So how do you feel about paying twenty bucks for a couple of limes?

You can come up with any number of reasons why El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago decided on Thursday night to threaten Mexico with a five percent tariff on all its goods shipped to the United States unless Mexico does something about the people fleeing violence and despair in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. And Mexico, too, I guess. All of those reasons are bad ones. The president* needed a distraction from the investigations that are closing in on Camp Runamuck from all sides. The president* got petulant over all the good press Robert Mueller got the day before.

Or, finally, he's just too ridiculous a president* to do anything else. In fact, Juliette Kayyem, a former Obama official and a Harvard professor, opined in a lengthy thread on the electric Twitter machine that this fits a pattern of presidential* bluster and head-fakes that all of us should be used to by now. Kayyem argues convincingly that the way this all will play out is that, now that the president* has done his Master of the Universe thing in public, there will be a spate of stories about what a bad idea it is, and about how it will affect the world economy and the lives of average Americans, and then, sometime reasonably soon, the president* will declare victory based on some calculation known only to him and the tariffs actually never will take place.

It’s all just so dumb. Drew Angerer Getty Images

And, in any case, what in the hell do tariffs have to do with stopping immigration? Don't ask anyone in the administration, because they don't have a clue about it. The president* has roiled the stock market, scared the bejesus out of the American people and their elected representatives, and upended his own North American trade deal by doing this, and for what? Nobody knows. From the Washington Post:

White House officials did not immediately explain how driving up the cost of Mexican goods might stem the flow of migrants. If the tariffs damaged the Mexican economy, more of its citizens would try to cross the border to find work in the United States.



All of this is fine, of course, because the administration* is pulling in the cream of conservative intellectualism to manage the country's economic policy. Take Judy Shelton, who has been nominated for a seat on the board of Federal Reserve, an organization she believes is akin to how the Soviet Union used to run things, and who doesn't believe the Fed should have anything to do with interest rates. From the Financial Times:

In an interview with the Financial Times at the Trump International Hotel in Washington this week, Ms Shelton called on the Fed to “think about whether they are doing more harm than good”. If appointed to the board, she would be “asking tough questions” about its most basic mission, she said. “How can a dozen, slightly less than a dozen, people meeting eight times a year, decide what the cost of capital should be versus some kind of organically, market supply determined rate? The Fed is not omniscient. They don’t know what the right rate should be. How could anyone?” Ms Shelton said. “If the success of capitalism depends on someone being smart enough to know what the rate should be on everything . . . we’re doomed. We might as well resurrect Gosplan,” she said, referring to the state committee that ran the Soviet Union’s planned economy.



You have to give Ms. Shelton one thing, though. Not even while explaining why a return to Gilded Age economics is a good thing does she forget to suck up to the boss.

Ms Shelton has long been sympathetic to the gold standard, which the US fully abandoned in the early 1970s in favour of a flexible exchange rate for the dollar. “People call me a goldbug, and I think, well, what does that make them? A Fed bug,” she says. Her big dream is a new Bretton Woods-style conference — “if it takes place at Mar-a-Lago that would be great” — to reset the international monetary system, replacing the current regime, mostly based on floating currencies.

At least she's got a good handle on what part of the national economy is important to this administration.* It's the part that's small enough to fit in the president*'s pocket.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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