R.I.P. Francis, Mo, Jesse, and Pearl April 21, 2025 Too many people are dying. Pope Francis was the best pope ever, embodying what this atheist’s reading of the New Testament takes to be the true teachings of Christ — teachings we all should aspire to live by. What a contrast with his last official visitor . . . (“Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in January for assisting immigrants, saying their concerns about the Trump administration were due to the fear of losing federal funding.”) . . . or with our Two Corinthians President, a stable genius who throws rolls of paper towels to the needy, whose Easter message read: Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing — But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and a very happy Easter!!! Needless to say, I never met the Pope. But my brother-in-law-had-marriage-been-legal the priest met His Holiness on multiple occasions, so I’m delighted to think that I came within just one degree of separation from this wonderful man. Two other wonderful men we lost this month, days apart, were my college classmates: Stephen “Mo” Hanan was a tremendously talented actor/singer/everything. One of the privileges of charging no subscription fee for these posts is that I get to do self-indulgent things like telling you, who never knew him, that he will be missed. “Attention must be paid,” as it were . . . though Mo was far more “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” than “Death of a Salesman.” (“Stephen Mo Hanan sparkles as Pseudolous, the freedom-craving slave. His comic timing is impeccable,” raved the Fort Myers paper, “and he literally throws himself into the role, rolling about on the stage. His rubber face expresses delight, shock, dismay, lust, fear and all other shades of emotion in-between.”) Jesse Kornbluth was a spectacular friend whose passing made the New York Times: Jesse Kornbluth, Magazine Writer Who Covered Everything, Dies at 79. Kudos to Penelope Green, who never knew Jesse, for bringing him to life beautifully. And then — if you enjoy great writing — there’s the obit Jesse wrote for his mother Pearl. I never knew Pearl, but now I do. Rest in peace, one and all. Every day is a gift.
Exactly Backwards April 21, 2025 The way to cut the deficit is to (drumroll, please) INCREASE REVENUE and DECREASE SPENDING. (Duh.) The way to INCREASE REVENUE is to let the tax cuts for corporations and on personal income above $400,000 expire . . . and to fully fund the IRS to make sure people and corporations pay what they owe. (Not only would the IRS collect more revenue from delinquent auditees; it would also collect more from those it didn’t audit once word got around there was a real risk of penalties for underpayment.) –> INSTEAD, Trump and his cowed Republican senators have it exactly backwards: working to renew tax cuts for those who don’t need them . . . and to further cripple the IRS. It’s insane. On top of that, the unnecessary recession their tariffs are gliding us into — or possibly worse, if Smoot-Hawley is any guide — will cut tax revenues while raising safety-net outflows . . . thus worsening our deficits. The way to DECREASE SPENDING is not to decimate the government, allow children starve and disease to spread. It is to lower interest rates. (We spend hundreds of billions more on interest than on defense; a trillion more than on the global soft-power and moral high ground USAID provided us.) And the way to lower interest rates is to lower inflation (which Biden handed off to Trump at just a hair over the Fed’s 2% target). –> INSTEAD, Trump and his cowed Republican senators have it exactly backwards: raising inflation by imposing tariffs and by shrinking the labor supply through mass deportation. Meanwhile, the Trump team argue that cutting corporate taxes will create jobs. My brilliant friend Simon Yates, to whose new Substack I’ve just subscribed, explains why that’s wrong: Does Cutting the Corporate Tax Rate Create Investment? Probably not. As the Republicans discuss tax cuts an argument that’s inevitably going to appear is that cutting the tax rate for corporations will create economic growth, and jobs. The argument goes like this: If a company is considering doing ‘Thing A’ (let’s say, building a factory), then it will compare the financials of Thing A against some hurdle rate for investments, X. If Thing A does better than X, then do it. Otherwise not. Hence, if the tax rate is lower, Thing A will have better financials and a greater chance of beating the hurdle rate X. More factories will be built and more jobs created. The problem with this argument is that this isn’t really how companies make decisions. They don’t face absolute, binary decisions like “should we do Thing A or not?” but instead relative decisions like “should we do Thing A or Thing B?”. Thing B might be a very simple alternative like leaving the money in the bank. If the corporate tax rate drops, then this is also more attractive. The company will pay less tax on the interest it earns. So Thing A doesn’t gain any relative advantage. The factory isn’t more likely to be built. What is clear about reducing the corporate tax rate is that less money will go to the government and more will go to shareholders. For somebody like me who’s lucky to be affluent and a shareholder — hey, that’s nice, thank you! But for workers who are looking for a job, beware. The people making this argument don’t have your interests at heart. Join Indivisible. Don’t sell your puts. Have a great week.
David Brooks: MUST READ April 19, 2025April 19, 2025 What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must. But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short. Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice. . . . We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican. It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power. So worth reading in full. Join Indivisible!
Holy Cow. Talk About Speaking Truth To Power! April 17, 2025 If you haven’t already seen it, this was last week’s opening TED Talk, by Carole Cadwalladr. Wow. Wow. Wow. Join Indivisible.
Gold And Frozen Vegetables April 16, 2025 “We’re going to get the prices down. Groceries, cars, everything. While working Americans catch up, we are going to put a temporary cap on credit card interest rates at 10%.” — Candidate Trump, September 29, 2024 It was smart to say this, because if he had said we’d get higher prices and a recession . . . falling 401k’s and a possible depression . . . pardoned January 6 cop beaters and a cut-off of aid to starving children . . . and an alcohol-challenged Fox Weekend News host heading the Pentagon — fewer people might have voted for him. (Not to mention chaos at Social Security, “disappearing” people without due process, and so many likely violations of the Emoluments Clause it’s clear he doesn’t take seriously his oath of office.) But he’s there now and already has his eye on a third term. It’s beginning to seem a bit monarchical. Speaking of which . . . How Trump and His ‘Gold Guy’ Are Redecorating the White House The president is making the world’s most famous residence more like Mar-a-Lago, his gilded Florida club The Government Publishing Office, which prints the official presidential portraits that hang in hundreds of federal buildings, received an unusual request from the White House last month. President Trump wanted his portrait to glimmer. The White House asked that Trump’s portrait, along with Vice President’s JD Vance’s, be printed with a golden border that would catch the light, an administration official said. The reprint required metallic gold ink and a specialized printer. And it delayed the completion of the portraits, some of which had already been printed with a more understated white border, according to an internal government document outlining the request. . . . Way to root out waste and abuse, boys! (Another nice touch — skewing more dictatorial than monarchical — would be the $100 million military parade being considered for his birthday.) FOOD NEWS Too Good To Go: End Food Waste! Too Good To Go makes it easy to make a positive impact on the planet while saving money on your favourite foods. That’s why it’s been named as Winner in the ‘2023 Cultural Impact’ category at the prestigious annual Apple App Store Awards. With the #1 app for reducing food waste, you can save tasty unsold snacks, takeaway meals and ingredients straight from shops, cafes, grocery stores and restaurants in your area – all at an unbeatable price. Lifehacker’s “New Favorite Way to Get Takeout.” How did I now know about this??? And wait! How did I not know about this??? 3 Reasons to Love Frozen Fruit and Vegetables They’re often cheaper . . . MORE nutritious . . . more convenient . . . and (my own, fourth, bonus reason) you’re less likely to waste them, the way I sometimes find myself having to throw out stuff that went bad before I got around to eating it.
Total Power, Harvard, DOGE, Puts, And A Dead Outlaw April 15, 2025April 15, 2025 What Hannah Arendt saw in Hitler’s Germany, we can see in Trump’s America As a descendant of German immigrants, from college on I devoured histories of the rise of fascism to grasp how the cultured and educated democracy of my great grandparents could succumb so tragically. I never got it; I had an American’s complacency that made Germans’ complicity incomprehensible. Decades later, I do understand. Because it is happening here. Comparing Hitler and the Nazis to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement is of course fraught. Trump’s world war is a bloodless one over trade; his lawless roundups of migrants and domestic enemies aim to deport, not exterminate. And yet the parallels are undeniable. . . . Just as this country’s Republican Old Guard, Germany’s conservative establishment initially thought it could control Hitler, so politicians and business leaders didn’t ostracize or condemn him. But he played them, just as Trump has mastered Republican “leaders,” parlaying his popular appeal and political ruthlessness into total power. Read in full and see if you agree. One thing for sure: He likes violence. Trump and Some of His Cabinet Members Attend U.F.C. Fight in Miami . . . In the second fight, Bryce Mitchell, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump for many years, was beaten by Jean Silva, a Brazilian. Earlier this year, Mr. Mitchell faced a firestorm of criticism after he praised Adolf Hitler as a “good guy” who “fought for his country.” (In fairness to Mitchell: some believe “Hitler did some good things.“) DOGE GETS IT WRONG Elon Musk now says his group will produce only 15 percent of the savings it promised. But even that estimate is inflated with errors and guesswork. And yet they’ve managed to wreak havoc on everything from Social Security and the V.A. to USAID and the IRS (whose slashed enforcement budget will increase the deficit). His trillion-dollar goal was preposterous from the start. HARVARD GETS IT RIGHT In defiance President Trump, President Garber concludes his letter: We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world. Worth reading in full . . . and, if you have time, watching Lawrence O’Donnell (from 2:45 to 15:45) remind us what Harvard has done for the world these past 389 years. PUTS A savvy Wall Street currency trader thinks puts are too expensive now and that “we’ll get a rally when he removes or vastly reduces the China tariffs which will happen sooner rather than later.” So maybe wait for that rally and buy them when they’re cheaper. And yet he tells me not to sell my December 2026 DIA 430 puts or my June 2025 SPY puts. (One of you asked which i had bought. Now you know.) He shares my view that there’s a great deal of risk in the market. As you know if you watched yesterday’s Ray Dalio clip. DEAD OUTLAW The thing is: it’s based on a true story. Try not to know any more than that when you go see it. (Well, know that it’s a musical and that there’s no intermission.) I was in the back row of the balcony at last night’s first preview — $48! — and I loved it. DON’T FORGET TO FILE YOUR 2024 TAXES TODAY OR AN EXTENSION . . . AND YOUR FIRST QUARTERLY ESTIMATED 2025 PAYMENT, IF DUE
Governed By Confused Intuition April 13, 2025 Wall Street Journal editorial board member Holman W. Jenkins Jr. — who in the middle of Trump’s first term was paraphrased as saying “Trump can do anything and I’ll support it” — now writes: Trump Wants to Be Impeached Again. It’s already in the cards thanks to his ill-founded trade war, no matter how that war plays out. . . . A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning. It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners. . . . Mr. Trump’s great achievement was his 2024 re-election, a rebuke to the injustices and insults meted out to him and his fans since 2016, some of which were even real. However, no consensus or even significant coalition exists for trying to force into existence a new American “golden age” with tariffs, which anyway is like asking a chicken to give birth to a lioness. He invented this mission out of his own confused intuition. But if we impeach him, could we please impeach them both? The Vice President says “peasants” and here’s what the Chinese hear (46 seconds). Fareed: “Complexity breeds corruption, and the tariff system is now tailor-made for both.” . . . The India I grew up in was a country riddled with tariffs, high barriers designed to protect the country’s domestic industry and shield it from what was regarded as unfair foreign competition. It produced stagnation, poverty and lots of corruption, thoroughly politicizing the economy. No business of any size in India could survive without a good relationship with the government. When I got to America, I was thrilled to see that most businesses went about their work with little care as to who was in the White House. But now I watch tech pioneers give interviews slavishly extolling Trump’s genius and Wall Street titans race to post North Korea-style congratulations to the president for his brilliance in rescuing the economy from his own actions, and I wonder, what country am I living in? If you saw Ray Dalio on Meet the Press, you know he thinks we could be headed for a global depression. I have the happy gene, but that hasn’t kept me from buying puts.
Everything He Touches Dies April 11, 2025April 11, 2025 It’s not as though we weren’t warned. Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever. That was published in 2018. This was published a few days after Trump won, digesting Timothy Snyder’s warning: Is Trump trying to kill us? Authoritarian expert says yes. Here’s how. (Professor Snyder has since moved to Canada.) Yesterday, The Economist gave us The Age of Chaos: How Trump’s Incoherent Trade Policy Will Do Lasting Damage. Just a few months ago, The Economist dubbed our economy “the envy of the world.” Because — despite its problems — it was. And here we are today with The Third-Worlding of America by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. Subhead: How to destroy 80 years of credibility in less than 3 months. Putin is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams. (The tariffs, and Russia’s singular exemption from them, are the least of it — though he likes them, too.) But is this what anyone here wanted? What any of us voted for? Would they have voted for this if they had known? Yes, 24% of American citizens voted for him (the rest voted for Kamala, were too young, or just didn’t bother). But I’m wondering what proportion of that 24% think the economy is better now, and that the country has a brighter future, with a more competent people running the government and its myriad departments and agencies, than when he took office. Consumer confidence has plunged to its second lowest level since they began measuring it 73 years ago. I hope you found time to read yesterday’s warning: On April 20th, 2025, the United States may Cross the Point of No Return > As crazy and unthinkable as all this is, remember how crazy and unthinkable the Ukrainians thought a Russian invasion was. Putin was very straightforward in assuring them and the world he would not invade. He was just conducting military exercises. > Is it any crazier or more unthinkable than that Kash Patel runs the FBI? Before setting foot there for the first time, he was a podcaster selling K$h-branded wine and tie pins and “an elixir,” Rachel reports, that could reverse your COVID vaccination status in case you had foolishly gotten the jab. Acknowledging that his authorship of a children’s book extolling King Donald and his charity work on behalf of the January 6th hostages might not make him the ideal candidate to lead the world’s premier law enforcement agency, he promised to appoint as his deputy someone from within . . . but instead hired a Fox News Host Permanently Banned From YouTube who had no experience but required a full security detail 24/7, which no prior FBI deputy director had ever had, even when he was inside FBI headquarters. Because this is an administration focused on eliminating waste and abuse as it hires the best people to fight crime. The only possible crime here is that I could not find Rachel’s segment lambasting Patel in its original form. It is too funny. Reacting to the April 20th doom-sayers, Oliver Kornetzke offers this message: I keep seeing these anxious posts bubbling up from the swamp of doom-scrolls, clutching their pearls about April 20th—the day, supposedly, when the Trump regime will dust off the Insurrection Act like a vintage bottle of fascism, smash it open on the table, and toast to martial law. Constitutional rights? Suspended. Civil liberties? Vaporized. America? Repackaged as a theocratic police state with a God complex and a meth addiction. And sure, the evidence pointing in that direction? Compelling. Chilling, even. But let’s not confuse “possible” with “inevitable” . . . and let’s certainly not confuse “dangerous” with “invincible.” This is not some fucking Marvel movie where the villain has a flawless plan. No, this is a clown car of egomaniacal sycophants with the strategic acumen of a toddler playing Risk while hopped up on Pixy Stix. . . . [So] here’s my answer: Don’t. Fucking. Comply. You want to know what non-compliance looks like? It looks like whatever the hell you want it to look like. It’s not about heroism or martyrdom. It’s about being a magnificent, ungovernable pain in the ass. It’s about weaponizing inconvenience, absurdity, and joy against a system that demands fear and obedience. Throw a wrench in the works—everywhere, all the time. Go limp when they try to arrest you. Laugh like a lunatic in the face of their solemn tyranny. Fill their inboxes with existential poetry or pictures of your morning post-coffee porcelain bowl masterpieces. Tape absurd messages in public places: “Authoritarianism gives you hemorrhoids.” Get petty. Get weird. Flush their toilet paper. Release crickets in inconvenient places. Spoil their scripts, trip their rhythm, yank the narrative from their hands. Join a general strike. Practice the black cat sabotage—cut their supply chains not with violence but with broken protocol and creative disorder. Don’t show up. Don’t respond. Don’t cooperate. Don’t validate their authority with your silence. If you’re going to get arrested, make it for being a glorious bastard who refuses to play their game. Make a mockery of it. Because here’s the ugly truth they don’t want you to hear: authoritarianism only works when the people allow it to work. It’s a performance, a bluff, a collective hypnosis. Break the spell. Break the frame. Mock it. Undermine it. Set it on fire (proverbially) with your refusal to kneel. But here’s the thing—this has to be everywhere. Everyone. If you sit back, clutch your pearls, and hope someone else will jump first—you’re part of the problem. This isn’t Putin’s Russia (yet). We don’t need a handful of martyrs; we need a flood. A tsunami of “nope.” A wildfire of “fuck you.” We need resistance so widespread, so creatively chaotic, so utterly unmanageable, that the regime cracks under the weight of its own overreach. History is watching. But more importantly, your children are watching. And if you let a pack of psychotic Bible-thumping oligarchs jackboot over your rights while you nervously refresh Twitter and do nothing—then don’t be surprised when the future looks back and calls you exactly what you were: a coward. Choose better. Be bold. Be clever. Be feral. And above all—DO NOT COMPLY. And let me be crystal clear here: NO violence. None. Not a shred. That gives them the excuse they’re desperately craving to justify tyranny. What we need is coordinated, irritating, clever-as-hell, petty-as-fuck, infuriating noncompliance. Be a stone in their shoe. Be sand in their eyes. Be a bureaucratic migraine. Drive them nuts—but never give them the moral high ground. This is about outsmarting them, not becoming them. Have a great weekend. Don’t sell your puts. Or your HYMC, PRKR, ANIX, SQNS, CNF, UNIT, or whatever other crazy speculations I’ve recently mentioned, if you bought them with money you can truly afford to lose.
What To Do Now — And What Might Happen A Week From Sunday April 10, 2025 Dave P.: “I have a friend who manages a small portfolio of stocks for me. A recently sent me a market commentary, understandably focused on the tariff issue. My response: My own thinking is that the tariffs, though significant per se, are just a sliver of the angst the market is now processing. They are just one weapon of potential self-harm for America, its people, and its corporations, and the valuation of those corporations. If Trump tomorrow declares victory, says every country in the world has kowtowed, they all have offered “great deals” which he graciously has accepted, so consider Liberation Day as being on rollback, the market will celebrate temporarily.* But it soon will reprocess the bigger message, that the Administration’s malevolence, mendacity, fecklessness, recklessness in matters of security as well as finance, incompetence, blindness, distrust of science, cruelty, pathological absence of empathy, disloyalty to friends, cozying up to tyrants, etc., etc. etc., are a recipe for catastrophes that to most remain unimaginable. *Someday, likely in the near future, the stock market will have a very large gain. Surely we don’t want to miss that! And that gain should signal “all clear,” right? Well, not exactly. If we look at the 20 best one-day gains in the DJIA, fully 40% of them, 8 separate days, occurred after the October 28, 1929 crash, and before the ultimate bear market low, 89% lower than pre-crash, in July, 1932. Had you bought following any of those big up days, you would have lost at least 16% to the bottom (from whence it would take another 22 years to recoup the pre-crash level). Excluding that (16)% day, buying at the close of any of those other 7 big up days would have led to losses of (29)-(84)%. Lest you think these archaic examples are long-bygone, two of the market’s 7 best single days occurred in October, 2008, following the commencement of the bear market foreshadowed by the September Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The ultimate declines from each of those closing levels was (29)-(31)% to the March 6, 2009 closing low. “I sent that Monday.” → Two days later — yesterday — we got that “very large gain.” Far from breathing a sigh of relief, I’d take yesterday’s market leap as an opportunity to sell some of your holdings . . . or, if they’d be subject to large capital gains taxes, buy some long-term puts like the ones I suggested last month. That’s what I’d do now. (Late yesterday, I bought more puts.) Of course, I’d love Dave’s caution — and my own — to prove unwarranted. Yet it‘s very hard to see how this ends well In the best-case scenario, where Trump gets countries to lower their tariffs, that will be nice and allow him to declare victory. (Europe can “slash” its from 1.7% tariff to zero, but can he get them to lower it below zero?) But even then, so much damage has been done. In a few short weeks, he has transformed America from a rock of stability into an unpredictable, unreliable, flailing bully, whose leader says — in public! on camera! — that countries are “coming to kiss [his] ass.” Publicly humiliating people — or nations — has a strange way of making them hate you. (Obama’s mocking Trump at the 2011 Correspondents’ dinner may have persuaded him to run; Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” remark five years later may have cost her the election.) Having most of the world hate you — and distrust you — is probably not a great long-term strategy for success. Putin and Xi are thrilled. The stock market — and bond market — not so much. And of course the idea that we have 50 or 100 million Americans available to replace the labor of the 50 or 100 million foreign workers who sew our clothes and assemble our iPhones, make our umbrellas, toys, and Christmas tree ornaments — and make the merchandise Trump sells his followers — is just ridiculous. Our work force is only 170 million, of whom 8 million are unemployed. And Trump plans to deport millions of workers who pick our fruit, trim our hedges, build our homes, and care for our elderly, which will further shrink the pool available to do the work the Chinese and Vietnamese (and the penguins he is tariffing) currently do for us. How we even get through the next 19 months to the mid-terms is not clear . . . let alone to 2028. And does anyone doubt that he aspires to the models of strong men like Putin and Xi who rule for life? Which brings me to what one guy thinks will happen April 20. I doubt it will come that fast if it comes at all. Maybe in May or June or July?) But: a) It’s an interesting read. b) The more people aware of this fantastical scenario, the less likely it is to happen. c) It’s happened lots of other places. (Have I ever mentioned the book that Trump, famously a non-reader, long kept by his bedside?) So please read this: On April 20th, 2025, the United States may Cross the Point of No Return
Oh Boy, Oh Boy! Listen Or Watch April 8, 2025 Last night’s Lawrence O’Donnell, if you missed it, was a home run. Here is the first segment, which seems to be unrestricted. To watch the full episode, you need to jump through a hoop or two . . . but can listen to it all without commercials here. It seems Musk may actually be doing something good, pressing Trump for free trade, not tariffs. So far, that’s been in private. But look what his brother Kimbal Musk, a Tesla and SpaceX board member, posted: Who would have thought that trump was actually the most high tax president in generations? Through his tariff strategy, Trump has implemented a structural, permanent tax on the American consumer. Even if he is successful in bringing jobs on shore through the tariff tax, prices will remain high and the tax on consumption will remain in the form of higher prices because we are simply not as good at making all things. A tax on consumption also means less consumption. Which means fewer jobs. Should turn leads to less consumption. Then even fewer jobs. America has incredible strengths. We should play to those strengths and not be forced to play to our weaknesses. Same with the rest of the world. So Peter Navarro (recently released from prison and again a key advisor to the convicted felon in the Oval office) may not win the tariff policy battle after all. He bases a lot of his trade theory on the work of economist Ron Vara — just read his book and you’ll see — but it turns out, as Rachel Maddow explains*, economist Ron Vara does not exist. He is just an anagram for Navarro. So the expert on whom he bases his world view that currently threatens global depression is . . . himself. Maybe economic sanity will prevail? One can hope, anyway. *And yes, of course, Rachel is almost always, a must-watch, too.