In a recent New York Times essay, Josh Lipsky argues that tariff revenue has become important enough to federal finances that bond markets will make President Trump’s tariffs difficult for a future administration to unwind.

There is a simple arithmetic point behind the argument. Tariffs now raise a larger share of federal revenue, and refunding illegally collected duties or repealing tariffs without offsetting spending cuts or other revenue would increase the deficit.

But that argument pushes simple budget arithmetic into doing far too much work. Bond investors are not attached to customs duties as a line item revenue source. They care about the government’s overall fiscal position and about how policy affects economic growth, inflation, interest rates, and the cost of servicing the debt. Once those broader effects are considered, the market’s behavior over the past 18 months looks less like an addiction to tariffs than a response to the ever-changing size of the tariffs themselves.

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The “Section 122” tariffs, imposed after February’s Supreme Court ruling against President Trump’s “emergency” tariffs, expired last night and were immediately replaced by “Section 301” tariffs of roughly the same amount. The new duties range from 10 to 12.5 percent, cover goods from 60 economies, and are justified as a crackdown on “forced labor.” 

In my new column at The Dispatch, I show why these tariffs have almost nothing to do with forced labor and instead are just “a ham-fisted way to reinstall Trump’s tariff wall and protect it from another IEEPA-like defeat in federal court.” Five issues stand out:

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Cato scholars have argued for years that Congress should take back some of the tariff powers it handed to the executive branch over roughly the last hundred years. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. Throughout President Trump’s two terms in office, Congress has watched from the sidelines while the administration unilaterally imposes one legally dubious (to say the least) and economically destructive tariff after another, most recently reviving a nearly 100-year-old, never-before-used law (Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930) to heavily tax imports from Canada. Yet a recent bill introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D‑OR) is a positive sign that Congress may soon finally take this constitutional role seriously.

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A recent analysis warns that evaluating the impact of free-market reforms too early can obscure their true effects.

The study used 

data from the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index for 1950–2023 … [and] identified one reform episode in each of 30 countries by finding the shortest window over which its index score increased by two or more points.

For years, the Jones Act has effectively cut off Puerto Rico’s access to mainland propane. The reason is simple: there are no Jones Act-compliant oceangoing LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) tankers capable of transporting it. The only possible uncertainty was whether Puerto Rico wanted American propane in the first place. Thanks to the March 2026 Jones Act waiver, that’s now settled.

Since the waiver took effect, Puerto Rico has imported roughly 809,000 barrels of mainland propane. That’s 4,792 percent more—nearly 49 times—the average annual volume shipped from the mainland during 2004–2025. Put another way, it’s more than twice the amount of mainland propane shipped to Puerto Rico during the previous twenty-two years combined.

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A recent study points out the dearth of historical research on the macroeconomic effects of tariffs, especially as a tool to analyze modern-day tariffs. The study

addressed this challenge by analyzing all major US tariff rate changes from 1840 to 2024. Drawing on historical research, congressional records, and statutes, we identified … 21 tariff rate changes, which we used to examine the macroeconomic effects of tariffs.

These examples

reveal that increasing tariff rates contracted the US economy. … [T]ariff increases did not shield domestic industry despite their protective intent. Additionally, trade contracted markedly. 

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A disclaimer up front: I am not a Russia specialist. I have no particular expertise on the war in Ukraine, and no informed view on whether another round of sanctions on Moscow is necessary, sufficient, or beside the point. 

But I do know something about what happens when Congress hands the executive branch, and President Trump in particular, unilateral and discretionary tariff authority. And the tariff title of the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026—the long-stalled package championed by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑SC), now backed by the White House and more than two dozen senators—deserves a hard look on those grounds alone.

The bill would authorize the president to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five largest purchasers of Russian crude oil, currently China, India, Slovakia, Hungary, and Azerbaijan, and on the five largest buyers of Russian natural gas, which last year were China, France, Belgium, Japan, and Hungary.