The day before Sen. Lindsey Graham died, he and a bipartisan group of colleagues announced that they had reached agreement with the Trump administration on a bill to impose new U.S. sanctions on Russia. Graham’s colleagues now want to pass that bill as a memorial to him. Congress should change it first. The bill as written would give President Trump a new legal tool to continue his destructive trade wars.
Congress is right to increase pressure on Russia, whose economy is under stress from earlier rounds of U.S. and European sanctions as well as Ukraine’s intensifying drone strikes against Russian oil refineries, military factories and other economic infrastructure. President Volodymyr Zelensky has called those attacks “long-range sanctions.” But the centerpiece of Graham’s bill would hand Mr. Trump a new tool to impose sweeping U.S. tariffs on countries that buy oil or gas from Russia. He would almost certainly use that tool as a legal pretext to threaten tariffs on American friends, allies and adversaries alike.
Since his second inauguration, Mr. Trump has overseen a historic increase in U.S. tariffs, which are at the highest levels since the 1930s. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, however, authorizes Congress—not the president—to impose tariffs. Mr. Trump has therefore had to rely on statutes in which Congress delegated slices of that power to the executive, and the courts have pushed back.
…..
The Senate’s Russia sanctions bill would give Mr. Trump a new legal tool to increase tariffs up to 100% on the countries that buy the largest quantities of Russian oil and natural gas. Bill supporters see this as a tool to target China and India, the two largest importers of Russian oil. But many U.S. allies also continue to import smaller quantities of Russian energy, often because of legacy energy infrastructure built years ago that can’t readily obtain supplies elsewhere. Jurisdictions importing Russian oil and natural gas this year include the European Union, Japan, Turkey, Brazil and South Korea.
Vague language in the bill authorizing the president to impose the same crippling tariffs on countries facilitating “oil sanctions evasion” could give Mr. Trump an even more flexible tool to threaten tariffs on countries that do a small amount of business with Russia’s energy sector. He could use these residual energy imports as the legal basis for sweeping tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from these countries, even if his actual reason for imposing the tariffs has nothing to do with Russian energy and everything to do with his latest international feuds.
We have already seen Mr. Trump attempt this. Last year, before the justices ruled that IEEPA doesn’t include a tariff power, Mr. Trump used that law to impose 25% tariffs on India, purportedly over its imports of Russian energy. He never imposed energy-related tariffs on China, a much larger importer. The difference? Mr. Trump was seeking a détente in his trade war with China and was at odds with India over trade.
Consider how this might work today. Mr. Trump could use the new law to impose 25% tariffs on the EU, purportedly over its natural gas purchases but in reality because he is irate over European leaders’ reluctance to back his war against Iran, or because of a tiff with some European head of state. Meantime, he could impose a 1% tariff on China as he continues to seek a trade peace. Irrespective of Mr. Trump’s actual reason for imposing tariffs, courts would likely uphold them so long as he can show that the targeted country or jurisdiction did in fact import Russian energy, or had some nexus to “evasion.”
Megan McArdle reports on the sorry state of many academic ‘disciplines.‘ A slice:
Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned that report.
But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they are wrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.
They can get away with this in the classroom. They can play those lines for applause at disciplinary conferences. But in the world outside, “experts say” no longer works. Academics spent years lending their institutional credibility to various political projects. Now they are reputationally bankrupt. If they don’t repair the damage, and convince people to keep writing the checks, many institutions will eventually be financially bankrupt as well.
Here’s the first of David Henderson’s ten lectures, for the Peterson Academy, on economics.
Medicare-for-all does indeed mean higher taxes for all. A slice:
A recent poll by Echelon Insights found that 74 percent of voters who support the idea championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and other progressive lawmakers think raising taxes only on billionaires would cover all of Medicare’s costs.
Just 40 percent knew the truth: Medicare-for-all would require raising taxes on most taxpayers, including the middle class.
Even that is true only if Medicare-for-all means creating a government-run health care system along the lines of what exists in some other country. The version advanced by Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, does not resemble another country’s system or Medicare. The legislation that Sanders and Jayapal have introduced is so light on details that it’s not possible for the Congressional Budget Office to assess how much it would cost.
Logan Tantibanchachai writes about this reality:
Visa holders founded half of today’s Fortune 500 companies and a majority of billion-dollar startups. Current restrictions damage that competitive advantage and choke off future growth.
Ryan Bourne is not favorably impressed by J.D. Vance’s grasp of economics. A slice:
In the same chapter, Vance complains that economics has occupied the moral space vacated by declining religion. The deeper irony is that many political economists stood alongside Britain’s evangelical abolitionists in fighting slavery. The evangelicals saw humanity as brothers and sisters before God. The classical economists began from the secular premise that black people possessed the same agency, rationality, and right to choose as anyone else.
Economics earned the “dismal” epithet that Vance now repeats, in other words, not by calculating away human freedom but by taking it seriously.
Kyle Pomerleau busts myths about a proposed “windfall-profits” tax on oil and gas suppliers.
Timothy Taylor shares some thoughts on Joel Mokyr’s Nobel lecture.
James Pethokoukis decries “America’s stagnationist activist groups.” Here’s his conclusion:
Clearly the anti-data center movement is gaining ground, and that was true even before the New York permitting pause. As the bank JPMorgan explained in a note last month, “Data center buildout is shifting from an engineering-and-real-estate problem to a political-economy problem: who gets power, who pays for upgrades, and who tolerates the local impacts.”
Despite all the talk about the escalating power needs of AI infrastructure, it’s now obvious that AI optimists have been underpricing the social license issue. Specifically, how hard those aforementioned Down Wing forces will fight to keep their dominant position by exaggerating issues of electricity prices and water usage as their vectors. For these activists, the real issue is their dislike of techno-capitalism, as much as it is disdain for nuclear-powered AI data centers. Even if these data centers are all powered by small modular nuclear reactors and recycle all their water, the activist opposition will continue—perhaps even into orbit.
Roger Pielke, Jr., documents the continued decline of climate calamitism.
