Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Because of the trade war, China is getting more agriculture goods from Brazil than the U.S.. China is building a port in Brazil to get even more from Brazil and even less from the U.S.. Too bad for U.S. farmers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4l_wHA8kvk
“Senate Republicans have already said they plan to move quickly to confirm Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran to fill one current vacancy. If Cook loses a pending legal challenge and is dismissed — and her replacement is confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate —Trump-appointed Fed governors would hold four of the seven seats on the central bank’s board.
That majority, in turn, would be enough to control the reappointment of the 12 regional bank presidents throughout the country who also have a say on rates and whose five-year terms are scheduled to expire in February.
And that, in effect, could give Trump control of the Fed’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee, whose refusal to lower interest rates throughout his second term has put the president on the warpath with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Any exertion of White House control over the reappointment process for regional bank presidents would represent an extraordinary break in precedent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/27/how-cooks-dismissal-would-upend-the-fed-00527582
“Overall, the producer price index (PPI), which measures the prices paid to domestic producers for their output, climbed by 0.9 percent last month (well above expectations) and 3.3 percent on an annualized basis. A few categories saw particularly large increases. Wholesale prices for food, for example, rose by 1.4 percent, while wholesale prices for consumer electronics increased by over 3 percent.
…
Lots of domestic products rely on imports of raw materials and intermediate goods. You can’t make a chocolate bar without cocoa beans, for example, and over half of all imports are things that domestic businesses use as inputs.
Economists have warned that tariffs would increase the cost of importing component parts and force domestic firms to increase the prices they charge for their outputs. That seems to be exactly what today’s PPI report shows.
Second, the PPI is often seen as an advance warning system for higher inflation at the consumer level—because higher prices at the wholesale level will likely be passed along at the retail level.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/soaring-wholesale-prices-mean-higher-inflation-is-coming-are-tariffs-to-blame/
“As with any bureaucracy, the agency is fair game for criticism. BLS has plenty of flaws. But we know how Trump and MAGA play the game: Any results that are good for them are the truth—and anything not to their liking is evidence of rigging or conspiracy. Their take on any news is the one that advances their interests.
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the feds need an independent body to analyze statistics. The New York Times quoted Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell: “Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government, but it also helps the private sector.” Trump has indicated he’d like to replace Powell—presumably with someone who will juice interest rates to help his political goals. Any intelligent person, though, can see why good policy flows from an accurate understanding of reality.
These are banana republic moves, backed by MAGA and the Banana Republican Party. Had any Democratic president tried to so directly politicize these independent agencies, Republicans would be screaming about the coming tyranny. Democrats aren’t immune to politicizing independent bodies—consider the troublesome plan to expand the U.S. Supreme Court—but they didn’t dare meddle in statistical counting.
Consider how budget matters are handled in Democratic-dominated California. The governor issues his budget and revenue/deficit predictions, which, of course, make the most optimistic projections. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) does its analysis, which typically is less sanguine. The governor might take issue with those results—but he doesn’t try to remove the head of the LAO and replace him with a political hack who issues only good news.
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We’re all used to this administration “defining deviancy down,” as we all lower our standards for acceptable presidential behavior (free jet from Qatar, anyone?). So I guess this will be just another deviant action that the Republican Party will eagerly defend.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/15/firing-bls-director-over-weak-jobs-report-is-banana-republic-behavior/
“In most cases, Trump’s tariffs are significantly higher than the tariffs charged by other countries on American goods.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/18/trump-promised-reciprocal-tariffs-the-numbers-tell-a-different-story/
“Even as some Republicans mocked economists for predicting prices would rise as a result of tariffs, there was a whistling-past-the-graveyard quality to the snickering. Yes, tariffs that had been threatened, delayed, and only partially implemented hadn’t yet much increased costs for consumers, but there were clear signs that importers were rushing to beat high customs duties, and that trouble was on the way. Now we’ve had a weak jobs report and a higher-than-expected producer price index (PPI), and it’s clear that tariffs perform just as we were warned: They raise prices for domestic businesses and consumers.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/20/tariffs-begin-taking-a-bite-out-of-the-economy/
“The Trump administration’s 50 percent tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were expanded this week to cover hundreds of imports that plainly are not steel or aluminum. Among the items targeted by the new tariffs: dairy products like milk and cream, as well as gasoline and other fuels, fire extinguishers, baby strollers, furniture, engines, and motorcycles. In short, anything that contains steel or aluminum or that is (as with dairy products) transported or stored in steel or aluminum containers could now be subject to those massive import taxes.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/20/trumps-steel-tariffs-now-apply-to-milk-and-hundreds-of-other-products-that-arent-steel/
“The world’s supply of chocolate depends on the global trade of cocoa beans, which are grown exclusively in equatorial climates across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The United States produces more chocolate than any other country in the world, but there would be no American chocolate-making businesses, large or small, without imports.
A lot of American manufacturing is like that too: U.S.-based businesses rely on imported raw materials when making everything from candy bars to new cars. Policies that make those inputs more expensive or difficult to obtain—policies such as the Trump administration’s tariffs—are leaving a bitter taste.
Chocolatiers, in particular, say trade barriers are a recipe for higher prices, lower quality, less innovation, and smaller profits. Doesn’t sound very sweet, does it?”
https://reason.com/2025/08/01/trumps-war-on-chocolate-theres-no-way-for-us-to-source-this-domestically/
Even conservative economists are saying that Trump’s pick to lead BLS is essentially a partisan ideological hack whose work is clearly biased and riddled with mistakes.
Trump fired the former BLS leader because he didn’t like the poor job numbers.
Economic data helps us know what’s going on in the country. If hacks lead the agencies that produce the data, we won’t be able to trust the data, and leaders and citizens won’t have this basic information to help them make decisions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXUFZhAzsl0
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/how-overregulation-burned-out-competition-in-the-fire-retardant-industry/