Last week, I wrote about Puerto Rico’s propane imports from the US mainland exploding once the Jones Act waiver made American supplies available for shipment via oceangoing tankers. In about four months, the island imported more than double the combined total shipped from the mainland during 2004–2025. The waiver, I argued, had turned a theoretical argument about the Jones Act’s harm to Puerto Rico’s energy supply into an empirical one.

Later that week, the Washington Post weighed in, and its July 23 editorial is worth a close look because (among other things) it adds something I didn’t: a comparison.

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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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Financial regulators are the latest agents to be recruited in the Trump administration’s war on immigration. Their weapon of choice appears to be debanking.

Choke Point, Again 

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) came together to warn banks about offering services to “individuals who are not legally authorized to work in the United States.” In other words, the regulators are pressuring banks to cut off anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. 

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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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For most children, playing “city” means cardboard storefronts and imaginary money. But in Germany and Austria, thousands of children spend part of their summer running something much closer to a real economy. 

They elect mayors. Publish newspapers. Open businesses. Bake bread. Argue court cases. Pay taxes. 

These “mini cities”—temporary child-run communities modeled after real civic life—started with Mini Munich in 1979, which is still operating today. Yet they remain almost unknown beyond those countries. Daniel Fetz, an Austrian entrepreneur who attended a mini city in Austria as a boy, wants to change that. He’s translating the handbooks, guides, and essays on mini cities from the original German to English and publishing them on his Mini Cities website. 

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Every few weeks, fresh speculation emerges about when the Federal Reserve will change its interest rate target, followed by confident claims that this decision will drastically alter the mortgage, auto, or credit card rates that weigh on American households. The assumption beneath the coverage is that the Fed sets the cost of borrowing, so its next move matters more than anything else. People don’t want to hear that the Fed matters less than “everyone” thinks, but at the very least, the past seven months are enough to question exactly how much the Fed controls rates.

The Fed has held its rate target steady since its December cut. But as this table shows, nearly every rate Americans actually borrow at has climbed over the same stretch.

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The current outbreak of cyclosporiasis has Americans cutting back on salads and other raw vegetables. Such outbreaks have become routine in recent years, with leafy greens providing the most common pathway for nasty bugs like E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, and cyclospora. 

Seizing on the latest outbreak, the New York Times recently ran an op-ed by food safety expert Timothy Lytton explaining how such outbreaks occur and what can be done to reduce their occurrence. In Cato’s Regulation magazine last fall, Lytton argued that civil action and private incentives can be used to combat them. In “How Nuisance Law Can Improve Food Safety,” he points out that manure runoff from cattle feedlots and dairy operations sited near produce fields is often the contamination source. 

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