“On a ranked choice ballot, instead of picking one candidate from a list, voters rank each candidate in order of preference. If one candidate wins an outright majority, then that person wins; if not, then the lowest-performing candidate is eliminated, and their ballots are re-tallied and allotted to whomever they picked as their second choice. This process repeats until one candidate passes 50 percent.”
“Start with that $30 toaster made overseas. Now, slap a 10 percent tariff on it, so that consumers must pay $33 to buy it. That means the Treasury Department collects $3 in new revenue, but it also means that domestic toaster-makers can sell their wares for $32 and undercut the imported models.
If tariffs cause consumers to switch to those domestic-made toasters, Cass acknowledges that consumers are out two bucks. This is what economists call a “deadweight loss” and it’s one of the major reasons why tariffs harm the economy.
Cass, the head of American Compass and a prominent proponent of the conservative moment’s shift toward central planning, wants to focus on the benefits of those higher prices. “The share of the $32 purchase price that would once have gone to a Chinese factory and its workers now goes to an American firm and its workers instead,” he argues. “It pays American taxes and supports American families in American communities.”
All of that for just $2 more. Wow, what a great deal!
Unfortunately, Cass is wrong about the math and wrong about the underlying economics.
Tariffs can, of course, be used to make foreign-produced goods (like toasters) more expensive. That doesn’t mean that manufacturing firms will radically redesign their supply chains to produce more toasters in the United States. And if they did do that, those new toasters wouldn’t cost a mere $2 more than the ones available at Home Depot now. Cass is making several wild logical leaps here, and offers no evidence to substantiate this claim of a hypothetical $32 American-made toaster.
How much would that toaster actually cost? More than $250.
That’s the figure offered by Ed Gresser, the former assistant U.S. Trade representative who is currently the director of trade and global markets for the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). Unlike Cass, Gresser understands how tariffs and trade work.
More importantly, he also shows his work. Because there are no kitchen appliance manufacturers making toasters in the United States right now, he examined the prices of toasters made in other wealthy, western countries like Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. At the lowest end, those toasters cost the equivalent of $250, and some would be significantly pricier.
“In sum, ‘developed’ high-income countries do make home toasters. But they are profitable at prices about ten times those you’d find in mainstream U.S. retail outlets.,” writes Gresser. “So to achieve Vance’s apparent goal, mainstream toaster prices would probably have to rise to Neiman Marcus levels, say $300 each.””
…
“there would be far more toaster-buying consumers than toaster-making workers—and the consumers would be far worse off. Indeed, the workers would be worse off too, since they become consumers as soon as they clock out for the day.
…
“Now, imagine what would happen if you told them that the price of jeans would have to increase tenfold, as would be the case with toasters. I suspect that Cass—and Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), who is making a version of this same argument on the campaign trail—is relying on faulty math and bad economics because he’s aware that the real numbers would be unpalatable to just about everyone.”
“The resulting pier mission did not go well.
It involved 1,000 U.S. troops, delivered only a fraction of the promised aid at a cost of nearly $230 million, and was from the start beset by bad luck and miscalculations, including fire, bad weather and dangers on shore from the fighting between Israel and Hamas.”
…
“The U.S. military aimed to ramp up to as many as 150 trucks a day of aid coming off the pier.
But because the pier was only operational for a total of 20 days, the military says it moved a total of only 19.4 million pounds of aid into Gaza. That would be about 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the pier, based on estimates by the World Food Programme from earlier this year of weight carried by a truck.
The United Nations says about 500 truckloads of aid are needed daily to address the needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Just days after the first shipments of aid rolled off the pier in Gaza, crowds overwhelmed trucks and took some of it.
Israel’s killings of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near the pier as it staged a hostage rescue recovery mission in June also dented the confidence of aid organizations, on whom the U.S. was relying to carry the supplies from the shore and distribute to residents.
A senior U.S. defense official acknowledged that aid delivery “proved to be perhaps more challenging than the planners anticipated.”
One former official said Kurilla had raised distribution as a concern early on.
“General Kurilla was also very clear about that: ‘I can do my piece of this, and I can do distribution if you task me to do it,'” the former official said.
“But that was explicitly scoped out of what the task was. And so we were reliant on these international organizations.”
Current and former U.S. officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid organizations themselves were always cool to the pier.
At a closed-door meeting of U.S. officials and aid organizations in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden’s pier project.
But Kaag stressed the UN preference was for “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It referred to a briefing on Monday where a spokesperson for the organization said that the U.N. appreciated every way of getting aid into Gaza, including the pier, but more access through land routes is needed.
The underlying concern for aid organizations was that Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats over Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, was pushing a solution that would at best be a temporary fix and at worst would take pressure off Netanyahu’s government to open up land routes into Gaza.
Dave Harden, a former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza, described the pier project as “humanitarian theater.”
“It did relieve the pressure, unfortunately, on having the (land border) crossings work more effectively.””
https://www.reuters.com/world/how-bidens-gaza-pier-project-unraveled-2024-07-25/
In a series of panels about promoting North American gas, oil, and uranium energy in ways that will boost the economy and make North America strong and independent vis-a-vis world challenges, people are worried about the effects of Trump’s proposed tariffs which will hurt both countries’ economies and make energy more costly.
“a judge struck down Arlington, Virginia’s missing middle reforms that had briefly allowed smaller, four- to six-unit multifamily developments in the D.C. suburb’s single-family neighborhoods.
In a Friday ruling, Judge David Schell said that the county had violated a number of procedural requirements when it unanimously passed its Enhanced Housing Option (EHO) last year and had failed to adequately study the impact of increased residential density.”
“Qatar agreed in recent weeks to kick Hamas out of its country following a request from the US to do so, capping off months of failed attempts to try to get the militant group – whose top leaders reside in the Qatari capital of Doha – to accept a ceasefire and hostage release deal in the Israel-Hamas war, US and Qatari sources told CNN.
With efforts to pause the war – which has been a top priority for President Joe Biden – firmly stalled, US officials informed their Qatari counterparts about two weeks ago that they must stop giving Hamas refuge in their capital; Qatar agreed and gave Hamas notice about a week ago, sources said.
“Hamas is a terrorist group that has killed Americans and continues to hold Americans hostage,” a senior administration official told CNN. “After rejecting repeated proposals to release hostages, its leaders should no longer be welcome in the capitals of any American partner.”
Throughout the course of the war and negotiations to bring the hostages home, US officials have asked Qatar to use the threat of expulsion as leverage in their talks with Hamas. The final impetus for Qatar agreeing to kick Hamas out came recently after the death of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Hamas’ rejection of yet another ceasefire proposal.
Qatar has been a major player in efforts over the past year to try to secure a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, in no small part because senior members of the militant group are based in Doha. Major negotiations have taken place in the Qatari capital for that reason.
Exactly when Hamas operatives would be exiled out of Qatar – and where they would go – are unclear.”
“Figures close to the Trump campaign like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have openly endorsed the view that Crimea is rightfully Russian.
Trump overturned decades of US policy and international consensus by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which he has described as a snap decision made after a quick history lesson from his ambassador to Israel and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. He did the same for Morocco’s claims over the disputed region of Western Sahara, in return for Morocco recognizing Israel. (In fairness, the Biden administration hasn’t reversed either of these moves — once the taboo is broken, it’s hard to reestablish.)”
“President-elect Donald Trump was indicted four times — including two indictments arising out of his failed attempt to steal the 2020 election. One of these indictments even yielded a conviction, albeit on 34 relatively minor charges of falsifying business records.
But the extraordinary protections the American system gives to sitting presidents will ensure that Trump won’t be going to prison. He’s going to the White House instead.”
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“Two of the indictments against Trump are federal, and two were brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia. The federal indictments (one about Trump’s role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection, and the other about his handling of classified documents) are the most immediately vulnerable. Once Trump becomes president, he will have full command and control over the US Department of Justice, and can simply order it to drop all the federal charges against him. Once he does, those cases will simply go away.
The White House does have a longstanding norm of non-interference with criminal prosecutions, but this norm is nothing more than that — a voluntary limit that past presidents placed on their own exercise of power in order to prevent politicization of the criminal justice system. As president, Trump is under no constitutional obligation to obey this norm. He nominates the attorney general, and he can fire the head of the Justice Department at any time.”
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“The fate of the state charges against Trump is a little more uncertain, in large part because there’s never been a state indictment of a sitting president before, so there are no legal precedents governing what happens if a state attempts such a prosecution (or, in the case of New York, to impose a serious sentence on a president who was already convicted).
It is highly unlikely that the state prosecutions can move forward, however, at least until Trump leaves office. On the federal level, the Department of Justice has long maintained that it cannot indict a sitting president for a variety of practical reasons: The burden of defending against criminal charges would diminish the president’s ability to do their job, as would the “public stigma and opprobrium occasioned by the initiation of criminal proceedings.” Additionally, if the president were incarcerated, that would make it “physically impossible for the president to carry out his duties.”
There’s little doubt that the current Supreme Court, which recently held that Trump is immune to prosecution for many crimes he committed while in office, would embrace the Justice Department’s reasoning.”
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“These same practical considerations would apply with equal force to a state prosecution of a president, and there’s also one other reason why a constitutional limit on state indictments of the president makes sense. Without such a limit, a state led by the president’s political enemies could potentially bring frivolous criminal charges against that president.”