Ask someone in a third world country to do some basic addition and they can do it pretty easily. Ask the average American, and they can’t. We’ve become dependent on calculators. AI may be like this for a much broader range of thinking and we risk turning ourselves into morons.
The China shock was actually quite minor compared to the size of the US population. Most lost jobs are due to automation, not China. Tariffs don’t solve this. Dumb tariffs, like Trump’s tariffs, make it worse.
At some point in the 1990s, the central Chinese government made it so that profitable things like factories didn’t benefit local government revenue as much because it started going to the central government instead. However, the local governments could still make money by leasing land, and they could make a lot more money leasing land if they built a bunch of cool and useful stuff, making the land more valuable.
In Ohio, data centers spiked electricity costs, provided few jobs other than temporary construction jobs, and thanks to tax deals given to the companies by the Ohio government, the data center companies pay little taxes. They do however, use local services like firefighting when the data centers have fires.
Trump tariffed India for buying Russian oil, and now Trump is buying Russian diesel, which is a form of refined oil. He has turned the United States into a hypocritical country with no principles, who no one should trust because no words, no deal, means anything. The country has always had to look out for itself, but the repeated backing out of deals, including ones made by Trump, the repeated economic and military aggression, and the naked unprincipled hypocrisy has turned the United States into an asshole country.
Property taxes incentivize people to sit on land and not use it because if they develop it, they will have to pay higher taxes. Land value taxes incentivize people to actually use the land because the tax is the same either way, and, they can better make up the cost of the land value tax if they use it productively or sell it to someone who will.
Land is hard to value, but it should be doable with modern techniques.
This should lower taxes on single family residential homes, while greatly increasing it on vacant land.
Previously, the IRS delivered a public report telling us how many due taxes went unpaid. Under the Trump administration, the IRS is now no longer delivering this report.
Federal agencies are understaffed thanks to Trump and DOGE.
In 2025, due to DOGE, federal employees were paid $9.5 billion to not work.
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In 2025, due to DOGE, federal employees were paid $9.5 billion to not work.
Some economists think tariffs never make sense. Others, think that with strategy, thinking carefully about where to apply them, to which countries, on which items, what the different impacts will be, and informing and working with your allies…then tariffs could be a net good despite the costs. That’s not what we got from Trump.
With Trump, we got hectic tariffs that require a daily chart to manage them all. It doesn’t make sense to build a factory based on a short-term tariff that could change at any moment due to a variety of reasons.
Putting tariffs on every country cuts your leverage over any particular one country.
If the goal is to get specific industries back in the US, then you want highly targeted tariffs.
Liberation day tariffs were based on a simple formula and they were absurd on their face. The administration just didn’t do their homework when coming up with tariffs.
Trump ignored free trade agreements that the US had made with countries.
Trump enacts tariffs for a variety of personal reasons that don’t make sense, like tariffing Canada for fentanyl, even though US fentanyl mostly comes through Mexico. If I’m another country watching erratic tariffs, I don’t really know what to do to avoid tariffs, and I’m going to start planning with other countries how to counter this erratic country called the Untied States of America.
When the government makes applying for welfare hard, they mostly just waste a lot of people’s time and make it so people who qualify for benefits do not get them because the application is too burdensome. Such qualifications don’t boost employment, they just make poor people suffer more.
It’s easier to get subsidies that mostly go to those with higher incomes.
When you make qualifying for benefits difficult, you make it harder to track fraud. The biggest fraudsters are organized actors that know how to get around complex requirements. More fraud is doctors and wealthy people cheating on payments and tax subsidies, than poor people cheating to get food or healthcare.