The Shipping News

MORAN: 145% tariffs on China--

TRUMP: Yeah. That's good. They deserve it

MORAN: It'll raise prices on everything from electronics to clothing to building houses

TRUMP: China probably will eat those tariffs pic.twitter.com/mgubqxh7gs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 30, 2025

All the shipping from China is done. Businesses anticipated the tariffs and ordered accordingly, because they know how tariffs work. 

President Dunderhead doesn’t.

Not sure who he’s going to blame when shelves go bare this summer and the outlook for Xmas is bleak because he broke the supply chains. I’m sure he’ll send Peter Navarro out again to tell us the economy’s fine if we just ignore Trump’s tariffs and DOGE’s illegal activities. (Even Navarro admits there was “a surge in imports because of the tariffs.” He doesn’t, of course, follow that train of thought all the way to the station.)

And about how all those cuts in government spending are going to make us all richer;

A 50% cut to science funding (which is close to what Trump is proposing for NIH) would result in huge negative long-term economic outcomes:

*7.6% cut in GDP
*8.6% cut in federal revenues
*equivalents of making the average American $10,000 poorer

NYT:

Cutting federal funding for scientific research could cause long-run economic damage equivalent to a major recession, according to a new study from researchers at American University.

...

It is going to be a decline forever,” said Ignacio González, one of the study’s authors. “The U.S. economy is going to be smaller.”

A smaller economy also means less income for the government to tax. As a result, while cutting investment could save money in the short run, it could leave the federal budget in worse shape over the longer term. The researchers estimate that a 25 percent cut to research funding would reduce government revenues 4.3 percent in the long term.

Larger funding cuts would have even greater effects. A 50 percent reduction in funding would lower gross domestic product nearly 7.6 percent, the researchers estimate, and a 75 percent cut would reduce it 11.3 percent — a larger decline than in any recession since the Great Depression.

Yes, it would be that bad:

Such estimates might seem extreme, but they are consistent with other research. A recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that government investments in research and development accounted for at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II.

“If you look at a long period of time, a lot of our increase in living standards seems to be coming from public investment in scientific research,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a Texas A&M economist and an author of the Dallas Fed study. “The rates of return are just really high.”

Or just ask Alabama about the prospect of losing funding for some of the major employers/economic engines in the state (healthcare and research). (In the’60’s, Alabama benefited from NASA. Most of the rockets were built in Alabama.). The idea that government spending all goes where the socks go in the dryer is just about ready to be challenged by Jimmy Stewart’s speech that stops the run on his S&L.

Political leaders in earlier eras appeared to recognize that payoff. In another recent study, Mr. Fieldhouse found that past efforts to cut the federal budget largely spared investments in nondefense research and development.

So everything old is new again; there is some cause for long term optimism.