Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump’s tariffs have actually retarded U.S. manufacturing rather than bolstered it due to uncertainty and tariffs raising the cost of manufacturing inputs. From the Trump tariffs already put into effect, we haven’t seen huge price jumps as companies frontloaded their inputs to buy time and haven’t yet made pricing decisions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USjlhMDX90w
Two percent of working Americans get tips. If you are a waiter who gets tips, you get a tax cut, but if you are a dishwasher who doesn’t get tips, you don’t get a tax cut. If you are getting tips and stay within the bill’s 25k limit, you aren’t paying much taxes to begin with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNjSrXnMY4Y
The Federal Reserve took great and new action during the great recession, but they kept many of those policies afterwards, which can be dangerous and is an expansion of the Fed’s power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVFEcg-RIAk
“Without Newsom’s efforts, major CEQA reform would have died on the vine. Another late-breaking housing bill was under consideration as part of the budget, but not subject to Newsom’s ultimatum—but the Legislature caved in to union demands. The Sacramento Bee reports this bill was roughly based on another measure that “allows developers to bypass CEQA review if they agree to pay a certain minimum wage to construction workers.”
Mandating wage boosts drives up the cost of housing construction and weakens the usefulness of these deregulations, but it was an attempt to lessen the degree to which unions use CEQA to slow construction projects to extract concessions. Newsom’s failure to overcome union opposition here is a disappointment, but doesn’t tarnish an otherwise noteworthy effort.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/04/with-environmental-regulatory-reform-california-gov-gavin-newsom-finally-does-something-substantial/
“Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s newly minted candidate to be the next mayor of New York City, found himself in some hot water last week after The New York Times reported that he claimed to be both “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his college application to Columbia University in 2009.
Mamdani holds U.S. citizenship, but was born in Uganda to Indian parents. He is African, and he is American, but he is definitely not black, which is what the term “African American” implies.”
…
“Mamdani told the Times that his options were suboptimal and that he subsequently wrote in “Ugandan” to add clarity.
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” said Mamdani.”
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“If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at colleges that incentivize applicants to be misleading about their skin pigmentation because false value is assigned to it—a practice that majorities of American voters and the Supreme Court wisely hold in disdain.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/07/colleges-created-a-diversity-box-ticking-game-zohran-mamdani-just-played-it/
“In 2024, Congress passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which prohibited operating or hosting “a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)” within the United States. The law required TikTok to find a buyer by January 19, 2025, or else shut down operations within the United States.
Ultimately, neither happened…Trump issued the executive order on his first day, “instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today.” He has since issued two additional orders further extending the deadline
…
“But no president has the authority to simply postpone the enforcement of a law passed by Congress. The fact that Congress seems content to let Trump decline to enforce it does not obviate the law itself. And for that reason, if Congress will not repeal the law, then it should insist Trump enforce it.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/07/either-repeal-or-enforce-but-ideally-repeal-the-tiktok-ban/
“”Due process is the most foundational legal principle protecting individual liberty in Western civilization. It dates back to the Magna Carta,” Bolick observed. Yet “we have seen the words due process appear in quotes repeatedly, as if this concept was created by rogue liberal judges to help illegal immigrants stay in the country.””
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“Bolick is a principled legal thinker and one of the genuine good guys in American law. If he is worried about the health of our constitutional order, we should all pay heed.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/the-republican-appointed-judge-decrying-trumps-deeply-disturbing-attacks-on-the-rule-of-law/
“Our findings indicate that individuals from
both political affiliations are prone to believing and disseminating politically aligned fake news via social media. Despite
employing a stronger reflection manipulation in contrast to past research, we failed to replicate the mitigating effect of
the reflection on the acceptance of fake news. We observed that reflection reduced Democrats’ willingness to spread fake
news, yet it did not affect Republicans.”
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12144-025-07578-5.pdf
“So why are birth rates falling all over the world? The authors knock down the conventional hypothesis that rising monetary costs are to blame. The real costs of children, they argue, are the opportunity costs: “what a potential parent would be ready to give up to have an extra child.” The seductions of the modern world include higher paying work, longer vacations, restaurant meals, sports, video games, innumerable on-demand entertainment options, and so forth. “Once we see that costs include opportunity costs, as life becomes richer and more rewarding, children cost more,” they say. “Even if we eliminated every dimension of social inequality and unfairness between women and men, the opportunity cost of having a child would still be greater in the richer, freer, better-entertained future than it was in the past.” And as demographic history shows, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay those costs.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/the-depopulation-bomb/
“One of the supposed goals of the Trump administration’s trade policies is to protect and promote American-made products.
Greg Shugar, who owns a business that does make things right here in America, has a hard time seeing it that way.
“I’m charging more and I’m making less,” says Shugar, owner of Beau Ties of Vermont, which manufactures neckties, socks, pocket squares, and other fashion accoutrements.
While the vast majority of American clothes and accessories are imported these days, Shugar’s company, which employs 18 people, is one of the few that are cutting and sewing those products here in the United States. He told Reason last week that the tariffs have not been a boost for his business. Quite the opposite, in fact, since his products depend on silk jacquard and other materials that are imported from overseas—mostly from China but also from Italy.
Silk jacquard, Shugar explained, is made “from a very specific type of looming machine where they weave silk and it creates more of a stiffer silk, which is what you wear on your ties.”
…
Shugar’s business is a lot like many other American-based manufacturers. More than half the imports to the U.S. are raw materials, intermediate parts, or equipment—the stuff that manufacturing firms need to make things, including the silk jacquard that goes into Shugar’s ties—rather than finished goods. Tariffs are making those imports more expensive, which in turn makes manufacturing anything in the United States more expensive.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/the-only-winner-is-the-government-says-american-bow-tie-ceo-facing-higher-tariff-costs/