Shock and Awe Miscellany, 2/10/25

But now the president has another territory he would like for the United States to have:  Gaza, the 25 mile long by 3.7 to 7.5 mile wide strip of land bordering Israel, the Mediterranean Sea, and Egypt.  Which is the site of the bloody war between Israel and Hamas.  My question is, WHY?

After a meeting with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, who is open to the idea, President Trump said this, according to the transcript:

“I also strongly believe that the Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it, and especially those who live there and frankly who’s been really very unlucky. It’s been very unlucky. It’s been an unlucky place for a long time.

“Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck.

“This can be paid for by neighbouring countries of great wealth. It could be one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, 12. It could be numerous sites, or it could be one large site. But the people will be able to live in comfort and peace and we’ll make sure something really spectacular is done.

“They’re going to have peace. They’re not going to be shot at and killed and destroyed like this civilisation of wonderful people has had to endure. The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.

“They’re living under fallen concrete that’s very dangerous and very precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again.

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.

Can Tariffs Help Our Economy?

America’s top three trading partners, combining both imports and exports, are Mexico ($798 billion), Canada ($773 billion), and China ($575 billion).  Together, they account for 42% of America’s trade.

Last week, President Trump imposed 25% tariffs on goods coming in from Mexico and Canada, and a 10% tariff on goods coming in from China.  Those countries have vowed to retaliate with tariffs against American products.

The reason the president gave for hitting our allies, with whom we have a free trade agreement negotiated by President Trump himself, over twice as hard as our adversary China, is that Mexico and Canada are not doing enough to stop illegal immigrants from crossing their borders into the U.S.  Also that those porous borders are letting in the deadly drug Fentanyl.

At this action, the stock market plunged, since the U.S. economy is highly dependent on world trade, both imports for our supply chains and consumer goods and exports, to sell U.S. products.

But by the end of the week, both Mexico and Canada agreed to put 10,000 troops along the border to deter illegal immigrants and Fentanyl smuggling.  So the president paused the tariffs for 30 days.

So perhaps the threat of the tariffs was just the president throwing the nation’s weight around, a way to force countries to comply with our demands.

And yet, President Trump likes tariffs, calling them “the greatest things ever invented,” and the duty on China’s products remains and is likely to go higher.  (He earlier proposed a 60% tariff on China.)

My question is, how would it be possible to implement such tariffs without triggering massive inflation?  Importers always add the duty fees to the cost of the product.  That would inflate the prices of just about everything Americans buy on Walmart and Amazon.  But that’s not all.  If tariffs are successful in limiting the amount of imports, so that more people “buy American,” the drop in overall supply plus the greater demand for domestically-produced goods will also send prices higher.

The hope is that tariffs will help American manufacturing, but American industries are highly dependent on other countries for raw materials and parts necessary for their supply line.  In time, the American economy could probably adjust, but that will take a long and painful time.

Meanwhile, the loss of foreign markets for American products can only mean hard times for our companies, layoffs for our workers, and hardship for our farmers.

Is there a way that high tariffs (traditionally a policy favored by liberal Democrats) could possibly help the American economy?

Slashing the Government

To his credit, President Trump is slashing the overgrown federal government.  The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, is decimating the federal work force and is eliminating entire agencies.

To those who complain that no one elected Musk, I would say that no one elected the IRS agent who collected my taxes or the TSA agent who screened me at the airport.  They were simply acting by virtue of the authority given to them by the Executive Branch of the government, under the auspices of the President of the United States.  Musk is acting on the authority of the democratically-elected president, who is the head of said Executive Branch.

One casualty was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was completely eliminated, with its foreign aid function transferred to the State Department.  Observes  John Daniel Davidson,

“In the six decades since it was established, USAID has gone from fighting poverty, spreading American ideals, and undercutting Soviet propaganda, to becoming a woke propaganda operation of its own that actively undermines the pillars of western civilization. . . .Everywhere you look in the USAID database, you see projects promoting LGBTQ ideology, mass immigration, multiculturalism, DEI, climate change-ism, and the like. You see programs that undermine the traditional family, that enable anti-free speech censorship, that strive to make the rest of the world just like urban liberal enclaves in the U.S.”

He cites some of the grants:  “$70,000 for a ‘DEI musical’ in Ireland, $47,000 for a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia, $32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru, and $1.5 million for an LGBT jobs program in Serbia.”  (Go here for more.)

In a bigger move, all federal workers were offered a buyout of eight months severance and benefits.  If they don’t, they risk losing their jobs as part of a reduction in force.

So far, some 60,000 have accepted, about 3% of the federal workforce, though the overall goal is to cut the number of employees by 5%-10%.

One agency offering buyouts to its entire workforce is the CIA.  Though most national security personnel were exempt from the cutbacks, the new CIA Director John Ratcliffe decided to apply it to his clandestine domain.  Granted, that institution has been guilty of  hugely consequential intelligence failures (e.g., Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan) and scandalous political interventions (e.g., the Russiagate scandal, the Hunter Biden laptop coverup).  A house cleaning is certainly in order.  But if some agents or their handlers decide to take early retirement from their dangerous work, can we risk losing our spy networks in places like China, Russia, and Iran?  Shouldn’t the pruning, for the CIA and elsewhere, be more targeted?

UPDATE:  A federal judge has paused the buyouts.