Tariffs Harm Manufacturing Employment

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Terry Lane at Investopedia:

One benefit of U.S. tariffs on foreign imports is that they are supposed to spur an increase in domestic manufacturing. So far, tariffs seem to be having the opposite effect.

A closely followed survey of manufacturers indicated that the sector contracted for the sixth straight month in August, despite some signs of improvement. However, the data also showed that manufacturers struggle to handle the impact of tariffs while contending with higher prices for materials and lower spending from cautious buyers.

The Institute of Supply Management (ISM) manufacturing sector Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) improved to 48.7 in August, but still fell short of the 50 mark that indicates growth.1 The data showed that high input prices and elevated supply pressures from tariffs helped to wipe out improvements in new orders and employment levels.

“Uncertainty around tariff policy is limiting activity,” wrote Wells Fargo economists Shannon Grein and Tim Quinlan.2 “While the higher costs associated with tariffs are a challenge, the uncertainty around where tariffs ultimately land is likely more so limiting current activity today.”

Tariffs and Inflation

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Emily Peck and Joann Muller at Axios:

Where it stands: Reality is biting. At the beginning of the month, the U.S. started levying tariffs of about 15% on dozens of countries. That was on top of China tariffs of 30%.Companies are "coming to the point where their margins are getting squeezed and they need to start passing that onto consumers," Beth Hammack, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, told CBS News earlier this month.

Zoom in: Home Depot had been able to maintain prices on imported products because they'd stockpiled before tariffs took effect. But now, the company expects "modest price movement in some categories" (corporate speak for price increases), an executive said on a call with investors Tuesday. Last month, Procter & Gamble, maker of toothpaste, laundry detergent, etc., said that it would raise prices in August on about a quarter of its products as a result of tariffs.

What to watch: The auto industry could be next. New vehicle prices have been mostly flat as automakers have eaten the cost of tariffs.

Canadians Don't Like the US Anymore

 Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Sofia Hernandez Ramones, Jonathan Schulman, and Andrew Prozorovsky at Pew:

With Donald Trump back in office, Canadians’ opinions of the United States and its president are at or near historic lows, based on more than two decades of Pew Research Center polling.

Canadians express little confidence in Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs or to handle several key global issues effectively. And a majority of Canadians now see the U.S. as the country that poses the top threat to their own – a marked shift from 2019, when China was most often named as the top threat.

At the same time, more than half of Canadians view the U.S. as the world’s top economy, and two-thirds say it’s more important for Canada to have close economic ties with the U.S. than with China.

These findings come from a survey of 1,024 Canadian adults conducted from Feb. 19 to April 15, 2025. The survey was being fielded as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took office and after Trump announced initial tariffs against Canada, China and Mexico.

Tariff Effects

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Ben Casselman at NYT:

Data from the Labor Department on Tuesday showed that overall inflation remained tame in June, but that prices were up sharply in some categories affected by tariffs, such as toys and appliances. The job market, too, is starting to show some cracks, and there are signs consumers have begun to pull back their spending.

Economists expect that evidence to mount in the months ahead, as companies use up inventories built up before the tariffs took effect and begin passing costs on to customers.

“It was always going to take a few months to filter into the hard data,” said Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University.

Economists once expected a much steeper slowdown. But those dire predictions came in response to the punishingly high tariff rates that Mr. Trump announced in early April. Those policies never took effect: The president paused most of the tariffs in response to turmoil in financial markets, and later agreed to temporarily reduce tariffs on China as well.

Even the reduced tariff rates are the highest in decades, and most economists are confident that the policies — and the uncertainty surrounding them — will lead to faster inflation and slower growth. But the damage will be subtler and more gradual than if the duties that Mr. Trump announced in April had taken effect.

Court Strikes Down Tariffs

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic:

The debate over President Donald Trump’s tariffs often focuses on whether they are prudent. Defenders insist that Trump’s tariffs will help make America great again and boost national security. Critics counter that they’ll wreck the economy. But the strongest argument against the tariffs is actually that they are unlawful. Neither the Constitution nor any statute authorizes Trump to impose what he ordered.

Now, months after sticklers for the rule of law began making that argument, it has finally been vindicated: Yesterday, the United States Court of International Trade, the federal court with jurisdiction over civil actions related to tariffs, struck down almost all of Trump’s tariffs in a 49-page ruling. The decision includes a detailed discussion of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the 1977 law delegating increased power over trade to the president during national emergencies, which the White House had cited to support its moves. It concludes that the law does not authorize any of Trump’s tariff orders.

V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump

State of Oregon v. Trump

Underlying the issues in this case is the notion that “the powers properly belonging to one of the departments ought not to be directly and completely administered by either of the other departments.”  Federalist No. 48 (James Madison).  Because of the Constitution’s express allocation of the tariff power to Congress, see U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1, we do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President.  We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers.  Two are relevant here.  First, § 1702’s delegation of a power to “regulate . . . importation,” read in light of its legislative history and Congress’s enactment of more narrow, non-emergency legislation, at the very least does not authorize the President to impose unbounded tariffs.  The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariffs lack any identifiable limits and thus fall outside the scope of § 1702.  Second, IEEPA’s limited authorities may be exercised only to “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared . . . and may not be exercised for any other purpose.”  50 U.S.C. § 1701(b) (emphasis added).  As the Trafficking Tariffs do not meet that condition, they fall outside the scope of § 1701.  

Tariff Power

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Philip Wallach at AEI:

The Congress of a new generation doubled down on presidential leadership with the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which also contained Section 232, allowing for tariffs implemented for national security reasons. At the urging of President Richard Nixon, Congress gave the president yet greater powers with the Trade Act of 1974, which created a “fast track” procedure for Congress to consider trade agreements negotiated by the president. Section 301 of that act gave the president the ability to impose new tariffs when a foreign nation’s trade practices were deemed “unreasonable or discriminatory.”

With these two provisions in place, U.S. presidents had tools capable of quickly imposing a broad protectionist program. But while Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both engaged in some targeted protectionism, it wasn’t until the first presidency of Donald Trump that these powers were employed to their fullest, with Section 232 used to launch steel and aluminum tariffs and Section 301 used to impose a panoply of tariffs on China. The Biden administration largely left those actions intact.

While the second Trump administration’s actions of the last few weeks thus build on a long record of presidential leadership, they nevertheless represent a new chapter—in part because they have an entirely novel legal basis. Trump has claimed the authority to rewrite tariff schedules because America’s trade deficit represents an “emergency” for the nation. This unlocks presidential powers under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), a law heretofore used as the basis for economic sanctions but not for making trade policy, or so the theory goes. Trump has made it clear that the nature of this emergency requires the president to act as dealmaker-in-chief, which means he must be able to threaten, adjust, and readjust at the drop of a hat if he is to get the best deal for the American people and end our decades-long trade peonage.

Trade War: The Happy Ending or the Horrible Ending

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Originally published in La Tercera as “Los aranceles de Trump: El final feliz.”

Trump's trade war has two possible endings. One would be happy. The other could be terrible.

The happy ending would look like the following. China and other nations make minor concessions on trade policy. In return, Trump drops all of the tariffs that he recently imposed. Everyone declares victory, and the global economy returns to normal.

That ending would be consistent with Trump's character. In business, politics, and even golf, he has often pretended to have won contests that he actually lost.

This ending would benefit him politically. His devoted followers believe everything he says, and he could easily convince them that a surrender is a triumph. Other Americans would dismiss his claim of victory, but would be glad to see the trade war come to an end.

The happy ending has to come soon. The longer Trump waits, the more harm he will do to the economy. At some point, the losses will be hard to reverse.

If Trump continues the trade war, Americans will suffer. He keeps suggesting that other countries pay his tariffs. In reality, American importers pay them and pass the cost to American consumers. The result of a prolonged trade war will be inflation. Even worse, economists are predicting that it will lead to a recession.

During bad economic times, the party in power always loses ground. If the 2016 congressional elections occur during a recession, Trump's Republican Party will surely lose its narrow majority in the House of Representatives, and might lose control of the Senate. Democrats will use their newfound power to thwart Trump's policies and investigate his administration. His presidency will end in failure and humiliation.

If Trump is as smart as he claims to be, he will choose the happy ending. But to quote one of his favorite phrases, we'll see what happens.

Trade War Casualties

 

.@The_Budget_Lab has already put out revenue, distributional, inflation, and GDP estimates of the tariffs from yesterday.

-$3,800 hit to average income and $1,700 hit to low-income families when combined with other 2025 tariffs.

-2.3% increase in prices

-0.6% smaller economy pic.twitter.com/Jx3S0lKQL1

— Brendan Duke (@Brendan_Duke) April 3, 2025

Smoot-Hawley Redux

Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade.

Jason Douglas and Tom Fairless at WSJ:

In the U.S., more than 90% of 5,200 product categories are subject to harmful import restrictions, up from half just before Trump’s first term in office, Global Trade Alert data show. According to the Tax Foundation, a think tank that scrutinizes tax policy, the average tariff rate facing goods imported into the U.S. is now back to where it was in 1946, at 8.4%, compared with 1.5% when Trump first took office in 2016.

If Trump follows through on all his remaining tariff threats, tariffs on U.S. imports could hit 18% on average, Fitch Ratings estimates—the highest level in 90 years.

From the Tax Foundation: 

Presidential Tariff Power

 Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, P.A:

A new report from the Cato Institute argues that several laws authorize the president to impose tariffs on a wide range of imported goods without substantial procedural or institutional safeguards. 

...

The report explains that several laws provide the president with “vast and discretionary authority to unilaterally impose sweeping trade restrictions.” Some of these are familiar to the trade community because of their recent use. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 allows the president to restrict imports determined by the Bureau of Industry to represent a threat to national security, though the only time this law has been used to impose tariffs is when Trump targeted steel and aluminum imports in 2017. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the imposition of tariffs or other trade restrictions on a wide set of products imported from a targeted country or countries to address harmful foreign economic policies. This law was heavily used in the 1980s but was largely dormant after that until Trump used it to levy tariffs on imports from China.

Other laws include tariff authorities as well, even though none of them has ever been used in this manner. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 grants the president wide discretionary authority to address threats to national security, foreign policy, or the domestic economy from a source outside the U.S. Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act authorizes new or additional tariffs of up to 50 percent on imports from countries that have discriminated against U.S. commerce, and if the discrimination continues the president may block such imports entirely or expand the trade restrictions to third-party countries that benefit from the discriminatory conduct. Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act could be used to unilaterally implement a 15 percent global tariff for 150 days to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits.

Protectionism Is Bad

Michael Strain at the  Aspen Economic Strategy Institute:

•  The 2018–2019 Tariffs Likely Reduced Manufacturing Employment. Manufacturing employment has been on a downward trajectory since the end of World War II, with no significant changes observed following China’s entry into the WTO or the adoption of protectionist policies. Researchers looking at the effects of Trump’s 2018 tariffs have found that the protection from import competition those tariffs provided was outweighed by two effects: the increased price of intermediate goods and the retaliatory tariffs that other countries imposed on US goods. They found that industries more exposed to tariff increases experienced greater declines in employment. Beyond the manufacturing sector, counties with higher exposure to tariffs experienced higher unemployment rates. 
• Post 2017 Protectionism Did Not Reduce the US Trade Deficit. Although reducing the trade deficit was a primary goal of the Trump administration, protectionist measures did not accomplish this goal. The current account deficit, which measures the balance on trade in goods and in services, along with income flows between domestic and foreign residents, rose from $85.5 billion when President Trump took office to $180 billion at the end of his term. 
• Post-2017 Protectionism Did Not Reduce America’s Reliance on China. The extensive tariff regime established in 2017 did reduce the bilateral trade deficit in goods with China by 17.9 percent between 2017 and 2020. However, this deficit fell because Chinese manufacturers rerouted goods through other nations, such as Mexico and Vietnam, to evade US tariffs. Indeed, even as the bilateral trade deficit fell between 2017 and 2020, China’s “value added” to US domestic final demand (the amount Chinese firms contribute to goods purchased by US households, businesses, or governments) rose. In this way, protectionist policies did not reduce the economic linkages between China and the US.

Tariffs Are Bad

 Phillip W. Magness at Cato:

• James Madison viewed tariffs as necessary to raise revenue but was caught off-guard by early attempts to enact tariffs for industry protection.
• Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay supported the use of tariffs to stimulate infant industries. However, there’s little evidence the American System of tariffs and industrial subsidies was responsible for American economic growth in the 19th century.
• Contrary to the “national conservative” narrative, many of the leading figures of the American Founding opposed the protectionist arguments of Hamilton and Clay.
• From 1789 to 1934, tariff-seeking industries were notorious for diverting resources into rent-seeking, or the lobbying of Congress for preferential rates with bribes and backroom deals.
• Corruption associated with protectionist tariff policy of the late 19th century directly led to adoption of the 16th Amendment and the federal income tax as an alternative revenue system.
• Modern American trade policy was restructured in 1934 to bypass the disastrous Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which exacerbated the Great Depression and illustrated the tendency of protectionist tariffs to serve corrupt interest groups.

"Buy American" -- A Bad Idea

 George F. Will at WP:

“Buy American,” like protectionism generally, can protect some blue-collar jobs — but at a steep price: A Peterson Institute for International Economics study concludes that it costs taxpayers $250,000 annually for each job saved in a protected industry. And lots of white-collar jobs are created for lawyers seeking waivers from the rules. And for accountants tabulating U.S. content in this and that, when, say, an auto component might cross international borders (U.S., Canadian, Mexican) five times before it is ready for installation in a vehicle.

In the usual braying-and-pouting choreography of the State of the Union evening, members of the president’s party leap ecstatically when he praises himself, and members of the other party respond sullenly, by not responding. This year, however, something unusual happened when President Biden vowed to “require all construction materials used in federal infrastructure projects to be made in America.” A bipartisan ovation greeted his promise to reduce the purchasing power of tax dollars spent on infrastructure projects by raising the cost of materials.

Tariffs and Regs Helped Create the Baby Formula Shortage

 WSJ Editorial:

Last year Abbott accounted for 42% of the U.S. formula market, about 95% of which is produced domestically. There are only four major manufacturers of formula in the U.S. today: Mead Johnson, Abbott, Nestle, and Perrigo. One reason the market is so concentrated is tariffs up to 17.5% on imports, which protect domestic producers from foreign competition. Non-trade barriers such as FDA labeling and ingredient requirements also limit imports even during shortages.

Canada’s strong dairy industry has attracted investment in formula production. But the Trump Administration sought to protect domestic producers by imposing quotas and tariffs on Canadian imports in the USMCA trade deal. The FDA can inspect foreign plants so the U.S. import restrictions aren’t essential for product safety. They merely raise prices for consumers and limit choice.

Further limiting competition is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) for low-income mothers. By the Department of Agriculture’s estimate, WIC accounted for between 57% and 68% of all infant formula sold in the U.S. Under the welfare program, each state awards an exclusive formula contract to a manufacturer.

Companies compete for the contracts by offering states huge rebates on the formula women can buy. The rebates equal about 85% of the wholesale cost, according to a 2011 USDA study. Women can only use WIC vouchers to purchase formula from the winning manufacturer. These rebates reduce state spending, but there’s no such thing as free baby formula.

Why would manufacturers give states an enormous discount? Because the contracts effectively give them a state monopoly. Stores give WIC brands more shelf space. Physicians may also be more likely to recommend WIC brands. After 30 states switched their WIC contracts between 2005 and 2008, the new provider’s market share increased on average by 84 percentage points.

Paleoconservatives

Matthew Continetti at Commentary:

However strong the conservative consensus of the mid-1990s may have appeared at the dawn of the Republican Revolution, it soon came under sustained criticism from intellectuals excluded from Kristol’s “more comprehensive conservatism.”

The most coherent challenge came from the so-called paleoconservatives. Their main cause was the dramatic reduction of immigration. Their champion was the syndicated columnist, author, former White House official, and cable-television personality Patrick J. Buchanan. He had built his reputation as a smart, plainspoken pundit before making a transition into electoral politics. After a surprise showing as a protest presidential candidate in New Hampshire in 1992, Buchanan galvanized that year’s Republican National Convention with a speech both describing and advocating a “culture war” in the United States.

Buchanan launched his second run for the presidency on March 20, 1995. In his announcement, he singled out Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, the GOP front-runner, for supporting American membership in the World Trade Organization. Buchanan pledged to withdraw from the WTO and the newly minted North American Free Trade Agreement. He said he would remove U.S. troops participating in UN peacekeeping missions, build a wall along the southern border, and bar immigration for at least five years. “When I raise my hand to take the oath of office,” he said, “this whole New World Order is coming crashing down.”

Buchanan’s invocation of a sinister global conspiracy hinted at his populism’s dark side. He was a well-known opponent of the neoconservatives, and he laced his rhetoric with anti-Semitic tropes cleverly masked for plausible deniability precisely because he was so intelligent. He flirted with racists, anti-government extremists, and conspiracists. The chief theoretician of Buchanan’s movement, the newspaper columnist Samuel T. Francis, was fired from an editorial position at the Washington Times in 1995 after it was revealed that he had told an audience, “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”

Francis believed that conservatism was defunct. The label “conservative” was meaningless, he said, because Buckley’s movement had failed to generate support among the masses. He argued that the future of American politics hinged on “Middle American Radicals,” also known as the men and women from MARs. These were non-college-educated blue-collar workers disaffected from the electoral process and contemptuous of political, business, social, and cultural elites. They decided elections because they had no allegiance to either party.

According to Francis, the MARs seesawed between the economic nationalism of the left and the cultural nationalism of the right. Buchanan was the first Republican of the post–Cold War era to understand the importance of MARs. He campaigned for their votes by combining economic and cultural nationalism into one angry package. He and Francis introduced many of the terms and concepts that would come to dominate political discourse on the right—phrases like “the ruling class” and “globalism” and slogans like “America First.”

De Facto Chinese Censorship of US Films

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian at Axios:

China's box office is projected to soon surpass the U.S. as the largest film market in the world.

• "Access to that market can make or break the success of a major Hollywood film," said James Tager, the author of a recent PEN America report about how the Chinese government censors the U.S. film industry, and how the industry responds by self-censoring.
• But the Chinese government tightly controls access to the market, excluding films that include content it dislikes, and blacklisting individual actors or film studios that have previously participated in activities the Chinese Communist Party doesn't like.

...

Movies also have an almost unmatched ability to instill widespread public sympathy for vulnerable groups and to prolong remembrance of crimes against humanity, such as the Rwandan genocide, depicted in "Hotel Rwanda."

• But the last time a major Hollywood studio made a movie that presented a vulnerable group as the victim of Chinese government aggression was in 1997 with "Seven Years in Tibet" starring Brad Pitt.
• The Chinese government responded by slapping a five-year ban on Columbia TriStar, the production company that made the film — a response that cast a chill over the U.S. movie industry.

The result: Film studios now go out of their way to ensure their movies avoid topics or depictions of China that might fall foul of China's censors.

• "The most significant effect of this censorship and self-censorship is completely invisible, because it involves the movies that are never made," said Tager. "What major Hollywood studio would make a movie about what is happening in Xinjiang, with the internment of over a million Muslims?"
• “For 10 years, you haven’t seen any bad Chinese guys,” said Schuyler Moore, a partner at Greenberg Glusker. “If I saw a script with an anti-Chinese theme, I would advise my client that that film would never be released in China.”

Americans Pay American Tariffs

Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, David E. Weinstein at NBER:

Using data from 2018, a number of studies have found that recent U.S tariffs have been passed on entirely to U.S. importers and consumers. These results are surprising given that trade theory has long stressed that tariffs applied by a large country should drive down foreign prices. Using another year of data including significant escalations in the trade war, we find that U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers. We show that the response of import values to the tariffs increases in absolute magnitude over time, consistent with the idea that it takes time for firms to reorganize supply chains. We find heterogeneity in the responses of some sectors, such as steel, where tariffs have caused foreign exporters to drop their prices substantially, enabling them to export relatively more than in sectors where tariff passthrough was complete.

Tariffs Don't Work

Flaaen, Aaron, and Justin Pierce (2019). “Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-086. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,
https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2019.086  The abstract:

Since the beginning of 2018, the United States has undertaken unprecedented tariff increases, with one goal of these actions being to boost the manufacturing sector. In
this paper, we estimate the effect of the tariffs—including retaliatory tariffs by U.S. trading partners—on manufacturing employment, output, and producer prices. A key
feature of our analysis is accounting for the multiple ways that tariffs might affect the
manufacturing sector, including providing protection for domestic industries, raising
costs for imported inputs, and harming competitiveness in overseas markets due to
retaliatory tariffs. We find that U.S. manufacturing industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment as a positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs. Higher tariffs are also associated with relative increases in producer prices via rising input costs.

International Emergency Economic Powers Act

From CRS:

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) provides the President broad authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency. IEEPA, like the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) from which it branched, sits at the center of the modern U.S. sanctions regime. Changes in the use of IEEPA powers since the act’s enactment in 1977 have caused some to question whether the statute’s oversight provisions are robust enough given the sweeping economic powers it confers upon the President upon declaration of a state of emergency.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Congress delegated increasing amounts of emergency power to the President by statute. The Trading with the Enemy Act was one such statute. Congress passed TWEA in 1917 to regulate international transactions with enemy powers following the U.S. entry into the First World War. Congress expanded the act during the 1930s to allow the President to declare a national emergency in times of peace and assume sweeping powers over both domestic and international transactions. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, TWEA became a critically important means to impose sanctions as part of U.S. Cold War strategy. Presidents used TWEA to block international financial transactions, seize U.S.-based assets held by foreign nationals, restrict exports, modify regulations to deter the hoarding of gold, limit foreign direct investment in U.S. companies, and impose tariffs on all imports into the United States.

Following committee investigations that discovered that the United States had been in a state of emergency for more than 40 years, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act (NEA) in 1976 and IEEPA in 1977. The pair of statutes placed new limits on presidential emergency powers. Both included reporting requirements to increase transparency and track costs, and the NEA required the President to annually assess and extend, if appropriate, the emergency. However, some experts argue that the renewal process has become pro forma. The NEA also afforded Congress the means to terminate a national emergency by adopting a concurrent resolution in each chamber. A decision by the Supreme Court, in a landmark immigration case, however, found the use of concurrent resolutions to terminate an executive action unconstitutional. Congress amended the statute to require a joint resolution, significantly increasing the difficulty of terminating an emergency.

Like TWEA, IEEPA has become an important means to impose economic-based sanctions since its enactment; like TWEA, Presidents have frequently used IEEPA to restrict a variety of international transactions; and like TWEA, the subjects of the
restrictions, the frequency of use, and the duration of emergencies have expanded over time. Initially, Presidents targeted foreign states or their governments. Over the years, however, presidential administrations have increasingly used IEEPA to target individuals, groups, and non-state actors such as terrorists and persons who engage in malicious cyber-enabled activities.

As of March 1, 2019, Presidents had declared 54 national emergencies invoking IEEPA, 29 of which are still ongoing. Typically, national emergencies invoking IEEPA last nearly a decade, although some have lasted significantly longer--the first state of emergency declared under the NEA and IEEPA, which was declared in response to the taking of U.S. embassy staff as hostages by Iran in 1979, may soon enter its fifth decade.

IEEPA grants sweeping powers to the President to control economic transactions. Despite these broad powers, Congress has never attempted to terminate a national emergency invoking IEEPA. Instead, Congress has directed the President on
numerous occasions to use IEEPA authorities to impose sanctions. Congress may want to consider whether IEEPA appropriately balances the need for swift action in a time of crisis with Congress’ duty to oversee executive action. Congress may also want to consider IEEPA’s role in implementing its influence in U.S. foreign policy and national security decisionmaking.

Not the Most Competitive Economy

The impact of the 2017 tax cut is fading while the impact of the trade wars is showing.  Shirley Tay at CNBC:

For the first time in nine years, Singapore surpassed the United States and Hong Kong to clinch the title of the world’s most competitive economy.

y, according to annual rankings compiled by Switzerland-based business school IMD.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Wednesday, Arturo Bris — director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center — said the Southeast Asian country had been following a simple “recipe for competitiveness.”

Singapore’s immigration laws, advanced technological infrastructure, availability of skilled labor and efficient ways to set up new businesses helped it advance to the top, IMD’s 2019 World Competitiveness Rankings found.

The city-state is “a poster-child for the world economy today, and not surprisingly it made it to the top position this year,” Bris said.

IMD measures a country’s competitiveness using four indicators: economic performance, infrastructure, government efficiency and business efficiency.

Here are the top 10 economies by competitiveness, according to IMD:

• Singapore
• Hong Kong SAR
• USA
• Switzerland
• UAE
• Netherlands
• Ireland
• Denmark
• Sweden
• Qatar