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Random Thoughts #70

Renaming stuff, illegal Koreans, the Fed nominee and genius quarterbacks

The president seems fond of renaming things. There is the Gulf of Mexico, now the Gulf of America. Let’s see how long that name change lasts once he leaves office. Now the Department of Defense is the Department of War. Why? Who knows? Again let’s see how long that name says around too. Renaming is a hassle and very costly. Defense (er, war) secretary Hegseth had the title on his door plaque changed. But that change must be made on everything throughout the Pentagon and the military. Seems like it will cost billions of dollars to effect the change throughout the over 700,000 (!) facilities Defense (er, war) has around the world. Are those billions coming out of the defense (er, war) budget that are slated for other stuff – like ammunition?

Trump is reverting back to the name that the Defense department had from the inception of the country until 1947 when Harry Truman renamed the department. What I don’t understand was Trump’s statement calling for the change. He said “We won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to DOD. So, we’re going Department of War.” What “woke” is he talking about? Harry Truman was “woke”?

Speaking of “woke” is Trump going to demand that we rename the black boxes in aircraft?

Did you see where Abrego Garcia’s lawyers claim that there are twenty two countries where he cannot be deported for fear for his life? Twenty-two? ICE was going to deport him to Uganda where he says he will be persecuted and tortured. Maybe he should seek refuge in Zohran Mamdani’s family compound. So ICE picked a country not on the list and is sending him to Eswatini. Yes that is a real country. What I want to know is whether Garcia will be incarcerated there.

When I saw news of the ICE raid at the Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia that arrested 475 illegals, I immediately thought that these must be Mexican construction workers. But no. They were South Koreans. The news reports were never clear what these workers were doing and how did they get here. Surely they did not come across the southern border. If they were flown here by Hyundai or LG, didn’t they have to have passports and visas to enter the country? Surely they weren’t all somehow spirited into the country without anyone knowing about it. Homeland Security said that the illegals had either crossed the border illegally, overstayed their visas, or arrived on visas that didn’t allow them to work. Duh. 

Well let’s eliminate the crossing the border illegally thing. Overstaying the visa excuse is a probability as is the “visas that didn’t allow them to work.” If the Koreans were here to supervise the construction of the plants or to train Americans in the use of the equipment – which I assume was Korean, why didn’t they get their visas renewed and/or why didn’t they have the appropriate visas? Some politicians are claiming that the Koreans were putting the Koreans to work in the plants rather than employing native American workers, saying that employing Koreans was cheaper than hiring Americans. But the Koreans are saying that they are not displacing Americans because there are no Americans to displace given the paucity of technically trained natives. If that were true, then wouldn’t Hyundai-LG seek to make these workers legal? It’s all very confusing.

Stephen Miran who Trump nominated to fill the remaining months of Fed governor Kugler’s term says that he will not resign from the Council of Economic Advisors. Rather he will take a leave. This makes a mockery of Fed independence and Miran saying that he will not be compromised is obviously lying. Does anyone really think that if he doesn’t do Trump’s bidding that he will get his old job back?

There is a superficially compelling article in the Wall Street Journal why boys are better at math than girls.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/do-sports-explain-the-math-gender-gap-eecb0dbe

Its all about sports and numbers. “The better one understands a sport, the greater one’s appreciation of its numbers. Statistics exist for each game—all derived by mathematical calculations. Football’s yards per play and points per game. Baseball’s batting and earned run averages. Basketball players’ points and rebounds per game. All these observations apply to other sports too.” Well there are very simple empirical tests to confirm or disconfirm this conjecture. First, do athletes have higher math scores than nonathletes? This should apply both to female athletes too. I know that the author will say that its not just the athletes he is talking about but that more boys follow sports than do girls. Yet a simple test would be to look at the math scores of girls who play sports versus girls who don’t. I don’t really anticipate that football players score higher on their math SATs but who knows? I would especially be interested in seeing the math scores of quarterbacks whose position is probably the most mentally demanding in all of sport.

Speaking of math, I was suspect that professional card players and gamblers are probably good at math.

If boys are better at math than girls then that’s damning with faint praise. Recall that most of my college seniors could not tell me what was 5 percent of $500.

Tariffs are taxes, tariffs are taxes.

The dismal August jobs report of only 22,000 jobs created continued the downward spiral of job creation during President Trump’s time in office. Since the initial reports always overstate reality, it is likely that job growth in August was negative. So is Trump going to fire the new head of BLS? I have a friend who says no, that Trump welcomes the poor jobs report so he can blame the Fed. 

The prognosticators are predicting a 100% chance that the Open Market Committee will cut the Fed funds rate by at least 25 basis points and maybe as large as 50 basis points. No matter. Trump will yell that Powell is “too late” again and its all his fault. It can’t be the uncertainty due to the tariffs. The new jobs added were not in industries directly impacted by the tariffs. They were in social assistance and healthcare. However, manufacturing, wholesale trade and equipment all shed jobs. Of course, that is all the Fed’s fault as well. Right? John Deere and Caterpillar, users of imported steel and aluminum and dependent upon foreign sales are reporting losses from the costs of the tariffs. Ford and General Motors are also reporting huge losses as the high tariffs on Canada and Mexico remain. But again it’s the Fed’s fault. Right? The interesting thing is that if the public were told that Trump had imposed the largest increase in taxes in history, many if not most would realize that the impact would be deflationary. If consumers have less to spend and expect taxes to go up even more then they will spend even less. Business in turn would decrease investments and shed jobs. Would this too be the Fed’s fault? 

The Fed will likely cut the Fed funds rate even in the face of rising prices due to the tariffs. Currently, the Fed’s preferred index (the personal consumption expenditure index) is up to 3.3% and predicted to be as high as 4.75% in the first quarter of next year. Then if the economy gets hit with an inflationary recession, the Fed will still be blamed. Yet interest rates have always been a poor indicator of the economy. Very low interest rates exist in a slumping economy as businesses cut back investment spending and hiring if there is not adequate demand for their products. Cutting interest rates will not spur either more investment or hiring in that situation. This is the old “you can lead a horse to water” saying. Both increased investments and increased hiring increase costs and if the demand isn’t there, then there will only be greater losses. Didn’t we learn anything during the period of zero Fed funds rates and negative real interest rates? Apparently not. 

But the Fed got itself into this mess by acting as if the current employment numbers were driving monetary policy. Monetary economists know – as should the Fed – that monetary policy operates with a lag, as long as twelve to 18 months. Yes it is true that when the Fed acts, that there will be short term effects on the market but the measurable impact on unemployment and prices manifest themselves over the longer term. As a consequence, the Fed will always be acting “too late” if it lets today’s numbers determine monetary policy.

Somehow we have lost sight on why jobs are disappearing. Yes the tariffs are a big factor but so is Trump’s slashing of the federal workforce. Black unemployment has jumped up to 7.2 percent while overall unemployment has gone from 4.2 percent to 4.3 percent. Disturbingly, much of the unemployment has been among college educated blacks. The reason has been the impact of the federal jobs cuts. Forbes estimates that 350,000 educated black women have lost their jobs under Trump. Labor force participation of educated black women has fallen 2 percent, meaning that these are not counted as unemployed since they are no longer looking for a job. It is likely that the concentration of black women in DEI programs both federal and corporate play a part in the job losses. It is also possible that when all the probationary employees (like my cousin) were fired, that a disproportionate number were blacks as well.

But didn’t Trump and JD Vance say that enforcing the immigration laws and deporting the illegals would increase native worker employment? Vance said that jobs vacated by deported migrants would be filled instead by some of the 7 million Americans who are either unemployed or out of the labor force. Illegals, Vance said, that illegals taking jobs are “one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.”  Vance, like his boss, is prone to pop off without checking the facts. Maybe we haven’t seen this surge in native American employment because there hasn’t been enough time yet. But in the face of increased taxes, businesses curtail investment and hiring. The unemployment rate is going up not down. Someone needs to tell the vice president that there are currently 7.2 million job openings in the country. Why haven’t they been filled by the natives who are out of work? Sorry, but illegals seem to be a convenient scapegoat taking the blame for whatever ails the economy. But hey, who believes these statistics anyway? I am certain when the president’s man gets installed as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that we will once see statistics showing full employment of native Americans without inflation.

The idea of JD Vance as president is frightening. If he has said anything that makes sense, it has escaped me.

Lest we forget that inflation remains high and may go even higher with the rate cuts. In order for the economy to rebound what is needed is an increase in consumer confidence and in business confidence. As to consumer confidence, the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment has been falling, the reasons being concerns about job loss and inflation. Since this is a consumer driven economy, decreases in consumer confidence do not inspire increased spending on the part of businesses regardless of low are interest rates.

I know how to rekindle consumer confidence: cut all tariffs to zero. Subsidize those items that are truly vital to national security. Rein in government spending. Trump once boasted during his first term about his tax cuts. Now repeat after me: tariffs are taxes, tariffs are taxes, tariffs are taxes.

Trump’s illegal tariffs are again ruled to be illegal

The decision by the US Federal Court of Appeals on Trump’s tariffs was surprising. It was 7-4 in upholding the Court of International Trade’s finding that the tariffs were illegal. Why was it surprising? Not because the lower court’s decision was upheld but because of the vote. I thought it was going to be unanimous like the lower court but it was 7-4. No lawyer am I but I had thought that tariffs were the purview of the Congress and not the president – although the president could impose tariffs under certain circumstances. I also thought that the courts would find that the declaring trade deficits a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in order to impose tariffs was so laughable that it would be thrown out of court. Not so fast my friends.

First, when the ruling by the appeals court was handed down, the president went off in his usual bellicose manner. He tweeted:

Again, it was the 7-4 vote that was interesting. The president said it was partisan. But was it? Of the seven in the majority, yes 6 were appointed by either Obama or Biden but of the four that dissented two were appointed by George W. Bush and two were appointed by Obama. What is intriguing is that the dissenting opinion was written by an Obama appointee who has ruled consistently in favor of executive overreach. This is consistent with what I have been warning. What Trump is doing in defining the powers of the executive will be used by the next democrat that occupies the White House. And then the republicans will be wailing and gnashing of their teeth bemoaning executive overreach. Remember what is sauce for the goose. The court’s ruling will not take effect until October 14 allowing the administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.

While the government tried to argue that the tariffs were a response to the so-called (and imaginary) national emergency caused by the trade deficits, the appeals court instead concentrated on the tariffs being a tax and said:

“While the President of course has independent constitutional authority in [foreign affairs and national security], the power of the purse (including the power to tax) belongs to Congress. Absent a valid delegation by Congress, the President has no authority to impose taxes.”

And there’s the rub. There are two salient points here. First, is a trade deficit a basis for the declaration of a “national emergency” and second, are tariffs a tax? The court acknowledged that if indeed there were a national emergency, the president did have limited authority to impose temporary tariffs targeted to specific aims. For example, the tariffs imposed on Canada, Mexico and China to limit fentanyl could possibly stand. Also the tariffs on steel and aluminum were imposed under the Trade Expansion Act and are not including in this ruling. Second, are the tariffs a tax? An economist would argue that they are in fact a border tax imposed on imported goods at the port of entry. Can the administration argue otherwise? This is reminiscent of the arguments on Obamacare where Chief Justice Robert’s decisive vote was on the basis that Obamacare was a tax and hence in the purview of the congress. If this logic carries over to the tariffs, then I would expect a decision upholding the lower courts that the tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Powers Act are illegal. Again I would expect a unanimous vote but now I am now so certain.

What is particularly interesting to me is the presidential misuse of the international Economic Emergency Powers Act. As one legal scholar points out “The Act is intended to enable sanctions against individual countries that pose a national-security threat—not a persistent, broad, social or economic

Dynamic.” So since China is a threat to the national security, an imposition of tariffs to that country (or to Russia, Iran or North Korea) would be allowed. Where Trump erred is using this particular statue to impose worldwide global tariffs on countries that do not pose a national security threat to the US. Stay tuned.

Some favorite quotes

Would we be governed differently if elections were held on April 16^th?

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you caan convince one man by logic. – Robert Heinlein

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.  –  Stuart Chase

“Rent control appears to be the most effective technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing.” – Assar Lindbeck, Swedish economist

Brave men die but once, a coward dies a hundred deaths. – Julius Caesar

The essential prerequisite for learning is the readiness to acknowledge one’s ignorance. – Socrates

Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever. – Robert Heinlein

“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” – Ronald Reagan

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” – Socrates

If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything. – MLK

My father used to say that colored people came out of slavery, Negroes built all of the institutions, blacks helped with the right to vote and African-Americans just complain. – John Sibley Butler

“One cannot hope to reason people out of those things they haven’t been reasoned into” – Jonathan Swift

“The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” John Roberts

Fixing what is broken in Washington is not hard if your own political future is not your pressing concern. – Tom Coburn

Countries don’t have permanent friends only permanent interests – Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston.

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” George Orwell

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.” 
― Robert A. Heinlein

Life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” 
― George V. Higgins, 

The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends. — Ludwig von Mises

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Declaration of Independence)

“Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln

“If you are never controversial, you have probably never said anything interesting.” – Assar Lindbeck

Ominously, as de Tocqueville said “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” I’m afraid that day has arrived.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

We do not know enough to justify anything we believe. – Aristotle

We are too intellectually lazy to verify what we profess to believe – Aristotle

“Nobody seemed to give a damn about my work until very late in my career. Then, I felt like I was on an extended victory lap”. John Steinbeck

G. K. Chesterton’s century-old observation: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

You’re fired!

It is really ironic that I was working on an article on the uptick in black unemployment when yesterday I was fired by the conservative weekly I write a column for because I am too conservative. At least they didn’t fire me because I was black. But first a little background. For twenty years I wrote a monthly business column for our local daily. Then it was sold to Gannet whose editors did not like me – no surprise there. They started editing my articles, sometimes changing their meaning. When I complained they said “If you don’t like it then quit.” They then moved my column from the business section of the Sunday paper to “Opinions”. Why? Because sometimes I expressed an opinion in the pieces. “OK”, I said, “I will now write opinion pieces.” Then during Covid they refused to publish my article that listed all the mandates from our local health department saying that I could not find scientific justification for any of them. Stores had a curfew – I asked did this mean that Covid only spread after hours? There was the 6 foot rule, later admitted by Fouci to be made up. I noted that every rule was a repeat of rules mandated by health departments during the Spanish Flu and asked whether knowledge had advanced since 1918. But our newspaper was in the “let’s keep them scared” camp. They wouldn’t publish the piece. So I quit. It was not a surprise that I was too conservative for the new editors.

Fast forward to yesterday. The publisher of the conservative weekly had called me when he found out I had quit the other paper and said that I could write “anything I wanted”. Turns out that was true only while Joe Biden was president. Although I wrote pieces supporting President Trump on his efforts on DEI, trans and antisemitism, I was opposed to the tariffs, the shakedown of private firms and noted that Trump had lied when he said he was going to be too busy to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The publisher called me obviously upset I had used the word “lied” – maybe I should have called it a fabrication – and fired me. He said that he was receiving too many criticisms of my articles and remember “we are a conservative paper.” It was curious because I had gotten only one email that called me a racist for writing that Europe was a loser and we should look elsewhere for alliances. Recall that months later, the Wall Street Journal had a piece saying the same thing. I reminded the publisher that I was a conservative – a laissez faire, free market, government with a small “g” conservative. But I was not a Trump conservative and the publisher was, agreeing with everything done by this president. So he fired me.

Isn’t it ironic that I was fired from a liberal paper for being too conservative and then fired by a “conservative” paper for the same reason? So my platform continues to shrink. Now there is only my blog. But so be it. I have been told from the womb that my mind works differently. I do this because it is fun. I don’t ask you to agree with me. I only want you to enjoy what I write whether you agree or not. Tell me when you do and please tell me when you don’t. I am an academic. Milton Friedman once said that professors love to profess. And I do love to profess.

Again. Thank you for being there.

Random thoughts #69

Not particularly relevant to anything but the University of North Carolina played TCU. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor are at the game. They probably don’t remember me but I was on the UNC athletics board and spotted for both of them in the weight room. LT was a beast but I could bench more than MJ. In those days it was thought that upper body muscles would inhibit your shot so the basketball players concentrated on the lower body.

I am surprised that the democrats aren’t demanding that ESPN change the name of their show “NFL RedZone.”

If you want to lease an EV, now is the time. A Kia Niro EV (base price $28,435) can be leased for as little as $40 a month! A Kia EV9($56,761) can be had for $189 month. The dealer uses the $7,500 tax credit which expires at the end of September to lower the lease price of the vehicle. For some weird reason the tax credit does not apply to the purchase of an EV made overseas but does apply to leasing the vehicle. Unfortunately my tastes run more toward a Porsche Taycan. Porsche is offering a $22,000 discount on a lease which lowers it to $949 a month with $(,829 due at signing. I think I will stick to my 2007 Mercedes 350 CLK.

What may stop you from leasing that EV is that Motor Trend has released the statistics showing that the deadliest car in America is (to few people’s surprise) Tesla. Kia is number two.

What’s with the workers at all tech companies that think they can picket their own company, set up encampments and deface property? Microsoft, Google and Tesla have been hit by these leftists who protest their companies doing business with Israel. These employees are getting fired. Apparently, they mistook the “campus” of their employer for a college campus and thought it was ok to act up. Someone said that the office is for work. Who knew?

Also what’s with these celebrities “fleeing” Trump’s America for England? First Ellen DeGeneres and her wife buy a house there and say “Everything here is just better – the way animals are treated, people are polite. I just love it here.” Then someone named Robin Wright fled to England saying “I love being in this country. There’s a freedom of self here. People are so kind.” That freedom apparently doesn’t cover freedom of speech.

I guess they don’t know about the UK throwing people in jail for saying or tweeting the “wrong thing.” Over 12,000 Brits are arrested each year over social media posts deemed offensive. This tells me two things. First, do the British really believe in free speech and two, if you know you are going to be arrested and still post, most people would consider you either very brave or very dumb. One of the people arrested said “It was hard to shake off the sense that I was living in a police state.” Hey, but it is a state where Ellen and Robin at least are free from Trump who hasn’t sic-ed his “Justice” Department on anti-Trump postings – yet.

England does not have a First Amendment. In case you have forgotten, here is ours:

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The UK is even arresting people for praying near abortion centers. Guess they got that one from Joe Biden.

Speaking of stupid, several so-called democrat influencers are still clamoring the pack the court with their kind of people. Recall that this was the rage when Biden was president and that even the liberals on the court said it was a bad idea. It amazes me that the democrats would even utter this while Trump is in the White House and republicans have both the House and the Senate. I had said previously that I was all for court packing – now.

And what happened to Trump’s objections to the EU’s Digital Services Tax and Digital Services Act? Are they still being negotiated? The EU seemed hell bent on keeping them in place regardless of the tariffs. Trump had said that he was willing to lower their tariffs if they scuttled the acts. I have written about the digital services tax The Digital Services Act policies the online environment safer in by policing the tech giants on illegal content, hate speech and child sexual abuse material. Trump calls this censorship and has threatened actions including increased tariffs and even visas revoked against EU officials.

I wrote a piece on the decline of Europe and suggested that we look elsewhere for partners who are vibrant and love freedom. For that I got emails calling me a racist. Well the Wall Street Journal a bit later published a similar piece – “Europe is Losing”. I am sure that they don’t read my blog. I looked at the letters to the editor and found general agreement and no one accusing the Journal of being racist.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europe-is-losing-fe179376

This is unbelievable and I just saw it in Apple News. I’m glad I posted it first.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a65924126/african-union-replace-mercator-map-equal-earth/

A mere sampling of the wisdom of Thomas Sowell

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence they are creating artificial stupidity.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of “diversity”?

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions that by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

What exactly is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce and canonized those who complain. 

You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible. 

A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said “I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat.”

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging the fabric of society as a whole.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.

Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves.

It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

I’m so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.

People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state.

It is fascinating to watch politicians come up sith “solutions” to problems that are a direct result of their previous solutions.

The minimum wage law is very cleverly misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled workers receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.

Hilary Clinton said you know it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that.

Some ideas sound so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time. Other ideas sound so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time. Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operation of a free market are among the second kind.

Would the president’s obsession with Greenland change if he knew its actual size?

What did you want to be when you grew up? When I was little I wanted to drive a coal truck. My father’s father drove one and I thought that it was really cool. Then in elementary school I wanted to be a cartographer. I was fascinated by maps. My parents bought me a globe and I would spend hours on end looking at every detail, every country, every longitude, every latitude, every lake and mountain range. Everything. I was always bothered when I saw “not to scale.” I would ask my parents “what’s to scale?” They told me to go look in the Encyclopedia Britannica which told me that maps were not to scale but never showed me what the world really looked like. I never quit liking maps but decided in high school that I wanted to be a physicist. I had a great physics teacher and he encouraged me to apply for an NSF grant to study physics during the summer at Norfolk State University. I did and from the first lecture realized that physics was not for me. Maybe I should go back to geography and be a cartographer. But I had a perfectly awful geography teacher and my Dad said “aren’t all the maps already drawn?” So I decided that maybe I would be a lawyer like Dad’s older brother because I did not want to be a school teacher like both of my parents. My older brother wanted to be an engineer and was at Purdue because in those days he wasn’t allowed to go to Georgia Tech but we really didn’t know what an engineer did. Maybe we thought it was like our cousin Herman who was an engineer on the Norfolk Southern railroad. 

The map that was on my globe and all my maps was the Mercator projection drawn by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.  It was used by European ship’s captains because it allowed navigators to plot a straight-line course from point A to point B. But when it translated a three-dimensional shape like the Earth into a two-dimensional projection like a map, it distorted size and distance as you got closer to the two poles. As a result Greenland and Antarctica look huge. Greenland actually looks bigger than Africa even though Africa is fourteen times larger than Greenland.

Is the Mercator projection the source of Trump’s obsession with Greenland? The president said in an interview in 2021 “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.'” Oops. A geography professor said “Anyone who looks at Greenland with a Mercator projection, thinking that it is huge, needs remedial training in geography.” Well that “anyone” is not only Donald Trump but all the rest of us brought up with the Mercator projection.

Why is this artifact of 1569 still used today? There are a lot of conspiracy theories. One is that it is used by the white powers-that-be to make Africa look smaller and the US, Russia and Europe look larger than they are. In fact the Boston schools use the Gall-Peters world map instead to counter “white racism”. But historically cartographers made their homelands greater in size to symbolize its importance and the maps we use were developed by northern Europeans. The Boston school system said explicitly that it wanted to shift away from being Eurocentric. But even the Europeans are moving away from being Eurocentric too. The Gall-Peters world map is now promoted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and is widely used by the British state school system in an effort to depict the Earth closer to how it actually looks rather than how it looked in 1569 to a Flemish cartographer.

But why the Gall-Peters map? It is only one of many of the world. There is the Equal Earth projection map developed by NASA which is based on Robinson projection with the curved sides of the projection suggesting the spherical form of Earth, straight parallels making it easy to compare how far north or south places are from the equator and the meridians are evenly spaced along any line of latitude. There is the Natural Earth projection where the mathematical formulae for the projection were derived from a polynomial used to define the spacing of parallels.

But what would the map look like if China had dominated the world? Here is one drawn by a Chinese cartographer.

I wonder if the Mercator map were not so widely used if the president would be as obsessed with Greenland? But contrary to what my Dad said, there are still maps to be drawn. Maybe I should have become a cartographer after all.

Here is what the countries look like in actual size.

Here is the Gall-Peters map which also distorts the countries as well.

Labor Day 2025

Isn’t it somewhat appropriate that on Labor Day, it was reported that union membership has fallen below 10 percent of the workforce? In 1983 that percentage was 20%. Much of union membership is now with government workers. In the private sector only 5.9% are union members and a third of those are in the teachers’ unions – government worker too. Is this good or bad for the country? Of course the democrats will say this is bad because it means less money flowing into democrat coffers. Republicans will say that the declining membership is good for the country. The Pew Research Center bears this out and reports “Today, 82% of Democrats say this decline has been bad for the country, up from 69% who said this a year ago. 85% of Democrats also say the decline in union membership has been bad for working people, up from 74% in 2024. By contrast, majorities of Republicans and GOP leaners continue to say that the decline in union membership has been good for the country (62%) and for working people (59%).”

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/27/majorities-of-adults-see-decline-of-union-membership-as-bad-for-the-us-and-working-people/

An important question is why then do the unions continue to occupy an outsized influence in American politics? President Trump has catered to them with the Teamsters’ president speaking at the republican national convention. His vice president loves unions. Remember when Vance showed up on a picket line during the auto workers strike? At least the Teamsters for once did not endorse the democrat candidate for president. But they didn’t endorse Trump either. Trump then went as far as to install as his labor secretary a Teamster favorite who opposed right to work laws and voted to repeal them when she was in the House. I guess for the republicans, the unions matter only in the states where they might make a difference like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Again my good friend Frank Glassner offers his encyclopedic view of the world. Happy Labor Day Frank!

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