Meanwhile, the administration’s proposal would expand eligibility for the subsidy to millions of married mothers who already choose to stay home. Those families would get the same kind of deadweight spending that went to the 75 percent of EV tax-credit recipients who would have purchased an electric car with or without the subsidy. Millions of other well-off married parents could stop working and reduce their incomes enough to newly qualify for the benefit.
Defenders insist that the proposal would merely repurpose existing spending, not add any more. But it would be impossible to target the new subsidy at only those parents who would otherwise work. If spending truly wouldn’t grow to accommodate new recipients, the change would necessarily redirect benefits from poorer single parents.
…..
The vice president and his allies are doing a motte-and-bailey routine. Among themselves, they openly discuss using state power and taxpayer money to privilege traditional ways of life. Then, when scrutinized by conservatives, they say they are just shifting current spending around. But no, this is a Republican administration seeking to expand the entitlement state so it can influence social outcomes.
Impose a tariff. Businesses warn that costs will rise. Economists explain that tariffs are taxes on imports paid initially by domestic importers. Firms begin adjusting supply chains, absorbing margins or passing some of the additional cost downstream. Then exemptions appear, rates decline, offsets materialize, or entire categories of goods are quietly removed.
And we are asked to believe that the one thing connecting those decisions is not the cost imposed on Americans.
The November 2025 food exemptions are particularly difficult to explain away. The administration removed tariffs from products including coffee and beef amid concerns about grocery affordability. Contemporary reporting explicitly described the move as tariff relief aimed at easing pressure on consumers. But…? No, never mind.
This does not mean every tariff increase produces an immediate, one-for-one increase in retail prices. Exchange rates move. Foreign producers sometimes absorb part of the tax. Importers compress margins. Inventories delay pass-through. Businesses substitute suppliers. Consumers substitute products. The incidence of a tariff can be distributed across several parties and over time.
But none of that rescues the proposition that tariffs somehow make Americans richer by making imported goods more expensive. The repeated reversals demonstrate what should, for a nation owing so much to markets, prices, and property rights, be embarrassingly basic economics. When taxing an imported product begins creating politically uncomfortable consequences, the solution repeatedly turns out to be…taxing it less.
One admirable thing about the president — and I’m being serious here — is that he ran as a tariff man. He was elected on that promise. He loves tariffs. He wanted to impose them. He was very, very clear about that.
Here’s the thing he didn’t do. Not once during the election campaign did he say that the country he wanted to target was Canada. Why?
The idea is absurd. Canada is a longtime friend and ally. We have deeply integrated manufacturing supply chains. It would hurt people in Canada. It would hurt people in the United States. And the president’s political instincts were strong enough that he understood not to run on tariffs against Canada.
Then he won the election. Many people forget that the very first trade policy action of the new Trump administration was a set of tariffs on Mexico, China, and Canada.
These were the so-called fentanyl tariffs. The stated goal was to use access to the American market as leverage to get those countries to stop the flow of fentanyl across their borders. That is fair enough, and the objective is good. There’s one problem, though. Almost no fentanyl came from Canada.
There was almost nothing Canada could do to eliminate fentanyl manufacturing or stop exports of fentanyl, because they basically didn’t have a fentanyl trade to stop in the first place. The stuff was crossing north from the United States about as often as it was crossing south.
So from Canada’s perspective — and from reality’s perspective — this was an arbitrary set of tariffs imposed because of something they hadn’t done. They retaliated with their own tariffs in March and April of 2025. Then the Supreme Court ruled the fentanyl tariffs unconstitutional, they vanished, and the president more or less forgot about Canada.
…..
We are now busily converting that one market into three separate ones. And what we’re spending to do it isn’t the tariff revenue, which is trivial, and it isn’t the 4% of Canadian exports, which they’ll re-route. What we’re spending is Canada’s belief that we are a country worth building a factory next to.
We lose the cluster. We lose the investment that would have come to the border. We lose the cheap parts that made American cars competitive. And we lose the thing that takes generations to build and one weekend to break, which is the assumption that a deal with the United States is a deal.
Bloomberg reports on strengthening ties between Canada and the E.U.
This CNBC piece only further confirms Trump’s complete ignorance of basics facts of international commerce. (HT Scott Lincicome)
When a government exploits a chokepoint, whether Iran holding the Strait of Hormuz or China bringing down the boom on rare earths, it takes a risk. In the short term, Iran or China will achieve asymmetric gains, but over time these returns will diminish. Inventories rise, customers diversify, producers change investment plans, and infrastructure that had been too expensive becomes economical. That’s happening now with China’s hold on critical minerals, and it’s why Beijing’s trading partners are working together more effectively to break that hold.
Looking back, China probably did its trading partners a favor by exploiting the chokepoint it spent decades establishing. Dependence on China for critical minerals has been a national-security vulnerability for those trading partners for decades. We knew that well before China imposed export controls in 2023.
Reason‘s Jacob Sullum tells of growing opposition to Flock cameras.
