Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Wall Street Journal Opinion" channel.

  1. Can we all take a moment to savor that fantastic headline? 🎉 I think I'll print a screen grab and tape it to the wall, just to gaze at it. (Let somebody at YT headquarters plaster the whole C-suite!)
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  2. Numerous times over the decades I've heard that tariffs only hurt consumers. Likewise I heard many times that free trade hurts workers and domestic industry. Though the subject is complex, it seems both claims were largely true. Perhaps it's just as the economist Thomas Sowell said: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs."
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  3. Obviously he is preparing the ground for dealing with enemies like Russia, Iran and China by treating friends like Canada and Denmark aggressively. Obviously. ("If he treats friends like that, what's he going to do to us?") How anyone can fail to see that is beyond my capacity to understand.
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  4. And you didn't vote for any of the president-elect's other appointees or advisors either. Nor for his cabinet nominees. So?
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  5. No, imports will crash in Q2, reversing the Q1 effect, which was an incredible -5.0% drag on Q1 GDP. (Imports are subtracted from GDP.) For that reason a stellar GDP number is possible. Look for +3.0% minimum. It's H2 where things look fairly doubtful.
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  6. Didn't listen? GDP shrank simply due to a one-time 50% surge in imports.
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  7. Check those figures. That difference of $138bn is far bigger than official stats of either country shows. Something's off. Still, the per-capita ratios which you show do lean the right way. That's broadly how it is.
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  8. He might have an opinion on Canada, as he's a Canadian citizen. His mother is Canadian, also his first wife and Grimes, so most of his kids have a Canadian mother. He lived there, worked in three provinces, and went to university there. I almost wonder if he'll one day be its prime minister. (Immigrants are eligible.)
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  9. @ "They"? Who are "they"?
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  10. And there are sensible reasons for that. As the RCMP points out, Canadian production of fentanyl is small and most is consumed in Canada. What enters the US is mainly via what it calls "micro-exporters" who use Canada Post and the US Mail. Meanwhile, most fentanyl in Canada is believed to enter from the US.
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  11. Nearly as silly as the US & Canada uniting (this century, anyway) is the WSJ thinking all Canada could become one state. Surely the provinces would accede individually (after a likely merger of the four small Atlantic provinces) as the 51st-57th states. Their average population would be 6m, not far from the present 6.7m.
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  12. I'm not as dead-set against the EU as that, but I endorse the rest of these remarks and your other one on Trump. I would add that it's not only the free-ride aspect of underspending to which I object. Far more important is that it stretches the US too thin. It necessarily entails a weak alliance which can't do nearly enough to sustain global security. And the Authoritarian Axis is determined to challenge it in multiple regions, and to topple it. It aims to deliver the entire West a Suez Moment far more momentous than the actual one in 1956. The world would be profoundly, fundamentally different after that. It would be vastly worse. This could come any year now, and we're not even close to ready for it.
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  13. Almost no one gets Donald Trump on the America-Europe alliance. They're so stubbornly thick. Trump wants a strong alliance. But he accurately perceives that it's only possible with a strong Europe. The US can't defend all Europe, plus Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Israel, the Philippines, and all the other places which must be defended from the Authoritarian Axis. Simply impossible. And even if it could, the burden would be morally unjustified. American presidents' cajoling and pleading for decades has had little to no effect. Now Europe has at last begun to wake up, but it has still barely budged (with a few notable exceptions). And it's almost too late. Freedom and prosperity in all our countries could easily evaporate to a major degree over the course of less than one eventful decade. He is thus stuck with a sole stratagem: threatening to withhold protection if Europe doesn't get its security act together. I say good for him. He may succeed. (I think he will.) Because of deeply-rooted European recalcitrance, no other pathway appears to have any chance of working. So he (wisely) aims to pull it out down to those roots in order to save the Transatlantic alliance, not end it.
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  14. Bon voyage. Want help packing?
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  15.  @eanerickson8915  Enjoy criticizing the government on social media over there. Unless you have no desire to, being deeply in admiration of it, which I regard as likely. In which case, buh-bye.
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  16. Actually tariffs tend to reduce spending on imported goods. If sneakers go from $100 to $160, there won't be a 60% bigger market for them. More like a 60% smaller market. As a result, spending on domestic goods and services will increase, not fall.
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  17.  @SheffKhalid  There's a lot of difference between Elon Musk and a Russian oligarch.🤨
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  18. It's not about games, it's about an economic de-coupling from China and it comes with a price. It has to start now because the US certainly wouldn't want to do it when the price would be far higher; namely in wartime. Trump is plainly convinced that such a war is coming before long.
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  19. Thanks for the summary of media reports from some AI program.
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  20. BS
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  21. The expansion of the Russian empire is deeply dangerous to European security. You ask like the USSR didn't own East Germany for 41 years.🙄
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  22. There will be a price to end America's dependence on China for steel. There would be a much higher price not to. Eventually tariffs will be cut on imports from friendly nations.
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