Simple Truths

Some of the things that our president s useful for is to see how much a lot of things are misunderstood.  Of course he continues to spread that misinformation which he generally picked up from fake news sites so it isn't all good.

Take clean coal.  He announced the other day that a new mine was opening up in Pennsylvania, that would produce clean coal a process he described as taking out the coal and cleaning it.

Well there you go, how simple it is and not sure why anyone opposes washing some coal.

Of course that's not what is meant by clean coal, what is meant is reducing the pollution created when you burn it and that is generally too expensive to happen and be competitive.  I'm not sure anyone would oppose burning coal if it wasn't one of the biggest polluters on the planet, but the cost to clean it is too high. The following link takes you to a discussion of the issue.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/01/investing/coal-mine-trump-paris-speech/index.html

Now take our trade deals.  The president condemns them pretty universally but the numbers show that a lot of people in America did quite well.  What did happen to some extent is as the biggest and wealthiest country in the world, we buy more than anyone else.

Now we are always going to attract imports, trade deal or not so what is more the issue is did the trade deal guarantee our ability to export products competitively.

Economic statistics are really boring and we are talking about a wide range of items but our agricultural and service areas generally benefited the most.

To some extent our manufacturing suffered some but the extent is not as clear since the cost of production in these countries with or without free trade is still generally lower.  So eliminating tariffs might reduce prices of imported components resulting in cheaper prices or larger profits but having those tariffs doesn't guarantee a boon in US manufacturing jobs unless the output is competitive.

The link below discusses NAFTA.

http://www.naftanow.org/myths/default_en.asp

Finally he dismisses climate change as some kind of hoax, started by the Chinese to keep us from staying ahead, I guess.  Of course all the statistics and data are part of the fake news although in this case even the fox news people have to acknowledge the changes, just arguing they are natural and not man induced.

Now it is a big planet and for those hunting and gathering in small tribes doubt they have much impact on the climate.  However we have a lot of people on this planet now and all of us use carbon to some extent releasing it back into the atmosphere.

Not really something you can argue about and since the stuff we are burning was captured carbon, unless we recapture it somehow it is going to have an impact.

Just simple truth.