𝙱𝚛𝚢𝚊𝚗 𝚁𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚢 🗽🇺🇸

Four American presidents on free trade (Truman/Eisenhower/JFK/Reagan) 60 seconds

The pending farm bill includes a mandate that schools must use 95% domestically produced food regardless of the cost. I have a better idea: Schools should be required to produce their own food. Maybe then people would learn something about ag AND about economics.

Last year I submitted a FOIA request to the US Trade Representative with a simple purpose: to figure out where the Trump admin's infamous "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariff formula came from. This formula, posted on the USTR's website, was the basis of the charts at the April 2025 tariff press conference. It was also mathematically incoherent. Its denominator terms canceled each other out, yielding an nonsensical result that simply spat out an economically meaningless percentage based on bilateral trade volume. The formula became a target of ridicule for good cause, but nobody could explain where it came from. Some speculated that Peter Navarro dreamt it up, likely because it just felt like a crazy and economically incompetent Navarro product. Others suggested that it looked like something hallucinated by ChatGPT. So I submitted the FOIA request in an attempt to find out. My simple request turned into a full year of unexplained delays, stonewalling, missed deadlines that they had previously communicated for delivery, and general non-responsiveness. The USTR, which officially published the formula, is subject to FOIA as a federal agency and does not enjoy the exemptions afforded directly to White House staff. Nonetheless they claimed legal review privileges since the formula's documentation apparently involved correspondence with unnamed White House officials. After a year of waiting, I finally got the answer this morning. The USTR located 31 pages of records pertaining to the "Liberation Day" tariff formula. But it was invoking an exemption from FOIA under a "presidential communications" privilege and therefore denying access to all 31 pages. That said, the email did provide a clue confirming one of my long-held suspicions about the origin of the formula. The specific party they claimed privilege to protect was not Peter Navarro - it was the White House Council of Economic Advisers. This in turn suggests what I have long suspected. The formula either came from or had substantial input from somebody at the CEA, as presumably documented in the 31 pages of excluded correspondence.

@JustinWStapley 🫡

As President Eisenhower said: "it is improper policy, unbusinesslike procedure and unfair to the taxpayer for the Government to pay a premium on its purchases."

Sec. 4304. Mandatory overpayment for school lunches.

From the Senate Farm Bill. May I respectfully ask why there is nothing in here about the impact on the 350 million Americans WHO FREAKING EAT AND PAY FOR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES?

@JK_Lundblad Farm bill scheduled for ag committee vote next week agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

@FreeTradeBryan What is this from?

To be more explicit, the question is do you decide, or does someone decide for you?

❓Who decides the common good? You are mostly well-meaning people but I don't want ANY of you dorks deciding whether I'm watching The Odyssey or Spider-Man next weekend. DISCLAIMER: I am not a Claremont-briefed member of the New York/Ivy League elite, just a KS dude who listened to 2112 a lot.

@alldspeed @danieldbunn @scottlincicome @clark_packard @GaryWinslett @EBGresser @CNLiberalism @EricBoehm87 I suppose their ad doesn't mention that most of the tariffs hit goods from Europe/Canada/Japan etc. NOT CHINA LOL

@danieldbunn @FreeTradeBryan This list looks like a tell to me. They aren't attacking anyone in the South for opposing Trump's tariffs because trying to find any upside to the trade war in the South is like looking for a glacier in the Sahara desert. @scottlincicome @clark_packard

Can someone please explain to me why every single Democratic candidate in the country is not running a single-issue campaign against Trump’s unilateral $200 billion a year tax increase?

@MichaelRStrain Thanks for sharing this

“Get your head out of your ass. I would vote for Sarah Palin before this shit.” This is so good. And it would be so much funnier if the DSA wasn’t so horrifying, appalling, and stupid.

@michaelbd Are you Catholic? Are you willing to move out of the NYC bubble? Have I got a deal for you!

My mother sent me to a good Catholic elementary school in the 1990s for a little over $1,000 a year. Roughly $2300 in today’s dollars. The Catholic school near me, offering roughly the same kind of screenless education I had is led by lay people, charges $22,500. The housing inflation since Covid has priced all my peers out of the neighborhood we moved into years ago. it’s so drastic it feels fake but it has real effects on our behavior- we can’t move unless there’s a similarly disproportionate giant step up in income. But incomes are far far behind housing inflation. Since 2017, average earnings are up about 43%, while home sale prices are up 81% and rents 54%

I know i’m going to get “but your phones and AC and square footage,” but I say this is all backwards. Individual liberty flourishes when we are rich in established common goods. Much of the rage younger people feel has been hard to articulate. But I think it’s their sense that the social treasury previous generations relied on is depleted: neighborhoods where kids played unstructured, large extended families that support each other in family formation, homes that are affordable for 27 year olds, cheap parochial schools staffed by religious, medical care that didn’t require byzantine subsidies, grandparents young enough to help.

Here is link to the above quote: millercenter.org/the-presidency…

Weird, uneducated protectionists often talk about trade as if it's only about helping globalist billionaires. But trade has always been about lifting people out of poverty and strengthening U.S security. Here is former USTR Carla Hills from 2004, for example:

🤣 “Donald ‘Mamdani’ Trump”