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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

by IleneHinds Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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How much would a 20 percent tariff on Mexican imports cost us? I think it’s pointless to delve very deeply into this until President Trump and congressional Republicans produce a serious plan of some kind. Relying on random tweets and leaks from GOP gatherings will just drive us all crazy, as we try to analyze every dumb idea that gets run up the flagpole. Hell, even Paul Krugman says he’s a little confused about some of this stuff, and his Nobel Prize was for international trade.

However, there is one bit of raw data that you might as well get familiar with, since it’s not going to change. Here are our top 20 imports from Mexico:

I’ve highlighted a few of the categories that get the most attention: cars, televisions, crude oil, and produce. Generally speaking, if we tax these things at X percent, their price in the US is going to increase X percent. It won’t be quite that much, since trade will adjust based on the taxes, and in the long run the dollar will rise. Probably. And this all assumes there’s no retaliation from Mexico, which there probably would be.

Still, in the short and medium term, a 20 percent tax will increase the price of Mexican goods by 20 percent. That means a Ford Focus will cost 20 percent more, flat-screen televisions will cost 20 percent more, and avocados will cost 20 percent more. The problem, of course, is that Ford can’t increase the price of a Focus by 20 percent. Nobody would buy them. So they’ll just have to keep prices low and take it in the shorts.

Bottom line: in some cases, prices will go up, which will be bad for US consumers. In other cases, importers who are stuck with Mexican factories will have to accept lower profits, which is bad for US companies. In yet other cases, imports will just cease and plants will be shut down, which will be bad for Mexico.

So who will this be good for? That’s a very good question. In the case of cars and TVs, probably Japan and South Korea. In the case of produce, maybe Chile. In the case of crude oil, maybe Iran.

Of course, if we decide to put a tax on all imports from everywhere—not just Mexico—then consumer prices of just about everything will go up with no release valve. This would violate every trade treaty we’re part of, which means that the entire world would probably retaliate. In the end, prices would go up and American factories would either keep production unchanged or even cut back some. This would be pretty disastrous for the working class folks who voted for Trump.

But that’s what everyone is talking about.

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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

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Being President Is Seriously Cutting Into Trump’s TV Time

by ArnoldDunne564 Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Maggie Haberman reports on how President Trump spends his days:

His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel in a small dining room in the West Wing, and looks through the morning newspapers: The New York Times, The New York Post and now The Washington Post.

But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.

….Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, went back to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, and so Mr. Trump has the television — and his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides — to keep him company. That was the case after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to the Bill O’Reilly show on Fox News, which was airing a feature on crime in Chicago.

Naturally, I am reminded of this famous photograph:

Like LBJ, Trump watches a lot of TV to see how he’s being portrayed, and then spends a big part of his day seething over slights real and imagined. In the end, that didn’t work out so well for President Johnson, but of course television was a new and unsettling thing for him. Trump, by contrast, is a media native, having spent his entire life in front of the tube. Maybe endless seething will work out better for him. Maybe.

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Being President Is Seriously Cutting Into Trump’s TV Time

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What Does It Take for the Press to Call a Lie a Lie?

by Shenna1238 Posted on January 22, 2017

Mother Jones

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Watching the inauguration yesterday, I saw the smallish crowds just like everyone else. My immediate thought was: Oh God, this means tomorrow will be a 24/7 offensive from the White House about how this was the biggest inaugural crowd ever in history. The boy king will demand no less.

Sure enough, that’s what we got. Trump went out to visit the CIA today and informed everyone that the inauguration crowd was at least a million, maybe a million and a half. Then he sent out his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to deliver an unprecedented screed, yelling at the assembled reporters about how dishonest they were and then spewing out a whole array of fabricated numbers to back up his boss’s lies. When he was done, he turned on his heels and left without taking any questions.

I’m not interested in pointless discussions of whether Trump does this stuff to distract us (in this case, from the massive number of people at the women’s marches around the country). I suppose that’s part of it. But it’s obvious from decades of watching Trump that he simply can’t abide any criticism, either express or implied. Everything he does has to be the biggest and best. He’s incapable of not lashing out when anyone suggests otherwise.

That’s obvious enough to be banal at this point. What I’m more interested in is when the media is going to get over its faintheartedness and start calling this stuff what it is: lies. On MSNBC, Jim Sciutto reminded us that Trump frequently says things that “defy the facts.” CNN wrote about Spicer’s “misstatements of fact.” The New York Times said Trump’s crowd numbers were “false.” Other newspapers said the same thing in different ways.

But even by the strictest definition, Trump and Spicer were lying. Trump made up his numbers out of thin air, knowing perfectly well they were based on nothing. Spicer delivered a whole bunch of numbers that were obviously either invented or just plain fake—and did it in an angry tone that was clearly meant to intimidate everyone in the room.

All of this stuff was not just “false,” it was knowingly false. Everyone knows this. So let’s cut out the delicate language and the earnest panel discussions about whether Spicer might have a point about one thing or another. He was lying. Trump was lying. Can’t we be adults and just say so?

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What Does It Take for the Press to Call a Lie a Lie?

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The Most Popular Theory About What Causes Obesity May Be Very Wrong

by Francis7894 Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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You’ve heard it over and over again: The obesity crisis, which affects more than a third of US adults and costs the country hundreds of billions of dollars every year, is due to the fact that people eat more calories than they expend. In other words, one of the leading causes of preventable deaths is rooted in gluttony and sloth. If people jogged more and ate fewer Big Macs, they wouldn’t get obese.

What if that idea is just wrong? Gary Taubes thinks it is. Taubes joined us on the most recent episode of Bite to talk about the flaws in this popular idea of how we get fat.

As a journalist and author, Taubes has devoted his career to understanding how what we eat affects our weight. Taubes sees serious flaws in the “energy-balance theory”—that you just have to eat less and move more to stave off the pounds—and thinks that the idea is seriously undermining the fight against obesity. The more nutritionists and doctors promote that theory, he argues, the more they avoid talking about what Taubes sees as a more convincing cause of our public health woes: sugar.

Taubes traces the roots of the energy-balance theory in his new book, The Case Against Sugar. In the 1860s, German scientists invented a calorimeter which measured how many calories a person consumed and then used up. This innovation helped inform the “new” nutrition science of the early 1900s: “You could measure the energy in, you could measure the energy out,” Taubes explains. “Clearly if someone was getting fatter, they were taking in more energy than they expended. From this came this theory that obesity was an energy-balance disorder.”

But in the 1960s, researchers developed radioimmunoassay, allowing them to measure the circulation of hormones in the blood. Scientists could soon establish how hormones regulate the fat we accumulate, and how the food we eat influences those hormones. But at that point, notes Taubes: “The obesity and nutrition community continues to say, ‘look, we know why people get fat: It’s because they take in more calories than they expend.'”

That stubborn theory—Taubes sarcastically deems it “the gift that keeps on giving”—prevails even today. As my colleague Julia Lurie pointed out in this story, junk food companies use this idea in order to peddle sugary foods to kids. In one lesson of Energy Balance 101, a curriculum backed by companies like Hershey and PepsiCo and taught to 28 million students and counting, students learn that going for a bike ride can balance out munching on a chocolate bar.

The problem with this mentality, Taubes and numerous doctors and scientists argue, is that it ignores the way certain ingredients play a unique role in the way our bodies develop fat. Sugar is metabolized differently, and it doesn’t trigger the hormone that tells us when we’re full. Doctor Robert Lustig argues that too much sugar causes metabolic syndrome, a condition linked to heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses.

So if obesity isn’t an energy-balance disorder, but is rather a metabolic defect, says Taubes, “you have to fix the hormonal thing.” And “the way you start fixing it is you get rid of all the sugar in your diet.”

Taubes realizes all of this is such a bummer to swallow. He’s written a book that’s “the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas,” he writes. So I wanted to know, if not sugar, what’s his vice? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ podcast for people who think hard about their food. Listen to all our episodes here, or subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, or via RSS.

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The Most Popular Theory About What Causes Obesity May Be Very Wrong

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Should BuzzFeed Have Published the Trump Dossier?

by RosieYilbvfpn Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

Last night, BuzzFeed decided to publish a dossier of raw intelligence put together by a British former MI6 officer. Like most reports of this kind, it contains lots of tittle-tattle, and there’s a good chance that much of it is untrue. So should BuzzFeed have published? Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan makes the case against:

It’s never been acceptable to publish rumor and innuendo. And none of the circumstances surrounding this episode — not CNN’s story, not Trump’s dubious history with Russia, not the fact that the intelligence community made a report on it — should change that ethical rule.

Quite so, and virtually every mainstream media reporter seems to agree. And yet, I’m not so sure. Several things happened in the past couple of days that make this a trickier question:

The intelligence community briefed Obama, Trump, and several members of Congress about the contents of the dossier.

CNN reported that “US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect a few days ago.”

The Guardian reported that the FBI took these allegations seriously enough to apply for a wiretap warrant on several of Trump’s aides.

This is still a judgment call. But it’s not a judgment call about some random celebrity. It’s a judgment call about the soon-to-be president of the United States. And it’s about allegations that the intelligence community is taking very seriously.

What’s more, this dossier has apparently been seen or discussed by practically everyone in Washington DC. It has long annoyed me that things like this can circulate endlessly among the plugged-in, where it clearly informs their reporting unbeknownst to all the rest of us. At some point, the rest of us deserve to know what’s going on.

Put all that together—president, credibility among the intelligence community, and widespread dissemination—and I’m not at all sure that BuzzFeed did the wrong thing. Maybe this will all turn out to be the worst kind of made-up gossip, but at some point there’s enough reporting around it that it’s time to stop the tap dancing and let us know just what it is that has everyone so hot and bothered.

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Should BuzzFeed Have Published the Trump Dossier?

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Were 401(k) Plans Just a Big Mistake?

by ChelseaGaertner Posted on January 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday about the folks who (accidentally) created the 401(k) retirement plan. They aren’t happy with their creation:

Many early backers of the 401(k) now say they have regrets about how their creation turned out despite its emergence as the dominant way most Americans save. Some say it wasn’t designed to be a primary retirement tool and acknowledge they used forecasts that were too optimistic to sell the plan in its early days.

Others say the proliferation of 401(k) plans has exposed workers to big drops in the stock market and high fees from Wall Street money managers while making it easier for companies to shed guaranteed retiree payouts.

The Journal piece is accompanied by the chart on the right, showing the decline of the personal saving rate over the past few decades. It looks pretty bad. Just as old-style pensions were going away, Americans were saving less and less, including their savings in 401(k) accounts. Retirement is now a hellhole, just a grim march from retirement to death subsisting on cat food.

But let me show you another chart. There’s more than one way to save, it turns out. For example, you can build up equity in your home. And as housing prices have risen over the past several decades, so has total personal wealth:

Even this number is down since the 80s, but a drop from 103 percent to 98 percent doesn’t seem all that scary, does it? And it’s worth remembering that housing wealth has long played a role in retirement, as retired homeowners either sell their houses, downsize their houses, or take out a reverse mortgage on their houses.

Now, this hardly tells the whole story. The truth is that there are good and bad aspects to both old-style pensions and 401(k) plans. Here are a few:

Most people vastly overestimate how generous those old-style pensions were. Half of Americans never got them at all, and most of the rest got modest pensions. The exceptions were public-sector workers and some unionized workers.
That said, old-style pensions were most likely distributed a bit more evenly than 401(k) wealth, which is skewed toward the wealthy. But the difference probably isn’t huge. Unfortunately, there’s no reliable data that tells us for sure.
Overall pension wealth hasn’t changed much. It was about 13 percent of total wages in 1984 and it’s about 13 percent today.
Early 401(k) plans largely bypassed the poor and working class. However, changes made in 2006 have increased the retirement saving rate among the young and the low-income. It’s probably the case that more low-income workers are saving for retirement today than ever in history.
401(k) plans are more vulnerable to stock market shocks. However, the 2006 changes included a provision that encourages employers to offer “lifecycle” funds, which become less volatile as workers get older. Hopefully this will become close to universal in the future.
The bottom third of the income spectrum is screwed now and always has been. Neither old-style pensions nor 401(k) plans have ever helped them much, and they rely almost entirely on Social Security. We should increase Social Security payouts for these folks.

I’ve written about this in more detail before, most recently here. Advantages of 401(k) plans over traditional pensions are here. The bottom line is that 401(k) plans aren’t perfect, and we could stand to make more changes to them. I’d like to see hard caps on management fees, for example. Nonetheless, on average, old-style pensions weren’t all that great either, and 401(k)s are getting better. I’m all for further reforms, and I’m all for expanding Social Security for the bottom third. But taken as a whole, 401(k) plans aren’t bad, and as the 2006 reforms continue to make a difference, they’re going to get better.

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Were 401(k) Plans Just a Big Mistake?

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Meet Mike Pence, America’s New Prime Minister

by HildaYcrekr Posted on December 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The front page of my morning LA Times happened to feature the headlines on the right. The headline on women reminds me of this Slate piece about how a lot of women who voted for Trump are now worried that he might defund Planned Parenthood. And of course, there’s yesterday’s news about all the business titans who are suddenly concerned that Trump might raise tariffs. Even on the right, it seems like everybody’s worried or alarmed or concerned these days.

We’ve seen dozens and dozens of headlines like this over the past few weeks. An awful lot of Trump backers seem sort of shocked by what’s going on. I mean, he wasn’t serious about all that stuff on the campaign trail, was he?

Who knows? But it looks to me like America has finally adopted a constitutional monarchy. The nice thing about this arrangement is that you have one person, the king or queen, who handles all the ribbon cuttings and so forth, and another person, the prime minister, who can then focus almost entirely on actual governing. In our case, Donald Trump is the new king of America, tweeting out nonsense, going on victory tours, and hobnobbing with famous people at Mar-a-Lago.

And then we have our new prime minister, Mike Pence. Freed from the demands of public appearances, he spends all his time behind closed doors running the country. He wants to kill Planned Parenthood. He wants to privatize the VA. He wants to immiserate millions of people on Obamacare.

Maybe Trump wants some of this stuff too. There’s no telling, really. As near as I can tell, he’s basically the guy tasked with distracting everyone while Pence fills the cabinet and chats with Paul Ryan about how to run the country. Among other things, this probably means that the business community doesn’t need to worry. Pence and Ryan will talk Trump out of the wall and the tariffs and the replacement for Obamacare. If he starts to balk, they’ll get Jared Kushner to whisper soothingly in his ear and then turn on the TV.

Welcome to the Mike Pence administration.

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Meet Mike Pence, America’s New Prime Minister

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Trump Releases Twitter White Paper on Trade

by ChristelLuster Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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After hinting around for weeks, president-elect Donald Trump finally released a detailed, 7-part (!) tweetstorm about his plans to reform America’s mercantile policy:

The U.S. is going to substantialy reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence, is WRONG! There will be a tax on our soon to be strong border of 35% for these companies wanting to sell their product, cars, A.C. units etc., back across the border. This tax will make leaving financially difficult, but these companies are able to move between all 50 states, with no tax or tariff being charged. Please be forewarned prior to making a very expensive mistake! THE UNITED STATES IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS.

Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!

At the risk of taking Trump literally, rather than seriously, I wonder if he actually thinks he can do this? It’s not as if the president is allowed to unilaterally slap a 35 percent tariff on Carrier air conditioners or Ford Fiestas, after all. If Trump invokes the appropriate “national emergency” authority, he could impose a tariff on all air conditioners or all cars. Or he could impose a tariff on all goods from Mexico or all goods from China. But I think that’s as far as his authority goes. He can’t simply decide to punish one particular company.1

In the case of Mexico, of course, he can’t do even this much unless he persuades Congress to exit NAFTA—and that has a snowball’s chance of happening. He could, in theory, impose a 35 percent tariff on, say, telecom equipment made in China, but that would send up howls of protest from American businesses and almost certain retribution from China.

So…what’s the plan here? The American business community, which would go ballistic over something like this, has been pretty quiet, which suggests they think it’s just blather. That’s my guess too. But I guess you never know. We overeducated elites like to say that stuff like this is just affinity politics—aka red meat for the rubes—but perhaps eventually we’ll learn that we should have taken Trump literally after all.

1As far as I know, anyway. But I would certainly appreciate a detailed explainer on this from someone who’s truly an expert.

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Trump Releases Twitter White Paper on Trade

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Donald Trump Decides to Poke the Chinese Dragon

by SwenA289748 Posted on December 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Financial Times reports that Donald Trump spoke on the phone today with Tsai Ying-wen, the president of Taiwan. This is a very big deal:

The telephone call, confirmed by three people, is believed to be the first between a US president or president-elect and a leader of Taiwan since diplomatic relations between the two were cut in 1979.

Although it is not clear if the Trump transition team intended the conversation to signal a broader change in US policy towards Taiwan, the call is likely to infuriate Beijing which regards the island as a renegade province. “The Chinese leadership will see this as a highly provocative action, of historic proportions,” said Evan Medeiros, former Asia director at the White House national security council.

Of course, maybe Trump was just calling to ask for a business favor:

The mayor of Taoyuan confirmed rumors on Wednesday that US president-elect Donald Trump was considering constructing a series of luxury hotels and resorts in the northwest Taiwanese city. A representative from the Trump Organization paid a visit to Taoyuan in September….Other reports indicate that Eric Trump, the president-elect’s second son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, will be coming to Taoyuan later this year to discuss the potential business opportunity.

Who knows? But foreign policy wonks are blowing a gasket over this, and the question of the hour is: Did Trump set off this diplomatic shitstorm accidentally or deliberately? I have to believe it was deliberate. Even Trump’s team isn’t so pig-ignorant that they’re unaware of our policy toward China and Taiwan.

But if that’s the case, it means that Trump is dead set on pursuing a hostile policy against China from the get-go. Perhaps, thanks to his decades of steely negotiating victories, he believes the Chinese will eventually back down once they realize they can’t mess with him. Perhaps. Welcome to Trumpland.

UPDATE: It’s worth noting that Trump has an odd kind of advantage here. For a little while longer, anyway, he can do this kind of stuff just to see what happens—and then, if it blows up, he can pretend he wasn’t up to speed what with all the staffing work etc. etc. Then he calls someone in China and declares that everything is fine, China is a fantastic place, he has nothing but the highest respect for them, blah blah blah.

Will this work? I suppose it might. But not for much longer.

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Donald Trump Decides to Poke the Chinese Dragon

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Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

by Fbvisitsmy Posted on November 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve written a post or two about the main reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election, and I always nod to the fact that there are other, smaller reasons too. One of these smaller reasons is that Clinton herself made mistakes, something that Harold Pollack noted a few days ago. So I asked him what he thought the campaign’s three biggest miscues were. He wrote a long post about this, which you should read since it contains a lot of discussion and nuance. In normal bloggy fashion, however, I’m going to ignore all that. Instead, here are Pollack’s answers, along with my comments:

Creating the email and speech problems, and being brittle and defensive about cleaning them up. No argument here. We both agree that these problems were wildly overblown by the press, but nonetheless they were problems that Clinton brought on herself. It’s all part of her greatest character deficit: pushing rules to the boundaries and then being defensive and secretive about it when her actions come to light. The former is a bad habit, and the latter just makes the press even more ravenous than they’d ordinarily be. It’s a toxic combination.

Final Polls on November 7

ABC/Post
NBC/WSJ
NBC/Survey Monkey
UPI/CVOTER
CBS/Times
IBD/TIPP
Fox
Monmouth
Bloomberg/Selzer

Clinton +4
Clinton +5
Clinton +7
Clinton +3
Clinton +4
Clinton +1
Clinton +4
Clinton +6
Clinton +3

Overconfidence and complacency across the political spectrum. In retrospect, this is obviously true. But even now, this hardly strikes me as a campaign problem per se. Clinton and her fellow Dems were confident because every poll showed them well ahead. I assume that all her internal polling showed the same thing. In the end, though, that polling was apparently off by about 3 points, and more than that in the famous trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That’s a big miss.

So what happened to the polls? Did Clinton’s internal polling show her way ahead? If so, how did it fail so badly? That’s what I’d like to know. I think anybody would have been overconfident if their polling showed them winning in a walk.

Signaling to older rural white voters that we didn’t want them, and indeed would leave them behind. This is hard to assess. There’s no question that Democrats have steadily lost the support of the white working class over the past two decades. This is something that goes far beyond Hillary Clinton. But did the white working class leave because they thought Republicans were likely to bring their jobs back and make their lives better? That hardly seems likely, given that during this entire period Republicans have campaigned on a steady diet of corporate deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

But if that’s the case, we’re back to optics and race—and Trump appealed explicitly to both. He loudly and persistently pretended to care about the white working class while offering nothing much that would actually affect them. And he was pretty plainly pro-white, which obviously appealed to at least some of them. Clinton’s problem is that she isn’t cynical enough to do the former and not loathsome enough to do the latter.

Could she still have done more? Of course. Politicians routinely use symbols to demonstrate respect for groups even if their platforms don’t offer an awful lot of help at a concrete level. Clinton didn’t do that, and it turned out to be a mistake. I can’t bring myself to blame her too much for this, since it’s all hindsight, but it was still a mistake—and an especially big one since she clearly failed to understand what was happening in three states that were so critical to her that they were called the “blue firewall.”

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Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

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