“Tariffs don’t conjure consumer demand out of thin air. Americans were buying plenty of washing machines, clothing, and steel before the tariffs. What changes is where some things are made. Production shifts from foreign manufacturers with efficiency or cost advantages to more expensive domestic manufacturers. American producers stand to gain, except when they must pay tariffs to import the materials they need (as is often the case).
But everyone who buys the product pays more. The extra $100 a family spends on a washing machine won’t instead be spent at the restaurant next door, the repair shop, or the shoe store. Real wages—what your paycheck actually buys—fall when the prices of most things rise.
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When Americans buy less from China, it’s true, some of our overseas business competitors lose revenue. But what about the American households losing access to cheaper goods? Or the American producers losing access to cheaper materials and ingredients that make them more competitive?
Both countries take a hit. Serious analysts who favor targeted tariffs for strategic reasons generally acknowledge this tradeoff and argue that the benefits justify the costs. What they don’t claim is that such costs don’t exist.
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Even when firms do absorb some of the hit, the money doesn’t disappear. These companies instead hire fewer people, pay lower wages, invest less or, in industries where profit margins are already thin, hike future prices. The burden just takes a different route to your wallet.”
“Many conservatives are embracing big government, from police-state immigration tactics to socialist economic policies.”
There were some true believers, but for the most part, don’t tread on me Republicans were just anti-Obama reactionaries who globbed on to whatever justification they could to complain about Obama.
“As Georgia’s top elections official, Raffensperger rebuked efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results, turning him into a target of attack from Trump and his allies for years. That has created a deep tear between the Georgia secretary of state and Republicans in his state, many of whom continue to echo the president’s false claims of widespread fraud.
Now, Raffensperger is running for governor — and Trump just made 2020 the top issue in the GOP primary again.”
The Vice President either did terrible research, or lied. He said that ICE had no choice but to detain the five year old boy because his illegal father ran and abandoned the child. He failed to mention that another adult living in the home begged ICE to let him stay with them, and that they used the 5-year old as bait to see if they could capture anyone else in the home.
Multiple police chiefs met and said that their off-duty non-white police officers were being harassed by ICE. The Vice President dismissed this as something someone said on the internet, and claimed that they take accusations of discrimination seriously while dismissing credible claims of exactly that.
Young person was standing there holding a loudspeaker, probably ignoring orders to back up, when ICE grabbed him and pulled him away. Another young man with a loudspeaker ran toward his kidnapped comrade, where ICE shot him point blank in the face with some sort of non-lethal weapon. He has serious eye damage and may be blind in one eye. DHS then lied about the severity of the wound. DHS also claimed that they were rioters, although the video made it look like they were standing there talking into loudspeakers when DHS grabbed one of them.
“As the Senate considered a resolution that would have blocked the Trump administration from using military force against Venezuela, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly gave a classified briefing to key members of Congress.
In that November briefing, Rubio “indicated that the administration is not currently preparing to target Venezuela directly and didn’t have a proper legal argument for doing so,” The Washington Post reported at the time. Similarly, CNN reported that administration officials told lawmakers that “the US is not currently planning to launch strikes inside Venezuela and doesn’t have a legal justification that would support attacks against any land targets,” and that the legal justification offered for strikes against suspected drug boats traveling near Venezuela “does not extend to land targets.”
In the early hours of Saturday morning, however, American forces did attack a land target in Venezuela: Fort Tiuna, the military compound where Venezuelan leader Nicholas Marudo was holed up. According to the BBC, at least four more targets in and around Caracas were hit during the operation.
On Sunday, reporters asked Rubio about the obvious gap between what he (and other officials) told lawmakers in November and what had just unfolded in Caracas.
Rubio told the Post that the administration would need congressional approval only if it “was going to conduct military strikes for military purposes.” And this, he insisted, was not a military strike but “a law enforcement operation.”
That claim seems to contradict the description offered by President Donald Trump at his press conference on Saturday morning. Trump described Maduro’s capture as an “extraordinary military operation” unlike anything since World War II. The administration also trotted out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine to describe in detail how U.S. forces had breeched Venezuelan defenses and successfully captured Maduro in an operation that lasted more than two hours and involved more than 200 troops.
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The Trump administration did not need Congress to sign off on specific operational choices: the time, location, forces involved, and so on. What the Constitution and relevant statutes require is that Congress authorizes the use of the military. That could have been done without jeopardizing any specific mission.
Think about Iraq. Congress approved the use of military force in October 2002. Congress did not need to approve the operational details of the invasion in March 2023. That’s the purview of the executive branch, but only after getting permission from Congress.”