Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins last summer said the Trump Administration’s goal is to create a 100% American farm workforce. Well, now the Administration is quietly conceding that too few Americans want to work these grueling jobs, and that its policies risk driving up food prices.
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Farmers report that crops are wasting in fields because they can’t find workers. DOL warns that shortages are resulting in more food imports, which have become more expensive because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Wholesale fresh vegetable prices have risen 48% in the past year, according to the producer price index. Americans no doubt have noticed in stores.
We’re glad the Administration is trying to make it easier to hire guest workers, but how about making the case to voters that the country needs legal immigrants for vital jobs that drive the economy.
First, Trump promised on liberation day that jobs and factories would come “roaring back” once a deadened U.S. manufacturing sector was protected from foreign competition. Yet after a year of high tariffs, manufacturing has shed tens of thousands of jobs, continuing a slide that began in 2023. Other blue-collar industries that rely on imports, such as construction and transportation, saw similarly weak employment.
Investment in building new factories also declined in 2025. Protectionists might contend that tariffs need more than a year to bring manufacturing home. But American manufacturers overwhelmingly view tariff policy as a headwind to manage, not a boon to celebrate. The uncertainty generated by ever-changing duties has killed their ability to plan new investments. Meanwhile, factories pay higher prices on the 56 percent of U.S. imports that serve as inputs for other products.
Research finds that tariffs are passed on to Americans at rates of up to 96 percent, rather than paid by foreign countries, as Trump claims. Tariffs have raised the prices of imported and domestic goods alike, as dampened competition allows U.S. producers to charge more. Merchandise prices are now around 6 percent higher than they would have been under pre-tariff trends.
Trump also said that the trade deals he negotiated using tariffs had brought in trillions of dollars of foreign investment. Those numbers were always fanciful. Foreign direct investment in 2025 was lower than in previous years, and most of it was in retained earnings rather than in new ventures.
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Although Trump’s country-by-country levies were struck down, he is reconstituting his tariff regime piecemeal — first through a temporary 10 percent duty across the board, then through phony investigations into foreign trade practices. Alas, the new tariffs will have the same impoverishing effects as the old ones for no discernible benefit. What were we supposed to be “liberated” from, again?
Bryan Riley tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
A Federal Reserve study found that >50% of intermediate inputs used to produce pharmaceuticals in the U.S. are imported. (Mostly from Europe, not China). Putting big tariffs on intermediate goods used by U.S. manufacturers discourages domestic production.
Climate science, in the years following An Inconvenient Truth, increasingly took on the role of secular exegesis — the interpretation of extreme weather events, polar bear photographs, and pretty much anything-that-just-happened as signs confirming a narrative of planetary emergency requiring repentance.
The “post-liberals” attract characters of dubious intellectual and ethical merit, including the one profiled here. (HT Phil Magness)
