The European Commission will review an approach that led then-President George W. Bush to remove tariffs in previous dispute
“It’s actually a stupid process that we must to do this, but we have to,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Friday in response to Mr. Trump’s announcement. “We can also do stupid.”
.. The EU hopes to erode support for Mr. Trump’s policies by taking its fight to his allies’ constituencies. Roughly 95% of all bourbon comes from Kentucky, home of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican. House Speaker Paul Ryan is a Republican from Wisconsin, home to Harley Davidson.
.. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Sunday dismissed the EU’s tariff threat as a “rounding error.”
.. The EU lastly is readying a challenge, with other trading partners, in the World Trade Organization against Mr. Trump’s national-security justification for the tariffs, EU officials said.
“We think that these are safeguards in disguise to protect American industries,” the EU official said.
.. A similar playbook was successful in a fight with former President George W. Bush. In 2002 he imposed tariffs ranging from 8% to 30% on steel imports to protect against a surge of imports, mostly from China. That move was cast as an industry safeguard, not a national-security measure.
Brussels responded by publishing a list of U.S. goods to be slapped with duties totaling $2.2 billion. The list included orange juice from Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother was governor.
Trump Threatens to Impose Tariffs on European Cars
Trade tensions heat up as president vows to penalize EU if it retaliates against U.S. metals duties
.. “They make it impossible for our cars (and more) to sell there. Big trade imbalance!”
.. Imposing a tax on the imports of European cars would be more difficult than Mr. Trump’s tweet suggests.
.. The European Union’s executive arm responded Friday that it would retaliate against any metals tariffs, saying it had put together a package of penalties that would affect a total of $3.5 billion in U.S. exports, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles, bourbon and denim.
.. “I don’t like to use the word ‘trade war,’ but I can’t say how this wouldn’t be warlike behavior.”
.. Mr. Trump has raised the prospect of taxing European cars before. In January 2017, he threatened impose a 35% import tariff on exports by German auto companies from Mexican plants to the U.S., singling out BMW AG, the Munich-based maker of luxury sedans and sport-utility vehicles.
“I would tell BMW if they want to build cars in Mexico and sell in the U.S.A. without a 35% tax, they can forget it,”
Paroling the Spanish Prisoner (Wonkish)
one of the issues that came up was the recovery in Europe, which is real and in some ways a bigger story for the world economy than the continuation of the Obama expansion here. An obvious question, which Anil raised, was whether this recovery calls for a reconsideration by Euroskeptics like myself.
.. we underestimated the political cohesion of the single currency, the willingness of political elites to suffer enormous economic pain in order to stay in the monetary union.
.. During the good years money poured into Spain, fueling a huge housing bubble. This fed inflation that made Spanish industry uncompetitive, leading to a huge trade deficit.
.. over the period 2008-2018 Spain suffered an enormous cumulative loss of output it could have produced: 33 percent of potential GDP. That’s as if the U.S. were forced to pay a price of more than $6 trillion to, say, remain on the gold standard.
.. the politics of the euro have been far more robust than us Anglo-Americans could have imagined.
As West Fears the Rise of Autocrats, Hungary Shows What’s Possible
Several men urged caution. But Viktor Orban, the prime minister-elect, disagreed. The voting result, Mr. Orban continued, had given him the right to carry out a radical overhaul of the country’s Constitution.
.. Nearly eight years later, Mr. Orban has remade Hungary’s political system into what one critic calls “a new thing under the sun.” Once praised by watchdog groups as a leading democracy of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Hungary is now considered a democracy in sharp, worrisome decline.
.. Through legislative fiat and force of will, Mr. Orban has transformed the country into a political greenhouse for an odd kind of soft autocracy, combining crony capitalism and far-right rhetoric with a single-party political culture.
.. At home, he is pushing new legislation, this time to place financial penalties on civil society groups that help migrants.
.. He is arguing that Europe’s postwar liberal consensus “is now at an end” — and his vision is being emulated in Poland
.. Mr. Orban is emblematic of a strongman age. He has courted President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and praised President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. In 2016, he became the first Western leader to endorse the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump.
.. “Orban has pioneered a new model of single-party rule that has spread through Eastern Europe
.. defended Mr. Orban’s actions as a determined effort “to get rid of the remnants of communism that are still with us, not only in terms of institutions but in terms of mentality.”
.. Mr. Orban is undeniably popular with many Hungarians
.. he also has positioned himself as a buffer against what he portrays as modern-day threats: such as European Union bureaucrats; or George Soros, the liberal Hungarian-American philanthropist; or, above all, migrants who seek to settle in the country.
.. Migration fits into a wider agenda about the protection of the Hungarian people,” said Andras Biro-Nagy, a politics lecturer at Corvinus University of Budapest. “He’s protecting us from everything.”
.. Weeks later, Mr. Orban and his lieutenants began a legislative assault on the Hungarian Constitution, curbing civil society and, to less fanfare, diverting billions of euros in European Union and federal money toward loyal allies.
.. First, he moved simultaneously to curb the Hungarian media and the judiciary. Next came the erosion of the country’s checks and balances, which has helped Mr. Orban share the spoils of power with close friends and important businessmen.
.. And then, came the electoral process. The restructuring of Hungary’s election system, including a redrawing the electoral map
.. During the next five years, Fidesz used its two-thirds majority in Parliament to pass more than 1,000 laws, many of them enacted after a few hours of debate — and often presented by low-ranking lawmakers who had neither written nor read them.
.. The laws allowed Mr. Orban to appoint his own candidates to lead the country’s two main media regulators, while simultaneously giving those regulators more power to fine and punish independent news outlets. (Most of those outlets have subsequently been bought by allies of Mr. Orban.)
.. Mr. Orban put ex-Fidesz politicians in charge at several institutions, including the State Audit Office, which monitors government expenditures, and the State Prosecution Service, which oversees criminal prosecutions. His supporters also now control the board overseeing the National Fiscal Council, an independent body scrutinizing economic policy.
.. Yet it is Hungary’s judiciary that has perhaps been most affected.
.. Judges had to be nominated by a committee staffed by representatives of all the parties in Parliament — ensuring that all judges were chosen by consensus.
.. But Fidesz voted to give itself complete power in choosing the candidates. Eight years later, the court is made up entirely of judges appointed during Fidesz’s tenure.
.. Homelessness is once again a crime in Hungary.
.. “It’s not a totalitarian system,” Judge Szepeshazi said. “But it’s very autocratic.”
.. Mr. Orban has been able to accrue so much power in Budapest partly because he met little effective opposition from Brussels
.. The main problem was that the founders of the European Union never considered the possibility that a member state would backslide, and did not create procedures to deal conclusively with such an event, Ms. Reding said.
.. Mr. Orban has subsequently claimed to have tricked European officials into believing that he had made substantive changes, even though they were largely cosmetic, a tactic he has publicly described as the “dance of the peacock.”
.. Voting districts that had historically leaned to the left were reshaped to include around 5,000 more voters than districts that traditionally leaned right, according to an analysis by polling specialists at Political Capital, a Hungarian think tank. This meant that leftist parties needed more votes to win a seat than Fidesz did.
.. “All the characteristics and features on the surface are of democracy,” he added. “But behind it there is only one party and only one truth.”