Tioga Herald

Shall We Discuss Trade Deficits?

Dear Editors:

Perhaps I am just weird because I take a different perspective and look at issues by doing so with a goal to effectively promoting humanitarian visions and looking through the lenses of learning from history. I find it appalling the number of times those in the media simply invoke their own conclusions without really digging deep into the details. The trade deficit is one such issue recently identified in your newspaper.

I might also one point (as I extend my writing too much, I am sure). That I like the fact that your newspaper maintains a very complete business section. I also like the other sections which you have and have been ripped out of Gannett local newspapers, whether in Binghamton, Ithaca, Melbourne, Florida, or West Palm Beach, Florida. For instance, sections which focus on culture and not just shallow entertainment we are dished out from shallow companies like Spectrum, Dish, DirecTV, etc. I only wish your newspaper would expand up here to Binghamton and provide capitalist competition here in this area. When I delivered newspapers here in the Binghamton area, there WAS competition. I delivered the Sun-Bulletin in the morning and there was also the Gannett, Evening Press. Today both are merged into one monopoly here. 

OK. Trade deficit. Yes, we are facing a large trade deficit. Do we point fingers or figure out a way to fix this? Perhaps in order to get to the root of the problem, we need to point fingers, so as to LEARN FROM THE PAST, rather than being barbaric and uncivilized and pointing fingers. For in that case, if Trump points one finger at the Democrats, there are three other fingers pointing back at that ass of a business leader who knows nothing about how to treat human beings. So one can say the same thing about me, right, should I point one finger. There are three pointing back at me. But let me be clear. I point the finger and then rely on what Kierkegaard said:

​Let me begin.

When the Republicans under George H.W. Bush proposed a treaty like NAFTA, they was also, according to Lee Iaccoca (2007) in Japan throwing the American auto companies and its unions under the bus. He arranged that Toyota and other companies could come to America, but refused to open up the markets in Japan for American companies to openly sell there. ​No wonder, at the buffet Bush attended when “honoring” that trade agreement, he vomited. Does anyone remember that? Iaccoca describes it, but I recall hearing about it by way of the American media.

Bush with the Republicans then pushed ahead on ideas for what became NAFTA. He lost the election in 1992. The stupidity of the Democrat who won was to “appease” the Republicans and NAFTA was put in place. Yes, the Republicans have reasons today to point a finger at Clinton and the Democrats for NAFTA.

NAFTA has been great for Mexico. It has been great for American executives to steal money from pensions, Social Security, and Medicare by ridding America of higher paying jobs, as we watched them all go overseas to cheap labor. Since Reagan, CEO salaries have increased by over 1000%, with all the bonuses and thievery due to a love of money. Wages and salaries for American labor have been fairly flat during those years. In fact, for me, myself, and I, I LOST salary, due to Republican efforts to deregulate and create monopolies.

Which brings up the point about deregulation. Deregulation was meant to destroy unions and the better salaries with living wages in America. AT&T was deregulated by Reaganomics, in the name of IBM, a NON-UNION company which treated its employees with great benefits. After AT&T was destroyed, the world was an oyster for IBM, but what happened to the benefits once put in place by Thomas J. Watson when there was a reduced competitive environment? You don’t know what I am saying? Look into the wonderful Unix operating system developed by AT&T’s Bell Labs and what has happened to that? Look into the strategy AT&T wanted in those years, but Reagan and his Republican cronies in business destroyed the company. Yes, government WAS the problem, just a few years after Reagan declared government as being a problem and he had fired the air traffic controllers for creating a union. Government controlled by CEOs, monopoly, and corporate PACs and lobbyists and government DID become the problem.  To the stupidity of younger people today: that does not mean we should destroy government with fake news and unproven and lying conspiracy theories.
Get a life and recognize that you bastards on Jan. 6, 2021, were irresponsible in your quest for “liberty and freedom.” You bastards don’t know what liberty and justice” for all really and truly means, so you think you were not treasonous, as you used violence and bloodshed to attempt to work out perverted insurrection. You are wrong. The Republicans who defend it are wrong. There. I had to say this, as I am talking about trade deficit. My apologies for saying this, as I see it related to the stupidity all around regarding conclusions about the trade deficit. You don’t want to fix a democracy, you want to destroy a democracy with lies about the 2020 election. TRUMP NEVER WON YOU DAMN ASSHOLES. TRUMP NEVER WON, YOU DAMN ASSHOLES. GET THAT, YET? TRUMP NEVER WON IN 2020. So let us all live with liberty and justice for all. You talk about your GODDAMN individual rights for liberty and that does NOT provide for justice for all. You try to validate what you damn asses do by saying only YOUR god rules the nation, so “one nation under [YOUR FREAKING] god, with liberty and justice for all.” There are many very good Americans who don’t believe in your GODDAMN god of EVIL and we don’t want you disturbing the peace of America. For peace and justice go hand and hand. So you want to be like the Taliban and execute those who don’t agree, doing so in the name of your FREAKING LOUSY PERVERTED god, and therefore have justice when people are gone.

​Back to the trade deficit.

Let’s be blunt. The Founding Fathers, from the past, gave us ways to handle trade deficits. America was a brand new nation with a HUGE trade deficit. They established checks and balances in politics and economics. Economics based on the TRUE definition established by Adam Smith, a contemporary of our Founding Fathers.  Infrastructure projects were started, beginning with the one begun by Governor Clinton of New York because of his intelligence in recognizing that the flatlands which​ crossed upstate New York from Albany to Buffalo, were an excellent way to increase transportation for the sake of goods being transported. Need I say more about this, or will I go into too much detail for people who don’t understand what this was about?

Later, the railroad infrastructures were established with business and government alliances for INFRASTRUCTURE made it happen. The interstate road system was an infrastructure for the purposes of expanding business and commerce. It destroyed the rail system for which American taxes and business investments had created. All in the name of “change for the sake of change.” In fact, it was CHANGE for the sake of INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS of Americans who clamored after the personal automobile.

We built a business for cars. The American auto industry was once the “Big Three” around the world. We had a fourth one, too, strongly led by a Mormon and former Republican governor(?) named George Romney. The business destroyed public transit like railroads I have been told that there has not been new train engines or train cars built in America for many years. No manufacturing in that area,as America abandoned it for individual rights of drivers and the ability for the wealthy to travel in the air. In the process, we despoiled the air, in the name of individual rights and “I love my car” by macho males and their quest for a brutal personification of the male, so as to attract the females. As a result of NAFTA and that lousy Japanese trade agreement arranged by anti-union Bush, what has happened to our American auto industry? Even when GM was able to build a more efficient car to compete with Japan, Iaccoca (2007) points out GM did NOTHING to market the product and it died. A very good American-produced car, the Saturn, destroyed.

Today, Joe Biden has mentioned the evil which exists with monopolies of technology and he wishes to reverse what Reagan began. Immediately, the fat pigs who have increased their salaries by more than 1000% jump on his case by paying off the media to tarnish all he says. Like Governor Clinton of 19th Century New York, President Biden is scoffed at. In the 19th Century, it was “Clinton’s Ditch” rather than the Erie Canal.  Today ,there is junk about Joe Biden, such as “Sloppy Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.” The sloppy ones were Reagan, Bush, Trump, and their monopolistic fascist cronies in business. Reagan should have been called, “Sleepy Ronnie in the Cabinet.” Get my jist on that one? Don’t bother.

President Biden has been intelligent in describing infrastructure which is similar to what our Founding Fathers envisioned. Let us bring back technology industries here and stop the Chinese communists from making an attempt to grab such industries now located in a small population of Chinese CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY people.  Like Dixie which did not know how to create companies like IBM, to avoid infrastructure projects, Dixie stole IBM and other companies in the same way the Chinese communists wish to steal from Chinese DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISTS. Dixie was made up of a bunch of white supremacist fascists, not communists. But they were too lazy to develop their own types of business. So they stole from the North. The fat pigs of business are stealing from the pensions, Social Security, Medicare, insurance CAPITALIST INVESTMENTS made by WE THE PEOPLE. Meanwhile, President Biden gets the axe in the media by lousy loudmouths who lack any knowledge or intelligence, but have plenty of support from money-lovers galore.

In case people are not aware, the Founding Fathers and generations following the Founding Fathers put forth infrastructure projects so as to reduce the trade deficits. Joe Biden is having his reputation tarnished as he attempts to do the same thing. The Republicans do not even speak with him about what they think might be better. Why? Because they are assholes who are afraid they won’t win and that is all they want – to win. They prefer to win by forcing Democrats to put in place something like NAFTA or DADT instead. Republicans are cowards today who don’t know what it is like to be human beings.

Yet, Thomas Jefferson promised to bring “industry” to Vermont, in return for having Vermont added as the 14th state, done with a provision that Vermont could choose to SECEDE from the USA, as written into their state constitution. Vermont borders on Canada and is known for an “industry” which is very prevalent in Canada: maple industry. Jefferson wanted to stop our trade deficit with the Caribbean islands by opening up the production of maple syrup and maple sugar in America. In later years, without a hot, humid temperature base in large parts of America, we did develop products such as sugar beets, etc.

Then, Thomas Jefferson worked out the Louisiana Purchase. Suddenly, this INFRASTRUCTURE addition was the sugar cane fields in the southern end of that purchase. In other words, the state of Louisiana. 

We also had infrastructure addition, scoffed at with the name, “Seward’s Folly,” in the name of 49th state admitted to the union: Alaska.  We had infrastructure development done by wealthy people in their contribution to government funds, rather than being JACKASS ones trying to avoid paying taxes, because “taxes are only for the little people.”  The wealthy island nation of Morroco, damn it all, has taxes of the wealthy, not in income taxes, but in VAT and real estate property taxes.  So the asses of wealthy fat pigs in America today need to think about what they hell they are doing by not supporting this nation and then complaining about a trade deficit.

The early leaders of the USA, BEFORE THE LOUSY INCOME TAX OF AMERICA, used tariffs to help promote the development of American business. A VAT might be a domestic form of a tariff, but it COULD replace an income tax and thus the transfer of the input of revenues MIGHT offset what the American people no longer pay in income taxes, with all its lousy and perverted convoluted deductions and credits.

The tariff on foreign goods, might not be as good. However, if tariffs were to be used to replace the income tax, is this statement true?

In both scenarios, there is a Catch-22. Should we put a tariff on imported goods and a domestic VAT (replacing sales taxes, too), during a time of inflation. Will there be a negative or positive impact on the price of goods and services during a time of inflation?

Using tariff and VAT to replace income and sales taxes could help in the profit margins of small businesses and small family farms. As a professor, educator, teacher for some 50 years, why should I care about the loss of business for tax lawyers and tax accountants? Perhaps those losses would be offset by the myriad small businesses who pay for those people to shuffle numbers and papers? I have no care about such professionals losing their jobs, as the lack of jobs for educators in upstate New York FORCED me to leave my homeland of New York and move to Florida.
You might just brush this statement off as how I found success anyway. But I lost my homeland the way Castro destroyed the homeland for many Cubans who also moved to Florida. One difference. I hated the heat, humidity, and hurricanes in Florida. Apparently, Cubans do not.

​Only those who are more knowledgeable about economics and commerce than I am, could evaluate what I just said and give us an answer.

But alas. We don’t discuss such matters in this way. The commercial and economics person needs to be non-biased to such ideas and merely look at all of this with an overall perspective not from the perspective of trying to preserve the monopolistic / deregulatory / anti-union environments which brought us to this point. I am pro-union, so another reason why, with my lack of knowledge in this area, I should do such an analysis. Even if there were obstacles discovered in the approaches I mention, there are ways to overcome the obstacles, rather than just shooting holes in the solution and tossing it all aside. 

One final thought about trade deficits. Donald Trump was a stupid jerk in dealing with the topic of tariffs. He had no understanding at all and felt he could communicate with the Chinese Communists in the same way the coward always did in communication in business. Being a white supremacist, he also likely did not like the “yellow” skin, either. He was an insult to America, while dealing with the Chinese Communists who have a hold on America with the debt it can hold over America and rub our noses in it.  Donald Trump, like most Republicans and their GD “wedge issues,” only focus on one segment of the population. That was what Donald Trump did with his proposals for tariffs. One segment of the market, rather than taking an overall approach and doing so with ALL trade partners, for the protection of USA business and commerce. The Chinese Communists literally laughed at the bastard Trump. And he thinks he won the election in 2020? Sometimes the American people are not so stupid and can recognize a scam artist at work. 

Trade deficits. If America works together for the goal of America, not political parties and white supremacist lousy people at the helm of the Republican Party; not for political ideology; not for red or blue; we CAN accomplish miracles that lead to success by overcoming obstacles. How many times have I promoted such ideas? I have lost count.