The Trump tariffs were profoundly stupid, virtually every reputable economist can tell you so,
Your definition of reputable precludes anyone who would not say exactly that. If a renowned economist that was widely respected for decades publicly made the argument for the benefits of Trump's tariffs, you would immediately categorize them as unreputable. It is actually logically impossible to appease your standards.
I think there's a sort of sniff test here. If a journalist is covering some people, and they commit a crime, should the journalist be arrested as their associate in crime? On principle, I think most people would broadly say no.
Then there's this Ku Klux Klan law. I can see why that law exists. Does anyone think it's proportionate to apply in this situation?
I do think it is appropriate to apply in this situation, certainly for the group protesting. They are on camera in Lemon's coverage saying explicitly that their intention is to confront people where they don't expect it, cause disruption, and make them uncomfortable. They went to a church service to try to make a government official uncomfortable in his private life by disrupting a federally protected exercise of rights. That is precisely the sort of behavior that law exists to deter.
Now, the question of Don Lemon does have potential gray areas, but only in as much as he's kinda dumb, and that might give him plausible deniability. If a journalist covers a bank robbery in progress that they didn't know about until it was happening, nobody would even suggest arresting the journalist. If the journalist is told in advance that there is going to be a bank robbery, and he is invited to come cover it, told to keep it a secret, and he walks into the bank with the robbers having warned nobody it was going to happen, I think the average person is going to have some strong negative opinions about him at minimum, and should his actions in covering the event serve to enable their robbery in some way, would unhesitantly charge him as an accessory to the crime.
So question 1 would be whether you think the protesters themselves were committing a crime. If not, it does not matter if he's a journalist. If you do think that they committed a crime, then he was told of a crime in advance, agreed to attend the event, kept the planned crime secret, and acted in a way as to advance their cause during the commission of the crime. Genuinely, his best defense is that he is so ignorant or delusional as to think that crashing a church service and refusing to allow it to continue is totally lawful behavior.
I think understanding things about how the economy works nudges working people in a revolutionary direction
So long as you can sneak just the right amount of untruth in...
from the point of view of the consumer, an excise tax (a tariff is a kind of excise tax) has an inflationary effect because it makes at least some goods more expensive
That's not an inflationary effect. Inflation is a holistic perspective, not a question of one good being more expensive. It's possible for a price increase in one area to drive wage increases to drive prices increasing in other areas. It is also possible for a price increase in one area to put downward pressure on prices elsewhere as people's budgets are decreased. It's also possible in the case of an increase targeted at things people don't actually need to have no effect on the value of money as a whole, as people just transfer their spending habits to an equivalent replacement. If the price increase is going into federal taxes, which we agree are not directly related to nor strictly necessary for spending, it is effectively going into a blackhole, where it cannot enable things like wage increases elsewhere to keep up with the price increases.
It's always worth noting who gets screwed by inflation in any conversation about it. It's the little guys. If everything increases in price but wages also increase in price exactly proportionately, it is largely meaningless on the face of it, it's just applying different arbitrary numbers to the same real world conditions. But when moving from one situation to the other, the proportion of money to property in your life will dictate the effect. Working class people are disproportionately money based, getting income in money and needing to maintain savings to fulfill the need for goods, and their needs are largely goods that are increasing in price. Wealthy people are disproportionately based in property and investments that will go up in value relative to money, and the contribution of actual dollar amounts to their net worth is probably more debt than liquid assets. So the inflation is effectively taking the spending power away from the workers and increasing the net worth of the wealthy.
It is genuinely comical watching people who consider themselves advocates for the poor and enemies of the capitalist hegemony advocate for government policies that will drive up inflation, often explicitly dismissing inflation as a potential outcome of their policies or even something to be concerned about. With you, I don't think that's the case. Like, in 2021 and 2022, when Democrats followed up their $2,000,000,000,000 stimulus with a $500,000,000,000 extra spending bill in an economy of very stressed and diminished supply chain, I expressed concern for the effect of that response on inflation, and I suspect you also knew what the long term outcome of that would be (and Agema blew off my concerns cause the Democrats said it would be cool, and he's just that simple). With you though, I think you'd be perfectly content with hyperinflation, as it would nudge working people in a revolutionary direction, as you say. It would just be nice if you were honest about that intention, rather than pretending that balancing the federal budget against taxation isn't meaningful in any sense.
