Claire Lai pleads for the release of her heroic father, Jimmy Lai. A slice:
I grew up in a loving family, privileged and protected but never blind to the sacrifices, achievements and values of my parents. My father made his fortune in the apparel business, but by the time of my birth he was devoted to journalism. He founded the Apple Daily newspaper because he believes passionately that freedom depends on access to information.
Thomas Dichter decries the Trump administration’s cruel, ignorant, and dangerous hostility to immigrants. Two slices:
The Trump administration seems on a path to all-out war against immigration. Calling Somalis “garbage,” using the word “leeches,” halting immigration applications by Afghans, threatening to denaturalize those who are already citizens—all in addition to the masked ICE raids—represents a darkening turn from what started out as the second Trump administration’s promise to secure the borders. Now hostility towards all immigration, both legal and illegal, seems on the verge of becoming official policy; indeed, the State Department recently said on social media that “mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization.”
…..
Words like “threat” and “existence” are meant, as in all propaganda, to tap into the most primitive and base instincts in human nature. They are meant to trigger and unleash latent fear, as well as baser feelings of envy and jealousy. While it is possible that such blatant hostility towards immigrants may cause a backlash, there is also the very real danger that we are on a slippery slope towards events reminiscent of many the world has seen before (including the round up and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II). After all, as German Sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out in 1955, hostility towards others can come about with “uncanny ease.”
The direct tax burden these tariffs place on American companies has been widely discussed and is undoubtedly significant (roughly $30 billion per month at last count). Less discussed, however, is a regulatory burden that’s at least as substantial.
First, each special tariff measure comes with its own legal rules, procedures, exceptions, and reviews—brand new regulations that demand American companies’ finite time, money, and attention. Second, the specific design of Trump’s tariff measures amplifies this complexity because—again, unlike the pre-Trump era—the tariffs can vary not only by country, product, and content, but alsoby how these tariffs interact with each other. IEEPA “reciprocal” tariffs, for example, apply a different baseline rate for imports from dozens of countries; these tariffs are typically added (“stacked”) on top of the general HTSUS tariffs but not for certain “trade deal” countries (which have negotiated different arrangements). They also stack atop other IEEPA tariffs and Section 301 tariffs, but they usually don’t apply to products covered by Section 232 tariffs. Some 232s, meanwhile, apply to both a covered product (e.g., steel) and a product containing a covered product (e.g., washing machines), but tariffs on the latter will depend on its exact content, with 232 tariffs on the covered materials and IEEPA tariffs on the rest—unless, of course, some other exception or penalty or “trade deal” term applies. (The IEEPA fentanyl-related tariffs, for example, apply to all products from Canada and Mexico, unless they comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.)
Got it?
An August U.S. Customs and Border Protection fact sheet summarizes some of these rules but—in a classic case of laugh/cry—contains clear disclaimers about relying on it and is already very much out of date. (An update hasn’t been published.)
…..
This is just the tip of the complexity iceberg, and it’s hard to express how crazy it all is in practice—even for seasoned pros. In July, for example, trade wonk Samuel Marc Lowe walked through the pain of calculating the total amount of U.S. tariffs an importer would owe on a simple can of Belgian beer, showing that what used to be a boring and easy determination (at 0 percent) now requires the American company to have detailed knowledge—and provide detailed reporting to the U.S. government—of the item’s aluminum content, that aluminum’s country of origin (not where the can was made), and whether the beer is covered by a subsequent trade deal. Adding to the absurdity, Sam actually got the calculation wrong on his first pass, and his July article was then superseded by the U.S.-EU trade deal agreed to a couple weeks later (a deal that has already changed once and may now be in further trouble). Sam also omitted a crucial detail: a U.S. beer importer’s failure to know the aluminum’s origin would default it to Russia, thereby subjecting the beer’s entire value to a 200 percent duty—a penalty presumably intended to prevent U.S. companies from feigning ignorance so they can surreptitiously import sanctioned Russian metal via beer cans and other items. (No, really.)
…..
Tariff complexity also imposes other, potentially larger costs to U.S. companies and the economy. As economist Luis Garciano noted, for example, “The growing regulatory complexity and arbitrariness of the tariff regime provides rents to those connected with power, not to innovators.” Large, well-connected incumbent firms can, say, give the president a literal gold bar to win lower tariffs, blanket exemptions, and other special treatment from the federal government. Smaller, newer players, on the other hand, are stuck with big bills. Over time, this means less dynamism and slower growth.
Uncertainty is another big economic cost. As Bloomberg reported in July, the complicated and ever-changing U.S. tariff regime has pushed many firms to postpone or scuttle major decisions on hiring, investment, purchases, and more until they have more clarity on their ultimate tax liability. For many firms, “It’s impossible to know where and when to send their next purchase orders, much less plan capital investments,” and they’re “struggling more today with understanding the rules than they are with paying the tariffs.”
Consistent with prior research on Trump 1.0 tariffs, recent surveys of the still-stagnant U.S. manufacturing sector confirm that uncertainty continues to be a major drag on domestic activity. As Bloomberg detailed in September, the burdens are particularly acute for smaller businesses that typically lack larger firms’ capital and resources (e.g., in-house compliance professionals).
It’s becoming part of the Trump playbook.
It goes like this: (1) Farmers overwhelmingly vote for Donald Trump to be president. (2) Trump imposes enormous tariffs unilaterally, wrecking the export markets that farmers rely on to sell their crops at profitable prices. (3) Farmers lobby the Trump administration to give them money at taxpayers’ expense to cope with the effects of the same administration’s trade policy. (4) Trump bails out the farmers with billions of federal dollars and changes nothing about the tariffs that hurt them in the first place.
…..
The proper solution to farmers’ financial woes in 2025 is the same as it was in 2018: end the tariffs. Instead, the Trump administration has chosen to paint over the problem with a $12 billion bailout. So much for the tariffs’ supposed deficit reduction. That amount is on top of the $30 billion in federal payments that farmers already received this year in ad hoc disaster and economic aid, according to the Department of Agriculture, in addition to roughly $10 billion in regular crop-insurance subsidies.
“Denying the affordability crisis won’t change the data” – so writes Peter Earle. A slice:
Tariffs are a component of the affordability problem: rather than removing the cost-raising policies of prior years, the administration has expanded them, even though tariffs are taxes that raise input prices, distort supply chains, and weaken competitive discipline — all of which generate costs ultimately borne by producers and consumers alike.
Insisting there is no affordability crisis while simultaneously increasing import costs is analytically incoherent, especially when many of the underlying pressures — monetary excesses, pandemic distortions, and longstanding regulatory barriers — predate Trump’s return to office. Instead of denying these strains, the administration could acknowledge them and credibly explain their origins while advancing market-oriented solutions: expanding competition, removing regulatory bottlenecks, and eliminating tariffs, which would quickly relieve price pressures and reduce costs economy-wide.
They treat a debt crisis as a binary event: markets panic, yields spike, and the government formally defaults. In Tyler’s view, because there are no signs of those two things happening, we are, apparently, still in the zone of calm fiscal waters. Moreover, he believes that because markets know there is plenty of private wealth to confiscate through taxation (or fiscal repression) if needed, it functions as private backing, hence there will never be a US default on the debt. He isn’t denying that there is “deadweight loss” or “distortion” resulting from the debt (or the spending). But as long as markets are calm, he isn’t worried.
But this is an upside-down way of thinking about this issue, and it misses the main reasons we worry about and fight against this debt accumulation today. In advanced economies with deep financial markets and reserve currencies, debt crises almost never show up through hard defaults. They show up through unexpected increases in the price level when investors realize that some portion of new debt has been issued without sufficient fiscal backing.
I have a riddle for you. If we call a drug smuggler a combatant, how many combatants died when SEAL Team 6 killed 11 men on a cocaine boat near Venezuela on September 2?
Zero, because calling a drug smuggler a combatant does not make him a combatant. That reality goes to the heart of the morally and legally bankrupt justification for President Donald Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which began on September 2 and so far has killed 87 people in 22 attacks.
