“The bill’s reforms aside, its restrictions would have made the border a much more dangerous and inaccessible place for people seeking protection. A similar border-buttoning authority during the pandemic didn’t prevent crossings, but it did lead to thousands of reported instances of kidnapping, torture, and rape suffered by asylum seekers who were returned to or stopped in Mexico. Fortifying the border against asylum seekers, as the bipartisan bill would’ve done and as President Joe Biden is now doing, keeps vulnerable migrants in danger.
Harris and Walz’s eagerness to defend the failed border bill is a sign of the Democratic Party’s rightward shift on immigration and border security this year. The legislation had no grand reform—no pathway to citizenship for undocumented longtime residents, no solution for Dreamers, no farm work visa improvements—to balance the significant asylum restrictions. But the border and immigration have increasingly become liabilities for Democrats (and top priorities for voters), so their messaging has gotten tougher and their appetite for restrictionism has grown.
Congress should work on immigration reform instead of relying on the president to patch up the broken system. As Walz said in yesterday’s debate, “You can’t just do this through the executive branch.” Questions of process aside, this year’s bipartisan bill wasn’t the silver bullet or the humane solution Democrats keep suggesting.”
“the vast majority of fentanyl brought into the U.S. is not carried by illegal immigrants or the result of porous borders: From 2019 to 2024, 80.2 percent of the people arrested at the border with fentanyl were U.S. citizens, according to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
And as NPR reported last year, “the vast majority of illicit fentanyl—close to 90%—is seized at official border crossings.””
“The nationalist conservative obsession with blue-collar manufacturing jobs often ignores the interests of workers and the will of consumers. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) provided a perfect illustration in an early August campaign speech in Nevada on “the American dream.”
In it, Donald Trump’s protectionist running mate declared that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”
On its face, that’s just rhetorical silliness. Common sense says anyone should be willing to make that trade: Affordable and abundant appliances are part of the reason that 21st century America is the best place to live in the history of the human race. Jobs are abundant too—there were 7.6 million unfilled jobs in August, per the Department of Labor—and the loss of a few should not worry vice presidential candidates.
But when right-wing populists such as Vance make this argument, they mean something less literal: that America would be better off if the nation manufactured more and imported less, and Americans would be better off working in metaphorical toaster factories than doing whatever job they have now.
Both ideas are wrong.
The supposed decline of American manufacturing is wildly overstated by politicians such as Trump and Vance (and across the aisle by President Joe Biden). Yes, a lot of low-level manufacturing has been outsourced via global trade, but American manufacturing output is running at near-record highs these days. Instead of making toasters, America makes BMWs and designs the components in, and apps on, your iPhone.
That’s a good tradeoff, especially for workers. You earn more building fancy cars than you do piecing together basic kitchen appliances. The average wage for manufacturing workers (excluding managers) has doubled since 1999, outpacing inflation.
Vance and his nationalist conservative allies think that’s a problem, one they wish to solve with more tariffs and other trade barriers that they hope will incentivize low-paying toaster-making jobs to return to the United States.”
…
“When Biden expanded Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum earlier this year, one of the many objections came from the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers (NAFEM). In a June letter to the U.S. Trade Representative, the trade association pointed out that higher tariffs on the raw materials needed to manufacture appliances would, predictably, harm American companies.
“Even in instances of growing sales, the costs of tariffs grow with business,” NAFEM wrote. Member companies would thus be forced to “reallocate the funds that would be used for wage increases and additional employees to pay for the increased tariff costs.”
The nationalist conservatives also misunderstand Americans’ willingness to accept Vance’s deal—even if many prefer the idea of boosting domestic manufacturing.
Earlier this year, the Cato Institute polled consumers to ask if they’d support a tariff on imported blue jeans in order to increase blue jeans manufacturing jobs in America. About 62 percent of respondents said yes.
But hold on. When told that the tariff would make jeans just $10 more expensive at the store, support for that policy flipped: Now, 66 percent opposed it. And if the tariff would make jeans $25 more expensive, an overwhelming 88 percent said no.”
…
“How many Americans living in the year 2024 aspire to work—or see their children and grandchildren work—in a toaster factory?
The answer is pretty close to none. That’s great. We should prefer a country where young men and women aspire to be scientists, AI developers, and tech entrepreneurs over one where the dream job is a 40-hour-per-week gig at the local toaster plant.
Vance, and his nationalist conservative allies, are selling a vision of America that’s long out of date. It’s a backward-looking economic message that assumes people would be happier if they were less materially wealthy and had fewer prospects. Most Americans seem unwilling to go along when you show them the bill.”
“The most generic definition of a commodity is something of value that’s bought and sold. A not insignificant segment of the left uses this generic definition when they say we should “decommodify” housing—it should not be something that’s bought and sold like a normal product.
Hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) decry the “privatization” of real estate development at a recent event promoting her Homes Act. That bill, jointly authored with Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.), would get the federal government back into the business of building and operating public housing units.
Their debate remarks notwithstanding, there’s no indication that Vance and Walz want to go so far as to completely end private housing markets.
Rather, they want to stop certain types of people from buying and selling housing—corporate speculators in Walz’s case, illegal immigrants in Vance’s. (In past remarks, Vance has also said we should squeeze corporate investors out of the housing market.) Once we get rid of the demand of Wall Street and illegal immigrants for housing, there’ll be more left for normal, decent Americans, the thinking goes.
As I wrote on Tuesday, that’s a mistaken attitude. There’s plenty of evidence that corporate investors and immigrants lower the cost of housing. The former provides the capital, the latter the labor, to get needed housing built.
There’s also no reason to think that a free market would transmute rising demand into ever higher prices. There’s not some fixed number of housing units. Increased demand might raise prices in the short run. But higher prices also encourage more homebuilding. That brings prices back down.
If it was profitable for developers to sell homes at $300,000 a unit and then more immigrants or speculators swoop in and buy houses, pushing the price up to $400,000, developers will respond by building more housing until the price falls back down to $300,000. If they were making money producing homes at that price, there’s no reason they’d suddenly stop just because demand increased.
Over time, capitalist innovation will lower production costs such that more and more housing is available at a lower price. This is what it actually means to make something into a “commodity” and we see examples of it everywhere in the economy.
There are more people and more demand than ever. Yet, somehow the price of common commodities and mass-produced consumer products keeps falling.
Real prices falling in the face of ever-rising demand is what it actually means to “commodify” something.”
…
“With zoning codes limiting how much new housing can be built at one time, the size of home-building firms has fallen, reducing economies of scale and construction productivity. Building codes dictating how homes have to be built has further helped to close off innovative construction methods.
Those regulatory restrictions on new supply never went away, with the result being that the price of housing has risen in tandem with rising demand. Additionally, new technology that promised to automate construction tasks has repeatedly failed to take off.
Rather than becoming a commodity, home-building has stayed a cottage industry (no pun intended). Real prices continue to rise and housing affordability has become an issue of national concern debated by candidates for federal office.
In this context, Walz and Vance have decided to double down on the zero-sum nature of the housing market. They say we need to decommodify housing by preventing the wrong people from buying a fixed stock of housing.
This is exactly backwards. Housing supply is fixed by regulation, not nature. If we stripped away regulations on homebuilding, supply would rise and prices would fall.
We’ve failed to make housing a commodity and that’s exactly the problem.”
“In June, former President Trump traveled to Las Vegas where he unexpectedly revealed a new tax idea: no taxes on tips. Why was Trump suddenly so keen on eliminating taxes on tipped earnings? Because he was trying to win the electorally important state of Nevada, which is home to a large number of Las Vegas-area service workers who rely heavily on tips for income.
This wasn’t a policy that fit into some broader framework or comprehensive theory of how taxes should work. It was an idea, floated in the middle of a rambling speech, targeting a specific, electorally important group, and offering them a benefit through the tax code.
Trump didn’t even try to pretend otherwise. At the June rally, he announced the plan, saying, “for those hotel workers and people that get tips you’re going to be very happy because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips people (are) making.”
There’s a word for this: pandering. And it has defined many policy proposals from both the Trump and Harris campaigns this year.”
…
“Pandering is hardly new in politics or policy. Politicians have long sought to win constituencies and placate voters with narrowly targeted policies designed to address specific concerns. All politicians pander to some extent.
But in the past, pandering has at least sometimes been a voter outreach tool for politicians with bigger ambitions and clearer visions they intend to pursue. In 2024, there’s hardly anything else in play. The campaign agendas are barely more than marketing one-sheets: half-baked promises to sell to voters with the details to come later. The pandering is the point. ”
“When asked why Harris has not distinguished herself by opposing these measures, Lincicome notes that supporting tariffs is just part of the “conventional wisdom in Washington today” even if polls may not completely support this assertion. “The view among the political experts is that elections are won or lost in a few places with a few votes,” and those critical “voters like tariffs.”
Given the IMF’s projections, bipartisan support for tariffs could lead to increased costs and slower economic growth for Americans regardless of who wins in November. ”
…
“former President Donald Trump floated a specific 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods alongside a 10 percent across-the-board tariff, which he recently increased to 20 percent. “It’s just what he thinks galvanized an audience,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics and Stiefel Trade Policy Center at the Cato Institute, tells Reason. “Let’s face it, none of this has any rigorous econometric modeling behind it, so it could be as simple as he thinks 20 percent sounds better.”
“Taking the candidates at their word, you would have to say that Trump’s tariffs would be orders of magnitude worse than what Kamala Harris might do, or say she will do,” Lincicome adds.”
“The US Navy has been battling the Houthis and some of Iran’s best weaponry in the Red Sea and changing some of the ways it fights to defeat them, America’s top naval officer said this week.
Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, said this week that the Navy is taking away many lessons from its almost yearlong fight against the Houthis, including the fact that drones are fundamentally changing warfare.
The Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group that Iran has armed and supported for years, have used aerial and surface drones to attack key merchant shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and threaten US Navy ships since last fall. The militants have also fired anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles at vessels.
US warships and aircraft, in partnership with allies, have been intercepting these threats. Just last week, American forces engaged a number of Houthi drones and missiles.
“We’re continuing to learn,” Franchetti responded to questions at a Wednesday Defense Writers Group event. “And again, I’ll just go back to the changing tactics, techniques and procedures based on adversaries.”
“The Houthis are using the best Iranian technology, and we know that we need to be able to defeat that,” she added. “And again, our ships are doing an amazing job. And our aircraft.””
…
“In this fight, the Navy has fired well over $1.1 billion worth of munitions fighting the Houthis, a figure that covers hundreds of air-launched weapons and ship-fired missiles that have been used to take out rebel weaponry, both missiles and drones.
The increasing use of unmanned systems, such as aerial strike platforms and naval drones, has been seen in other conflicts, most notably the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine, for instance, has built up a formidable arsenal of domestically produced naval drones and has used these systems to target Russian warships and ports around the Black Sea. Even though Kyiv lacks a proper navy, it has demonstrated it can still cause problems through this asymmetrical style of warfare.
“I think Ukraine has shown us that you can innovate on the battlefield,” Franchetti said. “I want to innovate before the battlefield so we can stay ahead of any adversary any time.””