Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump’s threatened tariffs on Brazil for them prosecuting a former president for crimes he appears to have committed have appeared to backfire as the current president is getting a polling bump from Trump’s unjustified threats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bowcbk9W50A
The items driving inflation are those that are subject to tariffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffxhsNxvrOo
The rich can game the tax code to avoid paying taxes, worsening the debt and increasing the burden on everyone else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJGEKsTNbsU
“Forcing states to cover some of the cost of food stamps would be a big change for how the program operates, and one that is long overdue. “The federal government pays for 100 percent of the benefits, so state administrators have little incentive to crack down on theft,” Chris Edwards, chair of fiscal policy for the Cato Institute, and a longtime advocate of food stamp reform, tells Reason. While most states are not swindling federal taxpayers as often as Alaska does, more than $1 in every $10 spent through the food stamp program last year was paid out in error.
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to get Murkowski and Sullivan on board with the bill, the Senate added a sweetener: Any state with a food stamp error rate of more than 13.3 percent will be exempt from the federal-state cost-sharing measure for two years.
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Imagine that you’re administering the food stamp program in a state like Delaware, which last year had an error rate of 12.37 percent. If the Senate version of the tax bill becomes law, you’d have a pretty strong incentive to simply let that error rate rise a bit for the rest of this year, thus buying you two more years of a fully federally funded SNAP program with no mandatory state spending.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/02/the-tax-bill-rewards-states-for-higher-rates-of-food-stamp-fraud/
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
“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.”
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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/
Repeated Republican presidents and Congresses have told us that tax cuts will pay for themselves, and they repeatedly have not paid for themselves. Tax cuts like these are budget busters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqVzMF3QOng
“If Trump’s goal here is to strike deals that will lower foreign barriers to American exports and deliver better trading conditions for American manufacturers (who rely on imports), then hiking tariffs on South Korea makes startlingly little sense.”
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“the new tariffs seem to violate an existing trade deal between the U.S. and South Korea. That deal, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, was signed in 2007 by President George W. Bush and implemented in 2012. Under the terms of the deal, about 95 percent of the goods traded between the two countries are imported tariff-free. Among other things, that deal put an end to high South Korean tariffs on American cars and light trucks, which has boosted American exports and U.S. auto manufacturing jobs.
On the whole, the deal has been good for both countries. Bilateral trade between the U.S. and South Korea expanded nearly 70 percent in the first 10 years that the deal was in place. As the Heritage Foundation noted in 2022, the deal was particularly good for American farmers (who saw exports to South Korea hit record highs) and for foreign investment in American industries (South Korean investment in the U.S. nearly tripled during the deal’s first decade in force).”
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“Trump himself signed a renegotiated version of that same trade deal in 2018. The so-called KORUS 2.0 rolled back some of the free trade provisions in the original deal—most notably, it limited exports of Korean steel to the U.S. and postponed a planned elimination of the U.S. tariff on imported light trucks.
Still, it was mostly “a minor tweak” to the previous deal, as the Cato Institute termed it at the time.
Trump called the reworked deal “fair and reciprocal” and said it was “a historic milestone in trade.”
Now, less than seven years later, he’s effectively torn up that deal. Or he’s pretending that it never existed (or he forgot about it).
So, here’s the question: What is the White House hoping to accomplish with this latest maneuver?
If the goal is to lower tariffs across the board, then KORUS already did that. If the goal is to increase American exports to foreign countries by getting them to lower their trade barriers, then KORUS has already done that too. If the goal is to allow Trump to renegotiate the supposedly flawed trade deals from previous generations of American leaders, then KORUS 2.0 did that.
And, of course, if the goal is to strike more deals with more countries—as the White House keeps claiming—then this seems to be a step in the wrong direction. What other leader will be willing to negotiate seriously with this administration, knowing full well that it does not respect the deals it reaches?”
https://reason.com/2025/07/07/with-new-25-percent-tariffs-trump-just-blew-up-his-own-trade-deal-with-south-korea/
“Special tax breaks for venture capitalists, Alaskan fisheries, spaceports, private schools, rum makers and others — together costing tens of billions of dollars — quietly caught a ride on Republicans’ sprawling domestic policy megabill.”
Pork pork pork. Where’s the tea party!?
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/04/from-rum-to-gun-silencers-tailored-tax-breaks-add-billions-to-megabill-00438962