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Elections are binary. Sometimes, we vote FOR our guy and sometimes we vote AGAINST their guy.

We only have the candidates who survive the torture test. Maybe that’s sound.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

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Small point — the first shot in a trade equalization is not to put on tariffs but to allow free and fair trade with American companies. I suspect more than half of any trade deficit would disappear if this were done.

I would take every product we trade and put them all on a spreadsheet and say, “Pick which Chinese product you want unfettered access to the US market. I will pick a corresponding product American that gets unfettered access to the Chinese market.”

Then, I would dollar weight the trade relationship and force the amount of trade to equalize.

I am willing to be such a methodical approach would fix more than half of the imbalance.

Then, I would say, “These products can come to the US but only if they are final assembled or manufactured in the US.”

This is exactly what we did with cars and it worked.

In the end, it will be smooth but it takes friction to create that smooth.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Since in the FT Mike Bloomberg called the content of the POTUS campaigns “banal” and Trump took that as aimed at him and, thus, no longer regards Mike as a friend, my remark here hoping for more in quality and detail in Trump’s proposals on the economy may guarantee that Trump would never regard me as a friend!

Let’s see: IIRC, Bloomberg wants to “fight climate change”, ban 32 ounce soda with sugar, cut back on salt in restaurant food, and put wind turbines on the tops of the buildings in NYC — hmm, where does Mike get that really strong funny stuff he’s been smoking?

Maybe I’m asking for too much: Maybe a good answer for the economy would require economic modeling from the Fed, the OMB, the CBO, etc. and be a huge effort and still not very precise. Maybe Trump has some expert advice. Maybe he thinks that getting into such details in the campaign would just create a mess — here maybe he is correct.

There is the old rumor that the Smoot-Hawley tariff was a big cause of the Great Depression. Hmm …. So, now there are claims that if the US puts on some tariffs and weakens the dollar, there will be a global trade war. Hmm.

Trump has been talking about trade imbalances with China, Japan, Mexico, and sometimes Viet Nam. Okay. If he puts on tariffs with just those three and they retaliate, which they might not do much of, that still leaves for US selling to the rest of the world. IIRC, Google has been getting more revenue from outside the US than inside. Maybe a nice survey of what we are selling and to whom would show that our export revenue would remain fine and, if we weakened the dollar, improve.

But my guess would be, if Trump’s actions really bring back a lot of jobs, then we’re talking one heck of a sudden, huge slug of capex for the plant, equipment, etc. for those jobs. Maybe that’s much of what he expects the $2.5+ trillion of US earnings held overseas and brought back to the US would be used for. At, say, 15%, that would also be $375+ billion in new tax revenue, thus, offsetting tax reductions elsewhere? Is there any good work better than just back of the envelope for such planning?

Let’s see, in comparison, as at

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

etc. in the news we have that physics and the NSF, and thank you NSF, just found that at 1.3 billion light years away, two black holes orbited each other faster and faster and closer and closer and just merged into one black hole. The event generated gravitational waves that were detected for 0.2 seconds.

The two black holes had masses of 36 and 29 solar masses, and the final, one black hole has a mass of 62 solar masses. So, we are missing 36 + 29 – 62 = 3 solar masses of mass. So, in less than a second, the event converted 3 solar masses of mass into energy, in this case gravitational energy — a spectacular level of power, that is, energy per unit time. That is,

“For a tenth of a second [the collision] shines brighter than all of the stars in all the galaxies,” Allen says. “But only in gravitational waves.”

from

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/gravitational-waves-einstein-s-ripples-spacetime-spotted-first-time

So, the gravity field of the universe changed via gravity waves. We had two very sensitive laser interferometers (remember Young’s double slit in physics?) that detected the event.

That’s a lot of detail for something that happened 1.3 billion light years away for black holes that we essentially can’t see.

Nice work!

Now, how can we get such nice work on the major issues we are hearing about in this campaign, especially the US economy?

I’d sure like to see such quality and detail on Trump’s proposals for the economy.

IMHO, especially on the economy, all the rest of the candidates are much less promising than Trump, but, without all the quality and detail, Trump is by a wide margin the least bad but not nearly as good as I want and I fear we need.

Ancient v vintage?

The old white guy and the old white girl?

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/bernie-v-hillary-when-ancient-battled-vintage/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com