Read it and weep: Tariffs work, and the numbers prove it



Just about every influencer, economist, and politician predicted President Trump’s tariffs would unleash an inflation tsunami. Prices would spike and consumers would drown in a rising tide of costs.

Yet here we are, deep into summer, enjoying beach days and backyard barbecues. The price of lawn chairs and beach balls remains well within reach. So where’s the inflation?

Is it worth surrendering political and economic independence just to shave a few cents off the price of some Chinese-made junk?

According to the latest government data, inflation hasn’t surged. In fact, it’s lower than it was this time last year. The experts missed again. Why?

The short answer: Tariffs don’t necessarily drive inflation.

  

The Walmart effect writ large

Think about how Walmart keeps its prices low. It’s the biggest store in town, so it sets the terms. Producers either cut their costs or lose shelf space. Everyone wants access to Walmart customers, so they play along — and prices fall.

Now scale that logic up. America is the biggest consumer market in the world. In 2024, Americans spent more than $19 trillion on consumer goods, including over $4 trillion on imports.

This gives us leverage. When America slaps tariffs on foreign goods, those producers face a choice: Eat the cost or risk losing access to our market. And they know they’ll get outcompeted if they try to pass the full cost on to American buyers.

That’s exactly what’s happening. Recent surveys show about two-thirds of manufacturers expect their foreign suppliers to eat the tariff costs instead of raising prices on U.S. consumers.

  

Dodge the tax: Buy American

Here’s the other thing the panic-peddlers don’t say: Tariffs are avoidable. They’re a tax on imports. Buy American, and you don’t pay.

And while $4 trillion in imports sounds massive, it only accounts for about 13% of the U.S. economy. That’s not nothing, of course, but it hardly amounts to the kind of widespread pressure needed to trigger across-the-board inflation.

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  Photo by Andrej Ivanov / Contributor via Getty Images

Instead, tariffs apply pressure in the right places. They force foreign competitors to compete with American producers or lose market share. That creates new opportunities for domestic manufacturers — and when they scale up, costs per unit drop. It’s basic economics — and it just happens to be a win for sovereignty.

Want lower prices? Close the trade gap

The media talk about consumer prices like they’re the only prices that matter. But they ignore the other kind of inflation — the kind tariffs can help tame.

Every year, we import more than we export. That trade deficit doesn’t just disappear. We pay for it by selling off our assets and racking up debt. Foreigners now hold trillions in American real estate, farmland, and commercial property.

In 2024 alone, foreigners bought $42 billion in residential real estate, $8 billion in farmland, and $12 billion in commercial properties. That drives up housing costs and shuts American families out of the market.

  

Then there’s the debt. Foreign entities hold more than $8.6 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities. We owe them interest. Every year, we ship more than $150 billion abroad just to service that debt. We’re borrowing money from our rivals to buy their products. That’s suicidally stupid.

Cheap isn’t the goal

Even if tariffs raised prices slightly — which the data says they haven’t — so what? Cheap isn’t the mission. National survival is.

That’s the argument I make in my book, “Reshore: How Tariffs Will Bring Our Jobs Home and Revive the American Dream.” America isn’t just an economy. It’s a nation — a people, a language, a culture, a way of life.

We can’t offshore everything and expect to remain free. Tariffs are essential to keep our economy self-sufficient. They secure our borders, protect our workers, and defend our future.

Ask yourself: Is it worth surrendering political and economic independence just to shave a few cents off the price of some Chinese-made junk?

I didn’t think so.

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Why tariffs beat treaties in a world that cheats



President Trump’s tariffs are set to snap back to the “reciprocal” rates on Wednesday — unless foreign countries can cut deals. So far, the only major players to reach agreements in principle are the United Kingdom and, ironically, China.

Others aren’t so lucky. The European Union, Japan, and India all risk facing a sharp increase in tariffs. Each claims to support free trade. India has even offered a so-called zero-for-zero deal. Vietnam offered similar terms.

Free trade is a myth. Tariffs are reality. The Trump administration should raise them proudly and without apology.

The Trump administration should be skeptical. These deals sound good in theory, but so does communism. In practice, “true” free trade — like true communism — has never existed. It’s impossible. The world’s legal systems, business norms, and levels of development differ too much.

Economists may still chase unicorns. But the Trump administration should focus on tilting the board in our favor — because someone else always will.

Free trade is a mirage

Start with the basics: Different countries are different. Their economies aren’t equal, their wages aren’t comparable, and their regulations certainly aren’t aligned.

Wages may be the most obvious example. In 2024, the median annual income for Americans was around $44,000. In India, the median annual income was just $2,400. That means American labor costs nearly 20 times more. And since labor accounts for roughly a third of all production costs, the math practically begs U.S. companies to offshore work to India.

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  Photo by JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images

It’s China in 2001 all over again.

Back then, the average U.S. wage was about $30,000. China’s? Just $1,100. When China joined the World Trade Organization, American manufacturers fled en masse. Since 2001, more than 60,000 factories have disappeared — and with them, 5 million jobs.

The result: decimated towns, stagnant wages, and hollowed-out industrial capacity. And don’t blame robots or automation. This was policy-driven — an elite obsession with free trade that delivered real pain to working Americans.

 

We’ve run trade deficits every single year since 1974. The inflation-adjusted total? Roughly $25 trillion. And while U.S. workers produce more value than ever, their wages haven’t kept up. They’ve been undercut by cheap foreign labor for decades.

Equal partners? Think again

What if the other country is rich? Can free trade work between economic peers?

Not necessarily. Even when GDP levels match, hidden differences remain. Take regulation. America enforces labor standards, environmental protections, and workplace safety rules. All of those raise production costs — but for good reason. American-made goods reflect those costs in their price tags.

Meanwhile, competitors like China or Mexico cut corners. They dump waste, abuse workers, and sidestep accountability. The result? Cheaper products — on paper. But those costs don’t vanish. They just get pushed onto others: polluted oceans, exploited laborers, sicker consumers.

This is why the sticker price on a foreign good doesn’t reflect its true cost. The price is a lie. Cheapness is often just corner-cutting with a smile.

National strength means self-reliance

Rather than debating whether free trade is possible, we should ask whether it’s good for America.

Should we outsource core industries to foreign nations with no loyalty to us? Should we depend on countries like China for our pharmaceuticals, our electronics, or even our food?

The founders didn’t think so. The Tariff Act of 1789 wasn’t about boosting exports — it was about building an independent industrial base. A sovereign nation doesn’t beg for favors. It builds.

We aren’t just an economy. We are a people — a nation united by heritage, language, faith, and trust. That matters more than quarterly profits.

Free trade is a myth. Tariffs are reality. The Trump administration should raise them proudly — and make no apologies for putting America first.

EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Thomas Massie Reveals What Would Get Him To ‘Yes’ On Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

'I could be for that, possibly'

One big, beautiful bill — one big, back-loaded disaster



Republicans have a bad habit of passing major legislation without thinking through the consequences. The “one big, beautiful bill” suffers from one big, ugly dose of shortsightedness. It’s an ambitious package loaded with short-term tax cuts and spending increases, followed by a cliff’s-edge drop into fiscal and political chaos just three years down the road.

That’s right. The expiration dates baked into the bill all but guarantee a showdown with Democrats during the 2028 election season, with Trump still in the White House, handing them enormous leverage and setting up Republicans for another round of fiscal self-sabotage.

Another fiscal cliff in the making

To keep the bill’s official price tag under control, drafters built in a series of sunset provisions. The goal: Limit the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate to just three years of deficits, even though they fully intend to extend those policies later. That gimmick allows Republicans to pretend the bill adds “only” $3 trillion to the national debt.

Republicans just built a bomb — and they are poised to hand over the detonator to their political enemies at the worst possible time.

But the policies don’t just disappear in 2028. If history is any guide — see the Bush and Trump tax cuts — most of the expiring provisions will be renewed. And when that time comes, Republicans will argue that these are now “current law” and therefore don’t count as new spending. It’s baseline budgeting sleight of hand, and everyone in Washington knows it.

Let’s look at what’s on the chopping block at the end of 2028:

  • $320 billion in extra defense and immigration spending
  • A larger standard deduction for all taxpayers
  • A $500-per-child bonus tax credit
  • A deduction for auto loan interest
  • $1,000 “Trump accounts” for newborns
  • A higher standard deduction for seniors
  • Exemptions from tax on overtime and tips
  • Immediate expensing for business structures

On top of that, several key business tax provisions — 100% bonus depreciation, enhanced interest deductions, and the R&D credit — will expire in 2029. That timing coincides with the possibility of a Democrat retaking the presidency, leaving Republicans with even less control over what happens next.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, extending the 2028-2029 provisions would add another $2 trillion to the national debt. That would push total costs above the original Trump tax cuts. And it would come just as the U.S. confronts mounting interest payments and an economy likely in no condition to absorb more debt.

A perfect storm in ’28

The timing couldn’t be worse. Democrats are already poised to take back the House in 2027. The GOP’s majority is razor-thin, and Democrats sit just a few seats away from regaining control. If recent special elections offer any clues, the midterms won’t be kind to Republicans.

That means Trump will likely face a Democrat-controlled House in 2028, as his administration scrambles to extend the bill’s most popular provisions: child tax credits, overtime and tip exemptions, baby accounts, business deductions, and elevated defense and homeland security spending — all of it set to disappear just as voters head to the polls.

Trump won’t want to campaign on tax hikes or cuts to defense and border security. He’ll push to renew the provisions — and Democrats will know it. They may agree with many of these policies, but they’ll still demand concessions, knowing Trump has no choice but to deal.

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  Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Expect ransom demands. Democrats could insist on undoing the repeal of Green New Deal policies. They might push to roll back modest Medicaid reforms included in the bill. They could demand changes to immigration enforcement or extract new spending commitments, especially if the economy continues to falter. Nothing would be off the table.

In short, Republicans have given Democrats the upper hand in a high-stakes negotiation just as Trump is trying to shape his legacy and tee up a successor. They didn’t just walk into the trap — they built it.

Lessons not learned

Republicans keep making the same mistake. Rather than structurally reforming the federal government, they pass short-term tax cuts and temporary spending increases while pretending deficits don’t matter.

This bill could have tackled the cost of health care, the explosion of federal spending, or the burden of inflation. It could have included structural reforms to entitlements, energy, or higher education. Instead, the GOP opted to pass a tax cut bill that tries to game the budget window.

If they believe growth will eventually offset the deficit — fine. But in that case, why not go all in? Make the cuts permanent. Expand them. Flatten the code and eliminate more deductions. Build a case for supply-side reform rather than hiding behind fiscal gimmicks.

Instead, they did the opposite. They chose a politically popular mix of spending and tax breaks and timed it to explode during an election that will determine Trump’s legacy, hoping no one would notice.

The bottom line

The one big, beautiful bill doesn’t reduce spending. It doesn’t rein in the bureaucracy. It doesn’t fix the structural problems crushing the middle class. It temporarily cuts taxes while baking in a debt explosion and surrendering future negotiating power to Democrats.

If Republicans think deficits don’t matter, they should at least have the courage to admit it. If they think Trump’s policies will spark enough growth to pay for themselves, then make those policies permanent. But don’t pretend to care about fiscal restraint while quietly handing the next Congress a multitrillion-dollar mess.

Republicans just built a bomb — and they are poised to hand over the detonator to their political enemies at the worst possible time.

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Trump’s downsizing isn’t cruelty — it’s the last hope for solvency



For more than a century, one trend has defined American politics: the relentless expansion of federal power. The Founders built a limited framework of law and order to protect liberty and promote a flourishing society. That framework has morphed into a sprawling leviathan that reaches into nearly every aspect of American life. Each crisis, often of the government’s own making, brings the same answer: more bureaucracy, more spending, more control.

Generations of Americans have paid the price to support a self-described “problem-solving” class that fails to solve anything — and demands even more to fix the failures it created. Under President Trump, however, the country finally has a leader who sees bureaucracy not as the solution but as the root of the problem.

The choice is clear: a government that serves the people — or an unaccountable leviathan that consumes them.

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal exploited economic collapse to justify a sweeping expansion of federal agencies. Lawmakers used the crisis to transform the relationship between government and the free market.

By the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society pushed federal overreach farther, binding millions of Americans to Washington through government handouts. Decades later, after 9/11, George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, giving federal agencies unprecedented access to Americans’ private lives — all in the name of national security.

Today, the federal government reaches into your doctor’s office, your child’s classroom, and even your kitchen appliances — often without a single vote in Congress.

This unchecked sprawl, always justified by its own failures, has saddled taxpayers with $37 trillion in debt, a crushing weight that future generations must carry.

Enter Donald Trump.

In fewer than 100 days, Trump removed 126,000 federal workers and targeted another 100,000 positions for elimination. He gutted USAID — a bloated redistribution agency infamous for funding “Sesame Street” in Iraq — cutting more than 99% of its workforce. The IRS shed 3,600 auditors, directly rejecting President Biden’s plan to hire 87,000 new agents through the Inflation Reduction Act.

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 Sarah Rice/Bloomberg via Getty Images

For the first time in years, an American president has moved decisively to dismantle the administrative state — rejecting Washington’s bipartisan instinct to grow government and funnel more power to unelected bureaucrats.

No one should be surprised that Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal government have sparked outrage from Democrats, who now portray federal workers as the new victim class. Their narrative paints Trump and Republicans as “cruel” and “heartless.”

But here’s the truth.

While more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, Washington’s bureaucratic elite dominate six of the 10 richest counties in the country — all clustered around the nation’s capital.

During the 2008 financial crisis, 8.6 million Americans lost their jobs — 5.5% of the national workforce. Yet Washington barely flinched, shedding just 1.1% of its taxpayer-funded positions. While global economies collapsed, the D.C. bureaucracy grew, kept afloat by billion-dollar federal contracts. Politicians demanded more money for “problem solvers” to solve the problems they created. After all the “assistance” and bailouts, average Americans were left with just one thing: nearly $1 trillion in new debt.

Trump’s war on the administrative state doesn’t stem from cruelty — it reflects a long-overdue reckoning with bloated federal power. His success represents a win for working Americans. While Trump has made historic gains against the bureaucracy, many of his reforms remain tied up in court, blocked by forces determined to preserve the status quo.

If real change is the goal, Congress must do more than applaud. Lawmakers must codify Trump’s actions and pass his proposed spending cuts. The choice is clear: a government that serves the people — or an unaccountable leviathan that consumes them.

Middle-class Americans thrived under Trump’s tax cuts. Here’s the proof.



As the 2025 fiscal cliff approaches, key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire — triggering one of the largest planned tax hikes in U.S. history. If Congress fails to act, the hardest hit won’t be billionaires or Wall Street elites. It will be working- and middle-class Americans who will get hammered.

For years, the left has pushed a false narrative about the TCJA, passed in 2017 under President Donald Trump. They claim it was a “giveaway to the rich.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) even labeled it a “wealth transfer” from working families to millionaires and billionaires. That claim is flatly untrue. The data from the Internal Revenue Service tells a very different story.

Democrats say they care about working families. If that’s true, why are they standing in the way of the very law that lowered the tax burden on millions of middle-income Americans?

A new policy study from the Heartland Institute, which I co-authored, analyzed IRS data from 2017 through 2022 to evaluate the real impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Although the law passed in 2017, it didn’t take effect until 2018. Using the most recent available tax year (2022), we compared data before and after the law took effect to determine how much taxpayers saved across each IRS income bracket.

Since IRS data for 2023 and 2024 isn’t available yet, we used historical averages to project savings for those years.

Big tax cuts for the middle class

The results are clear. The TCJA cut personal income tax rates across the board. But the biggest winners — by percentage saved — were working- and middle-class Americans earning between $30,000 and $200,000 a year. Over the period studied, these families saved thousands.

Here’s the breakdown: From 2018 through 2024, we project that households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 saved around $6,300 in federal income taxes. Those making between $75,000 and $100,000 saved about $8,300. And families earning between $100,000 and $200,000 saved nearly $13,500.

That’s not a giveaway to the rich. That’s real relief for working families.

While high-income earners benefited too, their relief was modest compared to the savings middle-class families received.

In 2022, filers making between $5 million and $10 million saw their federal tax bills fall by just 2.3% compared to 2017. Meanwhile, households earning between $40,000 and $50,000 saved nearly 19%. That’s not trickle-down economics — that’s targeted relief for working Americans.

Overall, the income groups that saw the largest percentage tax cuts were those earning less than $75,000. Within that group, even the lowest-performing bracket — households making between $50,000 and $75,000 — still saved a little over 16% in 2022 compared to pre-TCJA levels. Every other bracket in the under-$75,000 range saved at least 18%.

Perhaps most striking of all, our study shows that the TCJA actually made the federal tax code more progressive. It shifted more of the income tax burden onto high earners while easing it for working families — the very opposite of what critics have claimed.

The IRS data from 2017 to 2022 shows a clear trend. After the TCJA took effect, households earning less than $200,000 paid a smaller share of all personal income taxes, while households earning more than $200,000 picked up a larger portion of the national tab.

Debunking the deficit myth

This contradicts a favorite claim of the left — that the Trump tax cuts would drain federal revenue and explode the deficit. Yes, the deficit has worsened since the TCJA took effect, but not because tax revenues collapsed. The truth is just the opposite.

In 2017, the IRS collected about $3.5 trillion in total taxes. By 2022, that number had jumped to nearly $5 trillion. Personal income tax collections alone reached $2.13 trillion in 2022 — up half a trillion dollars since the TCJA became law.

The TCJA didn’t starve the Treasury. Federal income tax revenues have grown significantly since 2017. What has fueled the national debt and deficit is not a lack of revenue, but out-of-control government spending.

The clock is ticking

Middle-class tax relief is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. If Congress fails to act, the fallout will be severe. Many middle-income families could face tax hikes of 18% or more, costing them thousands of dollars over the next few years. Higher earners would face even steeper increases — an economic drag that would ripple across the entire country.

Democrats say they care about working families. If that’s true, why are they standing in the way of the very law that lowered the tax burden on millions of middle-income Americans? Why are they trying to undo the progress that helped working people climb the economic ladder?

The answer is plain: politics. Democrats have opposed the TCJA from the beginning — not because it failed, but because Donald Trump signed it into law.

But the facts don’t lie. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act worked. It lowered tax rates, fueled economic growth, and helped everyday Americans keep more of what they earned.

If Congress doesn’t step in soon and make the cuts permanent, the middle class will once again be left holding the bill.

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