Joe Lancaster reports that Trump’s tariffs might soon increase Americans’ car-insurance premiums. A slice:
But if tariffs remain in place, the report estimates the average national rate will go up by 7 percent
Granted, parts from Canada and Mexico that comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) from Trump’s first term are exempt from his new tariffs; just over 50 percent of all auto parts imported in 2024—around $100 billion worth—came from Canada and Mexico.
But that means nearly half of all imported auto parts are still subject to hefty taxes.
Japan, for example, accounts for nearly 12 percent of the global market in automobile exhausts; even though Trump announced last month he would lower Japan’s tariff rate to 15 percent, that’s a 15-percent tax Americans will have to pay simply because the president demands it.
Still, flaws are different from bad faith. While I am glad the administration is drawing attention to the need for reform at the bureau, it’s going about it the wrong way. First, firing the commissioner, as Trump as did last week, won’t fix the system. Second, as Dominic Pino pointed out in National Review, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, an expert advisory group that was actively working on this accuracy problem. Composed of unpaid professionals from academia and industry, the committee had been helping the bureau and other statistical agencies explore ways to improve data quality by boosting response rates—drawing on lessons from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. Its elimination was not a cost-saving move but a decision that undercuts ongoing efforts to strengthen the integrity of federal economic data, even as the administration publicly expresses frustration with the quality of those same data.
Progressives and a growing faction of Republicans support cash handouts as an important answer to America’s social ills. So readers might want to know about a study published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research that finds $1,000 monthly payments have few long-term benefits.
Researchers with the nonprofit OpenResearch and several universities ran a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of a cash transfer on lower-income, working-age Americans. One group received $1,000 every month for three years—$36,000 total—no strings attached. The other were paid $50 a month to participate as a control group.
OpenResearch says the study showed that “parents improved their parenting practices and made meaningful investments in their children and themselves.” But drill down, and the findings are uninspiring.
Those who received the $1,000 payments did report better parenting behavior in surveys, though they may have been more inclined to say this because they were receiving free money. They also spent more money on their children. On the other hand, they reported that their children experienced more developmental difficulties and stress than the control group. The authors suggest that parents receiving cash might simply have been more attentive to their children’ problems than those in the control group.
Notably, while the transfer payments reduced parents’ self-reported stress levels during the first year of the study, the “effects were short-lived and dissipated by the second year,” the researchers write.
