Mr. Trump starts by torching a straw man—to wit, that critics were wrong to say tariffs would produce a recession. We can only speak for ourselves, but we never predicted that. We said tariffs are a tax that would hurt growth, but their overall impact would depend on whether tax reform and deregulation outweighed the tariff harm.
So far they have. Congressional Republicans last year spared the economy an enormous tax increase, and the Administration is taking aim at burdensome regulations. The artificial intelligence boom is boosting investment.
The question is: How much better would the economy be now without the tariffs and their on-again, off-again imposition? Prices on many goods would be lower, for one thing. Tariffs don’t cause general inflation, but they do raise relative prices. Mr. Trump says foreigners bear the costs of the import taxes. He claimed in his essay for us that researchers at Harvard had found that “foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S.” pay “at least 80% of tariff costs.”
We published that claim because readers should know that’s what the President believes, but the paper he cites says something different. In an updated version released after Mr. Trump wrote, the authors note that the “retail pass-through” of the tariffs has been 24%—a measure of the extent to which a given tariff rate feeds through to consumer prices, given that the cost of the good at the border is only one part of the final price. This pass-through rate is higher than under Mr. Trump’s 2018-19 China tariffs.
But that doesn’t tell the full picture of how the tariff cost is distributed. The Harvard economists note in the same paragraph that U.S. consumers are bearing up to 43% of the tariff burden, with U.S. companies absorbing most of the rest. That aligns with other research, such as a recent paper from Germany’s Kiel Institute that found Americans pay 96% of the cost of tariffs. Foreign exporters either pass on the full cost of the tariffs to their U.S. customers, or they ship smaller quantities of goods.
Americans pay one way or the other—via higher prices or less choice. Mr. Trump admitted as much when he said last year that tariffs mean Americans might have to buy fewer dolls for their children at Christmas.
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Higher tariff costs imperil the investments of which Mr. Trump is so proud. Volkswagen’s chief executive recently warned that his company may ditch plans for a new Audi plant in the U.S. You can’t blame him, when his supply chain would be vulnerable to willy-nilly tariffs.
Voters elected Mr. Trump to revive economic growth and tame inflation. His biggest successes have come despite his tariffs, not because of them. He isn’t going to repeal them. But if he froze them in place now and declared victory, he’d have a better chance of persuading Americans that he’s fulfilling his promise.
Trump’s tariffs are rupturing what has been one of the most efficient cross-border trade relationships in human history. He claims his tariffs have “created an American economic miracle” with low inflation and high economic growth. But Michigan, which the president carried in 2016 and 2024, is experiencing high unemployment, layoffs, inflation and deepening anxiety.
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Canada’s retaliatory tariffs have badly damaged the farming sector, a key element of Trump’s coalition. Canada was Michigan’s primary export market. Now its wheat exports are down 89 percent since 2024. Cherry exports are down 62 percent. Soybeans, mostly destined for China, are down 46 percent.
All this could hurt Republicans in November’s midterms. Michigan has open races for governor and Senate. The major GOP candidates have largely backed Trump’s “America First” trade policy as necessary for revitalizing the economy, despite intense short-term pain. Democrats have hammered Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, a former congressman, for seeming to dismiss the economic anxiety by saying, “The shoe is going to pinch every once in a while.”
Among Michigan voters surveyed, tariffs are about as popular as an Ohio State bumper sticker at an Ann Arbor tailgate. “Made in America” increasingly feels like “Taxed in Michigan.”
Sanjai Bhagat makes the case for capitalism over socialism. A slice:
The capitalist system provides individuals with powerful economic incentives to work and innovate; this contributes to and stimulates their economy. One of the major flaws of the socialist system is its complete disregard for human incentives — resulting in an ongoing and significant negative impact on their economy, and more importantly, on the lives of their citizens.
George Will wisely warns: “The national debt is nearing $39 trillion. Dire consequences are coming.” Two slices:
In 2016, a budget expert was allotted 20 minutes to brief Donald Trump on those possible consequences. After five minutes, Trump said, “Yeah, but I’ll be gone.” He was perfectly in sync with the political mainstream he professes to supplant.
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The most probable, and most ominous, outcome would be a gradual crisis. In 2021, debt service consumed less than 10 percent of federal revenue. In 2025: 18 percent. By being gradual, a protracted crisis would mean a demoralized nation slowly accommodating perpetual economic sluggishness, waning investments in research and development, social stagnation, diminished contribution from the entrepreneurial energies of talented immigrants, and waning U.S. geopolitical influence.
A gradual crisis would be anesthetizing, rather than an action-forcing, cymbal-crash event that could stimulate recuperative reforms of U.S. political culture. Instead, this culture would become more toxic. Political power would be fought for, and wielded, with the desperate ruthlessness of a zero-sum competition in which one faction’s gains must equal other factions’ losses.
So, government would simultaneously become more powerful, more divisive and less legitimate. The currency is how everyone meets the government every day through the unstated — because presumably obvious — government promise that the currency it issues is trustworthy.
Nothing unsettles a middle-class nation more rapidly than inflation, a component of all of these crises. By it, people are reminded daily that the currency is failing as a store of value. This unnerves the public as much as crime, today’s deportation mayhem and other disorders. Inflation is disorder. Its quiet ubiquity is especially sinister, making everyone feel powerless.
“Dystopian” is the antonym of “utopian.” “Utopia” was derived from Greek roots to denote something imaginary — “nowhere.” The dystopian consequences of U.S. debt could someday be everywhere.
Reno is vague and euphemistic in exactly how he wishes to present Wilson as a role model other than to promote a general sentiment in favor of strongman government. We need “solidarity,” he writes, and “our history has . . . been marked by periods during which illiberal methods were employed to renew and buttress solidarity,” a process in which “Woodrow Wilson played a central role.” Wilson and FDR “sought to renew American solidarity, which required taming and restraining certain kinds of freedom, especially freedom of contract. (Roosevelt intimidated the Supreme Court to secure the overturning of Lochner.) In a word, Wilson and FDR administered strong doses of illiberalism.” This is, in unspecified ways, a good thing because the past gave us the present, and this makes it good.
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More to the point, Wilson and FDR changed the American constitutional system less by formal amendment than by usurpations that the judiciary and Congress either connived in or were cowed into accepting. The vast administrative state, the great expansion of federal power, and the shriveling of basic economic liberties against the federal leviathan resulted in a government that would have been shocking to the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution. By the end of the era of Wilson and FDR, the country was unrecognizable in many ways, and many American traditions were put to rout. To imitate this is a species of envy utterly unmoored from the sense of responsibility that we ought to feel toward what we leave to our posterity.
Barry Brownstein decries “theocrats, socialists, and the totalitarian impulse to plan.”
Jack Nicastro is correct: “The private sector handles hunger better than Mamdani could.”
Politicians routinely insult their fellow citizens’ intelligence. Here’s a recent example tweeted by Jonah Goldberg: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Trump in NBC News interview: “we have record low crime in the United States. Nobody has been able to say that for 125 years.” I ask everybody: What does that mean?
Most complaints about immigration are declarative: “Immigrants take our jobs.” “Immigrants abuse the welfare state.” “Immigrants won’t learn English.’ “Immigrants will vote for Sharia.” One complaint, however, is usually phrased as a question: “But don’t people have a right to their culture?” When people so inquire, their tone is usually conciliatory, as if to say, “Surely, even you will accept this.” My considered judgment, however, is that this challenge is a true Trojan Horse. No one, no one, has “a right to their culture.”
The perpetuity of self-government depends on the sound political sense of the people, and sound political sense is a matter of habit and practice. We can give it up and we can take instead pomp and glory.
In a growing economy there is more pie to go around – enabling everyone to have a bigger slice and without the interference of government redistribution programs.
International trade, especially, tends to expose cultures to new ways of doing things and breaks down the perception that only one way is possible, even in non-economic areas like politics, art and religion.
