RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/20/newsom-s-answer-to-californias-business-exodus-is-a-free-burner-phone/

Whenever someone gets around to cataloging the most lame-brained political idea, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to pass out free burner phones to CEOs in the state will forever top the list.

Newsom has so far sent roughly 100 cellphones – with his direct line programmed in – to CEOs with a message that “if you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.”

“This was the governor’s idea to connect more directly with business leaders in the state,” spokesperson Izzy Gardon said.

More accurately, it’s Newsom’s attempt to keep still more corporations from joining the well over 350 companies who’ve left the state since 2018, and the million-plus Californians who followed them out the door.

Well, we looked into it, and we couldn’t find a single corporate executive – or individual – who said they would have stayed put if only they had a Newsom burner phone.

Instead, they said things like “taxes are too high,” or “regulations are too stringent,” or “the cost-of-living is punishing,” or “the schools suck,” or “I’m tired of being robbed.” The state’s criminal wildfire negligence hasn’t helped either.

When Stanford University’s Hoover Institution looked into why so many companies were leaving the state, they found that “several economic factors that have led to these departures by raising business costs, reducing productivity, and reducing profitability, including tax policies, regulatory policies, labor costs, litigation costs, energy and utility costs, and concerns about a declining quality of life within the state.”

Indeed, by almost any ranking of business friendliness, California is at or near the bottom of the list.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/18/trump-needs-to-cut-the-51st-state-crap/

It started as a joke, or so it seemed. Canada should become the 51st state, said US president Donald Trump to then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in late November. Trudeau laughed nervously, according to the Fox News report of the meeting. Two weeks later, Trump took to Truth Social to mock Trudeau as the ‘governor’ of the ‘Great State of Canada’.

Trudeau and his fellow Canadians are not laughing any more. And for good reasons. What began as a seemingly offhand quip, an idea so crazy it had to be a joke, has now caused a serious rift between the two countries.

Since Trump initiated his on-again, off-again tariffs in February, he has been constantly repeating his ‘51st state’ jibe, presenting it as a solution to his self-created trade war with Canada. This flared up again last week, when Ontario premier Doug Ford announced a 25 per cent export charge on electricity to the US. Trump responded by doubling his planned tariffs on Canadian exports of steel and aluminium to 50 per cent. Both sides then backed down.

Trump has continued to claim that Canada’s tariff problems would disappear if it became a US state. ‘As a state, it would be one of the great states’, he said. In what he must have thought was a kind gesture, Trump then added that Canada could retain its national anthem if it joined the US.

Imposing tariffs on Canadian goods is bad enough, but Trump’s demeaning ‘51st state’ talk only adds insult to injury. He has angered the Canadian people, united their political parties in patriotic opposition to him and further alienated America’s Western allies. Indeed, last week’s G7 meeting of foreign ministers was overshadowed by the question of how to respond to Trump’s threats to annex the meeting’s host, Canada.

After weeks of repeating his 51st-state ‘solution’, we must call it what it is – imperialistic bullying. Trump is behaving like a mafia boss, making an offer Canada can’t refuse: ‘Nice little country you have there – it would be a shame if someone crushed its economy.’ Trump is offering ‘protection’ to Canada – protection from the threat he created.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/artificial-intelligence-china-deepseek-nvidia-broadcom-openai

How secure is America’s lead in artificial intelligence? It wasn’t long ago that the conventional wisdom put China years behind the curve. This was partly because the United States introduced export controls in 2022 and 2023 that notionally embargoed Chinese companies from the most advanced AI chips.

Today, however, most experts I speak with believe China trails the U.S. on AI by at most six to nine months—if at all. Take the sudden rise of China’s DeepSeek, the impressive AI startup that began as a hedge-fund CEO’s side project. DeepSeek shocked the markets earlier this year by releasing R1, a “reasoning model” that replicated top AI firm OpenAI’s breakthrough o1 model only a month after the latter’s unveiling, and seemingly at a fraction of the cost

OpenAI’s latest models still top the leaderboards, but only because they have access to vastly more computing resources. What DeepSeek nonetheless demonstrated is just how few technical barriers stand in the way of competing at the AI frontier. As DeepSeek’s CEO Liang Wenfeng put it in an interview last year, “money has never been the problem for us; bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”

In practice, though, U.S. chip export controls have been incredibly leaky. Chinese buyers have circumvented the controls on a mass scale by routing chips through third parties in nearby regions, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. In other words, East Asian allies and U.S. firms are enabling the transmission of chips to a geopolitical adversary. America’s economic and military advantage depends on government stepping up to stop the flow.

The evidence for mass export-control evasion was always right under our nose. When the chip controls were first introduced in 2022, Nvidia responded by releasing a new, slightly inferior chip tailor-made for China—the H800—within weeks

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-america-first-tariffs/

Tariffs have figured prominently in the news since President Trump returned to the White House. He says that ‘tariff’ is one of his favorite words and lauds the 25th U.S. president, William McKinley, for using tariffs to achieve his goal of protecting the American economy. President Trump has brandished the specter of tariffs as leverage in advancing his own economic and national security objectives. They include enhancing cross-border security with Canada and Mexico, reshoring manufacturing back to the United States, reducing trade deficits with U.S.’s trading partners through fairer trade agreements, protecting American workers’ jobs, and safeguarding America’s national security. But tariffs have become a rapidly moving, economically volatile issue with potentially unintended consequences and unpredictable outcomes. Tariffs can backfire badly and hurt American consumers and manufacturers if they are not carefully calibrated to ensure that their benefits clearly outweigh their costs.

On the other hand, if tariffs are used with precision against the right targets at the right time and their purpose is clearly communicated, tariffs can play a valuable role in protecting America’s economy and national security. Just the mere threat of tariffs provides great leverage in overcoming the resistance of other countries to key U.S. demands.

President Trump has scored early successes with his tariff policies. Colombia backed down and reversed its initial refusal to take back its citizens deported from the United States after the president threatened to impose steep tariffs. President Trump also threatened Canada and Mexico with 25 percent tariffs on their exports to the U.S. if they did not show considerably more progress in securing their borders with the U.S. and stopping the cross-border flow of fentanyl. The two countries immediately began to step up their efforts to do just that, in return for which President Trump agreed to delay the imposition of these tariffs for now except on aluminum and steel.

President Trump has other tariff policy objectives besides border security. Promoting fair trade between the U.S. and its trading partners is a key objective.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/can-we-sacrifice-for-the-common-good/\

Recently the portents of a weakening economy have continued. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “tech stocks and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply again on Monday,” and “Friday’s jobs report . . . showed employers added 151,000 jobs last month . . . half as many as in November and December.” We’re hearing more and more gloomy talk of a looming recession.

Many commentators, the Journal continued, are blaming “Mr. Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs” –– the latest on Canadian aluminum and steel––that “are weighing on business sentiment.” Trump’s measured admission that tariffs may cause “a little disturbance” and require a “period of transition” was not enough for many economists who see the more serious negative effects of raising tariffs as more important than the improvements that others say could follow correcting our negative balance-of-trade with China, Canada, and other countries.

Canada’s surplus, for example, alone was $64.26 billion in 2023. Our total trade deficit is $1trillion. Surely, eliminating such imbalances would be good for our fisc––especially those of our rich Nato partners, who until very recently have defied the 2014 obligation to spend a meager 2% of GDP on their militaries, while freeloading for decades on our military for their defense. And don’t forget Mexico’s $170 billion, and as Victor Hanson reminds us, “Mexico currently siphons off $63 billion in remittances from the U.S. economy, most of it from illegal aliens.”

So, which “experts” should we heed? First, we must acknowledge the problem with the dueling, credentialed economists who counsel government officials and inform us citizens––economics is not a science properly understood. Any discipline that involves individual, unique human beings–– with their unpredictable spontaneity, their “passions and interests,” and their power to serve both no matter how irrational, destructive, and selfish––cannot be the subject of a pure science.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/19/public-thinks-that-25-or-more-of-all-federal-spending-is-wasted-ii-tipp-poll/

Americans have shown a high-degree of support for the cuts being made to the federal bureaucracy and spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Why? A majority across the country believe the government wastes vast amounts of their tax money, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

For the March online national I&I/TIPP Poll, voters were asked the following question: “What percentage of your tax dollars do you believe is wasted by the federal government?” The possible responses included: “Less than 10%,” “10%-25%,” “26%-50%,” “51%-75%,” “More than 75%,” and “Not sure.”

It’s fair to say that Americans see a lot of their money being wasted. Among the 1,434 people who took the poll from Feb. 26-28, 52% responded that they felt more than 25% of their tax money was being wasted, with the breakdown showing 24% responding 26%-50%, 14% at 51%-75%, and another 14% guessing 76% or more.

By comparison, just 19% answered 10%-25% and only 10% agreed it was less than 10% waste. Meanwhile, “Not sure” notched 19% of the responses. (The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points).