Entries Tagged 'Economics and Investing' ↓

WORD of the DAY – SCOTUS

I FIND IT AMAZING THAT WHAT DONALD TRUMP DID TO MAKE THE HUSH MONEY TRIAL HAPPEN ECHOES HOW THE ROBERTS’ SUPREME COURT HAS NOW BEEN ACTING IN THE SAME WAY.   

When I first started to blog on Brucenomics.com I added on my side bar books that talked about how right-wing conservatives were setting up within Academia from coast to coast, a Scheme that even spread as far as Russia late in the twentieth century.

THE SCHEME  – SENATOR WHITE HOUSE’ BOOK– A Review

The East Coast Scheme was funded by two conservative right-wing academics’ grants:  James M. Buchanan, Nobel Prize winner, and Gordon Tullock at George Mason University.

All during the 20th century these men sought funds to spread their plans to to weaken our Supreme Court. They were Libertarians who wanted to create a smaller government in the United States.

These Libertarian Academics provided federal judges with workshops in Florida every summer – with all expenses paid to lecture them in libertarian views of smaller government, good food, and access to golf courses.

The West Coast Scheme of our century is being now being funded by billionaires. (The Koch family members and other oil barons) The West Coast is now passing  piles of dark money to put federal judges aiming ultimately to get favors done for the male members at the Supreme Court.

Back in the late 20th century many right-wing politicized groups were forming, like those in the Tea Party. As a back-of-the book indexer, I created a ten volume book index set for for Tullock and Buchanan. These Tea Party books often had identified the word “liberty” in its titles and pages.

Senator White House calls them ‘Front Groups’

The Senator’s book, The Scheme is far more comprehensive than my earlier blogs. So today I’m going to talk about a few of the pages from Senator Whitehouse’ book because they are is as shocking as the Alioto upside-down American flag.

HOW SCOTUS OPERATES

Starting on Page 124, here is how Senator Whitehouse’ Book is comparable to how Donald Trump’s Hush money trial is similar to how the Supreme Court operates.

The Donald Trump Hush money trial was about hiding the truth about a former President so rich and powerful   that he conspired to fool the public that his comtemt of women was not revealed to the public.

The male Justices at SCOTUS also are so powerful they too have taken millions of dollars from dark money billionaires who have an axe to grind.

Justices, Thomas,  Alioto, and Gorusch et.al. are not taking cases from the American people –  they are making up cases, inviting their ‘Front Groups’ in to find someone who will win their cases for them or lose in court.

These justices do not rely on precedent or real facts of their made-up cases. Justice Thomas is clearly there to kill precedents. And these days, they only talk in turns about hypotheticals and ridiculous upside-down ideas. These justices are so keen to bury precedents and real facts. And then to rake in lots of dark money .

For years  they have relied on  5 to 4 court rulings to get their pet peeves accepted by the phony results in their fake cases.

And just like Donald Trump they take all the money these male justices can while the female justices protest against their lost cases and cry.

TWO EXAMPLES

On page 127 there is an example of a union-busting case involving  Justice Gorsuch who was appointed in 2017.

The  5 to 4 court  results reopened  and the Front Groups’ rushed in on the question of unions “fair share dues”. The male Justices created a fast lane to the Supreme majority that they were so eager to throw out the union’s law case. As it turned out even with all the rush they were too late.

Justice Scalia died before the case was decided, depriving the union-busting 5-4 door reopened.

“The party in that second case as with an amicus plaintiff, Mark Janus, a home health aide, was in the Friedrichs case.  Justices asked Janus to lose the case. Justice Gorsuch rushed back to the friendly Supreme Court–with no record, no witnesses, no evidence of the likely consequences of the ruling. Gorsuch voted as predicted, and out went a precedent that unions, cities, and states that had been forty years old.”

Note: I have worked in several factories with unions during my life. At the first factory a woman from Europe felt that she was a faster worker than the rest of us when the union was formed. She said she would not pay her share of dues that the rest of us owed. The union lost most of their battles and management took away their pay for overtime. This happened just as I left to drive away to college in the Sixties.

SOURCES : See also Supreme: Court can’t collect ‘fair share’ fees

[Think that union happened decades long ago?  No! It was in 2018.] And as I write this Justice Alito is perhaps now now airing out his pet peeves on some other fake case.]

WORD OF THE DAY — TARIFFS CRITIQUED

March 12th , 2018
Nearly everyone and his or her brother and sister have come out against Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum this week! 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum.

I have read some things I didn’t know about tariffs on steel and aluminum. Most of these things came from an article in The Conversation titled “George W. Bush tried steel tariffs. It didn’t work” by William Hauk, Associate Professor of Economics at one of my alma maters, the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Here are some facts I didn’t know:

Trade protection transfers money from a good’s consumers to its producers. I talked about this in February in my post, “Trump’s Trade and Infrastructure Weaknesses“. But what I didn’t know is it really matters who the consumers of the good being tariffed are!

Americans are the one’s who get taxed on imports we wish to buy when trade wars start.

If we mean consumers or investors like you and I, a tariff might have little impact because there are so many of us our that individual shares of the tariffs might be quite low.

On the other hand, if the consumers are giant auto companies and the construction industry, the concentration of wealth within these two sectors is so great, they have far more lobbying power in Congress than we individual investors or the steel industry do.

Thus, happpened when George W. Bush imposed tariffs of up to 30% on imports of steel to the US. back in 2002 the auto and construction industries convinced the National Association of Manufacturers to come out against the tariffs. Lawsuits were threatened.

By the time President Bush backed off of those tariffs in 2003, 200,000 employees of other US manufacturing companies had lost their jobs, while the entire steel industry consisted of 197,00 workers. All that resulted was a huge displacement of American workers from one location to another, a topic I’ll cover in my next post.

So now it’s even worse. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, there are roughly 140,000 people employed in the steel industry.

A TV news commenter I watched this weekend pointed to technological advances as the cause for the 25% loss of steel industry jobs over the past 15 years. This has a ring of truth to it. Others have blamed the industry for itself profits on dividend payouts and buyouts rather than making use of it’s excess capacity to output more steel.

Whatever the cause, it is likely that President Trump’s steel tariffs will meet an even worse fate than Bush’s and will perhaps far more enmity among our trade partners—causing them to retaliate by slapping export taxes on goods we sell them.

This is particularly true because Canada provides the U.S. President Trump’s willingness to let Canada off the hook for steel tariffs.

According to Professor Hauk we now import a fifth of the US with 63% of the aluminum we use. Our own aluminum industry is now largely defunct with only a handful of plants in Washington State, Kentucky and New York State remaining open.

A reason I hadn’t heard before

So why would the President impose a one-sided deal that is so likely to backfire and cause a huge trade war along with even more dislocation of workers within the other manufacturing industries within our economy?

Lots of news commentators have been claiming it is because Donald Trump wants to create any distraction he can from the current investigations of collusion with Russia and other crimes by his campaign team and possibly himself.

Is President Trump that desperate and ignorant of economics? Perhaps not. 

Professor Hauk suggests that Trump’s tariffs were imposed because of steel’s “political advantages”.

Steel producers are mostly located in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Like Florida, with its heavy protective tariffs on sugar, these states are the most important “swing states” in our Presidential elections.

Given President Trump’s campaigning this weekend in Pennsylvania for a Republican candidate in the 2018 Congressional elections where Trump mostly bragged about himself, that idea doesn’t seem quite so far fetched to me.

After all Trump beat Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election in Pennsylvania by only 44,294 votes and in Ohio by 446,841 votes. Will Trump’s tariffs enable him to swing the vote his way again in 2020? or even 2024?

WORD OF THE DAY— TARIFFS

If you saw the Trump/Biden Debate you heard Donald J. Trump say he’d bring back tariffs.

Or you may have heard this at one of his rallies and thought he was going to make money on tariffs

PLEASE DON’T BE FOOLED BY DONALD J. TRUMP AGAIN!

The only things Trump’s tariffs brought about while the former President was in office

in the last few centuries were massive losses while the US created higher and higher deficits.

Trump’s tariff taxes in 2018 and 2019 led to massive losses of American jobs and inflation.

Here are three stories that I posted on in Brucenomics in those centuries.

Back then China and the US  largely taxed each other as we exchanged tariffs

Others before Donald had failed as well. And the expert Economists showed  reasons why.

Trump’s trade tariff wars led to the US becoming a debtor nation. Americans had to pay the tariffs

And Donald Trump lost money because Donald spent more than the former President made from his tariffs.