Rule by Rolex – The Dispatch

One of the things that most offends me about American political corruption is how cheap our guys are. Sen. Menendez got some help buying his lady friend a Mercedes, which sounds pretty fancy, but it was a C-Class Mercedes—the entry-level Benz. If you were a rapper driving a C-Class, other rappers would make fun of you. Here is a text message from a business operator to the Boston official accused of accepting bribes related to his firm:

The official was in charge of school bus operations for the state and had the ability to steer very lucrative contracts to friendly firms. That’s big money on the table—and, as the feds tell the story, he received less than $1 million in total bribes over the course of many years taking bribes. Given the cost of living in Massachusetts these days, that is not very much. I once saw the great Mikhail Baryshnikov perform a tribute to a “minimalist” choreographer, which consisted of the legendary ballet dancer walking around the stage like a normal person, sitting in a chair and then standing up, etc. It was disappointing, and that is how I feel about those penny-ante payments to the corrupt bus guy in Boston: One expects more. You go in with the expectation of something spectacular, and what you get is a guy hanging out at the turnpike rest stop at Natick with his hand out, anxious to go shopping for whatever eight grand buys. That isn’t even Rolex money, really—that’s not even across-the-range Seiko money.

If you are going to sell your soul and auction off your integrity, then at least get a good price. For Pete’s sake, the vice president’s salary is only $235,100 a year—though I suppose that whatever has corrupted J.D. Vance is not the allure of a government salary.

Trump is getting a good price. Or so it seems. It is a mystery, of course. I will confess to being a little bit of a Trump-wealth truther—I suspect that he is not as wealthy as he pretends to be, and it seems to me that he has proven himself an incompetent in business often enough that he is entirely capable of having lost much, all, or more than all of the considerable income he has enjoyed over the years. Lord knows Qusay and Uday are 16 flights of mental stairs down from mediocrity and entirely capable of wrecking a splendid fortune.

But set that aside for a second. I recently had dinner with a friend of mine who runs an important nonprofit enterprise. He spends a lot of time raising money from billionaires. We both have friends and acquaintances in that world, and we both are sometimes mystified by their motives. Why do these billionaires go to work every day? Many of them genuinely enjoy their work, of course, and it is creative in a way that is distinct from—and, to many minds, more interesting than—the kind of creative work that we writers and such do. But that doesn’t explain the whole thing, either. What my friend and I decided is that whatever it is in us that would make us entirely satisfied with the first billion dollars is also the reason we never make the first billion dollars. There is a kind of drive in such men that isn’t exactly greed, or just greed. It maybe lives in the same part of the brain where greed lives, but your typical American billionaire is no Scrooge McDuck—they give away tons of money. Yes, there may be some vanity in that, sometimes, but many of these guys quietly give away enormous sums with no display at all. It is a complicated psychological thing: I have seen men who are absolute chiselers about a $100 expense on Friday give away $100 million on Saturday. And the thing that makes them chiselers is part of the thing that makes them philanthropists. I think that it is like being really good at basketball or chess or singing—if you are really good at something, doing it feels really good. 

That is, I suppose, the most charitable explanation for Trump’s chiseling, for his petty self-dealing and almost comically vulgar corruption. Chiseling and venality and self-promotion are the things he is good at—they are the only things he is good at. Chiseling and grasping are his air and his exercise.

But, boy, is Trump stupid.

With a bit of golden encouragement from the Swiss (who are unsentimental about these things), Donald Trump has started rolling back tariffs on many goods, not only those Rolex watches but also on many common items of consumption at a less-elevated level: beef, coffee, etc. The Democrats have discovered this “new word,” as Trump put it: “affordability.” The notion that “affordability” is a “new word” is right up there in the book of Trump quotations alongside “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

And so Trump has now discovered an interesting economic phenomenon: When you make something more expensive, it is more expensive.

Tariffs are a sales tax. Tax incidence is an interesting little obsession in economics—who actually pays a tax in real economic terms? Most of us know, instinctively, that the “employer share” of payroll taxes gets passed on to employees—this is critical: some employees—in the form of lower wages. What matters to an employer’s business income is not the employee’s take-home pay but the entire cost of keeping that employee on the books: salary, benefits, taxes, other costs. An employee that costs you $100,000 a year in salary plus $8,000 in payroll taxes and $17,000 in insurance and other expenses is an employee that costs you $135,000 a year, according to my English-major math.

What tax incidence really comes down to is economic power: An employer may try to pass on tax costs to the employee in the form of lower wages, but very in-demand employees also try to pass their tax costs up to the employer. If you are going to work for, say, Apple, a salary of $x working at the Cupertino campus is not the same as a salary of $x working at the Austin campus. If you are a very in-demand kind of person living in Charlotte, an employer who wants you to work in Manhattan is going to have to write a big check: A $200,000-a-year guy in Charlotte needs (according to the Bankrate calculator) almost $460,000 in Manhattan just to break even. Some employees have the power to pass expenses up, some have less power and get expenses passed down to them.

I have made this point over and over again with the notion that big companies just “pass it on to the customer” when there is a new tax or mandate. That is sometimes true—but, sometimes it isn’t. It is much more complicated. Some businesses in very price-sensitive markets have relatively little power to raise consumer prices (thanks, competition!) but more power to pass on costs to their employees, vendors, business partners, etc. Walmart has more leverage over companies that rely on Walmart for the majority of their sales than they do over Walmart shoppers who may have lots of other options if Walmart tries to jack prices up on them too much.

It is complicated—very complicated—but the guiding principle is that economic burdens get shifted from the economically powerful to the economically weak. Hence that “new word,” in Trump’s dim mind, “affordability.” If you are a billionaire looking to buy “a yacht for your yacht,” as the New York Times put it, and the builder comes back and says he is going to have to raise the price by 58 percent because of tariffs, then you have some options, such as not buying the yacht for your yacht, or putting it off for a while, or whatever other options exist out there in the yacht-for-your-yacht world. If you have hungry kids at home and the cost of a box of mac and cheese jumps from $1.39 to $2.19, what, exactly, are you going to do about that 58-percent bump up? Not feed your kids until prices come down? Burn $1 worth of gas (and $25 worth of opportunity cost) driving across town to see if you can save 80 cents? You do not have a lot of good options—and, probably, you are going to end up eating the cost.

If you are an $22-an-hour guy who doesn’t know that there’s another $22-an-hour job waiting for him, what are you going to do when the boss says he’s cutting back on overtime or paid breaks—or if he tells you the job now pays $20 an hour, take it or leave it? That will depend on what your next-best offer is, of course. But changing jobs is stressful and anxiety-inducing, and it usually involves significant transaction costs. How much anxiety are you going to endure—this week, this month—over a cut in overtime? How willing are you to risk going weeks or months without pay at all if you start singing Johnny Paycheck songs to the boss? (You know the one: “Take This Job and Shove It.”) Lots of variables there.

But what should not surprise us is that the costs of Trump’s imbecilic tariffs are going to be borne by the very people for whom affordability, that supposedly perplexing neologism, is an urgent concern. There is a lady I know who does not know what gasoline costs: “What am I going to do—not fill up my car? Not drive?” she says. “It costs what it costs.” And that is an entirely reasonable way of looking at it if gasoline is a relatively small part of your income. There’s another lady—I don’t know her, but I stood in line behind her at 7-Eleven—who is only putting $12 of gas into her car (the one she drives two kids around in) because that is what she can afford. And the lady paying for $12 worth of gas with a plastic bag full of coins is the one who is paying the tariffs.

“We have trillions of dollars coming in,” from the tariffs, Trump boasts. That is, like most things that come out of Trump’s mouth, not true. The actual number is something more like $200 billion a year. (It is difficult to calculate because under Trumpian ad-hocracy, the rates and specifics change day to day and hour to hour, depending on whether some Canadian regional politician you’ve never heard of hurts Trump’s feelings or some Swiss executive pushes a bar of gold across the president’s desk, because that is the insane world we Americans now live in.) Let’s call it $200 billion a year for the sake of argument. That is a lot of money and, over time, it does add up to those trillions of dollars Trump brags about, and many markets are pretty efficient when it comes to adjusting prices today in response to expected future costs. Whose trillions does Trump think are going to hit the Treasury’s cashflow? Those trillions will come disproportionately from relatively powerless American consumers, workers, and businesses.

Everybody understands that we compete in the marketplace as producers. But we also compete as consumers, and that is, in fact, often more relevant: Think about buying a house or a gallon of gasoline. There are lots of people who want that house, and a whole world of people who want that gallon of gasoline and the oil that went into producing it. Trump can try telling some overseas oil producer that he has to pay a tax for the privilege of selling his barrel of oil in the United States, but the producer can sell that barrel of oil in China or Canada or Switzerland about as easily. (Again, it is complicated: Jonah Goldberg likes to point out that the U.S. trade deficit with Canada is in considerable part the result of the Canadians selling discounted oil in the United States because geographic proximity and the presence of convenient pipelines makes that more economically feasible than shipping the stuff off to Singapore or wherever.) You can tax that imported oil, but American consumers probably will pay most of the tax.

It is no mystery: Take that $200 billion a year in new taxes that fall on relatively powerless people, take the trillions in projected future taxes falling on the same people, and there is your “affordability” crisis. Trump being Trump, he proposes to mitigate the entirely predictable effects of his idiotic policies by sending other people’s money to lower-income Americans, no doubt in the form of checks bearing Trump’s signature if not his image. That’s a particularly dumb worst-of-both-worlds outcome. Even if we assume some rigorous means-testing, Trump’s tariffs will not generate enough year-to-year revenue to even offset the cost of those $2,000 checks he wants to send to lower-income Americans. But neither will those $2,000 payments offset the costs the tariffs are imposing on those lower-income Americans, because higher prices reflect both current tariff costs and expected future tariff costs.

The result is exactly what you expect from a Donald Trump enterprise: incompetence resulting in chaos careering in the general direction of insolvency. It is like the whole country has been turned into one of those ghastly Atlantic City casinos Trump bankrupted.

Speaking of casinos, and insolvency, and debt, and Rolexes, I was in Las Vegas this week to speak at an event put on by Jon Ralston and the Nevada Independent, an admirable journalist and institution doing the kind of old-fashioned journalistic work that Nevada desperately needs. I went in to get a shave at the barbershop at the Cosmopolitan (ask for Frank—he did a first-rate job) and sat next to a fellow who spent the better part of an hour talking to his barber about his plan to buy a Rolex. What he wanted to know was whether the barber (who seemed to be knowledgeable about these things) knew somebody who would, as the man put it, “Let me walk with it,” i.e., take the watch and make payments on it. He thought he might like some diamonds on the dial, but not too many. And he was very specific about wanting the relevant GIA paperwork on those stones. He proposed that his payments on the Rolex could be made weekly. The fellow also apparently did a good deal of sports betting. This is, obviously, a man who is going to die broke. I am not much of a poker player, but I suspect I could take that guy.

But that is the American way, particularly in the Age of Trump. Among the president’s truly daft and batty ideas is his suggestion that banks should start writing 50-year mortgages in order to address housing affordability. The idea is, of course, pig-rectum stupid. Just as long-term automobile financing puts upward pressure on car prices (because buyers focus on their monthly payments rather than total expenses), even longer-term mortgages would put upward pressure on house prices. And because interest rates on loans tend to be higher the longer the duration of the loan, such mortgages would push buyers in the direction of low-equity “ownership,” with interest payments making up an even larger share of monthly housing expenses than they would under a 30-year mortgage. “Probably not an optimal approach” in the words of one Treasury official who is not obviously high on meth while simultaneously suffering from a severe concussion. Again, it may not occur to such a dimwit as Donald Trump, but the cure for high prices is not more debt. The cure for high interest rates is not increasing demand for credit. If you really wanted to lower housing prices, the thing to do (I do not recommend this, for all sorts of reasons) would be to restrict banks to writing mortgages extending no more than 10 years and to forbid such payment-lowering shenanigans as interest-only mortgages. In a similar way, the easiest way to bring down college tuition would be for the government to stop lending people money to pay college tuition. Subsidized financing always pushes prices in an upward direction for obvious reasons: Subsidizing consumption encourages demand, and higher demand means higher prices.

Tucker Carlson helped to make J.D. Vance vice president of these United States. Tucker Carlson also has decided that his future as a media entrepreneur is best served by trafficking in antisemitism. He recently denounced Ben Shapiro, a rival media figure and a Jew, as a practitioner of “usury.” I am pro-finance and pro-credit, myself—finance is a big part of what makes modern economic innovation possible—but I will note for the record that J.D. Vance’s main job in life before becoming a full-time social-media troll on the public teat was working for Peter Thiel’s venture-capital gang—which is to say, he was a literal moneylender.

“This Is No Way to Rule a Country,” reads the New York Times headline over an essay by Eric Schmidt and Andrew Sorota. The essay is fine, but the headline stinks: Americans are citizens, not subjects, and we are not here to be ruled—we are, on a good day, governed, although Americans have been trending in the direction of ungovernability for, oh, I guess just about 250 years now.

Another Times headline and a deck: “8 Senators Break Ranks With Democrats and Advance G.O.P. Plan to End Shutdown. Two of them are retiring, and none of the others face re-election in 2026.” None faces, not “none face.” None is a contraction of “not one.”

From USA Today writing about the mighty Cyndi Lauper’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “Lauper also proved her MVP status during the show’s finale, a gut-bellowing version of fellow inductee Joe Cocker’s ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ with Susan Tedeschi, Bryan Adams, Chris Robinson, Nathaniel Rateliff and Teddy Swims.” I like Joe Cocker’s version of that song, but it is not his song—it is a Beatles song.

Mainly, I am surprised that it has taken this long to get Cyndi Lauper into the hall of fame. What a voice. The ’80s were very much a hit-and-miss decade, but there was not much in pop music in that era better than the music of Cyndi Lauper.

Related: I once saw Rob Hyman of The Hooters do a small, quiet set that included a beautiful version of “Time After Time.” One of the members of the audience afterward complimented him on “his take on” that “Cyndi Lauper song.” Hyman did not explain that “Time After Time” is a song with two authors, and that he is one of them, and that he sang on Lauper’s famous version of the song, too. How many people who spend a lifetime writing songs ever write anything as good as “Time After Time”? Not very damned many. I think of that when people sneer about “one-hit wonders.” Yes, I’m sure that Flock of Seagulls would have loved to have had a bigger and more varied career, but nothing takes you back to 1982 quite like “I Ran.” Except maybe 16-percent mortgage rates.

(That’s how you fix inflation, by the way. Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan did it, it was hard, nobody enjoyed it, and it nearly wrecked Reagan’s presidency before he really got started, but it was the right thing to do.)

Relatedly related: Backing vocals are an interesting little subgenre. I remember listening to a song by the great country singer Joe Ely (one of the innumerable musical products of my hometown) and catching a distinctive plaintive tone in the backing vocals. You know that you’re a musicians’ musician when you’ve got Bruce Springsteen singing backup. And Joe Ely, before that, sang the backing vocals on the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Funny little world.

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I have always assumed that the position of the Jews of Israel would be a dangerous one for as long as I’d be around to observe it. And I have generally thought that the safety of the Jews of Europe cannot be taken for granted. But I had never thought that I would see the day when we had to worry about the safety of the Jews of the United States of America. I had thought George Washington settled the matter:

And it is to the Father of All Mercies that we must appeal again. But the Israeli position does suggest that the Jews of the Jewish state have taken Oliver Cromwell’s sage advice: “Trust in God and keep your powder dry.” We should all learn from their example.