What the French Protests Can Teach Americans

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

On Monday, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that police have “lost control” as some cities continue to see massive waves of looting and mayhem. Social media brims with images of stores being ransacked, cars burning, and mask-wearing goons running wild. In Limoges, the beautiful Hôtel de Ville was burnt to the ground.

 

But the chaos, as is so often the case, began peacefully. And many supporters and leaders of the protests have condemned the violence. I think that violence has more to do with France’s miserable record of assimilating immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East than with budget cuts. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe the goons pillaging Louis Vuitton stores are planning to resell the handbags to buy better school supplies or to bolster their teachers’ salaries.

 

The initial protests were about budget cuts, primarily in education. As allied groups joined in—socialist and communist parties, labor unions, etc.—the argument expanded to generalized complaints about France’s “austerity” policies. In short, they argued, as they have for generations, that the government should spend more on pensions and other entitlements.

 

The problem is that France can’t afford it. It’s borrowed money to pay for its lavish government sector for a very long time. It has run consecutive budget deficits—i.e., took in less than it spent—for more than half a century. In 1974, public debt was around 15 percent of GDP. Today it’s at 116  percent. Government spending now makes up 57 percent of the GDP (compared with 23 percent of GDP for the U.S.), and France spends three times as much on “social protection” —including pensions and family benefits—as does the United States, and more than any other country in Europe and the OECD.

 

Naturally, the blame for this sorry state of affairs, according to some supporters of the protests, falls on capitalism. Famous French economist Thomas Piketty says the country’s woes are the result of the state pursuing the “capitalist logic” of underinvesting in the public sector and undertaxing the wealthy. In terms of personal income taxes alone—France has massive payroll and consumption taxes as well—the top 10 percent of French taxpayers provide 74 percent of the revenue. The top 1 percent provide a third. France also has the highest corporate tax rates of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

 

I’m hard-pressed to see how just a bit more taxing and spending will solve France’s problems.

 

I have real sympathy for the nonviolent French youth. Their economy is moribund in large part because retirees have a stranglehold on the state’s finances, consuming 14 percent of GDP. (Social Security and Medicare account for 9.4 percent of U.S. GDP. One reason education spending is so tight: A third of the education budget goes toward Education Ministry pensions.  

 

I don’t think retirees should be thrown to the wolves, but such a system is objectively unsustainable. Yet, in 2023, when French President Emmanuel Macron introduced reforms to bump the retirement age from 62 to 64, the resulting protests paralyzed the country (that modest reform was suspended last month). France is now caught in what economists call the “dependency trap,” producing too few workers to pay for the lifestyles of its older generations.

 

When protesters talk about feeling “hopeless,” what they often mean is that the gravy train will run out before they get to partake in it. I don’t blame them for being resentful, but it’s difficult to see how this is a failure of capitalism or “neoliberalism.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”

 

The most obvious answer to France’s problems is economic growth—much easier said than done, of course. The reason that’s so hard for France isn’t because the government is “unresponsive” to the people and their concerns., It’s because it’s too responsive. For decades, the French have demanded the economic policies that got them into this mess, and the government appeased them.

 

France is an outlier in its poor economic performance and lavish social spending, but its problems are recognizable across the West, including in America. The U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as France’s over the last quarter-century, but the demands for less “capitalism” from young Americans echo those protesting in Paris.

 

France has the sort of universal health insurance many insist would solve everyone’s problems here. It hasn’t spared France from political turmoil. Our own Social Security and Medicare aren’t far from insolvency, but demands for higher benefits and “Medicare for All” only grow louder.

 

The French canary in the coal mine is a good reminder that the best solution to some crises is to avoid them in the first place.

The EU’s Inexplicable Aggression Toward America’s Tech Industry

By Josh Hodges

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Last month, the American AI company Anthropic reported that Chinese operators had circumvented its security safeguards to develop military software, including air-defense suppression tools simulating strikes on Taiwanese targets. Chinese AI labs have also siphoned off Claude’s capabilities to train rival models. Months before that, the EU sanctioned two China-based companies for their roles in cyberattacks across six member states. And in January, a San Francisco jury convicted a former Google engineer of stealing AI trade secrets for China’s benefit.

 

China is coming for Western technology, and neither the United States nor Europe can claim they haven’t been warned. The EU’s own sanctions show that its leaders understand the danger of an authoritarian adversary willing to hack and steal its way to technological dominance over the West and, ultimately, the world.

 

Given that threat, Europe has every reason to stand alongside the American companies that China is targeting. Instead, the EU increasingly treats those companies as enemies.

 

On September 21, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google, whose AI trade secrets had been stolen for China’s benefit, nearly $500 million over its handling of users’ location data under EU privacy rules. That came barely two months after the separate European Commission fined Google nearly $1 billion over its search rankings and restrictions on purchases outside Google Play.

 

European penalties against America’s leading technology companies now total roughly $18 billion, with Google’s alone accounting for nearly $12 billion. According to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, the EU’s fines against Google account for “over 2 percent of the EU’s budget,” effectively making the company a larger financial contributor to the bloc than many EU member states. In late September, France’s Minister for Europe proposed using €4.6 billion in Google fines to cut what member states pay into the EU budget.

 

The rest of America’s technology sector is getting much the same treatment as Google. EU officials have already used the Digital Services Act to investigate how X moderates speech, while House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has accused them of pressuring the platform to censor political speech the European Union disfavored. The European Commission ultimately fined X $140 million over its blue-check system, advertising database, and refusal to give them sufficient access to its data.

 

Similarly, Apple was fined $570 million by the European Commission over the App Store’s management of outside purchases, on top of a $2 billion penalty involving music-streaming apps the year before. Meta was fined another $228 million over its advertising model.

 

In June, the European Commission went further, preliminarily designating Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure under the Digital Markets Act — even though it conceded that neither meets the law’s quantitative thresholds. That move would subject both cloud services to European regulations backed by fines of up to 10 percent of the companies’ annual revenue.

 

Meanwhile, potential changes to the Digital Networks Act described in a leaked January draft raised the prospect of requiring American platforms to subsidize European telecom companies through “network usage fees.” Doing so would directly contradict the EU’s explicit promise in its 2025 trade commitment to the United States that it would not adopt such fees.

 

In its quest for “digital sovereignty,” Europe has become shamelessly determined to bleed America’s technology industry dry. Never mind that it’s targeting a democratic ally’s companies already under attack from China, or that these are the very companies whose technology European businesses and broader economy have depended on for years.

 

Even the commission has struggled to replace American technology with European alternatives. This summer the European Commission rolled out a “sovereign” backup to Microsoft Teams. Its staff kept using Teams. One official called the replacement “absolute shit,” Politico reported; another conceded that if American technology went dark, the U.S. would “instantly win the war.”

 

When Europe’s homegrown alternatives inevitably fall short, the fallback won’t be European; it will be a choice between America and China. Europe has a direct stake in keeping American companies strong, both for its own economy and for the West’s broader economic and national security.

 

Beijing, of course, isn’t complaining about Europe’s aggression toward U.S. tech companies.

 

Chinese state-owned outlets have praised the EU’s fine against X as evidence of the bloc’s willingness to confront major technology companies. They’ve also characterized European investigations into Google and Meta as flashpoints in the transatlantic relationship and described the bloc’s technology disputes with Washington as “a new focal point of transatlantic conflict.”

 

But Beijing’s support for that scrutiny disappears as soon as Chinese companies are involved. Any EU proposals to remove or even investigate high-risk Chinese suppliers are framed under the same media apparatus as “naked protectionism” and “unreasonable suppression.”

 

Beijing clearly wants European markets open to Chinese companies and European regulators occupied with American ones. And its state media is perfectly willing to encourage the fights that help make that possible. All the while, Chinese operators will keep trying to hack into and steal from companies on both sides of the Atlantic. European leaders should recognize whose interests they are serving. Burdening American companies gives their Chinese competitors more room to advance, while the resulting disputes give Beijing more opportunities to divide the allies.

 

Europe has another reason to reconsider its approach: The United States still holds substantial advantages in the global AI race. American firms drew $286 billion in private AI investment last year, 23 times China’s total, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index. The United States hosts roughly three-quarters of the world’s AI computing power; China, about 15 percent. And where Chinese labs have closed the gap, they’ve often done it by copying: According to Anthropic, a single Alibaba campaign used fraudulent accounts to generate more than 151 million exchanges with Claude between May and July this year to train its own models. China’s frontier is, in no small part, built on the back of America’s technology and innovation.

 

The EU claims to understand the danger of Chinese technological dominance. It cannot expect to prevent that outcome while relentlessly penalizing the American companies best positioned to compete. Each new fight with those companies is another opening for Beijing, and Europe has already given it far too many.

Republicans Facing the High Political Cost of Tariffs

National Review Online

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

As Republican prospects in this fall’s midterms deteriorate, the pre-criminations have already started. Many are eager to blame President Trump’s decision to launch a war on Iran, and indeed, the increase in diesel and gas prices has been politically brutal. But another piece of the puzzle is the incredible political damage done by President Trump’s sweeping unilateral tariffs.

 

Trump completed a stunning comeback in 2024 in large part because soaring inflation during Joe Biden’s presidency led the majority of Americans to conclude they were better off economically during Trump’s first term. While federal government intervention rarely works to bring down prices, it can certainly make things more expensive. And in raising tariffs, Trump took an action that, by design, made many goods more expensive for consumers.

 

A major part of the case for tariffs was that for decades, our dependence on buying goods abroad has shrunk the industrial base at home, hollowing out towns and moving people away from stable factory jobs to the uncertainty of a gig economy. The thesis was that by raising the cost of foreign goods, the government could reverse this process, convincing businesses to manufacture more goods domestically.

 

We have always been skeptical of these claims. But even if the protectionists were right on all points, the transformation of the economy they sought was bound to take more than one election cycle. Businesses make decisions such as where to manufacture products years in advance. Moving manufacturing from overseas back to the U.S. requires planning, building, and a massive investment. Businesses were never going to make decisions like this in reaction to a policy that not only could change with the next president but has also wildly vacillated during this presidency. Trump, often on social media, spent the early months of his presidency arbitrarily announcing he was raising or lowering tariffs, with his policies often fluctuating based on which foreign leader he was feuding with on a given day. He triggered an unnecessary rupture with Canada, which is rich in natural resources and has long been a key partner. He also imposed tariffs with shoddy legal reasoning that the Supreme Court rejected.

 

The result of this erratic policy is that Americans have felt the pinch from tariffs, which have led them to trust Republicans less on their handling of cost-of-living issues. President Trump’s repeated insistence that foreigners pay the full burden of tariffs and that affordability issues are a “hoax” has understandably fallen on deaf ears. And this sticker shock has not been offset by benefits from increased American manufacturing. The manufacturing sectors that are doing the best tend to be the ones least protected by tariffs.

 

Additionally, many states with competitive House and Senate races have been hit by tariffs that hurt consumers and businesses dependent on overseas parts and materials, as well as by retaliatory tariffs limiting their export businesses. Ohio, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, and Iowa are all examples, and tariffs have played a prominent role in those races as well as close House races.

 

Aside from being bad economic policy and a political own goal, all of this is yet another reminder of the wisdom of the Founders, who believed that major changes needed to be approved first by the people, through the House, and then by the states, in the Senate. Trump couldn’t be bothered to try to win the approval of either, so he acted on his own whim, and Republicans increasingly look like they will pay a hefty political price.

Farmers Voted for This

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” is a vote for trade wars.

 

Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got.

 

And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year. This is an entirely predictable outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

 

In much the same way that Americans lately have been promised that gasoline and diesel prices are just on the verge of going back down—and in much the same way that the Republican standard-bearer has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for 12 years now and running—Trump keeps saying that the Chinese have committed to buying $x billion worth of this or that commodity from U.S. farmers, and—surprise!—those commitments continue to go unrealized, with China being at the moment many, many billions of dollars behind on promised orders from U.S. farmers. “We like to hear commitments from Chinese buyers, but we also need to see beans on boats headed west,” says a board member of the American Soybean Association. It is almost as though one cannot quite trust in the good intentions of an authoritarian police state run by Communist Party oligarchs or in the sound judgment of a serially bankrupt former game show host who once tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Which raises the question:

 

Why are American farmers such a bunch of chumps?

 

Thomas Frank’s famous thesis, spelled out in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, is that shady right-wing corporate interests have successfully used culture-war rhetoric and Jesus talk to snooker Middle America’s farmers, blue-collar workers, and small-business owners into—all together now!—“voting against their own interests.” It isn’t a very good thesis, inasmuch as the evidence very strongly suggests that voting in a way that would appear to be at least superficially at odds with one’s self-interest is so common as to be nearly universal in American politics. Americans are not especially self-interested voters.

 

For example, college-educated white voters and college-educated African American voters are, on average, more progressive than the non-college-educated of their respective racial groups, and college-educated white voters in particular are more likely than their non-college counterparts to support redistributive tax and welfare policies that are likely to increase their own tax burden while providing no benefit to them, their families, or, in general, to people who are economically similar to them. The Democrats are the party friendlier toward redistributive tax and welfare policies, and it is the Democrats—not the Republicans—who in recent years have seen the most growth in their support among the educated and affluent most likely to be disadvantaged by those policies. As Sam Zacher, a researcher with the progressive Analyst Institute, observes in a very interesting 2024 paper titled “The Polarization of the Rich: The New Democratic Allegiance of Affluent Americans and the Politics of Redistribution”:

 

Strikingly, in multiple elections since the 2010s, the data actually show a form of “backwards” polarization: majorities of affluent voters voted for Democratic candidates. Specifically, some evidence shows that Democratic candidates actually beat Republicans in attaining support from the top 5% (by income), the highest income stock- owning voters, and even the top 1% of voters (by income) over the past decade.

 

That being well-disposed toward welfare programs (to linger on an illuminating example) does not neatly follow income should not surprise you very much if you have thought through the issues a little bit. There are many possible factors at work. High-income African American voters, having the shared experience of racial discrimination, may be more oriented toward racial solidarity than class interest and may see their socioeconomic status as necessarily tied up with the shared interests of black Americans, who are more likely to rely on welfare programs than whites. (African Americans make up about 13 percent of the overall population but more than twice that share of SNAP beneficiaries, for example.) Similarly: For years, I have been chronicling the leftward political drift of Wall Street, and people who are surprised by the political loyalties of the men and women at the commanding heights of finance should consider that these voters are disproportionately products of the Ivy League and other elite universities, that they largely live and work in and around New York City and other major metros, and that they have a great deal politically in common with similarly situated voters who do not work in finance but who share experiences and interests with the Wall Street gang even if they occupy lower tax brackets. A related, albeit cynical, possibility is that affluent Americans of all backgrounds have an unarticulated but understood interest in giving the poor just enough to depress any more radical efforts at economic reorganization, in much the same way that many historians see the emergence of the Bismarckian welfare state as an essentially conservative program meant to take the steam out of the socialists with more far-reaching ambitions.

 

Whatever the reason, it is reasonably well-established that economic self-interest has very little reliable effect on voting or policy preferences. As the economist Bryan Caplan observes, “self-interest has little effect on public opinion.” Caplan is among those who believe that we would have better politics if voters were more self-interested because altruistic attitudes so often lead voters to support “foolish policies,” and he laments that the stereotypical, conspiracy-theory-adjacent view that our policymaking agenda is dominated by billionaires is—alas!—not quite true. Rather, there is broad agreement across income groups on many big policy questions, including the big economic ones, though the very wealthy do tend to prevail in those cases where they sharply disagree with the non-wealthy. In those cases, Caplan writes, “democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich. And since I think that statist policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes, my sincere reaction is to say, ‘Thank goodness.’”

 

In much the same way that Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling Wall Street traders vote a lot like Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling nonprofit executives, rural America has a fair number of export-dependent farmers who vote a lot like the clerk down at the feed-and-seed. Many of those farmers are multimillionaires with graduate degrees from Texas A&M who run sophisticated high-tech businesses and know a hell of a lot more about crop genomics than Bobby Kennedy Jr. does and a good deal more about practical Chinese politics than Marco Rubio does: They aren’t rubes—but they vote like rubes.

 

Well, I didn’t vote for an assault on American farmers! I didn’t vote for $6.59 diesel because I wanted to spend $320 to fill up my F-250. I didn’t vote for chaos! I didn’t vote for this! I hear that all the time. But the truth is, some 77 million Americans did vote precisely for this. Trump ran as a trade-war and tariffs guy. This is what a trade war looks like: It makes you poor and vulnerable. Trump’s low character was a matter of public record way back in the ancient days when the great big wall in our political discourse was the one running through Berlin. His profound ignorance, biliousness, and moral grotesquery long have been observable in American public life for anybody with enough money to buy a copy of the New York Post. Americans should have known better in 2016, but there’s no excuse for not having known better in 2024. Farmers voted for this just as much as Philadelphians have spent two generations or more voting for high crime and crappy schools and Angelenos have voted for ... well, go there and have a look around.

 

There are better ways to govern. We could begin with Caplan’s observation—which is unimpeachable—that Americans’ “policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes,” e.g., that a country can get rich by blockading its own ports, literally bombing its own supply chains, having the state seize the means of production, and deporting a chunk of its workforce—and doing so because a pampered and half-literate New York City real estate heir thinks socks and building supplies aren’t expensive enough.

 

Yes, Americans voted for this: Farmers and car dealers and a whole lot of people who should have known better. The question is how much pain it is going to take for Americans to choose something better.

Who Wants to Get Rid of Billionaires?

By John Fund

Sunday, September 20, 2026

 

The Golden State is trying to impoverish itself. This November, Californians will be voting on Proposition 40, which would impose a (supposedly) one-time 5 percent wealth tax on any resident whose net worth exceeds $1 billion.

 

Rarely have a ballot proposal’s shortcomings been so visible. At least six billionaires left the state before the end of 2025 to avoid the tax, which would apply to anyone who has lived in California at any time after January 1, 2026. These are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir; famed Hollywood director Steven Spielberg; Don Hankey of the Hankey Group; and Craft Ventures founder David Sacks. A study by economists at the Hoover Institution found that these six tax refugees alone have already removed “$536 billion, or nearly 30 percent of aggregate billionaire wealth, from the tax base.” And because these individuals will no longer pay any income tax in California, the wealth tax is expected to lose almost $25 billion in net revenue in present value terms.

 

There are roughly 200 billionaires in California. Many of them believe that, if Proposition 40 passes, the retroactive application of its 5 percent levy will be struck down as unconstitutional. It’s likely, however, that many more will head for the exit to avoid any of its future implications. The latest poll on the proposition was conducted between September 4 and 10 by the Public Policy Institute of California. Disturbingly, it found that Proposition 40 enjoys majority support, with 52 percent of respondents in favor. There is a precedent for it. A measure that added a 1 percent surcharge on taxable income over $1 million was passed in 2004, and two measures subsequently raised rates on high-income earners.

 

And yet, Proposition 40 is such an awful idea that even many of the state’s leading Democrats — including Governor Gavin Newsom — oppose it, as do some reliably leftist labor unions such as the California Teachers Association. Sponsoring the measure, however, is SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, whose leader, Dave Regan, one of the masterminds behind the proposal, might have been using thuggish tactics to build support for it. SEIU International authorized independent investigations into allegations of extortion against Regan. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Regan is alleged to have “violated the SEIU Constitution by threatening and defaming certain union leaders as part of his campaign to secure endorsements for the Billionaire Tax.”

 

Joel Pollak, the opinion editor of the California Post, says, “Regan has been using Proposition 40 as his power play among the union elites. But even the unions have had enough. Union leaders don’t like being bossed around by Dave Regan any more than business owners or health clinics do.”

 

The vote this November will have profound consequences. It may just decide whether California can still be viewed as a desirable place to do business and accumulate assets. It will also send a clear signal about whether the state is under the thrall of thuggish special interest groups such as Regan’s union. If that’s the case, it won’t be just billionaires fleeing. It might also accelerate the departure of the state’s middle class.

Everything Trump Wants to Do Causes Inflation

By David A. Graham

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Just call it the Five-Grand Old Party. This week, at the Republican Party’s midterm faux-convention, President Trump announced something called (inevitably) the “Trump Dividend.” The premise is simple. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

 

Problems abound. First, this is wildly inappropriate, for obvious reasons: It’s an attempt at using taxpayer money to bribe voters into supporting the president’s party. Because Trump is not premising the supposed payout on individuals’ votes, it might be legal, though the White House would presumably require congressional approval for the estimated $1.3 trillion cost. A Republican Congress might sign off; a Democratic one might be more inclined to start impeachment proceedings.

 

Second, the payments almost certainly won’t happen. (If you disagree, I’d be happy to sell you a nice bridge in Brooklyn if you sign your Trump Dividend over to me.) Trump has promised to cut checks to Americans before and not followed through, and this proposal appeared to catch many of Trump’s advisers, as well as Republican lawmakers, by surprise. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s rival for the 2024 GOP nomination, quickly criticized the pledge.

 

Third, injecting more than $1 trillion into the economy wouldn’t just blow up the deficit and national debt—it would also drive up prices. Giving every American $5,000 to spend would create demand that couldn’t immediately be met, encouraging sellers to raise prices. I could quote lots of economists from left, right, and center who have already said that the payouts would be inflationary, but you could also just take it from Trump himself, who has repeatedly blamed inflation on high spending during the Biden administration—including in the same speech where he floated the dividend.

 

A paradox of this moment is that inflation is a big reason for Trump’s cratering approval and his party’s sinking odds in the midterm elections, but nearly every one of his signature policy ideas is inflationary. The basic challenge is not novel to this president—voters hate inflation, yet most anti-inflation measures the government can take will hurt the economy, which voters also hate. But Trump’s strategy seems to be to commit to new proposals that would drive up costs.

 

In some cases, inflation is incidental to the president’s goal. When Trump launched the war in Iran, he apparently believed that it would end quickly—and might even result in the United States gaining control over Iran’s huge oil reserves. Instead, the war is dragging on into its seventh month, with no end in sight. The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, have strangled shipping of oil as well as other goods, driving prices higher. The average price of a gallon of diesel fuel in the U.S. topped $6 today for the first time, and because so many goods move via diesel trucks, the rise drives further inflation.

 

Trump’s efforts to crack down on immigration also have the collateral effect of pushing prices up. The administration has not only tried to secure borders and deport unauthorized immigrants; it has also revoked legal status from more than 1 million people who were permitted to live and work in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. Many of these people were employed in industries such as construction and health care that are difficult and low-paid; for example, more than 20,000 Haitians with TPS worked in caregiving last year. Housing shortages plague many parts of the country, and more building could alleviate them. Perhaps Americans will be willing to take these difficult jobs, but with unemployment rates already low, that will likely require higher salaries—which will mean higher costs, and therefore higher prices.

 

Other Trump policy ideas are directly and explicitly inflationary. For decades, Trump has espoused protectionism, saying that the United States should impose tariffs in order to close trade deficits with some partners. Regardless of the other merits of this plan (and they are dubious at best), tariffs are by definition inflationary. The goal is to raise prices on certain products. A tariff is a tax on goods, and someone has to pay it.

 

Faced with economic headwinds and voter dissatisfaction, Trump has at many times dismissed voter concerns, but he has also pressured the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Trump attempted to oust former Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the board member Lisa Cook, and made clear that he expects his newly appointed chair, Kevin Warsh, to lower rates. By law, the Fed is required to promote maximum employment and stable prices. (It aims for 2 percent inflation.) Trump wants lower interest rates because they encourage economic growth, but they drive inflation for the same reasons: Lower rates encourage borrowing, which produces spending, which has a similar effect on prices as sending every American adult a $5,000 check.

 

Writing off Trump’s pursuit of inflationary ideas as cynical is tempting, if only because so much of what he does is cynical, but years of evidence suggest that Trump actually has little idea how economics works, as the journalist Steve Benen recently noted. The president’s obsession with trade deficits is nonsensical; Senator Rand Paul memorably quipped that because he gives money to his grocer and gets food in return, he’s running a trade deficit with the supermarket. Last week, Trump perplexingly suggested that the United States could simply cut off commerce entirely: “We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries.”

 

Perhaps Trump doesn’t understand that his ideas will drive up prices. Perhaps he does, but concludes that dangling free money in front of voters is worth the hit. Either way, new numbers released today show that inflation rose 3.4 percent from one year ago. Trump’s policies are working.

Californians Shouldn’t Tax Away the State’s Prosperity

National Review Online

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

As hundreds of thousands of residents flee to states with lower taxes and friendlier business climates, one might think California would try to compete. Instead, the state may dig itself a deeper hole this November.

 

On the ballot is Proposition 40, which would impose a purportedly onetime wealth tax of 5 percent on all personal net worths in California above $1 billion. That levy would apply to roughly 200 billionaires. Revenue would be funneled overwhelmingly into low-income health-care spending.

 

This initiative was sponsored by the largest labor union of California health-care workers, SEIU-UHW, which projects that the tax could raise $100 billion over five years. The need for new revenue, the union claims, stems from the federal reconciliation law passed last year that requires states to shoulder more of their Medicaid expenditures. California should have taken the opportunity to slim down its bloated entitlement bill. Thirty-eight percent of state residents are dependent on Medicaid — compared to a national rate of 26 percent — despite California’s typical poverty rate.

 

Most of the problems with the billionaires’ tax are the same as when wealth taxes are floated nationally. The net worths of wealthy individuals are notoriously hard to pin down and can fluctuate wildly year to year. Most of billionaires’ assets are tied up in equity stakes in valuable enterprises, not liquid cash sitting ready to be wired. That wealth is being put to work, not “hoarded.” Should it work as intended, the levy would function as a staggering penalty on investment — on top of existing income taxes — thereby weakening economic growth and hitting job creation, the very opposite of the sort of measure a labor union should support. (Indeed, a number of private-sector unions oppose the tax.) Adding injury to injury, the tax is quite possibly unconstitutional.

 

Good news for the nation is that billionaires and the companies they fuel can move out of California. But that is why a state-level wealth tax is especially foolish, as it drains a jurisdiction of its most productive residents. Much of the damage is already done. Several men collectively worth up to $1 trillion have preemptively left California, taking $27 billion in lost income-tax revenue with them. The Stanford-based Hoover Institution calculates that this exodus will result in the wealth tax raising $40 billion, not $100 billion, and will cost the state $25 billion in net revenue.

 

Thus, the health-care union is not only targeting billionaires, but threatening to yank money from other parts of the state government. That is why other influential unions that rely on public funds, such as the California Teachers Association and United Domestic Workers in home and child care, are rallying against SEIU’s proposition. Even progressive Democrats are deeply split. Both the current governor, Gavin Newsom, and his presumptive successor, Xavier Becerra, oppose the wealth tax. Nancy Pelosi withheld an endorsement. This week, the San Francisco Democrats — not usually a meek bunch — joined the chorus for fear of threatened revenue.

 

Most fundamentally, wealth taxes are immoral per se in any republican government. The American founders believed that justice is the end of government. California would turn that purpose on its head, making the government into an instrument of naked injustice by confiscating the property of a particular group. That is precisely the kind of oppressive measure the constitutional order was designed to protect against.

 

Voters may still slow California’s descent into economic suicide, if not reverse it. Should the billionaire tax pass, however, they risk killing the Golden State’s golden goose — the limitless spirit of building that erected Hollywood and Silicon Valley — by snuffing out the fuel of incentive.

Trump’s Runaway Trade War

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

The president’s advisers — senior White House officials and even “elected Republicans,” according to Axios, are throwing up their hands in frustration. “They no longer even try to persuade President Trump to do or not do something,” its Wednesday report read. “Why bother?” one asked. “What he wants,” another mused, “he gets.”

 

The deepening U.S. trade war with neighboring Canada is almost certainly one of those harebrained ideas that only makes sense to the president. On Tuesday night, Trump escalated his campaign of economic pressure on Ottawa by issuing a sweeping ban on imports of a variety of Canadian products. Americans will no longer have access to some Canadian dairy products, most alcoholic beverages, and all motorcycles. In addition, the U.S. imposed a 50 percent tariff on a range of other goods, ranging from “mattresses to motorboats.”

 

That’s not all. “Trump also moved to shut Canadian products out of large, long-term U.S. government contracts and directed the U.S. General Services Administration to declare Canadian products ineligible for those contracts until Canada allows “full and fair reciprocity″ for American products,” the Associated Press reported.

 

The Trump administration will contend that Canada started it. Ottawa has a protected market for dairy products and other key imports like soft lumber. The White House only wants an even playing field. Canada will also claim it’s the victim here. For over a decade, Canada’s liberal government has negotiated in good faith with the Trump administration over trade-related issues, but those deals aren’t worth the paper on which they’re printed. Both parties claim the other sabotaged the latest round of negotiations. Who is to say who is right?

 

That may not be a question most voters are interested in answering, given the acute threat to their pocketbooks. It’s true that the trade balance on the goods Trump targeted favors the United States. While the U.S. imports about $360 million in Canadian dairy products and roughly $900 million in alcohol, Canada imports more of both products from America. But the intangibles of statecraft may favor Canada in this conflict.

 

All evidence suggests that the Canadians are incensed by Trump’s trade aggression. They appear to be foursquare behind Carney, who owes his liberal government to Trump’s ham-fisted intervention into Canadian politics. Ottawa shows no signs of backing down, nor are there any indications that the Canadian people want him to sue for peace. The same could not be said for Trump.

 

An Ipsos poll released last week showed that just one-quarter of American adults believe Trump should take a firm hand with the Canadians. Seven in ten respondents, by contrast, want to see Washington compromise in its negotiations with its northern neighbor. Sixty percent oppose imposing new tariffs on Canada, compared with just 20 percent who do. While 12 percent blame Canada for the outbreak of hostilities and 18 percent say both countries are equally at fault, 46 percent say Trump is solely responsible for this unpopular contretemps.

 

That survey comes at a time when the public’s view of Trump’s economic policies is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Over the weekend, a survey sponsored by the Financial Times found that just one-third of registered voters approve of Trump’s economic record — a new low. Voters’ dim view of the president’s approach may be owed to what one CNN poll released in late July discovered. Then, only a meager 27 percent of American adults said Trump had the right priorities, while a “record-high” 73 percent said he had “not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.”

 

Sure, some dairy farmers, brewers, distillers, and motorcycle manufacturers will be thrilled with the news. And perhaps they are perfectly distributed constituencies that will, by virtue of their geography, make the difference in November’s vote. But that’s unlikely. More likely, Trump’s initiative pleases a few while angering a much larger host, and all while cementing the impression in the public’s head that he, like Joe Biden before him, neither understands nor cares much about the burdens associated with the rising cost of living in the United States.

 

If the Republican Party could have talked Trump out of it, they would have. The president is a runaway train now. And the GOP is just along for the ride.

How to Lose a Trade War

By David Frum

Saturday, August 22, 2026

 

U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed last night. Punitive Trump tariffs will now go into effect. Canada will reciprocate with retaliatory tariffs of its own.

 

The story may not be over. Donald Trump is notorious for issuing threats, then reversing them. Wars are on, off, on again, off again, then on a third time—but only as a “little detour.” This is not an administration that thinks even one move ahead. But without a supersized Trump TACO, the U.S.-Canada impasse likely won’t resolve soon.

 

The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.

 

Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.

 

To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.

 

The Canadian economy has definitely suffered because of Trump’s hostility. Exports were down last year, and growth slowed. But this year, Canada got an unexpected bailout: Trump’s Iran war and inflation have boosted prices for Canadian oil, gas, minerals, and food products. Canadian incomes are rising again. Meanwhile, Canada’s low levels of public debt have kept inflation low. Whereas the U.S. government must pay 5.3 percent to borrow money for 30 years, Canada pays 4.2 percent.

 

By contrast, Trump is facing an omnishamble. “Trump’s Economic Challenge: $40tn Debt, 6.7% Mortgages and $5 Diesel.” That’s a headline in today’s Financial Times. The paper could have added one more: 33 percent job approval, and falling fast.

 

Trump’s tariffs are costing the typical American household $1,100 a year in both direct collections and indirectly in higher prices, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Although teasing out Canada-specific costs is tricky, one indicator is the price of aluminum. In 2024, about one-fourth of the aluminum consumed by Americans came from Canada, the U.S.’s single largest source of imported aluminum. Result: Whereas European and Japanese consumers now pay about $3,000 a ton for aluminum, Americans pay almost $5,000, driving up the cost of everything from a can of beer to the construction of a new hospital.

 

Although Canada’s economy is much smaller than the U.S.’s, Canada’s government has a more rational and intelligent leadership—and can therefore target its retaliation in ways that better serve national ends. U.S. alcohol exports to Canada have collapsed by 80 percent as Canadian provincial liquor stores ban U.S. wine and spirits. Canada’s booze boycott hurts more than one might expect given the comparatively small size of the Canadian market. Alcohol exporters to Canada prepare special labels for their products to meet Canadian legal requirements. More than 1 million bottles of wine intended for Canadian markets now slumber in U.S. warehouses, unsellable anywhere else without costly repackaging.

 

More than 30 percent of Ohio’s exports go to Canada, and almost 40 percent of Michigan’s. Both states will this year elect a U.S. senator and fill open governor’s seats. Not only is Trump putting at risk his party’s position in purple Michigan, but suddenly the races in beet-red Ohio look in jeopardy too. These states may turn control of the Senate—and Trump’s chances of facing meaningful accountability next year for his law-breaking and corruption.

 

Trump’s theory of his trade war, like his theory of his Iran war, is that the bigger bully always wins. Size counts for a lot, but not for everything.

 

As Trump has declared over and over again, his ultimate goal in this trade war is to add Canada as a 51st state. Why? To make the United States look bigger on the map. For that goal, which excites ultra-MAGA crackpots, Trump is hazarding not only America’s most important trading relationships but very possibly every other political equity he holds, including avoiding investigations and accountability by a Democratic House and Senate after January 2027.

 

Against Canada, Trump is fighting a trade war that very few Americans support, under leadership that most Americans reject, to achieve results that virtually all Americans would dismiss as pointless if not crazy.

 

Against Trump, Canadians are fighting a trade war that the great majority support, under leadership that commands broad assent, to defend their independence and self-respect. That’s a war that even the weaker side can win, especially if it needs to hold on only a few months longer to survive.

The DSA Has Slogans, but Isn’t Interested in Policies

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

Apparently, nothing is quite so devastating to the Democratic Socialists of America as simply and directly asking them, specifically, what policies they want to see enacted if their candidates win office.

 

The New Yorker’s David Remnick interviewed DSA co-chair Megan Romer Friday. It did not go well for Romer. You can watch the video here; notice Remnick did not ask her about algebra or obscure regulation details or historical dates. He simply asked her to go beyond the slogans and to articulate specific policies. And on issue after issue, she simply couldn’t:

 

Romer: But we do believe in taxing the hell out of millionaires, yeah, absolutely.

 

Remnick: Well, what does ‘taxing the hell out of them’ mean?

 

Romer: Uh, yeah, you know, again, I don’t have like a solid . . . but I think—

 

Remnick: But, shouldn’t you?

 

Romer: Um . . .

 

Remnick: I mean, if you’re the co-chair—

 

Romer: That’s a good question.

 

Remnick: If you’re the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn’t you be more specific than just taxing the hell out of something? What exactly do you mean?

 

Romer: So again, it’s democracy, right? And we have to look at what we need to spend and what we need. We don’t want to depend on the existence of millionaires because that means people are still getting exploited. So, yeah, we need to look at what we need to pay for in the interim, what sort of tax base we need for that to happen, and build from there.

 

The interview moved on to “prison abolition.”

 

Remnick: What does prison abolition mean to you?

 

Romer: So, again, let’s start from first principles, right? What do we need? We need safety,

 

Remnick: Let’s not begin from principles. Let’s begin from what is to be done, to use a Leninist phrase.

 

Romer: We need community safety. We need people to be safe. We need people to be able to live their lives without fear of being assaulted, without fear of being robbed, without fear of violence. What communities do we know are the safest? It’s not communities with cops on every corner, it’s communities that have good schools, good jobs, good park systems, good recreation for their teenagers, things like that.

 

Having asserted that “good park systems” make the public safer and cops do not, Romer never got around to specifying what prison abolition meant. The conversation then turned to “defunding the police”:

 

Remnick: What does defunding the police mean, in your mind?

 

Romer: Every year, police budgets go up, every year, there’s a backlog of rape kits that don’t get tested.

 

Remnick: But should they be maintained?

 

Romer: I am not in favor of getting rid of police entirely, tomorrow.

 

Remnick: No, defunding the police means no funding, I think that’s, you know, in plain English.

 

Romer: I don’t think so, I think it means—

 

Remnick: Well, tell me what it means.

 

Romer: I think it means taking funding back and moving it elsewhere, right? So, pulling some of that funding back and moving it elsewhere.

 

Remnick: To what extent?

 

Romer: To the extent to which we are fully funding social services, to which we are fully funding schools, lunch programs for kids, afterschool programs for kids. Communities should be clean and they should be safe, we should be funding putting trees up, so people have more. . . .

 

Note that in 2024, the most recent year that full data is available, the U.S. federal, state, and local governments collectively spent nearly $1 trillion on K–12 education that year. If American K–12 education spending was a separate country, it would be the 21st largest in the world in terms of GDP.

 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture spends $18.9 billion on the National School Lunch Program and $6.1 billion on the National School Breakfast Program. School meal programs are reimbursed by the USDA for each meal they serve.

 

The interview continued:

 

Remnick: I don’t think anybody’s going to argue about any of that, trees or anything of the like, but they’re concerned—

 

Romer: But they do. They do, because there’s always more money for the police budgets, and there is never money for, “How do we just literally make our community safer, nicer, healthier?”

 

Eventually, the discussion turned to foreign policy and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

Remnick: In the weeks preceding the invasion of Ukraine, DSA’s international committee released a statement blaming NATO expansion and the United States essentially for the crisis. After the invasion, DSA released a statement condemning the invasion and calling for a cease-fire. There have been people in DSA who have been even more firm that it was mainly the United States’ fault that Russia felt compelled to invade Ukraine. How do you feel about it?

 

Romer: We do not believe in pouring U.S. money, military, weapons into anything — we don’t think it makes it better anywhere. But obviously Russia is this oligarchic dictatorship, which is hyper-capitalist, and Putin is this crazy right-wing oligarch, of course, he is going to make horrific human life ending decisions.

 

Remnick: Well, isn’t this precisely why those countries wanted to be in NATO?

 

Romer: [slight chuckle] Yes, but why aren’t we doing any amount of actual diplomacy? Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual . . . sending actual human beings to talk to human beings and figure out what—

 

Remnick: I don’t understand, what kind of — there’s been all kinds of diplomacy, however failed since the beginning of the invasion. We shouldn’t send weapons to the Ukrainians?

 

Romer: No.

 

Remnick: So, just allow Russia to overrun Ukraine entirely.

 

Romer: We should be sending huge teams of diplomats, we should be figuring out how to negotiate, how to get Russia off Ukraine’s back. We should — yeah, absolutely.

 

Remnick: So, Russia would get off of Ukraine’s back by us sending diplomats.

 

Romer: I don’t think that there is adequate negotiation, I don’t think that there has been anywhere near adequate diplomacy.

 

Remnick turned to what solutions the DSA wanted to see in the Middle East:

 

Remnick: What is the position that DSA is headed toward here? Is it for a two-state solution, or is it a binational, one-state solution? What in fact is the position of DSA?

 

Romer: Yeah, so our position is a free Palestine with the capital in Jerusalem. And so, I think that could be safely read as a one-state solution.

 

Remnick: So, the Camp David accords that were being negotiated at the beginning of the century, under the Clinton administration, had the Palestinians accepted it, that would’ve satisfied you?

 

Romer: Good question. I need to look at what the actual specifics there were, I don’t know them off the top of my head.

 

I will grant that the Camp David negotiations during Bill Clinton’s presidency are the one topic that Remnick asked about that is fairly obscure; by my math, Romer was 17 during the negotiations.

 

Remnick then asked about likely soon-to-be-Representative Darializa Avila Chevalier and her choice to attend an October 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas rally, which, Remnick said, many people saw as a justification of the October 7 attack:

 

Remnick: In other words, you would’ve gone to that rally, had you been able?

 

Romer: That’s a good question, I probably would have, yeah, yeah. I don’t live in New York City, so I wouldn’t have—

 

Remnick: One day after the slaughter of 1,200 people, and taking of over 200 hostages, you would’ve come and rallied behind Hamas?

 

Romer: I think that October 7 was largely inevitable. If you put people in an open-air concentration camp, and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants.

 

Remnick: Well, sure it is.

 

Romer: Do you think it is?

 

Remnick: You’re saying you’re supporting it.

 

Romer: I’m saying that I think it was inevitable. I think that you cannot put people in a cage and expect them not to revolt.

 

Later in the interview, Romer excused Hamas’s violence against gays:

 

Remnick: Queer-friendly is a good point. Earlier you expressed some support, I think I was reading you right, for Hamas. I wouldn’t call that a queer-friendly organization, would you?

 

Romer: I would not call Hamas queer-friendly, I would not say that you can get a lot of social rights when you’re under siege. I think that most queer-people who have been killed in Palestine have been killed by Israeli bombs.

 

In 2016, Hamas tortured and murdered one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, for being gay. Documents recovered by the IDF in 2025 allegedly detailed Hamas torturing and executing recruits within its ranks for having gay sex. In 2022, unidentified assailants beheaded a young Palestinian man for being gay.

 

According to the Human Dignity Trust, “Same-sex sexual activity is prohibited in Gaza under the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance 1936. The relevant provision carries a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment. Only men are criminalized under this law.

 

The law was inherited from the British. It continues to be in operation in Gaza today, though it is not in force elsewhere in Palestine.”

 

Near the end of the interview — perhaps sensing that she had not come across as knowledgeable and thoughtful in her answers — Romer emphasized that she doesn’t really speak on behalf of the Democratic Socialists of America:

 

Romer: So, if you’re looking to me to be the one true arbiter of DSA thought, I am absolutely not. I come from a—

 

Remnick: Who is? Or that doesn’t exist, and never will?

 

Romer: DSA, it doesn’t exist. A convention, I guess, would be the closest to the one true arbiter of DSA, and it happens every two years.

 

Over on the DSA Reddit, you can find DSA enthusiasts calling Remnick “a member of the ‘elite New York intellectual class’” who “considers himself above regular fly over state working class people.” (I feel like I’ve heard that kind of knee-jerk snide dismissal before.) But recall which questions tripped up Romer:

 

·         “What does ‘taxing the hell out of them’ mean?”

 

·         “What does prison abolition mean to you? ”

 

·         “What does defunding the police mean, in your mind? ”

 

·         “How do you feel about [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine]? ”

 

·         “What is the position that DSA is headed toward here? Is it for a two-state solution, or is it a binational, one-state solution?”

 

Those are not trivia questions. He’s asking her what she thinks. In theory, there’s no wrong answer.

 

I could write that Romer is a shallow, uninformed moron, and that would be a lot of fun and probably go viral. But it probably wouldn’t dissuade anyone who feels positively about the DSA. Fans of the socialist movement will probably dig in their heels and conclude, like that Reddit commenter, that Remnick, you, and I are being smug elitists because Romer had troubling answering those questions and articulating what policies she wanted to see.

 

So perhaps a better, more productive question to DSA fans is . . . shouldn’t a political movement that wants higher taxes on the rich be able to say what those tax rates ought to be? If you’re going to call for prison abolition, shouldn’t you be able to lay out what that would look like? If you don’t really want to “defund the police,” but merely want to reduce police budgets . . . shouldn’t you say what you mean and mean what you say?

 

And if you truly believe that Vladimir Putin is a “crazy right-wing oligarch” who makes “horrific human life ending decisions” — i.e., large-scale war crimes targeting civilians — don’t you need a better approach than just “sending huge teams of diplomats”?

 

In other words, if you want to dissuade a young socialist, don’t yell at them. Just show them Romer’s interview and ask them if they feel like those answers are sufficient.

 

ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, an observation about how the Democratic grassroots’ rage at the party’s establishment is driven in large part by the events of 2024, and how Biden’s presidency ended:

 

“The cancer has spread. It’s metastasized into his bones and further,” Hunter Biden told the BBC. “It’s very painful. It’s very debilitating in many respects, but he’s still out there. He’s still doing his thing, that is, he so believes in this country and as long as he’s alive, I’m promising you, he’s going to continue to fight.”

 

Left, right or center, we should all be praying for Biden in his fight against cancer, and that he be spared as much pain as possible.

 

But we’re also left with the uncomfortable confirmation that if Biden, his family and his most ardent supporters had gotten their way, and he had somehow managed to get reelected for another term in 2024, he almost certainly would have had to resign the presidency over these debilitating health issues by now.

 

Already this morning, I’ve seen a decent number of readers insisting that had Biden been reelected, his family and team would have just attempted to hide his cancer and treatments from the public. They may well have tried, but bone metastasis is a sign of advanced cancer, and I don’t think a condition as serious as that, and the required treatments, could be successfully hidden for very long.