Politics
Column: What will Trump's tariffs 'liberate' us from?
I am writing this from the last days of our captivity.
Indeed, by the time some of you read this, we will be free. If all goes according to the White House’s plan, April 2 will go down in history as America’s “Liberation Day.”
Steve Bannon, a prominent unofficial Trump advisor, is so confident about its success, he’s already talking about making Liberation Day a federal holiday next year.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. From what will we be liberated on Liberation Day?
The Trump administration has been oddly parsimonious about providing one of its patented pithy catchphrases for what we’re being liberated from. You’d think they’d come up with something like “Globalist Tyranny,” “Neoliberal Serfdom,” “Surplus Production Sucker Status.”
But we can infer what they have in mind from context. On March 21, President Trump posted on social media, “April 2nd is Liberation Day in America!!! For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the World, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Good Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY, and RESPECT, BACK. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”
To this end, Trump intends to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign cars and reciprocal tariffs on every single American trading partner.
The exact numbers and other details are murky. “No one knows what the f— is going on,” Politico quoted a White House ally close to Trump’s inner circle as saying over the weekend. “What are they going to tariff? Who are they gonna tariff and at what rates? Like, the very basic questions haven’t been answered yet.”
White House trade advisor Peter Navarro expects these tariffs to raise $600 billion annually. Nearly every serious economist across the ideological spectrum understands that American consumers would pay the bulk of that. Thus, if “successful,” Trump would be imposing the largest, most regressive tax increase in history.
It would be regressive because the taxes would hit the poor and middle class much harder than the wealthy, because a larger share of their income goes toward basics like gas, food and clothes.
The challenge of writing about “Liberation Day” is that it is so incandescently stupid it amounts to a conceptual piñata: You can whack at it from any angle and get some reward for your effort.
For starters, many people understand that tariffs on, say, foreign steel make foreign steel more expensive. As a result, the things we make from foreign steel become more expensive, too. What gets overlooked, however, is that taxing foreign steel also makes domestic steel more expensive. When you make something more scarce — steel, eggs, Taylor Swift tickets — prices go up.
Politically, the idea of deliberately making things — like literally all the things — more expensive, when you were elected in large part due to popular exhaustion with inflation, is so irrational it’s like the economic policy equivalent of a Dali painting.
Geopolitically, blowing up our alliances and the global economy in the name of “self-sufficiency” is unfathomably idiotic. The more a country relies on tariffs to “protect” its economy, the poorer it is. The more friendly trading partners a country has, the stronger it is.
The wellspring of this geyser of asininity is the simple fact that Trump doesn’t understand how trade works.
The British economist Charles Goodhart coined “Goodhart’s Law”: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” For Trump, the measure in question is balance of trade. He thinks trade deficits are proof that America is being “ripped off.” That’s not how trade works.
Every time you get a haircut, you have a trade deficit with the barber. Are you being ripped off?
Trump’s obsession with Canada illustrates his confusion. We have a trade deficit with Canada, under a trade agreement he crafted in his first term. Hence, Trump claims we “subsidize” Canada $200 billion a year (a made-up number, but that’s beside the point). The only reason we have a trade deficit with Canada is that they sell us oil at a price below global market rates. If we stopped buying their cheaper oil, we’d be worse off. Gas prices would go up and American jobs dedicated to refining that oil and exporting it would vanish. But the metric Trump cares about would improve.
Hold on here. Stuff we need would have become more scarce and expensive. Americans would be worse off. And that’s a win because … why?
During the years of our supposed economic captivity, the American economy became the “envy of the world.” That’s what Trump seems bent on liberating us from.
@JonahDispatch
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri on Monday urged his Republican colleagues to reject deep cuts to Medicaid as part of legislation to implement President Trump’s ambitious domestic agenda, including a plan to cut more than $4 trillion in taxes.
In an opinion piece published in The New York Times, Mr. Hawley declared that cutting funding for a program that provides health insurance to more than 70 million low-income Americans, including 1 million people in his state, would be “morally wrong” and “politically suicidal.”
“Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs,” Mr. Hawley wrote. “More than that, our voters depend on those programs.”
His plea comes a day after House Republicans released a plan that would cut an estimated $715 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and could leave 8.6 million people uninsured, although the proposal does not include the more drastic cuts that fiscal hard-liners were demanding. He argued his opposition to the cuts aligns with Mr. Trump’s own repeated promises to not “touch” the program in any way.
Mr. Hawley has carved a lane for himself as the sole Republican populist voice in the Senate. He has repeatedly diverged from his party by, for instance, embracing policy proposals that would cap insulin costs at $25 a month, and he was the sole Republican to vote earlier this year in favor of limiting bank overdraft fees to $5.
He also has accused Republican institutionalists of prioritizing the interests of wealthy Americans and corporations at the expense of the working-class voters who formed the wave of populism that sent Mr. Trump to the White House. Unlike most of his party, Mr. Hawley has refrained from calls to extend the corporate tax cuts that Mr. Trump enacted in his first term, saying he was skeptical that they did much to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States or incentivize corporations to treat workers better.
“If Republicans want to be a working-class party — if we want to be a majority party — we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people,” Mr. Hawley wrote.
President Donald Trump declared Monday that the U.S. “will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma” as he signed an executive order implementing what his administration is calling “most favored nations drug pricing.”
“The principle is simple – whatever the lowest price paid for a drug in other developed countries, that is the price that Americans will pay,” Trump said at the White House. “Some prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90%.”
Trump said that “starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries, which is what we were doing. We’re subsidizing others’ healthcare, the countries where they paid a small fraction of what for the same drug that what we pay many, many times more for and will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma.”
“Even though the United States is home to only 4% of the world’s population, pharmaceutical companies make more than two thirds of their profits in America. So think of that with 4% of the population, the pharmaceutical companies make most of their money. Most of their profits from America. That’s not a good thing,” Trump continued.
TRUMP SAYS HE WILL SLASH DRUG PRICES WITH EXECUTIVE ORDER
U.S. President Donald Trump, accompanied by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, speaks during a swearing in ceremony for Dr. Mehmet Oz as the Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator in the Oval Office at the White House on April 18. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
“I think, by the way, pharmaceutical – I have great respect for these companies and for the people that run them. I really do, and I think they did one of the greatest jobs in history for their company, convincing people for many years that this was a fair system. Nobody really understood why, but I figured it out. For years, pharmaceutical and drug companies have said that research and development costs were what they are, and for no reason whatsoever, they had to be borne by America alone,” Trump said. “Not anymore, they don’t.”
The White House said the executive order “directs the U.S. Trade Representative and Secretary of Commerce to take action to ensure foreign countries are not engaged in practices that purposefully and unfairly undercut market prices and drive price hikes in the United States.
“The Order instructs the Administration to communicate price targets to pharmaceutical manufacturers to establish that America, the largest purchaser and funder of prescription drugs in the world, gets the best deal,” the White House said.
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services will establish a mechanism through which American patients can buy their drugs directly from manufacturers who sell to Americans at a ‘Most-Favored-Nation’ price, bypassing middlemen,” the White House added. “If drug manufacturers fail to offer most-favored-nation pricing, the Order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to: (1) propose rules that impose most-favored-nation pricing; and (2) take other aggressive measures to significantly reduce the cost of prescription drugs to the American consumer and end anticompetitive practices.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, said alongside Trump, “I never thought that this would happen in my lifetime.”
“I have a couple of kids who are Democrats, are big Bernie Sanders fans. And when I told them that this was going to happen, they had tears in their eyes. Because they thought, this is never going to happen,” he said. “And we finally have a president who is willing to stand up for the American people.”
MAHA CAUCUS MEMBER PLEDGES HEARINGS INTO ‘CORRUPTION’ OF A PUBLIC HEALTH SECTOR ‘CAPTURED BY BIG PHARMA’
Bottles of medicine ride on a belt at a mail-in pharmacy warehouse in Florence, N.J., in July 2018. (AP/Julio Cortez)
Trump said earlier this morning that drug prices would be “cut by 59%.”
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) trade group opposes the order, saying, “This Foreign First Pricing scheme is a bad deal for American patients.”
“Importing foreign prices will cut billions of dollars from Medicare with no guarantee that it helps patients or improves their access to medicines,” the group’s president, Stephen Ubl, said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. “It will jeopardize the hundreds of billions our member companies are planning to invest in America, making us more reliant on China for innovative medicines.”
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 20, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“To lower costs for Americans, we need to address the real reasons U.S. patients are paying more for their medicines. We are the only country in the world that lets PBMs, insurers and hospitals take 50% of every dollar spent on medicines,” Ubl also said. “In fact, hospital markups in 340B and the rebates and fees paid to middlemen in the U.S. often exceed the total cost of medicines oversees. Giving more of this money to patients will lower their medicine costs and reduce the gap with European prices.”
Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
Politics
Trump DHS investigates L.A. County for providing federal benefits to unauthorized immigrants
The Trump administration announced Monday that it has launched an investigation into California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants, a state program that provides monthly cash benefits to aged, blind, and disabled non-citizens who are ineligible for Social Security benefits due to their immigration status.
The investigation began in Los Angeles, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations Los Angeles field office issuing a Title 8 subpoena to California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security said in a news release.
According to the department, the subpoena requests all records from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services, the agency that administers the state program, to determine if ineligible immigrants received supplemental security income from the Social Security Administration over the last four years.
“Radical left politicians in California prioritize illegal aliens over our own citizens, including by giving illegal aliens access to cash benefits,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement.
“The Trump Administration is working together to identify abuse and exploitation of public benefits and make sure those in this country illegally are not receiving federal benefits or other financial incentives to stay illegally,” Noem added. “If you are an illegal immigrant, you should leave now. The gravy train is over. While this subpoena focuses only on Los Angeles County — it is just the beginning.”
According to Homeland Security, its Los Angeles investigations field office is subpoenaing records including applicants’ name and date of birth, copies of applications, immigration status, proof of ineligibility for benefits from the Social Security Administration and affidavits that supported the application.
The investigation comes after President Trump signed a presidential memorandum on April 15 to stop immigrants lacking documentation from obtaining Social Security Act benefits in what he called a bid to stop incentivizing illegal immigration and protect taxpayer dollars.
The memorandum directed the secretary of Homeland Security to ensure unauthorized immigrants do not receive funds from Social Security programs and prioritized civil or criminal enforcement against states or localities for potential violations of Title IV of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.
It also expanded the Social Security Administration’s fraud prosecutor program to at least 50 U.S. attorney ofices and established a Medicare and Medicaid fraud-prosecution program in 15 U.S. attorney offices.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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