clearly be something wrong with me.

Of course the problem with your challenge is that there will be no way for me to prove that Trump is an existential threat unless and until it’s already too late to respond to. Therefore I would much rather nothing of the sort happens and you continue to think me an idiotic foolish boy crying wolf fearmonger. That would work better for both of us. As for the second part of your post: nice try. Trump needs to be defeated, yes, but only through democratic, peaceful means. Any alternative would be as bad as the threat he represents. So despite your poor attempts at logic I will stick to being a keyboard blowhard (in your eyes.)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/12/linda-mcmahon-a1-instead-of-ai/83059797007/ Actually Linda McMahon is absolutely right. A1 sauce is delicious and public schools would be better off if only we had more of it.

Maybe Biden was indeed brain dead. Maybe he wasn’t. It doesn’t matter at this point and in any event he was worth defending IMO because his policies and actions were good for the country, while Trump’s are not. If that makes me guilty of a double standard, so be it. I really don’t care about double standards. None of this has anything to do with the issue at hand: we have a current President who has put up tariffs based on a wrong-headed and old fashioned view of where this country is heading. He has already done tremendous long lasting damage to the nation and every day he persists it’s going to get worse. At the same time he seeking authoritarian solutions on a whole bunch of other areas. Nearly everything he does is damaging. He needs to be prevented from doing more damage. The first way to do that is to convince reasonable conservatives like you that this not a game in which if liberals win then conservatives lose. I get that you have a large number of issues in which you disagree with liberalism and want to see it defeated. Put those aside, we can fight about them later. Right now we need to unite in fighting against this existential threat to all of our freedoms which is Donald Trump.

Thankfully the number of folks that adore him is shrinking. In 10 years you’ll be hard put to find anyone to say it a good word for him. It will be a little like Italy in the decade after Mussolini.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/04/10/politics/supreme-court-abrego-garcia Damn. 9-0.

Well no it was also about Christians slaughtering a lot of Jews too. (And Muslims slaughtering Christians. And Muslims slaughtering Jews. And Muslims slaughtering fellow Muslims, and Christians slaughtering fellow Christians and.. well you get the general idea.)

Well they don’t trust the USA either. After all we chose as a people to elect him again, knowing what he is. What are the other nations to conclude other than this is exactly what we want?

If Trump isn’t stupid then he’s deliberately damaging our economy, both short and long term. Simply in order to satisfy his own ego. I don’t think that’s better.

Pretty good article explaining why, no matter what happens now, the last two disastrous weeks have screwed our economy for a long time to come: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-tariff-chaos-unfixable/682419/ Simply put nobody trusts our word anymore: New supply chains are going to be developed and the world will trade without us.

I meant around New Orleans in general.

I was little surprised, when I was there, to see more LSU signs and regalia than Saints stuff.

Update: Trump has now announced that smartphones and computers are exempt from the tariffs. This is a good thing; the consumer will be hurt just a little less. But I have to say that once again these decisions appear to be arbitrary and improvised, How anyone could still believe that this is part of a grand strategy is a mystery to me.

So now you’re changing the discussion from economic concerns to strategic concerns. Nobody has been able to demonstrate why trade deficits are bad for us in terms of economics. But you make the argument that they are bad for us in this case with China, due to long term strategic and moral issues. Putting aside the obvious fact that these sort of issues do not motivate President Trump ( and therefore if the final outcome, whatever it is, turns out in your opinion to be a positive one it will at best be accidental) you raise good points. This is an issue that really frustrates me. I am a believer in free trade and capitalism. Like so many others I thought that Nixon’s decision was a good one and that eventually our trade would cause the Chinese communist system to self-destruct. Back when Tiammenen square happened I figured this is it, won’t be long now. But damn that was nearly 40’years ago and somehow China kept itself a dictatorship. It’s an odd country. And yet…what is the alternative to still hoping for trade leading to a freer China? War with them is unthinkable. We can’t isolate them economically but even if we could that wouldn’t guarantee success (look how long Fidel Castro’s Cuba survived our embargo). Trying to make them suffer, as these tariffs will no doubt do, will make them more nationalist, hostile, and perhaps threatening to invade Taiwan. In short it makes the world a more dangerous place. Conclusion: despite your valid arguments, every alternative to continuing to trade with China would IMO be a worse outcome. Our policy since 1973 has been trade with China and hope they eventually become a free nation. I think we should continue that policy.

I still don’t understand how a trade deficit is a loss.

But I don’t accept your math. It doesn’t apply because we are not one entity. Thousands of American companies trade with China. Some make a lot of money. Some have lost money. On the whole it’s a net benefit according to the statistics discussed in the article I linked. Statistics and facts, not feelings.

My understanding is that China is already suffering economically and cannot afford not trading with the USA. i think your point about the government there being unmoved by suffering is a valid one though. How many millions died during the Great Leap Forward? But I really don’t look at this trade war in terms of winners and losers. I don’t see any winners. I think both sides lose.

Look I get the arguments you have made in your last two posts. And yet there are plenty of positives as well and I think they far outweigh the negatives, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/contentious-us-china-trade-relationship Here is a lengthy and thoughtful article on our trade relationship with China. I think it honestly portrays both the positives and negatives. But it also makes the same argument I am making: that the positives outweigh the negatives. Am I 100% sure about this? I am not sure. But this is the way I lean.

I may have written this too soon. The ACLU is complaining that the feds went looking for a judge and a jurisdiction inclined to favor them. Maybe there’s something to this. It will no doubt be appealed.

Classy as always

If so I’m satisfied. All I want is a hearing in each case.

Yes the rust belt has lost money. But you can’t deny that overall the USA profited. It’s been a net gain.