Targeted tariffs can be legitimately justified for national security (e.g., not depending on potential antagonists for defense materials), protecting iconic national-identity industries, or countering unfair trade practices like subsidies and market-access denial — but this is fundamentally different from taxing all goods from all countries.

The behavior of Washington regarding both the fiscal deficit and Social Security resembles a man who jumped off a 20-story building saying 'so far so good' as he passed the 10th floor — postponing acknowledgment of an inevitable crash.

Highly unequal wages and prices (disequilibria) cannot persist when labor and goods are mobile; trade and migration drive wages and prices toward equilibrium across countries, which is the mechanism trade harnesses and tariffs impede.

Keynesian theory prescribed deficit spending only to stimulate a slow economy, with surpluses and debt paydown during prosperity; modern US politicians of both parties have kept the deficit spending while forgetting the surplus-and-paydown half, running a $1.8 trillion deficit (6.4% of GDP) in fiscal 2024 during prosperity.

US automakers lost ground to imports primarily because American cars were more expensive than foreign cars but not correspondingly better, driven by higher wages and a unique fringe benefit package including lifetime medical care amounting to $1,900 per car by 2008.

If a $5 million house has a 1% annual probability of burning down, the insurer faces an expected payout of $50,000, so capping the premium at $25,000 simply means the policy won't be written — you can limit the price insurers can charge but you can't make them provide coverage at that price.

Social Security was designed as a pay-as-you-go program where current workers' taxes fund current retirees' benefits; because the worker-to-retiree ratio has fallen and retirees live longer without workers paying taxes longer, incoming revenues now fall short of benefits, the trust funds are being drawn down, and are projected to be exhausted in 2035, after which receipts would cover only 79% of promised benefits absent corrective action.

If the US continues to borrow and add to national debt faster than GDP grows, the interest bill at a constant rate will consume an ever-larger share of the budget, compounding deficits and debt; the US already spends more on interest annually than on defense, and the burden will soar if rates rise as low-rate debt matures and must be refinanced.

The decline of US manufacturing employment (from ~30% of non-farm jobs in 1950 to ~8% today) reflects a universal developmental pattern—economies peaking near $40,000 per-capita GDP then shifting from manufacturing to services—rather than unfair foreign trade practices, evidenced by ~400,000 unfilled US manufacturing job openings.

By the time of the 2025 fires, fewer than a quarter of affected properties were insured against fire, with State Farm non-renewing over 70,000 policies in 2024 and some premiums rising from $4,500 to $18,000, demonstrating that capping insurance prices deprived thousands of access to coverage.

Economies are organic entities that operate on their own pursuant to underlying laws like supply and demand and incentives, which are part of human nature and don't require a PhD to understand.

California regulators forced insurers to price wildfire risk using 20-year historical average losses rather than forward-looking catastrophe models, and prevented them from passing through higher reinsurance costs; as wildfires grew more frequent and severe, historical data became a poor predictor and insurers could not price to actual risk, leading major insurers to withdraw.

Rent control creates winners (existing tenants, incumbent politicians) and losers (landlords, developers, would-be renters); it discourages maintenance and new construction, reduces mobility because tenants can't monetize their below-market asset, and ultimately leaves the housing stock failing to meet community needs in both condition and quantity.

International trade is not a ripoff in itself but a fair trade, since the exporting country gets the money and the importing country gets goods it desires; the trade deficit in goods ($1.2 trillion in 2024) overlooks the US's $290 billion positive trade balance in services.

Protectionism via tariffs reduces import competition, which helps domestic manufacturers and workers but tends to raise prices, allows production of inferior goods, enables strong unions and high wages that further raise costs, makes consumers pay more, and can reduce exports as domestic producers become globally uncompetitive.

A tariff is fundamentally a tax on imported goods; the exporter or importer may absorb some of it to maintain market share, but otherwise it is paid by the end consumer in the form of a price increase.

Because the US is bigger and richer than most other countries, it is inescapable that it will buy more from them than they buy from it, so a goods trade deficit is largely structural rather than evidence of being cheated.

The US government has run fiscal deficits in 41 of the last 45 years and trillion-dollar-plus deficits in all of the last five, able to do so only because the world has extended it virtually unlimited credit at low interest rates — a privilege that cannot be assumed to last forever.

When allowed to function, the laws of economics provide incentives that encourage innovation, productivity, and efficiency, creating prosperity and optimizing overall welfare—for example, globalization delivers comparative-advantage benefits so consumers everywhere get the best quality-price combination and producing-nation workers get the highest possible pay.

Optimizing overall welfare is distinct from ensuring all individuals prosper; the better approach is to let markets operate freely and address undesirable side effects (safety nets, retraining, anti-competitive enforcement) rather than to mandate universal prosperity, because efforts to control markets—from the Soviet Union to California wildfire insurance—make things much worse.