A Different Take

The CO2 scare-mongers simply don’t make any sense. They are using the issue to destroy civilization because they think it is evil, no doubt projecting their personal attitudes and mental aberrations.--Moore

My class is today. Feels weird.

The Duchess of Sussex sent an envelope marked 'Kensington Palace' to the reunion of the class of 1999 of her all-girls Catholic school in Los Angeles, apologizing for not being there. Immaculate Heart High School! Another reason for the Brits to hate her.

Salon Media says they have reached an 11th hour deal to sell the company and its flagship property Salon.com for $5 million. In an SEC filing, Salon also revealed its position was dire and that it would face imminent “bankruptcy and liquidation” if the deal should fall through.

Britain's education system is failing to tackle the “astonishing” underperformance of boys as feminists have made the topic “taboo”, the former head of the university admissions service has warned. Mary Curnock Cook, who was chief executive of Ucas until last year, said the fact that boys are falling behind in education is a national scandal – yet it is such an “unfashionable” topic to discuss that it has become “normalised”.

Some numbers:

University: 57 per cent of women went to university last year compared to 43 per cent of men (Ucas, 2017-18)

A-levels: 79 per cent of girls received A*-C grades compared to 75 per cent of boys (Joint Council for Qualifications, 2018)

GCSEs: 71 per cent of girls received A*-C grades compared to 62 per cent of boys (Joint Council for Qualifications, 2018)

Key Stage 2: 68 per cent of girls reached the expected standard in the Three R's, compared to 60 per cent of boys (Department for Education, 2018)

The number of babies born in the U.S. last year fell to a 32-year low, deepening a fertility slump that is reshaping America’s future workforce. About 3.79 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2018, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who lives in Silicon Valley, befriended Mark Zuckerberg  in 2009 and subsequently became one of the largest investors in Facebook by channeling $1 billion of Gazprom money into purchasing shares. Milner also has long ties in the upper echelon of the Bank of Cyprus, which is known as the biggest money laundering operation on the planet for Russia. Milner helped fund Jared Kushner’s start-up real estate company, Cadre. Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, co-chaired the Bank of Cyprus until 2017.

_{^{On this day in 1770,}} Louis, the French dauphin, married Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Austrian Archduchess Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. France hoped their marriage would strengthen its alliance with Austria, its longtime enemy. In 1774, with the death of King Louis XV, Louis and Marie were crowned king and queen of France. they probably thought they had it made.

                                A Different Take on Tariffs:

Tariffs are “costs.” Tariffs are simply federal taxes. And the money doesn't disappear. The extra costs paid by importers, and consumers, goes to the government, to distribute as it sees fit, including, for example, on Obamacare subsidies. Government spending shows up in GDP.
It wasn’t long ago the media was complaining because Trump was cutting taxes. Now it’s complaining he’s raising them. 

And the amounts involved are trivial. 

President Trump just raised tariffs from 10% to 25% on about $200 billion in Chinese imports. In other words, he just raised taxes by $30 billion a year. The total amount we all paid in taxes last year — federal, state and local — was $5.51 trillion. This tax increase that has everyone upset is a rounding error.

Meanwhile, the total value wiped off U.S. stocks during Monday’s panic was about $700 billion. The total value wiped off U.S. stocks during Monday’s panic was about $700 billion in reaction to a $30 billion tax.  More than 20 years’ worth of the new tariffs. Even if Trump slapped 25% taxes on all Chinese imports, it would come to a tax hike of $135 billion a year. U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) last year: $20.5 trillion.

So even this supposedly scary “escalation” of this “tariff war” would raise our total tax bill from 26.9% of GDP all the way to 27.5% of GDP.

Right now we export less to China than we do to Japan, South Korea and Singapore put together. That’s the point. So the effect of China’s new tariffs on the U.S. are yet another rounding error. Even if China banned all imports from the U.S., that would amount to only 0.6% of our gross domestic product. And we’d sell the stuff somewhere else.
(from Arends)