Trump's biggest flaw: Today's news for December 22nd

If you want to find President-elect Donald Trump's biggest flaw, it isn't racism or sexism or Russian connections or the conflicts of interest from his businesses. It is this:

CNN:

Trump team floats tariffs

The Trump transition team is floating the possibility of an early executive action to impose tariffs on foreign imports, according to multiple sources.

Such a move would deliver on President-elect Donald Trump's "America First" campaign theme. But it's causing alarm among business interests and the pro-trade Republican establishment.

The Trump transition team didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the prospect of new tariffs. But a transition official said the team has discussed implementing a border adjustment tax measure under consideration by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, which would tax imports to spur US manufacturing.

So we kill U.S. import and export businesses so we can work on assembly lines, which will soon be roboticized anyway. This one gets the shark award for stupidity:

Trump's biggest flaw is his protectionism, which is far more dangerous than appointing a racist, or making derogatory comments about women, or even meeting with Putin.

Protectionism gave us the Great Depression. Specifically, the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. When the world moved from agriculture to manufacturing-based economies, the world's politicians tried to protect their agricultural interests from foreign competition with tariffs. In the U.S., it was Smoot-Hawley that killed our economy. In fact, the worldwide response to America occurred long before the tariffs were enacted. It only took the bill's passage by the House of Representatives in May of 1929 to start boycotts and counter-tariffs from other countries. The stock market crash of 1929 was an indirect result of this protectionist stupidity.

Speaking of stupid Trump tricks...

Politico:

Schumer: Trump's trillion dollar infrastructure plan sounds good to me

Donald Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure plan sounds good to Chuck Schumer, the incoming Senate minority leader said Tuesday.

The president-elect has called for a $1 trillion investment into upgrading the nation’s roads, bridges, tunnels and airports.

“We think it should be large,” Schumer told ABC News’ Jon Karl and Rick Klein during their “Powerhouse Politics” podcast. “He’s mentioned a trillion dollars. I told him that sounded good to me.”

A trillion dollars sounds good? Why not two trillion? Or 500 billion? We all know the answer to that, and it has nothing to do with the amount needed, and everything to do with the political impact of large numbers.

Expect a trillion dollars to be spent, and a trillion dollars to be blown, because it isn't about fixing infrastructure. It's all about the next election.

In other stupid news...

US News & World Report:

Black Males 3 Times More Likely to Be Killed by Police

Black males are nearly three times more likely than white males to be killed when law enforcement officers use force, according to a new study.

Black males aged 10 years or older died at a rate 2.8 times higher in so-called legal intervention deaths in the U.S. between 2010 and 2014, the study says. Hispanic males, meanwhile, died at a rate 1.7 times higher than that of whites. About 96 percent of the deaths overall resulted from shootings.

The study, led by Dr. James Buehler, a professor at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, was published this week in the American Journal of Public Health. It examined information on 2,285 fatal encounters with police between 2010 and 2014, as recorded in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database. Ninety-six percent of those killed were male.

Excuse me, but black men were 3 times more likely than white men to be killed, but what about the men overall being 24 times more likely than women to be killed? Talk about burying the lede...

Seriously though, the study doesn't get at the cause. Is it racism? Is it black men being more likely to commit acts that put them in harm's way? Is it cops being over-aggressive? You can undoubtedly find examples of all of these within the numbers.

But nobody stops to ask: Maybe cops are enforcing far too many laws? If you hand an armed officer a huge book of reasons to justify shooting people, it becomes much easier to justify shooting people, regardless of skin color or gender. Failure to comply with the legal code is a justification for killing, and ignorance of the law is no excuse. Hence, you can be killed for nearly any reason, and you don't have to know why in advance. By the way, if you get killed by a cop for a reason which is outside the law, that factor doesn't help you, since you will be dead.