Moneyball, tax cuts and trade- the past should matter

It's 80 degrees and sunny where I am at, so I'm not,going to spending as much time as normal in dissecting the increasingly odd events and absurd spin coming from DC and Scott Walker's office.

But I am digging into Michael Lewis's Moneyball for the first time. Yes, I'm 15 years late on this, but it is intriguing to see how resistant the average "baseball guy" was to using data to back up or counteract what they were observing from scouting games. And how we have so much more information about the circumstances of when ceertaib events happen. For example, it's amazing to me that baseball GMs didn't track the count when a play happened, and whether it was better for a batter to have a 2-1 count vs 1-2, or if fly-ball pitchers struggled more in hitters parks.

And it struck me how the same thing happens in economics. For example, some people are so locked into supply-side trickle-down BS that they ignore all evidence of the last 40 years that revenue growth is never enough to make up for the tax cut, and that corporations are much more inclined to use profits to hoard profits and buy back stock instead of grow their business and pay higher wages. And we're seeing the same happen in 2018, as this article and numerous others in recent weeks show.

On the flip side, I don't want to see Dems reflexively become the party of "free trade" in light of Donald Trump's announcement of new tariffs on steel and aluminum. Just because Trump pulled out these tariffs with little clue about how other countries would react, likely to the detriment of American jobs and wages, it doesn't mean all trade restrictions should be lifted.

Because anyone who has seen what had happened to the blue-collar Midwest in the last 25 years can see that wages and jobs in manufacturing have declined, despite the fact that many of those products are in demand more than ever. And the gains from trade have been in the form of higher PROFITS, but not,necessarily a better life for many of us. Sure, we might have better trinkets to buy and use (I'm using one right now), but does that actually add any value TO WORK? Not very sure it does, for most of us outside of corporate boardrooms.

I could rant more, but I'd rather concentrate on these scenes for a while instead.