The administration keeps trying to have its tariff cake and eat it, too. At the Supreme Court last Wednesday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the tariffs are regulations, not taxes, and that the revenue they raise is only incidental. Days later, Trump was back to emphasizing how much revenue the tariffs are generating.
The president can claim all he wants that tariffs are paid by foreign countries and companies. But the receipts make clear that the bulk are paid by U.S. companies. Americans pay taxes on the goods they import, and the sums are significant. The Tax Policy Center calculates that federal revenue from tariffs will bring in $299 billion next year alone, and $2.5 trillion accumulatively between 2026 and 2035. In other words, even if rebates eventually come, they would do little to offset the biggest tax hike on American businesses in modern history.
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Trump wrote on social media, “People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” There is plenty of foolish thinking to call out, but it’s hard to ascribe much of it to critics of the administration’s erratic trade policy.
A SCOTUS ruling is expected by December 2025 or January 2026, but a firm judicial rebuke of executive overreach will not by itself restore predictability—much less the pre-Trump status quo. Remember that economists view economic policy uncertainty as toxic for investment. When firms cannot foresee the rules of the game, they postpone hiring, delay projects, and hoard cash instead of building for the future. And the Trump administration would almost certainly use alternative authorities to maintain negotiated tariff deals, keeping global partners guessing and domestic firms on edge. Indeed, one would guess all these backup plans are currently being readied, just in case.
Ben Bayer argues that “the idea that the president is due some deference to manage his sweeping global tariffs in the name of ‘foreign policy’ is a complete sham.” Here’s his conclusion:
If no delimited, intelligible principle governs the congressional delegation, the separation of powers is dissolved and the door is opened to autocratic authoritarian control of the economy. The real targets will not be alleged threats from abroad, but the liberties of American citizens at home.
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley writes about the demise of the Heritage Foundation. Two slices:
In the 1960s, William F. Buckley famously shunned conspiracy-minded Birchers, to the lasting benefit of the conservative movement. The current effort to marginalize figures such as Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Nick Fuentes is evidence that the political right is still capable of policing itself.
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According to Mr. [Tim] nChapman, Heritage consciously decided to alter its mission. It is becoming the “enforcer” of the party leadership. What the White House proposes, Heritage advocates, regardless of the policy’s merit or the organization’s past positions. The rationalization is that the country faces an existential crisis and the Trump movement is the only way to save it from the political left.
Mr. Chapman’s assessment may be correct. Unfortunately, too many people on the left and right now traffic in apocalyptic scenarios should their political opponents prevail. The reality is that the country remains divided, but democracy isn’t under mortal threat, as evidenced by the robust turnout in last week’s off-year elections.
GMU Econ alum Julia Cartwright offers wisdom about populism and constitutionalism. A slice:
The New Right has been politically potent because it has mastered populism’s simple moral drama. Divide the world into two antagonistic camps, the virtuous “people” and the corrupt “elite,” and then promise power as the instrument of justice. Because populism is a “thin-centered” ideology, it readily fuses with other commitments like nationalism, cultural conservatism, and industrial policy. The current flavor of populism has produced an elastic coalition that includes Midwest factory workers who feel displaced by globalization, voters suspicious of credentialed expertise, citizens frustrated by immigration disorder, and even some small-government conservatives who see the state as a temporary sword to cut through captured institutions. Many of the New Right’s current policies would have been familiar to the Left a decade ago: tariffs and industrial policy; fixation on the trade deficit as a national scoreboard; a growing willingness to police speech in the name of public morality or national cohesion; and an eagerness to bend independent institutions to executive will. This is a politically marketable package because it translates frustration into concrete action: use the state. The rhetoric is crisp, the villains are named, and the time horizon is now.
But this is precisely why rule by populist diktat is so dangerous when the subject is speech. Tariffs and subsidies waste resources, regrettably, but discretionary censorship degrades the constitutional order that makes wealth creation and civic peace possible in the first place. Whether it is pressuring agencies to “do something” about disfavored pundits, threatening to make offensive expression a criminal act, or floating schemes to subordinate independent economic stewards to presidential whim, the logic is the same: expand discretion and promise it will be used for the “right” ends. Nevertheless, powers created to punish enemies never remain in friendly hands. The next administration will inherit the enlarged toolkit and repurpose it. In game-theoretic terms, precedents are strategies over time; once you normalize ad-hoc exceptions to speech protections, you change the repeated game from rule-guided cooperation to tit-for-tat escalation. The country then spirals into a contest of retaliation and control rather than a society governed by predictable, general rules.
Classical liberalism approaches the matter of free speech through the lens of preserving institutions that protect individual rights and pluralism rather than maximizing immediate leverage. It is less concerned with who wields power today and more with designing constraints that minimize damage when power is inevitably misused tomorrow. Classical liberalism values free speech not because every utterance is virtuous, but because open contestation is the only mechanism that reliably disciplines error, exposes falsehood, and diffuses power. Its time horizon is long, its disposition humble about knowledge, and its focus fixed on the rules of the game, not the score of the current inning.
Human Progress tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Neoliberalism made two major promises: It would put Western nations on a better economic track and turbocharge development in the third world.
On both counts, it delivered.
History’s gears are lubricated by gore. Witness America’s Revolutionary War, whose continuing reverberations have done more to improve the course of human events than any other event in history.
The war was fueled by crystalline ideas couched in elegant prose authored by members of the Colonial upper crust. But from 1777 on, most bleeding was done by “the poorest of the poor — jobless laborers and landless tenants, second and third sons without hope of an inheritance, debtors and British deserters, indentured servants and apprentices, felons hoping to win pardons.”
So says a new telling of America’s origin story, which is a tapestry of suffering, viciousness, selflessness and nobility. Beginning Sunday, in six two-hour episodes on PBS, “The American Revolution” will immerse viewers in an often bewildering, sometimes dismaying, but ultimately exhilarating documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.
