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Friday, June 14, 2019
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
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Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Another View Of Tariffs--One That Is Rarely Heard
Tariffs: The Taxes That Made
America Great
By Patrick Buchanan
As his limo carried him to work at the White House Monday, Larry Kudlow could not have been pleased with the headline in The Washington Post: “Kudlow Contradicts Trump on Tariffs.”
The story began: “National Economic Council Director Lawrence Kudlow acknowledged Sunday that American consumers end up paying for the administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports, contradicting President Trump’s repeated inaccurate claim that the Chinese foot the bill.”
A free trade evangelical, Kudlow had conceded on Fox News that consumers pay the tariffs on products made abroad that they purchase here in the U.S. Yet that is by no means the whole story.
A tariff may be described as a sales or consumption tax the consumer pays, but tariffs are also a discretionary and an optional tax.
If you choose not to purchase Chinese goods and instead buy comparable goods made in other nations or the USA, then you do not pay the tariff.
China loses the sale. This is why Beijing, which runs $350 billion to $400 billion in annual trade surpluses at our expense is howling loudest. Should Donald Trump impose that 25% tariff on all $500 billion in Chinese exports to the USA, it would cripple China's economy. Factories seeking assured access to the U.S. market would flee in panic from the Middle Kingdom.
Tariffs were the taxes that made America great. They were the taxes relied upon by the first and greatest of our early statesmen, before the coming of the globalists Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
Tariffs, to protect manufacturers and jobs, were the Republican Party's path to power and prosperity in the 19th and 20th centuries, before the rise of the Rockefeller Eastern liberal establishment and its embrace of the British-bred heresy of unfettered free trade.
The Tariff Act of 1789 was enacted with the declared purpose, "the encouragement and protection of manufactures." It was the second act passed by the first Congress led by Speaker James Madison. It was crafted by Alexander Hamilton and signed by President Washington.
After the War of 1812, President Madison, backed by Henry Clay and John Calhoun and ex-Presidents Jefferson and Adams, enacted the Tariff of 1816 to price British textiles out of competition, so Americans would build the new factories and capture the booming U.S. market. It worked.
Tariffs financed Mr. Lincoln's War. The Tariff of 1890 bears the name of Ohio Congressman and future President William McKinley, who said that a foreign manufacturer "has no right or claim to equality with our own. ... He pays no taxes. He performs no civil duties."
That is economic patriotism, putting America and Americans first.
The Fordney-McCumber Tariff gave Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge the revenue to offset the slashing of Wilson's income taxes, igniting that most dynamic of decades — the Roaring '20s.
That the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the Depression of the 1930s is a New Deal myth in which America's schoolchildren have been indoctrinated for decades.
The Depression began with the crash of the stock market in 1929, nine months before Smoot-Hawley became law. The real villain: The Federal Reserve, which failed to replenish that third of the money supply that had been wiped out by thousands of bank failures.
Milton Friedman taught us that.
A tariff is a tax, but its purpose is not just to raise revenue but to make a nation economically independent of others, and to bring its citizens to rely upon each other rather than foreign entities.
The principle involved in a tariff is the same as that used by U.S. colleges and universities that charge foreign students higher tuition than their American counterparts.
What patriot would consign the economic independence of his country to the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith in a system crafted by intellectuals whose allegiance is to an ideology, not a people?
What great nation did free traders ever build?
Free trade is the policy of fading and failing powers, past their prime. In the half-century following passage of the Corn Laws, the British showed the folly of free trade.
They began the second half of the 19th century with an economy twice that of the USA and ended it with an economy half of ours, and equaled by a Germany, which had, under Bismarck, adopted what was known as the American System.
Of the nations that have risen to economic preeminence in recent centuries — the British before 1850, the United States between 1789 and 1914, post-war Japan, China in recent decades — how many did so through free trade? None. All practiced economic nationalism.
The problem for President Trump?
Once a nation is hooked on the cheap goods that are the narcotic free trade provides, it is rarely able to break free. The loss of its economic independence is followed by the loss of its political independence, the loss of its greatness and, ultimately, the loss of its national identity.
Brexit was the strangled cry of a British people that had lost its independence and desperately wanted it back.
When Does A White Collar Crime Give You Solitary Confinement?
Leftism Makes People Meaner: Reflections on the Torture of Paul Manafort
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
The sadistic treatment of Paul Manafort illustrates something I have believed since I attended graduate school in the 1970s and saw the behavior of left-wing students: Leftism makes people meaner.
There are kind and mean conservatives and kind and mean liberals. Neither liberalism nor conservatism makes people kinder or meaner. But this is not the case with leftism. With the handful of exceptions that accompany every generalization, leftism makes people meaner, even crueler.
Take the transfer of Manafort, the one-time Trump campaign manager, from a federal prison to New York's Rikers Island prison. Rikers Island is universally regarded as a wretched place. As Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote:
"The decision to move Paul Manafort ... from the decent federal prison to which he was sentenced to solitary confinement to the dangerous hell hole that is New York City's Rikers Island seems abusive and possibly illegal.
"I know Rikers well having spent time there visiting numerous defendants accused of murder and other violent crimes. It is a terrible place that no one should ever be sent to."
Mass murderers and torturers are among those incarcerated at Rikers Island.
Moreover, Manafort, found guilty solely for white-collar crimes, will be placed in solitary confinement -- "for his own safety."
Virtually everyone who has written about solitary confinement, both on the right and the left, deems it torture. Manafort will therefore be tortured after being sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for fraud and, in the words of the Daily Wire, "a little-known law that requires lobbyists to report that they are working on behalf of a foreign government (in Manafort's case, Ukraine)."
Angry over the possibility that Manafort may be pardoned by President Trump, the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, charged Manafort with additional crimes based on state law. That way, if found guilty of state offenses, he cannot be pardoned by Trump, as the president's power to pardon applies only to federal -- not state -- crimes.
Everyone knows this prosecution is politically motivated. Vance hates the president and wants to use solitary confinement in a hellhole with violent criminals to squeeze Manafort into testifying against the president.
As Dershowitz said to me on my radio show, what Vance is doing reminds him of Stalin and Beria -- the infamous state prosecutor, a man Stalin referred to as "my Himmler." Dershowitz, a lifelong liberal Democrat and supporter of Hillary Clinton, does not use Stalin analogies loosely.
To her credit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: "A prison sentence is not a license for gov torture and human rights violations. That's what solitary confinement is. Manafort should be released, along with all people being held in solitary."
I might add that my opposition to Manafort's treatment is not partisan or new. On a number of occasions over the years, I have cited favorably New York Review of Books articles describing the horror of solitary confinement.
Despite its history of opposition to solitary confinement, The New York Times article reporting the plan to relocate Manafort said nothing against the unnecessary transfer but did comment on the expensive suits Manafort used to wear.
Solitary confinement is "basically a deathtrap," former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik wrote when Manafort was placed in solitary at his federal prison. Manafort should never have been sentenced to solitary confinement. But Robert Mueller (and Judge Amy Berman Jackson) sought it for the same political reason Vance has: to break the man.
As former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell wrote: "When a witness or defendant from whom prosecutors want 'cooperation' does not do as they demand, they put him in solitary confinement. And it works. It literally breaks people.
"Solitary does have a place in our prison system, but only for those people who are simply too dangerous to be placed around others at all. However, the torture of solitary confinement should never be used as it is now to break people to prosecutors' will -- to torture them until they will say or do anything to get out.
"Solitary is also called the 'hole.' It's a small space, barely large enough to stand, with a slit for light, to which prisoners are confined/caged for 23 hours a day. ...
"Paul Manafort, seventy years old, has endured this torture for eight months. He's now in a wheelchair, while Judge Amy Berman Jackson mocks his rapidly deteriorating health. Where is the outcry from the ACLU?"
So, then, what enables Vance, Mueller and Jackson to engage in such evil?
The only answer is their politics -- the politics of the Trump-hating left. Cyrus Vance, Robert Mueller and Amy Berman Jackson may well be good parents, loving spouses, loyal friends and charitable individuals. But leftism has given them permission to act vilely and mercilessly while thinking of themselves as fine people -- just as evil doctrines have done throughout history.
As noted at the beginning of this column, when I was at Columbia, I witnessed this leftist mean-spiritedness firsthand in the personal cruelty of left-wing agitators against professors and others with whom they differed.
Here's a question perhaps millions of parents will be able to answer: If your child returned home from college a leftist, was he or she a kinder or meaner person than before he or she left for college?
The question is rhetorical.
Monday, June 10, 2019
Do-Nothing Congress Is Upstaged By Mexico
White House Slams Congress:
Mexico is Doing More to Secure
Southern Border
image: https://structurecms-staging-psyclone.netdna-ssl.com/client_assets/trumptrain/media/picture/5982/0001/6970/2d47/02ca/0100/content_Donald_Trump_by_Gage_Skidmore_2.jpg?1501691919
Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The White House and President Trump have called out Congress claiming that the country of Mexico is doing more to secure the southern border than lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The mounting frustration comes after President Trump secured a deal with Mexico where Mexico will increase immigration enforcement to stem the tide of illegal immigrants flooding our southern border.
According to Town Hall:
President Trump and White House officials are slamming Democrats as they continue their refusal to solve the ongoing crisis on the southern border.
Over the weekend, Trump announced a deal with Mexico had been reached in order to hold off tariffs that were set to go into affect today.
Lindsey Graham will have a hearing about possible legislation to fix the border crisis. It still remains unclear if Congress will vote to progress the legislation to Trump's desk....
During an interview with Fox and Friends Monday morning, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway argued Democrats are doing less than Mexican officials to take action.
"Mexico took the President's tariff threat very seriously and they're starting to take enforcement of their southern border seriously. This is important to both countries. We now have Mexico doing more than the Democrats who work behind me on Capitol Hill on securing our southern border," Conway said.
Read more at http://trumptrainnews.com/articles/white-house-slams-congress-mexico-is-doing-more-to-secure-southern-border#Uqow1ECEsM5U5cDc.99
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Americans Had Better Awaken To This Threat!
Soros Claims More Scalps as
Major Corporation Drops Fox News
image: https://aanews-structure-psyclone.netdna-ssl.com/client_assets/aanews/media/picture/5929/9fac/6970/2d14/583e/0300/Slideshow_1024px-George_Soros_-_Festival_Economia_2012_02.JPG?1518106491
By Niccolò Caranti (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The Washington Times reports:
Bayer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, is reportedly done with advertising on Fox News programs hosted by conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.
Ads for products sold by the German aspirin maker will no longer appear on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “The Ingraham Angle,” two of the cable television network’s prime-time opinion programs, ThinkProgress co-founder Jeff Legum reported Thursday in his Popular Information newsletter.
Citing an individual “familiar with Bayer’s decision-maker,” the report said the drug giant cut ties with the programs amid both hosts facing criticism over recent comments...
... Prior to cutting ties, Bayer was the second- and fifth-most frequent advertisers on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “The Ingraham Angle,” respectively, the Media Matters watchdog group reported.
The campaign to target and harass Fox News advertisers is part of a campaign by Media Matters and the Center for American Progress, which runs “ThinkProgress” to bankrupt the Fox News Channel and force it off the air.
Both groups are funded by George Soros.
The announcement comes a day after YouTube buckled to a harassment campaign by another Soros-funded activist, Carlos Maza, into cutting off advertising revenues to popular conservative host Steven Crowder after Crowder called him a “lispy queer.”
YouTube initially declined Maza’s request to “demonetize” the popular “Louder With Crowder” channel, citing the fact that while Crowder’s comments may be offensive, they did not constitute a threat.
While Crowder never threatened Maza, Maza’s own Twitter account is filled with explicit calls for street violence against conservatives.
An enraged Maza continued to harass YouTube, enlisting the support of media giant Vox to target the company, until YouTube changed its position and cut off Crowder’s ad revenues.
Read more at http://americanactionnews.com/articles/soros-claims-more-scalps-as-major-corporation-drops-fox-news#yBGeZ8b8IUKFdqHB.99