OK, so work with me here [1].

I’m not especially a fan of tariffs. Some of the arguments against them aren’t much better, though. If they go through, they are taxes, yes indeed. And if they don’t – if they are leverage, used to successfully change trade policy, or in some cases safeguard an industry we *don’t* need getting offshored [2], then not so much.

But this goes way beyond tariffs, so again, bear with me [1].

Our economy has extremely healthy fundamentals – and some incredibly nasty endemic problems:

• – National debt that will crush the economy if we don’t do something useful
• – inflation that was down from four years ago, but still way higher than it should be, especially for working-class Americans (because the inflation rate for food, fuel and housing was and remains *way* higher than the economy at large)
• – A stock market that was very overvalued at the beginning of the year (with profit to earnings ratios almost double the rate of a healthy market), with a major bubble caused by federal spending and the AI bubble.
• – A Federal Reserve whose only answer is cutting rates (which will increase inflation, given all the loose money that’s already out there) or hiking them (strangling economic growth).
• – Four years of uncontrolled immigration, which depressed working-class wages (and artificially kept some prices down while raising other costs, economic and social).
• – A Congress that *can* and *should* fix all these problems, and *could*, at least to start by means-testing Social Security and Medicare, except that they have to win popularity contests every two years, and the noise machines of both sides have made being *honest* about the impending entitlement time bomb political suicide)
• Oh, yeah – Europe is closer to general war than it’s been in 85 years, and experts are predicting China will, not may, either invade or strangle Taiwan before the end of the decade. ]

So – what to do?

Let me take you back.

It’s 1982. I was still a Democrat. Probably kind of an obnoxious one, come to think of it.
And the economy had been a basket case for much of my childhood, and all my teenage years and adulthood to that point. The Oil Embargo led to the mid-seventies recession, which led to Stagflation, which led to the Malaise, and of course the Federal Government was spending money like crazy on the “war on poverty”, so inflation crushed economic activity; inflation peaked at over 12% when I was in high school.

President Reagan’s Fed chief, Paul Volcker, cranked the federal funds rate to *20%*. Mobbed up loan sharks said “dial it back, bub”. It SLAMMED inflation to the mat – but unemployement *soared* to 10.8% [3]. It triggered a VERY sharp recession in 1982 – one that’s still “the big one” to a lot of us.

The Democrat majority in Congress grew by 26 seats to a majority of *over 100 seats*. IF there’s been a Presidential election in 1982, Reagan would have lost by a landslide.

But here’s the thing about recessions – if the fundamentals of the economy are healthy, then the sharper the downturn, the sharper the recovery, if you let it [4]. In a year, the economy was gaining almost 500,000 jobs *a month* (and the population was 34 the size it is today), and the longest peacetime boom in history, almost 25 years, kicked off.

And Reagan rode that economy to the biggest landslide in history. And I made my first Republican vote, for Reagan (and my last Democrat one – for my Mom).

So – what about last week’s orgy of tariffs?

Maybe it just means Trump is stupid. Could be [5].

Or maybe the whole thing is:

1.  A sharp kick in the market’s teeth, to get those valuations down to size, AND…
2. … burn off some of that excess capital that Biden (and yes, Trump in 2020) pumped into the economy with no growth to eat it up, AND…
3.  Throw a stun granade into the international trade market to exert leverage on other countries to cut the tariffs that *are* there [6] AND…  Start creating demand for American blue-collar labor, to replace all the cheap foreign labor that the cartels aren’t walking across the border, AND…
4.  To force China into a recession that they can just not afford (if their exports are strangled, they are screwed blue), which might have the salutary effect of helping prevent WORLD WAR F**KING THREE in the Taiwan Straits, AND…
5. Unleash the Growth Fairy, which – let me put this as gently as I can – IS THE ONLY WAY THIS COUNTRY’S ECONOMY ISN’T GOING TO COLLAPSE in the next decade or so. Literally, those are the two choices – out of control growth, or collapse. There is no option C. Taxing billionaires don’t do it. Confiscating every dollar of wealth over a Billion, or a million, won’t do it. ONLY the greatest explosion of growth the world has ever seen will do it.

It’s not just me thinking this: my (Facebook) friend Glenn Reynolds wrote this [7]…

And HIS friend and my one-time rhetorical fencing partner Steven Green had this to say:

Decide for yourself. [1].

[1] Or don’t. I don’t care. But if you disagree, shoot for intelligent disagreement, OK? I’m kind of tired of the other kind.
[2] Germany is kind of starting to regret outsourcing the production of its army’s tanks to Greece, for one example.
[3] Yep, Millennials, almost a point worse than 2008. You didn’t survive the worst of all possible times.
[4] Which is why the 2008 recession, and the Great Depression for that matter, dragged on so long – government “recovery” efforts prolonged the economic trouble that caused the whole thing in the first place.
[5] We’ll see, one way or the other. I’ve been wrong about Trump before, and so have you. Anyway, hear me out [1].
[6] Both sides are wrong about trade, by the way; Trump’s largely wrong about the trade deficit (it’s mostly from us buying cheap stuff from poor countries, and the middle class has grown in the past 40 years) and his opponents are wrong about foreign countries’ policies (they DO hamper lots of American exports in the “free market”). We can discuss it [1].
[7] I eschew “appeal to authority” and other logical fallacies, and I hope you do too [1], but let’s be honest; he’s smarter than me, and probably smarter than you, too.

If it seems like just yesterday the national media was swooning over Saint Paul’s city council – the first all-female city council in the US, we were told – it’s because it practically was just yesterday that the entire establishment was swooning over them.  

They’re women, donchaknow.  

And I’m not gonna say I predicted this, but you know I kinda predicted this:

The president was, as luck would have it, my “representative”, Mitra Jalali – a woman whose “flexibility” on issues and identity makes Tim Walz look all boring and consistent; she left the council in January to focus on her health or something. 

Since then, the council has deadlocked on everything from a temporary replacement for Jalali, to space for the city’s new Sudanese-style trash collection service to stage its trucks (forcing Mayor Carter to declare an emergency and, speaking of emergemcies, forcing Mayor Carter to appear like a relative moderate and grownup.

Or perhaps the one person in the transaction who shows up for work: the councilwomens’ attendance is a little dismal:

That’s may actually be worse than the DFL in the House of Representatives. 

UPDATE: Mayor Carter has appointed Jalali’s legislative aide to serve out the term.  I don’t think this is over. 

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is pondering the tragedy that is his backyard garden when Avery LIBRELLE, riding a recumbent bike, rides up the alley, unbeknownst to BERG.

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Ohhhhhh fuuuuun seeing you Avery…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Robert F Kennedy is making Americans sick. There’s a huge measles outbreak.

BERG:  Huh.  And that’s RFK’s fault?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely.  He’s anti-Vaxx.

BERG: Whereas an enlightened country like, say, Canada won’t have any trouble with that kind of thing.

LIBRELLE:  Of course not. They’re enlightened and progressive!

BERG:  Huh.

LIBRELLE: Wait – is this another one of those things where you…

(BERG opens a link on his iPad):

Surely they must do better than the United States at controlling communicable diseases, right?

Yeah, well, not so much. Quite the opposite, actually.

While the numbers are inherently unreliable to some extent, we can get a rough estimate of the relative risk of somebody getting Measles here vs in Canada. Both have advanced healthcare systems that collect a lot of data, and both have active media environments that love to focus on scary stuff like spreading diseases.

Want to know the relative risk? Americans contract Measles at a rate of 1.1 per million more or less, while Canadians have a rate of 12.2 per million.

Canadians are more than 11 times more likely to get the disease than people in the United States. And they don’t have any mean, nasty conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr. to spread conspiracy theories. The English, a similar society to both Canada and the United States, has a rate 5 1/2 times the US. France and Germany have rates similar to ours, if a tiny bit higher at the moment.

LIBRELLE:  Dammit! Why do you always do that?

BERG:  (Not very interested) Do what?

LIBRELLE:  Shoot down everything I say, and make me look like some kind of idiot?

BERG:  It’s a blessing and a curse.

And SCENE

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I notice a common theme running through Berg’s Third Law (disasters) and Mother Jones Corollary to the Tenth Law (vicious lies) and 18th Law of Media Latency (48 hour rule): the media rushes to lie about Conservatives, so thoughtful readers will wait for the dust to settle an the truth to be revealed.

I wonder if a similar principle should apply to President Trump?

He proposes a course of action, the media loses its mind, Democrats and RINOs panic, the feared apocalypse does not occur. It happens over and over. He wants fair trade with Canada; Canada threatens to punish every American; tariffs are proposed; media, Democrats and RINOs panic; Canada backs down. If everybody had waited a week or two before setting their hair on fire, it all would have blown over.

Generally takes longer than 48 hours so how about a two week rule?

Joe Doakes

The committee is taking it under advisement. 

One of the truisms of playing in a bar band (as I do) is that bar bands aren’t musicians.  They are beer salesmen. 

And if you’re playing an American Legion in Anoka, and you bust out some Parliament or Sonic Youth, or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, you’ll make a few hipsters and fanboys happy – and send the rest of the crowd to the exits, sooner or later,.  Mostly sooner.   The American Legion in Anoka (or wherever( wants its Creedence Clearwater and Tom Petty and Bad Company and a little classic country probably woudn’t hurt.  

We’ll come back to that. 

The big splash in local media this past week is KQRS – the classic rock station that used to have literally the highest ratings in the country, the station that was so powerful it could beat back Howard Stern at (or near) his peak – is adjusting its format. 

Along with a playlist more heavily steeped in ’90s alternative rock — including a promised bump in Minnesota acts such as Soul Asylum and the Replacements — KQ’s corporate operators Cumulus Media announced the addition of new on-air personalities who will be familiar to listeners of other Twin Cities stations.

Longtime 89.3 the Current midday jockey Jade Tittle and former Cities 97 host and music director Paul Fletcher have joined the remade KQRS staff, a clear attempt by Cumulus to pick up some of those competitors’ audiences.

The classic rock crowd is angry.  The 90s alt rock crowd is chanting “it’s about time”.

Me?  I’m surprised it took this long.  

Here’s why.  

Like the (not remotely hypothetical) bar band in my example at the top, radio isn’t about music (or sports, or even conservative talk.  Radio is a delivery system for advertising.  Nothing more. 

Advertising focuses on people who have money – specifically, money to spend on an advertiser’s products.  A station’s “format”, whether talk or sports or some genre of music, is pretty tightly associated with a demographic group that is in some way desirable to advertisers, and the products they sell.  Whether pitching nightclubs to 20-somethings (KDWB in the ’90s) or lifestyle products to women from 25-40 (KS95) to stuff for harried moms (ChickTalk 107) to mental red meat for men 35+ (conservative talk), you can tell who the station is trying to reach by the products they’re trying to sell.  

And it gets to them via the emotions. 

One of the little secrets radio programmers know is that people form deep, lifelong, intense emotional bonds with the music that they were exposed to between, roughly, puberty and the time the brain stops growing – usually the mid-to-late 20s.   Doesn’t matter what the genre – the music of that part that you associate with that part of life when so much else about peoples personalities get formed, and they start noticing and getting noticed by the opposite sex, has an intense emotional connection for them.  More or less intense, maybe, but still, it’s a a powerful hook into a person’s psyche. 

“Classic rock“ is music of the baby boom.   For the past fifty years, they’ve been the biggest, wealthiest demographic surge in history.  And “classic rock” is the music of the people who were born between 1945 and sometime in the early ’60s.  Who were entering puberty between the late ’60s and the mid-seventies.  And whose brains became more or less fully formed between 1970 and 1980 or so.  

And for most of the past 45 years or so, KQRS has prospered by cracking the emotional response of one of the biggest, wealthiest demographic groups in the area – white men (remember – mens and womens brains are different!) whose brains started forming in the mid-sixties, and pretty much switched to emotional, and thus musical, cruise control sometime during the George HW Bush administration.  

The baby boom starts turning 80 this year. The younger ones start retiring. They don’t have the money or the clout anymore. Advertisers are moving on.  Which is the same reason the last of the Big Band and Beautiful Music stations (KLBB, WLTE, KMFY) left the air 30+ years ago, and why KOOL108 switched from Elvis and Carl Perkins to, well, the stuff KQRS was playing until two weeks ago; because their audiences aged out of the prime advertising years. 

It’s not about the music. It’s about business.  You gotta sell the beer. 

It only took ten years, and the advent of ubiquitous AI, but my book “Trulbert:  A Comic Novella About The End Of The World As We Know It” is finally out on audio!

When “Satanists” – actually a sophomoric cheetoh-dusty club of militant atheists – erected a “Satanic” holiday display in the Capitol rotunda, Christians angrily dissented, and occasionally fulminated – but let the “Satanists” enjoy their free speech and one of their few trips outside their parents’ basements. 

When an Easter display got excluded from the Capitol, Christians – including former Senator Dan Hall – took it outdoors:

You didn’t need to be a playwrite to foreshadow this one:

No cigar for guessing this one:

Norby allegedly has an arrest record involving “Antifa-Like” activities in 2020. 

Of course, the real precedent is that Minnesota leftists feel entitled to destroy speech they disagree with.  

And this being John Choi’s Ramsey County, I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and predict Norby gets “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the separation of church and state, using precedent.  

Entire Twin Cities media and left (ptr) last week:  “A graduate student, one of America’s best and brightest, was snatched away in the middle of the night by ICE for exercising free speech!  They could come come for any of us, citizen or not!”

Waiting period specified in statute passes:

Not sure it ever fails. 

Which is why we call ’em “laws”.