The nation security argument for tariffs is a smokescreen. Dan Ikenson writes:
The president wanted the domestic authority to impose tariffs, and invoking Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 was a foolproof way to get it.
The statute gives the president the broadest possible discretion to define and mitigate a "national security threat." Because he can modify the tariffs or exempt countries from its reach practically on a whim, Trump has amassed the leverage he wants to bend U.S. trade partners to his will: Buy more U.S. products and I'll drop the tariffs! Curtail your exports and I'll modify the scope! Ramp up your NATO spending and I'll call off the dogs! […]
Trump's gunboat diplomacy […] presents a grave threat to the international trading system and the global economy. […]
[Trump] sees deficits as proof that the United States is losing at trade (and losing because the foreigners cheat). A winning policy, he believes, would produce trade surpluses. But, if that's true for the United States, it's true for all countries and since all countries can't run surpluses, trade can't possibly be an exercise in cooperation and mutually beneficial exchange. To Trump, trade is a survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all, Hobbesian struggle.
Trump's trade policy is all about asserting U.S. sovereignty over the presumed constraints of international law and using the leverage that comes from threatening to impede access to the world's largest market to compel foreign governments to take certain actions. Trump reckons that countries running surpluses with the United States have more to lose from a trade war, hence his assertion that trade wars are "good" and "winnable." While it may be true that the United States would be less weakened than other countries by a trade war (as the U.S. is much less dependent on trade than almost every other country—imports plus exports account for 27% of U.S. GDP as compared to a world average of 53%), the damage to the U.S. economy would be considerable nonetheless. But the very notion of feeling confident to threaten a trade war because U.S. "casualties" would be lighter than say China's or Europe's is anathema to any proper understanding of how trade and the global economy really work. Trade is not a zero-sum game, but a win-win, lose-lose proposition. Hurting our trade partners unequivocally hurts ourselves. Trump's predecessors understood this.
[Daniel J. Ikenson, "Trump's Gunboat Diplomacy Takes Aim at the Global Trading System," Cato institute, March 16]
Thirty-eight states have bigotry on the books. This idea from the Pioneer Institute is much better than eating green mashed potatoes:
This St. Patrick's Day, join us in calling for an end to bigoted, 19th-century anti-Irish and anti-Catholic legal barriers that block access to better schools for hundreds of thousands of underprivileged children. "Big Sacrifices, Big Dreams: Ending America's Bigoted Education Laws," a Pioneer Institute documentary production, seeks to raise public awareness about these constitutional amendments that deprive the neediest children in 38 states of the opportunity to attend private or parochial schools. Here in Massachusetts, the Anti-Aid or "Know-Nothing" amendments prevent more than 100,000 urban families with children in chronically underperforming districts from receiving scholarship vouchers and education tax credits that would open access to additional educational alternatives.
You can see the documentary at: https://pioneerinstitute.org/blog/honor-st-patricks-day-lets-end-bigoted-laws-block-school-choice/.
Is Obamacare now unconstitutional? Twenty states are now arguing that Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius leads to just that conclusion. Brad Schimel and Ken Paxton, attorneys general of Wisconsin and Texas, respectively, explain:
Back in 2012, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare in a 5-4 decision. Although the five justices in the majority searched the entire Constitution, the deciding vote—Chief Justice John Roberts—found only one basis for Congress' authority to enact the individual mandate: the power to levy taxes.
In his opinion, Roberts said that while Obamacare's mandate is best read as an unconstitutional requirement on Americans—which Congress has no authority to enact—its constitutionality could be salvaged as a "tax" because the mandate's associated tax penalties raise "at least some revenue." Roberts cited this raising of "some revenue" as being "the essential feature of any tax."
Last year, Congress repealed the individual mandate tax penalty, leaving only the unconstitutional mandate. This change rendered the individual mandate unconstitutional under Roberts' reasoning. After all, the mandate no longer raises "some revenue."
And without the mandate, the rest of the law falls.
President Barack Obama and the leaders of Congress made it very clear at the time that the individual mandate is the core of Obamacare. Without it, Obamacare cannot function as Congress and the Obama administration intended.
The Obama administration even told the Supreme Court that key parts of Obamacare would be invalid without the mandate. In other words, you cannot constitutionally separate the mandate from Obamacare's structure. If the individual mandate is now unconstitutional, the entire law must be struck down.
Texas and Wisconsin, joined by 20 states, filed a lawsuit in federal court earlier this month asking the federal courts to obey what the Supreme Court has already recognized and hold all of Obamacare unconstitutional.
[Brad Schimel and Ken Paxton, "Without the Individual Mandate's Tax, Obamacare Should Fall Apart in Court," The Daily Signal, March 15]
Congress, of course, could have repealed the whole thing last year. By repealing only the mandate tax, it chose to put the theory that Obamacare cannot work without an enforceable individual mandate to the test.
What think tanks can do. Arthur Brooks announced this week plans to step down as President of the American Enterprise Institute in the next year. In doing so, he issued a call to action for think tanks, universities, and the media to lead the way in bringing decency and seriousness back to policy discussions:
[W]hat worries me most today—not for AEI, but for America—is that the competition of ideas is under attack. Many would rather shut down debate than participate in it. Politicians from both parties try to discredit their opponents with name-calling and ad hominem attacks. On too many college campuses, people with the "wrong" viewpoints and ideas are unwelcome. Much of the mass media has become polarized, meaning readers and viewers on the right and left are never challenged in their conviction that the other side is made up of knaves and fools.
Americans must commit to stand athwart this trend. That doesn't mean advocating mushy moderation or abandoning strong policy positions. My AEI colleagues are warriors for democratic capitalism, here and all around the world. But we also fight for respectful debate and repudiate the holy war of derision on both left and right, which makes dialogue increasingly untenable.
Part of this stance is pragmatic—no one has ever been insulted into agreement. Further, we need opposing viewpoints to challenge our own. If we're wrong, the best way to learn it is through challenges from our friends on the other side of the issue. […]
Another threat to the world of ideas is arguably even more insidious: mediocrity through trivialization, largely from misuse of new media. […] Famous academics spend big parts of their days trading insults on Twitter. Respected journalists who suppress their own biases in their formal reporting show no such restraint on social media, hurting their and their organizations' reputations. When half-baked 280-character opinions and tiny hits of click-fueled dopamine displace one's hard-earned training and vocation, it's a lousy trade.
[Arthur C. Brooks, "Reflections on a Decade of Leading a Think Tank," Wall Street Journal, March 14]
Abstinence-only programs can work. The argument that they don't, advanced by the Guttmacher Institute, is wrong, writes Michael J. New:
Evidence clearly shows that teen sexual activity fluctuates. In fact, both the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) have found that teen sexual activity has been consistently declining since the 1990s. Data from the NSFG show that, between 1988 and 2015, the percentage of teenage boys who had ever had sex fell from 60 to 44 percent. During the same time period, the percentage of teenage girls who had ever had sex fell from 51 to 42 percent. Additionally, a recent study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that sexual activity among young adults has declined since 2010.
Contrary to media reports, some abstinence-only programs have been found effective. A 2010 a study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine analyzed over 600 African American middle-school students in the Philadelphia area. It found that students assigned to an abstinence-only program were less likely to engage in sexual activity than students randomly assigned to other groups, including a sex-education program that emphasized condom use. Similarly, a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health analyzed over 800 students from a predominantly African-American and Hispanic school district in Southeast Texas. It found that those students assigned to a sex-education program intended to delay sex were statistically less likely to have initiated sexual activity than a comparison group that attended regular health-education classes.
[Michael J. New, "Guttmacher Report Misleads on Abstinence-Only Education," National Review, March 13]
-
Comments
Post a Comment