Although the prospect of a tariff hike has loomed large in financial markets and the financial media this week, higher tariffs on imports from China will not likely have much of an impact on American consumers.
Evidence from tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Chinese goods already in place indicates that businesses have not been able to pass higher costs of goods and materials on to consumers. Even though wages are rising, prices have been remarkably steady. In March, the index of personal consumption expenditures–the Fed’s favored measure of consumer prices–showed prices up just 1.5 percent over 12-months.
One reason tariffs are unlikely to hurt U.S. consumers is that trade with China accounts for a very small fraction of U.S. spending. According to a recent study by an economist at the San Francisco Fed, imports make up around 11 percent of the $14.3 trillion of consumer spending in the U.S. Imports from China account for 16% of that, which translates into 1.76 percent of consumer spending.
The tariffs that the Trump administration plans to hike apply to only around 34 percent of consumer spending on imports from China, according to a different study from the San Fran Fed. In other words, just over half a percentage point worth of overall U.S. consumer spending.
If all of the tariffs were passed through to consumers–which has not happened judging by price data–the overall impact on prices would be a 0.1 percentage point rise, according to the San Fran Fred’s estimate.
In other words, without the China tariffs, our 1.5 percent inflation rate would be 1.4 percent.
Raising the tariff to 25 percent would roughly double the impact. So the personal consumption index rises to 1.6 percent.
Keep in mind that the Fed is trying to move inflation toward its 2 percent target. Assuming the Fed can effectively hit its target, this means that consumer prices will be accelerating over the next year or two anyway. If tariffs raise prices by two-tenths of a percentage point, that just gives the Fed less work to do.
In other words, our economy is well-prepared to sustain any costs of tariffs because we are in such a low-inflation environment.
Even if the Trump administration expands the 25 percent tariff to cover all goods, the impact on prices would be just 0.4 percentage points, according to the San Fran Fed.
That would move us closer to the Fed target–but we are headed there in any case. Tariffs may just eliminate some of the need to cut interest rates in order to accelerate inflation.
To put it slightly differently: the tariffs will have no impact on U.S. consumers because their worst-case scenario effect would be to move price increases toward where the Fed is determined to see them go anyway.
It is unlikely, however, that 100 percent of the cost of tariffs will be passed on to consumers. Some will be absorbed by businesses, others eliminated by U.S. importers sourcing materials from manufacturers outside of China. If just half of the hike to 25 percent is passed on, the impact on consumer prices would be a boost of just one-tenth of a percentage point.
Our trade relationship with China has had massive impacts on the U.S. and global economy and may be one of the most important determinants of our economic and political future. But boosting tariffs on $250 billion of imports by fifteen-percentage points will not be noticeable to most consumers.
The Chinese government has actively helped Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro control, censor, and shut down the Internet in his quest to keep the legitimate president of the country, Juan Guaidó, from governing, Rep. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told Breitbart News in an interview Monday.
China’s ruling Communist Party has used its foreign relations arms to subtly distance itself from Maduro this year. Unlike neighboring Russia, which openly boasts of having intervened militarily in the country on Maduro’s behalf, China’s Foreign Ministry has stopped short of referring to Maduro as the nation’s president since Guaidó took office in January and took nearly a week to issue an official statement on the military uprising Guaidó called for on April 30. When it did, it urged a “peaceful settlement” without offering any specific statement of support for either Maduro or Guaidó.
Rubio suggested that Beijing may be distancing itself from Maduro because the tide has shifted so definitively against him in Latin America that the rest of the region may sour on investments with China if it interferes to help him. That does not mean China is not helping Maduro, merely that it cannot afford the bad press, Rubio stated.
“The Chinese are very involved. First of all, they are owed a bunch of money, so they want to get paid,” he explained. “Number two is they are single-handedly helping conduct the Internet control operation. They have basically taken a commercial version of their great Internet firewall and given it to Maduro, and it is a service they are providing him, so they are the ones that are shutting down the Internet and access to social media.”
Maduro’s regime regularly cuts nationwide access to the Internet to prevent Guaidó and other opposition leaders from being able to communicate with the masses or organize rallies against him. Most Venezuelan opposition figures, like Maduro, are avid Twitter users. Last week, Guaidó used Twitter to broadcast live from La Carlota, an airbase outside of Caracas, and declare the final step in removing Maduro, which he branded “Operation Freedom.”
En el marco de nuestra constitución. Y por el cese definitivo de la usurpación. https://t.co/3RD2bnQhxt
Guaidó, according to Rubio, has “no access to the media. Any time he tries to speak or communicate on social media, they shut down the Internet. … Literally, every time he holds a rally, they shut down the Internet.”
As the Chinese are “single-handedly controlling the defensive cyber operations shutting down the Internet,” they are responsible for silencing Guaidó. Yet being more open about their role could jeopardize investments in other parts of the continent.
“The Chinese play a tricky game because on the one hand, they are trying to grow in influence and presence throughout Latin America, so they are seeing all of these countries supporting Guaidó, and they don’t want to … antagonize these countries by being cheerleaders for the Maduro regime,” Rubio noted.
“On the other hand, they view Venezuela as a place of strategic importance because they have an existing leverage relationship with him [Maduro], they’re there on the ground, and the notion in their mind is they need to be against what they view as any American efforts to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.”
“That is not the case here, but that is how they view it because they think that, if they allow that [re-democratization] to happen in one place, that would be a predicate for it to happen in other places, including, potentially, China itself,” he said. “So the game they’re playing is, they don’t want to upset the Colombians, they don’t want to upset the Panamanians, they look at the list of countries that are against Maduro, so they don’t want to harm their relationships with those countries by being too far out there.”
The lukewarm tenor of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s remarks on Venezuela continued Tuesday.
“On the Venezuela issue, China upholds the UN Charter and the basic norms governing international relations,” spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters. “We insist that this issue should be resolved through inclusive political dialogue and consultation under Venezuela’s constitution between the government and the opposition independently. We stand against external interference and unilateral sanctions.”
Geng once again did not name either Guaidó or Maduro. Instead, he claimed that China stood alongside the European Union, which backs Guaidó, and promised China would “step up communication and work together in a constructive manner with the international community including the EU for the political settlement.”
China has invested billions, officially and through its corporate entities, in Venezuela’s socialist regime, both under Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez. Maduro’s incompetent handling of the economy scared Chinese money away for most of 2017 and 2018, but, late last year, China agreed to hand Maduro a $5 billion loan in exchange for one million barrels of oil, according to Maduro himself.
In addition to allegedly controlling the Venezuelan Internet, the Chinese government used telecommunications giant ZTE to build a replica of its “social credit system” – which allots points to individuals based on how much the government likes them and prevents them from access to basic societal services if their point totals drop too low – for Maduro.
The socialist government branded the new system the “Fatherland Card.” It gives the regime control over what Venezuelans buy and helps track Venezuelans’ public statements, social media, and anything that can be interpreted as political activity. Without the card, Venezuelans cannot access the little food, medical care, and fuel left in the country.
Outside of Venezuela, Beijing has worked to promote its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Latin America. While the BRI is nominally intended to rebuild the Ancient Silk Road – the major trade route connecting Asia to Europe – Chinese officials have convinced several Latin American nations to agree to major infrastructure projects in the region. As the preeminent communist country in the region, Cuba has taken the lead in promoting BRI, but 18 Latin American countries have joined to varying degrees, agreeing to pay China to build ports, roads, and railways.
In February, Adm. Kurt Tidd, the head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, described Belt and Road as providing “ample opportunity for China to expand its influence over key regional partners and promote unfair business and labor practices.”
“Increased reach to key global access points like Panama create commercial and security vulnerabilities for the United States, as do Chinese telecommunications and space ventures with dual-use potential, which could facilitate intelligence collection, compromise communication networks, and ultimately constrain our ability to work with our partners,” he warned.
Politico is touting a trickle of “voluntary departures” by illegal migrants back to their homelands, even as Central Americans use loose border rules to flood into the U.S. labor market.
“The number of immigrants who have applied for voluntary departure has soared since the election of Donald Trump, according to new Justice Department data obtained by The Marshall Project,” says Politico. It continued:
Last year, voluntary departure applications reached a seven-year high of 29,818. In the Atlanta court, which hears cases of Irwin detainees like Zamarrón, the applications multiplied nearly seven times from 2016 to 2018.
But the “surge,” up to almost 30,000 in 2018, is a tiny share of the nation’s population of illegal migrant workers, estimated to be at least 8 million. That total is 266 times the 29,818 people who agreed to a “voluntary departure” instead of forced deportation.
Moreover, the volume of departing migrants is a trickle compared to the flood of migrants entering U.S. communities.
In April, which is just one month of 2019, roughly 109,000 migrants were registered as they crossed the southern border. Several tens of thousands of other migrants began overstaying their visas or successfully sneaked over the border, while the federal government also welcomed a vastly larger flood of legal immigrants, temporary visa-workers, and work-permit workers.
Politico‘s article led with a sympathetic portrayal of one illegal immigrant who agreed to accept the plea deal of “voluntary departure” once immigration officials began the process of deporting her. But the article did not mention the many ordinary Americans who have lost jobs, wages, or homes, or who have been injured or killed by the establishment’s tacit support of illegal migration. According to Politico:
Alejandra Garcia Zamarrón, a mother of three American citizens, had lived in the United States for nearly 20 years when a police officer pulled over the unregistered vehicle she was riding in.
Georgia was her home, the place where she’d lived for years and raised her family. But when she found herself locked in the Irwin County Detention Center, she had few options to stay. She’d been brought to the U.S. as a child, but her protected status as a childhood arrival had expired. And she had given a fake name and date of birth to the police officer who stopped her, a misdemeanor that put her at greater risk of deportation.
Zamarrón, 32, initially vowed to fight her removal from the U.S. as long as she could. But as the months in detention dragged on, she changed her mind and asked for “voluntary departure,” which would allow her to leave the U.S. without a deportation on her record. “My family decided the best bet was for me to leave and fight from the outside,” Zamarrón said in a phone call from the detention center, before she returned to Mexico in November.
But there are many other examples of “voluntary departure” worth noting.
Nineteen Telugu students who had enrolled with Farmington University, a fake institution floated by the federal police in Michigan, US, to expose a “pay-to-stay” racket, have been granted permission for voluntary departure to India by a local court.
In all, 20 students have been under detention at two centres – 12 at Callahan County detention centre and eight at Michigan Monroe detention centre — since January 31. Of the 20, three students – two Telugus and a Palestinian — got the departure permission last Saturday. The remaining 17, all Telugus, were granted the permission by a Michigan court on Tuesday.
FBI busts company which allegedly helped get ‘Optional Practical Training’ work permits via fraud for roughly 1,900 Chinese grads, to steal jobs & salaries from American grads. More to come, despite media silence on white-collar job theft #HR1044https://t.co/VsSjAVsXNi
A Mexican national in the Bexar County jail on murder and arson charges connected to a June 18, 2018 incident was previously released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
20-year-old Ernesto Esquivel-Garcia is accused of killing 20-year-old Jared Vargas at an apartment on Jones Maltsberger Road on June 18. Police say he set the body on fire at an apartment. ICE confirmed at the time there was an immigration hold on Garcia, which indicates that he is in the country illegally.
…
The full statement from ICE reads:
On June 18, 2018, deportation officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed a detainer with Bexar County (Texas) Jail on Ernesto Esquivel-Garcia, from Mexico, following his arrest the same day by San Antonio Police Department on murder and arson charges. Esquivel-Garcia remains in state custody pending the outcome of his criminal case.
ICE first placed an immigration detainer on Esquivel-Garcia on March 1, 2017, after his criminal arrest for driving while intoxicated (DWI) and another misdemeanor. Esquivel was placed into removal proceedings. He posted bond granted by the immigration judge and was released from custody. On May 21, 2018, an immigration judge issued him a voluntary departure, contingent on posting a departure bond. On May 25, when Esquivel-Garcia tried to pay his bond, ICE turned him over to Bexar County after discovering that he had an active arrest warrant for obstructing highway. Four days later, Bexar County transferred Esquivel-Garcia back to ICE, and the same day he posted the departure bond that was set by an immigration judge May 21.
Before departing ICE’s office May 29, 2018, ICE deportation officers instructed Esquivel-Garcia to leave the United States by July 20, 2018, as imposed by the immigration judge’s voluntary departure order.
Armed with guns and backed by helicopter air support, more than 100 US immigration agents swooped on the employees of Fresh Mark meat packaging plant on a summer day in the small Ohio town of Salem.
The huge raid on 19 June resulted in 146 arrests, most of them Guatemalans suspected of being in the countryillegally, in a show-of-force raid that likely brought back violent memories of the militarized country many had fled years ago for new lives in America.
…
An Ice spokesman said he could not provide details on what had happened to the 146 people arrested in the raid. Some are believed to still be in detention, while a few have returned to Guatemala through “voluntary departure.”
ICE gave the following statement to 41 Action News:
Syed Ahmed Jamal, 55, from Bangladesh, initially legally entered the United States at Los Angeles in August 1987 on a nonimmigrant visa. After he overstayed that visa, a federal immigration judge allowed him voluntary departure until Aug. 26, 2002. He abided the judge’s order and departed for Bangladesh on July 24, 2002.
Three months later, Jamal legally re-entered the United States at Cincinnati, Ohio, on Oct. 25, 2002, on another nonimmigrant visa. He again overstayed his visa, and a federal immigration judge allowed him voluntary departure until Oct. 26, 2011. However, Jamal violated the judge’s order and failed to depart the United States, and the voluntary departure order instead became a final order of removal (deportation).
Politico‘s article does not mention those example of “voluntary departure” in the article about Zamarrón.
Nor does Politico or the authors at the Marshall Project seek to follow the money through the nation’s immigrant labor supply.
During Zamarrón’s two-decade stay in the United States, she was one tiny drop in the establishment’s ocean of cheap labor which helped ensure that Americans’ wages stalled and that Wall Street’s value accelerated, that housing prices spiked and then crashed, and that productivity grew a snail’s pace.
Washington’s establishment created the labor supply and it welcomed this resulting cheap-labor bubble — but now recoils as President Donald Trump tries to restore some balance to the earnings from wages and capital gains, and to the employment of native youths and migrant workers.
Good US/Guatemalan survey shows 1 million Guatemalans would like to quickly accept the Democrats’ tacit offer of ‘humanitarian’ migration into US jobs. But Dems’ ‘Great Awokening’ may prevent reforms before Nov. 2020. https://t.co/dcAxC26pFx
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment from the heartland to the coasts, explodes rents, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest and rewards investors for creating low tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
Goldman Sachs says Trump’s tight labor-market policy (AKA ‘Hire American’) gave 4% raise to blue-collar/middle-class in 2018. But upper-income graduate salaries lagged – maybe b/c of 1.5 million visa-worker graduates who work for spaghettiOs & green cards https://t.co/g6jtv9BS81
Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-LA), the GOP candidate for governor in Louisiana’s gubernatorial election this year, panned Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Richard Burr’s (R-NC) decision to issue a rogue subpoena to President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
In response to the news that Burr had subpoenaed Trump Jr., Abraham tweeted that there was no collusion, the investigation should end, and people should be focused on working together now to help Trump make the country better:
What part of NO COLLUSION is hard to understand? The US is booming under @realDonaldTrump – imagine if people quit trying to undermine him and worked with him.
And let me know when the investigation for Hillary’s collusion begins…https://t.co/ioxqKyp0nt
Abraham, who is surging in the polls in Louisiana against Democrat incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards, has consistently had Trump’s back regarding the Russia hoax:
Louisiana elected @realDonaldTrump and we’re going to re-elect him. Radical calls from Louisiana Democrats to impeach OUR PRESIDENT should be condemned.
Abraham called special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe a waste of tax dollars:
I called the Mueller investigation a witch hunt & total waste of taxpayer dollars from the get-go. It’s always been political w/ Dems who can’t stand that they lost the election. You would think they would be grateful that there was no collusion but that doesn’t fit their agenda.
And ripped the media for lying to the public about collusion, of which there was none:
There are many other examples over the years of Abraham standing with the president on this. Next week, Trump is headed to Louisiana for an event on infrastructure–interesting timing as he heads into the state as its Democrat governor is sinking in the polls and the GOP candidate is rising.
A 14-year-old boy was stabbed repeatedly, including in the back and the head, according to witnesses, in south London in broad daylight.
The youth was attacked on Wednesday at 5:30pm on Gloucester Road, Croydon, near Selhurst Railway Station. Police discovered him lying on the street, giving him first aid until paramedics arrived. His injuries are not thought to be life-threatening.
A suspect was reportedly seen running away from the scene shortly afterwards, and police are appealing for witnesses.
His stabbing comes on the very same street that 22-year-old Scotty Kouebitra was stabbed to death in 2016, the young man having been stabbed in the neck and heart with a screwdriver, according to the Metro.
On the same day as the teenage boy was attacked, another man was stabbed to death in a Tesco underground car park of in Slough, in the Greater London Urban Area. A 21-year-old witness who was in the supermarket carpark said he “heard shouting” and saw “lots of blood on the floor.”
Violent Crime Soars 19% in England and Wales in One Year, 112 Knife Crimes a Day https://t.co/90pw5R8UKi
The reports of violence come as London’s Metropolitan Police released the details of an assault on a pensioner on March 16th.
An 87-year-old woman, who has not been named, was left with severe bruising and a broken arm after being forced to the ground in Streatham, south London, and having her bag stolen from her.
She was knocked over from behind at around 11:30am after shopping before a family visit. She noticed her bag had been taken but was not able to get up, due to the extreme amount of pain in her arm. The bag was later found discarded but police found that her cards had been used in a series of transactions around the Streatham area.
One officer described the incident as “a horrible and cynical attack on a vulnerable and defenceless woman”. She said of the culprit, “this deplorable thug needs to be brought to justice.”
The incidents are just the latest in a long line of violent crime in England and Wales. Figures recently released by the Office for National Statistics show that violent crime has risen by a fifth over the last recorded year. Meanwhile knife crime was up six per cent to the highest level since records began. There was also an 11 per cent rise in robberies across the period.
This week, the Met Gala took place in New York City. The event has always been a showpiece for celebrities seeking to make a splash, from Rihanna in her Pope costume to Katy Perry dressed as a chandelier.
This year’s event was designed in homage to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” According to Sontag, “camp” is the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
In reality, camp according to Sontag is something else: a deliberate attempt to tear down boundaries.
“Camp taste,” Sontag wrote, “turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.” “[H]igh culture,” Sontag acknowledged, “is basically moral.” Camp, by contrast, “is wholly aesthetic.” In fact, it “incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.” It represents the “solvent of morality” and “neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”
As Kareem Khubchandani, performance studies and queer studies professor at Tufts University, told NBC News, camp “makes profane the things that are sacred.” Sontag said something similar in her essay: Camp is a “sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous.”
There is something inherently insulting about camp—particularly camp exhibited to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of dollars by ersatz socialists who consider themselves the moral superiors of those who live in flyover country.
Watching celebrities preen on the red carpet while dressed as stripper Mary Poppins (Lady Gaga) or a Cleopatra knockoff complete with shirtless slaves (Billy Porter) is inherently irritating. There’s something sneering and preening about it. But if you’re irritated, then you just don’t “get it.” You don’t understand the “irony.” You’re too sincere, which makes you a bore.
But sincerity builds social fabric; irony tears it down. Measured doses of irony can be helpful in debunking hackneyed ideas, but irony as an entire philosophy is a universal acid. Barack Obama wasn’t wrong when he said that Americans should “reject cynicism.” The only problem is that he simply labeled all those who opposed his political agenda as cynics.
In reality, cynicism—the mocking, derisive laughter of those who seek to overturn values—can never build anything. Camp doesn’t build beauty; it tears it down, drags it through the dust, and then laughs. Sontag knew that, which is why she spent most of her career tearing down, not building up.
It’s not a coincidence that the same person who promoted camp as a way of life also denigrated America—perhaps the most sincere country ever founded, given its reliance on creedal truths rather than mere nationalistic connection—with seething hatred:
If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. … The white race is the cancer of human history.
A good deal of America’s political polarization right now lies in the belief by those in the middle of the country that elitists on the coasts mock them, deride their pretensions at building as something passé. And those in the middle of the country aren’t wrong.
Those on the coasts who spend their evenings laughing at the nasty jokes of Stephen Colbert, tut-tutting at the “deplorables,” and giddily tweeting over the Panem-style fashion at the Met Gala are doing serious cultural damage. And telling fellow Americans to lighten up won’t heal those wounds anytime soon.
That will help the overflow problem for now. Via Daily Caller: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump has the authority to send asylum seekers to Mexico as they wait for the United States to adjudicate their claims, handing the president a big win on immigration policy. The “Remain in […]
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
Issues such as job losses and automation have become concerns for the American people as technology transforms our economy.
Back in February, a report revealed that a group of 100 homeless, prolific offenders in Seattle were responsible for 3,500 court cases, most involving petty crime. When the report was released 20 of the top 100 were in jail and 80 were on the street. But since then, 67 of the 80 who were on the street have been arrested again. These are people whose entire lives revolve around feeding a drug habit.
One of the 100 people mentioned in that report is Travis Berge who goes by the street name Travel Tron. Travel Tron is apparently quite a colorful character and has some musical talent as well as a fair amount of personal charm. Unfortunately, he also has a meth habit which gets him into trouble. He was free when the report was released but he’s since been arrested:
“I love methamphetamines,” Berge said in a February interview. At that point, he been booked into the jail 46 times and had been convicted of 34 various crimes, mostly misdemeanors…
Berge’s latest return to jail began on March 14, a month after the report was released. Surveillance video caught Berge at first trying to break a big plate glass window of the Joshua Green Building in downtown Seattle in the middle of the night.
After failing to break the cameras with a stick, Berge returns a couple hours later with a big rock and succeeds in breaking the window.
He admitted what he’d done to a security guard and was arrested. His public defender asked a judge to give him drug treatment instead of jail time. The judge released him but ordered him to check in daily with a treatment facility called the Community Center for Alternative Programs every day. Instead, Berge went to the center at night and broke their windows. He was arrested again and this time sent to jail. In a jailhouse interview he apologized for killing Seattle, a reference to the news special about homeless drug addicts in the city, and told KOMO News he had a new plan to deal with his addiction:
“For the first time I have the will and the desire to change — which is something I never had before. Sorry that I killed Seattle,” says Berge.
“I got the Travel Tron new leaf program — I’m just trying to turn around my life, never try to come back to jail, never try to commit another crime.”…
Travis believes he can kick his meth habit on his own and switch to Adderall, a drug he says he’s had before when he was young. He would take it 25 days of the month if he was allowed to use meth 5 days a month.
“Maybe go on a bender for 5 days straight so I can have that energy, that is really the only compromise I would accept,” says Travis.
I would say that Travis doesn’t seem to understand how this works but actually, he does understand it. He knows that with a few empty promises like this plan for a meth diet with cheat days, he can probably get a short sentence next week on the window breaking. And then he’ll be right back on the carousel, stealing, getting arrested, and set free again and again.
Travis got it wrong. He’s not killing Seattle. He’s just killing himself. What’s killing Seattle is the failed system that keeps putting him back on the street.
Here’s Travis six years ago in a San Francisco subway:
