Herbert Hoover

High Tariffs On Major Trading Partners Will Devastate The American Economy!

admin 3 Comments

If Donald Trump follows through on his threats to add a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico, and 10 percent on Chinese imports, it will devastate the American economy in short order.

Besides worsening relations with our three major trading partners, it will cause massive rises in prices on all kinds of goods, such as:

Clothing
Furniture
Household Appliances
Toys
Food
Automobiles
Travel Goods
Smart Phones

It will worse our relations with our neighbors, and destroy the USMCA trade agreements, promoting distrust with both Canada and Mexico, who share thousands of miles of boundaries, and undermine our relationship with China, our leading rival in world affairs.

It will be destructive of international relations, and of American economic progress, which had advanced under Joe Biden, despite the inflation problem.

If Americans voted against the Democrats on the inflation issue, they will get a rude awakening under Donald Trump, as we will have similar situation as we had in the Great Depression due to Herbert Hoover and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, and the Panic of 1893 due to Benjamin Harrison and the McKinley Tariff of 1890.

Day One Of Trump: Executive Orders On Mass Deportation And Tariffs, Insuring Economic Disaster!

admin 7 Comments

Every indication is that Donald Trump will make a dramatic, negative Inaugural Address on Monday January 20, 2025.

It is also, ironically, the celebration of Martin Luther King Day, with announcement of executive orders that will promote economic deterioration, and insure that the opposition Democrats will gain the edge for the 2026 Midterm Congressional elections and the Presidential Election of 2028.

Executive orders promoting mass deportation, and announcement of high protective tariffs on all foreign goods, will create a massive economic crisis in 2025.

There will be a great shortage of workers in many industries, including agriculture, education and health services, construction, wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing and mining, and leisure and hospitality,

There are over 28 million immigrants who work hard, pay taxes, and most obey the law, even if they came undocumented, for a chance at a better life, and to have the American dream.

It will be heartbreaking if many of these people, who add a great deal to the national economy, and have children who have lived and grown up in America, suddenly have their lives uprooted in an unjust and immoral manner.

And the prospective loss of their employment, as well as their consumption of goods and paying of taxes, will undermine the American economy in a massive way.

Tariffs, as in the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Panic of 1893 in the Gilded Age, under earlier Republican Presidents Herbert Hoover and Benjamin Harrison, respectively, will again prove to be destructive and undermine the lives of Americans.

They were fooled by Donald Trump to believe he would provide a prosperous economy, when his only intention is to benefit the rich with further tax cuts, as under Republicans Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump in his first term, adding massively to the national debt.

Donald Trump’s Insane Tariff Policy: An Economic Disaster If Ever Enacted!

admin 20 Comments

Donald Trump is proposing massive tariffs on foreign nations and their goods, particularly China, without realizing such a policy is a true economic disaster!

History tells us high protective tariffs, as for instance under President Herbert Hoover nearly a century ago, with the Smoot Hawley Tariff of 1930, helped make an economic downturn escalate into a full scale Great Depression!

Back then, hundreds of economists took out an ad in the NY TIMES, pleading with Hoover to veto such action, but he paid no attention, and it caused his demise to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Presidential Election Of 1932.

What Trump clearly does not understand is that it is middle class and working class Americans who will suffer the most, as prices of all kinds of imported goods will rise 20 percent or more, adding massively to the cost of living.

Trump is ignorant on economics, along with many other areas of knowledge and policy, and were he elected and able to accomplish his crazy economic ideas, it could lead to another Great Depression!

So the Presidential Election of 2024 is crucial on economic policy, as it is on so many other issues!

Republican Attacks On Joe Biden Totally Disingenuous!

admin Leave a comment

With President Joe Biden having withdrawn from the Presidential campaign, opposition Republicans have displayed a total lack of respect, and being totally disingenuous about his time in office.

It is understandable that for political reasons, Republicans would be critical of Biden, but they are going beyond the pale, and asserting totally ridiculous and preposterous comments about Biden.

We see Donald Trump, but also many other Republicans, asserting that Joe Biden is the worst President in American history, which demonstrates not only the horrible character of all concerned, but also, a total lack of knowledge of Presidential history!

It is a fact that no reputable Presidential scholar or expert would rate Joe Biden at the bottom of the 45 Presidents America has had, while many have made it clear that, indeed, it is Donald Trump who is the worst ever occupant of the Presidency.

So for Donald Trump to make such a stupid, moronic statement, is again an example of the psychological definition of “projection”!

But beyond that reality, how can any intelligent person say Biden is the worst, when he is rated as the “best” domestic achieving President in 60 years, since the time of Lyndon B. Johnson?

Biden was rated number 14 in the recent assessment of the American Political Science Association!

And what about such Presidents as Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Franklin Pierce, Herbert Hoover and a multitude of other Presidents who have been correctly rated as “disasters” or “tragedies” in office?

A Century Ago Revived: Isolationism, Protectionism, Nativism!

admin 1 Comment

It has been a century since three “isms” were promoted, that undermined the United States!

We had the rise of Isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s, after World War I, a very powerful movement, particularly among Republicans, which became a major challenge for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

This author and blogger wrote about this in his first book–TWILIGHT OF PROGRESSIVISM: THE WESTERN REPUBLICAN SENATORS AND THE NEW DEAL (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

We also saw the rise of Protectionism, the idea of high protective tariffs, which was pursued by Republican Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.

Hoover, in particular, pursued this with the Hawley Smoot Tariff of 1930, which made the emerging Great Depression only multipled in 1930 and after, and this despite hundreds of economists taking out newspaper ads, appealing to Hoover to reject higher tariffs.

And we also had nativism, with the passage of extremely restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s under Calvin Coolidge, discriminating against Catholic, Jewish, and Asian immigrants, an apology that led to great human tragedy during the 1930s and World War II.

Now, we have Donald Trump and the Republican Party pursuing the goal of Isolationism (unwillingness to back Ukraine in its war with Russia, weakened support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and expressing doubts about supporting the sovereignty of Taiwan against mainland China)!

And we have Protectionism rearing its ugly head, with Trump promoting the idea of 10 percent tariffs on all foreign goods, which will raise the prices to American consumers, causing major rises in the cost of living!

Finally, we have Nativism, with the pledge of Trump to deport up to 11 million migrants, both undocumented immigrants and others who are not citizens of the United States, bringing back memories of detention camps promoted by Trump in his first term, including separation of children from their parents!

America cannot allow these old “isms” to become government policy again, as we need to learn from mistakes of a century ago!

Rationale For Joe Biden To Retire

admin 17 Comments

Joe Biden has been an excellent President, but it was a mistake for him to decide to run for reelection at age 81.

The fact that he had a disastrous debate performance in the June 27 Presidential debate, while tragic, was a blessing that it happened now, not in September, when it would be too late to withdraw, and likely, would be a fatal situation.

The odds of him finishing a second term alive under the stresses of the position are not good, and he could be incapacitated, whereby he would have to leave office, or be in the kind of condition that Woodrow Wilson was in his last two years in office.

His wife, Dr. Jill Biden, is very devoted to her husband, but needs to be realistic, and wish for her husband to have peace of mind, and have the burdens of office taken off him, so he can have a pleasant and, hopefully, prolonged, retirement period.

Every President since 1900, with the exceptions of Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy have retired, and every President since Herbert Hoover has had a Presidential Library open while he was alive, other than JFK, with even FDR starting the planning of his library in his second term, and “founding” it in his third term in office.

It is time for Joe Biden to retire, enjoy private life, and hopefully, live to write his memoirs and open up his Presidential Library.

He has nothing to be ashamed of, as he saved America from Donald Trump, and now it is time to pass on that responsibility to others, with Kamala Harris ready to take the charge and attack against Donald Trump and everything evil that the Republican Party stands for.

235 Years Since The Inauguration Of George Washington!

admin 7 Comments

On this day in 1789, George Washington was inaugurated, 57 days late, as the first President of the United States, in the downtown Wall Street area of New York City.

Washington was the right person to start the Presidency of a new Republic, and he knew that it was essential that he give up power, in order to insure the survival and stability of the nation in the long term future.

We cannot thank Washington enough, or all of the later Presidents who knew when to leave!

And we can also be thankful that even in hotly contested elections in the future, Presidents who lost reelection—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush–followed the tradition Washington had set by leaving office.

Also, we have to be thankful that in close elections, such candidates as Samuel Tilden in 1876, Al Gore in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016 were gracious in defeat, and that Vice Presidents who lost the succession to their President—Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968—also were gracious in defeat, as was Gore in 2000.

Sadly, the crisis today is due to the reality that Donald Trump would not accept defeat graciously, and provoked a violent mob on January 6, 2021, for which he must be held accountable!

APSA Presidential Greatness Poll 2024–The Bottom 10 Presidents

admin Leave a comment

The American Political Science Association Presidential Greatness Poll 2024 makes clear that Donald Trump is the absolute bottom of all 45 Presidents, below James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, William Henry Harrison, and Warren G. Harding, all with very low total scores, but Trump with a final score of 10.92 as compared to Buchanan’s 16.71, Johnson’s 21.56, Pierce’s 24.6, Harrison’s 26.01, and Harding with 27.76.

The other four at the bottom, numbers 36 to 39 in order, are Herbert Hoover, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore.

Notice that of these 10 Presidents at the bottom, four are the Presidents preceding Abraham Lincoln and one following him.

The others are Harding and Hoover from the 1920s; and one month President William Henry Harrison and his successor John Tyler in the early 1840s, when the Presidency came under attack due to the first Vice President succeeding the President due to death of the incumbent.

And then there is Donald Trump, who ranks last for those participants in the poll who are identified as Democrats, Independents, Liberals, and Moderates; and even for those who identify themselves as Republicans or Conservatives, Trump only rises to number 43, with Buchanan and Johnson rated below Trump by Republicans, and Buchanan and Pierce rated below Trump by Conservatives.

Also note that the only Presidents of this group who served a full term were Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Donald Trump.

The 80th Congress (1947-1949) Vs. The 118th Congress (2023- )

admin Leave a comment

It has often been claimed that the 80th Congress (1947-1949) under President Harry Truman was unproductive, or as Truman claimed it in his 1948 Presidential campaign, a “Do Nothing” Congress.

While it is true that the Republican dominated 80th Congress worked against Democratic President Truman and his “Fair Deal” proposals, most notably passing the anti Labor Taft-Hartley Act over the President’s veto, in reality a lot was accomplished in that Congress.

The following actions were accomplished:

The Truman Doctrine
The Taft-Hartley Act
The Presidential Succession Act
The National Security Act–including the Defense Department at the Pentagon in Virginia, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, separate Department of the Air Force, and the Central Intelligence Agency
The Marshall Plan
22nd Amendment to the US Constitution

At the same time, NOTHING significant has been passed into law in the present first session of the 118th Congress, making it the least productive in modern times since the Great Depression 1931-1933 72nd Congress, split between a Democratic House of Representatives and Republican Senate under President Herbert Hoover!

118th Congress Least Productive Since Great Depression 72nd Congress!

admin Leave a comment

The 118th Congress (2023-2025) is fast becoming the least productive since the 72nd Congress (1931-1933) under President Herbert Hoover at the worst times of the Great Depression.

Both the House of Representatives and US Senate are responsible for such poor performance, but clearly, if the House of Representatives is poorly organized and operated, the Senate cannot make up for it.

Both Congresses had one house Democratic, and one Republican, which also caused stalemate and gridlock.

The fact that the House of Representatives Republican majority has just voted an Impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, with zero evidence of such abuse of power, is a sign of how incompetent and hopeless the 118th Congress is, even with a small Democratic majority in the US Senate.

Clearly, the most productive Congresses have been when one party, in all modern times Democrats, has had a vast advantage in the number of seats in both houses of Congress.

So those most productive Congresses were, chronologically:

63rd Congress (1913-1915) under Woodrow Wilson
73rd Congress (1933-1935) under Franklin D. Roosevelt
74th Congress (1935-1937) under Franklin D. Roosevelt
89th Congress (1965-1967) under Lyndon B. Johnson
111th Congress (2009-2011) under Barack Obama

The most productive of all were the 73rd Congress under FDR, and the 89th Congress under LBJ.