Our Gutless Congress and Free Trading Penguins
I once wrote that our congressional politicians were gutless to let the republican AGs do the heavy lifting in confronting the excesses of the Biden Administration. Well it continues. Trump’s usurpation of Congress is apparent to all. Article I, the Constitution vests the “power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” in the Congress, not in the president. As a result, the president isn’t empowered to impose his “reciprocal” tariffs on all our trading partners. Yet Congress sits on its thumbs. Even the democrat AGs who are fond of suing Trump at every turn have not sued him on tariffs. Rather they seem content to try to defend their various constituents – LBGTQs, illegals, federal workers, bloated federal budgets and the green industrial complex. I know that the republicans in congress are afraid of Trump – except for Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, Thomas Massie, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins – which is why they are letting the president abrogate their powers. But why are the dems – who hate Trump’s guts – not suing him? Jasmine Crockett, Al Green, Hakeem Jeffries, AOC in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate are doing absolutely nothing to stop Trump. I want someone to kindly explain to me why.
The venerable Art Laffer has suggested an exit strategy for Trump – assuming that he is looking for one. Laffer once said that Trump at a G-7 meeting offered to drop all tariffs and subsidies if the other countries would do the same and there were no takers. He is now suggesting the same thing. He says that Trump “should give a globally televised address announcing to the world that the U.S. is ready to drop its tariffs and industry subsidies to zero tomorrow on any nation that does the same.” The only problem is that Israel has done exactly that and still has a Trump tariff of 17 percent. Singapore which does not impose any tariffs period yet has the Trump global minimum tariff of 10 percent. Singapore’s prime minister says that this minimum global tariff doesn’t appear to be open to negotiation. Vietnam has gone to zero but their tariff stays at 46 percent. So Dr Laffer, zero does not mean zero in Donald Trump’s world if a country has a trade surplus with the United States.
Again this is lunacy. How will Vietnam get its tariff down to zero? It must refuse to sell any goods to US customers past what it buys from us, dollar for dollar. Never mind that its per capita income is only a tenth of ours. It cannot even sell the goods to a third party because that third party will be hit with tariffs when it sells to US customers. That is supposed to be the reason why Trump’s tariffs extend to every bit of real estate on the planet. The democrats and their media exploded with mirth over tariffs imposed on uninhabited islands with only penguins. Even though this was clearly an error by the administration, commerce secretary Lutnick had to lie, saying it was to prevent a transfer of goods through those islands as if we would not know that a place with zero inhabitants could not sell us goods. Sorry Art but Trump does not want zero tariffs and zero subsidies, he wants a zero trade deficit which is impossible unless he can make American stop buying foreign goods.
(And thanks Lynne for the penquin)
haroldblackphd.com 