Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“new data has emerged from Canada showing the near-catastrophic consequences to American alcohol manufacturers from President Donald Trump’s tariff wars. Yet despite clear signs that his tariff policies are backfiring, the president keeps doubling down.”
https://reason.com/2026/01/31/trumps-tariff-war-is-crushing-american-alcohol-makers/
“the trade deficit increased—not decreased—by nearly 37 percent in November, the most recent month for which data are available. Through the first 11 months of 2025, the trade deficit was 4 percent higher than it had been in 2024. That is literally the opposite of what Trump is claiming.
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“tariffs led to both rapid and gradual retail price increases.” The study found that “prices began rising within days of the March announcements and continued to increase steadily over subsequent months,” and also that “imported goods rose roughly twice as much as domestic goods relative to pre-tariff trends.”
There is no getting away from this fact: tariffs are pushing prices higher. The Harvard Business School, Trump’s favorite source on the matter, recently noted that prices for imported goods are up 9.7 percent from their pre-tariff trends, while domestic prices are up 4.4 percent. Those increases have added an estimated 1 percentage point to inflation as measured by the consumer price index.
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Trump repeatedly backed down and eased tariff threats in the face of negative shocks from both the stock market and the bond market. The “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on April 2 were postponed a week later after a huge stock market sell-off, and those that were later imposed were at lower rates. A threatened 130 percent tariff on Chinese goods never materialized. No wonder “TACO”—”Trump Always Chickens Out”—entered the political and financial lexicon last year.
As the Yale Budget Lab’s data show, Trump raised the average U.S. tariff rate from less than 3 percent to more than 25 percent with his Liberation Day tariffs and other moves in the first half of 2025. But those rates declined in the second half of the year and settled around 17 percent. That’s still very high, but not as high as it could have been—so it makes sense that the consequences were less severe.”
https://reason.com/2026/02/02/trump-claims-his-tariffs-have-brought-america-back-here-are-3-things-he-got-wrong/
“When The Columbus Dispatch interviewed voters headed to the polls in November 2025, almost all said they liked the idea of property tax abolition but didn’t want to see the quality of local services degrade.
None of Florida’s proposed property tax reforms include any plan to offset the lost revenue. The two measures that would eliminate homestead property taxes also include clauses forbidding local governments from cutting law enforcement funding.
The Ohio nonprofit Citizens for Property Tax Reform notably does not call for offsetting spending cuts. Instead, it suggests increases to sales taxes and local school district income taxes.
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Making up for the revenue lost from property tax cuts would be a tall order.
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Property taxes pay for nearly 30 percent of local government services in both Ohio and Florida. States trying to replace every dollar of property tax revenue with sales or income tax revenue would ultimately reduce overall economic efficiency as well.
Milton Friedman called the property tax (and particularly the tax on the value of unimproved land) the “least bad tax” because it discouraged less economic activity than sales and income taxes.
Property taxes are also less distortionary. People and firms can move to places where they are less heavily taxed to avoid local sales and income taxes. Real estate, in contrast, generally has to stay put.”
https://reason.com/2026/02/08/can-florida-and-ohio-kill-property-taxes/
Is Trump pushing the world toward a realist Westphalian order with less emphasis on permanent alliances and international organizations, or is he really moving us to a royalist system where global actions are less based on countries and more based on personal, familial, and buddy enrichment and aggrandizement.
Greenland is less about the defense of the US and minerals, which the US could do in Greenland without threats of war because Greenland, through Denmark, is a US ally, and instead about Trump making himself look great by adding territory to the US and making his friends with business interests rich. Ronald Lauder, a billionaire with business interests in Greenland, suggested Trump take Greenland back in 2018. Similarly, refineries that benefit from the Venezuela attack include Trump megadonors. Trump raised tariffs on India after Modi said Trump didn’t play an important role in creating peace between India and Pakistan. So this action was more about Trump’s status and aggrandizement than realist and economic strategy for the benefit of the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g37E9ztzxkE
Trump says a lot of things, and a lot of it is nonsense. Some of it turns into serious policies with huge consequences. But even the things he says that don’t come true have large consequences because he is president. Investors, businesses, and consumers have to make decisions, and Trump’s actions can impact that, so they have to deal with his words and the potential consequences. Even dealing with just his words, costs companies tons of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNhozAhtJLY
Inflation is still at 3%. The goal is 2%. The official numbers are 2.7%, but they just assume steady prices on objects they don’t have data on due to the government shutdown. Other experts who don’t just assume steady prices, estimate three percent.
If Trump successfully abuses the rule of law and uses lawfare to gain control over the Fed, inflation will likely go higher.
Before Trump’s new tariffs, inflation was getting close to 2%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmJ-CTeQQt4
Economist Luigi Zingales was on Fox News for something other than the estate tax, but they asked him about it and he said he was for it. He was never invited on Fox News again.
Frank Luntz was hired by the Republican Party and groups funded by super wealthy people to fight the estate tax. He renamed it the death tax so people wouldn’t think of it as a tax that mostly affected the super wealthy.
The problem with the super wealthy and taxes isn’t tax rates, it’s that much of their income is not taxed at all. It isn’t counted as income. Before the fall of Communism, the American super wealthy actually paid taxes, but without the threat of Communism, there wasn’t the pressure to show that capitalism will work for everyone. Many changes, and a lack of reform to catch up with gaming the system, has resulted in the estate tax being a joke and the super wealthy paying very little tax compared to their lifetime income.
High income people pay taxes, but the super wealthy don’t officially have much income. Of course, they do have income, but it doesn’t count and is often never taxed.
https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/how-to-fix-the-american-tax-system-ft-ray-madoff
“From January through September, the most recent month for which U.S. Census Bureau trade data are available, the U.S. imported $1 trillion more in goods than it exported. This is a $118 billion jump compared to the goods trade deficit that the U.S. ran from January to September 2024. (Likewise, the overall trade deficit, which includes services, increased by $113 billion.)
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Recently published data from China’s General Administration of Customs show the Chinese goods trade surplus has increased since Trump took office. From January to September, China exported $875 billion more goods than it imported—a $185 billion jump vs. the same time period in 2024.
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Fortunately for consumers, these macroeconomic statistics are meaningless. You run a trade deficit with your grocery store, I run a trade deficit with McDonald’s, good little boys and girls run a trade deficit with Santa Claus, and we’re all better off for it. As as the economists Daniel Klein and Donald Boudreaux have put it, a trade deficit is equivalent to running a surplus on current stuff.
Likewise, as countries get richer, their labor markets transition from agriculture to industry and then to the service sector. Declining manufacturing employment as a share of overall employment is a sign that Americans are richer, not poorer, than our ancestors.
Trump’s targeted metrics are meaningless as proxies of prosperity. But the fact that his protectionist policies are failing to achieve their stated goals shows just how flawed they—and their justifications—always were.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/17/trump-said-his-tariffs-would-reduce-the-trade-deficit-and-bring-back-manufacturing-heres-what-the-data-show/?itm_source=parsely-api
“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.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/14/trump-tariff-exemptions-us-imports-data-00685168
“American farmers exported more than 26 million metric tons of soybeans to China annually during Biden’s term. Trump’s deal with China would cover less than half that amount
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Since 2017, America has exported more than 22 million metric tons of soybeans to China in every year except two. Those years? The first was 2018, when China cut off purchases of American soybeans in response to Trump’s tariffs targeting American imports of Chinese goods. The second was this year, when China did the same thing in response to another set of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/10/trump-says-china-didnt-buy-soybeans-while-biden-was-president-heres-what-the-data-show/