Coyote Blog

The defenders of the Trump tariffs are starting to coalesce on a few different arguments, but what all these arguments seem to have in common is a core assumption that the current world trade system is "unfair." From Victor Davis Hanson via Powerline:

Our trading partners have taken advantage of us for decades after tariffs were no longer needed to help them rebuild their economies after WWII.

Or this:

I could write a book on this, and many people have, but what follows is my reaction to these tariffs and in particular to the notion that our trading partners are being "unfair."

Yes, many other countries have trade practices that are unfair -- unfair to their own citizens! I went to business school in the late 1980's and at the time it was all the rage a) to bash Japan for "cheating" the US and running a trade surplus and b) to wish to emulate Japan and their MITI-style economic management. I disagreed. I was fairly sure that MITI's control of capital flows was causing unseen distortions that would hurt the Japanese economy in the long-term (I had read my Hayek). At the same time, the Japanese were screwing their own consumers who had to pay far more than Americans for food and most manufactured goods, with far less choice and availability. It was not long after that Japan entered 20 years of stagnation as its trade subsidies and economic distortions just served to nuke their own economy.

Later, about 10-15 years ago, our Chinese exchange student and her friends came to the US for the first time. These kids, as it so happened, live only a few miles from one of the Apple assembly plants. They all brought huge empty suitcases to buy things in the US, including what seemed like a score of iPhones for their friends. The iPhones were far cheaper here in the US than in China where they are made and where many of the other things they bought were not available in China at all. So who is China's trade policy being unfair to? Me, or their own citizens?

I love foreign-subsidized trade. Nothing confuses me more than when people complain about foreign subsidies of exports to the US. Why? If the taxpayers and consumers of Germany wish to subsidize cheaper products in the US market, we should absolutely let them. I mean, I would be pissed off if I were a German citizen, paying higher prices and taxes so a few wealthy manufacturers can meet their quarterly profit goals, but why a US consumer should be unhappy is beyond me. (**see Panda Blog column in the postscript). And remember, we are not just talking about cars and vacuum cleaners, but raw materials and intermediate products bought by US manufacturers and support our domestic manufacturing.

Just as I was about to hit publish on this article, I saw this from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick defending tariffs:

He further urged, “these people have all been living in our house. They have been driving our car. They come by and visit, open our fridge and eat our food whenever they want.”

“They have taken advantage of us,” he emphasised [sic].

I am sure he will have all the hard-core MAGA types nodding sagely but what the hell does this really mean? In part this is the kind of confusion that results from aggregating what are in fact discrete transactions. Everything Americans buy we pay the asking price for, and everything the Chinese buy they pay our asking price for. How is someone getting cheated? How is there any fraud? Lutnick if pressed would obviously argue that fraud comes from the prices we are paying to the Chinese being artificially low. If that is the case, who is eating out of whose fridge? If I pay $20 less for shoes and $200 less for a phone and that difference is being subsidized by the Chinese people/government, then it is I that is getting over on them. Thanks for the free lunch, China. (update: Even Dave Chappelle agrees)

Hate me if you wish, but compared to consumers, manufacturers are a special interest. 13 million people or so are employed in US manufacturing firms, out of a total workforce of about 160 million, or something like 8%. And by no means are these all in jobs vulnerable to foreign competition -- in fact I would bet at least as many work for companies that are dependent on foreign raw materials for success as there are those working for companies that live at knife-edge vulnerability to competition.

Let me give you an example of a domestic industry entirely vulnerable to foreign competition that tariffs entirely support: Sugar. The US sugar industry would likely disappear if not for tariff's and import restrictions that raise the US sugar price to more than double the world price. We simply do not have the climate or land costs or labor costs to support competitive growing and manufacture of sugar in this country. As a result of tariffs, 300+ million Americans pay more than double for sugar, and perhaps worse, because of the high cost of sugar, food manufacturers in this country have largely abandoned sugar in favor of alternatives like HFCS that are far less healthy. And in exchange for this cost? We are protecting about 12,000 direct jobs. For nearly every tariff in every industry, you will find -- at its heart -- this sort of special interest math.

The history of sacrificing the mass of consumers to the profitability of a few elite producers goes all the way back to the horrible British corn laws. Economists refer to the problem as "concentrated benefits, dispersed costs." Costs are dispersed such that no one person bearing them really has the financial incentive to take on the costs of fighting them, while benefits are concentrated in a few hands that have the incentive and the means to fight to the death to protect their special privilege.

By the way, who is going to work in all these new on-shored manufacturing plants? Due to falling birth rates, the US labor force has been growing only very slowly:

This actually understates the problem, because there is a huge shortage of labor with the right skills for manufacturing. With the US near full employment (though with a relatively low workforce participation), its not clear how we will staff these theoretical new factories. Manufacturers are already screaming they can't get the people they need in the US:

“BlueForge Alliance calls me and they say, we need to hire some tradespeople, and we were wondering if you and your foundation could help.” “I said, I’ll try, as you probably learned, it’s pretty skinny out there … how many do you need?” “They said 100,000.” “100,000 tradespeople for one industry that most people don’t even think about.” “They said, we’ve looked everywhere … do you know where they are?” “I said, yeah I do, they’re in the eighth grade.” “That’s 100,000 building submarines. There’s 80,000 in the automotive industry alone for technicians. Right now … 80,000 openings.” “You start to go down the list and you begin to realize our workforce is wildly out of balance.”

Historically we have had two answers for this problem: 1) more immigration and 2) taking advantage of foreign labor through imports. This administration is trying to cut off both. (Long term there is an education opportunity, that will be addressed below).

If this foreign interventionist trade strategy is superior, why is the US doing so much better? The economies of most major trading nations are all on their back -- except the US. The US is doing very well and still is richer than most any other large nation. Countries like Germany and France that are supposedly so smart to be "cheating" in trade are clearly not doing a very good job of it, because every nation in the EU would be poorer on a GDP per capital basis than the poorest US state (Mississippi). Great Britain through most of the 20th century ran their economy into the ground through protectionism, leaving their industry bloated and inefficient. The US did the exact same thing in its auto and steel industries until tariffs were lifted in the 1970s. We have a smaller auto industry than we did then, but it is healthier and makes FAR better products.

The US is wealthier across the whole of the income spectrum than, say, countries in the EU. Our rich are richer than their rich and our middle class is richer than their middle class and our poor are better of than their poor, even considering the net of taxes and transfers. I have not updated this analysis for over a decade but I am pretty sure it is still directionally accurate.

In fact, there is a fairly direct correlation between low tariffs and citizen well-being:

I don't know where the average South Korean's or Thai's head is at on all of this, but I can say with some confidence that the average Western European citizen would be shocked at the notion that a) their country is somehow beating up on the United States and b) that they personally are getting rich at the expense of American citizens.

It should be noted that even when all else is equal, the fact that US citizens are substantially wealthier than their peers in other nations, it is almost mathematically guaranteed that we will buy more (ie import) than we sell in return in exports.

The Shifting of Jobs Out of Manufacturing Is A Normal Part of Economic Growth. Certainly a smaller percentage of Americans work in factories today than they did 30 or 40 years ago (ignore the Trump stat about 90,000 factories disappearing, though, it is totally fake). You know what other industry has lost jobs through US history? Agriculture. Today about 2% of the population works in farming vs well over 80% in the year 1800. I am pretty sure few today are pining away for a return to the life in a small farm -- I guarantee farmers and ranchers work way harder than most folks want to work today.

As the economy gets wealthier and technology advances, the nature of work keeps shifting. We are upgrading lower-skill, lower-productivity jobs for higher productivity jobs, just as we have since the start of the industrial and agricultural revolutions. We still need the things made in those lower skill, lower productivity jobs, so they shift to other countries (which in turn helps them get wealthier too). No one is demanding we shift workers back from manufacturing to agriculture, and no one should be arguing that we shift folks working on AI back to manufacturing.

Of course this process can have costs for individuals and communities. But we almost never wish to turn back the clock on past such transitions while still greatly wishing to block the current one.

These tariffs are not strategic. I have seen the most enthusiastic of Trump supporters try to argue that this is really about returning certain manufacturing to the US for strategic reasons. But this can't possibly be correct, or if it is, then its a really odd approach since these tariffs apply to every single country and every single product.

This may yet be another Trump negotiating ploy, but its a really expensive and high risk one. Trump supporters who have more than half a brain like Victor Davis Hanson are arguing this is just Trump putting a negotiating token out there. Perhaps. That is certainly Trump's style, to make an irrational demand and soften it only when he gets something back. Secretary Lutnick explicitly says this is the plan, and I will believe him. This is obviously expensive and high-risk, and to some extent still doesn't make a lot of sense since Trump slapped high tariffs on countries like Switzerland that have close to zero tariffs themselves and are largely productive partners.

It may well turn out that much of this ends up being performative. I need to remind everyone of Trump's much ballyhooed deal to get Foxconn to commit to a $10 billion plant in Wisconsin. I don't know if Foxconn ever intended to follow through, but in the end they never made most of this investment and the whole effort turned out to be performative. One interesting aspect of this article is that Foxconn backing out was not the only problem, there was a lot of local opposition as well for a variety of environmental, land use, and public policy reasons. It illustrates that the manufacturing labor shortage discussed above may not be the only reason manufacturing is shrinking in the US.

Trump supporters need to admit there is some vanity here. Trump likes to have people come to him hat in hand as a supplicant -- to kiss the ring, to thank him, to apologize, whatever. He blasted Zelenskyy for not doing just this on his White House visit (though I will confess I find Zelenskyy to be immature, irritating, and possibly corrupt). Trump supporters will say that what he really wants is for countries to show respect for America, and I suppose this is part of it, but I am convinced ego is a part of it as well.

There is more risk here than just price increases. Consumers are going to lose choices and many of those choices are going to be the low-cost options. Already Mercedes has hinted it may stop selling its entry level cars in the US. And yes, I know it is hard to cry for the Mercedes buyer, but the same math that causes the tariffs to hit hardest at their entry-level products (as they tend to have the lowest margins and the highest customer price sensitivity) is going to apply to about every other consumer product.

Ironically, one huge risk is to manufacturing investment. Trump's goal seems mainly to get more manufacturing investment in the US, but as long as the tariffs keep changing week to week -- and they will continue to if Trump is really using them as a bargaining chip -- no manufacturer in their right mind is going to make a major new investment. They are going to sit on their hands and wait. Many historians and economists of late have been coalescing around a theory that regime uncertainty in the 1930s -- ie the constant changing of regulatory rules and frameworks -- did much to cause the Great Depression to drag out longer.

And then there is the risk of cronyism. A system of high tariffs gives a huge new playing field for politicians to trade favors with favored companies, giving them special exemptions or hitting their competitors with extra costs. If you look at European politics around tariffs, it is a relatively ugly picture of favoritism to a few select elite. I guarantee you the special favors for Nike and Apple are already being discussed in the back rooms. Just look at the Foxconn deal discussed above, where Trump and WI governor Walker bought a trade-related election talking point for $4.5 billion in subsidies.

Update: And of course there is the threat to the rule of law. I left this out on the first draft because, frankly, I don't think the faithful of either party gives a sh*t about the rule of law if it is their agenda hat is being rammed through. Certainly Democrats didn't have any problem with Biden's lawless attempts to forgive a trillion dollars in student loans and I don't think Trump's supporters care about the legality of this tariff actions. The power to set tariff's is enshrined in the Constitution (that document Republicans used to care about) as a power of Congress. Weak-kneed and lazy Congresses have delegated some of this power to President's, but only very narrowly. The picture is complicated and illegal actions by the President can be hard to review in court. But looking at the 4-6 major delegations to the President of tariff authority, it is difficult to see that any of them apply simultaneously to every country on Earth and every single product manufactured anywhere. Certainly there is no precedent for them being enacted by the President on anything but a far far narrower basis (eg steel from China).

I also left out the issue of honorable dealings, which again I don't think political partisans of any flavor give a crap about. But Trump is violating any number of agreements, including not just lame President-only agreements like much of the climate stuff but real treaties that were legally passed by the Senate. He is also explicitly repudiating deals he personally made with Mexico, Canada, and the EU, among others. I suppose it is fine for him to behave this way in his personal negotiations for his personal businesses -- it is only his honor involved. But there is a real cost involved to the honor and reputation of the nation which makes it harder in the future for such agreements to be made.

So let me end by offering a few alternatives to tariffs to achieve some of Trump's stated goals.

Alternative 1: If you really want to reduce trade deficits, cut the government budget deficit. As I said above, the US is likely always going to run trade deficits as long as it is wealthier than the rest of the world. But probably the #1 thing that has caused these deficits to be higher than they would otherwise be is the huge Federal debt. Every year now we are issuing trillions of dollars of new US Federal debt. This pushes the interest rate for these bonds higher than the #1 risk-free world investment might otherwise be. This in turn attracts foreign capital, which buys dollars in order to buy of these bonds, which in turn increases the value of the dollar. This artificial inflation of the value of the dollar certainly helps consumers, by reducing the cost of imported goods, but hurts exporters by increasing the cost of their goods in local currencies of buying nations. The net effect is that government borrowing increases the trade deficit. Close the budget hole, and the trade deficit will come down over time.

Alternative 2: If you really want to increase US manufacturing, you need to increase the number of workers with trade skills. We talked above that US manufacturing is already limited by the lack of workers in skilled trades. In part this is due to government programs that pay people just enough that they play Call of Duty all day and still eat. But it is also due to the great fuck-up of our educational system. Public education has become complete crap. But even worse for manufacturing is the fact that we have for thirty years promoted a value system where it is high status to go to college and get a degree in the Lesbian poetry of Peru while it is low status to get a trade and go to work in manufacturing. The economic signals are pretty good -- the Lesbian poetry grad is probably unemployable while my friend with no college degree but welding skills makes 6 figures at SpaceX. But for some reason we have an entire hierarchy in education that says its wrong to encourage kids into trade schools -- they need to go to college. Starting to fix this is beyond the scope of this post but far more essential to US manufacturing than tariffs are.

**Postscript: I will conclude by recognizing that none of the above is recently adopted out of TDS, which I don't have. I would love certain parts of Trump's agenda to be succesful. But I have been making these same points for 20 years. Below is a post I wrote for my imaginary Chinese affiliate "Panda Blog" from an imagined Chinese citizen in 2006:

Our Chinese government continues to pursue a policy of export promotion, patting itself on the back for its trade surplus in manufactured goods with the United States.  The Chinese government does so through a number of avenues, including:

• Limiting yuan convertibility, and keeping the yuan's value artificially low
• Imposing strict capital controls that limit dollar reinvestment to low-yield securities like US government T-bills
• Selling exports below cost and well below domestic prices (what the Americans call "dumping") and subsidizing products for export

It is important to note that each and every one of these government interventions subsidizes US citizens and consumers at the expense of Chinese citizens and consumers.  A low yuan makes Chinese products cheap for Americans but makes imports relatively dear for Chinese.  So-called "dumping" represents an even clearer direct subsidy of American consumers over their Chinese counterparts.  And limiting foreign exchange re-investments to low-yield government bonds has acted as a direct subsidy of American taxpayers and the American government, saddling China with extraordinarily low yields on our nearly $1 trillion in foreign exchange.   Every single step China takes to promote exports is in effect a subsidy of American consumers by Chinese citizens.

This policy of raping the domestic market in pursuit of exports and trade surpluses was one that Japan followed in the seventies and eighties.  It sacrificed its own consumers, protecting local producers in the domestic market while subsidizing exports.  Japanese consumers had to live with some of the highest prices in the world, so that Americans could get some of the lowest prices on those same goods.  Japanese customers endured limited product choices and a horrendously outdated retail sector that were all protected by government regulation, all in the name of creating trade surpluses.  And surpluses they did create.  Japan achieved massive trade surpluses with the US, and built the largest accumulation of foreign exchange (mostly dollars) in the world.  And what did this get them?  Fifteen years of recession, from which the country is only now emerging, while the US economy happily continued to grow and create wealth in astonishing proportions, seemingly unaware that is was supposed to have been "defeated" by Japan.

We at Panda Blog believe it is insane for our Chinese government to continue to chase the chimera of ever-growing foreign exchange and trade surpluses.  These achieved nothing lasting for Japan and they will achieve nothing for China.  In fact, the only thing that amazes us more than China's subsidize-Americans strategy is that the Americans seem to complain about it so much.  They complain about their trade deficits, which are nothing more than a reflection of their incredible wealth.  They complain about the yuan exchange rate, which is set today to give discounts to Americans and price premiums to Chinese.  They complain about China buying their government bonds, which does nothing more than reduce the costs of their Congress's insane deficit spending.  They even complain about dumping, which is nothing more than a direct subsidy by China of lower prices for American consumers.

And, incredibly, the Americans complain that it is they that run a security risk with their current trade deficit with China!  This claim is so crazy, we at Panda Blog have come to the conclusion that it must be the result of a misdirection campaign by CIA-controlled American media.  After all, the fact that China exports more to the US than the US does to China means that by definition, more of China's economic production is dependent on the well-being of the American economy than vice-versa.  And, with nearly a trillion dollars in foreign exchange invested heavily in US government bonds, it is China that has the most riding on the continued stability of the American government, rather than the reverse.  American commentators invent scenarios where the Chinese could hurt the American economy, which we could, but only at the cost of hurting ourselves worse.  Mutual Assured Destruction is alive and well, but today it is not just a feature of nuclear strategy but a fact of the global economy.

1. Is this the most destructive Federal economic action in my 63-year lifetime? I am trying to think about the competition for this title. Certainly Nixon's wage and price controls would be up there in the top 5. The banking regulations that treated mortgages as preferred risk-free bank capital might be on the list. Perhaps we would include something like Biden's attempt to forgive a trillion dollars in student loans. There was some COVID craziness, including lockdowns and eviction moratoriums. But even looking at this collective Mt Rushmore of economic fail, I still think Trump's tariffs are at or near the top. This is as dumb as even the worst ideas of folks like AOC who the Republicans mock.
2. How is this possibly Constitutional? Article 1 Section 8 gives Congress sole "Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" and "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives." I understand the spineless Congresses have delegated all sorts of powers to the Executive Branch, but good God there has to be some sort of limit. Where is that nationwide injunction when you need it? This is as a good a case as any for the courts to test both Executive taxation power, limits to delegation of authority, and the general use of emergency powers.

The tariffs also bring to mind several ironies:

1. Trump called it "liberation day" but the actual day we celebrate liberation is the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. That document explains the King's injustices, including: "[the King] has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:...For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world [and] For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent" Can't find any exceptions for emergencies in this document or in the Constitution.**
2. Republicans have spent 5 years (rightly) complaining about the exercise of emergency powers when the person who gets the power also gets to declare an emergency. And now they have topped anything Biden ever did with COVID emergency powers
3. In economics, independence is the road to poverty. The most economically independent people in the world are the isolated primitive tribes in the Amazon. This stuff is not hard, we have understood it since David Ricardo was writing over 200 years ago. We literally understood how trade created value before we had invented the telegraph or the railroad or knew that germs caused diseases. We understood it before Iodine was discovered. My post on aluminum tariffs helped show the value of trade.
4. This almost goes without saying, but after campaigning on inflation, Trump is directly adding to inflation. Back of the envelope, given that imports are about 16% of GDP, then a 25% average tariff on imports adds something like 4% to prices. Immediately inflation rates for this year go from 3% to 7%, and I am fairly certain this simplistic approach underestimates the problem. A family member works in the finance department of a well-known low-margin retailer and said that they were absolutely going to have to pass through tariffs and spent today working on the numbers. Sure, Trump is going to identify a few high-profile companies to name and shame for raising prices to pretend that companies should not be passing through these costs, but this is -- ironically again -- exactly as ignorant as Elizabeth Warren blaming grocer greed for food price increases, something that Republicans mocked by the way.***

I only have the time, and frankly the stomach, to put down these few quick thoughts on this one. More later.

Update: From Pat Toomey vis Powerline, this is as good of an explanation as I have seen for the theory in Trump's head that is driving tariff actions. This explains pretty well the calculathttps://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/04/toomey-on-trumps-tariffs.phpion of the tariffs, which appear to be more correlated with individual trade deficits than current reciprocal tariffs

This, I’m afraid, is going to take us down a bad path, Dominic. I think that we’re going to experience more aggressive tariffs than a lot of people think, because the president really believes that — what he really wants to go after is the trade deficits. What he really objects to, and from all of my arguments with him, I’m convinced that he believes — and if you listen to his language — he believes that if you have a trade deficit with another country, that is the measure of the amount that country steals from you. And that of course disregards that we get something when we purchase products from other countries, but this is the way he views it. He thinks that the Canadians are ripping us off, because we buy some more goods from them than they buy from us (by the way, the difference is fully explained by oil imports that are quite useful and important to us). But this is where we are. We’re going to have relearn this lesson. I do think the markets are going to respond very poorly, if I’m right and on April 2 we discover we’re having a more aggressive round of tariffs than we expect.

We are really in trouble. This is really next-level ignorance.

** Postscript: Tariffs rather than immigration is the topic of the day, but I was reminded in perusing the Declaration of Independence for this post that it also says this: "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither"

***Postscript #2: The reason this likely underestimates inflation is because it does not take into account domestic producers raising their prices to partially match the price increases of their foreign competitors

The admissions by the media and government insiders just keep on coming. We've had:

• We knew all the time that COVID likely was a Wuhan lab-leak
• We knew all the time that the vaccine did not stop transmission
• We knew all the time that Biden was increasingly frail and senile
• We knew all the time that the inflation-reduction act infrastructure spending was burdened by unwieldly bureaucratic rules

Each and every one of which was not only vociferously denied at the time but contemporaneous critics pointing out the obvious truths were labelled as conspiracy theorists and targeted for censorship. Now to these we can add:

• We knew all the time we were risking nuclear escalation with our actions in Ukraine
• We knew all the time we were really engaging in a proxy war with Russia as much as a defense of Ukraine

The linked article above -- Matt Taibbi reacting to reporting from the NY Times -- is just infuriating for those of us who -- while greatly disliking Russia and its aggression -- were skeptical about our role. A couple of examples since the article is paywalled (Taibbi in regular font, NY Times quoted in italics)

To many watching from afar, it seemed like simple common sense that using American weapons and American support personnel to attack Russians in Russia risked drawing this country into a shooting war with a nuclear enemy at any moment. Those of us who said these things were dismissed as alarmist, Putin-loving fellow-travelers. Now we have Entous describing American officials feeling the same after the opening of “ops box” attack....

In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later… It was also a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war....

If you’re counting, that means we were lied to about the risk of World War, the chance of “victory,” the desire for negotiations, the success of last year’s counteroffensive, the solidity of our relationship with Ukraine, and the significance of U.S.-backed incursions into Russia. This was before Democrats lost the election last November, after which Biden crossed one more line:

Mr. Trump won, and the fear came rushing in… In his last, lame-duck weeks, Mr. Biden made a flurry of moves to stay the course, at least for the moment, and shore up his Ukraine project… He crossed his final red line — expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia — after North Korea sent thousands of troops to help the Russians dislodge the Ukrainians from Kursk… The administration also authorized Wiesbaden and the C.I.A. to support long-range missile and drone strikes into a section of southern Russia used as a staging area for the assault on Pokrovsk, and allowed the military advisers to leave Kyiv for command posts closer to the fighting....

There are a hundred details in this “Secret History” that serve as stark warnings to anyone who thinks protection from Armageddon is secure in the hands of career military and intelligence officials. Not only did we allow ourselves to be “blackmailed” into escalating a conflict with a nuclear power, the management of the “partnership” broke down because of a Heathers-style spat between the key brass twits, Ukrainian general Valery Zaluhniy and Mark Milley.

When Milley second-guessed Zaluhniy, the latter would respond with teen-like silence, or by avoiding Milley’s next call. Underscoring: the country to which we were giving hundreds of billions in aid didn’t feel a need to pick up the phone. Entous describes the general lack of communication via a moment of levity: “Biden administration officials would joke bitterly that they knew more about what the Russians were planning by spying on them than about what their Ukrainian partners were planning.”

Aggravating from first to last. The news briefly made a big deal about supposed releases of Epstein Clients and JFK Shooting Documents. But these have little interest to me when compared to what we are finding out about the secrets the government has kept these last 5 years. I will end with what I have written before on Ukraine:

The biggest question is -- what is the alternative? The implication is that there is somehow a hope to get the territory under Russian occupation back by military force. But I just don't see it. The Ukrainians have certainly been scrappy and creative and did a better job beating back the Russian thrusts at Kiev in the early days of the war than I would have guessed they would. They are now, though, fighting a static war of attrition with a county 4x its size. So what, at this point after 3 years, is the alternate plan that preserves territory? If that plan is to send a million American soldiers to Ukraine and risk escalation of the war, a nuclear exchange, and possibly a Chinese attack on Taiwan while our back is turned, then I am not going to agree.

Again, I would be happy to see Russia lose, but short of sending the American military into the line of fire, what is the plan? Perhaps Russia's will collapses before Ukraine's, but no one has presented me any evidence of that. That would be a sort of WWI outcome, where one side was eventually exhausted (though only after the intervention of US troops). As an aside, I wonder sometimes, would peace in 1915 perhaps with Germany retaining control of Alsace and Lorraine have been worse than all the deaths that followed, not to mention the platform the war built for the later rise of Hitler and the Nazi party?

As I said before, I am amazed that our ex-peace-protesting-hippies of the Left who would 100% retroactively say that the US should never have escalated in Vietnam after 1964 are in the lead of those who want us to fight in the Ukraine to the very end. Someone needs to tell me what's different, and I have not heard a good answer yet.