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The fallacies of protectionism know no bounds.

Mr. F__:

Thanks for sending along Glenn Beck’s recent remarks on trade and tariffs. I’m afraid I don’t share your admiration of what you describe as “his unanswerable defense of tariffs.” Here are answers to three of the most confused parts of Beck’s peroration on trade and tariffs.

First, he’s mistaken about trade allegedly “hollowing out” America’s industrial economy and middle class. It’s done no such thing.

Second, he’s mistaken that America’s industrialization in the 19^th century was fueled by protective tariffs. The great trade economist Doug Irwin debunked this myth in a famous paper in which he reports that those sectors of the 19^th-century American economy that grew fastest were sectors unprotected by tariffs. Irwin further discovered that, in his words, “tariffs may have discouraged capital accumulation by raising the price of imported capital goods.”

Along these same lines, Phil Gramm and I found that 19^th-century U.S. economic growth, as we put it in our book, “was strongest in periods when average tariffs were falling, not rising.”*

Third, and perhaps most egregiously, Beck is mistaken that free trade was good for the U.S. in the few decades after WWII because, while America’s industrial base was unscathed by the war, that of most of the rest of the world lay in ruins. By extension, he also believes that free trade today works much less well for us because we no longer, in his words, “own the market.”

While perhaps superficially plausible, the substance of this argument is deeply flawed.

It’s true that American industry, unlike foreign industry, was unscathed by the war, but it’s untrue that this situation was advantageous for us Americans. We produce only to receive real goods and services in exchange. When our trading partners are unproductive, they have relatively little to exchange. In that situation we might well, as we did just after the war, produce a larger share of global exports, but the absolute amounts that we sold in foreign markets were less than these amounts would have been were foreigners more productive – that is, our exports were fewer than these would have been had foreigners been able to offer us more and better outputs in exchange.

If you doubt this reality, suppose that the war had so devastated foreign economies that to this day the only things of value they can produce are kitchen matches and cheap socks. We Americans would indeed still “own the market,” but would we be richer than we actually are today? Would our economic prospects rise if foreigners suddenly lost their ability to efficiently produce and sell the likes of high-quality wine, aluminum, clothing, consumer electronics, and machine tools, and were reduced to producing only matches and socks? Clearly not – yet Beck’s argument leads to the opposite conclusion.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Beck’s argument implies that he’d be far richer than he is if every other person on earth were completely unskilled and denied access to all but the most rudimentary hand tools. He would own the market! Surely, though, you see that in such a poor world he’d be destitute even if he himself possessed the skill and genius of Leonardo along with a large workshop full of the most advanced capital goods.

Beck has matters backwards. Free trade is more advantageous to us the more productive are foreign economies.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, The Triumph of Economic Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), page 110.

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GMU Econ alum David Hebert, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, decries the distrust and uncertainty that Trump’s wild tariffing has done to Americans’ ability to trade profitably with non-Americans. Two slices:

While trade policy debates fixate on tariff rates and who pays, companies around the world are rerouting capital and effort to bypass the most unpredictable major economy on earth. Are tariffs here for the long haul or a fleeting fancy? Will exemptions be honored going forward? Business and political leaders around the world have to ponder these questions because a factory that takes years to build and pay for can’t be packed up and moved every time the White House discovers a new grievance.

Coercive diplomacy might produce the occasional headline-grabbing concession. But leverage decreases when partners have alternatives. India’s deal with Europe was a direct response to U.S. tariffs on India whipsawing from 26% to 50% and finally back to 18% in less than a year. Europe’s regulatory machine is slow and bureaucratic, but for long-term decisions, slow and predictable is preferable to fast and erratic. When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney refers to China as “more predictable” than the U.S., it’s a sign that something has gone deeply wrong with U.S. trade policy.

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The world isn’t deglobalizing. It’s reglobalizing around partners who commit to rules rather than those who wield tariffs like a club. The long-term cost of these tariffs isn’t measured in revenue collected. It’s measured in partnerships formed without us and the rise of a trading system that no longer needs U.S. participation to function.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, identifies four key myths that fuel Trump’s latest push for tariffs. A slice:

Tariffs don’t conjure consumer demand out of thin air. Americans were buying plenty of washing machines, clothing, and steel before the tariffs. What changes is where some things are made. Production shifts from foreign manufacturers with efficiency or cost advantages to more expensive domestic manufacturers. American producers stand to gain, except when they must pay tariffs to import the materials they need (as is often the case).

But everyone who buys the product pays more. The extra $100 a family spends on a washing machine won’t instead be spent at the restaurant next door, the repair shop, or the shoe store. Real wages—what your paycheck actually buys—fall when the prices of most things rise.

Second is the zero-sum argument: Making China worse off automatically makes Americans better off. This is not how economics works outside of campaign rallies.

Trade is not a game in which one side’s loss is the other’s gain. When Americans buy less from China, it’s true, some of our overseas business competitors lose revenue. But what about the American households losing access to cheaper goods? Or the American producers losing access to cheaper materials and ingredients that make them more competitive?

Here’s Hannes Gissurarson on why nationalists should support globalization.

Eric Boehm asks if the Trump administration will refund the tariff revenues that it illegally seized.

Also critical of the Trump administration’s resistance to repaying the government’s ill-gotten tariff gains are Scott Lincicome, Nathan Miller, and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless today does – need explaining: Government-run grocery stores will fail to improve the lives of their customers. Two slices:

The economics of public stores are fraught. By lowering prices below the market rate, stores struggle to fulfill surging demand and shortages become inevitable. That was the case at Kansas City’s Sun Fresh Market, which closed last year after wasting $18 million of taxpayer money.

Sourcing and stocking perishable food products is a complex business with notoriously thin profit margins. Despite claims by progressives that grocery stores price-gouge, profit margins usually fall between 1 to 3 percent. Partly that is due to shoplifting. Finding good real estate will also be costly in a city with scarce availability. (Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.)

Promising free stuff sounded nice on the campaign trail, but someone needs to pay for it. When his predecessor tried to trim spending on libraries, Mamdani called it “cruel.” Now that he’s in charge, his preliminary budget plan calls for nearly $30 million in library cuts. Those and many other cuts are probably necessary to get the bloated city budget on a more sustainable footing.

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The mayor has said before that his grocery idea would be “political experimentation.” But as the Big Apple faces a $5.4 billion budget shortfall and Mamdani threatens a 9.5 percent hike in property taxes, it’s foolish to spend money studying a foregone conclusion.

Iain Murray warns against the attempt by Western European governments to export their dirigiste economic interventions.

Jeffrey Miron debunks the economic fallacy – one peddled by progressives and MAGA-types alike – that the American economy will be strengthened by government prohibitions of stock buybacks.

Robby Soave is correct: “Libertarians should be wary about releasing the Epstein files.”

Bob Graboyes responds to some of his readers.

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… is from page 161 of David Schmidtz’s wisdom-packed 2023 book, Living Together [original emphasis]:

Many critics of CBA [cost-benefit analysis] seem driven by a gut feeling that CBA is heartless. They think that by denouncing CBA, they take a stand against heartlessness. In truth, weighing a proposal’s costs and benefits does not make you a bad person. What makes you a bad person is ignoring costs – costs you impose on others. Problems arise not when regulators take costs and benefits into account, but when they neglect to do so.

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Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV)
Washington, DC

Mr. Moore:

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, you assert that, because of free trade, the people of your district spent the past 40 years “watching factories close, jobs disappear and communities hollow out.” And you find in Pres. Trump’s protectionism a means of “bringing honest, blue-collar jobs back to the heartland.”

The economist Jeremy Horpedahl looked at the ten metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. that suffered the largest negative hits during the “China Shock” of a quarter-century ago. No region in your district is among these ten. But each of these ten MSAs is today significantly better off economically than it was before the “China Shock.” It’s a good bet that the same is true for your Congressional district.

While I have no data on your district alone, data for West Virginia at large show that inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings for West Virginians are today (2024) about 14% higher than in 2001. You might protest that this gain is too small, but a gain it nevertheless is and, thus, is inconsistent with your tale of terrible woe.*

A final point: the jobs and wages protected by tariffs aren’t “honest”; they’re dishonest. Those jobs and wages exist only because government denies to other Americans the opportunity to spend their incomes as they judge best. Every job protected by tariffs is matched by a job destroyed by tariffs. Every American business that exists or expands as a consequence of tariffs does so only because other American businesses disappear or shrink as a consequence of those same tariffs. And every cent of higher wages and profits made possible by tariffs is more than offset by reduced wages and profits elsewhere in our economy.

The gains of those who benefit from protectionism are no more “honest” than are the gains of those who benefit from robbery.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* I made this calculation using these three sources: here, here, and here.

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GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt ponders the ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump. A slice:

The IEEPA tariffs were bad because they were unconstitutional, but they were also bad politically and economically. They were incapable of achieving their stated ends, they fostered graft and corruption, created uncertainty, were based on the faulty notion that trade deficits are bad, put a regressive tax on ordinary Americans, drove a wedge between our America and her allies, and slowed economic growth. Removing these tariffs will bring more life, order, and growth to the American economy.

Also exploring the implications of the Learning Resources ruling is John O. McGinnis.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer asks: “How will Trump’s new 15 percent tariff fare in court?” Here’s his conclusion:

Finally, Section 122 reads in part that limited, temporary import restrictions can be employed “to cooperate with other countries in correcting an international balance-of-payments disequilibrium.” There is no such ongoing international cooperation.

My PIIE colleague Alan Wm. Wolff wrote recently about the major limitations of Section 122 and other statutes (Sections 338, 122, 232, and 301) that Trump will likely use as authority for new tariffs. The Supreme Court’s ruling implies that Trump will face serious legal challenges as he invokes these  statutes as instruments to raise substantial revenue through tariffs, rather than as instruments to address specific foreign practices.

Phil Magness shares evidence from the U.S. Senate report on the Trade Act of 1974 that Congress then understood that a trade deficit is not the same thing as a balance-of-payments deficit.

Tarnell Brown reflects on “executive overreach, trade law, and the challenge of accountability over time.”

David Hebert argues that, despite the applause-worthy ruling in Learning Resources, “the damage of tariffs has already been done, and it is continuing to be done.” A slice:

Trade is not just about transactions. It’s about relationships and trust built and earned over time. This establishes that trading partners will play by agreed-upon rules and that market access is not a bargaining chip to be leveraged whenever one side, in this case Washington, needs a political victory.

Adam Smith understood this. He knew that the wealth of nations wasn’t built on clever tariff schedules or trying to hold the rest of the world hostage. It’s built on expanding the division of labor, broadening the extent of the market, and enabling man’s propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange.” All these things are made possible by stable rules and predictable networks of exchange. Smith understood that tariffs altered these incentives, but even he may have underappreciated the role of trust in international trade, how quickly it can be eroded, and what happens when it is.

Rather than breathing a sigh of relief after the Court’s ruling, the rest of the world is getting further confirmation that this administration, and by extension the United States of America, is no longer trustworthy. The first trade deals of 2026 have included deals meant to limit the damage that can be done by the turn away from trade by the United States. Canada and China announced a “trade reset,” with the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, referring to China as “more predictable” than the United States. When China, of all places, is viewed as more predictable than the US, something has gone very, very wrong.

“Trump’s tariffs have not shifted the trade deficit” – so reports Timothy Taylor.

GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia makes clear that “America can’t tariff its way out of this debt crisis.”

And – as explained by Dominik Lett – nor will the U.S. government’s obscenely large budget deficits be eliminated by the ‘war on fraud.’

Jeremy Horpedahl again busts the zombie myth that the real incomes of American families haven’t increased substantially over the past few decades. Here’s his conclusion:

The gains in real median household or family income since the 1970s are not being distorted in any major way. Total hours of work didn’t double in the household — they increased modestly, by about 12 percent at the mean and 39 percent at the median. And this increase stopped after the Boomer generation (roughly in the mid-1990s). Furthermore, we can adjust household income for these increases, whereby we see a rise of 26-38 percent, not a fall of 40-50 percent as Mr. Tucker claims.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Roland Fryer makes a powerful case that, as he puts it, “the social harms of drug use are dwarfed by the social harms of prohibition.” A slice:

In a 2013 study with Paul Heaton, Steven Levitt and Kevin Murphy, I measured what crack cocaine did to black communities in the 1980s and ’90s. With the rise of crack, homicide rates doubled among black males 14 to 17 while fetal deaths among blacks sharply increased. Yet even as crack use persisted at 60% to 75% of its peak level through 2000, the violence almost disappeared. The initial violence was driven not by drug use but by the struggle to establish property rights in illegal markets. Once those rights were established and crack prices fell, the violence subsided. The carnage of the crack epidemic wasn’t an argument for prohibition. It was an indictment of it.

“Do immigrant cultures threaten liberty?”

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… is from pages 101-102 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s July 22nd, 1985, column titled “Lessons from Coca-Cola”:

The greatness of a competitive economy is that it forces constant revision of our estimates and changes in our behavior when we are mistaken. If we were omniscient, there would be no point in free enterprise or a competitive economy. Appointed officials could issue orders from on high to do the right thing, and that would be the end of it.

DBx: Yes.

Note that proponents of industrial policy implicitly believe that human beings who exercise government power are, if not omniscient, at least in possession of super-human intelligence and foresight.

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My emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague, Vernon Smith, sent the following note to me in response to this post of mine on Trump’s misunderstanding of trade. I share this note in full with Vernon’s kind permission.

Don:

Good job of explaining Trump’s ignorance on tariffs and trade. He really does not understand trade and the sharing of gains from trade.

The theorem that markets Limit the extent of specialization, which creates wealth, implies that any interference with markets, such as tariffs, reduces wealth creation.

Vernon

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent.

Mr. F__:

Thanks for your email.

You ask if my “antagonism to our president’s tariffs may fall if his prediction comes true that the tariffs will replace income taxes.”

Reasonable people debate the merits of different tax regimes. Being a very-small-government guy, I’m favorably inclined to any tax regime that’s as mild and broad-based as possible. For reasons that I’ll not get into here, tariffs don’t fit this bill.

But there are other equally valid reasons for dismissing Trump’s boast that – and I quote him– “as time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax.” These words reveal Trump’s cluelessness about history and economics.

First, since the federal income-tax was introduced in 1913, there’s never been a time “in the past” when tariffs replaced, much less “substantially” so, the modern-day system of income taxation. Anyone who’s this unfamiliar with history cannot be taken seriously.

Second, the data are clear that U.S. tariffs are overwhelmingly paid by Americans, not by foreigners. The fact that Trump continues to deny this fact is further reason not to take the man seriously.

Third, regardless of who pays U.S. tariffs, the maximum amount of revenue that these levies can raise wouldn’t come close to replacing the income tax. That Trump doesn’t recognize this reality is alone sufficient to discredit his boasts about his tariffs.

Fourth, if Trump really believes that foreigners pay all of the tariffs, then the fact that he also believes that his tariffs will create more manufacturing on American shores by protecting U.S.-based manufacturers from foreign competition exposes not only deep economic ignorance, but a flaw more fundamental: logical confusion. Foreigners pay U.S. tariffs only insofar as foreigners lower the prices they charge for the goods they export to America or as foreigners export fewer goods to America. If they pay all of these tariffs, foreigners absorb the entire tariff hike in the form of lower prices without reducing their exports. It follows that the prices that Americans pay for ‘protected’ goods don’t rise. And because these prices don’t rise, there’s no ‘protection’ given to American producers.

Trump’s blindness to the incompatibility between his claim, on one hand, that foreigners pay all of the tariffs, and, on the other hand, that the tariffs protect American manufacturing is, like each of the above three points, sufficient reason to dismiss all that he says about trade and tariffs.

Trump’s pronouncements on these issues drain him of all credibility when it comes to trade policy. Every mature person, regardless of politics, should resent the barrage of his intelligence-insulting pronouncements.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness explains that section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 – the legal authority that Trump is now trying to use as the basis for re-instituting tariffs – is not lawfully available for this purpose. A slice:

The White House’s tariff Plan B looks copied from President Biden’s playbook when the court overruled his student-loan forgiveness scheme in 2023 and Mr. Biden began statute shopping for anything to back it. That strategy hit a roadblock in federal court, as a succession of rulings invalidated his attempt to revive the policy under different laws.

The same may happen to Mr. Trump. His plan relies on a seldom-invoked clause of the Trade Act of 1974, Section 122. It allows the president to impose a general tariff of up to 15% for 150 days to address “fundamental international payments problems” that “require special import measures to restrict imports.”

Under Mr. Trump’s current interpretation, this law allows tariffs in the presence of a common trade deficit, which occurs when a country imports more goods and services than it exports. The U.S. has run trade deficits for most years since the mid-1970s. But Mr. Trump’s reading of Section 122 is erroneous. The relevant statute allows only tariffs that “deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits,” “prevent an imminent and significant deprecation of the dollar,” or facilitate an international agreement to correct a “balance-of-payments disequilibrium.” To justify his new tariffs, Mr. Trump is relying on the first option and now asserts the U.S. has a large balance-of-payments deficit.

But that’s different from a trade deficit. Turning to the arcane economic terminology of international accounting, the balance of payments is a complete ledger of all economic transactions between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The trade balance, also known as the current account, comprises only a part of this ledger.

Other components appear in the capital and financial accounts, which cover monetary transfers and investment transactions with the rest of the world. While the U.S. current account is in deficit, the capital account runs a large surplus, effectively balancing it out. Under this full accounting, the current U.S. balance-of-payments deficit is close to zero.

Also critical of the Trump administration’s reckless reliance on section 122 is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post. Three slices:

President Donald Trump’s first effort to replace the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court is based on a misreading of a 1974 law that allows for temporary trade restrictions due to “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” That is not the same as the balance of trade, which is why courts would ideally enjoin the president’s proclamation.

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Trump’s proclamation appears to be modeled on President Richard M. Nixon’s 1971 order to impose a 10 percent blanket tariff to respond to a balance of payments problem. But the economy has changed quite a bit over the past 55 years.

Back then, the global economic system had fixed exchange rates for many currencies, and the dollar was redeemable for gold. In that world, it could make sense to restrict trade to avoid an imbalance of payments due to dwindling gold reserves. That’s why international trading rules had an exception to allow for such restrictions.

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Courts are supposed to interpret the words in the laws that Congress passes. The justices have made clear they are no longer expected to defer to the executive branch’s interpretations of them. “Balance of payments” doesn’t mean “balance of trade,” and there’s nothing serious about these accounting statistics for the U.S. economy.

And here’s Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon on the unlawfulness of Trump’s selection of section 122 as the alleged legal basis for his re-instituted tariffs. A slice:

Under the current international monetary regime of floating exchange rates, a country that does not regularly intervene in foreign exchange markets to peg its currency and does not suffer from insufficient capital inflows (such as the US) does not need to use its foreign reserves to finance an imbalance between international payments and receipts. Its currency can freely depreciate and thereby prop up its exports and domestic assets. (Milton Friedman actually proposed a floating exchange rate as a solution to balance-of-payments problems in the 1960s: “a system of floating exchange rates eliminates the balance-of-payments problem […] the [currency] price may fluctuate, but there cannot be a deficit or a surplus threatening an exchange crisis.”)

Ilya Somin, a key player in getting Trump’s IEEPA tariffs declared to be the unconstitutional infringements that they are, writes at The Dispatch about this case. A slice:

Trump’s April 2025 “Liberation Day” executive order invoked IEEPA to impose 10 percent tariffs on almost every nation in the world, plus large additional “reciprocal” tariffs against dozens of other countries. He also used IEEPA to impose 25 percent tariffs against Canada and Mexico, and 10 percent tariffs against China, supposedly justified by the flow of fentanyl into the United States from those countries. Taken together, these tariffs amounted to the highest U.S. tariff rates since the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the Great Depression, and would have caused grave damage to the U.S. economy.

The main basis for the court’s ruling is that IEEPA does not even mention the word “tariff,” and has never been used to impose them by any previous president during the statute’s nearly 50-year history. The power to “regulate” importation, which IEEPA does grant in some situations, does not include a power to impose taxes.

But an additional crucial factor was the sheer scope of the authority claimed by Trump. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his opinion for the court, the president claimed virtually unlimited power to “impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time.”

The framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure the president would not be able to repeat the abuses of English kings, who imposed taxes without legislative authorization. Under Trump’s interpretation of the law, the president would have virtually unlimited tariff authority, similar to that of an absolute monarch of the kind King Charles I aspired to be. The court decisively rejected this aspiration to unconstrained presidential power. Roberts’ majority opinion, a concurring opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and one by Justice Elena Kagan (writing for all three liberal justices) all, in different ways, emphasized this aspect of the case. As Gorsuch put it, “Our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.”

Tim Carney decries the increasing habit of politicians, left and right, to accuse the U.S. Supreme Court as being illegitimate when it rules in ways these politicians dislike.

Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley on Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Two slices:

The Supreme Court’s decision striking down President Trump’s sweeping taxes on imports was the best thing that could have happened to Republicans in an election year when they will need all the help they can get. How long will it take the GOP to realize that?

The court ruled 6-3 that Mr. Trump overstepped his authority by using emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico to address trade imbalances and stop drug smuggling. Like previous high court decisions that blocked the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness and eviction moratorium, the ruling strikes a blow for the constitutional separation of powers. It also provides cover to Republicans who want a course correction on tariff policy between now and November.

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The president insists that tariffs ultimately are paid by foreigners and are necessary to “protect our companies,” but a recent study by the New York Federal Reserve concluded what many other studies have shown—that nearly all the economic burden from the Trump tariffs has fallen on U.S. firms and consumers.

That is no surprise to anyone familiar with classical economic writings on trade going back more than two centuries. But even people who have never read a word of Adam Smith, David Ricardo or John Stuart Mill can read an electricity bill or a grocery-store receipt. Mr. Trump is less bothered by higher retail prices because he thinks they are necessary to rebalance a global economy in which the U.S. supposedly has been “ripped off” for “many decades,” even as it somehow became the most prosperous nation in human history.

Voters punished Democrats in 2024 over inflation, but Democrats have since won elections by campaigning on cost-of-living concerns. Mr. Trump wants to double down on tariffs, but that means doubling down on tax increases at a time when consumers are most worried about affordability. The president would have Republicans ignore polls on the economy, stay the course on his trade policies, and hope for the best in the fall as he tries to make mercantilism great again. It’s a fool’s errand.

Reason‘s Jack Nicastro identifies three blatantly false economic statistics that Trump boasted about in his 2026 State of the Union address. A slice:

2. In 12 months, I have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.

Trump keeps making outlandish claims about the foreign direct investment supposedly fostered by the “deals” he’s brokered with his illegally imposed tariffs. Reason has debunked these claims here and here. But even the White House isn’t claiming the level of investment that Trump claimed tonight: Its website reports $9.7 trillion in total U.S. and foreign investments.

Here’s a photo taken on April 8, 2025, in Guatemala City. In it are, on the bottom left, Laura Williams; sitting on the bed is Ryan Yonk; on the couch are me and, to my left, Caleb Petitt; to Caleb’s left, standing, is Jack Nicastro; seated in the chair nearest Jack is Phil Magness; seated in the chair on the bottom right is Lenore Ealy. This photograph was taken by Brad DeVos. We were drafting – connected by telephone with David Henderson – the Anti-Tariff Declaration.

Scott Winship, with help from Jeremy Horpedahl, corrects one of the errors committed by Jeffrey Tucker in the latter’s attempt to discount the rise in ordinary Americans’ living standards over the past half-century.