More than you want to know about government debt

from Neva Yevsisyan and Randall Wray here.  They do the usual Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) debunk of government debt as a baddie, and add evidence to the notion that the Federal Reserve raising interest rates isn't a good idea to fight inflation.

Excerpt:

 "While high interest payments by government do not threaten the solvency of the Treasury, they are inefficient (in terms of promoting growth and employment), can increase inequality (interest payments mostly go to the already rich), and can be inflationary (by boosting spending of those rich folk). High interest rates also hurt the private sector—by raising business costs (interest is a major business expense that must be covered by prices charged—potentially adding to inflation pressure) and by increasing payments on mortgages and consumer debt."

 

"... Remember when President Clinton announced that the federal government was finally running a budget surplus, and predicted it would continue to do so for 15 years, allowing the government to retire all its debt? He was cheered by deficit hawks and those with debt phobias. We at the Levy Institute said it would not happen. It did not happen, because the housing, commodities, and stock market bubbles burst, with the economy weighed down by Clinton surpluses that morphed into renewed deficits.

"Projections of Trump or Harris administration debt ratios will also likely prove false—although we expect that the debt ratio will continue its slow, secular, 250 year and counting, rise. This is because good economic performance in the US requires that the government generally spend more into the economy than it pulls out through taxes, allowing the domestic private sector to save safe government bonds (and to import more than it exports to the rest of the world—points well-established by Levy’s sectoral-balance approach)."

"...The problem is not the deficit or the debt, but what the government spends on. The higher the Fed’s interest rate target, the more additional spending is devoted to servicing the debt—spending, that as we have explained, is not efficient in terms of meeting our policy goals.

"It makes more sense to use tools that can target the sources of potential inflation. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan was a step in the right direction—as it included spending to boost capacity to avoid bottlenecks that would create price pressures. Government can also use targeted taxes to release resources for alternative use (for example, taxing fossil fuels to release resources for alternative energy), and subsidies to boost production where needed (for example, to increase the supply of low-income rental apartments). Lessons from the WWII experience can be used, if necessary, to prevent excessive demand during the transition to an environmentally sustainable economy: a temporary, broad-based income tax surcharge (with exemptions for low to moderate income), postponed consumption, and patriotic saving.

"Reining in the Fed makes sense; cutting important social programs does not.

"While there are real world wolves—Leonhardt mentions climate catastrophe and autocratic leaders, and we would add rising inequality and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of billionaires—the federal debt is not one of them."

 

The Democracy Disease - distribution of everything but votes is unequal

(c) by Mark Dempsey

From Arnaud Bertrand: "[W]hen Trump undoubtedly attempted to showcase America's might, he's only achieved a brilliant demonstration of its impotence and, by contrast, highlighted China's diplomatic and economic adeptness. Basically, we're in a new world where America simply cannot bully its way around anymore: when they do so, they end up hurting themselves first and foremost." 

In a classic demonstration of how mob rule overtakes reason, President Trump blames immigrants and trade partners for the economic policy failures for the last two generations (at least). Industrial policy in particular and distribution of the benefits of the global trade architecture--including the US-dominated IMF and World Bank--were created as part of the US' post-WWII neocolonial empire.

The premise that poor countries somehow have cheated Americans with unequal terms of trade and debt bondage under which they have labored primarily for the benefit of elites and US multinational corporations is ridiculous scapegoating, not an accurate assessment of a problem.

Nevertheless, Trump voters often understand this very well and have voted for Trump not because he's going to  fix this system, but because he's promised to destroy it, and that destruction is well underway. Some disagree, citing Trump's appeal to racism and xenophobia, but even if those were real considerations the anti-system candidates' appeal--including Bernie Sanders'--would be a significant contributor to a Trump election victory

The voting public understands that the American economy is rigged to serve the rich, and tariffs won't change that, but they may destroy that postwar American empire. The plutocrats might wake up to the destruction they've wrought, or they may suffer as the aristocrats did during the French revolution, either way, Trump is in the driver's seat now.

Those non-aristocrats who have suffered because the system is rigged have decided they would rather destroy it, even if it means they themselves will suffer too. His voters have not mistaken Trump for a competent administrator. On the contrary he's the anti-Obama. He's sabotaging trade deals, not making them. He's tearing the bureaucracy apart, not employing it for public purpose. 

A recent instance of Trump sabotage means health care, and particularly mental health care has been gutted.  This makes sense. The revenge of the Trump voters impoverished by a rigged economy is that the inmates are now running the asylum. The politics of threats, extortion and fear has been turned loose on the population at large. 

So yes, Trump is terrible, but he's the symptom. This outcome is the consequence of the PMC refusing to address genuine problems, particularly the distribution of the fruits of America's computer-enhanced productivity. Wages have stagnated despite rising worker productivity.

Another example of badly distributed resources: the US has more vacant homes than its homeless population. The deregulated, neoliberal "pure" capitalism promoted for more than 40 years now has given us the beggar-on-every-corner economy in which the billionaires gained enormous wealth, and everyone else has been crushed.

Investigative reporter David Cay Johnstone reports that real median income for the bottom 90% has increased $59 since 1972. If that were an inch on a bar graph, the bar for the top 10% would be 141 feet high. The bar for the top 0.1% would be five miles high. Saying this is unsustainable is an understatement. 

Trump voters understand this, and have their vengeance: a fundamental rebalancing of power between China, the rest of the world, and the US, and an end to the era of US economic, military and political dominance. Perhaps predictably, there are few signs of repentance from the Democrats who helped set this up.

 

Miscellany

 Today's koan:

Who would you be if you had no memories?

 

A theatrical event to anticipate:

"Waiting for Godot, the musical"

Socialism from the Democrats...Eeek!

Written in response to a plea from Kentucky historian Warren Greer for Democrats to abandon non-centrist ideas.


(c) by Mark Dempsey

Dear Professor Greer,

I read your recent Courier-Journal column with interest. In it, you plead with Democrats to get more "centrist" in their appeals to the public, and abandon left-leaning ideas like [gasp!] socialism. In your account, socialism has failed throughout history, with its "centralized control [that] requires the suppression of individual freedom and dissent. Simply calling it democratic socialism doesn’t make it safer — it masks the coercive machinery that lies beneath."

But isn't one point of a modern state an apparatus to manage coercion, for example, catching and punishing crooks? Or are we to allow people to drive on the left side of our roads? The fantasy of an uncoercive state--say, one without taxes or punishment for crimes--would have to rise several levels before it reached "ridiculous."

You say that the "Soviet Union and Cuba offer clear examples [of the failures of socialism]: both promised justice and equity but delivered authoritarianism, censorship, and economic disaster. These outcomes weren’t incidental—they were baked into systems that centralized power under the guise of the collective good."

Note that Russian per-capita incarceration is a little more than half the US rate, which is roughly three times the world average. Socialist China incarcerates just under 22% of the US per-capita rate, while (socialist) Denmark incarcerates just under 13% of the US rate. Could these bits of "authoritarianism" have escaped your notice? And if capitalism is so beneficial and "freedom enhancing," why are so many people in jail?

And never mind "Declassified Biden-Era Domestic Terror Strategy Reveals Broad Surveillance, Tech Partnerships, and Global Speech Regulation Agenda"

You also ignore the Princeton study that says the US is a power-centralizing oligarchy, not a democracy. Just to clarify: The oligarchs who are centrally planning US public policy are not elected and are rewarded not for how they serve the public, but for how they line their own pockets. If Democrats can't acknowledge this and provide some remedies, they are beyond useless.

Meanwhile, neoliberal "centrist" capitalism has given the US the beggar-on-every-corner economy. Somehow, the non-beggar success of Scandinavian democratic socialism remains unmentioned, and certainly the sabotage attacks by "democratic" USA visited on Cuba merit no comment. 

Back here on planet Earth, professor, despite your unhappiness with socialism, some economies appear to do better when not guided solely by profit. Socialized medicine in Canada is inarguably cheaper and provides better health outcomes than the US variety of medical care. Compared to Canada's socialized medicine, US medical care produces shorter life expectancies, worse infant mortality, and, among other things, more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually. 

The joke goes like this: When the fire department puts out the fire at your house, that's socialism. When the insurance company denies your claim, that's capitalism.

In an odd coincidence, I've had political conversations with those shocked by the mere mention of democratic socialism in publicly-owned buildings. One such building was in the midst of a publicly-owned park to which we had all driven over publicly-owned roads. We all drank water from publicly-owned water districts, and our sewage was processed in a publicly-owned regional sewer plant. Several of us enjoyed public sector pensions and (socialist!) Social Security, never mind the (socialist!) single-payer healthcare for the elderly we call "Medicare."

The idea that something so ubiquitous as public ownership would be taboo, even shocking, is simply bizarre. Yet, that is the current state of play in the US. Anti-socialism rhetoric like your column, professor, has been so heavily marketed that many people simply can't conceive of something good coming from public ownership. 

During big emergencies--World War II is a good example--government takes over large swaths of the economy. In WWII government took over roughly 50% of the US economy. The supposedly unaffordable Green New Deal would only consume 5% of the current economy.

Incidentally, the neoliberal Democrats who advocate those "centrist" ideas laid a lot of the foundations of the public's disgust with the current economic system that rewards the plutocrats, but leaves the public at large in debt peonage. Here's a quote that puts it quite succinctly:

“Trump will not be defeated by educating voters.... Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge.....Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing." - Thomas Greene (Noteworthy): 

One cannot remedy these systemic problems without enterprises that include public benefit, not just personal profit, in the calculations that guide them. Professor, you may call what you're proposing "centrist," but it sounds like more of the flapdoodle Ronnie Reagan would endorse to me.

 

Amish Community to the Rescue!

 

🚨#BREAKING: A wild report from a firefighter in Tennessee confirms that an Amish community whose sawmill completely burned to the ground on the night of April 8th...

...had been COMPLETELY REBUILT AND WAS ALREADY FUNCTIONING on April 17th, just 8 days later

Read that again. pic.twitter.com/EeaSQCUK15

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) April 23, 2025

China (once again) Owns the US

(from a tweet)
Arnaud Bertrand

@RnaudBertrand

Responding to this previous tweet: WHITE HOUSE CONSIDERS SLASHING CHINA TARIFFS TO DE-ESCALATE TRADE WAR, SOURCES SAY -- WSJ

If this gets confirmed and Trump indeed folds, this will be seen as one of those seminal events that confirm, beyond all the propaganda, a fundamental rebalancing of power between China and the US, and an end to the era of US economic dominance. Factually speaking, the US launched an extraordinary attack on China's economy, as according to Trump and others around him the tariffs were largely about a "grand encirclement" plan of China (Bessent's characterization: https://bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-12/bessent-has-a-grand-encirclement-plan-for-china-bloomberg-new-economy…). 

But China didn't get intimidated and responded in kind, and 21 days after not a single country - not one - made a "deal" with the US against China, or even signaled their intention to do so. Quite the contrary, many countries publicly stated their intention to get closer to China as a result and to derisk from the US. 

Furthermore, as we all know, the US lost trillions of dollars in its stock market, saw the cost of its debt soar like rarely before and the value of its currency crash. And I'm not even speaking about the thousands and thousands of companies and individuals in the US complaining about how the tariffs are already affecting them negatively. 

The impact on China's side was much less pronounced: the CSI 300 Index is virtually unchanged, and so is the cost of China's debt, standing at 1.67% for their 10Y bonds vs 4.4% for US 10Y bonds. Due to the tariffs, the IMF just predicted a reduction of only 0.5% in China's GDP growth (down to 4%) vs a loss of 0.9% for the US's GDP (down to 1.8%), meaning that China would keep growing at more than twice the rate of the U.S. despite the tariffs, and would be much less affected by them than the U.S. 

In short, when Trump undoubtedly attempted to showcase America's might, he's only achieved a brilliant demonstration of its impotence and, by contrast, highlighted China's diplomatic and economic adeptness. Basically, we're in a new world where America simply cannot bully its way around anymore: when they do so, they end up hurting themselves first and foremost.

...

Meanwhile, from Molson Hart's tweet:

The White House has put itself and the country in a bad situation but doesn’t realize it yet. 

Around April 10th China to USA trade shut down. 

It takes ~30 days for containers to go from China to LA. 

45 to Houston by sea, 45 to Chicago by train. 55 to New York by sea. 

That means that there are no economic effects of what was done on April 10th until about May 10th. 

Around that time (it’s already started to happen) trucking work is going to dry up. Warehouses will start doing layoffs because no labor is needed to unload containers and some products will be out of stock, reducing the need for shipping labor. 

All this will start in the Los Angeles area. 

After about 2 weeks, it’ll start hitting Chicago and Houston. 

Let’s say the White House, after 3 weeks, changes its mind, on May 31st. “This isn’t working out like we thought it would. Tariffs back to 0.” 

Let’s say China says “bygones be bygones, we’ll go back to how things were”. Let’s say every factory in China that got screwed by their orders being cancelled says the same thing “no problem, we’ll make and ship”. 

The problem is, even under the most favorable conditions of China and the factories restarting economic ties as though nothing happened, it will be at least another 30 days before economic activity is revived. 

And that’s just in LA. 

In Chicago/Houston, you’ll need to wait another 45 days. 

New York, at that point, will still be getting containers from before April 10th, they will then have 50 days (May 31 minus April 10) of zero economic activity at the ports, in trucking of Chinese goods, in warehousing. 

The whole situation is a bit like lockdowns. Once you shut down, it takes a long time to get economic activity back to where it was, if you ever can. 

And again, this assumes, that China and its factories, which make things you can’t buy elsewhere, will start right back up again as though nothing happened, which is unlikely. 

It’s almost like we’re speeding towards a brick wall but the driver of the car doesn’t see it yet. 

By the time he does, it’ll be too late to hit the brakes.

Today's Bee Letter: Why is housing so expensive?

4/22/25, p. B10 "This California law made housing too expensive. Here is how to change it" - The Bee says regulations and red tape are what make housing expensive. My reply:


Your editorial cites CEQA as what makes housing expensive in California, but it's completely misguided. What makes housing more expensive is prop 13, the limit on real estate taxes. It not only makes real estate a safe haven to park wealth, it encourages land speculation--the speculators can cheaply hold land off the market until it reaches peak price--making property ever more expensive. Houses will typically rise to the value banks will lend, and since they lend multiples of available discretionary income, the lower prop 13 tax also encourages higher prices since it makes more income available for mortgage payments.


So you are straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel. The influence of CEQA pales to insignificance compared to Prop 13.

Bernie Sanders and AOC in Folsom

For a more detailed description at a "Fighting Oligarchy" rally, see this coverage of the one in Los Angeles. The secondary speakers were Northern California organizers and union representatives, no City Council or County Supervisors attended the Folsom rally.

Here's a recording of the full Folsom rally:

 

Overhead was a small plane towing a "Folsom is Trump Country" banner. AOC's response: "You know, I heard that someone started flying a plane with a banner that said 'Folsom is Trump Country," she said, with the audience voicing disapproval. "It sure don't look like it today."

When they held such a rally in four-times-more-populous Los Angeles, they got a crowd roughly equal to the one in much-smaller Folsom. 

Interesting note: Today's Sacramento Bee does not mention this event. The willingness of the press to entirely ignore popular movements like this is truly stunning. 

Update: The Bee did cover the event...on the front page two days after it occurred. It mentioned 20,000 RSVP'ed, but 30,000 showed up (then revised that figure downward in another story). At one point during the event, the line to get in was three miles long.

The Bee reporter at the rally interviewed 65-year-old Carolyn Watkinson, who said, "The Republicans wouldn't come out and face their own constituents. So if they're leaving a vacuum, I'm glad the Democrats are trying to fill that."

News flash, Sacramento Bee: Bernie is an independent, not a Democrat.

The reporter also interviewed a 45-year-old Folsom resident ("Matthew," who declined to give a last name), who was given more column inches than Ms. Watkinson. Note that the interview of the Bernie supporter was elderly, despite lots of young attendees, and such interviews were not 30,000 times more numerous than interviews with the Trump supporters. Equal time! The media must be fair!

The Bee also took pains to publish another story observing that Folsom was not that favorable to Republican presidential candidates. It gave Kevin Kiley an extended chance to answer charges made by Sanders and AOC. Sanders was not allowed a rebuttal.

Kiley's point: Socialism has been tried in San Francisco and failed (why it couldn't have been sabotaged!) so it must never work. Please ignore the beggar-on-every-corner economy deregulated capitalism has given us!

For those of you wondering whether public ownership (Socialism) works, remember publicly-owned SMUD provides electricity for about 35% cheaper than privately-owned PG&E, and its executives, unlike PG&E's, are not consulting with criminal attorneys because they might be liable for negligent homicide because they skimped on maintenance. But hey, profit excuses all bad behavior, so everything's OK!

Update 2: The Sacramento News & Review provided better coverage (here). One encouraging note from their story: "One Trump supporter said he walked up to the rally “and I didn’t see one American flag!” Nevertheless, a Bernie supporter passing by thanked him for increasing the attendance numbers."

Just FYI, the stage for the speakers had American and California State flags.

* * * * * * *  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In India, in 2020, a quarter billion people took to the streets to protest the Modi agricultural policies. The Western media ignored it too. 

 

Above are the 2020 protests in Paris where striking firefighters and police fought.  Again, not covered by American media.

Here's a protest of millions in Chile so spontaneous they didn't have time to make signs:

 

The Chilean protests objected to government austerity.

And here is the landscape of recent protests in America

...and austerity (at the root of most such protests) has consequences:

The austerity line of talk is this: We must conserve money when it comes to the needs of poor people, but billionaires, Wall Street and the Dept. of Defense can have unlimited money.

Why Trump & Musk Ignore The Largest Money Laundering Scheme In Human History

 via scheerpost.com

By Lee Camp / Substack

President Trump and Elon Musk will tell you they’re saving money for the US government and thereby the US taxpayer. The DOGE team have claimed that they have already cut out $65 billion of waste and fraud – equaling savings for the American people. Incredible! (I’m going to invest my cut of that money in an up-and-coming fad called “fidget spinners”.)

Oh, I forgot to mention – Everything Musk has said is utterly false. “…some of the biggest errors in savings [announced by DOGE] are, as CBS first reported, a USAID contract for $650 million that was listed three times, as The Intercept first reported, a Social Security contract listed as $232 million, instead of $560,000, and an ICE contract that DOGE listed as $8 billion, when, in reality, it was $8 million.” (But confusing millions and billions is an easy mistake to make — Especially by the agency ostensibly tasked with making our government run better.)

Yet we can’t scoff at all the money Elon Musk has grabbed for you and me. “If you did distribute …that $2 billion or so in savings across taxpayers in America, which is what Elon Musk has said he would like to do, it would basically come to $2.42 per person…”

BOOM! TWO DOLLARS! And who says having a white supremacist bobblehead with a breeding fetish as de facto ruler of the country doesn’t have benefits?

The truth is Elon Musk and Donald Trump don’t care about saving money any more than the Real Housewives of New Jersey care about Doctors without Borders. What Elon and Donny are up to is just a charade to shred the social safety net, public education, and a bunch of other things. If they – or anyone – actually wanted to save money for the US taxpayer, there is one place they would turn — The US military, which has a nearly $1 Trillion a year budget and accounts for around 50% of all discretionary spending. And Trump recently announced the Pentagon budget would exceed $1 Trillion soon. 

What I’m trying to say is – there’s no sign he’s heavily cutting the Pentagon budget. “The Senate Budget Committee’s resolution calls for a $150 billion increase in defense spending…” over the next decade while the House calls for $100 Billion more.

But maybe that trillion dollars a year is going to good use. For example according to the Intercept, “Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.”

Okay, so they have some golf courses. Big whoop. I see nothing wrong with cutting school lunches for poor children while the Pentagon has three or so golf courses. 

“The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement.”

ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE GOLF COURSES?! HOLY MOTHER OF GEORGE FOREMAN! But not to fear, DOGE is not avoiding all military cuts. They’ve been cutting some military personnel. There are “…calls from [DOGE] to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — [while] the U.S military’s golf habit is not on the chopping block.” Yes, PTSD now stands for “Good Luck Getting Medical Treatment!” (I know it has completely different letters, but the younger soldiers don’t know that because we’ve gutted our public schools.)

I can’t believe Trump puts up with this garbage from the military. Why wouldn’t Trump say, “Hey dickhead, no more taxpayer money for golf!” 

Oh, right — “President Donald Trump reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term.” Dude loves spending taxpayer money to stand on a hill and swing at a little tiny ball.

But the truth is, I’m burying the lead. The main story here has been for years the $21 Trillion of unaccounted-for financial adjustments at the Pentagon and Housing and Urban Development. 

As Forbes reported a few years ago, “[Economist] Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development,  conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998.  While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.”

That includes $6.5 Trillion in one year alone. And that number is much higher today than it was in 2015. There is more than enough in the Pentagon to do anything the American people want. 

But let’s take a quick moment to try to understand a trillion dollars. I’ll quote some two-bit hack named Lee Camp who wrote an article about this awhile back: “Picture a stack of money. Now imagine that that stack of dollars is all $1,000 bills. Each bill says ‘$1,000’ on it. How high do you imagine that stack of dollars would be if it were $1 trillion? …It would be 63 miles high.” 

Sixty-three fucking miles high. That’s higher than Snoop Dogg riding on Alex Honnold’s back. And to get to 21 trillion, we’re talking a stack 1,323 MILES high. 

This is the single greatest money-laundering scheme ever created and yet it’s a smaller story than “How a TikTok Cook Spends Her Sundays”. (That was on the front page of the New York Times this week.) Trillions of dollars lost at the Pentagon? Not important. 

In one of the only in-depth pieces written on the $21 trillion, Dave Lindorff reported in the Nation magazine: “For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher. … DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions … according to government records and interviews with current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.”

When this story started gaining traction in 2018, some garbage mainstream media outlets tried to run coverage by saying it’s not fraud, it’s just accounting errors. Those poor Pentagon generals were just making loads of accounting mistakes. …Um, NO. This is not an accident. One mistake – fine. Trillions of mistakes — that’s a plan. It’s like saying you had sex with 21,000 wild donkeys because you accidentally tripped and fell. (Two or three donkeys, sure. But you over a dozen – you have some explainin’ to do.)

Even the Forbes article on the $21 trillion said, “Let’s recall that this is not simply a matter of boring accounting. Trillions in unaccounted outlays, if that’s what’s involved here, is trillions of our tax dollars being spent without our knowledge. If that’s the case, we’re talking about the biggest government financial deception in the history of the country.”

You know how else you can tell when a massive fraud is intentional? When there’s a cover-up. 

“So is there a cover-up?”

“I’m glad you asked, Lee!” 

“Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion (in a single year) had been ‘removed,’ the inspector general’s office reported.”

And much like the Lord of Rings prequels, sequels, requels, and Nyquills, it only gets even worse. The Pentagon has failed all 7 of their audits. And when they fail these massive audits, sometimes they tell the public something useful. For example, at the last one the Pentagon admitted they can’t account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets. They can’t account for 63% of their shit?? I have a drunk uncle like that but he runs an adult toy store. (Losing track of a box of nipple clamps is a little different than losing Blackhawk helicopters.)

And I know what you smarties out there are thinking right now. “Lee, the Pentagon is not missing real things. These are unaccounted-for financial adjustments. It’s not a lost helicopter or things in a warehouse.” Um, yes it is. In fact, sometimes it’s the whole warehouse. [In 2019] “the Navy located a warehouse that was mysteriously absent from its property records. Inside the warehouse, the Navy found $126 million worth of spare parts for P-8 Poseidon, the P-3 Orion, and the F-14 Tomcat — the latter of which the Navy retired in 2006 (over a decade previous).”

And other times the military just loses literal pallets of money. During the Iraq War they sent $12 billion of shrink-wrapped cash to Iraq and never saw it again. (I wonder if they tried putting lost money posters on lamp posts? “Have you seen this bundle of cash? Answers to the name Shnookims. Please bring it back to us.”)

Why does the mainstream media almost never cover this unbelievable fraud committed by the Pentagon? Well, maybe it’s because they have smaller balls than the game of golf. They’re afraid to reveal the truth. I wrote one of the most viral articles about it and not long after that I became one of the most suppressed and censored comedians in America.

After doing his excellent investigation for the Nation magazine, journalist Dave Lindorff found himself pulled aside for special screening at Heathrow airport. This happened more than once. “When he got home, Lindorff called the Department of Homeland Security to speak with a press representative, who said that it sounded like he had been put on one of three or four federal terrorist watch lists.”

So, investigate Pentagon fraud and waste and you might be declared a terrorist by the US government. 

But don’t worry, Elon Musk says cutting social security for your 90 year-old grandma will make us all happier by saving us loads of money. And that way the Pentagon gets to keep their 145 golf courses (112 of which they can actually account for). 

---

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

---

Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.

Donate Online

Send a Check

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

Lee Camp

Lee Camp is a comedian, author, host, producer, and journalist. You can currently watch Lee’s livestream four days a week on Rumble. Lee was formerly the head writer and host of the national TV show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp on RT America. He’s a former contributor to The Onion, former staff humor writer for the Huffington Post, and his web series “Moment of Clarity” has been viewed by millions. He’s toured the country and the world with his fierce brand of standup comedy, and George Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, said Lee is one of the few comics keeping her father’s torch lit. Bill Hicks’ brother, Steve, said Lee is one of only a handful with Bill’s “message and passion.”

Author Site

A couple of TED talks worth a look: How to Spot a Liar, and How Language Shapes the Way We Think

 

How to Spot a Liar

On any given day we're lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lies can be subtle and counter-intuitive. Pamela Meyer, author of "Liespotting," shows the manners and "hotspots" used by those trained to recognize deception -- and she argues honesty is a value worth preserving. (Contains mature content)

How Language Shapes the Way We Think

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."

 

America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back

by Molson Hart

Molson Hart is the founder and president of Viahart, an educational toy company. For more insights like these, subscribe to his newsletter or follow him on X.

On April 2nd, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (“tariffs”), ranging from 10% to 49%. The stated goal is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to “make America wealthy again.”

These tariffs will not work. In fact, they may even do the opposite, fail to bring manufacturing back and make America poorer in the process.

This article gives the 14 reasons why this is the case, how the United States could bring manufacturing back if it were serious about doing so, and what will ultimately happen with this wrongheaded policy

I’ve been in the manufacturing industry for 15 years. I’ve manufactured in the USA and in China. I worked in a factory in China. I speak and read Chinese. I’ve purchased millions of dollars worth of goods from the US and China, but also Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Cambodia. I’ve also visited many factories in Mexico and consider myself a student of how countries rise and fall.

In other words, unlike many who have voiced an opinion on this topic, I know what I am talking about. And that’s why I felt compelled to write this article. I had to do it. I’m a first generation American and I love my country and it pains me to see it hurtling at high speed towards an economic brick wall. This article is an attempt to hit the brakes.

The 14 reasons why these tariffs will not bring manufacturing back

1. They’re not high enough
   
   A tariff is a tax on an imported product. For example, when Apple imports an iPhone that was made in China, it declares to the United States government what it paid to make that product overseas. Let’s say it’s $100. When there is a 54% tariff, Apple pays $100 to the manufacturer in China and $54 to the US government when importing. In this simplified example, an iPhone used to cost Apple $100, but it now costs $154. For every dollar Apple spends, Apple needs to make profit. So Apple sells iPhones to stores for double what it pays for them. And stores sell iPhones to consumers like you and me for double what it pays for them, as well.
   
   Before the tariffs, prices looked like this:
   Apple bought iPhones it designed for $100
   Apple sold iPhones for $200 to stores
   Stores sold iPhones to you and me for $400
   
   After the tariffs, prices look like this:
   Apple bought iPhones for $154 ($100 + $54 in import taxes)
   Apple sells those iPhones for $308 (double what it paid)
   Stores sell those iPhones to you and me for $616 (double what they paid)
   
   Now that you know what a tariff is, let me tell to you why they aren’t high enough to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
   
   In short, manufacturing in the United States is so expensive and our supply chain (we’ll explain that next) is so bad that making that iPhone in the United States without that 54% tariff, would still cost more than in China with 54% tariff. Since it still costs less to make the iPhone in China, both Apple and consumers would prefer it be made there, so it will, and not in the USA.
2. America’s industrial supply chain for many products is weak
   
   Think of a supply chain as a company’s ability to get the components it needs to build a finished product. Suppose you wanted to build and sell wooden furniture. You’re going to need wood, nails, glue, etc. Otherwise you can’t do it. If you want to build an iPhone you need to procure a glass screen, shaped metal, and numerous internal electronic components.
   
   Now you might be thinking, “What do you mean America has a weak supply chain? I’ve built furniture. I’ve assembled a computer. I can get everything I want at Home Depot and at Amazon.”
   
   That’s because America has an amazing consumer supply chain, one of the best, if not the best in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial supply chain.
   
   When you’re operating a furniture factory, you need an industrial quantity of wood, more wood than any Home Depot near you has in store. And you need it fast and cheap. It turns out that the United States has a good supply chain for wood, which is why, despite higher wages, we export chopsticks to China. We have abundant cheap wood in the forests of the Northern United States. But if you decided to move that chopstick factory to desert Saudi Arabia, you would not succeed, because their supply chain for wood is poor; there simply aren’t any trees for 1,000s of miles.
   
   When it comes to the iPhone, all the factories which make the needed components are in Asia, which is one reason why, even with a 54% tariff, it’s cheaper to assemble that iPhone in China than in the United States. It’s cheaper and faster to get those components from nearby factories in Asia than it is to get them from the US, which, because said factories no longer exist here, has to buy these components from Asia anyways.
   
   Supply chains sound complicated, but aren’t. If you can’t get the components you need at a reasonable price and timeline to build a finished product, it doesn’t matter what the tariffs are, you have to import it, because you can’t build it locally.
3. We don’t know how to make it
   
   Apple knows how to build an iPhone, but may not know how to make the individual components. It may seem trivial to make that glass that separates your finger from the electronic engineering that powers your ability to access the internet, but it’s difficult.
   
   The world buys semiconductors from Taiwan, not just because its relatively [inexpensive] (but more expensive than China) labor and excellent supply chain, but because they know how to make the best semiconductors in the world. Even with infinite money, we cannot duplicate that, because we lack the knowhow.
   
   A 54% tariff does not solve that problem. We still need to buy semiconductors from Taiwan, which is perhaps why the administration put in an exception for semiconductors, because we need them and because we can’t make them without their help.
   
   This is a problem which applies to more than just semiconductors. We have forgotten how to make products people wrongly consider to be basic, too.
   
   My company makes educational toys from plastic called Brain Flakes. To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as soon as one of those molds broke, we’d be in trouble, because there are almost no moldmakers left in the United States. The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired. In the event of a problem, we’d have to order a new mold from China or send ours back, shutting down production for months.
   
   People trivialize the complexity and difficulty of manufacturing when it’s really hard. And if we don’t know how to make something, it doesn’t matter what the tariff is. It won’t get made in America.
4. The effective cost of labor in the United States is higher than it looks
   
   Most people think that the reason why we make products in China instead of the United States is cheaper labor. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Frankly, the whole story is hard to read. People are not machines; they are not numbers on a spreadsheet or inputs into a manufacturing cost formula. I respect everyone who works hard and the people I have worked with over the years, and I want Americans to live better, happier lives.
   
   Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
   
   In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
   
   Chinese workers [are] much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30-minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
   
   And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
   
   Chinese workers work longer hours more happily, and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
   
   Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes. It’s fixable, but the American workforce needs great improvement in order to compete with the world’s, even with tariffs.
   
   So yes, Chinese wages are lower, but there [are] many countries with wages lower than China’s. It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.
5. We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture
   
   The inputs to manufacturing are not just materials, labor, and knowhow. You need infrastructure like electricity and good roads for transportation, too.
   
   Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat. In China, over the same time period, it has increased 400%. China generates over twice as much electricity person today as the United States. Why?
   
   Manufacturing.
   
   To run the machines which make the products we use, you need electricity, a lot of it. We already have electricity instability in this country. Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.
   
   And it would put huge stress on our roads and create lots more dangerous traffic. When we import finished goods from foreign countries, a truck delivers them from the port or the airport to distribution centers, stores, and where we live and work.
   
   When you start manufacturing, every single component, from factory to factory, needs to be moved, increasing the number of trucks on the road many times.
   
   Paving more roads, modernizing our seaports, improving our airports, speeding up our train terminals, and building power plants in the costliest nation in the world to build is a huge undertaking that people are not appreciating when they say, “Well, we’ll just make it in America.”
6. Made in America will take time
   
   We placed a $50,000 order with our supplier overseas before the election in November 2024. At the time of ordering, there were no import taxes on the goods. By the time it arrived, a 20% tariff had been applied, and we had a surprise bill for $10,000. It can easily take 180 days for many products to go from order to on your doorstep, and this tariff policy seems not to understand that.
   
   It takes at least, in the most favorable of jurisdictions, two years (if you can get the permits) to build a factory in the United States. I know because I’ve done it. From there, it can take six months to a year for it to become efficient. It can take months for products to come off the assembly lines. All this ignores all the infrastructure that will need to be built (new roads, new power plants, etc.) to service the new factory.
   
   By the time “made in America” has begun, we will be electing a new president.
7. Uncertainty and complexity around the tariffs
   
   To start manufacturing in the United States, a company needs to make a large investment. They will need to buy new machinery and if no existing building is suitable, they will need to construct a new building. These things cost money, a lot, in fact. And significantly more in the USA than they do in other countries. In exchange for this risk, there must be some reward. If that reward is uncertain, no one will do it.
   
   Within the past month, the president put a 25% tariff on Mexico, and then got rid of it, only to apply it again, and then get rid of it a second time. Then, last week, he was expected to apply new tariffs to Mexico, but didn’t.
   
   If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last. How do I know? I built a factory in Austin, Texas, in an industrial area. I cut its rent 40% two weeks ago and I can’t get a lick of interest from industrial renters.
   
   The tariffs have frozen business activity because no one wants to take a big risk dependent on a policy that may change next week.
   
   Even further, the tariffs are confusing, poorly communicated, and complex. Today, if you want to import something from China, you need to add the original import duty, plus a 20% “fentanyl tariff,” plus a 34% “reciprocal tariff,” and an additional 25% “Venezuelan oil” tariff, should it be determined that China is buying Venezuelan oil. The problem is there is no list of countries which are importing Venezuelan oil provided by the White House, so you don’t know if you do or don’t need to add that 25% and you also don’t know when any of these tariffs will go into effect because of unclear language.
   
   As such, you can’t calculate your costs, either with certainty or accuracy. Therefore, not only do you not build a factory in the United States, you cease all business activity, the type of thing that can cause a recession, if not worse.
   
   For the past month, as someone who runs a business in this industry, I have spent a huge portion of my time just trying to keep up with the constant changes, instead of running my business.
8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing
   
   Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive healthcare.
   
   They don’t want to be sewing shirts.
   
   The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is.
   
   When I first went to China as a naive 24-year-old, I told my supplier I was going to “work a day in his factory!” I lasted four hours. It was freezing cold, middle of winter, I had to crouch on a small stool, hunched over, assembling little parts with my fingers at 1/4 the speed of the women next to me. My back hurt. My fingers hurt. It was horrible. That’s a lot of manufacturing.
   
   And enjoy the blackouts, the dangerous trucks on the road, the additional pollution, etc. Be careful what you wish for, America. Doing office work and selling ideas and assets is a lot easier than making actual things.
9. The labor does not exist to make good products
   
   There are over a billion people in China making stuff. As of right now there are 12 million people looking for work in the United States (4% unemployment). Ignoring for a moment the comparative inefficiency of labor and the billions of people making products outside of China, where are the people that are going to do these jobs? Do you simply say “make America great again” three times, and they will appear with the skills needed to do the work?
   
   And where are the managers to manage these people? One of the reasons why manufacturing has declined in the United States is a brain drain towards sectors that make more money. Are people who make money on the stock market, in real estate, in venture capital, and in startups going to start sewing shirts? It’s completely and totally unrealistic to assume that people will move from superficially high productivity sectors driven by US Dollar strength to products that are low on the value chain.
   
   The United States is trying to bring back the jobs that China doesn’t even want. They have policies to reduce low-value manufacturing, yet we are applying tariffs to bring it back. It’s incomprehensible.
10. Automation will not save us
    
    Most people think that the reason why American manufacturing is not competitive is labor costs. Most people think this can be solved by automation.
    
    They’re wrong.
    
    First, China, on a yearly basis installs 7x as many industrial robots as we do in the United States. Second, Chinese robots are cheaper. Third, most of today’s manufacturing done by people cannot be automated. If it could, it would have already been done so, by China, which, again, has increasingly high labor costs relative to the rest of the world.
    
    The robots you see on social media doing backflips are, today, mostly for show and unreliable off camera. They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine which is specialized in the task can do it even better. For example, instead of having a humanoid robot doing a repetitive task, such as carrying a boxes from one station to another, you can simply set up a cheaper, faster conveyor belt.
    
    Said another way, the printer in your office is cheaper and more efficient than both a human and a humanoid robot with a pen, hand-drawing each letter.
    
    It’s unlikely that American ingenuity will be able to counter the flood of Chinese industrial robots which is coming. The first commercial electrical vehicle was designed and built in the United States, but today China is dominating electric vehicle manufacturing across the world. Industrial robots will likely be the same story.
11. Robots and overseas factory workers don’t file lawsuits, but Americans do
    
    I probably should not have written this article. Not only will I be attacked for being unpatriotic, but what I have written here makes me susceptible to employment lawsuits. For the record, I don’t use a person’s origin to determine whether or not they will do good work. I just look at the person and what they’re capable of. Doing otherwise is bad business because there are talented people everywhere.
    
    America has an extremely litigious business environment, both in terms of regulation and employment lawsuits. Excessive regulation and an inefficient court system will stifle those with the courage to make in this country.
12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated
    
    Imagine two companies which import goods into the United States. One is based in China, while the other is based in the United States. They both lie about the value of their goods so that they have to pay less tariffs.
    
    What happens to the China company? Perhaps they lose a shipment when it’s seized by the US government for cheating, but they won’t pay additional fines because they’re in China, where they’re impervious to the US legal system.
    
    What happens to the USA company? Owners go to prison.
    
    Who do you think is going to cheat more on tariffs, the China or the US company?
    
    Exactly.
    
    So, in other words, paradoxically, the policies which are designed to help Americans will hurt them more than the competition these policies are designed to punish.
13. The tariff policies are structured in the wrong way
    
    Why didn’t the jobs come back in 2018 when we initiated our last trade war? We applied tariffs. Why didn’t it work?
    
    Instead of making America great, we made Vietnam great.
    
    When the United States applied tariffs to China, it shifted huge amounts of manufacturing to Vietnam, which did not have tariffs applied to it. Vietnam, which has a labor force that is a lot more like China’s than the United States’, was able to use its proximity to China for its supply chain and over the past seven or so years, slowly developed its own. With Vietnamese wages even lower than Chinese wages, instead of the jobs coming to the United States, they just went to Vietnam instead.
    
    We’re about to make the same mistake again, in a different way.
    
    Let’s go back to that last example, the China-based and the US-based companies which were importing goods into the United States. That US-based importer could’ve been a manufacturer. Instead of finished iPhones, perhaps they were importing the glass screens because those could not be found in the USA for final assembly.
    
    Our government applied tariffs to finished goods and components equally.
    
    I’ll say that again. They applied the same tax to the components that you need to make things in America that they did to finished goods that were made outside of America.
    
    Manufacturing works on a lag. To make and sell in America, first you must get the raw materials and components. These tariffs will bankrupt manufacturers before it multiplies them because they need to pay tariffs on the import components that they assemble into finished products.
    
    And it gets worse.
    
    They put tariffs on machines. So if you want to start a factory in the United States, all the machinery you need which is not made here is now significantly more expensive. You may have heard that there is a chronic shortage of transformers needed for power transmission in the United States. Tariffed that too.
    
    It gets even worse.
    
    There is no duty drawback for exporting. In the past, even in the United States, if you imported something and then exported it, the tariff you paid on the import would be refunded to you. They got rid of that so we’re not even incentivizing exports to the countries that we are trying to achieve trade parity with.
    
    Tariffs are applied to the costs of the goods. The way we’ve structured these tariffs, factories in China which import into the United States will pay lower tariffs than American importers, because the Chinese factory will be able to declare the value of the goods at their cost, while the American importer will pay the cost the factory charges them, which is of course higher than the factory’s cost.
    
    Worse still.
    
    With a few exceptions like steel and semiconductors, the tariffs were applied to all products, ranging from things that we will never realistically make, like our high labor Tigerhart stuffed animals, to things that don’t even grow in the continental USA, like coffee.
    
    Call me crazy, but if we’re going to make products in America, we could use some really cheap coffee, but no, they tariffed it! Our educational engineering toy Brain Flakes also got tariffed. How is the next generation supposed to build a manufacturing powerhouse if it cannot afford products that will develop its engineering ability? It’s like our goal was to make education and raising children more expensive.
    
    Not only did we put tariffs on the things that would help us make this transformation, we didn’t put higher tariffs on things that hurt us, like processed food, which makes us tired and fat, or fentanyl precursors, which kill us.
    
    The stated goal of many of our tariffs was to stop the import of fentanyl. Two milligrams of fentanyl will kill an adult. A grain of rice is 65 milligrams. How do you stop that stuff from coming in? It’s basically microscopic.
    
    Maybe we could do what every other country has done and focus on the demand instead of the supply, ideally starting with the fentanyl den near my house which keeps my children indoors or in our backyard instead of playing in the neighborhood.
    
    It’s frustrating to see our great country take on an unrealistic goal like transforming our economy when so many basic problems should be fixed first.
14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball
    
    America is the greatest economic power of all time. We’ve got the most talented people in the world, and we have a multi-century legacy of achieving what so many other countries could not.
    
    Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, perhaps even the greatest athlete of all time.
    
    He played baseball in his youth. What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. Two years later, he was back to playing basketball.
    
    And that’s exactly what’s going to happen to us.

My prediction for what will happen with the tariffs

This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s just an opening negotiating position. Maybe it’s designed to crash the economy, lower interest rates, and then refinance the debt. I don’t know.

But if you take it at face value, there is no way that this policy will bring manufacturing back to the United States and “make America wealthy again.” Again, if anything, it’ll do the opposite: it’ll make us much poorer.

Many are saying that this tariff policy is the “end of globalization.” I don’t think so.

Unless this policy is quickly changed, this is the end of America’s participation in globalization. If we had enacted these policies in 2017 or 2018, they stood a much stronger chance of being successful. That was before COVID. China was much weaker economically and militarily then. They’ve been preparing eight years for this moment, and they are ready.

Globalization will continue without us if these policies continue unchanged.

China trades much less with the United States as a percent of its total exports today than it did eight years ago and, as such, is much less susceptible to punishing tariffs from the United States today than it was back then.

Chinese-made cars, particularly electric vehicles, are taking the world by storm, without the United States. Go to Mexico to Thailand to Germany and you will see Chinese-made electric vehicles on the streets. And they’re good, sometimes even better than US-made cars, and not just on a per-dollar basis, but simply better quality.

That is what is going to happen to the United States. Globalization will continue without us if these policies continue unchanged.

That said, I think the tariffs will be changed. There’s no way we continue to place a 46% tariff on Vietnam when eight years ago we nudged American companies to put all their production there. Most likely, this policy will continue another round of the same type of investment; rather than replacing made in China with made in the USA, we’ll replace it with made in Vietnam, Mexico, etc.

Finally, in the process of doing this, regardless of whether or not we reverse the policies, we will have a recession. There isn’t time to build US factories, nor is it realistic or likely to occur, and American importers don’t have the money to pay for the goods they import.

People are predicting inflation in the cost of goods, but we can just as easily have deflation from economic turmoil.

The policy is a disaster. How could it be done better? And what’s the point of this anyways?

The three reasons why we want to actually bring manufacturing back

1. It makes our country stronger. If a foreign country can cut off your supply of essentials, such as food, semiconductors, or antibiotics, you’re beholden to that country. The United States must have large flexible capacity in these areas.
2. It makes it easier to innovate. When the factory floor is down the hall, instead of 30 hours of travel away, it’s easier to make improvements and invent. We need to have manufacturing of high-value goods, like drones, robots, and military equipment that are necessary for our economic future and safety. It will be difficult for us to apply artificial intelligence to manufacturing if we’re not doing it here.
3. People can simplistically be divided into three buckets: those of verbal intelligence, those of mathematical intelligence, and those of spatial intelligence. Without a vibrant manufacturing industry, those with the latter type of intelligence cannot fulfill their potential. This is one reason why so many men drop out, smoke weed, and play video games; they aren’t built for office jobs and would excel at manufacturing, but those jobs either don’t exist or pay poorly.

How to actually bring manufacturing back

Every country that has gone on a brilliant run of manufacturing first established the right conditions and then proceeded slowly.

We’re doing the opposite right now, proceeding fast with the wrong conditions.

First, the United States must fix basic problems which reduce the effectiveness of our labor. For example, everyone needs to be able to graduate with the ability to do basic mathematics. American healthcare is way too expensive, and it needs to be fixed if the United States wants to be competitive with global labor. I’m not saying healthcare should be socialized or switched to a completely private system, but whatever we’re doing now clearly is not working, and it needs to be fixed.

We need to make Americans healthy again. Many people are too obese to work. Crime and drugs. It needs to stop.

And to sew, we must first repair the social fabric.

From COVID lockdowns to the millions of people who streamed over our border, efforts must be made to repair society. Manufacturing and economic transformations are hard, particularly the way in which we’re doing it. Patriotism and unity are required to tolerate hardship, and we seem to be at all-time lows for those right now.

Let’s focus on America’s strengths in high-end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation instead of applying tariffs to all countries and products blindly. We should be taxing automated drones for agriculture at 300% to encourage their manufacture here, instead of applying the same blanket tariff of 54% to that that we apply to t-shirts.

We can level the playing field without causing massive harm to our economy…

The changes in the policies needed are obvious. Tax finished products higher than components. Let exporters refund their import duties. Enforce the tariffs against foreign companies more strenuously than we do against US importers.

If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

We can level the playing field without causing massive harm to our economy by adopting policies like these which cause foreign companies to pay the taxes domestic ones pay.

And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of saying that products will be tariffed at 100% tomorrow, say they’ll be 25% next year, 50% after that, 75% after that, and 100% in year four. And then make it a law instead of a presidential decree so that there is certainty so people feel comfortable taking the risks necessary to make in America.

Sadly, a lot of the knowhow to make products is outside of this country. Grant manufacturing visas, not for labor, but for knowhow. Make it easy for foreign countries to teach us how they do what they do best.

Conclusion and final thoughts

I care about this country and the people in it. I hope we change our mind on this policy before it’s too late. Because if we don’t, it might break the country. And, really, this country needs to be fixed.

This article was reprinted with the permission of Molson Hart. It was originally published on his website.

Guillotine Alert: US wealth inequality is greater than pre-revolutionary France

 

U.S. has worse wealth distribution than pre-revolutionary France did. pic.twitter.com/Cvd9kfqNHD

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) April 8, 2025

From our friends south of the border

 

Wow wow. Mexico! From the President 1/2

🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽

🛑 BROTHERS AND SISTERS, LET US NOT BE MISTAKEN: THE ENEMY IS THE SAME

TO THE PEOPLE OF OUR INDOAMERICA
From: Claudia Sheinbaum, President of Mexico:

Why does imperialism want to see us divided?*
Because it knows that…

— Dr. Renee Levant (@ReneeLevant) April 6, 2025

Recommended: expand the tweet to see the entire communication.

 Just a reminder: between 1798 and 1994, the US is responsible for 41 changes of government south of its borders. This is not a new thing. The "pink revolution" among central and south americans, however, is waking up to who the enemy really is.

Incarceration in China vs. US

 

Interesting comparison between China and the USA. China's incarceration rate is nearly 80% lower than in the US, and 32% lower than the world average. pic.twitter.com/VyzBp41HOX

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) April 4, 2025

Today's best Trump comment + The best Cory Booker debunk

As Trump doubles down on tariffs, Matt Stoller wins with "You can’t rebuild through arson." The rest of his commentary is worth a read, too. Excerpt:

"More broadly, it takes years to reorient supply chains and rebuild factories, the only thing you can do in a few days is cut all cash going out the door and try to hunker down. So I suspect that’s what’s happening. For instance, Howmet Aerospace, a major supplier to Boeing and Airbus, declared it may halt shipments based on the tariffs. To offer a metaphor, it’s like trying to get someone off heroin by promising them that withdrawal will be fun, and then immediately putting them to work in the hot sun without water. It’s not that getting someone off heroin is a bad thing, but that approach may end up killing them."

 As for Cory Booker's 25 hour "filibuster" -- it wasn't a filibuster, there was no pending legislation, it was just showboating. See this critique ("The Longest Speech Says the Least: Cory Booker's Fake Filibuster ") for the details about how hollow it was. Excerpt:

"Booker’s 24-hour floor speech was not about halting harm. It was about constructing an image. The performance became the message.....

"Because this wasn’t a filibuster to halt a bill, it wasn’t a bold act of legislative resistance. It wasn’t even a formal filibuster — no legislation or nomination was being blocked. What it did do was keep the Senate floor open through the night, requiring Capitol Police and staff to remain on duty. When Booker finally yielded the floor, the Senate moved on — quickly confirming Trump’s NATO ambassador nominee Matthew Whitaker.

"We’ve been here before — watching politics turn into performance, not policy. Booker’s speech broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest Senate speech — a symbolic irony, considering Thurmond’s was an act of racist obstruction against the Civil Rights Act, now eclipsed by a Black senator using the same tactic… but for what?"

The Wolf Hall Commentary

(c) by Mark Dempsey

The BBC's show Wolf Hall (WH) chronicles the turbulent times of Henry VIII's rule and his relationship with his consiglieri, Thomas Cromwell. It's a more detailed look at the history than, A Man For All Seasons (AMFAS), which covers the same historical period, focusing on Thomas More, not Cromwell. AMFAS is a movie, WH is a two-season multi-episode drama that more time for a more detailed history.

AMFAS presents Thomas More across as a beacon of moral probity, refusing to compromise his religious principles about divorce when Henry VIII wants to divorce a wife who has not produced a son. Henry executes More when this uncompromising attitude threatens Henry's authority.

Wolf Hall, on the other hand, discloses that More's morality was much more ambiguous. For example, he  tortured at least one of Henry's opponents. For Cromwell, carrying out Henry's wishes is full of compromises and calculations, just as More's was, even though More drew the line at endorsing Henry's divorce, while Cromwell enabled it.

One historical side note: I've read that before antibiotics and modern medicine, childbirth was fraught with peril for women. So marriages in that dark time lasted, on average, six years. Meanwhile, in modern, healthier times, marriage lasts, on average, six years. The difference: The women get to live!

The political problem of how far to go into the territory of immorality, how to administer a state, is something we struggle with even today. Comments condemning Senators and Congresspeople for compromise are endemic in political discussions. 

But what is representative government if not a negotiation that, of necessity, must include compromise? Was Thomas More a prig, worthy of scorn, or was he an upright man, clear about his moral compass? Intolerance of ambiguity and compromise might produce a more moral state, or it might produce the rigid torture of Vlad the Impaler's terrified population.

Should we compromise, or hold out for moral consistency? The current setup systemically requires the former, if any public policy is to occur at all.

Update: A related story about how pursuing perfect justice degrades the pursuer.