Quick take on Trump's taxes on imports from Mexico and Canada. Trump, or at least someone with his ear, knows that his tax increases would be hugely unpopular, people are not anxious to pay higher prices for everything. This means that Trump does not actually want his import taxes on goods from Canada and Mexico to take effect.

Since I seem to have some MAGA friends here who are upset because I am blaming Trump for the fact that mortgage interest rates have risen since his victory looked likely, let me give a quick economics lesson. Suppose that people investing in the Treasury bond market have been listening to Trump promises about big increases in import taxes (tariffs) and mass deportations. (Mortgage rates track the 10-yr Treasury bond.)

If the media just used the phrase people understand "tax on imports," no one would have to look up the word "tariff," and the media could take some pride in actually conveying information in their reporting

https://twitter.com/earleklassen/status/1855952429763670365

Reporters really do not seem to feel any responsibility toward informing their audiences. I have argued for decades that is pointless to just write the billions of hundreds of billions that the government spends in various areas, because no one has any idea what they mean.

I hate to put a lot of highly paid pundits out of business, but look at this f**king graph
If the point here is not obvious, if we can't get people to know the most basic facts about the economy and the other issues they consider most important, how do we think we will get them to hear our great messages?

@GregTSargent Good piece and good to see, but it was only because of outrageously awful economic reporting that Trump ever had an edge on the economy. @GregTSargent The media kept pushing the complaint that "prices haven't gone back down." Every reporter knows that when wages have risen by 23 percent, prices CAN'T go back down. It's like wishing that we would grow younger.

Now that we know Jeff Bezos is trying to become friends with Donald Trump we know why the Washington Post has not run major pieces on how Trump wants to cut Medicaid, a program that provides health insurance to more than 70 million people. Now that we know Jeff Bezos is trying to become friends with Donald Trump we know why the Washington Post has not run major pieces on how Trump will raise the cost of insulin and other drugs for people on Medicare.

Peter Coy makes the biggest mistake about inflation in telling us about the other six big mistakes nytimes.com/2024/10/21/opi… He compares average wages today to average wages in January 2021. As everyone who follows this knows (including Coy), the average in January 2021 was misleading because 10 million mostly low wage workers had lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

This Philadelphia Inquirer headline and subhead is so beautiful. It should be required reading at the NYT, WaPo, NPR and every other major media outlet.

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1848497873807167557

This is how they should all be covering Donald Trump.

The polls keep showing the presidential race is a dead heat. I wonder where it would be if the media had not misled the country about the economy for the last 4 years, insisting everything was awful when most data showed an extraordinarily strong bounce back from the pandemic. My favorite is this New York Times piece from this summer cepr.net/nyt-finds-atyp…

Donald Trump seems to have forgotten what the economy was like when he left office. He talks as though it was booming and then Biden sank it. In fact, the opposite is the case. The economy took a massive hit in the spring of 2020 from pandemic shutdowns, while it did regain many of the lost jobs in the summer, momentum slowed sharply in the fall.

Donald Trump is really a mountain of ignorance. In addition to spreading absurd lies about immigration under his administration and the Biden-Harris administration, he also gets the story on farm income completely wrong.

https://twitter.com/UniNoticias/status/1846642008628019552

Trump said farmers were doing great under his administration and are doing awful under Biden-Harris.

This trick is too stupid for words, but it works again and again with our media. The Republicans keep insisting something that is obviously not true. In this case that FEMA is not giving help to Republican areas. More famously, they claim the elections are rigged.

https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1845809292789649425

Then they say, regardless of the reality, people have fears that FEMA is discriminating based on politics or the elections are rigged.

Trump’s & Musk’s lies about the Biden-Harris administration’s hurricane recovery efforts put me in a bad mood so I am going to make myself feel better by highlighting some of the truly awful news stories that twisted reality to make the economy look bad under this administration. I posted many of these on my blog a couple of weeks ago , but hey, since they keep repeating the lies, I can keep repeating the truth.cepr.net/my-six-favorit…

In trashing the New York Times "the Biden-Harris economy is bad" series, I keep forgetting to mention this classic on the retirement prospects facing older workers nytimes.com/2024/05/08/mag… The person at the center of this major New York Times magazine piece is making plans under the assumption Social Security will not exist in ten years cepr.net/tell-the-new-y…

You know the MAGA lies about Biden neglecting Republican areas would be a great opportunity for news outlets to do pieces reminding their audiences how Trump withheld during the pandemic from Democratic areas and promised to use politics again in distributing disaster relief.

https://twitter.com/GregTSargent/status/1841073260047331516

But since the major media outlets are owned and controlled by people who will pay lower taxes with Donald Trump back in the White House, guess we won't see it.

Todd Purdum's NYT column on how Vice-President Harris hurts herself by not giving more specific policy proposals shows a remarkable lack of self-reflection by the media nytimes.com/2024/09/19/opi… At the most basic level, almost no one is going to actually hear Harris' policy proposal. She might lay it out to a few thousand people in a speech and maybe tens or low hundreds of thousands will read it on her website.

The Washington Post has a new entry for a Pulitizer in the he said/she said category

washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/…
For very ignorant people and national political reporters, there is a tradition of Justice Department independence dating back for more than half a century. To further remove the risk of political interference, Attorney General Garland appointed a special prosecutor in this case.

There are two points worth making on this incident.

https://twitter.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1828564672490152400

First, any normal campaign would be apologizing to the staff of Arlington Cemetary as well as the family and friends of the veterans buried there for violating its rules.

I thought I would write a short thread on Donald Trump’s proposal for making tips tax free, since the media are too busy telling people that Vice-President Harris is thin on policy to examine any proposals Trump puts forward. First, as a practical matter, it is very hard to see any rationale for exempting tips from taxes. If there is a reason that someone earning $40k a year, half from tips, should pay lower taxes than someone earning $40k a year from straight pay, I can’t imagine what it would be.

When Trump boasts about the great economy on his watch I wonder if he realizes that it lost 2.7 million jobs or, given his mental state, Trump has no idea how bad things were when he left office. I am constantly told that people accept that the job loss under Trump was due to the pandemic, but blame Biden for the pandemic inflation.

@mcopelov Since NYT reporters apparently have difficulty understanding what happened with Biden choosing to step aside, let me make it simple for them, at the risk of being somewhat morbid. @mcopelov Suppose that instead of making a choice to step aside, President Biden had a heart attack and died. This would mean that the millions of people who voted in primaries would not have the candidate they supported on the ballot.