Over the weekend, President Donald Trump’s eulogy at conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s memorial service unfortunately spun off into a politically charged airing of grievances. After declaring that his “[t]ariffs are making us rich again,” for example, Trump added that “the only ones challenging them are people that hate our country or foreign countries that are paying a price.”
The facts, of course, say otherwise.
For the hundredth time, Trump’s import taxes are mainly paid by American importers and consumers, not foreign countries. And all the companies challenging the tariffs in court today are American small businesses, who are doing so not out of “hate” (or whatever) but simply because the president of the United States has singlehandedly put their livelihoods at risk.
One of Trump’s superpowers is to spew so much policy gibberish in so many directions that supporters latch on to the one angle they like and use it to rationalize their support for him, despite loads of countervailing statements indicating the opposite policy view.
Relatively stable consumer price inflation and lower producer price inflation—excluding and including imports—under Trump are surprising. After all, the president has more than tripled the average effective tariff rate to 11.6 percent on approximately $2.2 trillion worth of imports, according to the Tax Foundation. Therefore, all things being equal, CPI and PPI should be elevated. So, why aren’t they? The answer lies in the delayed implementation of Trump’s tariffs: Although “Liberation Day” was April 2, the “reciprocal tariffs” announced then were postponed for months, finally taking effect on August 7, meaning “the full effects of tariff increases have yet to be felt,” as the OECD explains.
While most Americans have not yet felt the tariffs’ full effects, businesses have started to. An August survey administered by the Dallas Federal Reserve found that 60 percent and 70 percent of Texas retailers and manufacturers, respectively, said that Trump’s tariffs were negatively affecting their businesses. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that Section 232 tariffs on imported steel and aluminum have cost John Deere “$300 million so far, with nearly another $300 million expected by the end of the year.”
Susan Dudley, writing at Forbes, reviews Phil Gramm’s and my book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom.
James Pethokoukis reports on “the hidden resilience of US manufacturing productivity.” A slice:
But the new NBER working paper “Why Is Manufacturing Productivity Growth So Low?” by Enghin Atalay (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), Ali Hortaçsu (University of Chicago and NBER), Nicole Kimmel (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), and Chad Syverson (University of Chicago Booth School of Business and NBER) argues that much of the apparent stagnation in manufacturing productivity reflects mismeasurement rather than true stagnation. Producer price data understate quality improvements in computers and other electronics, while consumer-based indices capture them more fully. Correcting for this bias, manufacturing total factor productivity still rose after 2009—about 0.6 percent a year, slower than the late-1990s boom of 2.3 percent but still an economically meaningful pace.
From the paper: “If quality improvements (and, hence, TFP) in goods manufacturing are understated, as our findings suggest, then conventional data sources may distort our understanding of the forces reshaping the manufacturing sector.”
And because manufacturing accounts for only a tenth of jobs but generates more than two-thirds of patents and R&D, even modestly better productivity trends mean past industrial policies—from SEMATECH to the CHIPS Act—may have been more effective than critics believe. Or as the paper puts it, “past assessments may have presented an overly negative depiction of their success.”
Jacob Sullum explains that “Trump’s vision of broadcast regulation is a threat to conservatives.”
Some Democrats are just as censorious as Trump.
Perhaps progressives should have been more troubled when the Biden administration was throwing its weight around, using regulatory threats from the White House and federal agencies to pressure social media companies to censor what that administration called “covid misinformation.” Some of what Joe Biden’s people wanted suppressed was true, or arguably so.
Although that administration’s coercion became public, it was intended to be done privately. Perhaps that administration, to its limited credit, had an uneasy conscience. And, in extenuation, that administration was improvising during a public health emergency about an imperfectly understood virus.
The Trump administration is exuberantly public about its censorship aspirations. They are connected only to its ambitious agenda to curate American culture to the liking of the president and his epigones.
Fortunately, Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump’s choice to chair the Federal Communications Commission, is a person of helpful coarseness. The law empowering the FCC to require that broadcasters operate in “the public interest” assumes two things that Carr demonstrates cannot be assumed:
That vague terms such as “the public interest,” allowing vast discretion to those construing them, will not be twisted for partisan purposes. And that the Senate will not confirm presidential toadies to positions where they can infuse unintended meanings into statutory language. If someday some defibrillator restores Congress’s heartbeat, the legislators might legislate about this.
