Tariffs are implemented, suspended, increased, decreased, not open for discussion, and then up for negotiation. Other nations retaliate. The U.S. doubles down. It feels like watching an unruly game of dodgeball where the players switch teams at random, the “ball” is an economic grenade, and no one knows when they’ll take that grenade to the face.
All this back-and-forth and uncertainty is a problem—a big problem.
I’ve discussed elsewhere how tariffs—taxes on foreign goods—are harmful to domestic and foreign consumers as well as domestic and foreign businesses. They provide opportunities for special interest to gain immensely at the expense of everyday consumers, foreigners, and domestic businesses that use foreign goods.
These costs are massive. Study after study finds that tariffs are bad news economically. U.S. consumers alone spend billions more as the result of tariffs. It is estimated Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico could cost the average U.S. household over $1,200 a year.
These costs we can measure, or at least estimate, but what about the costs we can’t measure? How do we measure the effects of the uncertainty surrounding trade policy? We could look at stocks. Since mid-February, the U.S. stock market is down significantly. Global markets are down too. But even these measurements underestimate the costs of the uncertainty introduced by our game of “tariff dodgeball.”
President Trump likes to blame Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for any trouble in the economy, but on Wednesday Mr. Powell was able to blame Mr. Trump’s tariffs for at least some of an anticipated inflation rebound.
The Federal Open Market Committee on Wednesday held short-term interest rates steady, but the bigger news concerned the Fed’s updated economic projections. Policy makers now expect GDP growth of 1.7% this year, down from the 2.1% they estimated in December, and they think their preferred measure of core inflation will hover at 2.8% instead of 2.5% as they predicted three months ago.
Under any other circumstance, investors might have spent the rest of the afternoon fretting about stagflation, especially given persistent concerns in markets about a possible recession. Instead, Mr. Powell shifted the focus to the tariffs Mr. Trump keeps threatening against all and sundry as an explanation for whatever might ail the economy this year. This provides Mr. Powell convenient cover as it becomes clearer that last autumn’s series of interest-rate cuts, totaling one percentage point, were premature.
And there you have it. Supercharge inflationary pressures to facilitate the admin’s crackpot tariff agenda.
George Will isn’t favorably impressed with the new Trump administration’s first two months in office. Three slices:
If the remaining 46 months of Donald Trump’s resurrection resemble the first two, this administration will have a remarkably high ratio of theatrical action to substantial achievement. And it will exacerbate the fiscal incontinence that is the nation’s foremost domestic crisis.
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In this fiscal year’s first five months, beginning Oct. 1, the government borrowed $1.1 trillion — almost $8 billion a day. In February, the first full month of the Musk’s government-pruning “revolution,” borrowing was $308 billion because spending was $40 billion more — a 7 percent increase — over February 2024.
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Trump lost in 2020 because voters, weary of a political diet consisting of huge dollops of turmoil smothered in a gravy of malice, thought Joe Biden promised tranquility. Trump won in 2024 partly because Biden whisperers convinced him that voters craved high-octane progressivism, from trillion-dollar spending tranches to innumerable pronouns.
In 2025, one party is prostrate before its Dear Leader, and the other is unembarrassed about pathetically waving a sign proclaiming “This is not normal.” This has become normal: In our two-party system, when one party drives itself into a ditch, the other swerves into the opposite one.
Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker decries anti-semitism. Two slices:
Joe Rogan, the podcaster with the biggest audience, last week hosted a man who has made a living spreading sympathetic falsehoods about Nazi Germany. I won’t dignify his sham scholarship by naming him, but he became famous recently when Tucker Carlson called him America’s “most honest popular historian.” He told a credulous Mr. Carlson that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II and that the Jews who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps somehow “ended up dead” there, as though six million all experienced freak fatal outcomes: accidentally stepping on rakes as they tilled the lush Buchenwald gardens, perhaps, or overindulging on Auschwitz cuisine.
One quote captures the substance of the latest colloquy: “When did Hitler start going after the Jews?” Mr. Rogan asks. A rambling answer punctuated with elementary historical errors ends with this gem: “His antisemitism is what allowed him to love the German people.” Greater love hath no man than this: to hate the Jews for his own compatriots.
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Sheer dumbness is part of the problem. Our culture is dominated by people with epic levels of historical, economic and scientific ignorance. Mr. Rogan is unimaginably successful and doesn’t need my critical approval, so he won’t mind when I say I doubt he has read a book of real history in his life or can see the difference between the charlatans he promotes and actual historians of the Third Reich such as Richard Evans or Ian Kershaw. Nor would he or his followers understand the difference between the historiography required of a genuine authority and the kind of drivel produced by a dilettante opportunist.
The larger problem is the steady undermining of truth itself. So much contemporary ideology rests on eradicated standards of objective reality, so people can believe all kinds of impossible things. The abandonment of academic truth is partially to blame. The tendentious and dishonest nonsense that holds sway at most of our top universities and the intolerance with which its adherents exclude dissent have undermined faith in academic truth and debased the currency of scholarship so that anyone with access to a social media account can propagate his own “learning.”
