Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 73. Sunrise is 6:57 and sunset is 6:27 for 11 hours 30 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer, the first prominent “talkie” movie, opens.
In free trade between nations, a trade surplus or deficit, alone, tells us little about a nation’s economic health — what matters is why the balance exists and whether the underlying economic conditions are sound. In Donald J. Trump’s way of thinking, a trade deficit means that one nation (or one nation’s exporters) is somehow taking money wrongly or unfairly in exchange for supplying goods or services.
This is nonsense: When this libertarian blogger buys a ButterBurger® at Culver’s for cash, it is a fair exchange with Culver’s — I give them cash, and they give me a burger. We’re even. Buying more from someone than one sells to that person does not establish that one’s been cheated.
And so, and so, possessed of a misunderstanding of free trade, Trump has done his best to defy market forces, altering our trade with the world, and reducing commerce that he falsely believes is unfair. He’s failing in that effort (as in so many of his policies):
The U.S. trade deficit rose sharply in August to hit a 17-month high, driven by an increase in imports of petroleum, gold and chips used for artificial intelligence.
The trade deficit — a measure of the difference between what the country imports and what it exports — grew by 13.7 percent from the previous month to $105.6 billion, the largest monthly total since before Mr. Trump imposed his global tariffs in April of last year.
[…]
Imports grew 4.3 percent from the previous month, to a record $420.8 billion. U.S. exports grew 1.4 percent compared with July, hitting $315.2 billion. Because growth in imports outpaced that of exports, the trade deficit widened.
The Trump administration has tried to reduce the trade deficit, which President Trump views as a sign of America’s weak manufacturing sector, by imposing hefty tariffs on everything from toys and steel to drones and auto parts.
But in recent months, the metric has trended stubbornly upward, in part because of the A.I. boom. Companies are importing far more expensive computer chips, most of which are made in Asia, to construct new data centers.
Many economists have also questioned whether tariffs are a good tool for reducing the trade deficit. They argue that the metric is often driven by other macroeconomic forces, like economic growth or government debt.
See Ana Swanson, U.S. Trade Deficit Widens in August (‘New data from the Commerce Department showed that imports grew in the month, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to limit foreign products’), New York Times, October 6, 2026.
There has been a powerful economic basis for free trade for centuries, and a consensus in its favor for generations: Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations bk. IV, ch. II (1776) and Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation ch. VII (1817).
What does one see? One aged real estate man, having inherited his position from his father, presuming to defy market forces of which he’s utterly ignorant.
Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize in physics for work on ‘ghost particles’ called neutrinos: