What He Said

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Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR), wrote of the need for modernizing and expanding our nuclear weapons capability across three dimensions: numbers of warheads and systems to deliver them, the quality of those warheads and systems, and the range of threat—tactical, theater, and strategic—against which those warheads and systems are optimized.

He closed his piece, though, with the most important Statement of Need of his piece:

[T]o those who fear an arms race: The race has already begun. Russia and China have been running it for more than a decade while we sat on the sidelines. The question isn’t whether there will be competition in nuclear forces, but whether America will show up to compete.

To which I add: if we don’t compete, we cannot compete successfully. If we cannot compete successfully, we will find ourselves very quickly faced with nuclear blackmail or a nuclear war that we will certainly lose. In either of those cases, we will see ourselves completely subjugated to our enemies.

Trumpian Tariffs, Who Pays Them, And So What?

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The Federal Reserve now is saying that us Americans are paying 90% of the tariffs put in place by President Donald Trump (R).

In an analysis on the [Federal Reserve] bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on US firms and consumers.”
They reach that conclusion by examining import data, to see whether foreign suppliers cut their prices in response to Mr Trump’s added tariff costs. Over the first eight months of 2025, “94 percent of the tariff incidence was borne by the US,” the analysis says, meaning “a 10 percent tariff caused only a 0.6 percentage point decline in foreign export prices.”

Say that’s accurate—and, frankly, I have no reason to dispute it—it seems that the tariffs’ impact on the prices us American consumers face has been effected already, that impact is minimal inflation, and that inflation seems to be coming under control. That’s the case even as individual items—furniture, for instance—do seem to have ongoing price increases that are more closely related to tariff rates.

Overall, that leaves other causes also impacting inflation at least as much, if not more, than tariffs: supply chains dependent on distant foreign nations with the attendant shipping costs, those shipping costs themselves dependent on container rates and fuel costs, and especially our dependency on critical items like rare earth ores and refined rare earths that are controlled by an enemy nation that already is squeezing our economy with greatly reduced and heavily controlled exports to us. Even those rising furniture prices are, in addition to tariffs, strongly impacted by Canadian charges for exporting timber to the US—which costs impact house construction costs as well as costs for the furniture to put into them.

Missed in the Discussion?

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The People’s Republic of China has a “national team” of investors who work at the government’s behest to maintain a measure of stability in the PRC’s stock market.

The group is known by market players as the “national team,” and it functions as a market stabilization fund. It has been a fixture in the Chinese stock market for more than a decade, usually buying exchange-traded funds, and was widely noted when it intervened to prop up prices during a 2015 crash. After Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs in April 2025, triggering a global stock selloff, the national team stepped in to relieve the pain as a buyer of index funds.

On the other hand,

The CSI 300 benchmark, which tracks shares listed in both Shanghai and Shenzhen, has risen more than 20% over the past year, despite the April dip. Last month, trading volume across mainland Chinese stock exchanges reached a record high.
…
“Substantial yet well-paced selling by the national team is curbing—but not killing—the positive market momentum,” analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note earlier this month.

Maybe this is the government doing a slow pump-and-dump, which is one way to make money (not legally in most western nations), maybe not. In any event, it’s also textbook investing: buy low and sell high. Either way, this is making a lot of money for the PRC government, which in turn provides serious money for subsidizing its cost of goods production and for offsetting the effects of foreign (mostly US) tariffs on PRC exports. More the former, most likely, since the PRC has been able to increase its exports to Europe and South America, to their economic dependency peril.

End of Start-Stop

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The Trump administration announced Thursday noon-ish a complete end to automatic start-stop in our cars. This is a mistake IMO, and it’s a sad example of a nominally conservative administration turning toward nanny-state-ism.

It’s certainly true that many of us American drivers don’t like the technology and wish it gone. It’s also certainly true, though, that many of us American drivers do very much like the technology. Count me in the latter group.

With my 2023 model Ford Escape, I get much improved mileage in city driving when my car’s engine shuts off while sitting at a red light waiting for it to go back to green. My car does this utterly reliably and with no discernable wear and tear on the car’s starter or on the car’s engine-start battery—even in the Texas summer heat or the (surprisingly ugly) Texas winter cold. Only my battery’s aging OEM status interferes with the function: my car complains of not enough charge to support start-stop. Which is to be expected for a car that’s parked on the street in the Texas sun.

There is an easy solution to this one-size-fits-all disconnect among us Americans over start-stop. Taking my Escape as an example, I have a button on the panel just in front of my center console that turns off the start-stop function, but that only lasts until I arrive at my destination and shut everything down. When next I start my Escape, which involves much more than just turning the engine on, the car’s automatic start-stop function is itself restarted.

It would be a simple, one-line coding effort to turn that start-stop button into a toggle: push it once, and the function is turned off, and stays off even after a complete shutdown and restart of the car. After starting the car anew, pushing the button again would toggle the start-stop function back on, to remain on through successive car shut downs and restarts until the button is toggled again. Let the car come from the dealer with the function defaulted to Off; those of us who like the function are fully capable of turning it on with that button push and then leaving it on.

Another option, albeit much more expensive, would be to make start-stop an option for car buyers to purchase as an add-on when they buy their car.

Either of these would let those of us who do not want the start-stop function to not have it working, and those of us who do to have it; even if one of them would more expensive for car buyers to buy and more expensive for car makers to make.

In either case, though, both groups of us American drivers would do fine without the nanny state dictating our choices.

Pending Republican Failure

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And it’s from the same old story of Republican failure. The backdrop is this:

Job growth trounced expectations. The unemployment rate fell. Wages grew.

And inflation is down, those rising wages are catching up with inflated prices, our border is secure, eleven of twelve budget allocations passed, with only a Progressive-Democrat Party-blocked DHS bill remaining as Party pushes for another (partial, this time) of their government shutdowns.

President Donald Trump (R) is rightly touting all of these successes and more (even though he’d benefit from bragging less and focusing on those successes for our national weal more). Congressional Republicans and candidates for Congress, though, are failing miserably in their own communication responsibilities.

Some of the more nationally known Congressmen are on the national and cable talk show hustings, but it isn’t enough just for those few to give interview to network and cable news outlets.

There’s more to this than that, too. It’s an utter lack of understanding, swaddled as they are in their cloisters, of each of the Congressmen’s and candidates’ need especially to talk to—and with—their constituents in their districts, not just the few to the nation at large. In the case of Senators, whose constituents are State-wide, and it includes the need to talk to voters in Progressive-Democrat enclaves as well as to their own.

It’s also the need to be specific—no glittering generalities, no obfuscating or question-dodging speechifying. Republicans need to discuss the specifics of their policies and policy goals, and they need to explain to their constituents in concrete terms how their policies will help them in particular. No generalizing about national-level benefits. How their policies and goals would help their constituents with their grocery bills, fueling up their cars, reducing their utility bills in real terms. And then tie those real terms to the nominal costs that are what comes out of their constituents’ pocketbooks.

That, though, takes courage. Being specific would bring on a host of Leftist and Party criticism, as we’re already seeing with the objections to the newly House-passed SAVE Act, which would go a long way toward ensuring only American citizens could vote in American national elections. It would be easy enough to demonstrate the foolishness of those policy specifics criticisms, just as it would be easy enough to demonstrate not only the foolishness, but the outright racist nature, of Party’s objections to SAVE—if Republicans only had the necessary courage and the willingness to do the work.

The needed work: Republican Congressmen and candidates need to stop wasting time on national television and get out into their districts and into Progressive-Democratic Party candidates’ base areas and hold town halls and meet in diners and recreation centers directly with their constituents. They need to write op-eds in their districts’ local news outlets, give interviews on local television and radio stations.

Each of these Congressmen have Congressional staffs, and they have offices scattered around their districts; these staffers can assist them with getting the interviews, drafting their op-eds, etc. Candidates have fewer staff outlets, but they have some, and these could help. It isn’t enough to just throw up a policy statement or a news release on their respective Web sites and call it a day. Those are necessary, but stopping there is just lazy when it isn’t cowardice.

In the end, too, those moves will make it much easier for their staffers and volunteers as they mount their get-out-the-vote efforts, which is especially critical regarding low propensity voters and unenthusiastic Republican voters.

[W]inning candidates motivate base supporters to turn out in off-year elections. That’s no easy task for a GOP coalition that relies on infrequent voters and unreliable partisans.

If Republicans fail at these specifics, they’ll deserve to lose their elections. And our nation will lose badly.