Month: April 2025

Goat Tuesday: A call for Christians to reassess their values in today’s political environment

Today, as I write this, is Tuesday of Holy Week. It’s not one of the major days—but according to the Gospel of Matthew this was the day Jesus told one of his key stories: the one about the sheep and the goats. And even if you are not religious, it appears to be an extremely potent story for the world we currently inhabit.

It goes like this (paraphrased and condensed). At the time of judgment, everyone will be called before Christ, who will divide them into two groups: sheep and goats. (Spoiler: it’s better to be a sheep.)

He will turn to the sheep and commend them for their behavior: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Baffled, the sheep respond: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?”

The reply: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” 

He then turns to the goats and says, “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”

They too are baffled and ask: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”

The reply: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

As I noted above, all of this was on the Tuesday before what we now celebrate as Easter. That alone makes it timely. But it also frightens me about us as a country. We seem to be turning into a nation of goats. (And note that both the sheep and the goats call Jesus “Lord.”)

Not that I feel all that comfortable writing this, because every time I get irritated at a homeless person blocking a drive-through begging for money, or camping in the park two blocks away, beating what used to be flower beds into a sea of trash, I reveal my inner goat. We all have one.

My fear for America is that a lot of Christians seem to be celebrating their inner goat as a virtue.

So, I may be adding to my Holy Week observations. The best known are Easter, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Maundy Thursday. I’m going to add Goat Tuesday to my own list. Not, I should add, as a time for condemning others, but for looking to make sure we’re not overlooking goat-like failings in ourselves. Because, as Jesus said in another of what I see as a core teaching, what it the point in trying to pick a speck out of your neighbor’s eye, if you have a log in your own eye? Instead, remove the log from your own eye, so you can see clearly to remove the speck from your neighbor’s.

And yeah, this means me.

How Trump’s Tariffs are Deliberately Designed to Reduce Imports

I was going to ask on Facebook if anyone here knew how Trump’s tariffs were calculated, but the NYT appears to have back-calculated it, and the Office of the US Trade Representative has posted an explanation that confirms this.

The bottom line is that the tariffs are based solely on the percentage trade deficit with each country (with a minimum of 10 percent). They are NOT done product by product, as would be more normal. Thus, if we import 30 percent more from a country than we export to it, the tariff is 15 percent (because in an apparent effort to somewhat soften the blow, the tariffs are set at 1/2 of the percentage trade deficit).

The posted formula is more complex than that, and is full of Greek letters and opaque terminology, but when you wade through the math, it becomes exactly what the NYT describes. Most confusing are a pair of parameters for import elasticity with respect to price and tariffs that are set at 4 and .25, then multiplied together. The two parameters actually make sense, but it looks like their values aren’t particularly well known and were set to cancel out as a sort of best guess.

The stated goal of these calculations is to find a tariff rate that will bring the trade deficit to zero, based on President Trump’s long-standing belief that trade deficits are stealing from Americans.

That is vastly over-simplified. Yes, there are lots of manufacturing jobs that have migrated overseas, especially in certain industries. Yes, high tariffs would (presumably) bring many of them back, at least eventually. But we would then be paying much higher U.S. wages for these products, and prices would go up.

Furthermore, people in foreign countries would have less money to buy our stuff, so our exports would go down.

Also, money from trade deficits migrates back to the U.S. in the form of overseas investments. These can be controversial, but they are one of the things President Trump claims to want. Shutting off the money that produces them does not seem wise.

The bottom line is that trade deficits have been going on for a long time in the U.S.–five decades, according the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative–and the economy has greatly expanded. Again, yes jobs in certain sectors have migrated, but it President Trump wants to bring some of those back, a more focused approach would seem more appropriate and less disruptive, overall.

Finally, the calculation used by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office appears based on the highly unlikely assumption that other countries won’t retaliate. If they do, our exports would drop, and the calculation would have us raise our tariffs. That’s a formula for everyone’s tariffs spiraling into the stratosphere. That said, President Trump is known for using strong actions as scare tactics, so it’s possible that this will be temporary.