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Trade desk: Onshoring Risks Are Manageable
Erin McLaughlin at Barron’s warns that “as the global trade war escalates,” “companies moving manufacturing to the U.S. will likely face a long and bumpy road.” There are some issues “that could make onshoring a challenge.” “Shifting manufacturing into the U.S. takes three to 10 years” due to the “intricate machinery” involved as well as “state and local permitting and environmental reviews.” Other challenges: “U.S. infrastructure is subpar” and our advanced workers face a “skills gap.” While onshoring raises costs, a “manufacturing renaissance would have short- and long-term benefits,” such new “jobs in construction” and higher-paying “advanced manufacturing jobs” than many services sector ones. “Better targeted economic and industrial policies” may mitigate the associated risks.
Libertarian: Jankowicz’s Censorship Bull
Biden disinfo czar Nina Jankowicz’s claim “that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, charged with countering foreign propaganda, was never engaged in anything approaching censorship” is “abjectly false,” fumes Reason’s Robby Soave. Jankowicz told Congress that NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which received State Department funding, were “focused on combatting Chinese government propaganda rather than encouraging censorship of American media entities,” even though GDI blacklisted libertarian and conservative outlets for “including commentary that COVID-19 may have leaked from a Chinese lab.” (That’s now accepted as the most-plausible theory.) This puts the lie to Jankowicz’s defense: By running cover for Beijing, GDI was “effectively complicit in the Chinese government’s most essential propaganda campaign. So much for the State Department paying disinfo cops to counter foreign misinformation.”
From the right: Fix Our Flawed Poverty Measure
Team Trump “recently promised that it ‘will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits,’” lament Phil Gramm & John Early at The Wall Street Journal. But that list shouldn’t include Medicaid, “the nation’s most abused welfare program.” While the first two programs are heavily self-funded, Medicaid and other welfare programs aren’t. They’re also “means-tested” based on a census-set figure that “overstates the extent of poverty because it doesn’t count as income 88% of transfer payments” to the poor. The good news? The Congressional Budget Office issued a new poverty measure that “counts a higher percentage” of transfer payments. “Pruning Medicaid enrollment based on a full accounting of the beneficiary’s income” would “dramatically” curb the deficit without harming the poor.
Mideast watch: Bernie Hates Palestinians
“Gazans are out in the streets to oppose” what Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders most wants to do, notes Commentary’s Seth Mandel: “enable Hamas to survive the war and keep charge of the enclave” by forcing “a vote to withhold arms to Israel.” His basis for this? A series of “anti-Israel talking points” around alleged war deaths of women and kids that “can be debunked with Hamas’s own stats.” “Sanders can complain about the Israeli government all he wants — Israel has been acquitted of Sanders’s charges by the Palestinian government itself.” And now “Gazan clans are striking back — very publicly — at Hamas in retaliation for its violent repression and mafia-like control tactics.” Which means “Bernie speaks not for innocent Palestinians but for their tormentors.”
Eye on China: Trump’s Schizoid Huawei Policy
“You might think” China tech major Huawei, is “no longer a threat to the United States,” observes Robert H. Bork Jr. at the Washington Examiner. But “recent action by the Federal Communications Commission suggests otherwise.” Last month the FCC “announced the formation of a national security group to investigate” the firm. Yet these efforts are undermined by a January lawsuit “against Hewlett Packard Enterprise for its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.” The “lawsuit makes no sense” because “both HPE and Juniper are in fierce competition with other US companies” and the “globally dominant player, Huawei.” “While the FCC acts against Huawei, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice is buoying Huawei’s prospects.” The folks in the Trump administration need to get on the same page.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board