When President Donald Trump ordered the implementation of his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, he proclaimed that it was “now our turn to prosper.”
Exactly four weeks later, Trump delivered a very different message to the American people: You’ll get less and you’ll pay more.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” Trump said Wednesday during a cabinet meeting open to the press. “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”
Some prosperity, huh?
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Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics for the Cato Institute, posted on X in response to Trump’s comments. “Forced scarcity is not a pathway to prosperity.”
Scarcity is the path that Trump has chosen, despite warnings from hundreds of economists. Now, having unilaterally created supply chain disruptions on a scale not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic in pursuit of supposedly populist goals, Trump is delivering an elitist shrug. If basic household necessities end up costing “a few bucks more,” that won’t be a serious problem for our elected leaders—or the lobbyists who are getting rich as businesses seek special favors within Trump’s tariff schemes.
Scott Lincicome, with his usual impressive thoroughness and breadth of knowledge, busts myths about manufacturing jobs. Three slices:
Other data reveal similar disinterest. Reason’s Jack Nicastro, for example, notes that both total U.S. manufacturing employment and the sector’s unemployment rate declined between August 2024 and March 2025, thus indicating that “workers are leaving the manufacturing labor force by choice,” not by necessity. (The unemployment rate in manufacturing today sits at a miniscule 3.1 percent.) And the Census Bureau recently found that more than 20 percent of U.S. manufacturing plants operating below full capacity cited labor or skills shortages as the main reason.
Contrary to White House spin, moreover, there’s not a vast reservoir of unemployed people, especially men, just itching to work in a factory. In terms of sheer numbers, we discussed last year, the common claim that 7 million working-age American men are sitting at home waiting for a job is wildly incorrect. (It’s maybe a fifth of that amount, though exact numbers aren’t available.) The Chamber of Commerce calculates that as of March 2025 there were only eight unemployed American manufacturing workers for every 10 job openings in just durable goods manufacturing.
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Some of that revealed preference stems from the fact that many manufacturing jobs today—especially the ones available to workers with just a high-school degree—aren’t what you’d consider “good” jobs in terms of wages, benefits, or job security. And this reality is especially clear when you compare the manufacturing jobs we already have to reasonably available alternatives in the U.S. market, including for “blue collar” men without a college degree.
For starters, manufacturing jobs today aren’t necessarily more stable or secure than services jobs. As my Cato colleague Ryan Bourne explained in 2019, for example, the last few decades have seen vast swaths of low-skilled manufacturing work disappear (for reasons discussed next), low levels of new jobs created (despite the aforementioned openings), and net job destruction in the sector overall. Manufacturing jobs are also highly sensitive to recessions, with big, deep cuts during the last several downturns. As a recent Economic Innovation Group analysis demonstrated, moreover, most of the manufacturing jobs created in the United States today aren’t unionized, as the recent uptick has been mostly in the high-growth, lower-cost, right-to-work South.
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Drilling into specific industries—especially the ones most affected by globalization—shows similar manufacturing wage weakness. As we discussed in December, for example, the few remaining textile and apparel jobs in the United States are—even with already-high U.S. trade barriers—relatively low-paying, and companies thus struggle to find workers today. The Seattle Times reports, in fact, that the median hourly wage for U.S. sewing machine operators in “cut and sew apparel manufacturing” was just a little more than $16—around 40 percent below the median U.S. wage. Even wages at luxury brands selling expensive stuff aren’t great: Jobs at fancy local clothing manufacturer Filson start at $21/hour, but that’s just a few cents above the local minimum wage. Given the pay and the nature of the work itself, the company and others like it can’t find workers nearby.
National Review‘s Rich Lowry: “Tariffs are amazing … But major U.S. concerns need and deserve exemptions from them. That’s effectively the administration’s message the last couple of months.”
A president who moved more like a container ship might have synced up the politics and policy. If the administration really wanted to change production patterns, it would have worked to make credible long-term commitments to a stable trade policy. It hasn’t done that at all. In the meantime, businesses twiddle their thumbs, forgoing major investments and waiting for reality to dawn.
The lag created by the speed of ocean transit and inventories means that Americans have hardly begun to feel the pain tariffs will cause. Much of the value wiped off the stock market can come back if the administration cans its tariff plan. Most business decisions about suppliers and investment haven’t been jerked around, only put on ice.
Scott Sumner shares several sensible thoughts about tariffs.
Trump is unlikely to change his mind on tariffs. His protectionism is gut-level, and seemingly immune to persuasion. His economic advisers seem reconciled to this, making more sophisticated but often contradictory arguments for tariffs. The nation’s economy instead depends on Congress and the courts to take away tariff-making powers that should never have been delegated to the executive in the first place. I argued this point back in 2020, and it is difficult to find a polite way to say “I told you so.”
The shrinking economy puts congressional Republicans in an uncomfortable place. They want to follow their president, but doing so is putting their jobs at risk. Price increases, whether from inflation or from tariffs, are very unpopular with voters.
[DBx: By making the ridiculous assertion that last quarter’s – Q1,2025 – shrinkage of GDP is a lingering effect of Biden’s policies, Trump continues to refuse to man-up to the consequences of his tariff ‘policy.’ Trump seems to be unaware that, as bad as Biden’s policies unquestionably were, real GDP grew in 2024, including in the final quarter of 2024.]
Other of today’s cowards include most members of Congress, which is today supine. (HT Phil Magness)
Decrying the wasteland that Trump is making of the global rules-based trading system, National Review‘s Jeffrey Blehar describes April 2025 as the cruelest month. Here’s his conclusion:
But I suspect that, one way or another, the die was truly cast for Trump 2.0 in April of 2025. This month — beginning as it did with “Liberation Day” — marks the moment when the president cashed in all of his chits and decided to imperially reorganize the global economy to favor his own personal obsessions. It is, as they say, a bold strategy. Let’s see if it pays off for him. The world holds its breath. Whenever it exhales, I fear we will remember April as the cruelest month of them all for the Trump administration — a self-inflicted defeat, no less.
A federal district court last year found Google guilty of “maintaining a monopoly in two product markets in the United States—general search services and general text advertising—through its exclusive distribution agreements.” In these pages former Attorney General William Barr called it “the most important antitrust case pursued by the U.S. government in decades.” Yet the government presented no evidence that consumers were harmed. It didn’t argue that Google exhibited classic monopoly behavior by restricting supply and raising prices, since consumers pay nothing for Google’s internet search service.
Google’s offense was using its massive resources to maintain its market position. Specifically, Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to have its search engine the default setting on the iPhone. The court deemed this payment an antitrust violation, and starting this week the court will hear arguments on the government’s proposed penalties.
The court doesn’t appear to have given any significant weight to the growing evidence that competition from Amazon and TikTok has cut Google’s market share from 90% of search advertising revenues in 2015 to under 50% today. While Google was attacked for gobbling up competitors, no note appears to have been taken of the baby Googles, roughly 2,000 startups by former Google employees (including TikTok) that are developing artificial intelligence and other platforms that could leave Google tomorrow in the same place where Sears finds itself today.
