NAFTA revisited

Being anti NAFTA and free trade in general was generally a talking point from the left, not the right, until recently.

Now that we don’t have anyone standing up for free trade, I expect to see some disastrous economic changes.

Clearly jerking around the Senate wasn’t enough for one day.

Who knew?

It does seem outside of the usual suspects, Republican seem to have abandoned their principals.

https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/857336139950305281

I’m not sure what bother me more the end of free trade, or that Senators aren’t screaming about President pulling out of a treaty, approved by the US Senate and the House (not sure why I House vote was needed), via an executive order.

1363 days and a wake-up.

What’s Utah exporting to us?

Edit: Huh. Refined gold, apparently. And the UK is importing it to back ETFs.

Mormons?

I did actually once have a Mormon intern. But she went back to Utah, so no net impact on the balance of trade.

Florida and Wyoming to Brazil.

So beef and crackers?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/i-was-all-set-to-terminate-inside-trumps-sudden-shift-on-nafta/2017/04/27/0452a3fa-2b65-11e7-b605-33413c691853_story.html

“I was all set to terminate,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview Thursday night. “I looked forward to terminating. I was going to do it.”

There was just one problem: Trump’s team — like on so many issues — was deeply divided.

As news of the president’s plan reached Ottawa and Mexico City in the middle of the week and rattled the markets and Congress, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and others huddled in meetings with Trump, urging him not to sign a document triggering a U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA.

Perdue even brought along a prop to the Oval Office: A map of the United States that illustrated the areas that would be hardest hit, particularly from agriculture and manufacturing losses, and highlighting that many of those states and counties were “Trump country” communities that had voted for the president in November.

“It shows that I do have a very big farmer base, which is good,” Trump recalled. “They like Trump, but I like them, and I’m going to help them.”

By Wednesday night, Trump — who spent nearly two years as a candidate railing against the trade agreement — had backed down, saying that conversations with advisers and phone calls with the leaders of Canada and Mexico had persuaded him to reconsider.

This guy sounds like a ridiculous imbecile when he talks.

“I was all set to terminate”

Who speaks like that?

President Trump: Great Leader, Great Teacher, Great Supreme Commander, Great Helmsman of our Nation,

(Still my favorite thread title of all time).

There’s something exhilarating about how transparent he is with his shallow thought processes. Has any politician, let alone a head of government, just flat out told the press unprompted “I was going to do something that I said I’d do and I thought was right, then somebody told me it would cost me votes, so I didn’t.”?

Do you mean exhilarating in the sense that he is in complete control of 4,000 nuclear warheads and 740 delivery systems, and his decision seems to shift 180 degrees depending on who has to talk to last, and what he sees on Fox News?

Or exhilarating in the sense that he speaks his mind and the words of his supporter does care about political correctness, so everyday Americans can a get an adrenaline rush by reading his tweet feed and wondering if their job or even their life will disappear.

When I was at Berkeley some the of crazy street people (er I mean people who were differently abled in processing social information) would run for city council or sometimes California governor. It is possible their thought process were as illogical as the President’s

Exhilarating in the sense that this combination of mental transparency,political ignorance, and susceptibility to suasion is just never seen at the highest levels of government, so nearly everything he says produces an andrenaline rush of “I can’t believe the president just said that”. It’s not even usually seen in state or municipal government. I’m not suggesting it’s a positive emotion.

All of it does make me wonder how he managed to survive in business all these years*. Looking back on it, him being able to get away with writing a book called The Art Of The Deal seems remarkable, given how much he signals his own weakness. Either he’s seriously deteriorated in recent years or his employees/family were doing the negotiating on his behalf.

*I mean, I know he didn’t, in a sense, but he did just about manage to grift long enough and have enough money to run for president at 70 whatever.

I’ve often wondered the same thing. Nothing I saw of Trump prior to this election made me say, “gee, that guy’s a business whizz,” or anything like that. Makes you wonder how the hell he in fact did get rich.

Well, he was born rich, and he put his dad’s money in real estate. As long as you don’t get completely wiped out in the downturns, that’s a pretty reliable way to get richer. And even when he did get wiped out in a downturn, he got the taxpayer to underwrite the loss. To the extent he has evident business savvy, it’s unsurprisingly in self-promotion, and monetising that brand. Of course it turns out a lot of that monetisation was in fact fraud.

It’s been noted in a few places that if he had taken dad’s money waaaay back when he was first given it, taken a couple million out to live on, and invested the rest in an Index fund, he would be far, far richer than he even claims.