Lee Elci: A lot going on in the world as always. Anything new you need to report to all of us?
Red Jahncke: Let’s key off of what you just said. A lot is going on in the world, and we’ve been talking about a lot. What we do have coming up next, I suppose, is August 1st, which is tariff day.
Lee Elci: Tariff day.
Red Jahncke: Not too long from now, a week.
Lee Elci: Right. And so what happens specifically and what changes on tariff day? Tell everybody what the difference is on tariff day. What are we looking at?
Red Jahncke: Well, the difference is, in April, President Trump declared Liberation Day. And then pulled the punch and rescheduled it for August 1st. So, this is when all the reciprocal tariffs come into effect. Right. We’ll see what happens actually.
So we, we talked about tariffs: what’s gone unnoticed – largely unnoticed in the national debate – is tariff revenue to date. If you take June’s number. It annualizes to $3.2 trillion over the next decade – completely offsetting the cost of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Lee Elci: Right?
Red Jahncke: So the president has a plan. He’s been criticized for one part of it [OBBB], and everybody’s ignoring the other part. The other part, of course, is under development. The Big Beautiful Bill has been passed. It’s law. Now we’ll we’ll see where we go with tariffs.
Lee Elci: Well, let me ask you, you know, the Big Beautiful Bill in the how, you know, it’s supposed to be three plus trillion dollars adds – maybe even $4 trillion, but let’s say 2028 comes rolling around and the Republicans lose the the presidency. Tariffs are probably likely gone. But how does that affect the Big Beautiful Bill? I mean I’m assuming some of the Big Beautiful Bill is locked and loaded and can’t be altered. Right. So and that would change the dynamic there too. Right.
Red Jahncke: Well, if the Democrats want to roll back the Big Beautiful Bill, they’ll have to raise taxes. It’s what they do, right?
Lee Elci: I, well, I guess I’m just curious as to how the if you’ve looked at the Bill itself and whether or not some of the aspects of the Big Beautiful Bill extend beyond Trump’s presidency, because the tariff deal would go, right.
Red Jahncke: Not sure that the tariffs would not extend. What are the Democrats going to do to replace that revenue? So, I think these policies have legs and will remain in place.
Lee Elci: Okay. Red Jahncke is with us. As I said, the-red-line.com is where you can read all the great things that he writes. It’s not just local papers. He writes for, again, the Wall Street Journal. He’s on, a bunch of other different websites as well.
So, August 1st will come and we’ll see what happens. You wanted to get into Gaza – 22 months in Gaza, and it’s been completely destroyed. And I know, you know, you probably had a little bit of a different view of this than most folks in the beginning were. Yeah, as far as Gaza and Israel right now.
Red Jahncke: What should be noted is simply that it’s still going on. Gaza is still being pulverized. It is like any sensational news item. Eventually it drops off the radar screen. So I think it’s worth just acknowledging that the war goes on. It goes on as destructively and with, the same mounting number of casualties as when everybody was taken with what was going on. It’s still going on. And starvation has hit. The big story of this past week was 25 Gazans were reported to have died of starvation.
Lee Elci: And they are trying to dump the humanitarian aid in there, but apparently Hamas is stealing some of that or most of that food. Right. I what have you seen with that?
Red Jahncke: Well, you’re not going to eliminate Hamas grabbing a portion of the aid. The aid is sustaining life in Gaza. It seems like Hamas taking a portion of it is like declaring the sky blue. And yet, the Israelis think that they should not allow Hamas the opportunity to grab any aid because it serves to sustain their troops. But the real bottom line is starvation is now taking hold in Gaza.
Lee Elci: Switching to the other heavy war front, we’ve got the action still happening in Ukraine. Right. So, we’ve got a little bit of a 180 from our president who, when he took off office, it seemed like he wasn’t going to help out the Ukrainians at all. And now, because him and Putin have had a little bit of a spat, looks like we’re we’re rearming them. So any thoughts on that?
Red Jahncke: Yeah, I think Trump’s policy is more consistent than you, in your comments, might give him credit for. And certainly critics are not going to give him credit. He has said we’re not going to continue paying for the war. And he crafted a deal where NATO members are buying US armaments, and they are sending them to Ukraine. So we are arming Ukraine, but the Europeans are paying for it.
It goes back, if you will, to the, Gulf War, where Bush One prosecuted that war in a way that I think was certainly historic in 2020 hindsight. It was a marvelously well executed foreign policy action. He took out Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, as we remember, in 100 hours. Then he said, job’s done. He didn’t allow mission creep to, to occur. He said our mission was to throw them out of Kuwait, which, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis had invaded. Job was done in 100 hours. Saudi Arabia paid for that. Americans did not pay one dime for the Gulf War. And we had a true international coalition. It was not just our troops.
So, Donald Trump is not doing something too far different from that. He’s got NATO, many nations in NATO, paying for the arms and sending them to Ukraine. So that’s one thing.
The other thing about Ukraine is this amazing transformation of warfare. There was an article, that I read, in the past couple of days about this drone warfare. And the battlefield has just changed. Drones rule the day.
Lee Elci: They really do. And it’s funny. Early on I had some folks who have lived over in Ukraine and, had a much better feel than I ever could of what’s going on over there. And they were actually telling us that this whole war will be fought with drones. And I sort of rolled my eyes and said, that seems like it’s impossible. I mean, what are you going to do against the the mighty Russian army with those homemade drones? But you’re 100% right. It is the new sort of warfare and America certainly getting in on it as well. So, it’s interesting to watch that and see it.
All right. Before we run out of time, two other topics we got to cover. And you’ve been covering the Medicaid. Actually, I think it’s you who actually broke the Medicaid scandal story, and you should get credit for that. But, what’s the latest with Medicaid?
Red Jahncke: Well, I think the big question for the state of Connecticut is who is the neediest group? Medicaid beneficiaries or state employees. State employees are demanding hundreds of millions of raises from Governor Lamont. We’ve been reading about one bargaining unit after another, declaring an impasse and demanding to go to arbitration. At the same time, the Democrats’ hair is on fire, that these massive cuts are coming down from Washington.
Lee Elci: Right.
Red Jahncke: And this is really just a reversion of the program back to its original form, which is a federal-state partnership. Under Obamacare and even further during Covid, Uncle Sam paid $0.90 on the dollar for the program. The program was launched as a 50-50 funding share between states and the federal government, and the Big Beautiful Bill just shifts the responsibility back to the original scheme. And if, Connecticut wants to have a program for illegal immigrants, the state’s going to have to pay more for it.
Lee Elci: All right. Red Jahncke is with us. Red. We’re going to run out of time, but in your Harvard days, were you, were you cranking out Ozzie on the Harvard campus? We were listening to a lot of heavy metal.
Red Jahncke: I never liked heavy metal. Not—
Lee Elci: [laughing] I was—
Red Jahncke: Not in those days. Not in even a few hours. I don’t think I played a nanosecond of heavy, heavy metal.
Lee Elci: All right, the-red-line.com is how you can find Red. Red, I got to go. I’m out of time. But I’ll talk to you next week.
Red Jahncke: Sounds good, Lee. Take care.
Red Jahncke is a nationally recognized columnist, who writes about politics and policy. His columns appear in numerous national publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, USA Today, The Hill, Issues & Insights and National Review as well as many Connecticut newspapers.