1 week Ago
President Trump has been doing some dumb stuff. I wonder whether he slept through his economic classes at the Wharton School? His tariff policy is a misguided attempt to expand domestic manufacturing by raising the prices of imports. It’s unlikely the CEO of any American company is going to allocate capital to expanding domestic production based on tariff increases that may be reversed within a week of being announced.
Even if Trump were to stick with the tariffs to the end of his term, the bulk of them — save, maybe those levied on China — will likely be axed the next time the Democratic Party is in power. If you study the international trade statistics, you find that two-thirds of imported goods fall into the categories of commodities. Raising tariffs on these goods, as Trump has, harms U.
S. manufacturers by increasing their production costs. There’s a reason U.
S. automobile stocks tanked after Trump announced his tariffs on vehicles and automobile parts. Much of the work being done by the Department of Government Efficiency is good.
The agency is ferreting out some wasteful spending and discharging some unnecessary employees — as well as, admittedly, some necessary ones. But it’s not federal spending and employment that impose a crushing burden on the U.S.
economy, it’s the massive overregulation. Vivek Ramaswamy understood this, but Elon Musk pushed him out of DOGE. Unwinding regulations is hard because they were enacted over decades by both Democrats and Republicans primarily to pay off their supporters at the expense of the average person.
Musk should focus his fire on those entrenched interests. Despite getting a lot wrong, Trump has gotten one key thing very right. He deserves prolonged and stormy applause for leading a counterrevolution against DEI in all its guises.
These days essentially no one is against equality of opportunity. But DEI isn’t about equality, it’s about equity — in other words, equal outcomes. According to Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and the rest of the DEI illuminati, the failure to achieve equal outcomes is the result of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.
That’s a conclusion based on ideology rather than facts. DEI turns on its head the founding principle of the United States that everyone is created equal. Instead we are urged to reverse Martin Luther King Jr.
’s dream and judge people by the color of their skin not the content of their character. Kendi has explicitly urged discrimination against whites and Asians writing “ The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
” In the name of DEI, elite universities have all but openly discriminated against Asian students. A Harvard study of its own admission criteria concluded that if it had judged applicants solely on academic grounds Asian students would have been 43% of the Harvard student body, rather than their actual 19% share. Admissions officers allegedly gave Asian applicants low scores in the nebulous category of “positive personality traits” to bring down their acceptance rates.
Some universities have made applicants for faculty positions pledge their support for DEI. Polls show even left-leaning students and faculty self-censor for fear of breaking DEI taboos . Orwell’s description of the Soviet Union as a place with “a Rule of the Saints, which, like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials” fits the situation on all too many college campuses.
At the K-12 level, DEI has opposed tracking students according to their ability and pushed for delaying the introduction of higher-level math courses until later grades. The result is to hold all students back rather than focus on improving the academic performance of Black and Hispanic students. Then there is the bizarre attempt — most notoriously on a graphic from the Smithsonian — to identify whiteness with working hard, being prompt and delaying gratification.
As if these traits aren’t desirable and aren’t widely shared by Blacks and Hispanics. It’s becoming clear that DEI in corporations and colleges has been a failure even on its own terms. DEI programs often increase racial divisions within organizations rather than reduce them.
If Trump can drive a stake through the heart of DEI, I’ll gladly overlook his other shortcomings. This is a contributed opinion column. Anthony Patrick O’Brien is professor of economics, emeritus, at Lehigh University.
The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author, and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. Do you have a perspective to share? Learn more about how we handle guest opinion submissions at themorningcall.com/opinions.
.
