The Sunday “talking heads” programs seemed to have settled on the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia as the most significant of the day with ABC, CBS, and NBC all featuring stories that in one way or another connected to it. To my eye the facts of the case appear to be:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national
He has resided in Maryland for the last 14 years
He has never requested asylum
He has a family in Maryland
The Trump Administration deported him to El Salvador where he was incarcerated with MS-13 gang members
The Trump Administration says their action was under the Alien Enemies Act
The Trump Administration says Mr. Abrego Garcia was departed to El Salvador via “administrative error”
The Supreme Court has gently rebuked BOTH the district court judge who ordered the Trump Administration to return Abrego Garcia to the United States and the Trump Administration, requesting the Trump Administration “facilitate” his return

The contested facts of the case appear to be

Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13
His wife filed a protective order against him for domestic violence

It has also been asserted that he has engaged in human trafficking.

The BBC summary of the facts of the case confirm all of the above.

There are several things that irritate me about the ABC, CBS, and NBC coverage of the story. First, there appears to be an implicit assumption that there is a generalized right immigration where no such right exists. Second, the words “due process” are frequently thrown around without acknowledging that there is no unitary due process but, rather, due process can be a lot of different things under different circumstances. It seems to be used synonymously with “individualized hearing” but not only is that not the definition of due process but Congress can change what the due process in different cases pretty much at will.

Nate Silver provides a pretty good commentary on the matter.

I honestly don’t understand why Democrats are pursuing this so assiduously. To my eye it appears to be a losing issue. Mr. Abrego Garcia is unlikely to be allowed to remain in the United States even if he is returned from El Salvador for an individualized hearing.

I’ve had writer’s block for a while but there are a few topics I wanted to talk about so we’ll see how far I get.

A few days ago my wife asked me when I thought the first resignation/firing of one of President Trump’s cabinet members would come. I said “within a month”.

To cast your mind back during President Trump’s first term there was considerable turnover among his appointees. I suspect this term will be little different in that respect.

The most obvious candidate for dismissal is Secretary of Defense Hegseth but, although he’s skating on thin ice, I doubt he’ll be the first to go. We’ll see what happens but Homeland Security Sec. Noem’s losing her purse with her passport, ID badge, etc. is not a particularly good look under the circumstances. I suspect she’ll be able to weather the kerfuffle.

So, those are my questions. When will the first resignation/dismissal come and who will it be?

On Thursday I visited my primary care provider and he prescribed a new pharmaceutical for me. I started taking it that evening. By Friday evening I was experiencing symptoms far worse than those the new drug was intended to deal with.

One of the problems with being me is that I’m not the average patient. My body is built differently than others’ and behaves differently than, apparently, those of most people. I have been on a low-fat and low-sodium diet for the last 60 years. I’ve never smoked, taken recreational drugs, or drunk much. My consumption of red meat is about a third that of the average American’s. I eat 1,800 or fewer calories per day (and have for decades) and (until recently) walk 5-7 miles per day. I was diagnosed with a chronic pain condition 30 years ago which, after an unproductive two year course of medical treatment I have managed by maintaining an extremely regular schedule, taking the occasional NSAID or drink of alcohol, and meditation. I’m no longer taking the NSAIDs or drinking.

I have what are called “paradoxical reactions” to pharmaceuticals. Painkillers either do nothing for me or produce pain. Anti-nausea drugs may make me throw up. And so on. That seems to be familial—my closest relatives have the same experience.

Consequently, looking at the drug side effects under “rare side effects” is sensible for me and, sure enough, what I was experiencing was a possible side effect of the new drug. The immediate care practitioner I consulted prescribe an antibiotic and a steroid for me and instructed me to follow up with my PCP in no uncertain terms. The next day after being unable to reach my PCP I spent a half day waiting in the emergency room, ultimately seeing a physician. The physician concurred with my decision to stop taking the new drug, suggested I avoid the steroid, and prescribed a different antibiotic for me. I’m taking that now.

I’m scheduled to see my PCP tomorrow. I may fight the original diagnosis. I don’t think that’s what’s wrong with me. I no longer have the symptom for which I originally sought care.

I don’t fault my PCP. I think he’s doing the best he can.

Here’s William Galston’s take on what should be our belated response to China’s actions:

Over the past decade, our manufacturing output has stagnated, as has the sector’s productivity. And in some respects, our manufacturing sector’s decline affects our national security. As we learned during the pandemic, the U.S. is highly dependent on other countries, including China, for drugs and other essential medical supplies. Nor can we hope to keep pace with China’s rapidly growing navy without regaining our lost shipbuilding capacity. Further, as we’ve seen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, our defense industrial base has weakened dangerously since the fall of the Soviet Union. But the remedy for these ills is a set of targeted policies, not a global trade war. The chainsaw isn’t an appropriate tool for restructuring the international economic order any more than it is for reforming government.

Antagonizing our friends around the world is a poor strategy for solving the heart of our trade problem—our asymmetrical relationship with China. Xi Jinping suppresses purchasing power and social benefits for his country’s citizens while subsidizing exports, allowing Chinese products to undercut those produced in other industrialized countries. China then uses the proceeds from artificially elevated export sales to direct investment to favored industries and new technologies while funding a massive military buildup.

In response to prior U.S. efforts to stem this flood, Chinese manufacturers have relocated significant production to countries such as Vietnam, whose cooperation the U.S. will need if it hopes to shut off this Chinese escape valve. Any way you look at it, imposing huge tariffs on every country with which the U.S. has a bilateral trade deficit makes no sense.

He changes the subject quite a bit so you’ve got to be able to “read around” his frequent digressions but the conclusion is inescapable. Reducing our trade with China is in our national interest. The risks of not doing so are simply too great. We can still afford to subsidize trade with our “friends”. I put “friends” in quotes because I genuinely believe we have no friends. We have clients and we have adversaries but no friends.

I’ve been off my game for a little while. This post isn’t taking the form I had originally intended because Noah Smith has said most of what I wanted to say:

The only possible solution way for China’s rivals to match it in size is to gang up. And in this case, what “gang up” means is to form a free trade zone amongst each other, with zero trade barriers between them.

If the U.S. had zero trade barriers with Europe, Japan, Korea, India, and the countries of Southeast Asia, those countries wouldn’t become exactly like one huge “domestic” market. There would still be language barriers, geographic distance, exchange rate fluctuations, and national regulatory differences that end up accidentally restricting trade. But it would go a long way toward allowing American manufacturers — and European, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Southeast Asian manufacturers — to attain the sort of economies of scale and supply-chain networks that China enjoys within its borders.

Basically, to balance China, you’d need to start thinking of “Non-China” as a single vast economic entity.

He goes on to emphasize the importance of imposing tariffs on intermediate goods as well as primary ones. Just to give one example Sun Pharma has 30% of the U. S. pharmaceutical market and 2/3s of Sun’s active pharmacological ingredients are imported from China.

As to the claim that we are starting a trade war, here’s your trade war for you:

Between 2000 (when China gained permanent most favored nation trading status and 2009 (China was admitted to the WTO at the end of 2001) China has dumped cheap subsidized manufactured goods on the U. S. market and we have suffered more then 5 million casualties—relatively highly paid manufacturing jobs lost here.

We are making the Chinese Communist Party rich through our trade policies and the CCP is polluting the air and the oceans. Its government-sponsored hackers are endangering every U. S. company or government agency. It is surveilling our military cites with observation balloons and drones.

While controlled by the CCP China is not a good global citizen and we should take the steps we must to end our support for that. Given their subsidies, import quotas, and eagerness to raise tariffs that may goes as far as embargo. We really have little choice.

I am under no illusions. Such actions will make us poorer than might otherwise be the case. That is better than the alternatives.

I have been thinking about writing a post on the discourse surrounding President Trump’s tariffs for some time. After considering it I have decided that would be simplified by defining some terms, particularly regarding things like “free trade”, “comparative advantage”, etc. This post is an attempt at those definitions.

I’m going to use the word “trade” in the sense of imports and exports to/from other countries.

There are, basically, three styles of trade:

1. Free trade
2. Managed trade
3. Autarky

The term “free trade” is used pretty loosely. To the best of my knowledge no country on the planet has truly free trade. Genuinely free trade means

• It applies both to trade in goods and trade in services.
• No tariffs or quotas
• No occupational licensing, intellectual property law, or the like

I don’t advocate truly free trade but that’s what it means possibly because that’s what it means.

“Autarky” means self-sufficiency, i.e. no foreign trade. There are only a few countries that might succeed at being autarkies, e.g. the U. S., Russia, China, and India. However, autarky practically by definition makes the country that is an autarky poorer than it otherwise might be and, indeed, that has been the experience of countries that practiced it.

That’s why I advocate managed trade but our present managed trade is perverse. We protect some goods and services while subsidizing imports. We subsidize imports by imposing regulations (health, labor, safety, environmental, etc.) on the goods we produce (which increases their costs) but not limiting our imports to countries that have regulations on goods production as strict (or stricter) than our own. I should point out that that’s why it makes sense (from their point of view) for EU countries to impose tariffs on goods imported from the U. S. since their regulations are stricter than ours.

The net effect of that is to benefit protected service-providers. That many of those protected service-providers, e.g. physicians, lawyers, etc., are in the top 10% of income earners while many of those in the goods-producing sectors of the economy that compete with imports are in the bottom 10% of income earners is why I see our system of managed trade as perverse.

The short version of “comparative advantage” is the countries should produce the goods and service they are able to produce better and cheaper than other countries are. The longer version of comparative advantage enunciated by David Ricardo more than 200 years ago is that trade between Country A and Country B makes sense even when everything produced by Country A is more expense than the same good or service produced by Country B so long as there is a relative difference between the prices of the competitive products or services. The additional complication is that although I doubt that 1% of Americans understand that argument I suspect that nearly 100% of Americans understand buying what’s cheaper.

It should be noted that comparative advantage only applies when the means of production are not portable from one country to another. The portability of the most significant factors of production, i.e. capital and labor, today makes comparative advantage a lot less important than it was 200 years ago. And, of course, our system of managed trade subverts comparative advantage.

What do you think of the three recent SCOTUS “emergency docket” actions? The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the decisions.

The three cases are:

• Donald J. Trump v. J. G. G. et al (5-4): an application to vacate the lower court ruling on removal of non-citizens to El Salvador
• Pause of an order by a lower court judge to reinstate fired federal employees (7-2)
• Administrative stay on decision by lower court judge to return a man erroneously deported

The editors conclude:

This will reduce cases that come before the Court on its so-called emergency docket and give different lower courts an opportunity to consider the merits before Justices do. The resounding and useful message to lower courts is to stay in your lane.

Unmentioned is that the first two actions were not taken along partisan/ideological lines.

At the Wall Street Journal Matt Grossman, Anthony DeBarros, and Konrad Putzier have an informative piece on the peculiar way in which the Trump Administration is calculating “reciprocal tariffs”:

A White House handout called these costs a tariff charged to the U.S., “Including Current Manipulation and Trade Barriers.” From there, in nearly all cases, the Trump administration imposed new “Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs” of roughly half that result.

“Drop your trade barriers…and start buying tens of billions of dollars of American goods,” Trump said Wednesday.

Several economists said that basing tariffs off of bilateral goods deficits is confusing and illogical.

and

Data sleuths on social media soon reverse-engineered the formula behind the White House’s calculations, zeroing in on the trade-related math. Dividing the U.S.’s 2024 goods-trade deficit with China—$295 billion—by the amount the U.S. imported from China resulted in the White House’s 67%.

The Wall Street Journal followed calculations highlighted in postings on social media, including by journalist James Surowiecki, a former business columnist for the New Yorker. The Journal found the calculations explained the costs attributed to nearly 100 countries, including all of the European Union, which the White House treated as a single bloc.

Read the whole thing.

Other commentators have pointed to the complexity of administering and enforcing such tariffs. I’ve already expressed my opinion—that China’s actions are in a class by themselves, were it up to me I would only impose tariffs on goods imported from China, and my tariffs on Chinese goods would be much, much higher.

The graph above illustrates the values of the S&P 500 stocks over the last year. Pretty clearly the market does not love President Trump’s tariffs. Here’s a sampling of opinion from across the spectrum.

New York Times

Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and Steve Rattner all have pieces against the tariffs.

Most critically, Trump might learn from the fallout of previous attacks on the global trading system. Trade today amounts to a much larger share of economic output than it did in the 1930s, when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act exacerbated the economic losses of the Great Depression. Yet Trump’s new levies bring the average U.S. tariff back to where it was in 1933.

Misconceived as Trump’s tariff barrage might appear to an economist’s eye, it hews to an underlying logic about the exercise of power. Regardless of their effects on production or employment, Trump’s tariffs will compel companies across the economy and countries across the world to seek a deal with America’s leader. This seems to be Trump’s only realistic goal.

Fareed Zakaria

The reality of America as the dominant nation in the fastest-growing and most critical spheres of the global economy today — technology and services — seems to mean nothing to him. His tariffs have been calculated using a method closer to voodoo than economics. Among many mistakes, they are based solely on U.S. trade deficits with countries in goods. That the United States runs huge surpluses in services — exporting software, software services, movies, music, law and banking to the world — somehow doesn’t count. More than 75 percent of the U.S. economy is apparently intangible fluff; steel is the real deal.

Megan McArdle

None of these theories work, and that’s because Trump doesn’t really have a theory of tariffs. What he has is a series of intuitions: that exports make you strong and imports make you weak and dependent; that America was a better place when manufacturing formed the core of our economy; and that manufacturing tended to be strong when tariffs were high. Combine those intuitions with a penchant for showmanship and a chaotic approach to administration, and what you get is, well, just ask the penguins.

George Will

Donald Trump’s economic agenda, from taxes to tariffs (which are themselves taxes), is variable because he believes in the immediate translation of whims into policy proposals, without an intervening pause for study. (His conversation with a Las Vegas waitress quickly became his proposal to end taxation on tips.) Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Trump suddenly favors eliminating “taxes” on people making less than $150,000 a year — in 2022, about 93 percent of Americans 15 and over.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs are the biggest policy shock to the world trading system since Richard Nixon blew up Bretton Woods in 1971. As with that decision, Mr. Trump is acting with little understanding about the damage his tariffs will cause. The “disturbance” might not be as little as he imagines.

Joseph C. Sternberg

Europe needs a new strategy, and the best plan by far is to live well—i.e., economic growth. If the American export market no longer is as available as it once was, there are enormous opportunities to expand Europe’s domestic market. Europeans have become aware in recent years of the shocking gap that has opened between European and U.S. productivity and per-capita incomes—with Europeans some 34% poorer on average than their American peers. This implies there are enormous opportunities for the European economy to jolt itself into greater prosperity.

Ideas for how to do so aren’t hard to come by.

Peggy Noonan

We are not bringing our friends close and our enemies closer. Too bad, when the world looks more and more like a mob war every day. We won’t come away from this new time looking stronger and more commanding but dumber and weaker—less like the Don, more like Fredo.

One of the things that impressed me about the responses, other than their collective neoliberal opposition to tariffs, was how mealy-mouthed so many of them were. Yes, our enormous trade deficit has made the United States richer. By far the greatest proportion of that wealth has been realized by the ultra-wealthy while middle income people, those between one standard deviation above the median income and one standard deviation below the median income find themselves struggling. You cannot reasonably complain about “the rich” while ignoring the reasons “the rich” are so much richer than the rest of us.

Furthermore, I think it is incumbent upon those who disagree with a policy to identify alternatives and not a single opinion piece did so.