Rogé Karma

If Donald Trump were trying to lose his trade war with China, it’s hard to see what he would be doing differently. The president’s gambit is likely to strengthen China’s geopolitical position, embolden Beijing militarily, and diminish both the United States’ global standing and its economy.
Earlier this month, Trump increased tariffs on all goods from China to 145 percent. China, in turn, responded with 125 percent tariffs on American goods, plus more targeted measures.

Some presidents spend their first few weeks in office trying to make good on their central campaign promise; Donald Trump has instead done everything he can to avoid having to follow through on his. A controversial campaign pledge to enact big, universal tariffs that would transform the global-trade system and usher in American prosperity has been whittled down to a set of hollow threats designed to extract mostly symbolic concessions from America’s neighbors.

The debate over immigration in America has taken a strange turn recently. Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer and a prolific spreader of dehumanizing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, finds himself defending an immigrant-visa program against his fellow right-wingers. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most prominent leftist in the country, has taken to harshly criticizing the same program for undermining American workers.

California’s new minimum-wage law hadn’t even gone into effect before it was declared a disaster. Business groups and Republican politicians have argued for decades that minimum-wage increases harm the very workers they are supposed to help, and this one—passed in September 2023 and setting a salary floor of $20 an hour for fast-food workers—appeared to be no different.

The central contradiction of Donald Trump’s reelection is this: He owes his victory to the fact that millions of voters appear to have seen him as the stability candidate who would usher in a return to pre-COVID normalcy. But he has put forward a second-term agenda that would be far more radical and disruptive than anything he accomplished while in office.
To much of the country, the notion of Trump as the return-to-normal candidate is laughable.

The Federal Reserve has declared victory in the war on inflation. At its meeting today, the central bank announced that, after setting higher interest rates for two years in an effort to tame prices, it is finally beginning to bring them back down.
The Fed lowered interest rates by 0.50 percent (or 50 basis points), and has suggested that future cuts will be similarly sized.

Nuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion.

Democrats 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.

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.What happened?One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents.