hudebnik

The Manhattan protest march was scheduled to start at 2 PM in front of the Central Library (the one with the lions), go down 5th Avenue, and end at Madison Square. It rained all morning, forecast to taper off in the course of the afternoon, so around 1:00 I put a transparent recycling bag over my protest sign, walked to the train station, took a train to Grand Central (a conductor said "I love your sign" as I boarded), and walked a block to the library, where things appeared to be more crowded than at the last two protest marches. (I use the first-person singular because shalmestere was in Boston, winding up a week at the Early Music Festival.)

Oh, about the sign. In honor of Flag Day, one side had a US flag, followed by the words "with liberty and justice for ALL!", the last two words underlined. The other side said "1775-2025: 250 years and we still don't bow to KINGS".

Chatted with various other protesters around 42nd Street, as the crowd surged forward a foot or two, then stayed in place for ten minutes, repeat. About 3:10 I got to 41st Street, but after that things moved more smoothly, and it wasn't quite 4:00 when I got to 34th Street and peeled off for Penn Station because my lower back was hurting.

The next train to my station was in 45 minutes, but I figured I could happily spend that time sitting in a chair with a back. A couple of white twentysomethings asked to see what my signs said, and seemed quite puzzled that I opposed anything the Trump administration had been doing. We discussed the DOGE dismantling of numerous government agencies, and I suggested that if you actually wanted to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, you would start by understanding what the agencies are supposed to do, then identifying particular programs that are working well and others that aren't achieving their goals, then analyzing them to decide whether the unsuccessful programs could be made successful or should be abandoned; you don't start by firing (illegally) all the inspectors general whose job is to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, then firing tens of thousands of mostly-competent workers regardless of whether they're doing a good job. Doing things the right way takes months, and Musk didn't have that much time: he wanted to destroy agencies in a hurry before the courts could stop him. The guy I was talking to acknowledged that there might be more effective ways than Musk's to improve government, "but Musk is gone now. You've been talking for ten minutes, and you're clearly very passionate about what Musk did, but you haven't mentioned Trump once.' [I had, in connection with Musk having no actual governmental authority, but not much.] "So what has Trump himself done that makes you think he's a king?"

So I took a deep breath, thinking "where do I even start?", and didn't do a great job of this part, before a middle-aged black guy walked up and told the kid I was talking to that he was full of shit. The kid stood up, they started shouting in one another's faces, and almost came to blows before the black guy's female companion persuaded him to walk away. One of the twentysomethings reported the episode to a cop, then came over and shook my hand before they all went to catch their train.

At which point I looked at my phone to check on my departure time, realized that I'd been looking at the schedule of trains in the opposite direction, and that I had just missed my actual train; the next one was in another 50 minutes, so I took the subway home instead.

Meanwhile, shalmestere had just boarded a train home from Boston. I got home, took an ibuprofen, lay down for a while, applied a heating pad to my back, walked and fed the dogs, ate a little (I wasn't very hungry), then went back to Penn Station to meet her and accompany her home. After which it became a relatively normal evening.

I've heard bits and pieces about "the abundance agenda" in reading Ezra Klein's NY Times opinion pieces over recent months. He recently co-authored (with Derek Thompson) a book entitled Abundance (review here)on the subject, and this Atlantic article sums up the split in the Democratic party caused by this and two other similar books (Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck and Marc Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works). I haven't read any of the three books yet, but I'm intrigued.

We can all see that the current administration is intentionally destroying the Constitutional Republic and the rule of law in favor of a klepto-autocracy. The only way it's likely to stop doing that is if it loses badly in free and fair elections, and the only likely candidate to beat it is the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party doesn't have a great reputation with the public either: it can run on "stopping the steal" and restoring the rule of law, but to seriously win, it needs to be in favor of something. What is it in favor of?

For most of my (sixty-year) life, the most consistent difference between Democrats and Republicans has been that Democrats believed government could and should work to make ordinary people's lives better, while (starting with Regan) Republicans believed government couldn't work, and shouldn't work, and that any time government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, it must be sabotaged to prevent it from doing that. Since it's always easier to break something than to fix it, Republican governments have had an unfair advantage over Democratic ones in proving their respective points.

But even where and when Democrats are firmly in control, whether local, state, or Federal, they haven't done a great job in recent decades of demonstrating that government can work. Public projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were built a hundred years ago, on schedule and under budget, but anything a government tries to build now takes much longer, costs much more, and accomplishes much less, than initial estimates -- think of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan, or inter-city high-speed rail in California. Trump likes to criticize "Democrat-led hellholes" like San Francisco for their homelessness, and he's not entirely wrong: Democratic-led large cities do have more homelessness than smaller cities or than the few Republican-led large cities. Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" (which was mostly an environmental-policy bill) promised vast increases in solar and wind power, widespread broadband Internet in rural areas, and thousands of new electric-car charging stations so one could actually travel across the country in an electric-only car without fear of getting stranded; in fact, most of the solar-and-wind and broadband projects are still going through permitting and approval, and only dozens of new electric-car charging stations were actually built by the time Trump took office and slammed the brakes on all of that in a fit of pique. By comparison, I think China builds more public transit, solar and wind generation, and so on every year than the US has built in its entire history.

I gather (from the summaries I've read) that in the 1930's and 1940's, liberals in government were successful at using it to build things to improve ordinary people's lives. In the 1960's, liberals started viewing government as the enemy, became more concerned about stopping it from making ordinary people's lives worse, and enacted lots of procedural rules to ensure that all conceivable stakeholders are heard before a shovel goes into the ground. Which is laudable, but in practice it often prevents government from accomplishing anything, even things that would clearly improve most people's lives. The Chinese government, of course, goes to the opposite extreme that Trump would like to emulate: what the President says is what will happen, and other stakeholders might as well not exist.

I don't lose a lot of sleep over the Trump administration demonstrating overwhelming competence at getting good things done, or even overwhelming competence at getting things-I-think-are-bad done. Very simply, Xi Jinping is better at being a dictator than Donald Trump will ever be, and he heads a system of top-down control that's already worked out a lot of the bugs over the past eighty years. But the "abundance" movement within the "liberal-ish" half of the US says "we need to demonstrate that we can make government actually work, largely through reducing procedural obstacles, simplifying and optimizing operations." Sorta what DOGE would be doing if it actually aimed to make things work better rather than just destroying them, if it took the time to understand what current systems aim to achieve and how they currently work before burning them to the ground. Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative was a related effort; see also this look back at its successes and failures twenty years later.

At the same time, I have libertarian friends I respect who would argue that anything government does to help ordinary people is inherently susceptible to corruption, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture, and we're all better off in general if government doesn’t try to do so many things.

I'm reminded that Frank Herbert wrote a couple of SF novels (and short stories, I think) on the premise that "efficiency in government" proponents had actually succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, to the point that a Bureau of Sabotage was created to slow down the rest of the government; the protagonist is a vaguely James-Bond-ish (and quite efficient) Saboteur Extraordinaire named Jorj X. McKie.

Comments? Suggestions? Have you actually read any of the recent books on the subject?

We got back from a camping SCA event at 9:30 PM Sunday, unloaded the car but mostly just piled things in the kitchen. Monday morning I put away most of the stuff in the kitchen. Walked dogs in the park. Cleaned and oiled my use-knife. Oiled my ankle-boots. Cleaned and oiled the treenware plates we used at the event. Emptied the dishwasher. Watered plants on the porch. Started a batch of sourdough bread. Eventually shalmestere got out of bed and we both did some gardening: she weeded things while I picked the first two wild strawberries of the season, and adjusted the bird-net over the cherry tree. While I was trimming dead raspberry canes in the back yard, the next door neighbor said he had a mail-order box that had arrived for us over the weekend, he went and got it, and we had a good conversation about working at Google Maps. His wife works at an organization that needs data about the footprints and heights of individual buildings, so they might be a good client for the Maps Platform.

Had a dream about reading and writing music/software that depended on writing words in cursive, rotating them 180°, and reinterpreting them: for example, "lookup" becomes "dpngooy", more or less.

As Stephen Vladeck at the Times points out this morning, the Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court not to rule on the underlying question of whether the 14th Amendment actually grants birthright citizenship, but "more modestly" on the more-technical question of whether a single district judge can issue a nationwide injunction against a governmental policy. Of course, this is anything but "modest": if SCOTUS rules the way the Justice Department would like, it would be an enormous win for the Trump administration, because the ruling would presumably apply to lots of other illegal and un-Constitutional things the administration wants to do.

Nationwide injunctions really are a concern: both major parties have used them -- together with careful judge-and-venue-shopping -- to impede actions by Presidents of the opposite party. Related is the question of "emergency" injunctions, which when the Supreme Court takes them up as part of its "shadow docket" are usually heard and decided very quickly, possibly with no oral argument at all, and a decision issued without signed opinions. Both of these practices have become increasingly common in recent years, and they both feel like "end runs" around the proper administration of law; it would be nice to have fewer of them.

So here's a question: what constitutes a legal "emergency"? To me, it would be something that's likely to seriously harm somebody who wasn't being harmed before. If you've had a particular right for decades, and somebody tries to take it away from you, especially in a way that's likely to be irrevocable in practice, that could well be an emergency. On the other hand, if something has been happening for decades or centuries, it's hard to claim that fixing it is an "emergency". In other words, the decision whether something qualifies for the "emergency" docket should be biased in favor of the status quo ante: even if a long-standing practice does need to change, it probably doesn't need to change so fast that it can't wait for a proper judiciary proceeding.

And that's why numerous courts have accepted cases about birthright citizenship as "emergencies": the Administration's position would apply a decidedly non-obvious interpretation to the 160-year-old Fourteenth Amendment, reverse a 127-year-old Supreme Court ruling, and reverse various Federal laws written in light of that ruling, so there's a strong presumption in favor of leaving those things unchanged. But the courts accepting those cases have all been lower-level courts. Several of them have issued nationwide injunctions against the Administration's policy, presumably on grounds that the decision doesn't depend on detailed facts of an individual case but on the plain language of the 14th Amendment, which is the same no matter what state or district you live in, and the Justice Department is "modestly" asking the Supreme Court to strike down those nationwide injunctions. Ideally, in the Justice Department's view, a lower-court case would apply only to the individuals involved in that case, and would at most set a non-binding precedent within that court's geographic jurisdiction.

An additional wrinkle is that many of the plaintiffs in these cases so far have been (IIUC) not individuals whose citizenship has been denied, but "blue" states concerned about the policy's effect on their people. I don't understand all the implications of this, or what standing the states have.

Anyway, if the Supreme Court overturned nationwide injunctions for the birthright-citizenship question, several weird things would happen.

1) Thousands, and eventually millions, of US citizens would lose their citizenship because they couldn't afford to file individual cases against having their citizenship stripped, or they didn't know how to do so. (Pro bono goes only so far when there are thousands or millions of similar cases in the system at once.)

2) Perhaps more significantly, thousands and eventually millions of US citizens would lose their citizenship because they're afraid to file a legal case. Imagine that your family consists of a US-born toddler, a DREAMer older child, a parent with a legal student visa or green card, and an undocumented parent, and you put your name on a lawsuit demanding that your toddler be treated as a US citizen. You would probably win the lawsuit, but long before it can even go to court, the rest of the family will have been deported (including the DREAMer and the legal resident). Of course, ICE could have deported the family anyway, but there are millions of such families; filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration will presumably jump you to the head of the line.

3) Thousands, and eventually millions, of US citizens might remain US citizens as long as they stay in the "blue" states where injunctions are in effect, but become non-citizens (and liable to deportation) if they ever travelled to other states. As one of the lawyers pointed out at oral argument, not since the Civil War has a person's citizenship depended on what state the person was in at the moment.

4) Thousands, and eventually millions, of nearly-identical cases would make their way through the judicial system. Probably 95% of these would be settled quickly, in favor of birthright citizenship and following the 1898 Supreme Court precedent, but perhaps 5% wouldn't -- and in those 5% of cases, the administration would have gained a new power (in certain parts of the country) that it hasn't had before. Heads I win, tails we tie: I'll play that game as often as I can.

5) Ironically, that scenario (a handful of rogue judges agree with the Administration in dropping birthright citizenship) is perhaps the best case, because the conflicting rulings allow the good guys to appeal to the Supreme Court, which (even with its 6-3 Republican-appointee majority) is unlikely to disregard the plain language of the 14th Amendment and reverse all those precedents. The alternative is that every single judge who rules on this supports birthright citizenship, but only within that judge's jurisdiction, the Trump administration chooses not to appeal to the Supreme Court and nobody else has standing to do so, the case never gets to the Supreme Court, and in the interim, the Administration can keep revoking people's citizenship as stated in 1 and 2 above in any part of the US where there hasn't been a court case yet.

So those are the effects on birthright citizenship. But the Supreme Court is extremely unlikely to overturn nationwide injunctions only on that one issue: they're more likely to overturn nationwide injunctions in general, on a wide category of legal questions. Such as whether the Trump administration is obligated to obey Federal laws on how and when Federal employees can be fired; whether it's obligated to obey Congressional appropriation bills; whether it's obligated to give due process to non-US-citizens before imprisoning or deporting them; whether it can default on (or "claw back") already-approved grants to universities, libraries, museums, and other non-profit organizations; whether it can penalize and blackmail law firms without naming anything specific they've done wrong; etc. etc. In each of these areas, we could end up in a situation in which the administration is constrained by Federal law in some parts of the country and not in others.

When did the phrase "Venn diagram" come to mean "intersection" in popular discourse?

If you haven't read Time Magazine's April 22 interview with Trump, ... maybe keep it that way, your brain will hurt less and your blood pressure will be lower, but there it is.

Time provides a page of fact-checks of the President's statements in the interview. On trade and tariff issues, he makes up a bunch of numbers that are much higher than the actual numbers, equates buying more than you sell with "losing" money, describes inflation under Biden as "the highest inflation we've ever had", says we're "taking in billions of dollars in tariffs from other countries" that are actually paid mostly by US consumers, etc. He also mis-states crime trends to make Biden look worse and himself look better, overstates evidence against Kilmar Abrego-García, understates prosecutions of rioters in the George Floyd protests, describes Jan. 6 rioters repeatedly as "peaceful and patriotic", overstates the fraud and savings found by DOGE so far, alleges incorrectly that "Stacey Abrams got $2 billion on the environment... something that she knows nothing about" (in fact there was a $2 billion grant to a consortium of NPO's, of which one of the smaller member organizations had formerly employed Stacey Abrams), and alleges widespread Democratic election fraud in both 2020 and 2024.

Trump brags about companies investing in the US: "the companies, the chip companies, the car companies, the Apple. $500 billion. Apple is investing $500 billion in building plants. They never invested in this country.... We have $7 trillion of new plants, factories and other things, investment coming into the United States.... Saudi Arabia, I happen to like the people very much, and the Crown Prince and the King—I like all of them, but they've agreed to invest a trillion dollars in our economy. $1 trillion."
The only way a foreign company or country can invest in the US is with dollars, which they can acquire only by selling stuff to the US, which Trump doesn't want them to do. I'm not an economist, but I get the impression that a country's trade deficit is almost by definition equal to its investment surplus: cut one and you've cut the other.

"[Time] it seems like you are expanding the power of the presidency. Why do you think you need more power?
[Trump] Well, I don't feel I'm expanding it. I think I'm using it as it was meant to be used. [changes topic to tariffs]
[Time] ... you've taken congressional authority on trade and appropriations. You fired the heads of independent agencies. You're challenging the courts right now, as you know. You're using the levers of government to weaken private institutions like law firms and universities. Isn't this seizing power away from institutions and concentrating them inside the presidency?
[Trump] No, I think that what I'm doing is exactly what I've campaigned on. [changes topic to immigration enforcement, equating immigrants with violent criminals]"
[Time] So you're not concentrating more power in the presidency?
[Trump] I don't think so. I think I'm using it properly, and I'm also using it as per my election. You know, everything that I'm doing—this is what I talked about doing. I said that I'm going to move the criminals out. [changes topic to immigration enforcement, blaming Biden for stopping wall construction]"

"[Trump] ... I've made all the deals.
[Time] Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?
[Trump] I’ve made 200 deals.
[Time] You’ve made 200 deals?
[Trump] 100%.
[Time] Can you share with whom?
[Trump] Because the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don't have to pay it."

In other words, simply by imposing tariffs, he has made 200 deals. This is a guy whose name is on a book entitled "The Art of the Deal". "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

"[Time] Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
[Trump] I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don't make that decision.
[Time] Have you asked President Bukele to return him?
[Trump] I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t. ... But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.
[Time] But if you haven't asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?
[Trump] Well, because I haven't been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.
...
[Time] Mr. President, whatever he might have done, whoever he might be affiliated with, doesn’t he deserve his day in court? Nazi saboteurs who came on our shores at Montauk during World War II had their day in court. Al Qaeda terrorists had their day in court.
[Trump] I really give that to my lawyers to determine, that’s why I have them. That’s not my determination. It's something that, frankly, bringing him back and retrying him wouldn't bother me, but I leave that up to my lawyer. You could bring him back and retry him—
[Time] That’s exactly right. You could fix this simply by bringing him back and going through the legal process—
[Trump] But I leave that decision to the lawyers. At this moment, they just don’t want to do that. They say we’re in total compliance with the Supreme Court."

"[Time] Some Republicans are considering raising taxes on millionaires in the package you're planning to pass that would extend your 2017 tax cuts. Do you support that idea?
[Trump] ... I actually love the concept, but I don't want it to be used against me politically, because I've seen people lose elections for less, especially with the fake news. ... I would not mind personally paying more. But the concept is something that may not be acceptable to the public."

One of the persistent mysteries of Trump 2.0 is why a would-be autocrat is simultaneously concentrating power in himself and dismantling most of the government agencies that would enable him to wield power. In particular, I've been wondering about the announcements in the past few weeks that large numbers of State Department offices, embassies, consulates, etc. are being shut down, their staff laid off.

The other day I was engaged in one of my usual debates with a Person Who Is Wrong And Isn't Actually There (this makes it easier to state the other side's arguments and eviscerate them), talking about immigration.

"But they're cutting the line! Why don't they follow the rules and apply to immigrate legally like everyone else?"

"And which application process would that be? There are five main ways to legally immigrate to the US: employer sponsorship, family sponsorship, refugee status, asylum, and the diversity lottery, and Trump (both 1.0 and 2.0) is trying hard to shut down at least four of the five. Employer sponsorship requires you to have a job offer from a US employer before you come to the US. Family sponsorship requires you to have a close relative already living legally in the US for at least a year or so before you come to the US. Refugee status requires years of paperwork and background checks in your home country before you come to the US. For asylum, you enter the US at a border crossing, immediately turn yourself in to a border guard, and request asylum, they listen to your claim, and maybe they give you an appointment for a hearing (or maybe they kick yo out immediately). And the diversity lottery really is a lottery: your chances of getting in that way are minuscule."

"But they shouldn't come to the US to try to get in; they should apply in their home countries --"

[click]

If you shut down all the US embassies and consulates in a particular country or region, you won't get immigration applications from people living in that country or region. This week's plans for State Department reorganization don't mention the entire continent of Africa, which might mean they intend to have no embassies or consulates anywhere in Africa. (Presumably Saudi Arabia, Israel, and some other relatively-wealthy Middle Eastern countries don't count as "Africa".)

I'm not sure of some of the facts here; if I'm wrong, please correct me.

I took an hour out of my work day on Friday to join in a family Zoom call with my uncle Will, who had scheduled his death for later that afternoon. He appeared mentally sharp, with the same dry humor as ever, but (whether because of Parkinson's or because of medications) his face didn't move, no expression at all, except when he was actually talking. My cousin and half-brother were there in person, as were his four-month-old grandson, his first wife (whom I hadn't seen in fifty years or so), and presumably an offscreen nurse to manage the assisted-suicide process. My other uncle, my sister-in-law, my brother, and I joined by Zoom from our respective homes. It was good to see all these people, and the prevailing mood was one of tender humor.

After the Zoom call ended, my brother reported by e-mail that Will took his pill, went to bed in the living room facing the window with a spectacular view of Mt. Hood, fell asleep, and stopped breathing two or three hours later.

Saturday we went to another protest march in Manhattan. This one's theme was "declaration of interdepence", with specific emphases on due process for immigrants and environmental protection. I re-used my sign from the last march, which said on one side "The Bill of Rights is not limited to citizens" and on the other "WASTE + FRAUD + ABUSE = DOGE", while shalmestere made a new sign about clean air, clean water, and clean energy. We stood around for an hour and a half in front of the Central Library before starting to walk, ending up at the corner of Central Park. No incidents that I noticed, no counter-protesters even, and we got gestures of support from the tourists passing by on buses and the drivers crossing our path. There was one guy, right at the end of the march, who used his bullhorn to exhort everyone to not patronize the horse-carriages of Central Park -- a legitimate issue to discuss, but not the main focus of the day, and he was unnecessarily insulting about it. Anyway, we took a subway back to Penn Station, and an LIRR to Queens, and walked home with our protest signs. One lady on the street asked what the signs were about, so I showed her mine, and she explained "Actually, the Bill of Rights is limited to citizens."
"It doesn't say so; it uses the word 'person', not 'citizen'."
"Trust me, I've read the Constitution, and even studied it. The whole Constitution is only for citizens."
"But the authors of the Constitution knew the word 'citizen', and used it in other places; they didn't use it in the Bill of Rights. Everyone deserves due process."
"You want to give due process to murderers and rapists who aren't even in the country legally in the first place?"
"Absolutely, because if they haven't had due process, we don't know that they are murderers and rapists."
Anyway, she got angrier and angrier, accusing "you people" of putting the interests of murderers and rapists and terrorists ahead of real Americans and the victims of murder, rape, and terrorism. We walked away.

Then spent the rest of the afternoon recuperating from the physical stress of standing or walking-slowly on pavement for several hours. It was a gorgeous day, high in the low 80's (and three days earlier I was wearing a winter parka!), with blue skies and light breezes.

Many people have already remarked on the bizarre variation in Trump tariff rates between one nation and another, and various reporters have discussed the "formula" that the Trump administration seems to have used to determine most of those rates. (Russia, North Korea, and Iran are mysteriously all at the 10% level.) It's not completely nonsensical: indeed, if there were a homework problem about tariffs in an Algebra I textbook written for twelve-year-olds who knew nothing about economics, this might be the answer in the back of the book.

Question 15: Your country annually sells $X worth of goods to the country next door, and buys $Y worth of goods from that country. If X < Y, this situation is called a "trade deficit". What level of tariffs would you need to impose on imports to make the trade deficit disappear?

Solution: let T be the tariff rate; the trade deficit is Y - X, the revenue from tariffs is T * Y, so equating the two and dividing both sides by Y, we get T = (Y-X)/Y.

Yes, it really is that simple and stupid.

For example, according to this Times article, the US bought $228M worth of goods from Lesotho last year, while selling it only $7M. (228-7)/228 = .97, so the formula suggests a tariff rate of 97% to balance things out. Trump says he's "being kind" to other countries by setting his tariff rates at only half this level, which is why he's imposing a tariff on Lesotho of "only" 50%. (The Times article also points out that the people of Lesotho don't buy much from the US, or from any country except South Africa, because most of them are desperately poor, and what they sell to the US is mostly diamonds, which can't be mined in the US because the US doesn't have naturally-occurring diamonds.)

Of course, there are lots of real-world issues that don't fit into this Algebra I question, most obviously

• how much of the tariff is actually paid by importers, retailers, and customers in this country rather than by the other country


• how much the tariff's existence changes the levels of imports and exports.

The Trump administration's formula acknowledges these -- sorta. It inserts two constant factors into the equation, one to represent what fraction of the tariff actually comes from Americans and one to represent how much imports decrease as a result of the tariff. In reality, it's not clear that either of those is actually a constant factor: both of them are likely to be superlinear, perhaps quadratic, in the size of the tariff. Anyway, it doesn't matter because whoever came up with the formula arbitrarily assigned one of them the value 4 and the other the value 1/4, so they cancel one another out and we can ignore both of them.

Another real-world issue that doesn't fit into the Algebra I question is how the other country will respond to your imposition of a tariff: will it reduce its own tariffs and trade barriers to get you to drop yours, will it increase its own tariffs and trade barriers in retaliation for you raising yours, etc.? Trump is usually very interested in forcing other people to bend to his will, but in this case he doesn't seem to care much what other countries do in response: he's going to take matters into his own hands and zero out all the trade deficits at the stroke of a pen.

A fourth real-world issue is the distinction between goods and services: for example, the US has a substantial trade deficit with the EU if you only look at goods, while it has a substantial trade surplus with the EU if you only look at services; combining the two, there's still a trade deficit, but much smaller than the goods-only deficit than the administration seems to have used.

Fifth, trade numbers between countries can fluctuate wildly from one year to the next: if one airliner or fighter-jet is delivered in December rather than January, that can make an appreciable difference. It would make more sense to use average figures over, say, five or ten years to do these computations.

And the elephant in the room: all of this is based simply on cash flows. The most common (populist) argument in favor of tariffs and trade barriers is that they'll encourage a particular domestic industry and its workers by protecting them from foreign competition. Of course, this effect only works if the tariffs are expected to stay in place for long enough (several years) for manufacturers to build factories and move their production, and long-term predictability isn't Trump's style. At the same time, a populist argument against tariffs and trade barriers, particularly on parts and raw materials, is that they'll hurt domestic industry and its workers by making their inputs more expensive, and they'll hurt consumers by making everything more expensive. These effects are more immediate than the positive effect on the protected industry, and they apply to every part of the domestic economy except the industry you're trying to protect. The formula takes no consideration of these effects (positive or negative) on domestic industry or consumers, only on how much cash is entering or leaving the country.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the great nations of Europe made trade policy based on a theory called "mercantilism", which measured a nation's greatness by how much gold and silver were within its borders, so selling more and buying less from other countries is always good. Adam Smith pointed out in 1776, in Wealth of Nations, that this is bonkers: in reality trade benefits both parties (or they wouldn't have done it). If you have the choice among buying something cheaply from a neighbor, making it more expensively at home, or not having it at all, you and your people may be best off buying it from your neighbor (especially since this makes your neighbor cash-rich and more able to buy other things from you). A few decades later, David Ricardo elaborated on this with the "theory of comparative advantage": to oversimplify, if your country (for reasons of natural resources, expertise, etc.) can produce commodity A more efficiently than commodity B, while a neighboring country is better at producing commodity B than commodity A, both countries are better off if you produce A and trade it to your neighbor for B. And no real economist or trade-policy expert in over 200 years has believed in mercantilism.

But Trump does. He measures everything in cash, including America's "greatness", so his tariff policy treats tariffs purely as a source of cash revenue, with no concern for any other effects they might have. See today's XKCD for another illustration of how silly this is.

So based on an economic theory that was thoroughly discredited 250 years ago, by ignoring everything we know about the behavior of actual human beings, companies, and nations, and by measuring only one year's exchange of physical goods for cash rather than any broader measures, he's come up with a policy that serves only to demonstrate his ability to tank the national and world economies and cause mass suffering.

we sat next to a guy on the train who asked what the signs were about, so we told him.

He assured me that while a few people would lose their jobs in the short run, everything would settle down soon and in the long run it would be good for everyone.

I disagreed politely, pointing out that the cuts are so deep, and in so many agencies, that pretty much every American will be affected by them, soon and with no expiration date. And that the cuts are being made with an axe, not a scalpel. I'm all in favor of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, but if you were really trying to do that, you would hire people who know about accounting and government procurement, and who would study what the agencies do before issuing prescriptions for how to fix them. But they don't have time to do that kind of serious investigation: they have to break things as fast as possible, without understanding them, because the longer they take, the more likely somebody is to stop them. Instead, they have a bunch of 20-year-old kids who are good at computer programming but don't know anything else making decisions about shutting down entire government agencies, and they've been given access to your entire financial history, your SSN and birthdate and tax returns etc, without even passing a security background check; I assume they've made copies of all that on their home computers so they can sell it later. He agreed that it would be best to have government fixed by people who know what they're doing.

And then I asked what business he was in. He talked about his efforts to get a mistaken DUI stricken from his record so he can get back his CDL and return to his job driving trucks so he can retire with full benefits before he's 70. Apparently a lawyer he hired to help with this lied to him in order to extract more legal fees from him, and never really pressed his case, but he's still out $30K, and several years of seniority, for the attempt. He was on his way to a job fair, and I wished him luck.

As he got off the train, he said "Y'all seem to be really nice people. You're clearly left-wingers, and I'm not, but it's been nice talking to you." I replied "Yes, we need to talk across these divides, or we'll have two countries rather than one."