by John Siciliano
by sundance
by sundance
by Raymond Ibrahim{americanthinker.com} ~ Each faith has its own rules for right behavior to which non-members are not bound. My Jewish friends don’t care if I eat a pork chop. Whether or not non-Catholics eat a steak on Ash Wednesday... or don’t go to church means nothing to me. It’s one of the glories of our country that we respect these differences. Tolerance and mutual respect help us live together in peace, but they constitute the seed of relativism with which every faith in our open society has to contend. How do we understand what values are particular to our faith group and which should be universal? A chaste college freshman encountering free-love dorm life may think, “Although it is wrong for me to engage in promiscuous premarital sex, it’s not against the moral code of my classmates and is therefore not wrong for them.” This perspective leads directly to rationalizing abortion on the same ground. To adopt the “personally-opposed to abortion but won’t oppose a woman’s choice” position, by the nature of abortion, requires accepting simultaneous conflicting fundamental truths, and in turn requires that no essential truth exists. If someone close to you has an abortion, it can’t be murder because your loved one is not a murderer. Morally, how do you square the near-universal revulsion at a mother killing her newborn baby with the large segment of society that will fight for her right to end the baby’s life a week or two earlier? By continuing to allow legal abortion, we tacitly proclaim that abortion is not wrong. If deliberately terminating an innocent baby is not wrong, then what is wrong? The answer is “nothing.” If nothing is wrong, then morality is just a construct, and no religion has any basis for claiming validity. This nothingness is why we can’t rationally discuss important issues anymore. The idea of a higher truth encourages debate. No matter how firmly we hold our convictions, if we believe that there is an ideal truth which we desire to comprehend, it is possible to rationally argue, with the hope of persuading and/or learning from people with whom we disagree...
Predictably, the Beltway media and Democrats (but we repeat ourselves) howled in protest and blamed Donald Trump. “U.S. trade gap with China reaches all-time high under Trump,” thundered Politico’s Doug Palmer. His piece was a representative sample of the coverage, which as an added bonus liberally quoted House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who predictably blamed Trump’s trade policies. The report “shows that the president has flunked the test he set for himself,” charged Hoyer. “It is time for President Trump to acknowledge that his scattershot approach to trade policy is failing and explain how he intends to change course and reverse these record deficits.”
Yet it’s worth mentioning, as The Washington Times pointed out, Trump faces some serious headwinds. China’s shaky, export-dependent economy had its worst performance in almost three decades last year; meanwhile, GDP growth in the EU was less than 1% and Japan flirted with recession. Combine that with a strong dollar that’s making imports cheaper and exports pricier, and the growing trade deficit becomes more predictable.
Bear in mind: That latter factor is ironically a headwind of Trump’s own making, as our economy has seen improved growth and employment since he took office, bolstering the dollar against other world currencies backed by nations with more sluggish conditions.
So do these deficits really matter when the economy is chugging along? “Capital investment matters more to job creation than trade flows do,” opined The Wall StreetJournal. The editors helpfully add that “a larger trade deficit is a benign byproduct of a healthier American economy.” Indeed, that’s true to the extent that we have consumers prosperous enough to afford the vast array of goods on the world market that aren’t necessarily created here. Moreover, the one area where we run a healthy trade surplus is in the service sector, which reflects well on the skill of our labor.
In addition, as Heritage Foundation trade economist Tori Whiting states, the trade deficit number leaves out an important piece of the economic puzzle: “Investment in America by foreign companies is everywhere. Japan’s Toyota, South Korea’s Samsung, the United Kingdom’s HSBC, and the Netherlands’ Philips all create thousands of jobs for Americans.” One can argue the benefits of foreign ownership of various icons considered “American,” such as Jeep (now part of the Italian company Fiat) and Budweiser (now owned by a Belgian conglomerate), but thousands of loyal Americans make their living creating and selling foreign-owned products thanks to our growing share of the global marketplace.
We’ll grant that President Trump won office in part because of his vow to create better trade deals, and the deficit situation on the surface looks like evidence that his approach isn’t working. But the Beltway echo chamber isn’t interested in the prime reason for the increasing trade gap. That’s because those politicos can’t bring themselves to admit the Trump economy is doing well. In fact, Democrats are invested in just the opposite, as Mark Alexander observed back in December. As if on cue, the media has whipsawed from talking about the “Trump boom” last summer to the looming “Trump recession” these days.
Yet Trump still has cards to play, as does Congress. The president is slated to meet again with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this spring at Mar-a-Lago, with the expectation of signing a new trade deal. For its part, Congress has yet to approve the deal the Trump administration reached with Canada and Mexico to replace NAFTA. Quick action on these fronts could allow us to “change course and reverse these record deficits” and, more importantly, do so without harming our economy.
~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/61631?mailing_id=4122&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4122&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
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