Tariffs are taxes on American consumers and businesses. They make inputs more expensive, reduce choice, and slow investment. They don’t bring jobs back—they make the tools to create those jobs more costly.

During the campaign, Vice President JD Vance claimed that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” The line got applause. But it betrayed a dangerous economic illusion.

Vance sees the toaster. He doesn’t see the millions of families who bought that toaster for $20 instead of $80 and used the savings for groceries, medicine, or a child’s school supplies. He doesn’t see the small business owner who bought cheaper equipment and hired another worker. He doesn’t see the everyday miracles of freed-up capital, redirected investment, and second-order job creation.

Henry Hazlitt called this the fallacy of the “seen and unseen.” It’s the oldest trick in politics: show the factory job you might save, hide the thousands of better futures you quietly destroy.

If we want a freer, fairer global economy, we don’t get there by torching trust and slapping taxes on ourselves. We get there by enabling investors and entrepreneurs to build competitive industries, by investing in lifelong education and innovation, and by strengthening institutions that last longer than one man’s grievance.

That’s what America used to stand for: rules, not whims; institutions, not improvisation.

Steve Miran argues that because the US has run trade deficits for decades, the economic models must be broken. But that’s like saying gravity stopped working because planes fly. The persistent US deficit isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s a reflection of how much of the system depends on us. Models need to be read with the institutional context in mind.

The stakes are bigger than a trade balance. What’s being traded away—at a terrible cost—is the American model of principled leadership, rooted in liberty, trust, and rules. We lose that, we lose the quiet miracle behind a billion pencils.

The result would be a "checkpoint society" where identity checks become an unavoidable part of daily life, Big Brother Watch says.

The group says such a system would fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state, creating a surveillance infrastructure vulnerable to abuse, discrimination, and hacking. A Big Brother Watch poll, carried out by YouGov, shows that 63 percent of Brits don't trust the government to protect their data – hardly surprising given Whitehall's track record of bungled IT projects, data leaks, and multi-billion-pound write-offs.

The group has also sounded the alarm over the UK's existing digital identification system, One Login, which underpins the credential issuing process in the so-called "BritCard" proposal, which it says is known to suffer from substantial cybersecurity and data protection weaknesses.

Big Brother Watch also warns of mission creep, arguing that once a system is live, "voluntary" quickly becomes mandatory. Those who fail or refuse to enrol risk being locked out of jobs, housing, or healthcare, while errors could leave people wrongly excluded from essential services.

"The notion that digital ID will provide a magic-bullet solution for unauthorised immigration is ludicrous," said Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch. "It will not stop small boat crossings, and it will not deter those intent on using non-legal means of entering the country from doing so. But digital ID will create a huge burden for the largely law-abiding 60 million people who already live here and insert the state into many aspects of our everyday lives."

Unlike its rival, Intel, AMD saw the need for battery efficient chips. It bet better than Intel. It will now be competitively disadvantaged by the United States government becoming Intel’s largest single shareholder.

Apple, too, is a major player in microchip architecture. Using ARM chip architecture, which is very power efficient, Apple engineers and manufactures all its chips for its devices. The Mac uses M-chips. The iPad Pro uses M-chips. Apple’s other devices use A-series chips. Many of Apple’s processing features run faster with less power than Intel’s chips.

But, again, the United States now is the largest shareholder of Intel, which puts every other microchip company at a disadvantage. Why? Because Intel now has subsidy by taxpayers. Instead of having to let the creative destruction of the market place pick apart Intel, which has chronically made bad decisions, the leadership that made those bad decisions has been rewarded.

Uncle Sam insists it will exercise no voting with its stock. But the fine print of the deal shows Uncle Sam is getting common stock with voting rights. Saying it will not vote and not actually voting are two different things. If the situation continues and a Democrat takes back the White House, you will see ESG and DEI explode as Intel seeks to humor its largest shareholder.

This is another step down a dangerous path. Defenders will say the government bailed out Fannie and Freddie. The government bailed out General Motors. The government even bailed out Chrysler. //

The government keeps making companies too big to fail and hiding behind “national security” as the excuse. In fact, that has become the consensus talking point among defenders who will say things like, “I’m uncomfortable with this, but national security…”. It is an excuse and justification, but not reality.

Intel can now ignore most of its other shareholders. Its competitors now face a company subsidized unfairly by taxpayers. Its business decisions get to shift with the whims of political administrations.

This is a terrible decision. Donald Trump has beaten Mamdani to seizing the means of production.

The Preamble

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Government: 'Trust us, it'll be different this time'

The reason for asking the civil government to proclaim the goodness of traditional family life is not because men and women in marital covenant wish to become a special interest group. Rather, the official acknowledgement of the traditional family’s goodness is proper because one of the government’s most basic duties is to promote virtue. Challenging the county commission to honor this role offered them the opportunity to proclaim truth amidst a backdrop of other governments, businesses, and institutions promoting vice.

You would cry too, if you were losing a compensation package bigger than the salary of the president of the United States. In 2022, CPB CEO Patricia Harrison’s compensation was $524,000, according to the CPB’ most recently available 990 tax exempt form. //

Each year, Congress gives CPB loads of federal taxpayer money, and CPB decides the amount to give to 1,581 public radio and television stations. But the Big Beautiful Bill trimmed CPB out of appropriations, meaning it gets zero money instead of the $1.07 billion it expected for 2026 and 2027. //

In 2022, CPB gave KSDP $211,000. The radio station’s total revenue was $265,000. The CPB portion could have been paid by Harrison’s salary alone for two years. The folks at KSDP might be angry to learn that their annual budget for the compensation packages for all employees combined that year, ($141,067), was slightly less than Harrison’s 2022 bonus ($144,645). At least one person on the KSDP staff has a second job.

If the CPB board really cared about keeping broadcasting viable in small towns like Sand Point, it would not have a huge, overpaid staff in Washington, D.C.

In 2022, CPB spent $19.3 million on salaries and benefits. At least 14 CPB employees that year had compensation packages worth more than $260,000. Of those, five employees were paid over $470,000. //

The Aleutian Islands are not a typical U.S. community and there KSDP radio may actually be a treasure to the 6,000 residents in its listening area, but in 2022 it only took in $1,650 in contributions; zero in membership drives; and just over $18,000 in “underwriting,” which is tax-free advertising. The station is almost fully subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. That is how it works at most public broadcast outlets.

The Internet Archive is now a federal depository library, meaning it can provide free access to bills, laws, regulations, presidential documents, studies, and other documents.

The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), run by the US Government Publishing Office (GPO), was established in 1813 to open up free access to official federal documents. Currently, there are 1,150 FDLs across all 50 states; all of them, except a few, are physical libraries.

Then, in the mid '70s, the federal government instituted the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, and at a stroke, all those huge station wagons weren't being built anymore. But there was a loophole: Light trucks had a more lax standard, which led to the rise of minivans and SUVs. People want big vehicles, and they're going to have them.

Now, though, in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), Congress pulled a good one - they didn't repeal the CAFE standards, but they zeroed out the fines manufacturers pay for exceeding them. //

Obama imposed a fuel economy mandate that was supposed to hit 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by 2025, which, as we pointed out in the pages of Investor’s Business Daily at the time, was designed to force EVs onto the market, because even compact hybrid cars can’t get that kind of mileage. //

Trump is again planning to roll the CAFE standards back. But Congress did him one better. Rather than wait for regulators to rewrite the rule, which can take years and be subject be endless lobbying and litigation from various interest groups – lawmakers simply zeroed out the penalty as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Now, if a car company sells cars that, on average, exceed whatever the fuel-economy limit is technically in force in a given year, they pay… nothing.

Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47
·
.@SecRollins on moving USDA staff out of DC to be closer to farmers: "This is literally what @POTUS has tasked his Cabinet to do — to deconstruct the Administrative State... This is aligned with our Founding Fathers' vision... where the government should be closer to the people."

10:35 AM · Jul 25, 2025 //

So yesterday, USDA announced we're going to be moving most of our headquarters staff out into the country, in the five cities, the five states that you mentioned, taking our, getting closer to our constituents, the farmers, the ranchers, the producers, ... //

bpbatch
3 hours ago
Now move the IRS to Antarctica.

Min Headroom bpbatch
3 hours ago
Wait I thought that was why Trump wanted Greenland…

rhhardin | July 21, 2025 at 6:23 pm
The Fed matches the number of dollars circulating to what the economy can do at once, so that the dollars don’t bid up the price of stuff that’s more than the economy can do at once, or have parts of it fall idle for lack of bidding dollars.

It does this by creating or destroying dollars.

It creates or destroys dollars by selling stuff it has (e.g. bonds) at a greater rate, or buying back stuff with newly created dollars (buying back debt, e.g.).

What regulates this selling or buying back is the target interest rate. They change this target rate in monthly meetings according to leading indicators of inflation. If inflation looks rising, it sells more debt and burns the dollars it gets. You can’t spend debt so that restricts bidding for goods and services. If inflation looks falling, it buys back more debt with newly printed dollars so there can be more bidding on goods and services. In between setting new targets, whether the market short term interest rate is above or below the target tells the fed to buy or sell more to hold the interest rate at the target.

Something gold can’t do for you.

What most people don’t understand, I think, is that money is not wealth. It is to an individual, but not to a country. Money is a ticket in line to say what the economy does next, presumably something for you. The Fed creates and destroys tickets to match what the economy can do at once.
There’s no increase or decrease in wealth, anybody’s wealth.

Maybe that takes some of the sinister magic out of it. //

rhhardin in reply to CommoChief. | July 21, 2025 at 8:36 pm
If productivity goes up 10% as well, then your $100 buys exactly what it did before. LIkewise is money velocity declines by 10%. Stuff changes and the Fed responds to keep the value of the dollar constant. Actually 2% inflation is the target because that adds stability to the economic system against sudden failures. //

Milhouse in reply to CommoChief. | July 22, 2025 at 3:03 am
Chief, the problem with a gold standard is that the gold supply grows at random, at rates that have no connection with the need for an expanded money supply. The gold supply grows and shrinks as new mines are discovered and old ones play out. If you suddenly have a huge influx from newly opened mines, you get inflation; even hyperinflation, as Europe experienced when the gold from the New World started flowing in. And if production has a major spurt, and the gold supply doesn’t increase enough to match it, then you have deflation, which is even worse than inflation; no one wants to invest money in anything, because they’re better off just sticking it in a vault and letting it appreciate on its own.

The idea of the Fed is to control the money supply and make it grow at the same rate as production does, or as close to it as possible. Now at times the Fed has failed to do this, but at least when it’s doing its job properly we can expect good results, whereas with gold it’s always up to pure chance. //

Milhouse in reply to destroycommunism. | July 22, 2025 at 2:57 am
Money doesn’t need to be “backed” by anything. It’s a medium of exchange in itself, and its value comes entirely from the fact that people are willing to accept it in exchange, confident that other people will be equally willing in turn. And they get that confidence from the fact that the IRS guarantees it will accept it, so if worse comes to worst you can use it to pay your taxes, and also from the fact that it’s legal tender, so you can discharge private debts with it whether your creditor likes it or not.

The idea that the government must be willing to sell you gold for dollars, at a fixed price, is obsolete and stupid. It reflects a mindset stuck in the olden days when gold was money and dollars weren’t themselves money but merely represented money. It’s the opposite now; dollars are money, and gold is merely a commodity, exactly like diamonds or wool. //

Milhouse in reply to rhhardin. | July 21, 2025 at 8:30 pm
What most people don’t understand, I think, is that money is not wealth. It is to an individual, but not to a country.

As Smith taught us 250 years ago! The Wealth of Nations should be required reading before anyone comments on economics in any way.

Smith destroyed the “gold equals wealth” myth by pointing out that Spain was flush with gold, but was a very poor country. Beggars had gold plates but nothing to eat off them. Whereas Poland had very little gold, but was a very rich country. Therefore the quantity of gold in a country could not be a measure of its wealth.

U.S. states have built less than 400 electric vehicle charging ports through April under $7.5 billion federal infrastructure programs, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday.

As of April 2025, 384 charging ports are operating at 68 stations in 16 states, GAO said, saying a joint office overseeing the program "has not defined performance goals with measurable targets and time frames for its activities." //

Nationwide, there are about 219,000 publicly available EV charging ports, according to the Energy Department. //

Oh, and for the sake of comparison, there are 198,443 gasoline stations in the United States, and to make it apples-to-apples, since the number of EV charging ports are just that - ports, equivalent to one single gas or diesel nozzle - just for the sake of argument, let's assume an average of six pumps per station, with two nozzles per pump; that's 2,381,316 gasoline or diesel ports in the United States. Even our own little local gas station, up the road in our little Susitna Valley village center, has six gasoline pumps and two diesel pumps, so I'm pretty confident with that number.

The Heritage Foundation's Defense Budget Tool provides a user-friendly method to aid in both the analysis and transparency of the U.S. defense budget and facilitate more informed debate about how the Department of Defense ought to be directing spending.

Until now, individual line items of the defense budgets have only been published on the website of Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) each year. This data is published in disparate PDFs and spreadsheets, with no mechanism for viewing all the data at once.
This tool:

• Provides an itemized accounting of the U.S. defense budget for analysis by national security experts.
• Allows a user to create customizable defense budgets that can be saved and shared for future reference.
• Makes defense budget data more accessible to Americans interested in the composition of the U.S. national security budget.

Reagan warned about unchecked government spending.

Obnoxious and entitled federal bureaucrats’ attempts to resist reform are making it hard to say good things about public service. //

Well, having been a political reporter in D.C. for 26 years, the fact there are extraordinary federal workers is unsurprising to me. I personally know good, talented people in the trenches. What is likely surprising to Lewis’ affluent center-left readers is that the bad federal workers are so, so much worse than unmotivated nine-to-fivers. //

So I would encourage you to read Who Is Government? and do it with an open mind. Let’s build a “culture of recognition” that rewards good federal employees, and better educates the public on the good things our federal agencies are doing for us. I would just humbly suggest that a culture of recognition is worthless without also building a strong culture of accountability. Based on the petulant reaction and baseless legal resistance to an elected president’s fairly modest attempts at reforming and downsizing an unelected bureaucracy, we have a long way to go before we get bureaucracy that puts the citizens’ needs before its own.

California's high-speed rail project officially began in 2008, although it was initiated on paper earlier. The whole system was initially planned to comprise 776 miles, with a completion date set for 2020. To date, none of the proposed rail network is operational. By way of comparison, the Transcontinental Railroad is 1,911 miles long, cutting through the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, and it was completed in 2,314 days, despite the Civil War and Indian raids. An [Irish track-laying crew laid 10 miles, 1,320 feet of track on a single day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracklaying_race_of_1869#Ten_Miles_of_Track,_Laid_in_One_Day:~:text=new%2520record%2520with-,10%25C2%25A0miles,-1%252C320%25C2%25A0feet%2520(16.496), while California has managed to lay 1,600 feet in nine years. //

The ballyhooed three-hour trip from LA to San Francisco only works if there are no stops. Once you add stops, the time starts to increase. There is no universe in which this rail line would not require large-scale government subsidies because the daily passenger demand just isn't there. At best, this is a sinecure for politically connected construction and consulting firms. At worst, it is outright theft. If California's voters are willing to foot the bill, they should be allowed to do so. The rest of us should be allowed to opt out, and thanks to Secretary Duffy, we have.

Fox News reported Wednesday that the Trump administration found every step of the streamlining and reorganization process to be difficult. Even something as simple as getting a list of the people who actually worked for the State Department turned out to require major effort. “It took us three months,” recounted one Trump State Department official, “to get a list of the people that actually work in the building.”

That’s your taxpayer dollars at work. “They couldn't tell you how many people worked here. It’s sort of scary as a taxpayer and as a public servant to think that we don’t even know how many employees we have. This is a national security agency, you know. Who are these people?” Yeah, good point. Not only were unknown amounts of money being wasted, but the State Department could have been the place of employ of any number of people whose loyalties lay elsewhere, or who were even at place in Foggy Bottom in order to gather information for hostile entities.

Inconceivable? If only it were.

Bureaucracy: The Real Engine Behind This Train
This isn’t just about a failed transit system. It’s about the broader addiction to government grandeur, the idea that massive spending equals progress, even when the results amount to a pile of gravel and invoices.

California’s rail saga should be taught in every high school civics class as a master class in government arrogance. The state formed committees to oversee subcommittees that evaluated contracts for lines that didn’t exist. Meanwhile, the actual train remains stuck in concept art and artist renderings. It’s easier to draw the train than to build it. //

The Private Sector Could've Built the Rails and Painted the Train Twice
Imagine if a private consortium had been handed $11 billion and told to build a rail line from L.A. to San Francisco. Given the right contractor, it would have been completed by now, including terminals, security, solar roofing, and possibly even a profit margin, potentially while under budget.

Just last week, USAID officials and three company executives pleaded guilty in a massive fraud and bribery scheme involving at least 14 contracts totaling over $550 million

The trial showed that USAID contracting officer Roderick Watson took bribes and was showered with lavish gifts—including cash, laptops, thousands of dollars in tickets to a suite at an NBA game, a country club wedding, downpayments on two residential mortgages, cell phones, and even jobs for his relatives.

In exchange for these bribe payments, Watson influenced the award of over $550 million in contracts by manipulating the procurement process at USAID. He now faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
https://dallasexpress.com/crime/usaid-official-three-executives-plead-guilty-in-550m-bribery-scheme/ //

The solution is twofold.

The first part is to root out and eliminate these programs, which are currently managed by unelected bureaucrats and shouldn’t exist in the first place. //

The only way to do this is to elect representatives who agree with these principles, and then hold them accountable to ensure they do what we’ve elected them to do.

The second part is to enforce radical transparency and accountability in all future government activity. This part is much more difficult.

It starts with only allowing programs to be created in public through the official legislative process. No more administrative decree. If an elected official isn’t willing to go to the public and say, “Here’s what I want to create, here’s why, and here’s how it will work,” then it shouldn’t be allowed to exist. But it’s not just elected officials who play a role here—as citizens, we have a duty to make our voices heard during that process and then look at the results of the programs that our tax dollars, whether federal or local, are spent on and determine if they’ve been effective. //

ibt
an hour ago
Every grant of funds to an NGO should have to be signed for by a Representative or Senator. Then, that person should be held accountable for any fraud with those funds. After all, it is the JOB of the Representatives and Senators to responsibly spend taxpayer money. Oh, if the Representative or Senator loses their election in November, the funds should be frozen until another one signs for it. "Please explain to this court why you allowed the NGO to steal this money."

In September 2007, Hillary proposed giving every American child a $5,000 “baby bond” at birth. The Republican National Committee immediately condemned it as a “budget busting baby fund.” Rudy Giuliani dismissed it as pure “pandering” to voters.

They were right then. What changed?

Trump’s version offers $1,000 per child — originally branded “MAGA Accounts,” now called “Trump Accounts.” With around 4 million births annually, taxpayers face a minimum $4 billion yearly obligation. The same policy framework Republicans spent months attacking has somehow become Republican orthodoxy. //

From a corporate finance perspective, this program creates perverse incentives that benefit wealthy families and financial institutions while providing minimal help to working Americans.

The structure allows families to contribute an additional $5,000 annually to these government-seeded accounts. Wealthy families who can afford maximum contributions receive ongoing tax shelters, while working families get a one-time $1,000 payment they likely can’t afford to supplement.

Meanwhile, Wall Street firms are already positioning to manage these accounts. Billions in new assets under management mean substantial fee income for financial institutions. Taxpayers fund the initial deposits, Wall Street collects the management fees, and wealthy families get tax advantages — a perfect trifecta for everyone except the middle class citizens who foot the bill.

Trump’s version contains another critical flaw that makes it worse than Hillary’s income-restricted proposal: no income limits and minimal citizenship verification. While children must be U.S. citizens, parents only need Social Security numbers.

This creates a massive incentive for illegal border crossings. //

Genuine America First policy should focus on proven strategies: cutting spending so working people aren’t killed by government-caused inflation, reducing regulatory burdens on small businesses, curtailing the skyrocketing costs of health insurance by repealing Obamacare, and eliminating corporate welfare programs that benefit connected elites.

Instead of creating new government programs, Republicans should expand existing vehicles like Education Savings Accounts and Health Savings Accounts that already provide tax advantages without requiring taxpayer funding.

Real pro-family policy means letting families keep more of their own money through tax cuts and other conservative reforms, not redistributing taxpayer dollars through government accounts managed by Wall Street firms.

President Trump and Sen. Cruz are sound conservatives who received bad advice from establishment insiders. But they can still correct course.

The test of conservative leadership isn’t avoiding all mistakes — it’s recognizing bad advice quickly and changing direction.