Wally Nunn: Lies, damned lies, and the Inquirer.

Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer editorial began with this sentence: “As expected, Donald Trump’s address to Congress was littered with lies.”

Sunday’s Inquirer editorial was littered with — well, let’s not be like them. We’ll just call them arguable positions. But some of these arguments are quite a stretch. In their unbridled hatred of Trump they have given up any pretensions of being journalists.

What is more surprising, they have apparently sided with Wall Street capitalists and show more concern to the Dow Jones Industrial Average than they do for millions of Americans who have lost their jobs to unfair trade. I think it’s fair to speculate that the editorial board may be influenced by the fact that their income depends on a large stock portfolio left by a local billionaire. Yes, without the Lenfest Foundation the Inquirer would probably have to shut its doors.

“The middle class will be weakened, manufacturing will be less competitive, and the mighty tech industry’s innovation will be stunted.” So say the economic seers that populate the Editorial Board. Here is something to think about: the top ten percent of the population have 50 percent of the consumption. The middle and working class can’t get much weaker.

An auto worker in Mexico is paid $5 an hour. In Detroit, it’s $33 an hour. Do they really think a tariff trying to level that disparity will make us less competitive than we already are? They mention the hit to agriculture and mention Mexico as a major consumer of our products but don’t mention that Canada has quotas and tariffs on our products. Canada restricts importation of milk — yes, the dairy farmers they talk about produce milk, and any amount over the quota has a 250 percent tariff.

“Less than 1% of the fentanyl entering the United States comes from Canada, while the majority comes from China.” Let’s not, as the Inquirer’s Editorial Board did, call this a lie. Let’s just say they decided to selectively leave out a few words. Most of the fentanyl is produced in Mexico, often using ingredients sourced from China. Why did they leave that inconvenient fact out? They certainly did not mean to lie, did they? They are insistent on investigating the root causes of nearly any problem except this one.

“During Trump’s previous term, he imposed tariffs on China that devastated the soybean industry…” Really ? How do you explain these “facts”?

In 2015 the final year of Obama’s term the United States exported $18.9 billion worth of soybeans. In 2020 the final year of Trump’s term the United States exported $25.7 billion worth of soybeans. Devastation? Hardly. 

So I ask the Inquirer’s editors: would you like to revise the editorial? We wouldn’t want anyone to characterize your paper as being “littered with lies.”

Wally Nunn is the former Chairman of Delaware County Council.