On the menu today: We always knew that the populist Donald Trump was not a free-market libertarian when it came to most economic issues, particularly trade. But few expected that 100 days into his first term, he would be echoing Vermont senator and socialist Bernie Sanders in hand-waving away limitations on consumer choices and suggesting that it’s better for Americans to have fewer options on the store shelves when they go shopping. Nor is it often you see an American president shrugging off the prospect of consumers seeing higher prices when they pick among those more limited options. In other news, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledges to finally unravel the mystery of “chemtrails.”
Trump Fine with Limiting Consumer Options
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, in an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, way back on May 26, 2015:
The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.
Oh, did we conservatives mock the backwards-minded socialist Sanders for this, and deservedly so.
As Howie Carr put it, “Bernie supports your right to choose, unless you want to choose your own deodorant or running shoe. He supports diversity, except in the antiperspirant aisle. When the Sanderistas win, it will be Mayday for Almay. On foreign policy, he’s a dove with no use for Dove.”
Let’s just get the obvious joke out of the way: Bernie Sanders’s economic philosophy stinks.
The variety of deodorants and sneakers in America has absolutely no connection with child hunger in the United States. (Americans are a strikingly generous people, giving $557.16 billion to charitable causes in 2023.) Our old friend Kevin Williamson characterized it as “dark age economics”:
The first falsehood is that the proliferation of choices in consumer goods is correlated with poverty, among children or anybody else, which is flatly at odds with practically all modern human experience. The reality is precisely the opposite: Poverty is worst where consumers have the fewest choices, e.g., in North Korea, the old Soviet Union, the socialist paradise that is modern Venezuela, etc. The second falsehood is that choice in consumer goods represents the loss of resources that might have gone to some other end — that if we had only one kind of sneaker, then there would be more food available for hungry children.
Beyond that, it was downright Marxist and deranged that Sanders could look at American life in the year 2015 and somehow deem the variety of deodorants and sneakers as a major problem that the federal government needed to solve. Look, when corporate America comes up with a dud of a product — New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, the Evian Water bra — consumers register their disapproval by not buying it, and sooner or later, the company stops making the product. If Nike makes a type of sneaker that nobody wants to buy, they stop manufacturing it. If Old Spice makes a deodorant that nobody likes, they stop selling it.
I’m not saying corporate America always gets it right; after all, Fox canceled Firefly. But this flawed system of different companies developing different products competing in the market, and letting the customer decide, gets it right way more often than any centrally planned system where the likes of Bernie “I don’t believe in charities” Sanders get to decide what products companies are allowed to sell to you.
You might be wondering why I’m talking about a Bernie Sanders quote from a decade ago. It’s because the current president of the United States is starting to sound like Sanders.
Taking questions during a cabinet meeting, President Trump shrugged off the possibility of empty shelves or limited selection as a result of a trade war with China:
I told you before, they’re having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. Uh, they made a trillion dollars when, with Biden, a trillion dollars even a trillion one with Biden, selling us stuff — much of it we don’t need. You know, somebody said, “oh the shelves are going to be open.” Well maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.
This is a really, really bad defense of the likely economic consequences of the tariffs and trade war with China. Remember, the ships stopped leaving from China to America’s West Coast ports, and the amount of trucks leaving Los Angeles last week was comparable to Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, usually the lowest-volume days of the year.
(NR’s Dominic Pino, appearing in the Washington Post, continuing our gradual expansion into the op-ed page of that newspaper: “The lag created by the speed of ocean transit and inventories means that Americans have hardly begun to feel the pain tariffs will cause.”)
Nobody voted for Donald Trump because they thought there was too much variety to choose from on store shelves. No one voted for fewer options or because goods were too cheap. Quite the opposite, in fact. Exit polls indicated that 68 percent of voters characterized the economy as “not good” or “poor.” Twenty-two percent of voters said inflation had caused their family “severe hardship” in the past year, and 53 percent said it had caused “some hardship.”
You don’t have to agree with everything University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers has ever said to concur with the point that we want Americans to be able to afford to buy more, not less:
If people can afford to buy fewer dolls, that idea, how much you can afford to buy with the income you have, is a concept that we economists call “real income.” Sometimes we call it GDP as well. Real income is what we’re trying to build, to build the spending power of American households. And so, in that example he just said, the real income of American households, your spending power, your material well-being, is going to fall. You know when we see real income fall, we call that a recession. . . .
Look it’s fine for a billionaire to joke about this. And maybe he doesn’t care, but some of us have kids! And even those of us who have don’t have kids realize the same forces that make plastic from China more expensive, make machinery for manufacturing firms just as expensive. And you wouldn’t see the president say, “Oh, you’re going to make do with two machines instead of 30.” This is economic vandalism and he’s harming people’s quality of life.
We just went through the post-Covid supply-chain disruptions in 2021 and 2022. This is not ancient history. They added to the sense of economic pain during the Biden presidency, which is one of the reasons Joe Biden was a one-term president. And here’s President Trump, shrugging off the prospect of empty shelves.
As I say from time to time, “The more intensely someone tells Trump not to stick a fork in an electric socket, the more Trump lunges to jab it in there, just to prove he can.” You can’t save a man whose self-destructive instincts manifest with such metronomic regularity.
Beyond that, those of us who say we want the United States to consciously uncouple from China economically were never that focused on Barbie dolls made there. (Mattel toys are also made in Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and Thailand.)
No, we’re more worried about U.S. reliance on Chinese exports of rare earth metals, antimony, and (to a lesser degree than a half-decade ago) pharmaceuticals. We also have good reason to want to eliminate Chinese software and hardware on internet-linked electric devices, including those in motor vehicles.
Three years ago, after the pandemic had laid bare the world’s vulnerability to supply-chain disruptions, the U.S. government designated a large swath of the periodic table of elements — 50 minerals in all — as “critical.”
The United States obtains more than half of them, including a category of 17 minerals known as “rare earths,” mostly from China. And this week, China tightened its export restrictions on six rare earths, all but halting U.S. access to new supplies. . . .
According to the Defense Department, every F-35 fighter contains around 900 pounds of rare earth materials. Some submarines need more than 9,200 pounds of the materials.
The U.S. uses antimony for armor-piercing ammunition, night-vision goggles, infrared sensors, and precision optics. According to CSIS, “The United States has mined no antimony since the closure of the Sunshine Mine in Idaho in 2001. Today, the United States meets 18 percent of demand through the recycling of lead-acid batteries but is otherwise import reliant on China (63 percent), Belgium (8 percent), India (6 percent), and Bolivia (4 percent).”
As I’ve noted in this newsletter periodically, the U.S. is not as reliant on Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturing as we were when Covid hit; about 85 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used in U.S.-consumed medicines are produced in either the U.S. or Europe. That’s the good news; the bad news is that according to Fortune magazine, the U.S. “gets nearly all of its supply of common over-the-counter pain medications from China,” including “more than 90 percent of the supply of anti-inflammation steroid hydrocortisone . . . as well as 70 percent of acetaminophen and 45 percent of the U.S.’s penicillin.” Even worse, “Nearly 90 percent of U.S. antibiotics rely on Chinese-made active pharmaceutical ingredients.”
It’s fair to wonder if we need tariffs — currently 124.1 percent — on Barbies, Hot Wheels cars, Legos, and other toys made in China.
As we know, Trump will grab any argument at hand, even if he contradicted it moments earlier. This is how on January 29, 2024 — when he had been out of office for three years — he could jump on Truth Social and declare: “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP.”
And then yesterday, when the markets plunged after a lousy GDP report — hey, who warned you about that? — after being in office for 100 days, Trump could insist, “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th.”
I don’t think you’ll hear a lot of Republicans criticizing the president for asserting that it’s a good thing if America’s little girls will have a choice of two more expensive dolls instead of the larger variety of less expensive dolls they’re used to seeing. When Bernie Sanders says it, it’s appalling and worth mocking. When Trump says it, every good Republican is obligated to avert his eyes, apparently.
Your Health and Human Services Secretary, America
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appearing in a town hall event with Dr. Phil McGraw, Tuesday:
Questioner: My name is Emily, and my biggest concern is the stratospheric aerosol injections that are continuously peppered on us every day — bromium, aluminum, strontium. It’s sprayed in our skies all day long. and I know you’ve talked to Dane Wigington about this. He seems to be one of the experts in the field—
Phil McGraw: Is there a question?
Questioner: Yes, how do we stop it?
Kennedy: That is — is not happening in my agency. You know, we don’t do that. It’s, it’s done, we think, by DARPA and a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel so you know those materials are put in jet fuel. We — I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it and holding them accountable.
“Chemtrails” are the belief that the condensation trails you see behind high-altitude jetliners are part of a deliberate effort to put chemicals in the atmosphere; the conspiracy theories often suggest a sinister motive behind the spraying of the chemicals. (It’s probably the work of the Stonecutters.)
DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is part of the U.S. Department of Defense. Does Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth want to address the secretary of Health and Human Services accusing one of his agencies of spraying the skies with dangerous chemicals?
ADDENDUM: Last night, Kamala Harris made her, er, allegedly widely anticipated return to national politics, declaring Trump’s second term has already created a “constitutional crisis.”
I can’t help but notice that for a woman who reportedly is interested in being the next governor of California, she doesn’t talk about state issues much. We keep getting told that she doesn’t see being governor as a consolation prize for losing the 2024 presidential race, but . . . she sure is treating it like a consolation prize for losing the 2024 presidential race.