“In 2025, the Trump tariffs amounted to an average tax increase of $1,000 per US household,” write Erica York and Alex Durante of the Tax Foundation. “We estimate that the tariffs both announced and imposed, including the Section 122 tariff, Section 232 tariffs, Section 301 tariffs, and Section 338 tariff on Canada, will increase taxes per US household by $900 in 2026.”
The somewhat lower additional cost of trade protectionism on Americans projected for 2026 relative to last year comes courtesy of the changing legal landscape, not because of any loss of resolve on the part of the Trump administration. The sweeping tariffs imposed last year under the alleged authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) were voided in February when the Supreme Court flatly ruled that “IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.” Since then, the president and his partisans have scrambled to exploit any possible means to burden imports with high duties and to punish foreign sellers for daring to export goods to the U.S. at competitive prices.
The laws that the administration has invoked for new tariffs are limited in scope or can only be invoked under specific circumstances. Section 122 tariffs, for example, may only be put in place for 150 days. Imposed after the IEEPA ruling, they expired on July 24 and were themselves overruled in May by the U.S. Court of International Trade since there was no balance of payments deficit as required by the law.
Bryan Riley tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Weird, uneducated protectionists often talk about trade as if it’s only about helping globalist billionaires. But trade has always been about lifting people out of poverty and strengthening U.S security.
George Leef explores what happens when academics deny reality (as they too often do). Two slices:
You’ve no doubt heard the expression, “That’s an idea so ridiculous only an academic could believe it.” It kept coming to mind as I read Professor John Staddon’s new book Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation. That individuals vary enormously in their talents and desires is an obvious fact, and yet many academics have become famous by declaring that individuals and especially groups must be treated as though they were equal.
Staddon, an emeritus professor of biology at Duke University, takes a critical look at the obsession among “progressives” for engineering equality, particularly with regard to race. Why, he wonders, are academic writings about race and “diversity” so filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and animosity? The reason, he maintains, is that few scholars are willing to subject the work of leftists to rigorous analysis—especially black writers who claim that America’s past racism calls for a national transformation. Toxic ideas that ought to have withered on the vine have therefore spread widely and influenced policy.
…..
[Ibram X.] Kendi declares that racism and capitalism are “conjoined twins.” Leftists are apt to nod in agreement with that, but Staddon replies that his position is “crypto-Marxist nonsense.” Rejecting capitalism would have the same disastrous results as did the rejection of traditional farming in the Soviet Union in favor of Trofim Lysenko’s crackpot beliefs rooted in Marxist theory. Again, thinking through the consequences of their demands is not part of the mental toolkit of academics like Kendi, nor is it expected of them by the educational establishment.
Nearly all Americans have been raised in the belief that individuals should be treated fairly and judged on the basis of their actions, not their race. Nevertheless, large numbers of them still harbor racist thoughts. That, at least, is the contention of numerous academics who declare that whites suffer from “color-blind racism.” They may think of themselves as good people who “don’t see color,” but they’re mistaken. How do we know? Because of a test devised at Harvard that supposedly reveals their “implicit bias.” Based on the dubious results of this strange “test,” the notion that many Americans harbor racial bias took hold. Staddon points out that although this test has been debunked, scholars persist in repeating that America is still awash in racism and that we need lots of education and training programs to combat it.
One of the hallmarks of the “thinking” of the academics Staddon surveys is that they refuse to consider non-racist explanations for social phenomena. A good example is the newly invented sub-field of economics called “Stratification Economics.” That’s the brain-child of Duke professor William Darity, who says that it studies why different racial groups have unequal incomes. Astoundingly, he forthrightly declares that he explicitly excludes any factors relating to the abilities of individuals. Ruling out a class of explanations is flagrantly unscientific, but Darity’s unintellectual approach is meant to support the “progressive” agenda of economic transformation and thus gets a pass.
George Will recommends David S. Reynolds’s new book, Two Ships. A slice:
Reynolds, a City University of New York historian, uses his subtitle — “Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America” — to assert this: The White Lion, the ship that first brought slaves to Virginia, and the Mayflower, which brought to New England Puritans in flight from monarchical absolutism and Anglican bossiness, incubated two ultimately incompatible American futures. Reynolds’s powerful demonstration is that his story — the symbolism of the two ships — is not his. It was ubiquitous in American political rhetoric until, happily, it no longer was, as the nation transcended old categories.
Here’s the abstract of Dora Costa’s and Matthew Kahn’s review of John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics: (I’ve not yet read the full review, but the abstract promises a solid analysis.)
John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics surveys 250 years of capitalism’s history through the eyes of roughly thirty critics, from the Luddites, early utopians and Marx to modern communitarians, antigrowth proponents, free trade opponents, and scholars of inequality. The result is a vivid, sympathetic reconstruction of left-of-center dissent. We argue, however, that the book reproduces two analytical weaknesses shared by the critics it profiles. First, it commits Harold Demsetz’s Nirvana Fallacy, evaluating imperfect real-world markets against idealized regulatory alternatives rather than against equally imperfect real-world governments. Second, it underestimates capitalism’s most distinctive self-correcting mechanisms: endogenous technological change and entrepreneurial creative destruction, all coordinated by the price system. The result is a catalogue of capitalism’s failures unaccompanied by any comparable accounting of the alternatives.
A realistic short-term prediction is that the stores will become havens for half-criminal resale markets, outright thievery, the homeless, and the mentally ill — that is, generally the same basket of issues that plague so many urban spaces where “discounted and/or free” stuff is on offer. Rather than relieve the very real affordability burden on the law-abiding working class, eliminating minimal barriers to entry, like normal prices and competition, that keep out the most antisocial elements of the city instead will force those workers to share space with the drug-addled, criminal, and dangerous. As surely as blood in the water attracts sharks, handouts of free or deeply discounted goods, in the melee of a populous city like New York, attract the worst kinds of crowds.
The importance of these small barriers, and correspondingly, the results of giveaways, can be affirmed all over New York and America’s other urban cores. For example, a “free” public pool in Central Park that opened in 2025 quickly became a hotbed for fights, disorder, and homeless “bathing.” The city has quietly stopped crowing about its success. “Free” gift stunts by companies or livestreamers in the city frequently result in unsafe mob scenes that further degenerate into violence.
The [New York] city’s plan rests on the assumption that it can control who buys subsidized goods. Yet Venezuela’s experience with government-run grocery stores suggests that assumption deserves scrutiny.
When Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez, created a nationwide network of government-run grocery stores called “Mercal” in 2003, he faced the same conundrum of how to control excess demand when prices are set artificially low.
Trade-offs are not just something thought up by conservative meanies. As long as what we want exceed what we have – and it’s been that way for thousands of years now – we are going to have to make trade-offs. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a carpenter or a CEO, whether you are down in a submarine or up in the dizzying heights of an editorial office in Times Square.
It must be remembered that since the McKinley Tariff [of 1890] the working classes and the lower middle classes of the United States have hardly known such luxuries as underclothing, or garments, or blankets, made of wool. Cotton and shoddy have been the principal raw materials of the so-called ‘Woollen Companies.’ The wealthy who travel have been in the habit of buying suits and dresses in England, and carrying them home duty free for personal use in their trunks. Consequently, if this new tariff passes there will not only be a general fall in prices, but also an introduction of many goods which for some time have been practically unknown to the shops of the United States.
The problem is not that government is spending too little but that it is spending too much. The problem in schooling is that government is spending too much on the wrong things. The problem in health care is that government is spending too much on the wrong things. The end result has been that government has become a self-generating monstrosity. Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.
A dynamic, competitive, and open economy is more likely to spark ongoing bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovation in every economic sector — including the defense industry — and thus produce genuine technological breakthroughs with potential military uses. In such conditions, military officials would be able to survey new, emerging technologies and assess which may give it an edge over its likely international opponents. Two welcome side-effects would be to diminish the cronyism problem and limit the understandable but also inhibiting preference on the part of military leaders and defense procurement specialists for what they already know.
