tagPopulation Map Reveals States Growing, Shrinking the QuickestA demography expert said the numbers are "most interesting" and most likely due to domestic migration. sharesave
Kristi Noem Hits Back at Tribal Reservation BansAs a result of previous comments she made, the South Dakota governor has been banned by seven Native American reservations in her state.
Florida's growing seabird population impacts local wildlife and a rescue org tries to helpIn Florida, the growing seabird population has been impacting local wildlife and one rescue organization is on a mission to correct the balance.
Brooklyn influencer part of bad girls club of NYC-Dublin ‘portal’ flashersA 26-year-old content creator from Brooklyn who goes by Clover claims she beat model Ava Louise to the chase by baring it all for spectators across the pond on Saturday.
Trucks carrying desperately needed aid are rolling across a newly U.S. built pier into GazaTrucks carrying desperately needed aid are rolling across a U.S.-built pier into Gaza. U.S. officials say this could mean up to 150 truckloads a day will get to the besieged Palestinian territory.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito faces scrutiny over upside down U.S. flag outside his homeSupreme Court Justice Samuel Alito faces mounting scrutiny over an upside down U.S. flag outside his home. The flag upside down became a symbol of the stop the steal movement used by rioters and election deniers after the 2020 election.
Explore the best of the West with these extraordinary experiencesThere’s something for everybody on the West Coast, but only if you know where to look. Our list of 101 best West Coast experiences can help you make the most of this coast.
NYPD ‘headcount’ faces record lows not seen in decades — 200 cops leaving each month : dataA total of 566 police officers have hung up their holsters through April, compared to 508 over the first four months of last year, NYPD pension data shows.
Mother and son DOE employees scammed NYC school for kids with disabilities: probeA mother and son duo employed by the city Department of Education scammed a Manhattan public school for kids with disabilities out of nearly $8,500, investigators found.
Family of little girl killed by illegal immigrant shares emotional story, aims to take action in CongressStewart Jones, a South Carolina Republican and godfather of a little girl killed by an illegal immigrant, is being backed by the child's mother in his run for Congress.
Just how long should a Supreme Court justice stay around?The decision about when Supreme Court justices should step down is a complex stew of personal ambition, court dynamics and, of course, politics.
Boyfriend Shares 5 Ways He Supports Girlfriend With PCOS in Sweet VideoThe woman said her partner's support has "helped me navigate the challenges of PCOS with a bit more grace and a lot less insecurity."
Cynthia Nixon remembers early ‘Sex and the City’ hate: ‘These are gay men in disguise’"They kept saying over and over, 'These aren't really women, these are gay men in disguise, women don't talk like this,'" the actress told Page Six.
The true story of a Staten Island hero soldier, whose spirit lives on in the ‘SSG Michael H. Ollis’ ferryAfter eight months, the 24-year-old Staten Islander was about to fly out to Bagram, Afghanistan, as Tom Sileo details in ‘I Have Your Back – How An American Soldier Became an International Hero’.
UFC Vegas 92 Fight Night predictions and picks: Barboza vs. MurphyYou'll notice many more long shots this week and fewer outright sides on this weekend's betting card.
Sorry President Biden, those inflation numbers totally suckNew inflation data may suggest the economy is strong, but a closer look reveals major weaknesses.
Biden staffer who resigned over White House’s ‘disastrous’ support for ‘genocide’ is daughter of weapons exec helping IsraelShe doesn't like bombs — unless they're paying her way.
Father of NYC menace ‘Ice Pick Nick’ grateful son is behind bars: ‘Saving his life’The frustrated father said that people like his son will keep terrorizing NYC “unless the government does something about the homeless and mentally ill people.”
Opinion: Disturbing Video Shows Diddy Was Right: ‘Time Tells Truth’Jason LaVeris“Time tells truth.”That was the cryptic Instagram post left by disgraced hip-hop mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs just days before surveillance video would reveal the truth that he physically attacked his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in 2016.The disturbing footage–that was originally obtained by CNN–shows Ventura trying to leave a hotel room with her belongings before being assaulted by Combs. Diddy, who was only wearing a bath towel wrapped around his waist, is seen in the triggering video grabbing, shoving, dragging and kicking Ventura on the floor. Such filmed abuse corroborates with the formal complaint Ventura filed last year against Combs in which she cited the attack as taking place “around March 2016” as her ex “followed her into the hallway of the hotel while yelling at her.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
Opinion: Disturbing Video Shows Diddy Was Right: ‘Time Tells Truth’Jason LaVeris“Time tells truth.”That was the cryptic Instagram post left by disgraced hip-hop mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs just days before surveillance video would reveal the truth that he physically attacked his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in 2016.The disturbing footage–that was originally obtained by CNN–shows Ventura trying to leave a hotel room with her belongings before being assaulted by Combs. Diddy, who was only wearing a bath towel wrapped around his waist, is seen in the triggering video grabbing, shoving, dragging and kicking Ventura on the floor. Such filmed abuse corroborates with the formal complaint Ventura filed last year against Combs in which she cited the attack as taking place “around March 2016” as her ex “followed her into the hallway of the hotel while yelling at her.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
She finished chemo then got a medical degree: ‘The dream is real now’Keri Cronin has her sights on her next goal: becoming an oncologist to help other cancer patients like herself.
New York Squatting Reform BackedExclusive polling for Newsweek has revealed the level of support for new anti-squatting legislation.
New York Squatting Reform BackedExclusive polling for Newsweek has revealed the level of support for new anti-squatting legislation.
Private tour inside St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican CityJoin Norah O'Donnell for a rare, private tour inside St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, the largest church in the world. Watch Sunday's 60 Minutes for a wide-ranging conversation with Pope Francis and tune in Monday, May 20, for a Primetime special, "Pope Francis: The First", on CBS.
Private tour inside St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican CityJoin Norah O'Donnell for a rare, private tour inside St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, the largest church in the world. Watch Sunday's 60 Minutes for a wide-ranging conversation with Pope Francis and tune in Monday, May 20, for a Primetime special, "Pope Francis: The First", on CBS.
Climate activists glue themselves at Munich airport to protest flyingThe activists from the German-based group Last Generation, which has carried out similar protests in the past, were protesting flying, the most polluting form of transportation.
Farmer commutes 6 hours a day to bring Pa. products to his Amish-owned NYC storeMillport Dairy, the first truly authentic, Amish-owned brick-and-mortar store in the five boroughs, opened May 1 on Broadway between 97th and 98th Streets.
Bill Maher defends Harrison Butker amid speech uproar: 'I don't see what the big crime is'HBO's Bill Maher offered a defense for Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who sparked outrage over comments he made during a commencement ceremony at a private Catholic college.
Ukraine's Controversial Military Mobilization Law Comes Into Effect Amid Russian AdvancesA divisive mobilization law in Ukraine came into force Saturday, as Kyiv struggles to boost troop numbers amid the Russian offensive. The post Ukraine’s Controversial Military Mobilization Law Comes Into Effect Amid Russian Advances appeared first on Breitbart.
NYC Council’s secret ‘woke’ wish list for Albany politicians revealed — including bill that could free killers when they reach 55The New York City Council’s far-left majority plans to push Albany pols to pass a slew of super-woke measures– including bills to help parole murderers over 55.
Yankees vs. White Sox prediction: MLB odds, picks, bets for SaturdayThe reeling White Sox are making a change to their pitching rotation by plugging Brad Keller into the mix for Saturday’s matinee against the Yankees.
The Gouda, bad and ugly: NYC law student addicted to cheese went to nearly $6K-per-week rehabAdela Cojab said cravings began during her junior year at NYU, in spring 2018, when she binged almost daily on the “cheapest” bricks cheese she could find.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's 'Congress Clown Show' CondemnedThe Georgia Republican's House committee clash with rivals is not a good look for U.S. democracy, say experts
London Mayor Khan Says Trump Is Homophobic, Racist, and Sexist, Demands Labour Party 'Call Him Out'Donald Trump is a homophobe, sexist, and racist declared far-left Mayor of London Sadiq Khan while urging his party to "call him out". The post London Mayor Khan Says Trump Is Homophobic, Racist, and Sexist, Demands Labour Party ‘Call Him Out’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Why the Nets need to strike quickly if Donovan Mitchell opens door to a New York returnDonovan Mitchell has been in the Nets’ plans. It remains to be seen if they’re in his.
Slain NYPD detective who probed Mafia to get ‘well overdue’ headstone — 100 years after his deathDet. Grottano was off-duty the night of May 19, 1924, when a robber ran past him with uniformed cop in pursuit after ripping off a shop in Downtown Brooklyn.
Los Angeles County Explains Why It Won’t Prosecute Diddy Despite VideoREUTERSThe Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has revealed why it won’t be prosecuting Diddy after horrific footage showed him brutally attacking his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura at a hotel.The office said in an Instagram post that because the alleged attack happened on March 5, 2016, the window to prosecute has lapsed. California’s statute of limitations for simple assault is one year, while aggravated assault is three years. “We are aware of the video that has been circulating online allegedly depicting Sean Combs assaulting a young woman in Los Angeles. We find the images extremely disturbing and difficult to watch. If the conduct depicted occurred in 2016, unfortunately we would be unable to charge as the conduct would have occurred beyond the timeline where a crime of assault can be prosecuted,” the office said. “As of today, law enforcement has not presented a case related to the attack depicted in the video against Mr. Combs, but we encourage anyone who has been a victim or witness to a crime to report it to law enforcement or reach out to our office for support from our Bureau of Victims Services.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
Los Angeles County Explains Why It Won’t Prosecute Diddy Despite VideoREUTERSThe Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has revealed why it won’t be prosecuting Diddy after horrific footage showed him brutally attacking his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura at a hotel.The office said in an Instagram post that because the alleged attack happened on March 5, 2016, the window to prosecute has lapsed. California’s statute of limitations for simple assault is one year, while aggravated assault is three years. “We are aware of the video that has been circulating online allegedly depicting Sean Combs assaulting a young woman in Los Angeles. We find the images extremely disturbing and difficult to watch. If the conduct depicted occurred in 2016, unfortunately we would be unable to charge as the conduct would have occurred beyond the timeline where a crime of assault can be prosecuted,” the office said. “As of today, law enforcement has not presented a case related to the attack depicted in the video against Mr. Combs, but we encourage anyone who has been a victim or witness to a crime to report it to law enforcement or reach out to our office for support from our Bureau of Victims Services.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
Vatican releases guidance on investigating 'supernatural phenomena'The Catholic Church's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released a document Friday providing new guidelines for the investigation of alleged supernatural events.
6-year-old girl bravely saves NYU Law commencement with hand-drawn heart after anti-Israel protesters refuse to leave stage: ‘She got the biggest applause’A 6-year-old child taught thousands of adults this week a lesson in love and respect.
NYT interviews swing state voters who regret supporting Joe Biden in 2020: 'Biggest mistake of my life'Reporters at the New York Times spoke to a variety of swing state voters who might have voted for Biden in 2020, but plan to vote for somebody else in the upcoming election.
How Jim Jordan connected the dots on Biden’s $8 million book dealThe House Judiciary Committee chair suggests the Robert Hur report on Joe Biden says more than it does.
Ukraine gamble pays off: Republicans face little backlash in primariesDespite months of fear and loathing over votes on Ukraine aid, recent Republican primaries show incumbents suffering little to no effect from their votes.
Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders joins new government as Europe's 'liberal elites' put on noticeThe Dutch electorate’s concerns over radical Islam and unfettered immigration led to the establishment of a right-wing coalition to address the country’s social problems.
11 Times CNN's Debate Host Jake Tapper Attacked Donald Trump with Nasty ClaimsJake Tapper is set to co-host a presidential debate on June 27, an event that is likely to produce fireworks between him and Donald Trump. The post 11 Times CNN’s Debate Host Jake Tapper Attacked Donald Trump with Nasty Claims appeared first on Breitbart.
11 Times CNN's Debate Host Jake Tapper Attacked Donald Trump with Nasty ClaimsJake Tapper is set to co-host a presidential debate on June 27, an event that is likely to produce fireworks between him and Donald Trump. The post 11 Times CNN’s Debate Host Jake Tapper Attacked Donald Trump with Nasty Claims appeared first on Breitbart.
How Companies Dodge TariffsProtectionist trade policies are popular on both the left and right. But some economists say they’re likely to backfire.
Key Moments Princess Kate Might Miss Amid Cancer TreatmentPrincess Kate has been off work while she has chemotherapy meaning she will likely be absent for some big royal moments.
Woman Reunites With Toddler After 3 Days Away—Not Prepared for His ReactionElizabeth Maclay didn't take it to heart as she knows her son gets "a little grumpy" when he first wakes up.
Free Trade Is DeadDemocrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that, he escalated a policy begun during the Trump administration, and marked the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that had dominated American policy making for nearly half a century. The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.Since the 1980s, American economic policy has largely been guided by the belief that allowing money and goods to flow with as little friction as possible would make everyone better off. So overwhelming was the agreement on this point that it became known, along with a few other free-market dogmas, as the “Washington Consensus.” (You may know the Washington Consensus by its other names, including neoliberalism and Reaganomics.) According to this way of thinking, free trade wouldn’t just make countries rich; it would also make the world more peaceful, as nations linked by a shared economic fate wouldn’t dare wage war against one another. The world would become more democratic, too, as economic liberalization would lead to political freedom. That thinking guided the trade deals struck during the 1990s and 2000s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the decision to allow China into the World Trade Organization in 2001.A few voices on both the left and the right had long criticized these theories, but they were outside the mainstream. The first major rupture took place in 2016, when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in part by railing against NAFTA and attacking America’s leaders for shipping jobs overseas. The same year, a landmark paper was published showing that free trade with China had cost more than 1 million American manufacturing workers their jobs and plunged factory towns across the country into ruin—a phenomenon known as the “China shock.” The coronavirus pandemic further undermined the Washington Consensus as the United States, after decades of letting manufacturing capacity move overseas, found itself almost entirely dependent on other countries for supplies as basic as face masks and as crucial as semiconductors.[Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves]These shifts strengthened the position of critics of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. The Biden administration, stocked with Elizabeth Warren disciples, entered office eager to challenge the free-market consensus in certain areas, notably antitrust. But on trade, the administration’s soul remained divided. In the early years of the Biden presidency, trade skeptics such as U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai frequently clashed with trade enthusiasts like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Biden quietly kept in place the tariffs Trump had imposed on China (which Biden himself had denounced on the campaign trail), but he focused his economic agenda primarily on boosting the domestic clean-energy industry.Then China’s aggressive push into clean energy forced Biden’s hand. As recently as 2019, China barely built electric vehicles, let alone exported them. Today it is the world’s top producer of EVs, churning out millions of high-quality, super-cheap cars every year. An influx of Chinese EVs into the U.S. might seem like welcome news for an administration fighting to lower both inflation and emissions. But it could also devastate the American auto industry, destroying a vital source of well-paying jobs concentrated in key swing states. A glut of discounted solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile—China currently produces the majority of the world’s supply of each—would undermine emerging American industries before they could even be built.To the administration, this presented a nightmare scenario. Already struggling parts of the country would experience a second China shock. The U.S. would become dependent on its biggest rival for some of the most important technologies in the world. Republicans would seize on the issue to win elections and potentially roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate change. (Trump has made the threat of Chinese EVs central to his 2024 campaign, talking about the “bloodbath” that would ensue if they were allowed into the country.)Economics, political science, geopolitics, electoral math: Many of the administration’s incentives seemed to point in the same direction. Which brings us to the tariffs imposed this week. In addition to the 100 percent EV duty, the U.S. will apply 25 to 50 percent tariffs to a handful of “strategic sectors,” in the words of a White House fact sheet: solar cells, batteries, semiconductors, medical supplies, cranes, and certain steel and aluminum products.A president announcing a new policy does not mean that the political consensus has shifted. The proof that we are living in a new era comes instead from the reaction in Washington. Congressional Democrats, many of whom vocally opposed Trump’s tariffs, have been almost universally supportive of the increases, while Republicans have been largely silent about them. Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that “Biden finally listened to me,” and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent. Most of the criticism from either side of the aisle has come from those arguing that Biden either took too long to raise tariffs or didn’t go far enough. What was recently considered beyond the pale is suddenly conventional wisdom.The old Washington Consensus was built on the premise that if leaders got the economics right, then politics would follow. Cheap consumer goods would keep voters happy at home, trade ties between nations would destroy the incentive to wage war, and the desire to compete in global markets would encourage authoritarian regimes to liberalize. Reality has not been kind to those predictions. Free trade upended American politics, helping to elect a spiteful kleptocrat initially opposed by his own party. The immense wealth Russia amassed by selling oil and gas to Europe may have actually emboldened it to invade Ukraine. Access to global markets didn’t stop China from doubling down on its authoritarian political model.The new consensus on trade taps into a much older understanding of economics, sometimes referred to as “political economy.” The basic idea is that economic policy can’t just be a matter of numbers on a spreadsheet; it must take political realities into account. Free trade does bring broadly shared benefits, but it also inflicts extremely concentrated costs in the form of closed factories, lost livelihoods, and destroyed communities. A political-economic approach to free trade recognizes that those two forces aren’t symmetrical: Concentrated economic loss can create the kind of simmering resentment that can be exploited by demagogues, as Trump long ago intuited. “Back in 2000, when cheap steel from China began to flood the market, U.S. steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” Biden said in his speech announcing the new policy, pointing out that nearly 20,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in those two states alone. “I’m not going to let that happen again.”[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]A more cynical way to put this is that Biden’s tariffs are a form of pandering to a bloc of swing-state voters. There’s truth to that, but it isn’t the whole story. The political-economic approach also acknowledges that foreign adversaries behave in ways that bear little resemblance to the rational economic self-interest presupposed by mathematical models. They pursue their own geopolitical agendas, market forces be damned—and so America must do the same. China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies is not a product of free markets at work; it was carefully engineered by Beijing, which for decades has poured trillions of dollars of state money into building up industries that it sees as vital to its national strength. To simply accept cheap Chinese exports under the banner of free trade would solidify that dominance, giving Beijing effective control over the energy system of the future.The shift on trade is part of a broader realignment that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has aspirationally called the “new Washington consensus.” What unites Biden’s tariffs with the other core elements of his agenda, including massive investments in manufacturing and increased antitrust enforcement, is the notion that the American government should no longer passively defer to market forces; instead, it should shape markets to achieve politically and socially beneficial goals. This view has taken hold most thoroughly among Democrats, but it is making inroads among Republicans too—especially when it comes to trade.The details of this new consensus, however, are still being worked out. Trump favors a blunt approach; he has proposed a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods from any country, including allies. Biden argues that Trump’s plan would sharply raise prices for American consumers without much benefit. His administration instead favors what officials call a “small yard and high fence”: major restrictions on a handful of essential technologies from particular countries.These are the terms on which the debate is now being waged: not whether to restrict free trade, but where, how, and how much. That is a very big change from the world we were living in not long ago. The precise consequences of that change will take years to reveal themselves. But they’re sure to be just as big.
Free Trade Is DeadDemocrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that, he escalated a policy begun during the Trump administration, and marked the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that had dominated American policy making for nearly half a century. The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.Since the 1980s, American economic policy has largely been guided by the belief that allowing money and goods to flow with as little friction as possible would make everyone better off. So overwhelming was the agreement on this point that it became known, along with a few other free-market dogmas, as the “Washington Consensus.” (You may know the Washington Consensus by its other names, including neoliberalism and Reaganomics.) According to this way of thinking, free trade wouldn’t just make countries rich; it would also make the world more peaceful, as nations linked by a shared economic fate wouldn’t dare wage war against one another. The world would become more democratic, too, as economic liberalization would lead to political freedom. That thinking guided the trade deals struck during the 1990s and 2000s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the decision to allow China into the World Trade Organization in 2001.A few voices on both the left and the right had long criticized these theories, but they were outside the mainstream. The first major rupture took place in 2016, when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in part by railing against NAFTA and attacking America’s leaders for shipping jobs overseas. The same year, a landmark paper was published showing that free trade with China had cost more than 1 million American manufacturing workers their jobs and plunged factory towns across the country into ruin—a phenomenon known as the “China shock.” The coronavirus pandemic further undermined the Washington Consensus as the United States, after decades of letting manufacturing capacity move overseas, found itself almost entirely dependent on other countries for supplies as basic as face masks and as crucial as semiconductors.[Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves]These shifts strengthened the position of critics of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. The Biden administration, stocked with Elizabeth Warren disciples, entered office eager to challenge the free-market consensus in certain areas, notably antitrust. But on trade, the administration’s soul remained divided. In the early years of the Biden presidency, trade skeptics such as U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai frequently clashed with trade enthusiasts like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Biden quietly kept in place the tariffs Trump had imposed on China (which Biden himself had denounced on the campaign trail), but he focused his economic agenda primarily on boosting the domestic clean-energy industry.Then China’s aggressive push into clean energy forced Biden’s hand. As recently as 2019, China barely built electric vehicles, let alone exported them. Today it is the world’s top producer of EVs, churning out millions of high-quality, super-cheap cars every year. An influx of Chinese EVs into the U.S. might seem like welcome news for an administration fighting to lower both inflation and emissions. But it could also devastate the American auto industry, destroying a vital source of well-paying jobs concentrated in key swing states. A glut of discounted solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile—China currently produces the majority of the world’s supply of each—would undermine emerging American industries before they could even be built.To the administration, this presented a nightmare scenario. Already struggling parts of the country would experience a second China shock. The U.S. would become dependent on its biggest rival for some of the most important technologies in the world. Republicans would seize on the issue to win elections and potentially roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate change. (Trump has made the threat of Chinese EVs central to his 2024 campaign, talking about the “bloodbath” that would ensue if they were allowed into the country.)Economics, political science, geopolitics, electoral math: Many of the administration’s incentives seemed to point in the same direction. Which brings us to the tariffs imposed this week. In addition to the 100 percent EV duty, the U.S. will apply 25 to 50 percent tariffs to a handful of “strategic sectors,” in the words of a White House fact sheet: solar cells, batteries, semiconductors, medical supplies, cranes, and certain steel and aluminum products.A president announcing a new policy does not mean that the political consensus has shifted. The proof that we are living in a new era comes instead from the reaction in Washington. Congressional Democrats, many of whom vocally opposed Trump’s tariffs, have been almost universally supportive of the increases, while Republicans have been largely silent about them. Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that “Biden finally listened to me,” and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent. Most of the criticism from either side of the aisle has come from those arguing that Biden either took too long to raise tariffs or didn’t go far enough. What was recently considered beyond the pale is suddenly conventional wisdom.The old Washington Consensus was built on the premise that if leaders got the economics right, then politics would follow. Cheap consumer goods would keep voters happy at home, trade ties between nations would destroy the incentive to wage war, and the desire to compete in global markets would encourage authoritarian regimes to liberalize. Reality has not been kind to those predictions. Free trade upended American politics, helping to elect a spiteful kleptocrat initially opposed by his own party. The immense wealth Russia amassed by selling oil and gas to Europe may have actually emboldened it to invade Ukraine. Access to global markets didn’t stop China from doubling down on its authoritarian political model.The new consensus on trade taps into a much older understanding of economics, sometimes referred to as “political economy.” The basic idea is that economic policy can’t just be a matter of numbers on a spreadsheet; it must take political realities into account. Free trade does bring broadly shared benefits, but it also inflicts extremely concentrated costs in the form of closed factories, lost livelihoods, and destroyed communities. A political-economic approach to free trade recognizes that those two forces aren’t symmetrical: Concentrated economic loss can create the kind of simmering resentment that can be exploited by demagogues, as Trump long ago intuited. “Back in 2000, when cheap steel from China began to flood the market, U.S. steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” Biden said in his speech announcing the new policy, pointing out that nearly 20,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in those two states alone. “I’m not going to let that happen again.”[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]A more cynical way to put this is that Biden’s tariffs are a form of pandering to a bloc of swing-state voters. There’s truth to that, but it isn’t the whole story. The political-economic approach also acknowledges that foreign adversaries behave in ways that bear little resemblance to the rational economic self-interest presupposed by mathematical models. They pursue their own geopolitical agendas, market forces be damned—and so America must do the same. China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies is not a product of free markets at work; it was carefully engineered by Beijing, which for decades has poured trillions of dollars of state money into building up industries that it sees as vital to its national strength. To simply accept cheap Chinese exports under the banner of free trade would solidify that dominance, giving Beijing effective control over the energy system of the future.The shift on trade is part of a broader realignment that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has aspirationally called the “new Washington consensus.” What unites Biden’s tariffs with the other core elements of his agenda, including massive investments in manufacturing and increased antitrust enforcement, is the notion that the American government should no longer passively defer to market forces; instead, it should shape markets to achieve politically and socially beneficial goals. This view has taken hold most thoroughly among Democrats, but it is making inroads among Republicans too—especially when it comes to trade.The details of this new consensus, however, are still being worked out. Trump favors a blunt approach; he has proposed a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods from any country, including allies. Biden argues that Trump’s plan would sharply raise prices for American consumers without much benefit. His administration instead favors what officials call a “small yard and high fence”: major restrictions on a handful of essential technologies from particular countries.These are the terms on which the debate is now being waged: not whether to restrict free trade, but where, how, and how much. That is a very big change from the world we were living in not long ago. The precise consequences of that change will take years to reveal themselves. But they’re sure to be just as big.
