Edifice of Trust

After Hoover Institute fellow Niall Ferguson criticized the Trump administration's tactics in negotiating a peace agreement for the war in Ukraine, Vice President JD Vance called Ferguson's critique moralistic garbage and accused Mr. Ferguson of being a globalist, apparently the lowest of the low in the MAGA world. In this commentary we try to understand the real reason for Mr. Vance's heated response.

Today we are going to take a look at how economies function when domestic companies are protected by high tariffs and how this system called import substitution ripples through the lives of people on Main Street and well as Wall Street. When it comes to import substitution I speak from experience.

President Trump is constantly threatening to impose tariffs on countries that export more goods and services to the United States than they buy from us creating a trade deficit. He believes that a trade deficit is losing big time. But Mr. Trump's economic thinking is old fashioned and wrong-headed, like thinking that foreign countries pay for tariffs. In this podcast we look at why trade deficits are a good thing for the United States.

Following up on my previous commentary about how President Trump views fairness and how he thinks America has been treated unfairly, we investigate the implications of what he intends to do and include an update on his recent actions of tariffs.

President Trump complained at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the United States is treated very unfairly by the rest of the world. Everyone wants to be treated fairly but not everyone agrees as to what is fair. But the real problem of fairness is that while it does not make good government policy it makes great politics. In this commentary the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, looks at ways to build an acceptable consensus on policies rather than supposedly fair policies.

Referring to the infamous Nicaraguan dictator Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." It appears that lame duck President Biden applies the same type of differentiation to oligarchs circling around the presidency. In this last commentary about the Biden Administration we show how the dire warnings of his farewell address are refuted by his own actions.

When one of our myriad electronic devices isn't functioning the way we think it should, we often shut it down and then restart the device to reboot the system. More often than not that solves our problem. I think that the 62% of Americans that believe the US is on the wrong path (according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls) would agree that America needs a reboot. The incoming Trump administrations is planning to make some big changes in Washington. In this podcast the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, discusses whether Mr. Trump is planning a reboot or something more drastic.

Once again, I am publishing my list of the urgent priorities confronting our nation, most of which have been unmet and consistently ignored by both Democratic and Republican politicians. But in 2025 we will have a new Trump administration that is vowing to change how things are done in Washington. One can only hope.

Government budgets are the inflection point between governance and politics. And bad budgeting is bad governance. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles looks at some of the consequences of bad budgeting and how that is going to impact American citizens.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy intends to save taxpayers trillions of dollars by making the government more efficient. But efficient systems are not robust, they are fragile and can breakdown. In this podcast the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, looks at how the Founders' efforts to preserve our Republic made the government inherently inefficient.