Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“A decade ago, only a fairly small group of congressional Democrats voted to support President Barack Obama’s free trade agenda. Protectionism was on the rise, helping fuel the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most of the “yes” votes for Obama’s trade program were Republicans.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/05/jared-polis-trump-democrats-campaign-free-trade-inflation-00592744
“President Donald Trump is considering imposing a 100 percent tariff on semiconductors to incentivize chipmakers to invest in domestic manufacturing, a move that would make it harder to build out American chip fabrication.
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The Chamber of Commerce warns that a 1 percent increase in tariffs on chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment will increase the construction costs of all announced domestic semiconductor fabrication plants (valued at $540 billion) by as much as $3.5 billion. A 100 percent rate increase, then, could increase construction costs for these projects by $350 billion. Moreover, “additional costs will reduce demand for end market products [and] reduce investments in semiconductor R&D,” diminishing American semiconductor dominance instead of enhancing it.
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Intel, “the only American company [that is] capable of producing leading-edge logic semiconductors,” warned that “Section 232 tariffs could increase U.S. manufacturing costs for essential materials and components.” The Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade association and lobbying group, said that “removing trade and other barriers to U.S. chips in overseas markets,” which account for 70 percent of revenue to the U.S. semiconductor industry, is key to making the expansion of domestic capacity economically viable. Right now, “the complete onshoring of all semiconductor supply chain elements is not feasible, much less in a short period of time,” because “supply chains have evolved over decades and cannot be rearranged overnight or even within a decade””
https://reason.com/2025/09/29/trumps-100-percent-chip-tariff-could-make-it-more-expensive-to-build-more-semiconductors-in-the-u-s/
Some of the taxes you pay are going to bailout farmers who only need to be bailed out because of Trump’s tariff policies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYVPQRK-gF0
“While most Americans have not yet felt the tariffs’ full effects, businesses have started to. An August survey administered by the Dallas Federal Reserve found that 60 percent and 70 percent of Texas retailers and manufacturers, respectively, said that Trump’s tariffs were negatively affecting their businesses. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that Section 232 tariffs on imported steel and aluminum have cost John Deere “$300 million so far, with nearly another $300 million expected by the end of the year.” The company has already laid off “238 employees across factories in Illinois and Iowa.” While anecdotal, John Deere’s struggles are reflected in the 48 percent lower growth in total nonfarm employment from January 2025 to August 2025 (598,000 jobs added) compared to those months last year (1.1 million jobs added).”
https://reason.com/2025/09/24/trumps-tariffs-have-already-hurt-the-economy-and-the-pain-is-only-beginning/
“Economists have long known that tax expenditures make our taxes unnecessarily complicated, distort pragmatic economic decision making, and mostly benefit hand-selected political constituencies. My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon and I have spent time demonstrating that most tax expenditures don’t offer broad-based relief but rather narrow carveouts that erode critical tax revenue while tilting the scales toward the special interests that sell whatever we’re nudged into buying.
Tax expenditures stand in sharp contrast to a neutral tax system—one that taxes income and consumption consistently and only once, trusts individuals to make buying decisions without manipulation, and leaves resource allocation to markets. Special-interest tax credits should ultimately be terminated.
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Deducting the interest on mortgage payments has virtually no effect on whether someone buys a house. It mostly leads to larger mortgages and bigger homes for wealthier households. That’s a subsidy for the upper middle class.
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The exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) payments is the single largest individual tax break, costing in excess of $3 trillion over the next decade. Most employees would take the insurance their employers offer with or without this incentive. It ends up inflating the size and cost of plans, driving up health spending, making it more necessary to insure through one’s employer, and entrenching workers in their current jobs.
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The implications are clear: Tax credits and deductions are generally not harmless ways to help taxpayers. They are costly, distortionary privileges captured by industries and interest groups. They complicate the tax code, mask the true size of government, and fail to deliver the promised bang for the buck.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/11/washington-says-tax-breaks-help-people-instead-theyre-corroding-the-tax-code/
91-Year-Old Pennsylvania Woman With Dementia Loses $247,000 Home Over a $14,000 Tax Debt
https://reason.com/2025/09/16/91-year-old-pennsylvania-woman-with-dementia-loses-247000-home-over-a-14000-tax-debt/
“Whether he is waging the drug war, imposing tariffs, deporting alleged gang members, or fighting crime, the president thinks he can do “anything I want to do.””
https://reason.com/2025/09/17/trump-has-a-habit-of-asserting-broad-unreviewable-authority/
“Manufacturing has been in decline for six months, nearly the exact amount of time since Trump’s new trade wars began.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/04/american-manufacturing-needs-relief-from-trumps-tariffs/
“if tariffs are linked to prosperity, it’s an inverse relationship, according to a recent report on America’s declining economic freedom for Canada’s Fraser Institute. The authors, Robert A. Lawson of Southern Methodist University and Fraser’s own Matthew D. Mitchell, write: “High-tariff countries are generally low-income countries while low-tariff countries are generally high-income countries. In the high-tariff countries, average GDP per capita is just $9,703 per year,” while “in low-tariff countries, it is $43,502 per year.”
In 2023, the U.S. had an average tariff rate of 3.3 percent, which put us in the company of such countries as Singapore and Hong Kong (zero percent each), Brunei (0.5 percent), Israel (1.3 percent), New Zealand (1.9 percent), Australia (2.4 percent), and Iceland (3.3 percent). This year’s tariff shift has been marked by wild fluctuations. But the average tariff rate on April 15 was 28 percent and is now around 19 percent. That puts the U.S. amongst the likes of Zimbabwe (18 percent), Chad (18.1 percent), Republic of the Congo (18.1 percent), Algeria (18.9 percent), and Egypt (19 percent).”
https://reason.com/2025/09/05/trump-says-tariffs-make-us-richer-so-why-are-most-countries-with-high-tariffs-so-poor/
“When you look at the sectors of the economy that were supposed to benefit from Trump’s economic policies, however, the news gets significantly worse. The manufacturing sector lost 12,000 jobs during the month of August and 78,000 over the past year, according to the data released Thursday by the Department of Labor.
Over the past three months, during which Trump’s tariffs have been in full swing, the manufacturing sector is down 31,000 jobs. Other blue-collar sectors like construction and mining are down over that same period.
All three sectors figure to have been negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs, which (contrary to the administration’s claims) have hit American businesses with huge new taxes on parts, raw materials, equipment, and more. Like with any big tax increase, one way businesses can offset those costs is by hiring fewer people or postponing new investments and expansion. That’s exactly what manufacturing firms say they have been doing.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/05/maga-economics-is-losing/