Category: Uncategorized

Marshall in Welt: Democrats Sense Their Chance

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, warns:
“We’re stuck thinking that mobilization is everything.”

He believes Democrats are well-positioned for the midterms because it’s a referendum on Trump—not a vote for Democrats. But the party has not reflected on why it lost in 2024.

“Many of the positions Democrats took in 2024 alienated voters because they were too far left—on immigration, crime, identity politics, and the economy,” he argues. That issue is currently overshadowed by anti-Trump sentiment but will resurface by 2028.

“The Democrats must not fail to change substantively if they ever want to win the White House again.”

[…]

Read more in Welt

Manno for American Compass: Learning By Doing

Posted on by Alex Terr

A startling transformation is underway, in the economy, in the culture, and among policymakers. The ironclad, bipartisan belief in college as the “ticket to the middle class,” in former President Barack Obama’s preferred phrase, that every child should go to college, that the public education system’s primary task is to prepare everyone for college, has begun to crumble.

As America awakens to the costs of offshoring and begins the task of reindustrialization, and as the largest technology companies place their bets on an unprecedented expansion of physical infrastructure to support their plans for artificial intelligence, the private sector, too, has discovered that new paths for workforce development are critical to their own success. Unlikely bedfellows from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, school boards, and union halls are coming together in search of new approaches.

Read more in American Compass

PPI Statement on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Kids’ Online Safety Markup

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

This week, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie announced a full committee markup of the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) as part of a new kids’ online safety package. The bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) was omitted. After months of productive bipartisan talks, negotiations collapsed, and Committee Democrats say the Majority is “moving forward with a partisan package that lets Big Tech off the hook.” PPI shares that concern. Child safety legislation that passes committee on a party-line vote has no path in the Senate, and this approach risks squandering months of good-faith work on an issue where real agreement was within reach.

Our concerns with the ASAA go beyond process. The bill’s age verification mandates don’t just affect teens — they require every adult to hand over identity documents to download any app, whether it’s Instagram or a weather widget. The Majority keeps pointing to Apple Pay as proof that this is easy, but about one in five Americans don’t have a credit card, and setting up Apple Pay often requires a government ID upstream. The burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it. Advocacy groups have warned that identity-linked verification causes adults to self-censor and marginalized users to disengage. Requiring universal ID collection to use an app store also runs counter to basic data minimization principles — the bill collects far more personal information than is necessary to keep kids safe, and shares it with every developer regardless of whether their app poses any risk.

The bill also moves in the opposite direction from the FTC, which just issued an enforcement policy statement defining “age verification” to include age estimation and inference — privacy-preserving approaches that the ASAA ignores. At the same time, the latest bill text explicitly exempts third-party app stores, which happen to be the actual channel where users download adult content apps that Google Play and the App Store prohibit. And while the Majority has taken a hard line on the need for rigorous verification, the new version of the bill lets parents simply attest to their child’s age — an internal contradiction that undercuts the rationale for making every adult produce an ID in the first place.

We’d also note that the argument made by the ASAA’s supporters — that minors shouldn’t be entering into contracts with app stores — doesn’t hold up. Under U.S. common law, minors can enter into contracts, but those contracts are voidable in every state. Minors already have more contractual protection than adults do.

PPI continues to believe that POPA is the stronger bill. It’s bipartisan, introduced by Reps. Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Houchin (R-Ind.), and supported by child safety advocates, small businesses, and industry stakeholders. It focuses verification on apps that actually provide different experiences for adults and minors, rather than treating every download the same. It gives parents real tools instead of burying them in consent requests they’ll eventually tune out. Our polling shows that 70% of parents want protections that keep working while their kids use apps, not a one-time check at download, and only a third think app store verification alone will keep kids safe. POPA was designed with those concerns in mind, and unlike the ASAA, whose state-level counterpart was blocked by a federal court as overbroad, it’s built on a legal foundation that can hold up.

Rep. Auchincloss has filed an amendment to Thursday’s markup that would strike the ASAA language and replace it with POPA. We urge the Committee to support that amendment and use it as the starting point for legislation that can actually get to the president’s desk. Kids and parents can’t wait for Congress to get this wrong twice.

Ainsley in Politico EU: Keep calm and carry on: Britain’s finance minister tries to dodge the Biden trap

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

Labour MPs and aides tried to learn lessons from the Democrats’ defeat in 2024, with several exchanges and meetings brokered through center-left U.S. think tanks such as the Progressive Policy Institute.

Claire Ainsley, director of the PPI’s project on center-left renewal, said: “The British government appears to be learning the lessons from the Democrats, which is talk about the economy in the way people experience it.”

But, Ainsley went on, “the Democrats also had very strong economic growth in which to do that and that is not the projection for the British economy in the 2020s. So Labour has to be very careful about not promising that people are going to be better when there are so many uncertainties.”

The U.K. government adviser referenced above added: “Things have definitely moved on from 2024 when there was this idea that doing kind of Biden-y things would result in being rewarded.” Likewise, they added, “[Trump’s] economic numbers are terrible. They’re not something to emulate.”

[…]

Read more in Politico EU

Refunding illegally collected tariff money is not difficult

Posted on by Alex Terr

FACT: Refunding illegally collected tariff money is not difficult.

THE NUMBERS:

Illegally collected “IEEPA”* tariffs: ~$175 billion
Annual IRS income tax withholding refunds: ~$330 billion

* “IEEPA” is an acronym for “International Emergency Economic Powers Act,” the 1977 law the administration used as the basis for eight tariff decrees in 2025. The other tariff decrees, “national security” claims under “Section 232” of U.S. trade law, haven’t been challenged so far and remain in force. The $175 billion is the estimated actual tariff collection under the IEEPA decrees, and does not include required interest payments.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Brett Kavanaugh, one of three Supreme Court Justices to side with the Trump administration on “international emergency” tariffs two weeks ago, explains his view at least in part by saying he thinks repaying tariffs will be difficult:

“The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA* tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others. As was acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a ‘mess.’ In addition, according to the Government, the IEEPA tariffs have helped facilitate trade deals worth trillions of dollars — including with foreign nations from China to the United Kingdom to Japan, and more. The Court’s decision could generate uncertainty regarding those trade arrangements.”

A general legal point on this, then a couple of comments on the practical issues:

Legal: If an administration puts an illegal policy in motion, and courts later find it illegal, unwinding it can be messy. That’s the nature of Justice Marshall’s “judicial review” concept. Any “mess” is the administration’s responsibility and its problem to fix, not the courts’.

Practical: Neither of Kavanaugh’s complaints is very daunting. The “deals” have basic problems — all of them raise costs for Americans — and don’t seem built to last anyway. And refunding the “IEEPA” tariffs needn’t be messy at all.

With respect to “deals” and “trade arrangements”, they aren’t worth “trillions” of dollars and don’t look like they’re meant to last long. As recently as January, for example, the administration itself was perfectly willing to abandon its “deals” with the European Union and the U.K. by threatening new tariffs over control of Greenland. And if it now places high value on them, it can eliminate any risk by asking Congress to pass implementing laws that bring them to life. Earlier administrations did this 18 times between 1974 and 2020 for GATT, WTO, and FTA agreements. If Congressional support is there, the deals will be fine. If not, maybe they aren’t very meaningful.

And with respect to refunding illegally collected tariff money, no “mess” unless the administration wants one.

There’s no blurriness about who is owed the money. In customs and tariff jargon, the people who write tariff checks to the Customs and Border Patrol are the ‘importers of record’, meaning about 242,000 importing companies in the U.S., 11,000 customs brokers handling trade paperwork for small businesses, and individuals now paying tariffs on arriving packages. CBP’s “ACE” (Automated Commercial Environment) system lets the firms and customs brokers enter their payments in digital form with an 8-digit tariff code identifying the product they’re buying, the date it arrived, its value, the applicable tariff laws and rates, and the amount of money they paid. Each of the administration’s eight “IEEPA” decrees created special tariff lines beginning with the HTS code 9903 to apply the new tariffs to incoming goods. As an example, the April 2 “global” decree created 52 new tariff lines, starting at “9903.01.25” and going up to “9903.01.76.” So CBP knows very well who has paid IEEPA tariffs on Ghanaian shea butter, Vietnamese-assembled TV sets, Valentine roses from Ecuador and Colombia, etc., and the payers likewise know how much of their tariff payments originated in an illegal IEEPA decree.

Nor should the government have any problem writing the checks. Tariff-payers can probably arrange most of the refunds themselves, using the ACE system to revise tariff filings dating back to April of 2025. (Tariff payments typically wait around at CBP for 315 days, then “liquidate” as CBP sends them to the Treasury’s General Fund.)  For the earlier ones, a bit more complicated but the U.S. government regularly does much larger and more complicated refunds. To put some numbers on this:

  • CBP’s “Trade Statistics” snapshot says that in Fiscal Year 2025, CBP line officers handled 50.08 million separate import “entries” – container unloadings, truck crossings, air cargo deliveries, pipeline shipments, etc. — with tariff collection totaling $195 billion. IEEPA tariffs totaled about $93 billion in 2025, and were running at $16 billion per month in the first quarter of FY2026. Assuming that remained pretty stable in early 2026, the IEEPA revenue total is likely about $175 billion. With interest, the government owes $200 billion or so in refunds.
  • By comparison, the Internal Revenue Service got 163.4 million individual income tax filings last year, and sent out 104.9 million tax withholding refunds, valued at $329.1 billion. So, twice as many individual payments, and 50% more refund money than the tariff repayment will require. Six weeks from now, in mid-April, they will do this all over again without any particular trouble.

In sum: CBP will have to sort through a lot of forms. The Treasury Department will need to send out more checks than usual this year. But it won’t be a mess unless the administration decides to create one. And either way, that’s not the Court’s problem.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

  • Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
  • Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
  • Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
  • Offer a positive alternative.

Law:

The Supreme Court’s Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump opinion. The ruling against the IEEPA tariffs is pp. 7-26, and Kavanaugh’s dissent starts on page 170.

… and Marshall’s Marbury v. Madison opinion (1803), introducing the “judicial review” concept.

The numbers:

CBP’s “Trade statistics” snapshot. See “entries” in the top box for the count of import arrivals, and scroll down for tariff collection under IEEPA, “232” national security claims, and “301” unfair trade practices.

CBP’s introduction to the Automated Commercial Environment system, which importers use to file documents and pay tariffs electronically, and facilitates refunds of wrongly collected tariff money.

And for comparison, the IRS’s summary of individual tax filings and refunds.

And another thing:

The administration spent a lot of time last year claiming that tariffs were a way to offload taxes onto foreigners, including foreign governments. Mr. Trump made the same assertion — “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries” — personally in the “State of the Union” address a week ago Tuesday. As the refund checks go out, Congress and reporters might usefully ask how many are going to foreign capitals and how many to American addresses.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

Guenther for The Hill: NASA fired its economists. It desperately needs to bring them back.

Posted on by Alex Terr

The Trump administration has talked a big game about ushering in a “new space age” as China threatens to beat us back to the moon and national security risks grow in space.

To achieve these goals, the White House said it would “unleash” the innovation and know-how of the commercial space industry.

It is a good bipartisan idea — one that took off in earnest under President Barack Obama — to enlist commercial players to modernize our space program. But execution is the hard part. And unfortunately, it’s clear that the administration has already shot itself in the foot by allowing the Department of Government and Efficiency to eliminate one obscure but important team.

That would be NASA’s Office of the Chief Economist, which the agency relied on for an independent understanding of the commercial space market.

If NASA wanted to land cargo on the moon, for instance, its economists were the ones who would figure out whether it made sense to lean on the commercial space sector, which would require a market for those services beyond the government, or if it would be prudent to rely on a traditional contractor. This was critical to NASA’s ability to work together intelligently with industry.

Read more in The Hill

Willett for Empire Report: To Accelerate Smoking’s Decline, New York Needs Pragmatic Tobacco Taxes

Posted on by Alex Terr

New York has been a leader in public health over the years. When it comes to ending cigarette smoking, however, the job is far from finished.

Nearly 1.6 million New York adults still smoke cigarettes, and more than 28,000 New Yorkers die each year due to smoking. Cigarette use is tied to more than a quarter of cancer deaths statewide and costs more than $12 billion annually in direct healthcare spending.

With such a staggering toll, tobacco tax policy should be about more than revenue. The way we tax nicotine products can either encourage adults who smoke to move away from cigarettes or unintentionally keep them there. That’s why Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposal to raise taxes on nicotine pouches deserves closer scrutiny.

Not all nicotine products are the same. Cigarettes burn tobacco and create smoke, which causes most smoking-related illnesses, including COPD and lung cancer. Noncombustible products, including nicotine pouches, expose users to far fewer toxicants and are considered significantly lower risk than cigarettes. After a rigorous scientific review, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized several nicotine pouches for sale, determining they are “appropriate for the protection of public health” and can benefit adults who switch completely away from cigarettes.

Today, cigarette use in New York is concentrated in working-class and economically disadvantaged communities, among people living with mental health challenges, and among veterans. Most people who smoke want to quit. While traditional cessation strategies, including tobacco quitlines, can improve success rates, fewer than 1 in 10 people who attempt to quit remain smoke-free long term. Many adults are therefore turning to lower-risk nicotine alternatives to transition from smoking.

Read more in Empire Report. 

Manno for Workshift: The Future of Learning Looks Like Workforce Infrastructure

Posted on by Alex Terr

For years, “ed tech” was an umbrella term grouping schools, online platforms, courses, credentials, and software under one idea: technology applied to education. That shorthand made it easier for investors, policymakers, and institutions to talk about innovation without rethinking how learning fits into the economy. Today, it no longer explains what’s happening.

That’s the central insight of “The European Learning & Work Funding Report” by Brighteye Ventures, a research and advisory firm tracking investment at the intersection of learning, work, and productivity. The report’s seventh edition shows that learning is no longer funded primarily as education. It is increasingly funded as part of how work gets done.

Across Europe, and increasingly the U.S., capital is flowing not toward courses or credentials but toward systems that are closer to production, including hiring platforms, staffing firms, clinical decision tools, payroll systems, and compliance software. These are not educational products, though learning is embedded throughout them.

In these systems, learning is not the point. Outcomes are.

This shift arrives as the traditional pathway from school to work is fraying. The first rung of the opportunity ladder—entry-level jobs that once provided experience, mentoring, and a way up—is eroding. Young people are told to “get experience,” but the places that once supplied it are disappearing.

Brighteye’s report helps explain why. Learning hasn’t vanished but moved from classrooms into the operating system of work itself.

Read more in Workshift

Manno for RealClearEducation: Developmental Education: From Catch-Up to Speed-Ahead

Posted on by Alex Terr

Astrid arrived at her community college to pursue a nursing degree with a high school diploma, a part-time job, and a plan. She was told she needed two semesters of noncredit remedial math and English courses before taking classes that counted toward her credential.

She never made it to the anatomy course.

Astrid is not a real person, but her story is. She represents the unspoken student story of American higher education’s developmental—or remedial—education system.

Strong Start to Finish reports that 40% of two-year college students and 25% of four-year students take at least one remedial course, an estimated 3.4 million students.

The result is predictable.

Read more in RealClearEducation

Willett for The Post and Courier: Commentary: Why SC should support risk-based tobacco policy

Posted on by Alex Terr

Over the past two decades, I have dedicated my career to tobacco prevention and smoking cessation, serving in leadership roles with the American Heart Association, the Truth Initiative and state health departments in New York and Ohio. Throughout my career, I have witnessed firsthand how evidence-based approaches — when implemented thoughtfully — can meaningfully shift public health outcomes. Today, I am more convinced than ever that tobacco harm reduction represents exactly this kind of evidence-based opportunity for South Carolina.

Cigarette smoking remains South Carolina’s most persistent and costly public health challenge. Despite decades of progress, more than a half million South Carolinians continue to smoke, leading to more than 7,200 deaths each year. This is not only a burden on the friends and families of smokers; it is also a substantial cost for taxpayers totaling $2.2 billion annually to treat smoking-related illness, with nearly $512 million of that coming from Medicaid.

The facts on smoking cessation are stark. Seventy percent of Americans who smoke want to quit, yet most lack the support systems needed to succeed. For every 100 people attempting to quit through willpower alone, only three to five remain abstinent beyond six months. Even health insurance offers limited help: Most plans cover only two attempts at quitting per year. This helps explain why an estimated 60 percent to 90 percent of adults who try to quit smoking ultimately relapse.

Fortunately, Palmetto State lawmakers have an opportunity to pass legislation that would provide people who smoke with incentives to make what I consider better decisions for their health and alleviate some of the financial burden associated with treating smoking-related illnesses.

Read more in the Post and Courier

Gresser in Politico Pro Morning Trade: USTR outlines goals for critical mineral pact

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

The two conflicting visions don’t add up, said Ed Gresser, a former USTR economist now at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank.

“I don’t think you can say in the State of the Union address that the economy is in really, really great shape and then also say we’re about to have a collapse in the dollar, mass unemployment, inability to service foreign debt, those sorts of things,” Gresser said.

[…]

Read more in Politico Morning Trade. 

Kahlenberg in The Boston Globe: Ending college affirmative action didn’t devastate minority enrollment but only shifted it

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

In fact, racial preferences worsen this exact problem. Richard Kahlenberg, an education expert who supports racial diversity on campus, wrote about “the dirty little secret” of American education in his book “Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges.”

As he notes, “The framework of race-based preferences disproportionately aided upper-middle-class students of color and sustained a system of favoritism for children of alumni, wealthy donors and the offspring of faculty.” Affirmative action produced racial diversity that made it seem as if the admissions system was fair. But to give one example that Kahlenberg cites, the University of North Carolina “had 16 times as many wealthy students as it did students from low-income backgrounds.”

[…]

Read more in The Boston Globe

Supreme Court: Presidents cannot use ‘international emergencies’ as pretexts to create their own tariff systems

Posted on by Alex Terr

FACT: Supreme Court: Presidents cannot use “international emergencies” as pretexts to create their own tariff systems.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. GDP growth, last five years–

2025    2.2%
2024    2.8%
2023    2.9%
2022    2.5%
2021    6.2%

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Having ordered his skeptical platoon to ford a flooding Louisiana river by moonlight, the obstinate, ill-fated captain in folksinger Pete Seeger’s Big Muddy insists that everything will be fine:

    “It’ll be a little soggy, but just keep slogging. We’ll soon be on dry ground …”

It doesn’t work out quite that way.

The Supreme Court’s Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump opinion, released Friday morning, offered the administration an easy way out. By striking down all of last year’s “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” (“IEEPA”) decrees, the Court gave the administration a chance either to (a) quietly liquidate an unpopular experiment, or (b) return to the Constitutionally appropriate approach of asking Congress to pass a tariff bill, as the like-minded Harding and Hoover administrations did in the 1920s. Within a few hours, it made a different choice: emotional denunciations of the court, a legal gamble on an antiquated law meant for a different purpose, and new tariff decrees oscillating up and down between 10% and 15%. As this thrashing around proceeds, a look at how the past year’s tariff binge played out, with Seeger’s piece as a wry optional soundtrack:

GDP growth slows: To start at the top, the administration’s central tariff decree — the now-defunct April 2 “Executive Order 14257” — predicted that tariffs would open a “new golden age.” In practice, the U.S. economy grew by 2.2% last year. This isn’t terrible for a “developed” economy, but is noticeably slower growth than in any of the four Biden years: 6.2% in 2021 during the pandemic rebound, then 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023, and 2.8% in 2024.

… and rural America crashes: Growth, of course, isn’t a single uniform figure across all regions and economic “sectors,” but the average of many different experiences. Rural America, the most export-reliant part of the U.S. — sales to foreign customers typically provide a fifth of farm income — has had a particularly bad time. Retaliations and consumer boycotts damaged farm export earnings last year — soybean sales to China down from $12.6 billion in 2024 to $3.1 billion, wine exports to Canada from $460 million to $103 million, etc. — while higher tariffs on fertilizer, agricultural machinery, fencing, tools, and other needs raised farm operating costs. With income down and expenses up, farm country is in bad enough shape for commodity-group and ag policy veterans to warn this month of a possible “widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities.”

Trade balance unchanged: The administration justified its April 2 decree to the courts by declaring a “national emergency posed by a large and persistent trade deficit” (in goods specifically, excluding services trade), and claiming a big tariff increase would “address” it. It hasn’t. Last Thursday, a day before the Supreme Court’s verdict, Census Bureau statisticians published the U.S. trade data for 2025, which showed a somewhat higher goods-trade deficit in 2025 than in 2024:

2024   2025
Imports of goods $3.30 trillion   $3.44 trillion
Exports of goods $2.08 trillion   $2.20 trillion
Goods trade balance -$1.22 trillion   -$1.24 trillion

Manufacturing slowdown: The administration’s pitch to the public was more practical: higher tariffs would cause “some pain,” but would compensate by launching a manufacturing boom.  That didn’t happen either. Employment growth slowed in general, and especially so in manufacturing: Bureau of Labor Statistics reports show manufacturing employment falling by 108,000 in 2025, mainly because manufacturers hired about 330,000 fewer new workers. Meanwhile, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates that the manufacturing share of U.S. GDP (based on the nine months of data available so far) contracted from 9.8% in 2024 to 9.4%.

Costs up: If tariffs haven’t produced growth, trade balance, or a manufacturing job surge, they have succeeded in raising costs. CBP appears to have collected a bit more than $260 billion in tariff money last year, more than triple the $76 billion of 2024. The biggest cost appears to have fallen on the automotive industry — over $40 billion on cars and parts, mostly under “national security” (technically, “Section 232”) tariffs that so far haven’t faced court challenge and thus remain in place. But the general tariff increase is seeping into daily life in unexpected and sometimes very personal ways. Some samples of where CBP got this money:

2024   2025
Primary health products
OTC medicines     $0 million     $316 million
Band-Aids and other bandages     $0 million     $206 million
Condoms     $0 million         $7 million
Tampons   $23 million     $143 million
Crutches, splints, other fracture devices   $0 million     $197 million

 

Personal care & beauty 2024   2025
Soap   $31 million     $172 million
Makeup $158 million     $724 million
Perfume   $11 million     $391 million
Hair care   $28 million     $140 million
Deodorant     $6 million       $17 million
Shaving cream, razors, & aftershave   $12 million       $63 million
Dental floss, toothbrushes, & toothpaste   $20 million     $100 million

 

Groceries                  2024   2025
Fresh fruit and vegetables                  $196 million    $1,175 million
Flowers                      $8 million       $145 million
Coffee & tea                      $6 million       $935 million
Honey                      $4 million         $64 million
Pepper, cinnamon, ginger                    $16 million       $128 million

Across the whole economy, the Harvard Business School’s tracking project estimates that tariffs raised the price of tariffed goods by 6.6% above trend, the price of similar locally produced goods by 3.8%, and overall prices by about 1%.

Federal debt up: As to federal finances, the Court’s ruling doesn’t mean the administration has to pay the whole $261 billion back, just most of it. The Congressionally authorized “MFN” tariff system is still active, though buried under much larger tariff decrees, and legally raises about $40 billion a year. The administration’s Section 232 “national security” decrees are often laughable — one defines condensed milk and balance beams as “steel or aluminum derivative products,” another says lumber tariffs will make sure we have the wood needed to build “ballistic missile defense systems” and “thermal protection systems for nuclear re-entry vehicles” — but so far haven’t faced legal challenge. But the “IEEPA” tariffs struck down on Friday account for about two-thirds of tariff revenue, roughly $175 billion, and the administration will have to pay it back with interest. That means the 2025 tariff experiment will likely end up a net loss to the Treasury.

In sum: slower growth, rural crisis, fewer manufacturing jobs, higher costs for families, and more debt for the government. The unfortunate captain in Seeger’s song tells his worried platoon to keep slogging as the water rises. But dry ground is nowhere in sight.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

  • Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
  • Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
  • Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
  • Offer a positive alternative.

Main documents:

Supreme Court Learning Resources, Inc., v. Trump opinion.

… PPI’s comment on the ruling.

… the now-defunct April 2 decree, “Regulating Imports with a Reciprocal Tariff to Rectify Trade Practices that Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits.”

… and its replacement (for now, pending court challenges), a February 20 decree claiming a “balance of payments emergency” to invoke “Section 122” for a 15% worldwide tariff.

Soundtrack:

Seeger’s “Big Muddy.”

Data:

Census Bureau reports imports, exports, and trade balances for 2025.

BEA’s GDP series, with a link to “GDP by Industry.”

The Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service reports on farm income.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics database. Use “Employment, Hours, and Earnings” for employment growth by industry, and “Job Openings and Labor Turnover” for total job openings, hiring, layoffs, and quits.

The U.S. International Trade Commission’s Dataweb lets you see exports, imports, and tariff collection by country and product.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

Osborne in Washington Monthly: Could New Orleans Be the Model for Fixing Public Schools?

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

In 2003, New Orleans public schools were among the worst in the country. Seventy percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in math, 74 percent weren’t proficient in English, and the graduation rate was barely over 50 percent. Moreover, the district was as corrupt as it was incompetent. FBI investigations led to the indictment of two dozen school officials; nearly $70 million in federal funding was missing.

New Orleans schools have since achieved a remarkable transformation. In 2023, the high school graduation rate was 79 percent, and 65 percent of graduates enrolled in college—nearly double what it was in 2004 and higher than the state average.

This success, one expert argues, was powered by the city’s commitment to charter schools. Publicly funded and but independently operated, charter schools enjoy more autonomy than traditional public schools in what they teach and how they teach it. Their charters, however, are dependent on their performance, which author and director David Osborne says is key.

In his new documentary, Turnaround, which premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival last fall, Osborne chronicles the rise of New Orleans public schools through its use of charters and argues for the expansion of this model. Osborne is the author of six books, including the 1992 bestseller, Reinventing Government.

Watch or listen to the full podcast on Spotify, YouTube and iTunes, or read the transcript in Washington Monthly.

Moss for ProMarket: The Nexstar-Tegna Merger Will Raise Your Cable Bill, and Then Some

Posted on by Alex Terr

Last fall, local broadcast television station owners Nexstar and Tegna announced a $6.2 billion merger. The deal will vault the first and third largest local TV station owners in the United States into the top slot, opening a yawning gap between the size of Nexstar-Tegna and the next largest station owner, Gray Television. The resulting behemoth will control about 265 full-power TV stations, capable of reaching larger regional areas, as compared to lower-power stations. These stations operate in the vast majority of states and in over 60% of local markets, or designated market areas (DMAs). Its national audience reach will top over 80% of U.S. households.

The myriad ways in which a single, powerful TV station owner will touch the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans are stunning. By eliminating major, head-to-head competition in local TV, the merger will tilt bargaining power in markets all along the supply chain. This risks higher subscription prices for multi-video programming (MVP) services that carry local TV stations; higher TV advertising rates for local businesses; and the erosion of diversity of political, social, and cultural viewpoint in local news reporting and content.

In any other political administration, Americans could have counted on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to ensure that the Nexstar-Tegna merger never made it out of the boardroom or, alternatively, was dead on arrival at the agencies’ doorsteps. Not so under the Trump administration. The deal is papered with opportunism and cronyism that is now the hallmark of a politicized U.S. antitrust enforcement and regulatory system. U.S. consumers will be the big losers.

Read more in ProMarket. 

Jacoby in Background Briefing: As Russia’s War on Ukraine Enters Its Fifth Year, A Report From Kyiv On How the Ukrainians Are Holding Up

Posted on by Alex Terr

Background Briefing with Ian Masters · As Russia’s War on Ukraine Enters Its Fifth Year, How Are Ukrainians Holding Up

 

We begin with the fifth year on Russia’s war on Ukraine beginning today and go to Kyiv to assess how the Ukrainian people are dealing with a bitter winter, constant Russian attacks on civilian targets and a United States under Donald Trump that has cut military and economic support while cozying up to Russia’s ruthless dictator who started this war and appears to have no interest an any real peace short of Ukraine’s capitulation. Joining us is Tamar Jacoby, the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. She was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, before that, the deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. She is the author of Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience and we discuss her article at The Washington Monthly, “Ukraine: Requiem for a Citizen Soldier: My friend, an entrepreneur turned exemplary officer, was killed in action in eastern Ukraine this year. Like his comrades, he knew what he was fighting for.”

Listen to the interview here.