“Every day, thousands of transactions take place in which Americans and Canadians consent to exchange currency for goods.
“Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks there is someone they forgot to ask. ‘We don’t want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada,’ Lutnick explained during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. ‘We want to bring [aluminum production] to America.’ Lutnick’s phrasing there is pretty telling. There is no ‘royal we’ in the marketplace — that Canadian aluminum is not being bought by the federal government, but by private American businesses, which are making deals with private companies on the other side of the border. There is, indeed, no reason to think about those transactions in a nationalist way at all. The economy is not a World Cup match. When Canadian companies exchange their aluminum for American companies’ money, both sides win.” (03/14/25)
“We’ve all seen the outrageous stats for the Department of Education. Until Donald Trump’s White House hit man Elon Musk sicced his Department of Government Efficiency on it, the Education Department had an annual budget of between $238 and $268 billion and employed about 4,100 bureaucrats. This week, the department my father tried to kill in its infancy 45 years ago laid off about 2,000 Education Department employees. What will happen to all the billions the doomed department spends each year still must be figured out by DOGE. … Liberals are making the Education Department sound like it’s indispensable to America’s present and future. But everyone in D.C. has always known that despite its huge budget, it doesn’t run classrooms or teach kids a thing.” (03/15/25)
“Trump continues to claim that tariffs are taxes paid by foreign countries. The reality, however, tells a different story: they’re taxes on Americans. Research shows his proposed trade barriers could hike household expenses by $2,600 to $3,900 annually, while pushing consumer prices up by as much as 2.8 percent. Unsurprisingly, low- and middle-income families would suffer the most, making tariffs a regressive and harmful policy. Perhaps one of Trump’s most bizarre assertions is that tariffs could reduce grocery prices. In reality, they would do the opposite.” (03/14/25)
