Posts Tagged → pain
No pain, no gain
The old gym motto “No Pain, No Gain” applies to the much-needed economic shakeup the Trump Administration is bringing to the entire planet. If we Americans do not put up with a little temporary pain and necessary readjustment now, for our own good, then we will enjoy no huge gain later on. It takes work to then earn and enjoy resulting benefits.
President Trump’s promise to American citizens was that he would return us to glory days, a golden age, which we richly deserve. Trump is correct that America has been the world’s piggy bank for decades, due to the huge tariff and trade imbalance. We should add that being the world’s piggy bank is an unsustainable and unfair arrangement paid for by the long forgotten American taxpayers, who see very few benefits in return for handing over their hard-earned cash to every Tom, Dick and Harry the American bureaucracy could dream up.
As we have learned over the past eight weeks from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), trillions of American taxpayer dollars have been illegally mis-spent on millions of dubious schemes, ideas, organizations, and fantasies, many of which directly aimed at harming the United States. American taxpayers have been funding their own sworn enemies through agencies like USAID, DHS, EPA, HHS, and the Department of Education.
In other words, domestic enemies here in America were running the federal government, and using our tax money to damage and destroy America. This egregious situation is only in addition to the lopsided international tariff arrangement that has grown out of control since about 1920.
The tariff situation is egregious by itself. All kinds of countries we Americans think of as “allies” have had heavy tariffs placed on importing American food and manufactured products, including milk and dairy, steel, etc. Many of these countries’ governments paid what minimal tariffs that the USA had in turn on products being imported into America, in effect buoying up their own private businesses.
America did not do that for our own businesses, and in fact America has had very low to no tariffs on most imports. And now after essentially handing over our own wealth and manufacturing sectors to foreigners for decades, we are tired of being the economic piggy bank or punching bag or host body for all of these takey-takey people around the world. It is hard to understand why Americans, particularly working and taxpaying Americans, support this large imbalance and wealth transfer from America to the world.
And yet, as we see, plenty of working Americans are arguing against tariff parity, and are setting fire to Tesla cars and dealerships as a form of protest against DOGE finding and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money. Do you have to be mentally ill to belong to that one political party? Do you have to be self destructive to be a voting member of that one political party?
Do you have to hate America, Americans, the rule of law, and everything great about America to belong to that one political party?
Why would any normal American belong to that one political party?
Just as DOGE is causing Americans to take a long hard look at federal government mismanagement, Trump’s tariff parity is going to cause a shake-up in our international trade relationships, no doubt. It is going to cause some re-arrangements of pricing and products we are used to having easily available to us. For example, cheap Chinese crap on Amazon is probably not going to be as cheap any longer. And yesterday the Princess of Patience and I went to look at a new car for her, and we see how the new tariff parity might effect car prices. We learned that those foreign-brand vehicles already ordered and in the pipeline are not subject to tariffs (our family is positively prejudicial in favor of Toyota vehicles).
Of course, foreign brand vehicles made here in America are not subject to tariffs, either, and many Toyota cars and trucks are made in America.
Long and short of this subject is give these policy changes time to work. Already America is seeing immediate positive responses from many foreign trading partners, who are lowering their own tariffs because they know that their own industries cannot afford to absorb Trump’s tariffs. They will lose their export markets if they lose American buyers. So just be patient, remember that this is all being done for your own good and your own bank account, and know that it will work out well.
Putting up with these changes is like making deposits into your bank account. You might feel like you are missing opportunities to party with your money in the short term, but in the longer term you will be very happy.
Lotta covid19 pain? Better be lotta gain
For all the pain we are all experiencing from the Chinese covid19 flu “lockdowns,” shutdowns, economic activity coming to a screeching halt, businesses laying off people, orders drying up etc., there had damned well better be a lot of gain when all is said and done.
Meaning, all our sacrifice and loss and crushed civil rights should damned well have happened for a good reason. A lot of people should have lived who were going to die or get very sick. etc.
When the most mild mannered attorney friend texts me out of the blue yesterday “Are you worried about our civil rights?” I knew that the felt pain was cutting deep.
Our text conversation last night was brief, but it covered all the territory a person might expect, given its premise. My friend reports that many of his other friends are starting to get pretty fussy about this government-imposed suspension of civil liberties. He wrote “It is one thing to cooperate and volunteer to move less in public, but to be told we must stay in our homes…?”
This guy who wrote these texts to to me is a solid religious person, a respected family man, a well regarded attorney, pretty staid and non-excitable, perhaps even at times a boring personality (hope he is not reading this). It would take a lot to get him to write something like this civil rights text. And yet by now it is doubtful we can find any American who has not also felt a lot of pain from this covid19 China Flu business, so his texts to me are probably indicative of a lot of other Americans’ restlessness. A chafing at the bit. A natural inborn resistance to being told what to do, as opposed to being asked to volunteer as free people.
Really at the center of all this lockdown/shutdown/ Big Coercive Government vs Smaller and Smaller Citizen are two factors: 1) The philosophy of governance held by the various mayors, governors, and federal disease experts, and 2) a sense of duty to nation and to one another held by Americans.
A natural tension always exists in our republic, between effective government decision making on the one hand, and citizens’ rights on the other hand. Our founding documents (Constitution, Bill of Rights) are all about this tension, and how to strike a balance between the trade-offs of having an effective government and also having a free citizenry. No doubt that Communist China has a really effective government, but on the other hand its citizens have zero freedom. Americans want maximum freedom, so we naturally reject the kind of government it takes to be really effective.
However, many if not almost all of the Washington, DC, careerists are inured to the notion of a strong federal government. An overpoweringly strong and coercive government, need be. And why would they not have this mindset? It makes them maximally relevant and powerful. So enter Washington bureaucrats Fauci and Birx, and their approach to the Wuhan China covid19 flu has been to at first pooh pooh it, and then when it becomes a big issue, to take the opposite tack – everyone lock yourself in your home and do not come out until we experts tell you to.
Back in January and February, Fauci was quoted many times pooh poohing and disavowing the China covid19 flu. Can’t happen, won’t happen, not a big deal. Oops, now it is happening – everyone run and hide, to hell with the economy.
Add to this message coming out of Washington bureaucrats the naturally authoritarian nature of many elected officials around America, and we get some pretty authoritarian abuses of power. In Malibu California the other day, a guy simply paddle boarding out in the surf was actually cut off by two police boats and then arrested for not self-social-distancing. While he was literally all alone out on the water, near no one, hurting no one, putting at risk no one. And of course the ACLU is nowhere to be found for him, because the ACLU is not about civil rights, it is about destroying America.
Here in Pennsylvania, our governor, the mild mannered and generally friendly Tom Wolf, has issued a pretty wild declaration, a dictatorial ultimatum, that has suspended our civil rights and shut down most businesses and the families who depend on them. While many of us have a strong sense of duty to our fellow humans, and we are happy to make personal sacrifices in order to protect our neighbors and our communities, at a certain point we begin to chafe under the dictatorial approach to applying law.
A lot of pain is being felt across America, and certainly here in Pennsylvania. Many of the businesses I regularly interact with are in increasingly bad shape. Much of this has to do with their diminished cash flow and uncertain banking situation. So if the banks are eventually made whole, then the rest of these businesses will be made whole, and the whole economy will come roaring back to where it was or stronger. In the mean time we all have families to feed and bills to pay, and the pain of Wolf’s lockdown is becoming intense.
Is this pain worth it, is it justified, people are asking.
Everyone I know has a real commitment to doing the right thing, because it is the right thing to do. They do not need to be told what to do, just asked. But now the pressure and resentment to being told what to do, at great personal cost, without a lot of evident gain, is beginning to build up. This would naturally be expected. The sacrifices we are all making seem to be much greater than would normally, reasonably be expected. We cannot really see the fruits of our sacrifices.
Americans die every day from all sorts of maladies and accidents. A regular flu season sees about 32,000 Americans die nationally, from just the regular old flu. We take that number of deaths as a matter of fact, a cost of being alive. And yet we are not seeing that same result from this covid19 coronavirus thing. Not even close. In fact, so far, just the opposite.
If it turns out that Wuhan China covid19 Chinese Flu actually results in very few deaths, and yet the entire nation’s economy was thrown out the window for little or no gain in health, then there is going to be hell to pay.
Red oak and rain: Taking a strong economy for now while America fights for an even better future
Our present tariff battle with communist China has some personal pain associated with it, but I and everyone in business I deal with say we are ready and willing to put up with it for the long term betterment of America.
“I am just sitting here watching the rain come down,” says ‘D’, a young forester I have worked with for almost twenty years.
A super hard worker, risk taker, and fourth generation forester\logger (he is the first in his family to have a college degree, and in fact he has a Masters in Forestry), ‘D’ has a young family to feed and a great deal of investment in time, equipment, and standing timber that he cannot do anything with, or earn money with, so long as it rains.
With incessant rain like we had throughout 2018 and now well into 2019, most forestry operations stop. Marking timber on steep mountain sides, building roads into timber, cutting, skidding, and hauling timber just is not safe or environmentally possible in rain. Then, as a result, the sawmills slow down. They cannot get the trees they need to make the hardwood lumber products so much of America and the world require for flooring, cabinetry, moulding, doors, tables, furniture, etc.
But the rain is only part of the pressure on the timber industry.
Almost half of Pennsylvania’s hardwood timber economy is comprised of the red oak tree, which grows a beautiful wood used around the world. Until the tariff spat began last year, China was the primary destination for almost all of Pennsylvania’s red oak. China took our exported red oak logs and manufactured all kinds of wood products that they then sold back to American companies. When the tariffs started to bite in 2018, demand for red oak logs began to slow, because Chinese companies could not afford to compete on that new level playing field. Their own tariffs on manufactured American goods had protected them from competition, and so with tariffs on their products, their own manufacturing slowed down, and their decreased need for raw materials followed. A year later, the demand for red oak lumber has nearly died. Spectacular high quality red oak trees, that six months ago were highly sought after in a fiercely competitive free market, are now being turned into railroad ties and pallet wood (some wood workers specialize in making beautiful furniture from homely oak pallets; well, guys, get ready for a whole lot of very nice red oak pallets to become available).
Standing red oak trees have lost over half their value since this time last year, and as a result, roughly a third of Pennsylvania’s powerful hardwood lumber industry is at a stand-still, with landowners, foresters, loggers, and sawmills trying to figure out how to make up that lost productive time, and lost revenue, and to find another tree species to take the place of the red oak.
Back to the rain… the forest products industry can weather this storm, as well as the tariff tiff with China.
“It’s for the best, for a better America, a better economic future for all of us” says Mike, a heavy equipment operator from Renovo, Pennsylvania, to me this morning, as he finally found time to discuss a timber project we have together, and the China tariff effects on it.
Mike, too, is stalled out temporarily by the non-stop rains, and he is also bitten by the temporarily slow red oak market.
“It hurts, but we needed to do these tariffs,” says Mike.
“It’s sacrifice and pain now, so that America will have an even better economy in the future,” says ‘D’.
I feel the same way. Pain and sacrifice, risk taking and hard work, all for a better future for us and our children. We will all be creative and find ways to make a living; after all, overall the economy is very strong.
Carry on, Mister President. We understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. The tariffs hurt, but we support you. It is about damned time that someone in Washington, DC, gave a crap about our country and we people who labor out of sight in flyover country.
Logger “Pete” takes a breakfast break on his log landing. A tough, super hard working little Irishman from central Pennsylvania, it’s Americans like Pete who keep our economy going from the ground up
Accepting the obvious, medical cannabis
Marijuana has a stigma earned many times over. Counter- culture anarchists tuned out with it, and lovers of American culture took note.
But here’s the obvious elephant standing in the room: Marijuana has medicinal virtues separate from its use as a recreational drug. If America routinely uses dangerous and addicting opiates for pain relief, why on earth would we not embrace using something equally as effective, maybe more so, and yet so much safer?
Medical cannabis, or medical marijuana as it is being called, can be tailor-made to treat pain, but not stoner needs. That’s neat. And it is time to embrace this technical advance, or traditional step back, as it were. Thank you, Governor Corbett, for recognizing this need. Many medical patients await effective pain mitigation, and this is it, apparently.
Side note: Like all public policy subjects, this one is also filled with ancillary issues. For example, medical-only hemp (sorry, no buzz for the tokers, no matter how much you huff n’ puff) can be easily grown nearly anywhere in America, thereby displacing medical/ drug poppy cultivation in lovely places like, say, Afghanistan. Displacing poppy growth is a good thing. Not supporting Afghanistan is a good thing. Supporting American agriculture is a good thing.
Yes, drugs are bad. Yes, recreational marijuana is a drug. No, promoting medical cannabis is not the same thing. It is a fact whose time has come. Let’s help people.