Trump Nominates Lawyer To Lead FBI (bbc.com)

President Donald Trump announced via Twitter on Wednesday that he has chosen a new FBI director. Trump says he's nominating Christopher A. Wray for the position. He described Wray as "a man of impeccable credentials." From a report: Donald Trump says he is nominating lawyer Christopher A Wray who served under George W Bush. Wray more recently represented the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, during the investigation into the George Washington Bridge lane-closing case, in which two of Christie's former aides were convicted of plotting to close lanes of the bridge to punish a Democratic mayor who wouldn't endorse the governor. Christie, who has informally advised the president, was not charged in the case.

Wray would succeed James Comey, whom Trump fired last month amid mounting scrutiny of ties between his campaign and Russia. The announcement comes a day ahead of Comey's scheduled appearance before the Senate intelligence committee on Thursday where he is expected to touch on his firing and claims that Trump asked him to soft-pedal the investigation into former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Comments

Re: "mounting scrutiny of ties"

[Lisandro]

The contacts are real and documented. What's being investigated right now if there was any collusion between Russia and the Trump administration.

Re:Lawyer

[Kierthos]

And five will get you ten that, during the confirmation hearing, at least one Senator asks "Did Trump ask you for a pledge of loyalty to him?"

Re:"mounting scrutiny of ties"

[bluefoxlucid]

Nothing Trump has promised to do would be good for the country and quite a bit of his agenda will hurt a lot of people.

Everybody thinks in terms of trickle-down economics, and so believes moving the average price of pants from $15 to $150 would be good for America if Americans were making pants instead of importing them from China.

They don't understand that then Americans in total would have less capacity to buy things, because they don't grasp that a potential 178,000 jobs in making pants (in this example) is trivial compared to the 125,000,000 employed: they think adding 0.14% more jobs by making everyone else poorer "keeps the money in America", and equate money to wealth. Too bad the same money doesn't buy so much, meaning...

They don't understand that those lost purchases mean fewer potential jobs. You might get +106,000 instead of +178,000, with low enough American wages in the factories. That's a best-case scenario of paying the American factory workers as little as possible--minimum wage, minimum benefits. You lose purchasing ability in the form of, at minimum-wage salaries, 40% as many pants sold.

With that 40% loss in pants shipped and retailed, you lose jobs. A truck carries 20,000 pairs in a 40-foot shipping container (large trailer). 192.6 million pairs imported, now Americans make and buy 115.6 million, that's 77 million fewer pairs, 3,851 fewer truck shipments per year. 981 register scans per hour by a retail worker, 77 million fewer items sold, no longer need ~78,526 retail workers.

There's additional loss in logistics, stocking, and some other stuff. The reduction in items sold is enough to close a couple stores, technically, although you'd only eliminate at best 2,000-3,000 employees in total through that route. The cost of shipping also includes things like truck tires, fuel, and maintenance, and the demand for those goods goes down when we can't afford as many goods (the prices of which already include those costs): a couple mechanics, Goodyear factory workers, and the like lose their jobs. Nothing major, like the huge bomb dropped on retail.

Call it 80,000 jobs. You can create 106,000 minimum-wage factory jobs and eliminate 80,000 other jobs by manufacturing pants in America instead of China. That assumes that the only cost in running the factory is the factory workers; you create fewer jobs and lose more jobs when you also factor in the cost of organization (managers, etc.), equipment, buildings, fuel and electricity, and so forth, all of which exceed the respective costs in the Chinese manufacturing theater.

At the same time, those minimum-wage workers produce pants which cost ~66% more. For a minimum-wage retail worker, a $15 pair of pants costs 1.8 hours of labor; for the minimum-wage factory worker, the $25 pair of pants costs 3 hours of labor. They have to work 1.2 hours longer to draw the wages to produce them.

The cost by number of hours worked to earn the wages to buy the product gets larger if we raise the factory-worker's wage; the number of jobs created shrinks; and the number of jobs lost elsewhere increases. You quickly go from ~26,000 new jobs and 300,000,000 poorer Americans to a direct loss of jobs and even poorer Americans when any of the involved costs increase.

See how many steps you have to work through to get that far? All people see is, "Well, factory workers! Jobs! New jobs!" and "Oh, well, pay the factory workers more and they won't be so poor!" Never mind that paying them more will actually make it harder for them to afford the products they're making--it'll let them afford more Chinese import products, though.

Best part: the end result of a gain or loss in jobs--in employment rate, really--is an adjustment of the labor force to either consume the available additional jobs or reduce the number of job-seekers. In other words: short- and long-term changes keep us around a certain stable employment rate (it's ~5% in