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Patrick Chovanec Profile picture
Patrick Chovanec
@prchovanec
Private sector economic advisor. Author of the newly released book “Cleared for the Option: A Year Learning to Fly”. https://t.co/vhcQrJq9n3. #avgeek
14 subscribers
Nov 7 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I no longer feel like I belong in this country. On a deeply personal level, its values are no longer my values, as they once were. My persistence in it feels increasingly strange and unwelcome. This is not some angry declaration. The feeling perplexes me, more than anything else.
Nov 6 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Well, so it has come to pass. I cannot say I am surprised, because I did see it coming, but it is saddening nonetheless. I will not say much, because I don't trust myself to. But I do think this nation has made a grave mistake. How grave, we shall only learn in time. This is not the country that I spent a lifetime, at home and abroad, loving and defending. It is something else, and what exactly that means for me I cannot yet say.
Oct 29 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Then you're a fool. We have a democratic republic. I've been a limited-government conservative Republican my whole life. In fact, some of my major criticisms of Trump are that he is too much a big-government interventionist in the economy. This inanity about "the US is not a democracy, it's a republic" is getting way too prevalent. The US has a republican form of government - as does China and North Korea. Unlike them, it is democratic in that it derives its authority from the consent of the governed.
Oct 25 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
If Musk tried to withhold Starlink services to aid a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, our Defense Dept should sit him down and tell him he going to restore it or the U.S. government is appropriating the company in the interests of national security. Full stop. I’m usually for the U.S. government taking a hands-off approach to business, but we’re talking about a wartime scenario that would almost certainly involve the U.S. in a peer-to-peer conflict and there’d be no room for fooling around.
Sep 11 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
1. There are times when a thread makes so many important mistakes and feeds into so many misconceptions that it's worthwhile to address it point by point. My apologies. 2. It is true that Trump's tariffs against China were ostensibly imposed for the purpose of forcing China to alter it own unfair trade practices - in large part because the President's legal authority to levy special tariffs requires him to cite this as the reason.
Jul 27 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. As someone who used to analyze and “summarize” these bills for Congress, let me explain … The reason the bills are “mammoth” is that they includes hundreds, even thousands of legislative changes on a wide variety of unrelated topics. Basically a “bill of bills”.
Jul 15 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
George Bush was one of the youngest Navy pilots in WW2 and survived getting shot down and floating in the Pacific for four hours. His crew was killed, and his fellow pilots were captured, executed, and eaten - yes, eaten - by the Japanese. Herbert Hoover survived a siege during the Boxer Rebellion in China, and coordinated efforts to feed millions of refugees during and after World War I.
Jul 9 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I keep encountering the question "If Trump is really a wanna-be dictator, why didn't he do it during his first term? You're just fearmongering." I have three simple answers to this. 1) When Trump was first elected, he lacked confidence, and surrounded himself with more experienced people who were willing tell him no. Eventually either they quit or he fired them. He sees them now as traitors, and has surrounded himself with sycophants competing for his favor.
Jul 9 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I disagree. Study economics … and history, philosophy, science, literature, etc. Get a foundation so you know what it is you’re even criticizing. The most revolutionary modern artists in the world had a solid training in more conventional art. It’s only because they did that they knew which rules needed breaking. They didn’t just start by ignorantly breaking rules.
Jul 4 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
The following is the address I wish President Biden would give for today, the Fourth of July. "Fellow Americans, Happy Fourth of July. I hope you're out there cooking a BBQ or gathering with friends, and not thinking about politics or Washington DC. That is the strength of America - not the halls of power, but the communities where we live our lives."
Jun 22 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I went to the USSR in the 1980s as well. I remember talking to coal miners who literally couldn’t buy soap for the past six months. I remember just buying a t-shirt was like a drug deal. I think the U.S. has problems. I don’t think it is remotely comparable to the Soviet Union. I remember that you even use the tap water in Leningrad to brush your teeth, for fear of a killer parasite. I remember falling ill with food poisoning in Irkutsk, Siberia, and the visiting doctor telling us we had more medicine in our luggage than he had at the hospital.
Jun 16 • 28 tweets • 5 min read
Let's talk about tariffs and how they work. For this purpose, I'm going to borrow freely from the nice charts offered by this online microeconomics textbook: .ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/uvicmicroecono… The chart below shows a situation in a market where the US imports a big chuck of what Americans consume. Image
Jun 14 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
At the risk of highlighting complete goofballs, let me answer this question: Image Okay, first of all, if the government is raising the same amount of money, you won’t be getting a massive tax cut. The same money will be requisitioned by the government, just in a different form. You pay plenty of taxes you don’t see, because someone else is charging you more.
Jun 9 • 40 tweets • 14 min read
1. You’ve probably seen it depicted in movies about the Battle of Britain. This thread is devoted to a recent visit I paid to the underground plotting room, just outside of London, where the fighter squadrons were directed from, in the anxious summer of 1940. Image 2. It was particularly interesting to see it the day after I went up on my Spitfire flight - a chance to see the Battle of Britain from two very different perspectives. Image
Jun 1 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I'm watching the "Great Courses" lectures on Chemistry, partly to refresh my own memory, and partly to prepare to help my son in his own chemistry course. One thing I'm struck by is how much early chemists (18th and 19th Century) were able to figure out through deduction. For instance, figuring out how to get the molecular mass on any compound by analyzing the density of vapor at standard atmosphere. A series of clever deductions that gives you the result for something you can't directly observe.
May 31 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Counterpoint: I think it’s good that Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is being put on trial for the bribes he allegedly took. It's all about due process. Simply "jailing" your political opponents without recourse is BAD, no question. But we have an adversarial justice system, where people make allegations and those allegations are tested in court, with the benefit of the doubt going to the defendant.
May 25 • 28 tweets • 9 min read
As those who follow me here already know, this past week I drove in a convoy that delivered ambulances to Ukraine. In this thread, I’d like to share some impressions from the very short time I spent in Lviv. Image Lviv is in the far west of Ukraine, far from the front lines. While you certainly see men in uniform (often visiting him from the front), most people are out and about their daily lives, and at bars and restaurants. Image
May 9 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
1. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to respond to inaccurate historical takes, if only as an opportunity explain what did happen. A thread. 2. Before World War I, most of today’s Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans sided with the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary) in that war.
Apr 29 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In re-reading all my old books about China, I’m often surprised by where I originally learned about certain things that stuck in my mind. I have to say, I’ve found several of the books by Harrison Salisbury - mostly now out of print - invaluable. amazon.com/gp/aw/d/038072…
Apr 26 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
I'll share my below-the-hood analysis of the GDP numbers here. Headline real GDP growth for the U.S. came in at +1.6% (annualized q/q) in 1Q24, lower than expected. That's the lower quarterly growth rate since 2Q22. Image The composition of real GDP growth in Q1 was: +1.6 = +1.7 consumption +0.4 business investment -0.4 inventories +0.5 housing +0.2 government spending -0.9 net exports.
Mar 30 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
As a former Republican, now Independent, and still WAY more conservative than most of you, I’m going to respond to these assertions one by one. 1) This is true, but only when you artificially limit it to "MSM". Which means ignoring the #1 cable news channel, talk radio, Epoch Times, and host of other podcast, etc. that have increasingly eclipsed legacy media outlets as sources of news and opinion.