“Some $1.6 trillion in annual imports are subject to the tariffs, while at least $1.7 trillion are excluded, either because they are duty-free or subject to another tariff, according to a POLITICO analysis based on last year’s import data.
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In an interview with POLITICO on Monday, Trump said he was open to adding even more exemptions to tariffs. He downplayed the existing carve-outs as “very small” and “not a big deal,” and said he plans to pair them with tariff increases elsewhere.
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In addition to the exemptions from Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, more than $300 billion of imports are also exempted as part of trade deals the administration has negotiated in recent months, including with the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan and more recently, Malaysia, Cambodia and Brazil. The deal with Brazil removed a range of products from a cumulative tariff of 50 percent, making two-thirds of imports from the country free from emergency tariffs.”
An unstrategic mishmash of tariffs is not good for the economy.
The US is having trouble building its navy partially because it doesn’t have enough skilled people. It takes 8 years to get people fully up to speed, and it is having trouble keeping its aging workforce on the job.
The reasons for current military action against Venezuela given by Trump and his allies are various. And the list of reasons to justify war sound a lot like Putin before and after invading Ukraine and W Bush before and after invading Iraq. Reasons for action in Venezuela include: drugs, terrorism, the influence of Russia and Iran, stolen land, stolen oil, opening up Venezuelan oil to American companies, and Maduro being the illegitimate ruler of Venezuela.
Russia has threatened to invade Kazakhstan. Russia is producing more weapons than it has in a long time. If it didn’t need them in Ukraine, it could use them to invade Kazakhstan.
“Southern Baptists, the biggest white evangelical grouping, remain the largest force in religious life in the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia, which are also the stronghold of nondenominational Christian churches, the vast majority of which are independent Baptist fundamentalist congregations. The distribution of the Great Wave immigrants is the primary force behind today’s religious geography.
One consequence of all this is political. These are the only regions where white Christian Nationalism — the belief that the United States is a country founded by and for white Christian evangelical Protestants — is sufficiently widespread to influence politics and policy. In all the other regions, white Protestants, whether evangelical or not, haven’t been a plurality of the population for decades or even centuries, but in the southern nations, evangelicals have been in the driver’s seat since the early 19th century. A majority of white evangelical Christians hold Christian Nationalist views compared to a third of white mainline Protestants and just 30 percent of white Catholics, according to a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among white Christian Nationalist adherents, 81 percent believe “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” and 87 percent believe that God intended the U.S. to be a promised land for “European Christians.” (By comparison, Americans overall rejected the latter assertion by more than two to one, the former by more than three to one.)
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the three “southern” regions have seen a substantial increase in the foreign-born population: roughly tenfold in the case of Tidewater and the Deep South, and a more than doubling in Appalachia. Now these regions have a higher proportion of foreign-born people than either Yankeedom or the Midlands, and Greater Appalachia isn’t far behind.
To be clear, it’s not that those regions have a higher share of immigrants than some other parts of the country. Rather, it’s that the share of the foreign-born population has grown dramatically in places where, historically, there were few immigrants to begin with and very little experience with living with them. Almost all of the immigrant growth in these regions has happened since the late 1990s, the result of the collapse of Yankee-Midland manufacturing and the transfer of factory jobs to the south’s low-wage, low-regulation, low-tax jurisdictions.
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Much of the scholarly research suggests that people in regions that have always been prominent immigrant destinations and continue to be so now tend to have positive feelings about immigrants, but people in regions that have recently become destinations after having few if any foreign-born residents are more likely to see them as invaders.
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Yankeedom’s Puritan founders had strict religious and moral requirements for citizenship…Newcomers were meant to “melt” into the existing culture.
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the Deep South and Tidewater were ruled by slaveholding oligarchs and aristocrats who saw no need for immigrants and created an economic and social environment that offered few reasons for any to come… These regions were tightly bound to narrow ethnoracial and religious criteria for belonging and remained so right into living memory, though the Tidewater has rapidly transformed in recent decades because of the massive federal presence around the District of Columbia and Hampton Roads, site of the world’s largest naval base.
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the Midlands and New Netherland each embraced different strains of pluralism and multiculturalism from their 17th century foundations onward. In both regions, immigrants were not only welcomed but encouraged to retain their cultural practices, identities, and languages…. “The process of Americanization…is not one of assimilation or conformation to any particularly ethnic type,” argued Marion Dexter Learned, a Delaware-born Midlander who headed the Germanic department at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 20th century. He said Americans should be a “composite people” composed of overlapping but still distinct ethnic cultures. America, in this tradition, is a mosaic not a melting pot.
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Greater Appalachia’s mythic narrative was developed in response to the Great Wave whose decidedly un-Protestant character panicked many “old stock” Anglo Protestants. In the midst of this “invasion,” the intellectual elite of Appalachia — many of them transplants from Yankeedom or natives who’d been educated there — asserted their region was a repository of unadulterated Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers, a time capsule where millions of people were living, speaking and worshiping just as their pioneering 18th century ancestors had, uncorrupted by unsavory aliens and degenerate cosmopolitans… Thus was born the notion that there were “real Americans” who were members of an American ethnicity that was British, Evangelical Protestant, English-speaking and white and to whom the country was supposed to belong.”
“Wiles told Vanity Fair that “there is no evidence” that the visits to the island took place.
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Clinton’s association with Epstein, including travel on his plane after the former president left office, is well-documented, Clinton has said he cut ties with Epstein before his 2019 arrest and had no knowledge of his wrongdoing.
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Wiles, who told the magazine that she read the files about the Epstein investigation, said she hadn’t seen anything indicating Trump had engaged in illegal activity with the convicted sex offender. Trump has also long denied having knowledge of — or participating in — Epstein’s crimes.”
“The unemployment rate rose to 4.6 percent in November, its highest level in more than four years, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The economy gained 64,000 jobs that month after losing 105,000 in October, mostly the result of federal government workers taking buyouts.”