The Ontario ad was right: Reagan would not have approved of Mr. Trump’s protectionist trade policies, particularly when aimed at allies. Reagan also predicted their adverse outcomes. In 1985, he said that “one of the first victims of a protectionist trade war will be America’s farmers, who have it tough enough already” — an accurate description of where we are today as soybean farmers suffer from the loss of foreign markets.
One Reagan rebuke, in a speech he gave in 1988, has resonance today. “Protectionism is being used by some American politicians as a cheap form of nationalism,” he warned. “We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag.”
Whatever short-term benefits different episodes in the history of American steel protectionism have conferred on the domestic industry, they have also proven pyrrhic victories. Steel prices in the United States are persistently among the highest in the world. Per the latest data from SteelBenchmarker, the US price for hot-rolled band (per metric ton) is 28.3 percent higher than the price in Western Europe. This undermines US competitiveness in steel-consuming industries, such as manufacturing and construction, and raises prices for final consumers and taxpayers.
The problem isn’t just that steel protectionism fails economically—it’s that it succeeds politically. The entrenchment of Big Steel in Washington politics foments political dysfunction at home and abroad. On one hand, the steel industry engages in aggressive lobbying, and its insiders, including prominent members of the past and current Trump administrations, cycle in and out of government. On the other, the protectionism coming from Congress and the White House has repeatedly undermined US relationships with longstanding allies and trading partners, as well as the functioning of the World Trade Organization.
Alan Dlugash has unwelcome news for the MAGA crowd: “Reagan meant what he said about tariffs.” A slice:
Today’s tariff cheerleaders want to rewrite Reagan as a protectionist hero. He wasn’t.
Ryan Bourne and Nathan Miller reveal “Mamdani’s wishful thinking on tax revenues.” A slice:
Empirical studies on this vary, but conventional economic wisdom is that anywhere between 30 percent and 70 percent of the corporate tax burden is passed through in the form of lower wages, stemming from less investment and so lower productivity of workers. In other words, ordinary New Yorkers will certainly pay a large proportion of this tax hike over time, even though the revenue yield will be lower than Mamdani presumes.
George Will decries “the choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition.” A slice:
For decades, the constitutional, political, social (and, lately, aesthetic) damages done by the ever-more-swollen modern presidency have become increasingly evident. Congress, in its decades-long siesta, has empowered presidents to unilaterally tax (see: tariffs) and wage war (hello, Venezuela) as they please. Congress is now composed almost entirely of two cohorts: those who do nothing but genuflect to their party’s president, and those who do nothing but caterwaul about him.
It is especially amusing to hear progressives, the principal creators of the watery Caesarism of today’s presidency, sorrowfully describing Trump’s ballroom as discordant with the White House’s proper modesty. They should worry less about the president’s residential immodesty and more about his anti-constitutional immodesty.
In 1980, America’s publicly held debt reached more than $712 billion (about $2.8 trillion in 2025 dollars), or roughly 25 percent of annual U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). Today, that figure is a little over $30 trillion, or around 100 percent of GDP. And as the federal debt grew 42 times larger over that span, the economy grew only tenfold. You can’t expand the numerator four times faster than the denominator for 45 years without courting economic danger.
That’s where we find ourselves. The U.S. is at peace, and despite President Donald Trump’s claims, there’s no national emergency. And yet we’ve only seen debt as a higher share of GDP during the years of 1945, 1946, 2020, and 2021. Then, Republicans and Democrats knew to scale back. Now, debt explodes during emergencies and continues to grow in peacetime.
Also warning of excessive government spending is Mike Munger.
The CPI figure Social Security uses is outdated, costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Social Security still relies on a 1970s inflation formula that overstates cost increases and inflates benefit growth—at a projected cost of $204 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The index in question, the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers, or CPI-W, reflects the spending habits of only about one-third of Americans and ignores how consumers adapt when prices change. In the real world, when the price of beef rises, people buy more chicken. Economists call that the substitution effect, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics began accounting for it 25 years ago with the chained CPI, or C-CPI-U, a more accurate measure of the cost of living.
