Im-Politic: The Cost of a Governor’s CCP Virus Grandstanding

Tags

Andrew Cuomo, CCP Virus, conservatives, coronavirus, COVID 19, Im-Politic, Larry Hogan, Maryland, New York State, nursing homes, Republicans, seniors, test kits, testing, The Washington Post, Trump, Wuhan virus

First, full disclosures: I’ve been a Maryland resident for more than 15 years now (though still a New Yorker at heart). I’ve voted for Larry Hogan for governor twice (different elections!) and think he’s done as good a job in Annapolis as could any Republican in a state that’s heavily Democratic (albeit one with a long tradition of choosing moderate Republicans as governor).

But I’ve always thought that he’s spent a little too much time and energy sniping at President Trump and fostering an image as a moderate, unifying, possible GOP and conservative alternative to Mr. Trump’s needlessly polarizing brands of politics and policy.

And my irritation at Hogan just ticked up a notch upon reading this Washington Post piece reporting his decision yesterday to test all nursing home residents and staff for the CCP Virus.

Yes, you read that right: “Yesterday.” Even though the unmistakable and tragic nationwide concentration of virus deaths and infections in such facilities has been clear for months now – in part because of their elderly populations and in part because of their confined quarters. Even though the state’s own new data show that “half of Maryland’s confirmed covid-19-related deaths and more than a fifth of its cases were linked to skilled-nursing facilities.” That’s a higher nursing home death rate even than in New York State, whose Governor Andrew Cuomo is catching flak for his own costly decisions in this regard.

Where’s Hogan been? In part, keeping busy by missing few opportunities to show up the President, and winning praise even from Democrats – most recently by crowing about his Korean-American wife’s success at procuring half a million test kits from South Korea — and conspicuously dissing the President in the process. Interestingly, though, it now turns out that the governor is discovering that turning this showy purchase – which may have been wholly unnecessary – into an effective testing program even in his smallish state isn’t as easy he and other Trump critics have implied. (See here for details.)

If Hogan runs for reelection, I’ll almost surely vote for him again – assuming that Maryland Democrats keep nominating tax-and-spending-happy, Sanctuary State- and city-backing, identity politics-obsessed rivals. But I’ll certainly be hoping that Hogan starts remembering those adages about people living in glass houses and tending to their own gardens.

Following Up: The Mainstream Media’s One-Sided CCP Virus Blame Game Continues

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, Mainstream Media, MSM, Robert Redfield, testing, The Washington Post, Trump, Wuhan virus

I’m well on the way toward formulating a new Law of Life: “If you’re hoping for accurate information about anything, always read to the very end of a relevant news item.” And I got a lot closer to final endorsement upon opening my Washington Post today and seeing the banner headline topping the front page blaring “70 days of denial, delays and dysfunction.” The subhead helped, too: “From the White House to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded as the virus spread. Despite being better prepared than many countries, the U.S. saw opportunities to mitigate the crisis slip away.”

Honestly: Why didn’t the Post just lead off with “Why the Bozo in the Oval Office Needs to be Impeached Immediately or Defeated in November”? What else could the newspaper’s real intent have been?

At this point, let me just note that I don’t keep focusing (in part) on the Mainstream Media’s (MSM) performance during this CCP Virus crisis because I don’t like their journalists, or because I’m a supporter of many of the President’s policies and I think (correctly, in my opinion) that these news organizations have done an especially poor and biased job in covering the Russia collusion and related impeachment stories.

Instead, I keep focusing on the MSM because they’re the main way the nation receives not only news but much information of any kind, and this goes double for the current situation – even taking into account the daily presidential press briefings (which, not coincidentally, have been directed toward the…press).

In this vein, here’s some crucial information that you find out if you make it all the way to the end of this looooong story, which maintains in the fifth paragraph (which comes on the front page of that print edition lead story, “Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.” For good measure, in the seventh paragraph, the Post reporting team emphasizes that

“it took 70 days from that initial notification [from China on January 3 – from a health official to the head of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention – CDC – that something new and dangerous was spreading in Wuhan] for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.”

And let’s not forget the charge that “Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just ‘miraculously’ go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.”

Again, what could be more awful?

Elsewhere in the article, however, we learn that

>”On Jan. 6, [CDC chief, Robert Redfield] sent a letter to the Chinese offering to send help, including a team of CDC scientists. China rebuffed the offer for weeks, turning away assistance and depriving U.S. authorities of an early chance to get a sample of the virus, critical for developing diagnostic tests and any potential vaccine. China impeded the U.S. response in other ways, including by withholding accurate information about the outbreak.”

>Nor did China’s obstructionism end there: it reported on January 14 that it had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

>As of late January, “The Chinese were still refusing to share the viral samples they had collected and were using to develop their own tests. In frustration, U.S. officials looked for other possible routes.

“A biocontainment lab at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) head of preparedness and response hoped that scientists at the two labs “could arrange a transaction on their own without government interference. At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.

“There is no indication that officials sought to escalate the matter or enlist Trump to intervene.”

And in a major omission, this lengthy Post account ignored compelling evidence that the first CCP Virus case in China dates from November 17.

>On the purely American side, regarding testing, the CDC had developed “an institutional arrogance, a sense that even in the face of a potential crisis there was no pressing need to involve private labs, academic institutions, hospitals and global health organizations also capable of developing tests.”

In other words, these CDC failings long pre-dated the Trump presidency.

>In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony S.] “Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point.”

The point of this post isn’t to add to the blame game, but rather to underscore how one-sided the MSM’s participation has been. And even though the proverbial buck in the United States rightly stops with the President, and consequently it doesn’t sound terribly convincing to claim that many long-serving experts in the U.S. bureaucracy have let him down, in this case, here’s an episode where it has the added virtue of lots of truth.

Im-Politic: Still Clueless – About Trump – After All These Years

Tags

conservatives, election 2020, GOP, Im-Politic, Jeff Stein, Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Mainstream Media, Populism, Republicans, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

Since a U.S. Presidential election year is now underway and since the Mainstream Media, for all its credibility problems, still supply the news coverage that so many voters rely on in whole or in part, it seems important to present some evidence that, nearly four years after Donald Trump’s victorious presidential run, at least two newspapers arguably at the top of the journalistic heap still have no clue as to what or why it happened.

Both examples deal with President Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, and the most disturbing of the two examples comes from The New York Times. The title of its December 21 piece – “Fear and Loathing: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party” – tells you pretty much all you need to know about its perspective. Authors Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman do refer in passing to “Mr. Trump’s deviations from longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs,” but they apparently believe that they’ve had nothing whatever to do with the GOP’s transformation.

Instead, they portray the post-2016 party as nothing but a cult of personality, comprised of voters and a majority of office-holders so blindly devoted to and terrified of Mr. Trump, respectively, that they’re determined to overlook supposedly dispositive proof of the President’s unfitness for the White House as his Ukraine policies.

In fact, Martin and Haberman are so incapable of attributing the President’s success to the policy disasters spearheaded by the political establishment’s right wing (Google “financial crisis” and “Great Recession”) that one of their sources for this claim is no less than the head of the Club for Growth – a leading anti-Trump orthodox conservative organization.

And when they encounter a more convincing explanation – an observation by a North Carolina Republican Congressman that Mr. Trump “has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him political power here” – they simply leave it hanging.

Somewhat better – but more bewildering – is Jeff Stein’s December 27 Washington Post report on “Trump’s quest to shatter GOP economics reached its culmination in 2019.” Let’s give Stein his due for focusing on the substance (even though he seems to forget that major Trump departures from Republican dogma began on his first day in office – when the President pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement).

But his two paragraphs could not be weirder – even from a standard political standpoint:

“Whether [the Trump era shift] will permanently remake the Republican Party, on the other hand, remains an open question.

“‘Republican lawmakers privately still believe the deficit is a problem and support free trade — but they’re not going to say that publicly, because it’s not where their voters are,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the libertarian-leaning Manhattan Institute. ‘I’m not sure Trump has changed the minds of Republican lawmakers as much as he has won over the base and lawmakers understand crossing the president is political suicide.’”

There’s no question that the long-term future of conservative, Trump-ian populism is still up in the air – if only because its triumph has been so sudden, and because largely as a result, its ability to create the institutional underpinnings needed for durability can’t be taken for granted.

But does Riedl really believe that Republican lawmakers matter to the party more than the base? That may be convenient for someone in a weakening establishment struggling to avoid the ash heap of history. But does Stein buy it? Or does his use of Riedl’s statement indicate that, like so many Mainstream Media reporters, he identifies with that weakening establishment, too?

Making News: Podcast On-Line of a New National Radio Interview on Globalism…& More!

Tags

Breitbart News Tonight, China, globalism, Hong Kong, Making News, nationalism, Robert Kagan, South China Morning Post, The Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that a podcast of a national radio interview from last night is now on-line.  Conducted by the folks at Breitbart News Tonight, it addresses the wide range of issues raised by a (revealingly) humongous article by Robert Kagan defending globalist approaches to domestic and foreign policy (and singling out nationalism as a particular evil) that appeared yesterday in the Washington Post.  Go to this link and click on the March 15 entry with my name for a fascinating conversation that literally has it all – politics, world affairs, economics, history,  philosophy, and more!

Also, it was interesting, to put it mildly to be described as “anti-China” in this article from the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post by an author who “researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view.” Hong Kong, you’ll recall, is now controlled by China, and although Beijing has permitted the locals to maintain a modicum of free expression and self government, the range of permitted liberties keeps narrowing all the time.

For the record, I’m perfectly fine with the Chinese people in general, and with much of Chinese culture.  But the country’s government and leaders?  Not nearly so much

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

 

Im-Politic: With Friends Like Jennifer Rubin, Pelosi Doesn’t Need Enemies

Tags

border wall, Im-Politic, Jennifer Rubin, Nancy Pelosi, shutdown, The Washington Post, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome

Is Nancy Pelosi prepared to stonewall on the Border Wall/government shutdown showdown even though she’s anticipating that it would “create a serious safety hazard” for Americans or “take a big chunk out of the economy” – which would involve major job and wage loss? Is she counting on this, at least to some degree, to win a big political victory? I certainly don’t know the answer. But Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin thinks she does. Moreover, those aren’t only precisely the claims she made in a column this past week. It’s a position for which she believes the House Speaker deserves praise.

In the process, Rubin both showed how far into fringe Never Trump-er territory she’s proudly marched.

The point in question came at the end of a piece in which Rubin fulsomely praised Pelosi’s skill in dealing with Mr. Trump – and especially her shutdown-related decision in effect to prevent the President from delivering the annual State of the Union speech in its traditional (but not Constitutionally mandated) place on the House of Representatives floor. According to Rubin:

“We don’t know how this will end, but should the shutdown create a serious safety hazard or take a big chunk out of the economy, there is little doubt who’s going to get the blame. And Pelosi knows it.”

My overall take on the Border Wall/shutdown battle is that Mr. Trump has demonstrated far more willingness to compromise than has the Speaker – and that it’s up to her to start reciprocating in order to re-open the government and minimize the chances that major damage will be done. But you don’t have to agree with me to recognize how bizarre – in fact, outright sick – Rubin’s contentions are.

For Rubin here is not simply saying that Pelosi is playing the same kind of game of chicken as Mr. Trump, or placing more of the blame on the President because she considers his position less defensible. Rubin is also saying that, regardless of the merits, Pelosi is basing her stance at least in part on an expectation that a shutdown-related calamity, either disaster-wise or economy-wise, will take place, and that most of the resulting blame will fall on Mr. Trump and his party and his cause – not hers. And in Rubin’s view, what’s most important to know about this calculation is how likely it would be to harm the President, and how therefore it crowns Pelosi as a political genius.

What the column really shows, of course, is that Rubin is so thoroughly infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome that it’s more important for her to see the President take a major political hit than to maximize the odds that everyday Americans don’t take major economic and worse hits from the shutdown. And unless Rubin is wrong, and she really isn’t counting on this, no one should be more offended by this column than Pelosi.

Im-Politic: ‘Tis the Season – for Immigration Double Standards

Tags

Associated Press, Chuck Schumer, CNN, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media. Nancy Pelosi, migrants, Open Borders, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

All reasonable participants in the often angry national debate about American immigration policy surely agree that the deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody and the killing of a police officer at the hands of an illegal alien are comparably tragic. Why, then, have the Open Borders supporters treated them like night and day, focusing intently on the former and literally ignoring the latter? And why has President Trump so needlessly fed his own critics’ charges of cruelty, racism, and xenophobia on immigration policy with some double standards-setting of his own on these matters?

The discrepancy on the part of Open Borders advocates has been especially dramatic when it comes to Congress’ leading Democrats – who will assume control of the House of Representatives in January. House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, and other major figures in the party (including its likely presidential candidates) have uniformly expressed outrage at the deaths this month of two Guatemalan children held by the U.S. immigration authorities after being brought to the border by parents on long, arduous trips from their home country.  (See, e.g., here and here.)

But the early morning December 26 killing of a Newman, California police officer (and an immigrant himself) by a suspect identified as an illegal alien by local law enforcement officials has elicited no response at all – even from Pelosi, who represents a California district.

The same pattern marks the coverage of these incidents by the Mainstream Media, which has made its Open Borders sympathies abundantly clear in recent years. For example, the Washington Post this morning was still highlighting on its front page the controversy over the children’s deaths. But the police officer’s death didn’t even make the print edition. The killing was mentioned on the paper’s website three times yesterday and today. But all three items were taken from the wire services, meaning that the Post hasn’t as of now assigned one of its own reporters to investigate.  (See, e.g., here.)

The New York Times did cover the policeman’s killing with one of its own correspondents – and ran the story on page 15 of the news section today. But an article on the children’s deaths, which are no longer breaking news, received front page coverage.

Visit the website of the Associated Press, the world’s largest bona fide news agency, and you’ll see an article on the most recent Guatemalan child’s death right near the top of the home page. But you need to scroll way down to find a piece on the police officer’s killing.

CNN also featured a follow up on the most recent child death prominently on its home page. But its coverage of the police killing doesn’t appear anywhere. You need to look for it with the search engine.

In my view, President Trump has dropped the ball here as well. It’s true that his administration has expressed regret over both migrant children’s deaths, is investigating these events, and seeking ways to handle the new flood of migrants more effectively. It’s also true that the administration has blamed the children’s parents in part for putting them in dangerous situations to begin with – and I agree. I also fully support the administration’s insistence that the U.S. government’s responsibilities to its own citizens are qualititatively different – meaning greater – than to citizens of other countries.

But although Mr. Trump has tweeted about the shooting (without condolences for his family or his colleagues) he’s made no comment at all about the children’s deaths. And just as the Open Borders folks exhibited a major blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special shame surrounding the death of a public official who risked his life every day on behalf of others by an individual who commonsense immigration policies likely would have kept out of this country, the President has exhibited a blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special sorrow surrounding the death of a minor who bore no responsibility for his circumstances. And he could so easily have done expressed such sentiments without conceding a single inch of ground in his campaign for the most stringent border security regime.

Im-Politic: Antisemitism by Any Other Name

Tags

academia, antisemitism, Im-Politic, Lila Corwin Berman, Mainstream Media, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, The Washington Post, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome

Leave it to American academia today to produce an article that simultaneously claims that anti-semitism in the United States is and has always been much worse than commonly believed, and suggests that “the opportunities and privileges [American Jews] gained came not because America held particular promise for Jews, but rather because it withheld that promise in so many ways to so many other people.”

And leave it to the Mainstream Media to publish such simultaneously incoherent and offensive garbage – perhaps in part because author Lila Corwin Berman managed to inject into her diatribe major swipes at President Trump.

I’ve read and re-read the sentence quoted above, which appeared in this morning’s Washington Post, numerous times for fear of misinterpreting it. But I can’t understand how it can mean anything other than that throughout their history in this country, Jews in general have at the very least selfishly “seen no evil” as they’ve basked in America’s tolerance – and at the most bear significant responsibility for the oppression of other minorities, either actively, or passively, through their determination to keep affixed their self-serving blinder.

Not that anyone, including me, should rule any of these possibilities out of hand. But the author – a Temple University historian of American Judaism – offers no serious evidence or even detailed argumentation to support the charges. And absent any grounding in fact, how are the allegations not simple antisemitic slurs? Alternatively, to employ some terms widely used these days to link the President to atrocities like the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, how does their simple voicing not “activate” or “encourage” or “release” or “embolden” such prejudice?

Further, how does Berman square these contentions with her belief – strengthened by the Pittsburgh murders – that the United States has not been “an exceptional place for Jews,” and that they have been wrong to “see an exceptional future for themselves and their children in the United States”? Spoiler alert: She can’t. Worse, she doesn’t even try. And her editors at the Washington Post somehow missed this whopping contradiction.

What could possibly explain such evident incompetence? How about Berman’s decision to make sure to blast President Trump for displaying:

“how easily [American] exceptionalism can become a weapon for exclusion; this is the very purpose of ‘Make America Great Again.’ The president legitimizes white supremacy as one of ‘both sides’ of American life. He declares himself to be a nationalist without bothering to distinguish between his nationalism and the dark history of xenophobic and genocidal nationalism. He routinely gives cover to those who abuse vulnerable populations — trans people, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, people of color, children and women — by telling his followers that they are the victims. In all cases, what he calls the ‘greatness’ of this country is its ability to exclude whole classes of people as unfit and undesirable for its blessings.”

In other words, Trump Derangement Syndrome has reached new lows. As the Washington Post has just made clear, a newspaper’s flagship opinion section will publish in the same article claims that American Jews have had no reason to be grateful for the haven the United States has provided them, and insinuations that these Jews have been complicit in the nation’s failures to treat other groups justly. Just be sure to depict the President as an enabler of every form of bigotry under the sun.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: With Allies Like These….

Tags

allies, Asia, auto tariffs, China, Europe, Germany, intellectual property theft, Japan, Robert J. Samuelson, South Korea, steel tariffs, tariffs, The Washington Post, Trade, Trump, value-added taxes, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson intended this week’s essay to show how foolish, and possibly disastrous, President Trump’s emerging new trade policy will be – including for the national security goals the administration has set. That’s why it’s so ironic that his column instead unwittingly revealed how thin a reed the nation’s long-time security strategy has been, and nowhere more so than in the importance it’s assigned to its long-time security alliances in Europe and Asia.

Samuelson’s piece conveys a warning that the administration’s trade policy moves so far are on course to undermine national security in two related ways: by ignoring the alleged imperative of enlisting its major allies in a multilateral campaign to discipline predatory Chinese intellectual property and related trade and industrial policies that need curbing; and by actually antagonizing these countries and thereby jeopardizing the very existence of those alliances.

This argument conveniently overlooks several big trade and security fundamentals. First, globalist pre-Trump American leaders themselves have insisted that they’ve long tried to create multilateral pressure on China’s rogue economic behavior for years before Mr. Trump became president – though it’s unclear how serious these efforts were. For example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal largely touted by the Obama administration for its potential to curb China’s influence contained a back door for numerous imports with major levels of Chinese content.

Second, it’s anything but obvious that U.S. alliances strengthen American security on net. As I’ve pointed out frequently (including this past week), they continue to expose the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack even though the Soviet-style kinds of global threats their nuclear guarantees were intended to counter have been (literally) gone for nearly three decades. Moreover, as has been widely reported, the militaries of many of these allies have deteriorated so markedly that their potential as force multipliers for the United States is open to serious doubt.

But Samuelson’s analysis makes no sense even if these considerations are put aside. The key is in his own portrayal of leading U.S. allies – which he describes as livid about recent American steel tariffs, and sure to become even angrier is levies are imposed on their motor vehicle exports to the United States. Indeed, he worries, major auto-exporting countries like Germany, Japan, and South Korea could well become so upset with the United States that they not only retaliate in kind, but unhesitatingly move to supply China with whatever high tech goods and services Washington embargoes or restricts.

In other words, these allies would redouble their efforts to feed the Chinese beast even though all of them face China trade, technology, and/or national security threats of their own, and even though the United States continues to provide them with crucial military protection – including, in the case of Japan and South Korea, from Chinese designs. But these same allies were supposed to be amenable to cooperating with Washington to deal with China? Even more revealing, the allies would choose to intensify confrontation with the United States instead of (finally) proposing concrete steps to deal with the China problem over which they profess concern.

And they would display no interest whatever in meaningfully removing the formidable obstacles they have created to block American automotive exports. (The recently reported German auto-makers’ proposal to eliminate all tariffs in the sector on both sides of the Atlantic would leave in place towering European value-added taxes – e.g., 19 percent in Germany – on motor vehicles and most other imports. No such U.S. equivalent exists either for autos or for light trucks and sport utility vehicles.)

No one can fault these European and East Asian countries from acting in their own perceived interests – or even for trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Indeed, for decades, globalist American foreign policies have encouraged and actively enabled precisely this kind of free-riding. What these countries should be faulted for is posing as allies (let alone allies with justifiably hurt feelings), and worse, as paragons of sobriety and free market values nobly resisting a wrecking ball of an American President. As for any Americans and U.S. leaders who keep fooled by this act for so long and, more important, failing to take the policy hints – shame on them.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Fake News Attack on the Trump Metals Tariffs

Tags

aluminum, Catherine Rampell, competitiveness, fake news, manufacturing, metals, steel, tariffs, The Washington Post, Trade, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Pundits like the Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell have every right to warn that President Trump’s metals (and other) tariffs will ultimately harm the U.S. economy more than it helps. What they have no right to do is peddle demonstrably false claims like her contention that because of the price hikes so far seen for steel and aluminum since these levies came onto the American trade agenda earlier this year, companies reliant on these materials for their final products “are now less competitive.”

I call these claims demonstrably false because every month, the U.S. government publishes detailed statistics on the nation’s trade performance, and the data through April contain absolutely no evidence that domestic metals-using industries are on the ropes – or anywhere close.

Let’s examine what seems to be the national chattering class’ and policy establishment’s favorite measure of industrial competitiveness: American exports. If the Trump tariffs have indeed been pushing U.S. metals-using industries close to the ash heap of economic history, then their overseas sales for the first few months of this year (the tariffs became likely when the Commerce Department officially recommended them in mid-February), should be much lower than they were the first few months of last year – or at least growing much more slowly.

In fact, just the opposite has been seen, at least when it comes to three major sectors of the economy that are especially heavy users of steel and aluminum – transportation equipment, non-electrical machinery, and fabricated metals products.

Over the first four months of this year (the latest data available), America’s global exports in these categories were not only 5.83 percent greater than over the same period in 2017. The year-to-date growth rate was some 7.2 times higher than that for 2017 (0.81 percent).

Perhaps more significant, the difference between the January-April, 2018 export growth rates for these metals-using industries and their January-April, 2017 growth rates was much greater than for American manufacturing as a whole. During the first four months of 2018, total U.S. manufacturing exports have grown 7.45 percent year-to-date. That’s higher in absolute terms than the export growth for the metals-using industries, but this export increase has been only 2.12 times faster than their export growth rate for January-April, 2017 (3.52 percent).

But what about my favorite measure of American competitiveness – trade balances and how they’ve changed? I focus on these two-way flows because the theory of comparative advantage at the heart of all justifications for the freest possible global trade makes sense only if these surpluses and deficits have consequences for global production patterns.

After all, comparative advantage holds that trade is the best possible way to create the best possible global division of labor – meaning that in a world of unfettered commerce, countries that trade products and services most successfully will inevitably wind up making those products and providing those services most successfully, and that all countries will benefit on net. And the countries that trade products and services most successfully are those that amass the biggest surpluses in those products and services. The opposite propositions logically hold the impact of running deficits in various sectors.

As it happens, the trade balance figures don’t show or presage any apocalypse for America’s metals-using industries, either. During the first four months of 2017, their cumulative trade deficit with the rest of the world increased by 10.56 percent on year. For the comparable period this year, the deficit’s year-to-date growth rate was faster: 11.64 percent. But clearly, this trade shortfall didn’t grow much faster.

The comparison with trade deficits for manufacturing as a whole is instructive as well. During January-April, 2017, this trade gap increased by 10.19 percent on year. During January-April, 2018, the figure was 10.85 percent.

So the metals-using industries’ trade deficit did grow faster during both periods than the shortfall for manufacturing as a whole. But the difference in the rate of acceleration has been trivial. In the metals-using sectors, the deficit during the first four months of 2018 grew 1.10 times faster than it grew during the first four months of 2017. For manufacturing as a whole, the deficit during the first four months of 2018 grew 1.06 times faster than during the same period in 2017.

I’d be the last to argue that this situation will never change. The Trump metals tariffs haven’t been imposed very long. Moreover, they’ve been phased in, so the full impact of their final (for now!), most sweeping version hasn’t yet been felt.  

Nonetheless, the effects could also be swamped by the benefits metals-using sectors have gained from the new corporate tax cuts and the regulatory relief offered by the Trump administration – two policies that industry as a whole has hailed enthusiastically as major boosters of competitiveness.

What should be unmistakably clear, though, is that claims that U.S. metals-using industries are already suffering from the Trump steel and aluminum are no better than Fake News – and deserve nothing more than scorn from all fair-minded readers.

Making News: Back on National Radio Tonight Talking Trump and China – & More!

Tags

China, Gordon G. Chang, Making News, The Daily Beast, The John Batchelor Show, The Washington Post, Trade, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that I’m scheduled to return to John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show tonight to discuss the latest – and arguably the strangest – twists and turns in President Trump’s China trade policy.  Click here to listen live on-line to what’s sure to be a lively segment with John, co-host Gordon G. Chang, and me at 10 PM EST.

Also, Gordon has been good enough to quote my views in two articles he published on this subject yesterday .  The first, a Washington Post op-ed focused on the threat posed by China’s predatory policies to the global trade system. You can read it at this link.

The second, a column for TheDailyBeast.com, analyzed the President’s bizarre decision to let off the legal hook a Chinese telecommunications entity convicted of violating American sanctions on countries like North Korea and Iran. (I refuse to use the word “company,” or “business” when describing these outfits because they have nothing to do with free market capitalism as practiced in the United States or anywhere else in the world.) 

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.