Peter Navarro begins his op-ed “Tariffs Are a Discipline, Not a Press Release” (Dec. 22) by knocking down a straw man. No serious economist predicted that the levies would “immediately crash the economy” or “ignite runaway inflation.” We said they’d make Americans poorer by forcing them to pay higher prices or accept inferior substitutes—which is exactly what’s happening.
Mr. Navarro claims victory because we haven’t seen a recession. But his colleague, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, promised in March that the economy would be “humming” by now. Instead, manufacturing employment has declined for nine consecutive months, business optimism is depressed and consumer sentiment nears historic lows.
Notice the pattern: When tariffs don’t deliver the promised renaissance, administration officials push back the timeline. First it was weeks, then months. Now, we need “the right timeline” and must not grade policy “on a news cycle.” This isn’t economic analysis—it’s buying time until the economy improves despite tariffs, at which point the administration will claim victory.
Mr. Navarro says that a slogan, “Who pays the tariff?,” is misleading. The data say otherwise. The Harvard Pricing Lab finds that after six months U.S. consumers are eating 20% of the tariffs on average in the form of higher prices. For President Trump’s first-term tariffs, the pass-through rate stayed under 5% for a full year. Mr. Trump 2.0’s tariffs are hitting us harder and faster, and there’s evidence that this pass-through rate will climb.
Tariffs don’t “discipline” foreign producers. They discipline American families, businesses and workers who must now pay more for less. No amount of rhetorical repackaging will change that.
David Hebert
American Inst. for Economic Research
Millions of American children are looking forward to Santa Claus’s visit and his sleigh full of presents. Timeless tradition? Harmless fun?
Not anymore. The United States has adopted a new philosophy about foreign trade under President Donald Trump, and jolly old St. Nick is desensitizing American kids to the dangers of trade deficits.
Here’s how Claus gains an illicit advantage and creates a trade deficit. Claus is not an American, and he brings his gifts from the North Pole (which is suspiciously close to Canada, a country that threatens U.S. national security). The gifts are produced by elves who don’t have the protections of U.S. labor laws in workshops that aren’t subject to U.S. environmental or safety standards. Claus has stolen jobs from American workers with his industrial policy, which uses Yuletide magic to subsidize the manufacturing and transportation of his exports. This unfair competition allows Claus to flood our country with toys priced lower than anyone else can produce them: $0.
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Trading relationships are fair only if the exchange of goods is balanced or America has a surplus. Which is to say: Americans must export as much, or more, to foreigners as they export to us. Yet in exchange for all those toys, the only things Americans export to Claus is cookies. The paunchy pillager should at the very least commit to buying a few hundred billion dollars’ worth of American oil and natural gas — or better yet, coal — to take a step toward balanced trade.
That way, every request from a child sitting on his lap at the mall would help create good-paying jobs in the Rust Belt. The white-bearded interloper also uses a foreign-domiciled vessel to make deliveries in the U.S. when he jumps from house to house. Efficient as it may be, Kriss Kringle’s sleigh and reindeer operation denies jobs to the hardworking American truck drivers, train engineers and union dockworkers who would transport the gifts instead.
Higher production and distribution costs might result in fewer toys, but as Trump has said before, girls don’t really need so many dolls anyway. Parents can have a teaching moment when they explain to their kids around the tree that the short-term pain of a less fun Christmas is worth the long-term gain of national sovereignty and a new golden age for manufacturing.
The transition away from the Santa Claus tradition won’t be easy for many families, but the era of outsourcing and trade deficits is over. Young children are too impressionable to risk developing fond sentiments about low-priced goods produced abroad. They might grow up to support free trade.
Here are the Editors of National Review on the MAGA-fueled ruination of the Heritage Foundation.
Eli Lake justly criticizes J.D. Vance for embracing illiberal provocateurs such as Tucker Carlson. A slice:
Vance has aligned himself with the side that wants to keep the MAGA tent as wide as possible. And that means he is on Team Tucker Carlson. On the other side of the party’s civil war are conservatives like Newsweek senior editor Josh Hammer, Fox News host Mark Levin, and [Ben] Shapiro. Shapiro’s speech denounced those inside the MAGA coalition who were too afraid to call out conspiracy theory hokum, lest they offend their very-online audiences. In short, Shapiro is asking the MAGA coalition to enforce its own borders and keep out the kooks, conspiracy theorists, and antisemites.
Vance’s allegiance to Carlson is understandable. Carlson played a major role in persuading Trump to select him as his running mate in 2024. And Vance made clear on Sunday that he will not turn on Tucker, despite having occasional disagreements with him. Vance is the prohibitive favorite to win the 2028 Republican presidential nomination and he is counting on support from Carlson and his audience for the nomination.
