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In Texas, Trump backs wall while O’Rourke rallies opponents

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EL PASO, Texas — President Donald Trump charged ahead with his pledge to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, skimming over the details of lawmakers’ tentative deal that would give him far less than he’s been demanding and declaring he’s “setting the stage” to deliver on his signature campaign promise.

In the first dueling rallies of the 2020 campaign season, Trump’s “Finish the Wall” rally in El Paso went head-to-head Monday night against counterprogramming by Beto O’Rourke, a former Democratic congressman and potential Trump rival in 2020, who argued that walls cause more problems than they solve.

The rallies across the street from each other served as a preview of the heated yearslong fight over the direction of the country. And they made clear that Trump’s long-promised border wall is sure to play an outsized role in the presidential race, as both sides use it to try to rally their supporters and highlight their contrasting approaches.

Standing in a packed stadium under a giant American flag and banners saying “FINISH THE WALL,” Trump insisted that large portions of the project are already under construction and vowed to fulfil his 2016 campaign promise regardless of what happens in Congress.

“Walls work,” said Trump, whose rally was repeatedly interrupted by protesters. “Walls save lives.”

O’Rourke, meanwhile, held a countermarch with dozens of local civic, human rights and Hispanic groups in his hometown, followed by a protest rally attended by thousands on a baseball field within shouting distance from the arena where Trump spoke.

“With the eyes of the country upon us, all of us together are going to make our stand here in one of the safest cities in America,” O’Rourke said. “Safe not because of walls but in spite of walls.”

There was a brief scuffle on a media riser away from the stage, when a man was restrained after he began shoving members of the news media. There were no apparent injuries.

More than a half-hour in his rally, Trump had scarcely mentioned immigration, offering just a passing suggestion that those chanting “Build the Wall” switch to “Finish the Wall.” Instead, he mocked O’Rourke, insisting the Texan has “very little going for himself except he’s got a great first name” and deriding his crowd size, even though both men drew thousands.

“That may be the end of his presidential bid,” Trump quipped, adding: “You’re supposed to win in order to run.”

The rallies began moments after negotiators on Capitol Hill announced that lawmakers had reached an agreement in principle to fund the government ahead of a midnight Friday deadline to avoid another shutdown.

Republicans tentatively agreed to far less money for Trump’s border wall than the White House’s $5.7 billion wish list, settling for a figure of nearly $1.4 billion, according to congressional aides. The funding measure is through the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

Three people familiar with Congress’ tentative border security deal have told The Associated Press that the accord would provide $1.375 billion to build 55 miles (90 kilometres) of new border barriers — well below the $5.7 billion that Trump demanded to build over 200 miles (320 kilometres) of wall along the Mexican boundary. The money will be for vertical steel slats called bollards, not a solid wall.

The talks had cratered over the weekend because of Democratic demands to limit immigrant detentions by federal authorities, but lawmakers apparently broke through that impasse Monday evening. Now they will need the support of Trump, who must sign the legislation.

But Trump appeared oblivious to the deal, saying that he’d been informed by aides that negotiators had made some progress but that he had declined to be fully briefed because he wanted to go on stage.

“I had a choice. I could’ve stayed out there and listened, or I could have come out to the people of El Paso, and Texas, I chose you,” Trump said. “So we probably have some good news. But who knows?”

Trump, who has been threatening to declare a national emergency to bypass Congress, added, “Just so you know, we’re building the wall anyway.”

The countermarch began at a high school about a mile from the baseball field in the shadow of Trump’s rally, its participants streaming past part of the border and the towering metal slats lining it. Marchers waved handmade signs reading “Fire the Liar,” ”Hate Is Not What Makes America Great” and “Make Tacos, Not Walls.” They chanted “No wall!” and “Beto! Beto! Beto!”

Many marchers, and those in the crowd at the ballpark, carried flags reading “Beto for President 2020” or black-and-white “Beto for Senate” yard signs from his closer-than-expected November race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz that had been modified slightly to read “Beto for President.” The Democrat said the event wasn’t only about him — or Trump — but meant to tell the true story of life in El Paso.

“It is going to be the people of the border,” O’Rourke told the crowd before beginning the march, “who will write the next chapter in the history of this great country. Ensuring that our laws and our language and our leaders match our values.”

Trump has insisted that large portions of the border wall are already underway. But the work focuses almost entirely on replacing existing barriers. Work on the first extension — 14 miles (23 kilometres) in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley — starts this month. The other 83 miles (134 kilometres) that his administration has awarded contracts for are replacement projects.

Trump has repeatedly pointed to El Paso to make his case that a border wall is necessary, claiming that barriers turned the city from one of the nation’s most dangerous to one of its safest.

“You know where it made a difference is right here in El Paso,” he said Monday, adding: “They’re full of crap when they claim it hasn’t made a big difference.”

But that’s not true.

El Paso had a murder rate of less than half the national average in 2005, a year before the most recent expansion of its border fence. That’s despite being just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a city plagued by drug violence. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows that El Paso’s annual number of reported violent crimes dropped from nearly 5,000 in 1995 to around 2,700 in 2016. But that corresponded with similar declines in violent crime nationwide and included periods when the city’s crime rates increased year over year, despite new fencing and walls.

The Trump campaign released a video showing El Paso residents saying the wall helped reduce crime. But many in the city have bristled at the prospect of becoming a border wall poster child.

Trump advisers have long insisted that, fulfilled or not, the wall is a winning issue for the president, who has already sought to rewrite the “Build the Wall” chants that were a staple of his 2016 campaign to “Finish the Wall.”

An AP-NORC poll conducted during last month’s shutdown found that more Americans oppose a wall than support it. But nearly 8 in 10 Republicans are in favour, with only about 1 in 10 opposed.

Democrats, meanwhile, are adamant that Trump’s insistence on a wall helps them and point to their 2018 midterm election gains in the House as proof that voters want to block Trump’s agenda.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Zeke Miller and Kevin Freking in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

Jill Colvin And Will Weissert, The Associated Press













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Trump Needs To Take Away What Politicians Love Most — Pork

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in an interview on CSPAN, Sept. 30, 2000

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

Shortly before his death in 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman over dinner in San Francisco. The last question I asked him was: What are the three things we had to do to make America more prosperous?

His answer I have never forgotten: “First, allow universal school choice; second, expand free trade; third and most importantly, cut government spending.” That was long before Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden came along.

There are not too many problems in America that cannot be traced back to the growth of big and incompetent government.

It is notable that the two big bursts of inflation during modern times both occurred when government spending exploded. The first was the gigantic expansion of the LBJ “war on poverty” welfare state in the 1970s with prices nearly doubling, and then the post-COVID era spending blitz in the last year of Trump and then the Biden $6 trillion spending spree with the CPI sprinting from 1.5% to 9.1%.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.

The connection between government flab and the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is obvious. In both cases the Washington spending blitz was funded by Federal Reserve money printing. The helicopter money caused prices to surge. (I still find it laughable that 11 Nobel prize-winning economists wrote in the New York Times in 2021: Don’t worry, the Biden multi-trillion-dollar spending spree won’t cause inflation.)

The avalanche of federal spending hasn’t stopped even though COVID ended more than three years ago. We are three months into the 2025 fiscal year and on pace to spend an all-time high $7 trillion and borrow $2 trillion. If we stay on this course, the federal budget could reach $10 trillion over the next decade.

This road to financial perdition cannot stand. It risks blowing up the Trump presidency.

Upon entering office, Trump should on day one call for a package of up to $500 billion of rescissions — money that the last Congress appropriated but has not been spent yet. Cancelling the green energy subsidies alone could save nearly $100 billion. Why are we still spending money on COVID?

We could save tens of billions by ending corporate welfare programs — such as the wheel barrels full of tax dollars thrown at companies like Intel in the CHIPS Act. The Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency is already identifying low hanging fruit that needs to be cut from the tree.

Along with extending the Trump tax cut of 2017, this erasure of bloated federal spending is critical for economic revival and for reversing the income losses to the middle class under Biden.

This is especially urgent because the curse of inflation is NOT over. Since the Fed started cutting interest rates in October, commodity prices are up nearly 5% and the mortgage rates have again hit 7% — in part because the combination of cheap money and government expansion is a toxic economic brew — as history teaches us.

Nothing could suck the oxygen and excitement out of the new Trump presidency more than a resumption of inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. Trump’s record-high approval rating will sink overnight if the cost of everything starts rising again.

Cutting spending won’t be easy. The resistance won’t just come from Bernie Sanders Democrats. Trump will have to convince lawmakers in his own party — many of whom are already defending green-new-deal pork projects in their districts.

This is why Trump should make the case in his inaugural address that downsizing government is the moral equivalent of war. Borrow a line from Nancy Reagan: just say no — to runaway government spending. Say yes to what Friedman titled his famous book: “Capitalism and Freedom.”

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”

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What is ‘productivity’ and how can we improve it

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jock Finlayson

Earlier this year, a senior Bank of Canada official caused a stir by describing Canada’s pattern of declining productivity as an “emergency,” confirming that the issue of productivity is now in the spotlight. That’s encouraging. Boosting productivity is the only way to improve living standards, particularly in the long term. Today, Canada ranks 18th globally on the most common measure of productivity, with our position dropping steadily over the last several years.

Productivity is the amount of gross domestic product (GDP) or “output” the economy produces using a given quantity and mix of “inputs.” Labour is a key input in the production process, and most discussions of productivity focus on labour productivity. Productivity can be estimated for the entire economy or for individual industries.

In 2023, labour productivity in Canada was $63.60 per hour (in 2017 dollars). Industries with above average productivity include mining, oil and gas, pipelines, utilities, most parts of manufacturing, and telecommunications. Those with comparatively low productivity levels include accommodation and food services, construction, retail trade, personal and household services, and much of the government sector. Due to the lack of market-determined prices, it’s difficult to gauge productivity in the government and non-profit sectors. Instead, analysts often estimate productivity in these parts of the economy by valuing the inputs they use, of which labour is the most important one.

Within the private sector, there’s a positive linkage between productivity and employee wages and benefits. The most productive industries (on average) pay their workers more. As noted in a February 2024 RBC Economics report, productivity growth is “essentially the only way that business profits and worker wages can sustainably rise at the same time.”

Since the early 2000s, Canada has been losing ground vis-à-vis the United States and other advanced economies on productivity. By 2022, our labour productivity stood at just 70 per cent of the U.S. benchmark. What does this mean for Canadians?

Chronically lagging productivity acts as a drag on the growth of inflation-adjusted wages and incomes. According to a recent study, after adjusting for differences in the purchasing power of a dollar of income in the two countries, GDP per person (an indicator of incomes and living standards) in Canada was only 72 per cent of the U.S. level in 2022, down from 80 per cent a decade earlier. Our performance has continued to deteriorate since 2022. Mainly because of the widening cross-border productivity gap, GDP per person in the U.S. is now $22,000 higher than in Canada.

Addressing Canada’s “productivity crisis” should be a top priority for policymakers and business leaders. While there’s no short-term fix, the following steps can help to put the country on a better productivity growth path.

  • Increase business investment in productive assets and activities. Canada scores poorly compared to peer economies in investment in machinery, equipment, advanced technology products and intellectual property. We also must invest more in trade-enabling infrastructure such as ports, highways and other transportation assets that link Canada with global markets and facilitate the movement of goods and services within the country.
  • Overhaul federal and provincial tax policies to strengthen incentives for capital formation, innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth.
  • Streamline and reduce the cost and complexity of government regulation affecting all sectors of the economy.
  • Foster greater competition in local markets and scale back government monopolies and government-sanctioned oligopolies.
  • Eliminate interprovincial barriers to trade, investment and labour mobility to bolster Canada’s common market.
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