My column for the Washington County Daily News is online. You can find the whole thing by following the link. Here’s a snippet:
Since the Constitution is a shackle for government, why would we make an institution of that government “the final arbiter” of its meaning and extent? That is like letting a child be the final arbiter on how much Halloween candy is permissible to eat in one sitting. Just as that child would end up bloated and sick, so too would a government left to decide its own boundaries.
The current apoplectic fury over the appointment of a single judge of a nine judge panel of a single branch of our three-branch government is symptomatic of the degeneration of our adherence to our Constitution. As a people, we Americans have ceded the responsibility of binding our government to the tenets of our Constitution to an unelected branch of that same government. We have permitted the pendulum of power to be permanently stuck on the side of the government.
The result has been predictable. Our federal government routinely acts well outside its constitutional boundaries with not only the consent, but the adulation of much of the citizenry.
It’s all a distraction from what’s really going on.
http://www.stonekettle.com/2018/07/folly-vice-and-madness.html?m=1
Quite possibly The Lamest Article Ever. (um, not yours, Owen). Written, obviously, by some ignoramus who thinks Twitter is the whole story and is too lazy to actually fact find. I stopped seriously reading after encountering this lie is the very first part…
Leaving aside the part where he offers up some statistic from 2017, you know, before Harley-Davidson announced their decision to move some of their manufacturing overseas in response to Trump’s 2018 trade war,
The statistic of HD’s falling sales was released by HD in January of this year and reflects the 2017 year-end number. I’m sure Trump would have used the 2018 number, but since it is only 7/4/18, he’d be hard pressed to conjuror it.
Ignorant of this simple business fact, the idiot who wrote that blog post in attempting to present Trump the fool is the only who comes away wearing the jester’s hat.
BTW, Harley’s worldwide retail sales decreased 7.2 percent, 1st Qtr, 2018. -12% in the US.
Second, Harley has been building Hogs out-country for years. In Brazil. In India. In Australia (they are closing the Australian plant when the Thailand plant opens).
Harley built it’s India plant in 2011 to escape India’s 100% tariff on import bikes. Harley’s India plant assembles US parts and exports bikes only to Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Hogs assembled/sold in India are subject to 0% tariff. India is the second largest motorbike market in the world, second only to the US.
The Thailand facility planning began in 2016 (you know, the Obama years) and Harley announced its intention to build and move assembly there in May of 2017. Thailand has a 60% tariff on imported US Hogs.
The bright spot? From Harley’s own 1st Qtr press release:
Harley-Davidson’s first quarter effective tax rate was 24.1 percent compared to 34.5 percent in 2017. The decreased tax rate was due to the favorable impact of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Yes, indeed.
Further, the post suggests that “foreign companies” are intrinsically evil, which quality is reserved to the Russians, of course.
He misses the point: Trump doesn’t much care what flag the company flies. He cares that US citizens are employed. Which will be the outcome.
Don’t like those Foreign Companies? Kick out Fiat-Allis, Siemens, and Wacker, not to mention Square D (now a Froggie firm.) Those are the ones which come to mind first…..