We haven’t had a PopeWatch Open Thread in a while. The usual Open Thread rules apply: be concise, be charitable and, above all, be amusing!
PopeWatch: Open Thread
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
We, in Australia, are not too thrilled about Trumps tariffs. Our PM will retaliate with 10%. Pffft.
We are currently in Federal election campaign mode and it’s, surprisingly, a bipartisan fear of the Trump tariffs. This is not good for our economy or our cost of living.
I understand why he is doing it, but boy has he gone full throttle…
Trump is enamored of tariffs. I do not share his enthusiasm except as a means of getting to no tariffs at all with the trading partners of the US which I think is the way this works out. China is in a different category.
Yes! China is in a different category. China should be tariffed up to its eyeballs. Every country needs to impose tariffs on China. Trump is the only one with the guts because the US has a powerful economy (and the biggest army in the world). Australia does not have power.
Supposedly the local police in Nashville have now provided a report on Audrey Hale and it only took them two years to complete it. Per these people, she had an antheap of writings in various formats and began pondering a mass shooting in 2017; she selected the elementary school in question because she thought there would be no one to overpower her and take her alive.
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The people she thought of killing included her father and her psychiatrist. This creature had been under the supervision of members of the mental health trade for 22 years. We can be assured that none of these people will be put under oath in front of a commission of inquiry or sanctioned in any way for this disaster.
Regarding tariffs, President Trump’s initiative was actually quite generous vis-a-vis the rest of the world. In many cases, other countries will be charged a tariff rate that is about half of what they charge us. During his formal announcement, President Trump held up the table attached to this comment.
Tariffs are a very blunt instrument & in the long term cause economic harm, so I expect we will see some adjustments over the following months as the Trump administration see things coming back to where they want them.
In the case of New Zealand, we adjusted our economy back in the 1980’s & removed ALL tariffs, & subsides to our farmers & manufacturers – it caused a lot of pain to many, but within a couple of years the economy adjusted & we became a much wealthier & efficient country. In addition, started negotiating FTA’s with other countries.
It is baffling to us how Trump has stated that NZ imposes 20% tariff on US imports. We have very few tariffs on any country, & the maximum tariff is 10%, but the maximum tariff imposed on the US by NZ is 5% on very few items – most imports from the US are tariff free. We import fruit from California, motor vehicles & trucks, farm machinery etc, steel & aluminium etc.& the US is our biggest market for beef & wine exports.
Obviously someone got something wrong, but we’ll see how things progress.
To Don Becket’s point, I would like to see an unbiased accuracy check of the figures on tariffs from other countries that the Whitehouse has provided.
Agree Don – I don’t think that chart is entirely accurate. In the case of Australia, the US gets a quarter of its Beef imports from Australia because of the impact drought has had on American Beef Farmers. Australia’s beef industry might turn around and start dumping exports into China to compensate. I think as a result, US consumers will be worse off and be paying more for Beef. Trump is self-sabotaging. He doesn’t need to be going so strong to make a point. I’m not sure if this has been thought through by the Trump administration. Time will tell.
[…] Analysis, Punditry, and News:PopeWatch: Open Thread – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at the American CatholicIt’s Here! The 2025 Color of the Year […]
Trump and his team have been planning for the past four years. I seriously doubt that anything they are doing has not been thought through. Perhaps their conclusions were mistaken in some respects. This is to be expected as none of us is perfect. We shall see, as all have noted.
But when your time horizon is short for trying to make visible progress in correcting the economic mistakes of the past fifty years or so, you use blunt instruments if they are at hand. Trump has been clear that he seeks to restore the manufacturing base this country intentionally handed over to China and other countries, causing serious economic stagnation to working-class America. He and his team believe that the way to do that, and ideally to enter someday into a no-tariff trade regime with all our trading partners, is to start by using tariffs to bring our absurdly high trade deficits down to more manageable sizes, and most importantly, to bring manufacturing back into the US. They believe, not without cause IMO, that the short term harm to US consumers, to the extent it exists and is not simply more Globalist propaganda, will be much less than what we have suffered for decades thanks to the willful destruction of domestic manufacturing and the loss of key strategic supply chains to China.
To supplement my previous comment, I offer this post from Catherine Salgado yesterday on PJ Media.
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/04/03/economist-trump-isnt-starting-a-trade-war-hes-doing-the-opposite-n4938556
More on the tariff topic. I will stop now. 😁
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/04/03/heres-why-trump-will-win-the-tariff-standoff-n4938553
Trump’s brain trust:
-nominated Matt Gaetz
-released all probationary federal workers then had to call them back
-included some serious criminals in the 1/6 blanket pardon
-seemingly forgot about immigration
-promised trillions in tariff revenue while also proposing to drop all tariffs if other countries play fair
These are people who haven’t planned ahead. As for the claimed tariff levels of other countries, they’re including things like VAT’s.
This is the best article I came across that explains in child’s language, why Trumps tariffs chart figures are flawed and don’t match up to economic reality. As of February 2025, the US had a trade surplus of $-1,373.5million dollars (as in Australia imports more US goods than the US buys off Australia), and yet he still put a 10% retaliatory tariff on Australian goods. But honestly, read the below article. I hope he fires his economic advisors.
https://amp.abc.net.au/article/105136808