Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-three. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 08m 12s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred fifty-eighth day.
On this day in 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacks the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Recommended for reading in full:
Tory Newmyer writes Trump wants to narrow the trade deficit. It just reached a ten-year high:
President Trump’s favored gauge for the health of U.S. trade is veering hard in the wrong direction.
The country’s trade deficit reached a 10-year high in October, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. The U.S. bilateral trade deficit with China also reached a monthly record, rising 7.1 percent to $43.1 billion.
Trump has been calling out that gap since the campaign trail as a sign that China is taking advantage of the United States. Never mind that a trade deficit doesn’t mean, as Trump argues, that the United States is losing money to China — rather, simply, that Americans are buying more from the Chinese than the Chinese are buying from Americans.
Annie Lowrey asks Does Trump Even Understand How Tariffs Work?:
Fundamentally, Trump seems to misunderstand how tariffs work, insisting that they act as a tax on foreign companies and translate into more American wealth. “I am a Tariff Man,” he wrote on Twitter. “When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs.” But the tariffs are acting, as one would expect them to act, as a tax on American consumers, raising domestic prices and slowing the domestic economy. (They’re slowing the global economy, too.)
Despite the back-and-forth, it seems likely that at some point Trump will get some trade concessions from the Chinese and both sides will lift their tariffs. At that point, Trump will undoubtedly declare a “win.” But he won’t have managed to change the Chinese economy, revitalize the heartland, or reduce the United States’ trade deficit—which has grown to a record gap with China since he took office.
Justin Amash responds to Trump in tweets from 12.4 and 12.5:
I am a Liberty Man. Trade is not raid. Voluntary exchanges make Americans wealthier.
@POTUS’s tariffs, which create barriers to exchange, are paid for by Americans. Taxing Americans to steer our decisions is social engineering that reduces our economic power and makes us poorer.….
International trade is like other trade in that it takes place between people or businesses, not countries. Believing that X country is buying/selling Y product from/to the United States likely leads to more mistakes in economic analysis than any other misconception about trade.
Yelping pack brings presence of coyotes alive in Milwaukee area: