Lies vs Truth

From The Hill:

President Trump’s half hour, impromptu interview on "Fox & Friends" last Friday sent the media’s fact checkers into overdrive this weekend. Everyone from PolitiFact to The New York Times to virtually all the Sunday morning national talk shows piled on, calling Trump a liar. But the media can’t stop lying about what the president says. Sometimes it can’t distinguish a legitimate point of disagreement from a lie. It is no wonder that people have tuned out much of the constant attacks on Trump.

 Just take the hyperbole on Sunday’s Meet the Press. Before playing a compilation of clips from Trump’s interview, moderator Chuck Todd exclaimed: “Let me put together this list of just outright misstatements, lies.” After showing the clips, Todd felt it necessary to emphasize yet again that everyone knew the statements were false: “Every single one of those things is absolutely not true.”

The show had on two liberal and two conservative panelists, but it wasn’t real balance as the conservatives were both “never Trumpers.” The guests debated whether Trump was simply lying or whether he lacked the "mental capacity" to know that he was spewing falsehoods. So let’s review the first three statements that Todd claims are false. Then we'll look at the one that he says is the “most ridiculous” of all.

Trump: “Well, no, there is no trade war.”

Whatever one thinks of tariffs or Trump’s negotiating strategy, the president’s tariff threats are more of a tiny skirmish than a full-blown “trade war.” In 2017, the US imported goods worth about $3.9 trillion. Only about $29 billion of those imports were in steel, and the aluminum imports that will face tariffs were $14 billion. This amounts to $43 billion in imports of these two goods. $18 billion (41 percent) of that total came from China.

Friday’s announcement of $50 billion in tariffs on Chinese electronics is more significant, but still a tiny fraction of our overall goods trade. These tariffs don't affect 98 percent of all imports. Eighty-seven percent of imports from China are unaffected. The average tariff rate on all imported goods will rise from 1.4 percent to just over 2 percent. The U.S. has among the lowest tariff rates in the world, and this will hold true even if the threatened increases go into effect. (Read more.)

From The American Thinker:

Economists Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer wrote in The Wall Street Journal Friday that President Donald Trump deserves credit for the economy’s improvement, not former President Barack Obama. Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and Laffer, the chairman of Laffer Associates, write that “Mr. Obama might be justified in taking credit for today’s economy if his successor had adopted and carried on his policies. Instead, Mr. Trump has reversed nearly every Obama rule, edict and law that he can legally overturn. At its core, the Trump economic strategy wasn’t complicated: systematically repeal Mr. Obama’s ‘accomplishments’ -- the tax increases, the regulatory blitz on business, the welfare expansions, the war on American fossil fuels, and so on. As a result, the economy would pop like a cork pulled from a shaken champagne bottle.”

Trump didn’t need a “stimulus.” All he needed was to remove the shackles from America’s entrepreneurs and let nature take its course. He let entrepreneurs know that they could take risks without fear of being punished for their success. Winners and losers would be determined by the talents of the participants and not bureaucrats who wasted billions on “shovel-ready” jobs that didn’t exist. It was Trump who let the economic dogs out. (Read more.)

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