Hello, and welcome back to your week in review of strong opinions, loosely held.
→ The U.S. economy contracts: Our GDP has started contracting at an annualized rate of 0.3 percent, after three years of robust growth. Usually there’s a logical reason for something like that (a pandemic? A housing market collapse? I take a week off from this column?), but this time it’s just a group of the most gin-drunk, sunburnt-from-golf economists and one stone-cold sober president who has decided to give chaos a try. One day, it’s big tariffs! The next day, maybe not. The day after, big tariffs but special exceptions for companies that donate to something helpful for Republicans. Then after that, it’s tariffs? Are you drunk? But yes, tariffs on China for sure.
Trump, who previously took credit for the stock market jump after the election, is now saying the economic slump is entirely on Biden: “This is Biden’s economy because we took over on January 20th. And I think you have to give us a little bit of time to get moving.”
Also, people need to stop complaining about rising costs due to tariffs, and simply buy less from China: “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,” said our degrowth president. Personally, my children only have simple toys made by Norwegians—hits such as a single unpainted wooden ball, and “books”—so I do support this part of the agenda. But the trouble is, the tariffs are on everything and everyone, even on the felted wool puppets I buy for my children that are itchy and stiff. That wooden ball already costs, I don’t know, $80? I already cannot justify this. Mike Pence, my progressive prince, agrees with me and writes this week in The Wall Street Journal:
The Trump administration can still get the economy back on track through free trade with free nations, even as the U.S. retains targeted tariffs on adversaries such as China. Instead of punishing free nations, we should rally them—uniting the democratic world in trade agreements that isolate China, not Europe and our Pacific allies.
Sweet Mike Pence. Remember when he was the chief villain of the Trump admin because he wouldn’t eat alone with a member of the opposite sex? The older I get, the more I agree with you there too, Mike.