Yet Another Podcast Twin Spin
==> In Episode 78 of Contra Krugman, we talk about Krugman railing against the anti-reality Republicans. I am swamped with work so I have to be brief in my outline:
6:00 I remind people that it was progressive Democrats who started using the phrase “fake news” as a political weapon.
8:25 Tom explains that he was the target of a Two Minute Hate.
15:20 Tom is a softie and takes Krugman’s side, in his criticism of Trump taking credit for job numbers.
19:40 I point out Krugman’s hypocrisy when he says CBO is “scrupulous about avoiding partisanship.” Nope, that’s not what Krugman thought in June 2015 when they warned about the deficit.
23:15 I clarify the recent CBO’s report that 14 million people will lose health insurance under GOP plan. CBO itself says most of the increase would be due to repeal of the penalties under ObamaCare.
29:15 I note that CBO also says $210 billion of the forces increasing the deficit (due to repeal and replace) is due to loss of penalties from the employer/individual mandates. That’s shocking… the “affordable care” guaranteed by ACA was so bad that Americans would rather pay $210 billion in fines over a decade, rather than buy this coverage.
33:15 I zing Krugman’s idiosyncratic use of language whereby 2% of the population turns into a “handful” of people.
==> Episode 36 of the Lara-Murphy Show: I explain the basics of “tax reform” from the perspective of pro-market economists. I’m not necessarily endorsing all of these principles, but it’s relevant to the current political debates.
LMR Ep 36 plays OK for me now. Must be after the embargo has lifted. 🙂
In the case of Ep 36 it was pretty basic stuff, but lots of people like that so I’m not running you down or anything. I kind of half-listened while doing other work.
Would be excited to hear you debate Peter Schiff on the question of where BAT is going because you do a pretty good job of explaining the mainstream position and I think you at least partially agree with the idea that BAT should drive up the USD (arguable how much exactly). Schiff takes the exact opposite position on BAT and his theory is totally different even in principle to the mainstream. At bit seat-of-the-pants if you ask me be pretty convincing.
Then again, I’m always aware that Schiff is trying to sell gold, so it’s unlikely he would ever try to start cheering for the strength of the USD… but that doesn’t matter for debate purposes because in a year or two we get to find out who was right. It’ an honour thing.
Not sure how closely you get along with Schiff… maybe Tom can organize it or something, he seems to have good contacts.
Tel can you point me to a succinct statement of Schiff’s reasoning of why the USD would fall?
http://www.schiffradio.com/bat-will-clobber-dollar-ep-236/
BAT discussion starts around 11:00 approx. Same thing copies onto YouTube and a bunch of typical podcast distribution networks.
However, it isn’t written in a nice succinct statement, I can’t even find a transcript of the podcast. He wanders over various topics without using your traditional tight academic essay format.
Here’s a summary in my own words of Schiff’s arguments in relation to BAT :
Market Sentiment Argument
Markets are driven (at least in the short term) by confidence and by best effort anticipation of coming events. For example: market confidence was boosted by Trump’s election win and a belief that Trump will be good for business (ignoring any specific Trump policies) and this confidence was the leading indicator. Yellen and the Fed were able to follow the market confidence by raising rates in response to that (effectively taking advantage of the Trump euphoria while they had the chance, which is perfectly rational based on common beliefs about Yellen’s intended objectives).
Since a potential 25% increase in the USD is a massive incentive for speculators, if the mainstream economists were correct about BAT, you would expect markets to at least partially be anticipating this but when you look at options pricing there’s no sign of it. Thus, either the market does not generally believe that BAT will ever happen, or does not believe the effect of BAT will be significant (certainly nowhere near 25% gains), or possibly both. If the mainstream economists’ argument is so convincing you would expect some traders to at least be making a few bets in that direction.
Additional Factors Argument
The BAT does not operate in a vacuum, and the US has run for a long time at zero interest rates, which means the economy is not healthy. The US has also run mostly trade deficits for many decades and is running a big trade deficit right now. The Obama “recovery” was weak, GDP growth is marginal, jobs are moving to part time and not high quality jobs, Schiff does not expect the US economy to boom, he expects it is on the verge of a downturn.
Although the BAT might well reduce the US trade deficit (a good thing in general) this will not be sufficient to turn it around into a trade surplus, which is what would be required in order to cause big changes in the USD value. Foreigners already own massive USD equivalent assets (e.g. Treasuries) so they won’t feel under any pressure at any time soon… thus the supposed upward pressure on the USD won’t happen. Foreign asset holders are also entitled to interest payments, which makes this effect even worse.
Something for Nothing Argument
The government believes that the BAT will pull in nett revenue, and that’s true while there is a US trade deficit happening (subsidy to exports will be smaller than tax on imports; therefore tax will deliver a nett gain for government). Many people seem to believe that this revenue will come from nowhere, but that doesn’t make sense, somewhere someone must be left worse off. Thus, no economist should expect that BAT is really neutral, at least not until the trade deficit balances out completely and Schiff seems to believe that won’t happen.
Sort Term vs Long Term Argument
There’s no easy way for US purchasing habits to shift back to buying “Made In USA” products, because offshoring has resulted in so many factory closures that those products simply don’t exist anymore. The only option will be to buy fewer products overall, buy more second hand. Similarly there will be a long delay before the USA is ready to boost physical export production, even with subsidy from BAT. Thus, the volume of trade cannot shift in the direction that mainstream economists expect, given that the physical means to do that doesn’t even exist right now.
In the short term, higher prices will result in lower standard of living for Americans (needs to happen in order to bring the trade deficit under control). Also, less foreign capital investment will deflate current US asset prices and put upward pressure on interest rates (also needs to happen but painful for US economy). Great short-term pain for consumers, reduced GDP will drive the economy into recession for a while at least.
US assets are artificially high priced because of foreigners recycling their surplus dollars, there’s a big adjustment required here, which is being completely ignored by the mainstream economists. All the negative wealth effects of a large asset price correction will be imposed.
Easy to Bypass, and Unexpected Consequences Argument
Buying online from an offshore web shop means the imported goods go directly to the consumer (skip the tax), and with a 20% BAT you can be sure most people will want to do that. This creates a massive market distortion and will demolish the physical retail stores in the US (e.g. Walmart) but perhaps the online stores are doing that already, just with BAT it will happen a lot harder and faster.
Closing stores means reducing US employment in retail, often at the low end of the pay scale… drives down unskilled wages, bad jobs numbers, worse consumer sentiment, kicks on to the financial markets in terms of unpaid debts. Could be more business going bankrupt.
“I remind people that it was progressive Democrats who started using the phrase “fake news” as a political weapon.”
What was the story there? You describe an article in Nov. 2016 describing the phenomenon of fake news, not using it as a political weapon.
This sort of thing used to be called “yellow journalism” and was partly responsible for the Spanish American war of 1898.
However, in the context of the current situation, we must distinguish between the use of the term “fake news” and the fake news itself.
Fake news is not simply news you don’t like.
Whoever used it first as a political weapon, some things are quite clear.
1) There was lots of fake news during the election – that is stories that were simply not true but made up to get clicks.
2) Fake news appealing to Trump supporters was much more prevalent than anti Trump fake news in the election. This was not ideological on the part of the fake news creators, but financial as they got more clicks. This was not intended as a political weapon, but presumably served as such since Trump supporters believed the Pope had backed Trump, as one example.
3) Since then the term has been abused to mean other things. One of the main abusers has been Trump, as he claims many stories he does not like are “fake news”.
4) Other people may have abused the term as well, listing Woods site for “unknown” reasons.
Fake news is stories that are just made up, which have no evidence. Stories which have supporting evidence but are not yet proved or disproved are genuine news.
You say people are horrified at Trump for using the term fake news, well yes, because by applying it to genuine news he is lying. He is trying to de-ligitimise the fourth estate, as he tries to de-legitimize the judiciary by referring to judges as “so-called”. He is successful in this among a sizable minority of his supporters, who believe against the evidence that he is a reliable source of information. Because there is so much evidence against him as a reliable source of information, the only way he maintains credibility is by denouncing the actual reliable sources.
We expect higher standards of the President of the USA. We do not expect denial of reality and dismissal of facts as fake in order to perpetuate his lies.
Harold here’s an example of fake news. I could give more. Your naivete is touching.
Now I’m sure you will move the goal posts and say, “Oh, what I mean is that ‘fake news’ is when an organization reports something made up that it knows will hurt their political opponents, and then doesn’t make a correction after being caught.”
Wrong, that is not fake news, that is a journalist getting it wrong, making a mistake and then correcting it. There is a important difference. Fake news is where the author knows it is wrong and just makes it up. Journalists sometimes get it wrong, as in this case. I am surprised you think these things are the same.
When his mistake was pointed out he retracted within minutes “He then sent out more than a dozen tweets correcting the mistake and apologizing, including one directed to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who had called it “a reminder of the media danger of tweet first check facts later.”
That is not shifting the goalposts. That is playing a different game. Mistakes happen, but honorable people acknowledge them and apologise.
When have we seen apologies and retractions from Trump? We don’t. He repeats the original lie and refuses to issue corrections. Since the evidence against his pronouncements is so strong, the only way he can maintain the position is to discredit the purveyors of that evidence. Even going back decades, he has never retracted his lies about the central park 5. He still says they are guilty – no apology there even though 5 innocent people spent years in prison in part because of his intervention.
Your assumption about what I would say fake news is was not correct. Fake news is when the author makes something up, whether or not they have any political objective.
So Spicer referring to jobs figures “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.'” is very real news reporting a fake position.
What is your definition of fake news?
Harold wrote:
“Your assumption about what I would say fake news is was not correct. ”
Harold, you almost verbatim did what I predicted you would do. Onlookers should be amazed at my performance.
Also Harold, on one of Trump’s signature issues, he held a press conference saying Obama was born in the US. So you need to tweak your stance again; “Trump only admits he was wrong when it helps him politically!” Which is fine, but I’m just pointing out that even your latest stance is demonstrably wrong.
“Harold, you almost verbatim did what I predicted you would do. Onlookers should be amazed at my performance.”
Your example was not fake news. What is your definition?
It is not shifting the goalposts to stick to a sensible definition of word and phrases.
For example, had you said ” here is an example of lying”, then posted a link to Krugman saying the weather was nice when the sun was shining, it would not be much of an argument to say “you will shift the goalposts by saying that lying is where someone says something that is untrue” I think you can see that t would not be shifting the goalposts to point out that that was what lying was.
My definition of fake news differs in very important regards from your description since it has no requirement for expected political advantage (although it does not preclude this either), and it does not mention retraction. It could still be fake even if retracted.
But other than that it is a good definition.
You example was not fake news because it was believed to be correct by the journalist. That makes it wrong, not fake. It was corrected, which makes it corrected wrong news, which is exactly how things should work.
And please read the story you link to. “Trump sought to end his longstanding attempt to discredit the nation’s first African-American president with just a few sentences tacked on at the end as he unveiled his new hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.”
He did NOT hold a press conference to say that Obama was born in the USA, which is the clear implication of your phrasing. He tacked it on grudgingly in an announcement about something else, after 5 years.
Still no apology. And no apology or retraction for the central park 5.
So I will retract my “never” and replace it with “seldom”, or ” much, much less than he should”. I don’t think t affects the argument much.
““Trump only admits he was wrong when it helps him politically!””
The thing is, he doesn’t seem to do it when it helps him politically. Is it helpful to be a laughing stock about the size of his crowd? Or about Obama’s wiretap? Or about the central park 5? Or any of the other things he lies about? Maybe he needs to maintain his opinion about the guilt of the central park 5 to appease the racists among his supporters, but it seems to be driven by something other than political calculation. I don’t know what motivates Trump, but I know it is dangerous.
So back to the original point. There is such a thing as fake news. Pointing this out is not using it as a political weapon. Labeling things as fake news when they are genuine news (whether right or wrong) is a political weapon. Trump does more of that than anyone else. It is dangerous because it undermines the institutions that provide checks on power. Something I thought you would support.
I hope you get paid by team blue to carry all that water for them.
Where I come from blue is Conservative.
Where I come from blue is what we say you are in the face from shilling.
Bob, Harold didn’t want to shift the goalposts, but he was thwarted.
All recent evidence suggests so.
The Goalpost Society of America assures us that no goalposts were shifted in the making if the above comment.
Fake news.
Ya got me there. I looked it up and there is no such thing as the Goalpost Society of America.
New York Times: Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, MARK MAZZETTI and MATT APUZZO FEB. 14, 2017
OK, so the NYT can boldly and confidently claim Trump is making contact with “Da Wussians”, because their journalists have been given valuable inside information directly by government employees involved in surveillance and investigation. Got it.
New York Times Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT MARCH 4, 2017
So now we are supposed to believe there was no surveillance, no intercepts, no proof, and anyway this kind of thing just isn’t done. No evidence whatsoever. What was reported in the same paper two weeks earlier should best be forgotten about.
And the readers WILL forget, that’s the amazing thing. They just believe whatever they are told to believe this week and it doesn’t even bother them. History? Consistency? Logic? Whooosh!!
Care for a small gentleman’s wager on whether the NYT are going to apologize for either of the above articles?
Tel, there is a very big difference between proof and evidence.
Trump accused the last president of illegal acts not only without proof, but apparently without any evidence. This is quite serious as the president has a certain status to maintain. Accusing the previous incumbent of criminal acts is really serious as it undermines the dignity of the president, whether he is right or wrong.
The allegations of contact between Trump campaign people and Russia is not only supported by evidence but has caused people to resign. This is pretty close to fact.
What is not fact is that Trump colluded with Russia or if his team gave assurances to Russia or if Trump was aware of what his team were doing. That remains uncertain. What did the president know and when did he know it is a question not yet answered.
There is overwhelming evidence that trump team talked to Russia during the election and they lied about it.
You seem to be suggesting that Obama did actually authorize surveillance of Trump, something for which there is no evidence evidence even after the senate has looked for it.
I find it very interesting that an apparently intelligent person can see an equivalence between Trump’s totally baseless allegations of wiretapping and NYT evidence based reporting of links between Trump campaign and Russia.
I can only presume that you would dismiss Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation as baseless because it relied on anonymous sources?
There is a huge gulf between simply making stuff up and reporting genuine concerns for which you might not be able to reveal your sources. trump just makes stuff up, the NYT reports on genuine stories. They have nothing to apologize for, whereas Trump does.
The first NYT article is reporting that wiretapping did take place. If there’s no evidence for it… then ummm… why did they report this information?
Maybe you should spend a moment to pay attention to that the NYT are actually reporting there. I even bolded it for you… “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials”
What part of “Phone records and intercepted calls” do you find difficult?
The NYT themselves reported exactly the thing that Trump tweeted about and then the NYT went and said that Trump had no evidence. There’s no possible way to spell this out in more simple terms.
“The NYT themselves reported exactly the thing that Trump tweeted about and then the NYT went and said that Trump had no evidence.”
Tel, Trump did not say there had been phonetapping by someone sometime that caught up his teams conversations. He said Obama tapped him. “Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory.” See- IN TRUMP TOWER. He called Obama bad or sick for doing so. This was untrue – that did not happen.
The NYT article does not say that Trump was tapped. These were intercepts of Russians. If Trump’s team get caught up in perfectly legal intercepts of Russians that is a totally different thing than Obama tapping Trump Tower.
It is entirely obvious that these are totally different things. The NYT did not report the same thing that Trump tweeted at all. There’s no possible way to spell this out in more simple terms.
Let’s play Harold!
You say “that did not happen”. What proof have you it did not happen?
Regular readers will recognize my Harold ploy here.
Aww Harold is so cute. 🙂
Fake Craw!
It is great that I have an award and a game named for me here! Or maybe that is not the name of the game and I am the object being played. Anyway.
OK, lets play.
If I say something happened, I need some evidence to support that. For example, if I were to say that the president tapped my phone, I would need some supporting evidence to be taken seriously. Without evidence people would think I was a tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy nutter.
However, if I say something didn’t happen, then anyone suggesting otherwise would need some supporting evidence to say that it did. the burden of proof has shifted.
I did not fly to Alpha Centauri last night.
The list of things that did not happen is endless, and there are few reasons to doubt that nearly all the things that I might say didn’t happen, in fact didn’t happen.
Neither you nor I have proof that I did not fly to Alpha Centauri last night. Does that mean I did?
So when you say “you say “that did not happen”” then ask what proof I have, the shoe is really on the other foot. We need evidence for thing that did happen rather than thing that did not.
So when someone says the moon landings never happened, we need some evidence to counter that claim. When someone says the Pluto landings never happened we would need some evidence to counter that claim. There is plenty of evidence for the former, and none that I am aware of for the latter. So we can reasonable conclude that the moon landings were real but we have not landed on Pluto.
Putting this into the Trump context, we can reasonably conclude that Obama did not tap Trumps phones, as there is no evidence to support this. As we specified above, without evidence we assume that something did not happen, just like me flying to Alpha Centauri. We do not need proof that it did not happen. We can also reasonably conclude that Russian people were tapped, and some of Trumps team were intercepted in their conversations with these Russians. That is the conclusions the evidence we have so far supports.
It is a fun game, but I am not sure where it is going.
As Hayek explained on PBS in 1977, Keynesianism is Fake News and was always intended to be:
http://bobroddis.blogspot.com/2014/02/being-polite-to-keynesians.html
Just a quick aside. It s not a slam dunk that even if your party controls both houses and the presidency everything the president wants will be easy to pass. Healthcare or Guantanamo, it is possible for the president to be thwarted in his desires.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/14756/12-pieces-proof-msm-knew-obama-spied-trump-and-john-nolte
A whole bunch of examples where media first reported that surveillance was happening, and then later on decided to report there was no evidence whatsoever that any surveillance happened.
I’m sure Harold has an excellent explanation… along the lines of “Look over there!”
I do indeed have an excellent explanation. It is also very simple. This is where you go wrong.
“…decided to report there was no evidence whatsoever that any surveillance happened.”
Nobody reported that there was no evidence that any surveillance happened. That would be an absurd claim, and nobody made it.
The claim is that there is no evidence that Obama tapped Trump.
Oh the splitting hairs defense? One of Obama’s staff did it so that’s completely different to Obama doing it with his own hands, huh?
There’s this thing called “responsibility” and when you take a top job that responsibility comes along with the job. The fact that Obama plays golf all day does not make his responsibility go away. Anyhow, you can join a few dots here… if most of the major newspapers were reporting surveillance and there were reports circulating around Washington and Obama is getting morning briefings from the intelligence community every day, then Obama sure as heck knew what was going on.
As you said, there’s a difference between evidence and proof, and there’s no way to conclusively prove what’s inside Obama’s head, but the fundamental evidence that any President is well informed on matters of intelligence gathering is overwhelming. As the link above pointed out, Obama put through an executive order removing the need to protect people “incidentally” caught up in these activities. Chance of that convenient executive order just accidentally coinciding with a major media campaign against Trump involving leaked intelligence… pretty much zero.
So yeah, Obama sure was in on it, and in any case he should be held fully responsible because that was on the job description when he stepped into the office.
What is with Trump that people lose all ability to think?
This is not splitting hairs, it is saying the opposite. Are you Guilty? No I am innocent! Ah, the splitting hairs defence!
As far the evidence we have , nobody tapped Trump. Obama did not order anybody to do it. Nobody did it. It is a lie. Thus is not splitting hairs.
It is entirely appropriate for the FBI to investigate stuff and have surveillance on Russians in the USA. These all have to get a court order and are not authorised by Obama. There is nothing untoward in that. There is nothing that suggests Trump tower was tapped.
If Trump team call up a Russian that is being tapped, that is totally different from Trump himself being tapped. Trump called Obama bad and sick for something he did not do. An apology would be the least you would expect.
Instead we get the usual Trumpish adhesion to lie. For some reason that I do not understand, people still believe him! They accept his twisted explanations – Oh yeah, there was surveillance of Russians that some of my guys got caught up in – that means I was right to accuse the last President of illegal acts.
No it doesn’t, and I can’t understand why people accept this sort of nonsense. They are twisting every piece of evidence to breaking point to support an unsustainable position.
Another aside. Trump says drone strikes can be carried out by CIA instead of the army and be authorized at a much lower level. Under Obama the CIA gave the intelligence to the army, and the final decision was theirs. That means there is less transparency and fewer checks on use of deadly power. Why no outcry from Trump supporters that criticized Obama for drone strikes?
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article140616638.html
“Another aside. Trump says drone strikes can be carried out by CIA instead of the army and be authorized at a much lower level. Under Obama the CIA gave the intelligence to the army, and the final decision was theirs. That means there is less transparency and fewer checks on use of deadly power. Why no outcry from Trump supporters that criticized Obama for drone strikes?”
Who are the Trump supporters that criticized Obama for his drone bombing? Maybe if you pointe out a few I could look into it for you.
As far as libertarians who called out the drone bombing, I can tell you virtually all of them condemn Trump for the same thing. See, unlike people like you who bleed blue or red, I can say Obama is a disgusting monster for blowing up tons of innocent men, women, and children. And I can also say that Trump is a monster for the same thing. I don’t need to bend over backwards to make excuses for murderers.
Dan, you are right – many of those who are libertarians denounce both parties for this sort of action. Point taken. Can’t say I have seen much discussion on this, but I can’t say there hasn’t been either.
” unlike people like you who bleed blue or red”
Equally, I don’t think you will find many comments fro me praising the Democrats, so i think that accusation is a little wide of the mark.
OK, you are back to saying that the surveillance never happened, even when a bunch of newspapers were provided with details coming from the “never happened” surveillance and when those newspapers reported comments like:
So the NYT must have just made up that false news I guess? Or you believe that two parallel universes can simultaneously exist and you crossover from one to the other as it suits you?
Or you are saying that Obama didn’t personally order it, but instead someone working closely with Obama ordered it but we are supposed to pretend Obama somehow didn’t know and wasn’t involved even when it was Obama’s job to know about what was going on and he was updated every morning. I’m not buying that one, and I doubt anyone else would either.
Tel, I will put this very simply.
Trump’s team getting caught in surveillance of Russians is not the same as Obama tapping Trumps phone.
There is no evidence that Obama or anyone else tapped Trump’s phone.
I don’t know why this is so difficult for you.
It is entirely consistent that the NYT story is true AND that nobody tapped Trump’s phone.
So it’s back to the splitting hairs argument.
These two are not *exactly* the same, but pretty dang close. The end result is having Trump’s personal information available to his political opponents, and that’s the primary thing that matters. In effect they found a “back door” method of wiretapping because the FISA court rejected their direct attempts.
Also, Americans have the normal expectation of privacy (basic Fourth Amendment rights) and for a long time there was a procedure of “minimization” which was designed to protect such rights. This was the procedure that was changed at a convenient time to start leaking Trump information to the press.
Once again I point out that this is all explained in the article above. The relevant change was announced January 3, 2017 and is explained here:
https://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/155766682978/fact-sheet-on-eo-12333-raw-sigint-availability
Tel. One is an unconstitutional and illegal act allegedly perpetrated by the president.
The other is court sanctioned, legal and constitutional.
It takes a special sort of desire to see the difference as splitting hairs.
Now that’s some goalpost moving — from “didn’t happen” to “constitutional”.
Of course it is legal and constitutional for people to talk to the Russians, and it is a stretch to call the FISA court a court, and it would be illegal to use it under false pretenses or for domestic political gain, and the unmasking of names was contrary to the FISA statute, and …
Look, if my phone is tapped, that means the listeners can hear the conversations of everyone I call or calls me. Everyone. Whether it is to my mother or my friends or the local drug dealer.
If the authorities tap the phone of the local drug dealer and I phone him up, the listeners will get details only of my call to the drug dealer.
If I were to say the authorities tapped my phone because they have records of my call to the local drug dealer that would be totally inaccurate, and a lie if I were aware of the true situation.
If it went to court, I might offer a defense of illegal wiretapping to get the evidence thrown out, but that is a very different thing from claiming my phone was tapped.
You are offering something akin to the illegal wiretap defense to suggest the evidence is dodgy. Fine, there is discussion to be had about that point.
Trump said his phone was tapped. It was not. He has presented no evidence that it was.
So can we move on? Can we all agree that Trump’s claim was a lie, or a mistake, but has become a lie since he refused to retract it?
Once we have that simple thing established we can then discuss the legality or otherwise of the evidence gathered.
To avoid accusation of assuming the antecedent or similar, feel free to replace “local drug dealer” with “someone the authorities suspect of being a local drug dealer”
After all, these calls may be completely innocent.
It does not alter the argument.