Free Republic

Just hours after President Donald Trump announced massive new tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States, a bipartisan group of senators made the first push to stop the most nonsensical part of Trump's global trade war. With a 51-48 vote, the Senate approved a resolution to block Trump's tariffs on imports from Canada, which he imposed by declaring an economic emergency in early February. The measure to cancel that emergency declaration, sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) and Rand Paul (R–Ky), faces an uncertain future in the Republican-controlled House and a near-certain veto if it reaches Trump's desk—but...

Vance thinks that jobs lost because of incompetent central planning don't matter—but that jobs lost to immigrants do.In an interview published this week by The New York Times, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) calls for a more muscular federal government to intervene even more aggressively in the economy than it already does, to create what Vance calls "incentives" for American workers. In doing so, Vance inadvertently reveals one of the major flaws in this line of analysis. Vance's opinions about these things carry significant weight, in no small part because he's on the shortlist to be Donald Trump's running mate. With...

One of the very first things President Joe Biden did after taking the oath of office was to order federal agencies to revamp the way they evaluate the costs and benefits of regulations.It went largely unnoticed amid the flurry of executive orders in Biden's first days, but that January 20, 2021, memo to the heads of departments and executive agencies signaled the administration's intention to rev up the regulatory state by counting "non-quantifiable" benefits of new regulations. As Reason reported at the time, the memo made clear that the new regulatory framework would serve "as a tool to affirmatively promote...

As many Americans who waited until the last minute will likely rediscover this weekend, filing federal taxes is a complicated and frustrating task. No matter how much care is taken, mistakes happen—and fairly often. During the 2021 tax filing season, for example, the IRS "suspended and reviewed 35 million returns with errors," according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which annually reviews the IRS' performance and makes recommendations for improvement. Those errors can be the result of taxpayers failing to include a necessary form or complete information, though they can also be the results of mistakes...

The decade that just ended saw a period of uninterrupted economic growth. In the decade to come, we'll pay for squandering it. Since the so-called Great Recession officially ended in the third quarter of 2009, the United States has enjoyed 42 consecutive quarters of solid if unspectacular economic growth. That's the longest run of uninterrupted growth since government economists began tracking the business cycle in the 1850s, far outpacing the average economic expansion of 18 months. Employment has increased by 12 percent, the jobless rate reached record lows, and America's gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by more than 25...

In Washington, D.C., he's been labeled "loser," accused of being a secret Democrat, and ostracized from the legislative caucus he co-founded, but on Monday night Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) found himself in friendlier territory—and embraced the opportunity. At a town hall in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Amash's constituents gave him applause and praise—but also fired pointed questions from left, right, and center political perspectives—during a nearly two-hour meeting marking the congressman's first public appearance since tweeting that he believed President Donald Trump had engaged in "impeachable conduct." It was the sort of spectacle that's all too rare in politics today; a...

By now, every political commentator has offered a suggestion for how Donald Trump ended up as president of these United States. Few have missed their targets as badly as Damon Linker's most recent offering, which suggests that we could have avoided President Trump if only the government had remained committed, for the past 40-plus years, to a policy that forced young Americans to die in foreign wars. Linker, a senior correspondent at The Week, suggests that historians will ultimately trace the rise of Trump to the decline in social cohesion that began, yes, with the abolition of military conscription in...