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Now 100% T****-Free!
I wonder if we can comment about the current administration’s activities without using the T-word or alluding to things that, however sensational they might be, aren’t actually matters of policy, executive action, or law.
I really like Scott Pruitt over at EPA. I think his talk of streamlining the permitting process, ending the seemingly arbitrary authority of that agency to classify my backyard as a navigable waterway, and otherwise introducing some balance into an overzealous bureaucracy, is wonderful.
I don’t like trade sanctions, think they generally do more harm than good. More people use steel to build stuff here than are employed in the manufacture of the steel itself; far more people buy stuff made with steel than are harmed by foreign subsidies on the steel we import. I hope Mr. Kudlow — a fine choice as economic adviser, in my opinion — can maintain the pro-growth enthusiasm while discouraging too much flirtation with protectionist measures that ultimately raise the prices of US goods.
I think the tax cut was great, and I hope Congress can act to make the best parts of it permanent so that the reductions don’t automatically expire a few years from now. I do expect to see significant business investment (particularly in the area of industry that interests me personally, which is automation) as a consequence of the changes to depreciation rules.
Putin is a fiend. He was a fiend when ex-President Bush looked him in the eye, he was a fiend when ex-President Obama and Secretary Clinton tried to be his friend, and he’s a fiend now. We should sell as much coal and natural gas to Europe as we can, to undercut Russia and deprive Putin and his thugs of their chief source of revenue and decrease their influence over the continent.
Speaking of over there, I’m a huge Brexit enthusiast, and I hope we quickly solidify strong and open trading agreements with our cousins across the pond. The United Kingdom has plenty of problems; trading with us shouldn’t be one of them.
I look forward to the groundbreaking for the new US Embassy in Jerusalem. Faster, please.
Dealing with sanctuary cities, improving border security, appointing conservative judges, continuing to deregulate: there’s a lot that’s happening and a lot that needs to be done. Let’s encourage our congressmen to do it.
Speaking of Congress: it’s pretty much a given that the incumbent party takes a bath in the midterm, particularly when it runs both houses and the executive. That’s likely to happen this year; the Democrat-aligned press and entertainment industries and their relentless anti-GOP hostility will pretty much guarantee it — despite a promising economy and positive developments on the international front. So here’s hoping we get a lot done before then, and don’t lose our heads when and if a foolhardy and gullible electorate decides to put the scoundrels back in office.
There. That wasn’t so hard.
Published in Politics
Agree entirely, although I think the GOP just might retain the House. We’ll see.
I have a distant hope of that — and a healthy skepticism about my ability to predict events. It would be historically exceptional if we did well at the mid-term.
I want to specifically commend Pruitt at EPA since I worked in the environmental field for decades. His latest move is to change the rules so that EPA has to make underlying scientific data publicly available in all its rulemakings.
ADDED: Link to Pruitt’s action.
I’m also a Brexit fan. I get the feeling it has been seriously derailed, though.
I would add to your list of issues Nikki Haley. I think she is doing a good job representing American Interests in the UN.
Northern Ireland was always going to be a problem, since the membership of Ireland and UK in the EU allowed England to basically paper over the issue since it more or less removed the border in the region. Now that 52% of UK voters want to reestablish that border they have to figure out how to do it without revitalizing the old problems that it caused.
100% agreed, the accomplishments have been genuine and truly wonderful. Scott Pruit, I hear, secretly wants to be AG, but it would be SUCH a loss to see him walk away from EPA, I’m torn at where he can be most effective. On other cabinet posts:
Nikki Haley is a breath of fresh air at the stodgy UN, her straight talk is so welcome to hear from that place.
Is Perry being wasted at Energy? I know the argument can be made that there shouldn’t even BE an energy dept, but as long as we have one let’s run it the best way we can, which means help in any way to produce MORE energy, not less.
Betsy Devos at Education (sigh)… I feel like she’s doing the best she can in a truly impossible job. The highly edited video of her interview with 60 min was a great example of why these cabinet sec’s should tell the networks to take a long leap off a short pier next time they want an interview. I applaud her for trying, for leaving her life of wealth and ease to work long hours trying to right a ship that might not be savable, public education.
Anyone else kind of hoping to see John Bolton in the government and playing a large role in one capacity or another? I love seeing him on cable news and all, but we need him and his mustache serving in the cabinet. Sec State seemed an obvious choice, but alas it’s not to be.
The omission seems a little forced when speaking about purely administrative action: agency failures and successes, court appointments (has there been a failure here yet), and administrative rollbacks.
A little more Article One focus would be great, if and when that branch ends its constitutional dereliction and its Alphonse and Gaston filibuster puppet show.
Maybe some more focus on the other 50 laboratories of democracy, some of which are enacting real conservative reforms and a few of which are showing us the leftist future we may face on the national level.
Yes. It is a concession to comity — if not sanity.
John Bolton? Imagining him at State is a recurring guilty pleasure of mine.
Many years ago the blogger Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom nicknamed Bolton’s mustache “Regis,” and credited it with all of Bolton’s power of intimidation.
I largely agree with you, if we keep it balanced. Throwing much more focus on Pruitt, Haley, DeVos, Zinke, Ajit Pai and some of the other superb actors is fair, especially when you concede that they are often acting without the deeply informed policy agreement of their boss.
But let’s not play into the “Not Our President” meme.
He’s not Voldemort.
Agreed. But some are unable to focus on anything else when the CinC enters the room. So it’s nice to occasionally have a quiet conversation without the distraction.
But TTTT…. hmm. But TTTTT…. hmm.
Let me try again.
But TTTTTT….
This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.
You’re doing great, HV. Keep at it.
Not me. He’d be great as UN Ambassador again, but we’ve got that covered, or as head of personnel at the State Department. Not as cabinet member or national security advisor.
Quite aside from real and tangible — and, I would argue, considerable — policy changes, there is a renewed sense that America is friendly to business. We spent eight years under ex-President Obama suffering the academic’s disdain for the grimy world of commerce and industry. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, we have an advocate in office, and we can honestly believe that, however misguided they may sometimes be, the policies flowing from Washington will at least be intended to further the business of business in America.
No matter which party wins in November, we can be reasonably confident that no new regulatory horrors lurk over the immediate horizon, and that America will remain generally business-friendly for at least the next two years.
That’s huge.
“We should sell as much coal and natural gas to Europe as we can, to undercut Russia and deprive Putin and his thugs of their chief source of revenue and decrease their influence over the continent.”
Ain’t that the truth. If Trump wanted to really improve our trade deficit situation quickly and create a multitude of jobs here at home, we should go all in ( subsidize it if necessary) on new technology and export facilities to export our natural gas to Europe. We have a ton of natural gas and it’s greenest energy supply source (the euros will like that) other than wind or solar. It’s a logical trade opportunity that for some reason has been left for Putin to fill.
I’m not in favor of subsidizing business in general, and I don’t think fossil fuels need subsidies. We’re currently squabbling with countries that subsidize their exports; it would probably be good not to start doing that ourselves.
But, yes, drill baby drill!
Should the United States never have any trade restrictions anywhere, even with the most brutal dictatorships which wish to see this country and its freedoms destroyed?
There were mostly Republican presidents between the Civil War and World War II. I think most, if not all, of them supported tariffs, but the nation seemed to survive quite well — before the national government decided largely to take over huge portions of the nation’s economy.
You say that, “I really like Scott Pruitt over at EPA.” I was always under the impression that Obamacare was largely responsible from wrecking the nation’s economy throughout most of the United States this past decade. Sure, places like Silicon Valley and the counties surrounding Rome (I mean Washington, DC) did well this past decade, but what about the rest of the country? I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that the Democrats largely targeted manual labor jobs usually performed by men with college degrees. (That idea was Trumped.) Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Al Gore have made various statements about wanting to wipe away the jobs American men have had in the coal industry. A president trying to protect individual businesses often seems wrong to me. An American company probably shouldn’t survive, if it cannot compete — after probably making previous bad decisions. However, it seems different to me when you are talking about extensively-trained entire sectors of the U.S. economy specifically targeted by other countries as I previously posted, “Feeling sorry for foreign aluminum producers? China produces about 37 times as much and Canada about 36 times as much per capita.”
We funded the government with tariffs, there were no corporate taxes, income taxes payroll taxes and the tariffs were pretty uniform, k street had yet to become the biggest determinant of return to big business, companies were managed by their owners. And that is just the US. Look abroad and the degree of protectionism broadly defined alone allows one to determine if a country is rich or poor. So does that mean no tariffs? No an across the board tariff with no exceptions and no variation in rate would be the equivalent of a devaluation and should be done, or an across the board uniform VAT. The purpose however would be to shrink the current account deficit every dollar of which, by definition must be borrowed abroad to pay for imports.
All cabinet sec interviews should be recorded for archival purposes. Then if a hack job is released, the full unabridged interview can be released on a government website as archival footage.
The right wing blogosphere then takes the hacks to task.
Hilarity ensues.
Feeling sorry for American consumers who will have to pay more for aluminum made products in order to subsidize a failing industry.
Too obscure. I have no idea what the T is.
Are you being deliberately stupid?
He’s referring to the President, and it’s been nice to not rehash the never-ending arguments when his name comes up, but rather discuss some policy.
@skyler, let me explain. The T stands for Trans: this is a 100% Trans-free thread.
Only masculine men and feminine women, people who are confident of their sexual identity and comfortable with whichever box was checked on their birth certificate, are encouraged to comment here.
Also, as Curt rather curtly noted (because not everyone gets dry humor), the current President goes unnamed (except in one comment by Unsk that I would delete if I could). But that’s just to avoid distraction.
That’s a pretty extreme position, and I tend not to take extreme positions. I do think embargoes, trade restrictions, etc., can be a useful tool of foreign policy. But I think we’re usually accepting a negative economic consequence as a cost of using that tool, and we should be aware of it.
As I say, generally sanctions do more harm than good. Trade wars aren’t good, no matter what you hear on the subject. We’re better off letting Americans buy inexpensive imports rather than propping up less competitive domestic industries at the consumer’s expense. I think the numbers make that pretty clear.
I also think it’s easier to reboot an industry than it used to be, and easier than many people assume: materiel, money, and knowledge move more quickly than ever before. Acme Steel can open a foundry in Ohio as readily as Caterpillar can move a manufacturing plant to Mexico.
It’s good to have the threat of trade restrictions in the diplomatic toolbox, and it’s probably good to use it once every great while. But I think it’s a mistake to believe that it’s economically wise — rather than occasionally diplomatically advantageous — to try to use it to level a playing field that, for intractable structural reasons having to do with America’s wonderful prosperity, can’t be made level.
No, I’m stupid by birth. What kind of crack is that? Is that how we promote civil discussions? You should be ashamed.
When has anyone been afraid to say Trump’s name? The post could have meant taxes for all I could tell.
Ah. I thought you were being humorous.
No one is afraid to say the President’s name, Skyler. But it’s easier to stay focused on policy, laws, and ideas when we don’t introduce strongly polarizing individuals. And, news flash: our President is a strongly polarizing individual.
I thought it would be nice to have a post that talked about what’s actually happening in our government, rather than focusing — as they so quickly tend to do — on one particular individual.
No fear. Just a desire to address more substantive things.
The point is that discussions of [redacted] generally degenerate into arguments about [redacted] himself. @henryracette wants to discuss policy without bringing [redacted] into it.
I, for one, agree with everything in the OP.
That’s a little defensive after some of the rudeness I’ve seen from you in the comments sections. You want to talk about civil discussions, but you make a comment like this – http://ricochet.com/502057/what-if-you-still-cannot-find-work/comment-page-4/#comment-4097697
You want to be the tough guy and toss out casual insults to people looking for work, but can’t take a little jab? Got it.