TRUMP’S OCTOBER SURPRISE - Friday, October 25, 2024 - C&C NEWS
BRICS Summit ends; signs of life in Canada; scientific self-censorship; dems' deal for President Trump to quit; market trends; Trump's earth-shaking October Surprise changes everything; more. by JEFF CHILDERS
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Only eleven more days to go. Your roundup, which ends with a tremendous ‘bang,’ includes: BRICS Summit ends and the BRICS plan becomes clear; Canadian Premier pushes back on professional censorship; scientists self-censor study showing no improvement from puberty blocking drugs; Politico says the quiet part out loud and offers President Trump a deal; more news of markets trending toward Trump victory; and President Trump quietly reveals his October Surprise and it’s even bigger and better than we could possibly have imagined.
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY
>> The historic BRICS Summit ended yesterday. Among other platforms, Business Insider ran its story headlined, “Putin has spent years championing the idea of de-dollarization — but a new reality is setting in.”
It turns out they aren’t creating a new currency to compete with the dollar. It’s much more ambitious than that.
How historic was this week’s Summit? On Wednesday, Bloomberg ran a story headlined, “IMF Sees Growth Shift Toward BRICS and Away From G-7 in New Outlook.” The G-7 has long been the world’s biggest and most influential economic alliance, composed of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and, for some reason I will never understand, that economic powerhouse, Canada.
The “Group of Seven” used to be the world’s biggest economies. (Plus Canada.) Not anymore. Bloomberg said that in just the last six months, BRICS has surged ahead of the stumbling G-7 group in IMF forecasts:
Surpassing the G-7 is happening even without whatever the BRICS are doing with their collective financial system. But once that comes online, the G-7 will become even less relevant, and the BRICS even farther ahead.
This woeful result proceeds directly from Joe Biden’s hysterical, anti-Russia sanctions. In Putin’s own words, quoted by Business Insider, BRICS isn’t anti-dollar, but all the sanctioning by the (smaller) G-7 countries is pushing the larger BRICS economic group to necessarily develop some kind of alternative:
Yesteday BRICS released a comprehensive plan to which its members and applicant members agreed. BRICS is not, in fact, creating any new global currency. Instead, it’s creating an alternative international payments platform, for people buying and selling things across borders, or for when nations trade with each other (to buy weapons, grain, or oil, for three examples).
Right now, everyone must use a common payment settlement system called SWIFT. SWIFT is U.S. created and effectively controlled, even though it is ostensibly privately owned and supposedly located in Belgium. The thought that SWIFT is at all independent is a great gag that everyone at the State Department always guffaws about making them cough champagne up their noses.
For many countries, SWIFT has at least two huge problems. When I say the platform is effectively U.S.-controlled, you can imagine all the implications. Users’ data is supposed to be private, but for some reason everybody thinks the U.S. constantly snoops on where all the money is going to and coming from. (One possibility for why they think that is because Edward Snowden exposed it all in 2013, but I digress again.)
The second, even bigger problem is that the U.S. acts like the spoiled kid at his birthday party, refusing to let the kids he doesn’t like ride the rented pony. In other words, the U.S. forces countries to do things they hate, like teach their kids trans techniques, by threatening to cut them off from SWIFT, or snatching their money as it travels through the collected SWIFT system.
Russia, for example, is cut off from SWIFT under U.S. sanctions. And $300 billion of its money was seized while sitting in a SWIFT clearinghouse bank. The implacable Russians are great poker players, you can’t never tell if they’re at all mad about Biden snatching their $300 billion or exploding their undersea pipelines.
But you can imagine how mad the Russians must be.
The Russians are mad enough to spend their time and money leading a world movement to replace the G-7 and its captive SWIFT system. Which would be horrible for us.
Once BRICS has its own interbanking system, they won’t need to trade in dollars anymore, not unless they need something from the U.S. or from a G-7 country. For complicated reasons, the reduced demand for dollars just from those lost transfers will drastically worsen our debt problem. And maybe more important for BRICS countries, the U.S. won’t be able threaten sanctions to force them to swallow every lunatic social experiment that comes down the liberal U.S. pike.
The BRICS pitched their interbanking system yesterday as a non-threatening “alternative” to SWIFT, rather than any kind of direct competitor. Having choices, they stressed, just improves everyone’s outcomes. But that logic is like claiming that when you parked your taco truck right next to Jose’s taco truck, it is actually better for Jose’s taco trade since diners like different choices of tacos.
Jose is not likely to agree. Jose is likely to go loco.
BRICS is not yet ready to switch the new platform on. But this week’s Summit was so significant that many articles, while not drawing a direct comparison, mentioned “Bretton Woods.”
Bretton Woods was the famous (or infamous) 1945 meeting where the winning countries after World War II created the international banking system, the IMF, and the World Bank. Yesterday, BRICS argued that things have changed since 1945. It’s like the G-7 is a seasoned citizen still using an iPhone 7. You can’t install any new apps. The international monetary system needs an upgrade.
The U.S. could shut this BRICS initiative down easily and immediately. All we need to do is reform SWIFT. If the U.S. stopped using SWIFT to sanction other countries, and SWIFT opened up its system transparently, and the U.S. stopped using SWIFT for spying, then BRICS would be unnecessary.
And everyone would keep trading in dollars.
In other words, we could rescue the dollar. We only need to give up the ‘dirty tricks’ tool we use to force other countries to make their kids sit through drag queen happy hours. But Biden’s neocons won’t try that simple remedy, will they? They’ll let the dollar be destroyed before they give up their economic wonder weapon.
>> Signs of life in Canada! Canada’s Global News ran a story yesterday headlined, “Danielle Smith promises to review Alberta’s professional regulators, legislate limits.” It was terrific news coming from an unexpected place.
CLIP: Premier Danielle Smith describes threats to free speech and the marketplace of ideas (5:41).
Canada is divided into ten provinces, like states, and three territories, like regions, each with its own local government. Each province has a Premier, similar to a U.S. governor. Danielle Smith is the Premier of Alberta Province, which is the closest thing to a Florida that Canada has.
Smith was the first pandemic Premier to reject vaccine and mask mandates and move toward a return to normalcy. Now she’s proposed a set of new laws to protect free speech from insane regulations on “misinformation.” In particular, Smith is aiming at professional regulations for doctors and lawyers, which she agreed were important to maintain quality, but professionals’ personal opinions should not be regulated. Healthcare workers shouldn’t be punished for political comments.
In the clip linked above, Smith’s Justice Minister gave several examples, including Professor Jordan Peterson’s awful experience. Peterson was punished for using incorrect pronouns on Twitter — something that had nothing at all to do with his professional competence.
Interestingly, Premier Smith did not pick any pandemic examples, even though everyone knows that’s what she’s really talking about.
Smith announced her proposed new policies in a series of tweets, which badly triggered some Canadians. You should see the comments. Some Canadians —publicly!— claim to love Justin Trudeau (how??). I think it must have something to do with the whole “politeness” thing. Many Canadians instinctively feel it’s appropriate to punish people for saying things that are impolite.
Of course, punishing professionals for saying stuff also isn’t polite, which creates an infinite woke death spiral.
Anyway, Premier Smith once again wins the C&C “hero of the week” award, for her courageous defense of free speech in a critical area — professionals like doctors and lawyers, who were too scared of cancellation to be much help during the pandemic.
We badly need less orthodoxy among our credentialed classes.
>> In an astonishing development, the New York Times was the only corporate media platform to run this story. I’m starting to think someone high up at the Times is questioning the trans agenda. The Times’ article was headlined, “U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says.”
In 2015, hyphenated-doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy received a broad, multimillion-dollar grant to research the beneficial effects of castration drugs on children’s emotions. She launched a nine-year study of 411 kids who received so-called “puberty blockers,” which permanently prevent their secondary sexual characteristics from developing, and which trans advocates claim make kids with gender dysphoria happy.
Johanna expected to confirm that hypothesis. She is a trans activist and has often been an expert science witness in high-profile trans cases. But the results of Johanna’s study unexpectedly went the other way.
After two years, the kids in the study showed no improvement in their mental health. Although Johanna would later claim this was the result of the kids starting and ending equally happy, the Times noted that in an earlier paper describing the study’s beginnings, Johanna’s team reported over 25% of the kids in the study were clinically depressed or even suicidal. Not happy.
But ever since that first introductory paper, as the years have gone by, Johanna’s team has never again published their findings. When the Times asked her why not, Johanna explained, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.” She expanded on that, adding she was worried her study’s results could be used in court to argue that “we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact” transgender adolescents.
In other words, no matter how hard they tried, they cannot find any improvement in the study’s heavily drugged kids.
Harry Potter author and women’s rights activist J.K. Rowling made the obvious sarcastic point:
Quibblers will argue Rowling got it wrong, since what we know about Johanna’s unpublished study suggests the kids came out even-Steven. But Rowling is right, since that metric only counted mental health. It didn’t account for all the other problems transitioning kids face.
For just one example of many, boys given puberty blockers face permanent shrinkage, since their package remains forever child-sized. They are usually left with what the doctors call, and I am not making this up, a “micro penis.” Those are two words that should never go together. Obviously, boys who de-transition will not enjoy living with a micro penis. It’s not good for their kidneys, either.
But that’s not even the stupidest part. Fake vaginas are made by hollowing out and “inverting” (don’t ask) the male member. But if the member is micro-sized, doctors can’t make a fake vagina out of it. It’s not deep enough. There’s not enough skin there to do anything useful. So giving boys puberty blockers ensures a bad result from their “gender-affirming surgery.”
You will have to explain how any of that makes sense to trans advocates, because I cannot. I think it must have something to do with a related condition called, “micro brain.”
That being said, there’s a second ugly facet to this tarnished story. What does this self-censorship say about our credentialed class? What does it say about the whole academic publication racket that withholding politically inconvenient results is considered business as usual? How many scientific studies are never published because of politics?
Why do scientists pretend like the academic journals are some kind of sanctified source of unbiased science?
I feel like everyone involved in the academic enterprise knows about all these problems but hides it from the rest of us, since if we really knew how things work, we would pay even less attention to scientists.
>> They just couldn’t stand it anymore and had to say it out loud, to make sure Trump got the message. Yesterday, Politico ran an ugly story headlined, “A Modest Proposal - A Deal to Stop Trump From Trying to Overturn the Election.” You already knew this was why they prosecuted him six ways from Sunday, but now they’ve spelled it out in painstaking detail.
Juleanna Glover, who penned the op-ed, owns a DC-based “public affairs advisory firm” that allegedly helps Republican candidates. She’s not helping Republicans much now though.
Instead, Juleanna has pitched us a deal: What if the federal and state prosecutors running rings around the Trump lawsuits circus all agreed to drop their charges if Trump will just say he lost the 2024 race? Just say the words.
Juleanna compared the potential deal to Judge Merchan’s gag order. She pointed out that Trump actually complied with the gag order — shocking far-left partisans who believe President Trump is mentally and ethically incapable of waiting for a crosswalk signal, much less controlling what he says.
Intentionally or unintentionally, Juleanna gave away the whole sordid game. Her proposal is not new. The lawsuits were always about coercing Trump to say he lost. That’s how political lawfare works. If Trump had dropped out, the lawfare would have magically vanished. Biden would have generously pardoned him, to avoid humiliating and dividing the nation.
But, it’s too late now, Juleanna. Too late.
More encouraging political news was hidden in the markets yesterday. The New York Times ran its story headlined, “U.S. Bond Market Braces for the ‘Trump Trade’ of Large Tariffs and Deficits.”
The media and the polls appear to have circled the wagons. It looks like the agreed official narrative from here on out will be “the race is too close to call.” So we must look to other sources for predictions.
The short version is, the Times says that bond investors have begun making purchases and sales assuming a Trump win. So that’s a great sign, since bond investors are betting with their own money and a lot of it, not just answering a random stranger’s questions on a phone call.
But look at this. Did the bond investors come to this conclusion from the polls? Nope. They are reacting to … wait for it … the betting markets:
But don’t overlook the tariffs and tax cuts. Hang onto your hat and prepare for today’s final astonishing story.
>> I told you so! For months, Trump has been chipping away at the income tax. No taxes on tips here, no taxes on Social Security there. Now he’s finally, quietly, without details, letting the media do the work, come all the way out into the open. The New York Times ran a potentially world-changing story yesterday that nobody noticed, headlined, “Trump Flirts With the Ultimate Tax Cut: No Income Taxes at All.
It is finally all coming together and making sense. Tax cuts and tariffs, as explained in the article’s subheadline: “The former president has repeatedly praised a period in American history when there was no income tax, and the country relied on tariffs to fund the government.”
Holy checking account, Batman.
Of course, the New York Times took the unpopular position of defending the income tax. In a word: fairness. The Times says that funding the federal government through tariffs isn’t fair enough, since it doesn’t soak “the rich” more than everybody else. (It feels so sinister when actual rich people like the owners of the New York Times argue in favor of soaking “the rich” through income taxes, which they do not pay, since their money derives from capital gains, but I digress.)
Tariffs are taxes. But suddenly, after being confronted with Trump’s plan, the New York Times has miraculously discovered that, get this, corporations pass taxes along to customers. I’d almost given up hope. This is also the entire argument for ending inflationary corporate taxation, but I digress:
So … Kamala’s plan to increase the corporate tax rate will also increase prices. In other words, her plan will accomplish the exact opposite of lowering inflation. Noted. Thanks, New York Times, for the helpful admission!
The cowardly Times disabled the comments section for this story.
But now, you can see the whole thing. Perhaps this is Trump’s October surprise, the unplayed card that Trump held in reserve (and is still keeping the details close to his chest). End the income tax and fund the federal government through tariffs. So simple. Even if it did result in higher prices for foreign goods and services (encouraging domestic alternatives, by the way), it would just be a sales tax.
As Trump pointed out, this can easily work. We’ve run the country this way before, for a long time. This is exactly how we used to do it. The proposal is simple, elegant, and practical. But economists never thought of it, which is why they’ll oppose it.
Only President Trump could have proposed something so radical and right.
Experts and economists will be badly triggered by all this talk of tariffs. They get obsessed with tariffs in a very Rain Man-ey sort of way. Maybe tariffs do impose some external costs. But there is no possible way to calculate the offsetting, galactic-sized boost our economy would experience from drastically reducing or eliminating the hated, productivity-killing income tax.
Nobody saw this coming. Media will do everything it can to suppress it. But Trump’s plan could produce the greatest economic boom this country has ever seen, a thousand times bigger than the gold rush. Only Trump could pull it off. It’s incredibly encouraging.
Have a fabulous Friday! I’ll meet you back here tomorrow for the Weekend Edition of essential news and commentary. Till then!
BRICS Summit ends; signs of life in Canada; scientific self-censorship; dems' deal for President Trump to quit; market trends; Trump's earth-shaking October Surprise changes everything; more. by JEFF CHILDERS
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Only eleven more days to go. Your roundup, which ends with a tremendous ‘bang,’ includes: BRICS Summit ends and the BRICS plan becomes clear; Canadian Premier pushes back on professional censorship; scientists self-censor study showing no improvement from puberty blocking drugs; Politico says the quiet part out loud and offers President Trump a deal; more news of markets trending toward Trump victory; and President Trump quietly reveals his October Surprise and it’s even bigger and better than we could possibly have imagined.
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY
>> The historic BRICS Summit ended yesterday. Among other platforms, Business Insider ran its story headlined, “Putin has spent years championing the idea of de-dollarization — but a new reality is setting in.”
It turns out they aren’t creating a new currency to compete with the dollar. It’s much more ambitious than that.
How historic was this week’s Summit? On Wednesday, Bloomberg ran a story headlined, “IMF Sees Growth Shift Toward BRICS and Away From G-7 in New Outlook.” The G-7 has long been the world’s biggest and most influential economic alliance, composed of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and, for some reason I will never understand, that economic powerhouse, Canada.
The “Group of Seven” used to be the world’s biggest economies. (Plus Canada.) Not anymore. Bloomberg said that in just the last six months, BRICS has surged ahead of the stumbling G-7 group in IMF forecasts:
Surpassing the G-7 is happening even without whatever the BRICS are doing with their collective financial system. But once that comes online, the G-7 will become even less relevant, and the BRICS even farther ahead.
This woeful result proceeds directly from Joe Biden’s hysterical, anti-Russia sanctions. In Putin’s own words, quoted by Business Insider, BRICS isn’t anti-dollar, but all the sanctioning by the (smaller) G-7 countries is pushing the larger BRICS economic group to necessarily develop some kind of alternative:
Yesteday BRICS released a comprehensive plan to which its members and applicant members agreed. BRICS is not, in fact, creating any new global currency. Instead, it’s creating an alternative international payments platform, for people buying and selling things across borders, or for when nations trade with each other (to buy weapons, grain, or oil, for three examples).
Right now, everyone must use a common payment settlement system called SWIFT. SWIFT is U.S. created and effectively controlled, even though it is ostensibly privately owned and supposedly located in Belgium. The thought that SWIFT is at all independent is a great gag that everyone at the State Department always guffaws about making them cough champagne up their noses.
For many countries, SWIFT has at least two huge problems. When I say the platform is effectively U.S.-controlled, you can imagine all the implications. Users’ data is supposed to be private, but for some reason everybody thinks the U.S. constantly snoops on where all the money is going to and coming from. (One possibility for why they think that is because Edward Snowden exposed it all in 2013, but I digress again.)
The second, even bigger problem is that the U.S. acts like the spoiled kid at his birthday party, refusing to let the kids he doesn’t like ride the rented pony. In other words, the U.S. forces countries to do things they hate, like teach their kids trans techniques, by threatening to cut them off from SWIFT, or snatching their money as it travels through the collected SWIFT system.
Russia, for example, is cut off from SWIFT under U.S. sanctions. And $300 billion of its money was seized while sitting in a SWIFT clearinghouse bank. The implacable Russians are great poker players, you can’t never tell if they’re at all mad about Biden snatching their $300 billion or exploding their undersea pipelines.
But you can imagine how mad the Russians must be.
The Russians are mad enough to spend their time and money leading a world movement to replace the G-7 and its captive SWIFT system. Which would be horrible for us.
Once BRICS has its own interbanking system, they won’t need to trade in dollars anymore, not unless they need something from the U.S. or from a G-7 country. For complicated reasons, the reduced demand for dollars just from those lost transfers will drastically worsen our debt problem. And maybe more important for BRICS countries, the U.S. won’t be able threaten sanctions to force them to swallow every lunatic social experiment that comes down the liberal U.S. pike.
The BRICS pitched their interbanking system yesterday as a non-threatening “alternative” to SWIFT, rather than any kind of direct competitor. Having choices, they stressed, just improves everyone’s outcomes. But that logic is like claiming that when you parked your taco truck right next to Jose’s taco truck, it is actually better for Jose’s taco trade since diners like different choices of tacos.
Jose is not likely to agree. Jose is likely to go loco.
BRICS is not yet ready to switch the new platform on. But this week’s Summit was so significant that many articles, while not drawing a direct comparison, mentioned “Bretton Woods.”
Bretton Woods was the famous (or infamous) 1945 meeting where the winning countries after World War II created the international banking system, the IMF, and the World Bank. Yesterday, BRICS argued that things have changed since 1945. It’s like the G-7 is a seasoned citizen still using an iPhone 7. You can’t install any new apps. The international monetary system needs an upgrade.
The U.S. could shut this BRICS initiative down easily and immediately. All we need to do is reform SWIFT. If the U.S. stopped using SWIFT to sanction other countries, and SWIFT opened up its system transparently, and the U.S. stopped using SWIFT for spying, then BRICS would be unnecessary.
And everyone would keep trading in dollars.
In other words, we could rescue the dollar. We only need to give up the ‘dirty tricks’ tool we use to force other countries to make their kids sit through drag queen happy hours. But Biden’s neocons won’t try that simple remedy, will they? They’ll let the dollar be destroyed before they give up their economic wonder weapon.
>> Signs of life in Canada! Canada’s Global News ran a story yesterday headlined, “Danielle Smith promises to review Alberta’s professional regulators, legislate limits.” It was terrific news coming from an unexpected place.
CLIP: Premier Danielle Smith describes threats to free speech and the marketplace of ideas (5:41).
Canada is divided into ten provinces, like states, and three territories, like regions, each with its own local government. Each province has a Premier, similar to a U.S. governor. Danielle Smith is the Premier of Alberta Province, which is the closest thing to a Florida that Canada has.
Smith was the first pandemic Premier to reject vaccine and mask mandates and move toward a return to normalcy. Now she’s proposed a set of new laws to protect free speech from insane regulations on “misinformation.” In particular, Smith is aiming at professional regulations for doctors and lawyers, which she agreed were important to maintain quality, but professionals’ personal opinions should not be regulated. Healthcare workers shouldn’t be punished for political comments.
In the clip linked above, Smith’s Justice Minister gave several examples, including Professor Jordan Peterson’s awful experience. Peterson was punished for using incorrect pronouns on Twitter — something that had nothing at all to do with his professional competence.
Interestingly, Premier Smith did not pick any pandemic examples, even though everyone knows that’s what she’s really talking about.
Smith announced her proposed new policies in a series of tweets, which badly triggered some Canadians. You should see the comments. Some Canadians —publicly!— claim to love Justin Trudeau (how??). I think it must have something to do with the whole “politeness” thing. Many Canadians instinctively feel it’s appropriate to punish people for saying things that are impolite.
Of course, punishing professionals for saying stuff also isn’t polite, which creates an infinite woke death spiral.
Anyway, Premier Smith once again wins the C&C “hero of the week” award, for her courageous defense of free speech in a critical area — professionals like doctors and lawyers, who were too scared of cancellation to be much help during the pandemic.
We badly need less orthodoxy among our credentialed classes.
>> In an astonishing development, the New York Times was the only corporate media platform to run this story. I’m starting to think someone high up at the Times is questioning the trans agenda. The Times’ article was headlined, “U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says.”
In 2015, hyphenated-doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy received a broad, multimillion-dollar grant to research the beneficial effects of castration drugs on children’s emotions. She launched a nine-year study of 411 kids who received so-called “puberty blockers,” which permanently prevent their secondary sexual characteristics from developing, and which trans advocates claim make kids with gender dysphoria happy.
Johanna expected to confirm that hypothesis. She is a trans activist and has often been an expert science witness in high-profile trans cases. But the results of Johanna’s study unexpectedly went the other way.
After two years, the kids in the study showed no improvement in their mental health. Although Johanna would later claim this was the result of the kids starting and ending equally happy, the Times noted that in an earlier paper describing the study’s beginnings, Johanna’s team reported over 25% of the kids in the study were clinically depressed or even suicidal. Not happy.
But ever since that first introductory paper, as the years have gone by, Johanna’s team has never again published their findings. When the Times asked her why not, Johanna explained, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.” She expanded on that, adding she was worried her study’s results could be used in court to argue that “we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact” transgender adolescents.
In other words, no matter how hard they tried, they cannot find any improvement in the study’s heavily drugged kids.
Harry Potter author and women’s rights activist J.K. Rowling made the obvious sarcastic point:
Quibblers will argue Rowling got it wrong, since what we know about Johanna’s unpublished study suggests the kids came out even-Steven. But Rowling is right, since that metric only counted mental health. It didn’t account for all the other problems transitioning kids face.
For just one example of many, boys given puberty blockers face permanent shrinkage, since their package remains forever child-sized. They are usually left with what the doctors call, and I am not making this up, a “micro penis.” Those are two words that should never go together. Obviously, boys who de-transition will not enjoy living with a micro penis. It’s not good for their kidneys, either.
But that’s not even the stupidest part. Fake vaginas are made by hollowing out and “inverting” (don’t ask) the male member. But if the member is micro-sized, doctors can’t make a fake vagina out of it. It’s not deep enough. There’s not enough skin there to do anything useful. So giving boys puberty blockers ensures a bad result from their “gender-affirming surgery.”
You will have to explain how any of that makes sense to trans advocates, because I cannot. I think it must have something to do with a related condition called, “micro brain.”
That being said, there’s a second ugly facet to this tarnished story. What does this self-censorship say about our credentialed class? What does it say about the whole academic publication racket that withholding politically inconvenient results is considered business as usual? How many scientific studies are never published because of politics?
Why do scientists pretend like the academic journals are some kind of sanctified source of unbiased science?
I feel like everyone involved in the academic enterprise knows about all these problems but hides it from the rest of us, since if we really knew how things work, we would pay even less attention to scientists.
>> They just couldn’t stand it anymore and had to say it out loud, to make sure Trump got the message. Yesterday, Politico ran an ugly story headlined, “A Modest Proposal - A Deal to Stop Trump From Trying to Overturn the Election.” You already knew this was why they prosecuted him six ways from Sunday, but now they’ve spelled it out in painstaking detail.
Juleanna Glover, who penned the op-ed, owns a DC-based “public affairs advisory firm” that allegedly helps Republican candidates. She’s not helping Republicans much now though.
Instead, Juleanna has pitched us a deal: What if the federal and state prosecutors running rings around the Trump lawsuits circus all agreed to drop their charges if Trump will just say he lost the 2024 race? Just say the words.
Juleanna compared the potential deal to Judge Merchan’s gag order. She pointed out that Trump actually complied with the gag order — shocking far-left partisans who believe President Trump is mentally and ethically incapable of waiting for a crosswalk signal, much less controlling what he says.
Intentionally or unintentionally, Juleanna gave away the whole sordid game. Her proposal is not new. The lawsuits were always about coercing Trump to say he lost. That’s how political lawfare works. If Trump had dropped out, the lawfare would have magically vanished. Biden would have generously pardoned him, to avoid humiliating and dividing the nation.
But, it’s too late now, Juleanna. Too late.
More encouraging political news was hidden in the markets yesterday. The New York Times ran its story headlined, “U.S. Bond Market Braces for the ‘Trump Trade’ of Large Tariffs and Deficits.”The media and the polls appear to have circled the wagons. It looks like the agreed official narrative from here on out will be “the race is too close to call.” So we must look to other sources for predictions.
The short version is, the Times says that bond investors have begun making purchases and sales assuming a Trump win. So that’s a great sign, since bond investors are betting with their own money and a lot of it, not just answering a random stranger’s questions on a phone call.
But look at this. Did the bond investors come to this conclusion from the polls? Nope. They are reacting to … wait for it … the betting markets:
But don’t overlook the tariffs and tax cuts. Hang onto your hat and prepare for today’s final astonishing story.
>> I told you so! For months, Trump has been chipping away at the income tax. No taxes on tips here, no taxes on Social Security there. Now he’s finally, quietly, without details, letting the media do the work, come all the way out into the open. The New York Times ran a potentially world-changing story yesterday that nobody noticed, headlined, “Trump Flirts With the Ultimate Tax Cut: No Income Taxes at All.
It is finally all coming together and making sense. Tax cuts and tariffs, as explained in the article’s subheadline: “The former president has repeatedly praised a period in American history when there was no income tax, and the country relied on tariffs to fund the government.”
Holy checking account, Batman.
Of course, the New York Times took the unpopular position of defending the income tax. In a word: fairness. The Times says that funding the federal government through tariffs isn’t fair enough, since it doesn’t soak “the rich” more than everybody else. (It feels so sinister when actual rich people like the owners of the New York Times argue in favor of soaking “the rich” through income taxes, which they do not pay, since their money derives from capital gains, but I digress.)
Tariffs are taxes. But suddenly, after being confronted with Trump’s plan, the New York Times has miraculously discovered that, get this, corporations pass taxes along to customers. I’d almost given up hope. This is also the entire argument for ending inflationary corporate taxation, but I digress:
So … Kamala’s plan to increase the corporate tax rate will also increase prices. In other words, her plan will accomplish the exact opposite of lowering inflation. Noted. Thanks, New York Times, for the helpful admission!
The cowardly Times disabled the comments section for this story.
But now, you can see the whole thing. Perhaps this is Trump’s October surprise, the unplayed card that Trump held in reserve (and is still keeping the details close to his chest). End the income tax and fund the federal government through tariffs. So simple. Even if it did result in higher prices for foreign goods and services (encouraging domestic alternatives, by the way), it would just be a sales tax.
As Trump pointed out, this can easily work. We’ve run the country this way before, for a long time. This is exactly how we used to do it. The proposal is simple, elegant, and practical. But economists never thought of it, which is why they’ll oppose it.
Only President Trump could have proposed something so radical and right.
Experts and economists will be badly triggered by all this talk of tariffs. They get obsessed with tariffs in a very Rain Man-ey sort of way. Maybe tariffs do impose some external costs. But there is no possible way to calculate the offsetting, galactic-sized boost our economy would experience from drastically reducing or eliminating the hated, productivity-killing income tax.
Nobody saw this coming. Media will do everything it can to suppress it. But Trump’s plan could produce the greatest economic boom this country has ever seen, a thousand times bigger than the gold rush. Only Trump could pull it off. It’s incredibly encouraging.
Have a fabulous Friday! I’ll meet you back here tomorrow for the Weekend Edition of essential news and commentary. Till then!
