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Why does David Brooks not cite George Gilder? Chestnuts, my precioussss, chestnuts. David Brooks is all about conservative respectability politics--a gig only found in the New York Times. George Gilder is, uh, not very respectable. Now if Edmund Burke had emitted a similar sentiment …

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Ah. Thank you. Shorter: Brooks plagiarized Gilder to avoid being recognized as a Laffer stock.

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LOL yes. Brooks is snobby about antecedents; about sources, not so much. Also, how much more convenient it is to be indebted to those who are dead!

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China's Rust Belt: I heard from a Chinese friend that there is a rust belt in northern China, created when heavy industry moved to the southeast of the country for cheaper labor, new plants, and new infrastructure - including ports for international trade. We tend to blame developing market trade for rust belts, but are rust belts an unfortunate tendency of industries relocating, even within the country?

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Yes...

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Perlstein: I scarcely recognize a triangle. Democrats need to change their positions on many many things, -- trade, taxes/deficits, climate change, immigration -- but not in order to compromise with Republicans; mostly they need to move farther away from Republican positions.

Journalism's problem is that the people they hire have no and develop no expertise in the things they report on.

Yes Republicans are terrible but one line does not make a triangle.

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China/Carolina Shock. So what WAS this response that some got right and others did not?

Between the two shocks, I'll continue to hammer on the double terms of trade effect driven by a) fiscal deficits => dollar overvaluation and b) trade negotiations that focused on opening foreign markets to US trademarks and intellectual property instead of US exports of goods.

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Brooks: ?? Is anyone supposed to think that opinion columnists are smart? Smarter than their sources? They ARE te original GPT Chatbots. Ross Douthat produces an at least A- sophomore essay every week. Krugman, of course IS smart, but has to keep it pretty well hidden to avoid frightening the NYT readership.

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Can someone explain why people continue to treat Brooks as if he were more than a sophisticated hypocritical conservative propagandist. Each of his columns has as a linchpin to his argument as statement, presented as a truth universally acknowledged, that is a false conservative myth.

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