I know, why am I worried about protection at my age? I really don’t want to be labeled a protectionist, but I think there is a happy medium between raw free marketeering and highwall protectionism. My father worked as a laborer in a furniture warehouse in Laconia, NH. He was able to own a house and raise five kids pretty decently. You can’t do that anymore, and the reason is that the economy is no longer self-contained in the way that a good system or a good machine can be. Without some containment, it’s rather like trying to farm without scarecrows, on the theory that the hungry birds are part of the free market of the farm, or letting the irrigation go wherever it likes, without channels to keep it from seeking the lowest point of the field. Healthy systems have their boundaries.
Many thanks those of you who have wished me luck in my debate with Judd Gregg later this week. No, he didn’t agree to it because he’s running scared! I’m sure he isn’t too worried. We have a tradition of debates in New Hampshire (town halls and all that), and he is just honoring that tradition. If anybody’s teeth are chattering, they are mine, but, luckily, they are on my dresser table!
Excuse my absense from this blog, but I was in transit back from a speech at Cal Poly in California. I put up my speech at http://grannyd.com/speeches.php in case you need something to put you to sleep tonight.
My, the college kids are fantastic! The greatest thing about George Bush is that he has awakened and organized an entire generation. If they vote, he is history.
Speaking of history, does anyone care to compare the dollars involved with Teapot Dome with the dollars involved with Enron, Halliburton and all the other inside scandals in the current White House? Won’t history record this as the most corrupt administration in our history?
I realize this is a subject where debate wont solve the issue, but insinuating that the dishonesty of Enron and the business that Hailliburton pursues somehow has made this “the most corrupt administration in our history” is simply not accurate.
I also realize its advantageous politically to connect Halliburton’s contract with VP Cheney and the White House (just as it is to exploit the sexuality of Cheney’s daughter – shouldn’t Kerry have spoken about the family values exemplified by the former governor of NJ), but the fact of the matter is there is no connection. First, by giving Halliburton a no bid contract Cheney, his wife, his kids, cousins, brothers etc. stood to gain or lose $0. That Halliburton does more business does not mean Cheney is better compensated. The fact is that Cheney negotiated a deferred payment contract in 1998 (1997?) whereby he would receive a FIXED amount of money from Halliburton. Sure, if Halliburton went totally under (not going to happen) Cheney’s compensation might have been behind the priorities of creditors BUT Halliburton has insurance for exactly this situation, which makes this a moot point. I can hear you now saying, but they gave Halliburton a no bid contract for billions of dollars how is that fair, the White House surely must be involved somehow. Unfortunately, while that argument might seem attractive I’m guessing that you will retract your position once you are confronted with the FACT that the Clinton administration gave Halliburton no bids as well. In addition the Iraqi contract has been for Halliburton a financial nightmare. They may as well have bid on it because its likely that the low bid would have been more than what they are getting paid for their work. Their return is miserable when you compare it to other oil jobs in their industry. Moreover, I’m sure you are keenly aware of the size of the job that Halliburton has taken – how many other companies are large enough to handle the job? Any while it isnt relevant because I dont believe any corruption was going on, I’m sure you realize that the Clinton’s are larger shareholders of Halliburton than anyone in the Bush administration. The Halliburton comspiracy simply is counterfactual.
The problem with protectionism is that you have two choices: pick winners or protect everyone. If you pick winners and decide which industries will get targetted protection (which is what we currently have and are in the process of phasing out) then you end up with a few inefficient sectors of the economy that are effectively on welfare and will eventually suffer a hard crash when the rest of us decide to cut their lifeline. If you try to protect everyone through general tarriffs then you will raise the average wage and this money will end up getting spent on over-priced domestic goods, leaving you with little net gain except that the government takes a bigger tax bite on both ends. You buy yourself a little time but will end up weaker in the end for making this choice.
The upside to offshoring labor intensive industries is that you end up with companies like the “evil” Wal-mart, who can provide incredibly low-priced goods with a hyper-efficient distribution system. The modern-day equivalent to your father may have a hard time buying a house (or at least the payments will consume a larger portion of his paycheck) but he will be able to fill it with with more stuff. Kind of ironic really… the house is the ultimate in protected domestic goods, it is always produced using domestic labor and can’t be moved offshore…so why is it so expensive? It may suck right now to be a farmer, but the other 99% of the country enjoys a larger selection of fresh food that costs less than it used to.
BTW, there are still high-paying options out there for blue collar workers, just not working on the line. A precision machinist or tool and die expert who only has a high-school diploma can pull down more than a doctor, you just have to know that your education will not stop and that you need to constantly improve your skills and knowledge. This is the economy of the future, and wishing that it was otherwise is not going to change anything. The children of the future need to be prepared for a world in which China and India are no longer “third-world” economic basket-cases but serious players, to pretend otherwise will leave you on the long slow road to decline (see, for example, Europe…)
there is containment. it’s called the atmosphere. we’re all on the same planet. give it time. your dad was just ahead of the curve. that sort of life isn’t sustainable without thinking of the rest of the planet. one day every dad, in every country, will be able to support five kids with a labor job. Until then, it’s gonna ebb and flow. we’re just points on a timeline. give some, take some.
Since the last poster said most of what I was going to say, I will only add a couple of things. The most important is that while GrannyD’s example was a good one, it was one of a bygone era. Unskilled labor is going to disappear. This trend has been happening for most of this century, and it came to be painfully obvious in the 80s and 90s as factories became more automated and factory jobs became scarce. Many blamed it on offshoring, but the cause really was technology. Factory jobs are not going to be able to support buying a house anymore.
Prediction: Robots will replace people for all physical labor. Protectionism cannot impact that. If your factory job evaporates, you cannot blame it on India (or Japan as was done in the 70s).
However, this is a good thing. In the future, people will increasingly be doing brain intensive jobs. That is what people are best at. Yes, there are a lot of intelligent people in India and China (arguably many more than in the US), but jobs based on intelligence are without limit. There are always more ideas and more things that can be thought of. New ideas do not exhaust possibilites. They create new ones. As knowledge expands at an ever accelerating rate, the need for people to process this information will become greater and greater. Educated societies should always benefit from this.
Now, if someone could figure out a way to make the population of the US educated, the problem would be quite a way along the path to being solved.
The other point I was going to make is that the current protectionist policy is causing a brain drain that will likely result in the US economy being damaged or destroyed. Foreign students come to the US to learn at US universities, and then they are kicked out. Many of these are the best and brightest created by the US collegiate system. So, the government is actively exporting its knowledge to other countries. College graduates from India that want to work in the US cannot. So, where are the employers going to go? They are going to go where the brain power is. Would you not?
I’m actually not the minority viewpoint on this one. What new points can I make?
How about international law? I seem to remember the idea that, even if Bush didn’t agree to the treaties himself, we are required to follow some rule of law. The US is a signatory to the WTO, and is required to not engage in protectionist strategies.
Of course, there are ways to get around that. If you remember, the EU has a form of sales tax called “VAT” (most people say “VAT tax,” but guess what the “T” stands for). The middle of last year, the EU decided to start collecting VAT on any sales made to EU residents. That included sales from US companies made over the internet. Since each country has a different rate, compliance with this law (determining where the buyer is, charging the right rate) is pretty expensive. Somehow, EU companies can charge whatever their home country charges, no matter where the end-buyer is.
In the end, several small businesses stopped selling to Europeans. This was probably the EU’s intent, and the EU residents can find European businesses to provide the same books, TVs, and goods at a higher price. Of course, they are now squeezed for more money because of the protectionist policy, and there isn’t any more money in their pocket to pay that extra amount.
Some economies — such as China, Latin American countries, and African countries — can’t substitute domestic goods for foreign goods, so policies like this do much more harm than help to them (Dependency and Development in Latin America is a good book about this, but it’s incredibly slow reading [it was written in academic Spanish, and translated to ultra-academic English]).
In the end, protectionism doesn’t work well in today’s global economy. Even in the EU’s case, consumers have to pay more to prop up ineffecient manufacturing practices because of the protectionism, even if they don’t have more to pay.
And that’s just market forces. When any country (or bloc of countries) puts a protectionist strategy in place, other respond in kind.
Oops, that should be “Even in the EU�s case, consumers have to pay more to prop up ineffecient manufacturing practices because of the protectionism, even if they don�t have more money to pay with.”
Otherwise, it may not make much sense.
I agree that some degree of protectionism is good. Not much, mind you, but protectionism has the nice side effect of smoothing the bubbling cyclicity that generally accompanies exciting new investment opportunities. China managed its way out of the Southeast-Asian currency crisis in the late nineties by disallowing hot yuan trading, and the US can manage its way out of manufacturing shock by giving people the chance to train for new jobs when their old ones are going away. But it must happen, and the faster it happens the stronger our nation as a whole will be (human costs included); most protectionists seem to not understand the necessary conversion from factory worker to knowledge worker…
While I agree that “protectionism” doesn’t work long term, some forms are important. Some tarriffs to balance the playing field are important. There are 3 major reasons I know of at the moment.
The first is abuse of workers (“sweat shops”). The US has laws and regulations to ensure that people are not abused, that their work environments are safe (i.e. they won’t lose limbs), etc. Offshoring to countries that do not have civil rights protections can save a company money at the expense of exploiting workers means that companies that do not exploit workers pay more for labor.
The second is envinromental impact. This is similar to the above point in that companies can move operations to countries with lax envinromental laws, again punishing corporations that thing long term and do not sacrafice the health of everyone.
The third is a nascent industries. Competitive advantage isn’t a static ratio. By providing temporary (keyword:temporary) protection for newly forming industries in your country, to protect them from external competition by mature companies in another country, those industries have a chance to mature into globally competetive entities. However, without that initial protection, they would be wiped out before getting off the ground. Of course the key here is that the training wheels eventually need to come off. (Also, this one is more of a concern for developing countries, the US already has most of those “mature” industries.)
Fair Trade does not necessarily mean that a government has to decide industry by industry which we will protect and by how much. It could be as simple as merely refusing to trade with nations whose giovernments allow the exploitation of workers at less than family friendly wages. Perhaps to be a trading partner we would require a minimum wage in our partners that allow a family to maintain a hiome, educate their children, give parents time to guide their children and share their spiritual guidance, and provide universally available health care. They should not be allowed to use slave or prison workers at lower than minimum wages to produce traded goods, and they should meet standards of protecting the environment and be signers of the Kyoto protocols. And they should all be real democracies and guilty of no violations of international law, such as aggressive, preemptive laws that violate the UN Charter and are illegal. Of course, we could not trade with ourselves by these standards–which we also should adopt. If we don’t prod the world to justice, who will?
The point is that we can have free trade only with those who treat their people and our world with respect. And they
Tito made some good points. However, I’m not sure regulation is the right course.
Listing three examples of when protectionist tarrifs should be considered, Tito wrote:
Alternatively, boycotts of US-based companies (such as, say, Nike) have proven to have an effect. This is something of a market as well.
However, from my experience in Brazil (and what I can gather of China right now, and what I learned from Dependency and Development in Latin America), it appears that a healthy market by itself converges on ethical practices. It takes a while, but a shortage of labor eventually causes “pay” to go up. Sometimes unions play a role, sometimes public awareness does, sometimes China’s desire to bring in more investment requires it to take humane actions to reassure investors. That pay includes medical benefits, safe working conditions, actual wages, and other good things that happen when people are employed.
I couldn’t help but laugh when anti-environmentalists tried to get power plants built in Mexico as a way of fixing the fake power shortage that happened in California.
However, we Americans were smart enough to recognize the problem of environmental issues without any body else pointing it out to us. I think people all over the world have the chops needed to make their own decisions on this one.
Actually, in this case we agree. So long as the protectionist tarrifs are handled intelligently and side-effects are minimized (many important local industries may require good products that must be imported, so tarrifs must be well-targetted to avoid hurting those industries at the expense of others). As Tito said, this is more of an issue for developing countries.
The US economy is too complex for tarrifs to have fewer harmful side-effects than good side-effects. The tarrifs propping up the US steel industry are a good example. By propping up the price of raw (and partially-processed) steel, everything made in America with that higher-priced steel (such as cars, toys, highway girders, etc.) is at a competitive disadvantage against foriegn imports made with the lower-priced globally available steel.
Even in developing economies, protectionist practices can be risky. If the country decides to prop up the price of industrial machinery, for instance, several nascent industries that use that machinery might never be born.
Wait a minute! You can still work as a laborer and own a house like GrannyD’s father did ninety years ago. It will have three or four rooms and be homebuilt as hers probably was originally. You start with an outhouse and no electricity or plumbing. You use a wood stove to cook on. You make improvements as you have the time, money, and laborers(kids, five in her case) to do the work. You add the plumbing, the electricity, appliances and maybe a spare room. That’s how laborers did it ninety years ago and that’s still how laborers around the world do it today. Very little has changed in that regard.
Tommy said: :…insinuating that the dishonesty of Enron and the business that Hailliburton pursues somehow has made this �the most corrupt administration in our history� is simply not accurate.”
True, it is not the dishonesty of the corporations and executives who bought Bush and Cheney which make their mal-administration, “the most corrupt…in our country’s history.”
Rather, it is the dishonesty of the politicuians such corporations and executives have bought that makes those politicians’ mal-administration the most cor4rupt in history.
The fact that the Bush/Cheney owning oil barons want them to create as much shortage of oil as they can to encourage higher prices and higher profuits does not make Bush and Cheney’s the most corrupt administration in our country’s history. It is the fact that Bush and Cheney woukld go to war and sacrifice the lives of Americans to ensure that the WMD inspectors would not have a chance to certify Saddam free of WMDs and thus eligible to have oil for food sanctions removed, allowing him to flush oil over the world market, bringing oil down to the $10-$20 range (endangering the Texas and other oil barons), that is the crux of their perfidity and treason.
“My father worked as a laborer in a furniture warehouse in Laconia, NH. He was able to own a house and raise five kids pretty decently. You can�t do that anymore…”
Nobody has addressed her central premise. Her whole rambling about the free market vs. protectionism pivots on the above point. How about it?
Well, Jardinero, it looks like you already replied.
Then again, buying land is difficult in the US. Wait a minute, the “backwards” trade policies Bush has followed have led to more American homeowners than ever before. (Although, I must admit that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, VA loans and other programs aren’t quite “free market.”)
It is true that, given land, I can get a decent 1900s house up an running on a day laborer’s wage. It is even easier if I don’t have to pay for computers, phone systems, running water, etc. Some people will quickly say that early-1900s houses had electricity, running water, etc. While it is true that such systems were available, they weren’t common in the early 1900s.
Free market economics have made it possible for middle class Americans to have quite a bit that didn’t exist in Granny D’s nostalgic memory. However, that same market also requires today’s workers to know quite a bit more than yesterday’s workers had to. I’m not convinced that it’s a bad trade.
Jardinero 1 seems not to appreciate what he/she/it calls “rambling.” No doubt that poster did not even see, let alone enjoy, Granny D’s sexual inuendo regarding why she should worry about “protection” at her age. Lighten up, guy, gal or whatever! Granny D is a whole person, not a careful abstraction honed by the dial and focus groups that chart the image production of the corporations’ “professional politicians.”
You get what you see, and that’s what she is, a humorous, straightforward, brilliant New Englander, as colorful as the fall foilage lavished upon New Hampshire: much like Robert Frost.
Note how close her sentence above: “Healthy systems have their boundaries…” relates to “Mending Walls’: “Good fences make good neighbors.” And like him, behind that irionically wrong summary of reality lies her whole perception of the brotherhood of man as so interconnected that those boundaries are set where they do not hurt our neighbors nor keep us apart from them, but bring us together with only such limits as are essential for the good of all.
She is in the progressive tradition that arose in New England prior to the Civil War and would not allow her fellowman to be enslaved and exploited in the South under the false pretences to desiring “freedom” for the Southern States. Peoples and families carry on the insights of their communities. It doesn’t just take a villiage, but a whole heritage of wise perception and deep thought to make the likes of Granny D. So listen closely to the whispers from the past gathering to the force of lightning as she snaps at nonsense.
It’s bad if you’re one of the people that doesn’t have that knowledge. Forgotten in this whole debate is the bare fact that relatively few people have the aptitude, inclination, or desire to design, build and maintain an enterprise router or nuclear power plant. We’re all supposed to “just get over it” and join the new knowledge-worker world; well, what about those people who simply can’t? Are we supposed to IQ-sort the population from birth and somehow quietly dispose of those who don’t have the mental watts to cut it in our brave new world? That’s where we seem to be heading…
Lulu told a real lulu: “Prediction: Robots will replace people for all physical labor. Protectionism cannot impact that. “
That is what one expects to hear from economists and educated people who are not having to provide manual labor. While one must appreciate and properly reckon on the importance of education in the creation of many of the higher paying jobs–and must foster all the education possible to enable our citizens to compete for such jobs, to see only the people at the peaksof the economy as all ther is or will be is nonsense–especially at times like thers when it is precisely the vast availablilty of “cheap” exploited manual labor around the world that are the source of our economic woes.
True, to the extent we still are competitive in skills and creative brain-power, we can mitigate, and have been mitigating our disadvantages of seeking a decent life for all our citizens, both manual and skilled labor, we have clearly been approaching a future in which our society will be ripped further apart into classes
of the masses of uneducated manual servants and the few highly educated technologically proficient and educated offspring of similar parents.
We need to be fostering the growth of true democracies of worker around the world instead of these corporate charades in which those who pry on human desperation find the source of profi6ts in human misery. We should trade with no country that uses politicas, laws and courts to prevent workers from unionizing and gaining decent wages. As long as capitalists have countries where they can go to exploit workers more profitably, they will do so. We need to work through the UN to create a bill of workers’ rights that include minimum compensation of the workers and maximum compensation of the parasites.
I agree with Tito: protectionism is bad, jobs will move abroad, but we shouldn’t support sweat shops or environmental destruction and occasionally will want to protect nascent industries.
Max, you presume perfect information. In reality remembering that Nike and Walmart are evil is about the limit of most consumer’s willingness to spend time on memorizing factoids about labor and environmental conditions in far away places. I would argue that most Americans would prefer *not* to have their purchases support sweat shops and environmental destruction but the research task in determining, for example, how picking a Kyocera vs. a Samsung phone relates to those issues is too daunting a task. Much better then to simply restrict the importing of goods that were immorally produced. It’s in the United State’s interest to promote environmental protection, democracy and well-being by doing so. You know, 9/11, leader of the free world and all that jazz.
Foreign labor will still be cheaper so we’ll still see off-shoring. But: We won’t be giving a competitive advantage to those who do abroad what we have made illegal at home.
Max, you also seem to be arguing that simply by buying goods from companies that mistreat their workers and harm the environment we promote ethical worker treatment and environmental stewardship. I’m skeptical. Sometimes this debate devolves into the inane question of whether a worker is better off working in a sweatshop or starving without a job. Neither are acceptable. The US is a large enough world consumer that, like McDonalds, we can make producers follow ethical practices simply by demanding it. (I’m not a big McDonald’s fan but they have on occasion improved things in the meat industry).
Jardinero 1 drew an idyllic picture of “that�s still how laborers around the world do it today.” That reminded me of what is known as Socrates’ “City of Pigs” in the Republic. Unfortunately, even in the City of Pigs there was still sufficient leisure for the philosopher to think. But in the City of Pigs in the New World Order of corporate fascism, the workers are generally so exhausted by the long hours and the need to forage to survive, there is not even leisure except while dying in the throes of hunger and malnutrition for the unemployed. No, Jardinero, the exploited poor mnanual workers of this world upon whom our economies are still based like the ice beheath the sea under thebeautiful peaks of ice bergs, spend most of their waking hours seeking dinero or fishing polluted streams or whatever else they have to do to try to survive.
There is no such “idyllic” life with out-houses as you imagine, and no leisure for most of them to get the education or engage in the thought that would give them the chance to realize that their only hope is to rise up in violence of one sort or another when one pied piper or another comes along piping tunes about the salvation of their god or political movement. Only to the extent the educated and developed nations realize that there but for the grace of history go we, is there any chance to reign in the parasites of this earth who seek nothing more than maximum profits from the maximum expolitation a people will sustain before they go ballistic and resort to their only option, terroristic violence.
Those idyllic pictures of “happy” “darkies” on the banks of the Suwanee prior to the Civil War were taken from a distance that didn’t show the exhausted limbs lying in pain from 12 hours of slave labor, hoping to catch a catfish to supplement the starvation allotment of gruel provided for their minimal susenance. You who look at life from the distance of the safe ivory tower fail to see the pain being inflicted on people.
It is like the plane spotters who see a group of people fleeing a building in Baghdad during an assault against that position and who assume that those must be the guilty fleeing. So they blow them away by the dozens and then wonder why the Iraqi people resent us as they mourn their friends in the wedding party. Those who try to deal with questions from a distance without being in the midst of life of those they make claims about, make very foolish claims. So go shut your self in your outhouse and wait for some plane sent by some corporate power to blow you away, and then tell us how iddylic that life is.
“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep�s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word ‘liberty.’ �
�Abraham Lincoln
I love a good drubbing. I never suggested that there was anything idyllic about the existence I described. I only stated that such an existence was the norm, at the time, for a laborer and it still is today, if you want to be a laborer. GrannyD is the one who sees it as being raised “pretty decently”. Maybe, GrannyD could provide a bit more detail on what her families lifestyle was between say 1910 and 1920.
It sure isn’t easy to have a discussion when everyone has such long posts….
Ultimately government should accept the reality of the global marketplace and help get us through it. The problem I see with “fair trade” people is that they spend time in a futile effort to preserve jobs that will get harder and more costly to keep here. As an anxious (but successful) computer programmer – I could join an angry lobbying group to try to stop outsourcing to India. But instead, I am working really hard to find clever ways to adapt to the international marketplace. Why can’t my government do the same?
Max, the problem with letting each country decide it’s own environmental policies is the classic “tragedy of the commons”. Each country can give it’s own industry a boost by reducing or ignoring environmental regulations. Since there is no world government to step in (the classic “fix” for the commons issue), each country needs to influence its neighbors. (No, the UN isn’t even remotely a “world government”)
Perhaps I was too quick to accuse Granny D and supporters of protectionism. I do agree with moderation, although I’d rather err on the side of the market.
I loved quotes like edromar’s, which had the effect of comparing market supporters the Confederacy:
Rob made an error similar to my quick summation that Granny D would regulate the market away:
Luckily, there will always be jobs that require less intelligence than designing nuclear power plants.
Lorrin said:
If that’s the case, should our government “legislate morality” on consumers? If it’s not a big enough issue with the people making the purchase, why should the government get involved?
More to the point, about ten years ago laws banning net-caught tuna (because the nets were hazardous to dolphins) were ruled violations of international law. Laws permitting tuna caught in dolphin-friendly ways to be labeled as such, however, were enough to cut down on net-caught tuna.
Oh, and I picked Nike because of its recent close encounter with the Supreme Court because of a false advertising case regarding statements Nike made about its labor practices that the Court took up, befire deciding that the case wasn’t ready to be ruled on.
I’m arguing that as Mexico’s economy improves because of the NAFTA jobs that were sent south of the border, Mexican workers demand better pay, better working conditions, etc.
I am aware that ten years ago, a day’s salary in Brazil brought the average worker enough money to buy two pounds of meat. Now it buys four pounds. Is it up to US standards? No. Is it an improvement? Yes. Why? Because the people involved are savvy, intelligent, and look out for themselves. Are the Chinese any less intelligent, savvy, or interested in their own well-being?
I’m not sure this qualifies as a tragedy of the commons, but I see your point.
I haven’t traveled the world. However, something tells me people know how to negotiate pretty well. Again, I know Brazil has laws to prevent destruction of the rain forest, and works hard to enforce those laws. I know most African countries work hard to stop poaching. In these cases, I think we ought to see how we can help enforce those laws.
I also know that many countries can be enticed into having low environmental standards when they are trying to bring in businesses, but after a while people start to worry about the same things we worry about. They know how to speak up for themselves, so I’m not convinced that we have to speak up for them.
Sorry, the previous post was mine. I thought I had taken credit for it. …
Anyhow, for the record, I have no problem “legislating morality,” since nearly all laws are based on a sense of right and wrong (and it’s hardto find a better rationale for a law). I even support the ethics codes lawyers must follow, even though I don’t agree with the concepts of right and wrong that the ethics are based on.
However, I ususally prefer labeling products as compared to banning them. Label unhealthy foods, label indecent programming, label inappropriate movies, etc.
You sure about that, Max?
Yes, Rob, I am because that is how the market works. People will always exist that can’t design nuclear power plants, and so they will find things that they can do that people are willing to pay them for.
—quote—
. We have a tradition of debates in New Hampshire (town halls and all that), and he is just honoring that tradition. If anybody’s teeth are chattering, they are mine, but, luckily, they are on my dresser table!
—end quote—
I really needed a laugh today and this just got me. Been laughing for five minutes. Granny, If I lived in NH, you would have my vote just for that.
Thank you!