What's happening in the Legacy Media

Let's do a quik trip through the NY Times for Saturday, April 5th.

I used to write fairly regularly about the fuckery in the NY Times and the WaPo. The headlines, the assholery in their opinion writers, and other items.

Time to bring this back. Let’s start this rollercoaster ride:

Gee, they seem to enjoy talking about the R’s and their affinity for tax cuts. What do they say this time… (link)

The Republican Party embarked this week on a haphazard experiment in economic policymaking, wagering that the United States can weather a monumental tax increase in the form of broad tariffs on imported goods as long as Congress also cuts taxes on income.

It’s a mash-up that many investors, economists and even some G.O.P. lawmakers expect to be a failure.

“I always think that with gambling, at least you have a chance of winning. This is worse than that,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist who worked for former President George W. Bush, said. “This is betting with the mafia. You’re going to lose.”

Gee, they are worried that the effective tax increase of the tariffs will blunt their tax cuts. Alas, the bulk of the Republican tax cut effort that is in process is mostly to extend the last tax cuts from Trump’s first term.

Problem is, tax cuts take a couple of years to begin to filter through the economy. But tariffs? Those fuckers start jacking up prices immediately. There’s a reason, and perhaps I will write a post to explain why prices go up even before the underlying factors are in place¹.

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What? Jerome Powell isn’t rushing in to save Trump from himself? Perhaps all the pointed barbs and threats directed at the Fed weren’t wise.

Still, Powell is right to wait and see what the effects of the ill-advised tariffs that aren’t actually well thought out. But that is pretty much just Trump in a nutshell. Thinking is just not done.

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, made that clear on Friday. The tariffs are much “larger than expected,” he said, and their immense scale makes it especially important for the central bank to understand their economic effects before taking action.

“It is too soon to say what will be the appropriate path for monetary policy,” he said at a conference in Virginia.

In fact, I’d say, the likelihood of further market declines is much greater than the chance that the Fed will turn the markets around in the immediate future.

Yeah, that seems wise. Look, we bought the ticket, we’re going to take the ride.

See, the Fed works to tame inflation, maintain employment, and keep the market functioning. When an ignorant troglodyte like Trump does the dumbest fucking shit that is certain to increase costs (tariffs) and the only real tool in the chest to tame said inflation is to increase interest rates, it is rather expected that the Fed will sit tight. Especially since the odds that the miraculous soft landing engineered by the Biden administration is going to be flushed down the toilet to appease Trump’s ego, the Fed is correct to be cautious.

With the Fed still battling inflation after the runaway surge in prices of 2022 and 2023, it is reluctant to lower interest rates when price increases in a range of goods could be just around the corner. And on Friday, the latest jobs report from the government showed that the economy in March remained reasonably strong. Employers added 228,000 jobs for the month, far more than anticipated, and while the unemployment rate rose slightly, to 4.2 percent from 4.1 percent, there were few signs of substantial weakness.

No surprises there

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Hey, I know what I should do. I should see what the Trump ballsack bather and taint washer has to say. The latest from Ross Douthat is in my sights.

Ross tells us that there are two theories of Trump’s brilliance in his tariffs. The first is the one that everybody posits, that this is a master plan to re-shore manufacturing and thus get back to the greatness of the post WWII America.

First, the goal is to revitalize American manufacturing, our capacity to build at home and export to the world. The global free trade system that took shape in the late 20th century served the American empire and American G.D.P. but at the expense of America’s earlier role as a manufacturing powerhouse — and because manufacturing jobs were such an important source of blue-collar male employment, at the expense of the working-class social fabric.

The problem is that you really can’t go back. Sure, the offshoring that was largely super-sized starting with Reagan, again, not a liberal squish, but even before that shift, the rise of automation and the decline of the labor movement (aka UNIONS) were on a trajectory to cut all the low skilled drones and to use the increased productivity to decimate the working classes².

Then of course, Ross trots out the other tired trope of the Republican Intelligentsia, refusing the deficit³:

Which is where the second argument comes in — that this policy is about fiscal deficits, not just trade deficits and manufacturing. The same global system that made America a net importer also enabled us to borrow immense sums, but we are reaching the point where that borrowing cannot be sustained, where interest rates on the debt will crush our policymaking capacities even if there isn’t an overall flight from the dollar.

Then Ross weighs in with his leaking Santorum…

Now for my own view. I think trying to reshore some manufacturing and decouple more from China makes sense from a national security standpoint, even if it costs something to G.D.P. and the stock market. Using revenue from such a limited, China-focused tariff regime to pay down the deficit seems entirely reasonable

Yo, fuck-o, there is, and has never been a way to just “stick” it to the Chinese to eliminate the deficit and pay down the accrued debt. Ross is a mental midget who has a perch at the NY Times.

Is it too much to hope that he loses his position? Please.

Ok, that’s enough for now. The fuckery is getting deep. The Legacy media is not doing their job. No surprise there.

What I am not seeing on the front page of the Times? Any reporting on the bevy of protests across the nation. That makes the Baby Jesus cry.

1. In short, markets look at what it will cost to replace their current inventory, and even if they paid old lower prices to build that inventory, if there is an increase in prices on the horizon, they will adjust the prices even before ordering more goods for inventory. There’s a lot more, but that is it in a nutshell.

2. It is funny as fuck that the R’s are now the party of the working classes, when they’s spent the last 75 years trying to unravel all the labor protections that were hard fought for in the first half of the 20th century.

3. I really fucking wish that ALL the motherfucking Republicans would shut the fuck up about deficits, interest, and “balancing” the budget. Even Ronnie the sainted one more than doubled the national debt. The hypocrisy is off the motherfucking charts, and yes, Sarah Longwell claims to be a deficit hawk, but her former party is abysmal at this.