There's an extremely stupid talking point going around the MAGA/Tarrif-Bot world that claims Trump's tariffs are justified under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Let's investigate it.🧵

https://twitter.com/WayneRo11785584/status/1928462283266548174

First, let's start with the USCIT case that struck down Trump's tariffs.

This case was NOT about Section 232 tariffs under the 1962 Act. It was about the "Liberation Day" tariffs, which Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (aka IEEPA).

I genuinely believe that Bessent is one of the leveler heads in a White House that's stocked full of protectionist crackpots. That said, he still grossly misunderstands tariffs, as per his piece in today's WSJ.🧵 Case in point here. He starts by arguing that tariffs are a negotiating tool to "reduce trade barriers in other countries."

Marxists: You can't use GDP to show prosperity because it's just a construct of the neoclassical paradigm to reinforce capitalist power disparities.

Also Marxists: Rising inequality proves that capitalism is failing, as per Piketty's stats...which use GDP as their denominator. Marxists: Capitalism is responsible for climate change, colonialism, slavery, the bubonic plague, and every other disaster and death in human history.

Also Marxists: You can't fault Marxism for the atrocities of explicitly-Marxist states. Those weren't real Marxism.

Tariffs are extremely unpopular with the American public (61% view them as harmful) and are uniformly opposed by economists. So why are we pursuing a trade war?

A. Trump stacked his economic team with fanatical band of Tariff Fundamentalist crackpots who support them anyway. Unlike most tariffs in the receng past, there isn't even a strong lobbyist push behind these ones. Lobbyists usually try to carve out tariffs for specific goods or industries, not impose them on entire countries. That suggests the source of the current tariffs is ideological.

This is the fringe and error-riddled economic history that JD Vance brought into the White House.

americancompass.org/rediscovering-… It's rooted in a bizarre rehabilitation of the economic philosophy of 19th century Sen. Henry Clay, a large slaveholder from Kentucky who believed that the role of the federal government was to centrally plan the national economy, all fueled by debt finance and a National Bank

This exact same pattern may be found for almost every trendy jargon term from academia.

It starts as an obscure proprietary concept on the Marxist far-left fringes of the professoriate. Then from about 2015 onward, it's everywhere. Two simultaneous trends explain why:

1. Starting around 2000, the academy shifted hard-left. With this shift, low-rigor ideological dreck from the Critical Theory fringe became the dominant perspective.

2. Journalism followed academia in adopting & promoting the same concepts.

Academic leftists: "The reason academia skews left is because we do better research & reality has a left wing bias!"

Also academic leftists: "Here's my CV. I mainly do postcolonial ethnographies of how neoliberal capitalism oppresses indigenous Marxist sex workers in Greenland." Academic leftists: "Our department won't hire anyone on the right because their research isn't good enough, according to us."

Also academic leftists: "Here's my CV. I mainly write Marxist cat poetry using a critical theory lens. Sometimes my cat is credited as the coauthor."

🧵Thread on @gabriel_zucman's claim that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the average American, as published in yesterday's @nytimes.

The short version: Zucman manipulates his data to fit a pro-tax political narrative. You can see this by comparing to his own earlier work. In 2018 Zucman (along with Piketty and Saez) published an article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics, estimating the avg effective tax rate on top income groups. They argued that the gap between top and bottom earner tax rates had closed due to payroll taxes.

The NY Times article about billionaire tax rates is engaging in intentional deception.

Graph below shows his original published statistics in blue vs. what he told the NYT in orange. The change came from manipulating how he assigned corp tax incidence.

nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Its author Gabriel Zucman is also engaging in another deception by reclassifying unrealized capital gains as "income."

The problem: that's not what the tax code or the constitution say.

Income is governed by the realization principle, meaning it must be earned to be taxed.

This is false.

Zucman's own statistics (before he manipulated them for the New York Times by altering tax incidence to support his narrative) show the top 1%'s average tax rate has barely changed since 1962. #communitynotes Here are Zucman's own stats before he manipulated them to fit his story.

1962 tax rate was 39%. 2014 was 36%.

Top 10% income share in the US using different approaches and sources. As usual, the Piketty-Saez (blue) is the outlier and presents an exaggerated depiction of rising inequality. 1/ Note that there are differences in the series & sources.

Piketty-Saez and Geloso-Magness are from IRS tax data. Geloso-Magness is generally lower because it corrects for accounting and data entry errors in Piketty-Saez, reducing overall inequality. 2/

Today seems like an appropriate time to remind everybody that @Harvard's epidemiology department employs a Marxist activist with no actual medical expertise.

He has a long history of calling for real scientists to be fired for opposing the Covid lockdowns
campusreform.org/article/harvar… @Harvard Here he is a few weeks ago bragging about how he pushed a communist political screed into a mainstream medical journal.

🧵Since commemorative statues are being reevaluated in light of their connections to atrocities, racism, etc., here's the case for why we need a commission on the Karl Marx monument in London's Highgate Cemetery. First, should Marx be canceled? The arguments:

1. Marx's system has a disastrous and bloody track record, including a 20th century body count of ~100 million

2. Marx endorsed revolutionary violence of the type his followers enacted

3. Marx was a vicious racist & anti-semite

Except it's not an error. Karl Marx was a vicious Anti-Semite. His essay "The Russian Loan" spread a ridiculous conspiracy theory about Jewish bankers manipulating governments into war in order to profit Jews. His hatred for Jews was unambiguous.

https://twitter.com/NathanJRobinson/status/1762535507341291711

Reciepts. And the essay only goes downhill from the opening paragraphs.

🧵Most academics who claim to study "neoliberalism" have an origin myth about the term. They believe it was coined by free-market economists at the Colloque Walter Lippmann in 1938.

Except it isn't true. The term had been around in German-language sources since the 1920s. 1/ The CWL briefly considered the term as a label at the suggestion of Alexander Ruestow...then rejected it.

The most likely reason for rejection? Because the far-left and far-right in Germany already used it as a pejorative to describe free-market classical liberal economists.

Richard Delgado, co-founder of CRT and participant in the original conference where the term was coined, has openly described its originators as a gathering of Marxists.

The reason why CRT is frequently described as a Marxist school of thought is because they said so themselves.

https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1746967032581767648

Here is CRT co-founder Charles R. Lawrence recounting another early gathering from 1990. It involved a speech by CRT co-founder Mari Matsuda where she explicitly traced her formative CRT contributions to adaptations of her openly Marxist father's teachings about capitalism.

This convoluted editorial argues that Claudine Gay should keep her job because her plagiarism was "unintentional" (how does one "unintentionally" make small edits to conceal a lifted passage btw?), and because her critics' motives are in "bad faith" 1/

thecrimson.com/article/2023/1… Calling something "bad faith" has become a default weapon to dismiss an otherwise factually true assessment of scholarly misconduct that, taken on its merits, would thoroughly discredit the perpetrator. 2/

Critical Theory is little more than a conspiracist epistemology to rationalize why none of Marx's predictions panned out and why the revolution didn't happen the way he promised. To wit: Marxism views its aims as inevitable & the historical progression to those aims as if they were scientifically deduced certainties.

Except it's nothing of the sort. Instead the mechanism of Marxist collective organizing is completely undermined by Olsonian freeridership.

Why do you keep lying about this, @gabriel_zucman?

Auten & Splinter absolutely show an increase in the top 1% *pre-tax* income. It's just not skyrocketing like your politically manipulated stats claim. @gabriel_zucman The key Auten-Splinter figure is here. Their pre-tax measure shows an increase. It's only flat when you look at after-tax income...which demonstrates that our highly progressive federal tax system has already offset the rise in inequality.

This is false. The Piketty-Saez series uses an inappropriate denominator for tax data, substantially exaggerating income inequality at both tails of the U shaped pattern. Also false. The Piketty tax data component is riddled with accounting errors. When you correct for those, inequality goes down in the entire series. Piketty has adamantly refused to correct them.

But most communists are bigots. ;-) Including Angela Davis.