The Books of Bokonon

There are times when truth really is stranger than fiction. Want to know where Trump found the "intellectual" backing for his insanely awful tariff plan? Rachel Maddow spells it out. Turns out that Peter Navarro, Trump's crackpot trade hawk, cited an individual in his books named Ron Vara as his basis for promoting tariffs. Here's the thing: Ron Vara doesn't exist. He is a work of fiction by Navarro himself. Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro. Yep. In the academic world, we would refer to this as fraud. We shun those who commit fraud in the academy with good reason. In the current White House, fraud is considered a positive. Crikey.

Johnathan Last of The Bulwark goes into just how self-destructive the current White House regime truly is - in the process declaring the American Age is over . When we keep in mind that Trump's big idea for decades has been to reimpose the sorts of tariffs only a Gilded Age president would love (McKinley, anyone?). We now are dealing with a tariff regime that makes no sense. Ask the penguins in isolated Antarctic islands that got caught up in this mess - well actually don't because penguins cannot talk or trade goods and services.  The tariff regime has led the current Canadian Prime Minister (and likely future Prime Minister following elections in the near future) to declare the era of American leadership to be effectively over. As a great power, the US is finished. We just don't quite know the scope of what has been done just yet. The way the tariffs were rolled out had no real coherence. The end result in addition to possible (or probably) plunging all involved into a gl...

If Lawrence is soon to be off the air (his contract ends in June), he is going to go down swinging. Here is his take on Trump and the GOP's cowardice:

One of my friends covered the bankruptcy filing of Big Lots! a couple months back and I would advise you look at his post and accompanying videos for more context. The news today is that the deal that would have saved at least some Big Lots! outlets had fallen through , and the company is days away from simply liquidating remaining inventory and closing all currently opened locations. I am well aware of my city's Big Lots! store. It is located in the same shopping center as the pharmacy I go to. There are some other discount outlets located at the same shopping center, including a Ross. I had expected that our city's Big Lots! would have been closed regardless, as that seems to be what often happens when a major change goes through bankruptcy. That said, the store always looked busy - at least based on parking lot traffic - so perhaps it would have survived reorganization. Barring a miracle, I guess we will never know. The retail apocalypse isn't quit my usual beat, but si...

I have been following Bill McBride's Calculated Risk blog since around the time the housing bubble was getting close to bursting, leading to the Great Recession. So this is a blog that has mattered a lot to me for over a decade and a half at this point. Bill knows his stuff. I think real estate is more his beat, but he runs a good general purpose economics blog that serves my purpose. One thing Bill has done is to take a look at the economic outlook post-election. As is his custom, a week on, he has his initial assessment for the economy Trump is inheriting, and what Trump's policies might mean. In 2016, Bill was pretty sanguine about how the US economy would function with Trump in the White House. By 2019, he started to worry a bit, thanking (prematurely) his lucky stars that no major emergency, like a pandemic, had occurred. This time around, Bill is considerably less sanguine. At best, he's expecting that this latest Trump term will lead to increased budget deficits and ...

I am expecting the next Trump term to be even more of a Pool-Pah (a Bokononist term for a shit show, or God's wrath - whichever you prefer) than the last. That's such a safe bet that there isn't much point discussing it. I continue to read and hear hot takes on what went wrong for the Democratic Party and almost all of them are awful.  If the only lesson Democratic politicians learn from this election is aggressively tamp down on inflation regardless of the consequences, we're truly in trouble. Conventional wisdom among the pundit class that has done well during the neoliberal era is that economic stimulus should be kept to a minimum, much the way the Obama administration did during Obama's first term which was during the Great Recession and its aftermath. There was a recovery of sorts, but it never really felt like a recovery, and we as a party did suffer - maybe not in the sense of losing the White House in 2012, but we lost a lot of ground politically and we are ...

One thing we know about Donald Trump from his one term as president was that the dude never met a tariff he didn't love. After decades pursuing a relatively liberal trade policy, the US began to revert to a more protectionist approach to economic policy. Although the Biden Administration has not really made moves to massively expand tariffs, the administration has maintained many tariffs from the Trump era. If Trump darkens the White House once more, there is a good chance that we will experience tariffs the likes of which none of us have experienced in our lifetimes. It's a complex topic, and since I am not an economist (nor will I pretend to be) but rather a layperson who likes to be informed, I am always grateful to reality-based primers. Axios does just that .  So what do we need to know? A tariff makes it more expensive to import many of the goods we take for granted. Someone has to pay. Guess who that someone will be. It will be you and it will be me. We could try to coun...

I am in a bit of a Daily Show mood right now, so here are a few segments that caught my attention:   Jon Stewart has been on fire since his return to The Daily Show. Desi Lydic opens Tuesday's show with a roundup of GOP's gross and weird men. And Desi Lydic again pointing out that Trump really has a better future as a pitchman for infomercials than whatever the hell he thinks he's doing. Finally, Jon Stewart's interview with European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde. Jon Stewart has a knack of bringing onto his show some of the world's heavy hitters from various sectors that affect our lives and explores some of the big ideas that affect all our lives, with some humor added in for good measure.

Nancy LeTourneau's blog, Horizons, has a wonderful post on the truth about the impact immigrants have on small towns and cities throughout the US. I would call it required reading. JD Vance may have made some headlines about how he needed to make shit up Haitian immigrants to get Springfield OH in the news, but the truth is that journalists have been writing about how small communities have been impacted beneficially by immigrants for quite a while now. Read for yourself. I can add my own personal perspective. I lived in a town called Goodwell, OK during the aughts. It's practically in the middle of Oklahoma's panhandle. There is a small university there where I was employed for about a decade before I moved to my current location. Goodwell is located about 10 miles southwest of the Texas County seat, Guymon, OK. I very quickly learned a few things about Guymon and the surrounding area. At some point in the 1990s a meat packing facility owned by Seaboard Farms opened for b...

I do. It's the same worn-out argument that's used by our supposed "betters" every time the topic or minimum wage increases is so much as mentioned. This past spring, the minimum wage for fast food workers in California went up from $15.50 an hour to $20 per hour. The usual suspects predicted a practically apocalyptic forecast, including a drastic reduction in available jobs and hours. Here's the problem with that forecast: the mass layoffs never happened . If anything, the opposite occurred. In other words, your favorite McDonald's franchise is not going to be devoid of workers any time soon. It feels good to see the wage suppression crowd proven wrong, and even better to know some fast food workers have just a bit more financial security than they had only a few months ago.