Pharmaceuticals are exempt from the new tariffs. Although that exemption probably doesn’t apply to feedstocks for pharma synthesis, so those made in the US will have to go up. Those made in other countries will not. So how’s that going to bring manufacturing back to the US?
Not a nitpick, but a fine point: it’s show. When people show you who they are, believe them. As in, someone might tell you he’s a great humanitarian, but then when he shits all over the wait-staff at dinner, he’s shown you he probably isn’t and you should believe that.
Likewise, Trump might have made musings about how he thinks DACA recipients should maybe get their green card when they graduate college, but anyone who watched how his administration handled immigration in his first term knew there was no way in hell that was going to happen.
Did you notice that he’s a high school teacher? It doesn’t say what subject he teaches, but how can he possibly have failed to notice that stuff like universal health care and feeding the poor are not things that Republicans want to do?
He also said he’s not worried about the stock market, because he doesn’t have anything invested in it. I’ve got news for him, yes he does. As a teacher in Indiana, he is automatically enrolled in the Teachers’ Retirement Fund, which is basically a 401k in everything but name. I know that because my wife is also a teacher in Indiana.
He may not have been paying any attention to those statements the Fund sends him every quarter, but I promise you he has money invested in the stock market, and I promise you his balance has taken a hit. Again, I know that because my wife is a teacher in Indiana.
Oh, please. That’s amateur hour magaflatearthering. The real tears in their eyes, sir saying magaflatearthers will blame the disaster in response to felon47's tariffs on Biden not placing tariffs during his administration and that was, of course, so Hunter’s drugs would not be impacted.
That takes us out of CT land and puts it into more routine special pleading, the practice of using evidence like a drunk uses a lampost, more for support than illumination. You can see it in the varied justifications for the Trump tariffs. Sometimes the tariffs are permanent and thereby will pay for extending Trump’s tax cuts. Other times they are temporary, designed to gain concessions from foreign governments. Each plank has superficial plausibility, and their conflicts don’t matter to the MAGA base.
In other news, Musk trashes Navarro:
Apparently Navarro went to Harvard, something Musk doesn’t like. Never mind that Navarro’s opinions on international trade (something he has published no peer reviewed articles on AFAIK) are decidedly against the broad consensus among economists, including those who occasionally favor tariffs.
This week, Washington learned about the mysterious anti-China voice that has long whispered in Mr. Navarro’s ear: Ron Vara.
Ron Vara has appeared as a cryptic voice of economic wisdom more than a dozen times in five of Mr. Navarro’s 13 books, dispensing musings like “You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food” and “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.”
But Ron Vara, it turns out, does not exist. At least not in corporeal form. He is apparently a figment of Mr. Navarro’s imagination — an anagram of Mr. Navarro’s surname that the trade adviser created as a Hitchcockian writing device and stuck with as something of an inside joke with himself.
Mr. Navarro’s imaginary source surfaced this week when The Chronicle of Higher Education published some of the findings of Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an emeritus professor at Australian National University.
Ms. Morris-Suzuki, concerned about Mr. Navarro’s statements on China, started digging into his earlier work. She unearthed about a dozen instances when Mr. Navarro, previously a business school professor at the University of California, Irvine, had invoked Ron Vara. Curious why she could find no record of such a person, she soon discovered he was not real.
“I think it’s a very strange thing for an academic to do in books that he is presenting as factual,” Ms. Morris-Suzuki said in an email. “It might be different if a writer — even a university-based one — were writing something that was obviously lighthearted and comical and in a nonacademic context.”
If you are tempted to just pass this video by because there is no summary, please spend the couple of minutes it takes to watch it. Especially if you are more proficient in math than the average second grader. The level of stupid is petrifying – you’ve heard of pseudoscience? I give you “pseudomath.”