“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“it’s not the policy that’s holding nuclear back: It’s the industry. All the incentives and permitting reforms the government can muster won’t change the basic economics that have led to just three new nuclear plants getting built in the U.S. this century: It takes too long, is too expensive and is only getting pricier.”
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” The nuclear industry has as much going for it right now as it’s ever had. U.S. electricity demand is growing for the first time in 20 years as data centers and artificial intelligence companies proliferate.”
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“The average cost of large-scale solar has fallen 84 percent since 2009, to $58 per megawatt-hour, while nuclear power has risen 47 percent, to $180”
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“the problem isn’t limited to the U.S. The U.K., France and Finland have all seen major cost and timeline overruns with their most recent plants. China, which is building more nuclear than anyone, has gotten its timelines down the farthest but is still around 7 years,”
Trump’s tariffs are costly, but if Trump takes over the financial power currently held by the Fed, that’s a much more dangerous threat to the prosperity and democracy of the United States. Especially when you combine this with Trump’s other potentially costly actions like limiting science and scientists, Trump’s constellation of bad economic policies could add up to a considerably weaker U.S. economy.
“If enacted across the board, Trump’s order would mean pharmaceutical companies must sell drugs to Americans at the lowest prices they were offering anybody else in the world.”
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“Americans do pay significantly more for prescription drugs than people in other developed nations, but the reasons for that are more complicated than Trump suggests.
“There are many good reasons why we should pay more for earlier access to new medications than our trading partners,” wrote Darius Lakdawalla and Dana Goldman of the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service. “As the world’s largest market for pharmaceuticals, America finds itself in the unique position of accruing the lion’s share of the benefits from new medicines. We often recoup these additional costs in the form of longer and healthier lives.””
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“”facing a choice between deep cuts in their U.S. pricing or the loss of weakly profitable overseas markets,” the companies may simply exit foreign markets altogether, “leaving U.S. consumers with the same prices, pharmaceutical manufacturers with lower profits, and future generations with less innovation.””
“For millions of families, a spike in health care costs might be around the corner because crucial subsidies are set to expire at the end of next year. Some families will see their premiums rise by thousands of dollars; others might lose their insurance altogether.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act, which included a provision that enhanced the premium tax credit — a piece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that subsidized the cost of premiums for some lower- and middle-income families. The Biden-era enhancements, which essentially expanded the number of people who qualify for the tax credit, were originally set to expire at the end of 2022, but Congress extended them through 2025 when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act. (For families at or slightly above the poverty line, the enhanced tax credit subsidizes the full premium. For people making more than 400 percent of the poverty line — people who were previously ineligible for this subsidy — it caps their premiums to 8.5 percent of their income.)
The enhanced premium tax credits contributed to a record number of insured people in the United States. In February 2021, before Congress expanded the premium tax credits, 11.2 million people were enrolled in health coverage through ACA marketplaces. By 2024, that number shot up to 20.8 million people.
There are many reasons for the dramatic increase in marketplace coverage — including the fact that millions of people were disenrolled from Medicaid coverage after Covid emergency measures lapsed and had to turn to other forms of insurance, including the marketplace — but the enhanced premium tax credit played a critical role. Its expansion was the main reason so many more people were able to enroll in health care coverage from the ACA marketplace, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If Congress allows the enhanced premium tax credits to expire, millions of people will see a noticeable rise in out-of-pocket expenses. Many will likely lose their coverage, and that’s without considering how much more will be at stake if Medicaid gets slashed as well. For low-income families, particularly those who live just above the poverty line, that could be a nightmare.”
“A set of new tariffs proposed by former President Donald Trump would cost the average American family an estimated $1,700 annually—and lower-income households would be hit relatively harder, a new analysis warns.
Trump has called for a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports combined with higher tariffs (potentially as high as 60 percent, he’s claimed) aimed specifically at imports from China. Together, those two policies would cost Americans about $500 billion per year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a trade-focused think tank.”
“”If reelected, Donald Trump has said he’s willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to deport the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country,” Kristen Welker asked of Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) on NBC News’s Meet the Press. “It would be the largest deportation operation in American history. Do you support that plan?”
“Yes, we are going to have to do something,” responded Rubio after arguing that the number of undocumented migrants is much higher. “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to do something dramatic to remove people from this country that are here illegally, especially people we know nothing about.”
A son of Cuban immigrants and, at one time, strongly critical of Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship and otherwise restrict immigration, Rubio’s turnaround matches the direction of his party, which takes a hard line on the issue. But if Trump plans “the largest deportation operation in American history”—his own words, adopted by Welker—we can assume that such a big-government scheme will come with matching costs. That’s exactly what number crunchers predict.”
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“”The costs of the former president’s plan to deport the more than 14 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. today could easily reach more than $1 trillion over 10 years, before taking into account the labor costs necessary for such a project or the unforeseen consequences of reducing the labor supply by such drastic amounts over a short period of time,” MarketWatch’s Chris Matthews reported this week of the results of a Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) analysis.
Trump’s plan is still taking shape, though the former and perhaps future president has proposed using both the military and local law enforcement to eject migrants in this country illegally. If that policy was put into effect, “the removal of one million immigrants would cost the federal government between $40 billion and $50 billion over 10 years, and up to $100 billion if those immigrants were higher-paid workers,” Matthews wrote of PWBM’s finding.
Matthews notes that immigration hawks like Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), predict as many as one million deportations per year under tough enforcement. That’s quite a reach, considering that deportations peaked at an average of 383,307 per year under former President Barack Obama. A dramatically higher target means rapidly accumulating costs, with the trillion-dollar price potentially reached after a decade.”
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“”Under current law, unauthorized workers…generally do not qualify for federal benefits,” PWBM economists point in a separate analysis. They add that “more deportations, though, leads to less economic growth.” As a result, according to PWBM, with the implementation of restrictive policies, “GDP in 2050 will be four percent lower relative to no additional deportations.”
AAF predicted that with deportations, “the labor force would shrink by 6.4 percent and, as a result, in 20 years the U.S. GDP would be almost 6 percent lower than it would be without fully enforcing current law.”
In 2017, the Center for Migrant Studies cautioned that with a mass deportation program, “gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 1.4 percent in the first year, and cumulative GDP would be reduced by $4.7 trillion over 10 years.”
Obviously, there’s a range of costs projected for a policy shift to mass deportations of undocumented migrants. That’s because it has never been tried on the scale envisioned by Trump and his supporters. In fact, if Rubio is correct that the real number of people in the country in defiance of the law is “upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million,” deportations will have to be that much more aggressive, with an even higher price tag to match.”