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The Debt Train Has No Brakes: Lyn Alden Makes the Case for BTC at Bitcoin 2025
“Nothing stops this train,” Lyn Alden initially stated at Bitcoin 2025, walking the audience through a data-rich presentation that made one thing clear: the U.S. fiscal system is out of control—and Bitcoin is more necessary than ever. …
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Foreign Affairs
The U.S. president should keep walking a middle path between escalation and giving up.
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Foreign Affairs
Andrew Day, Sumantra Maitra, and Joseph Addington discuss this week’s events.
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In a speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue Saturday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned that “the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.”
China is actively training to retake Taiwan, he said, noting that an invasion would “result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world.”
To ensure peace in the Indo-Pacific, Hegseth said that the U.S. would strengthen its forces in the region, and called on American allies there to increase defense spending to 5 percent of their GDP. He also said that European countries should focus their defense build-ups on protecting Europe, rather than attempting to contribute to the defense of the Pacific.
The defense secretary also criticized Chinese economic diplomacy and cautioned countries against the temptation of seeking investment or additional trade from the country. “Economic dependence on China only deepens their malign influence,” he said.
Hegseth specifically called out Chinese attempts to increase its influence in Latin America, including over the Panama Canal, a vital region for American national security.
The post Hegseth Warns of Chinese Threats in Asia appeared first on The American Conservative.
Now, the administration should heed Henry Clay’s warning on ‘specific’ tariffs.
Recently, and almost entirely unnoticed by the mainstream media, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) reopened a door that has been bolted shut since 1930. For the first time in nearly a century, U.S. producers were being asked simple, America First questions: What can we make more of here, in our own country? Which products need tariff protection?
Under an interim final rule that took effect April 30, manufacturers who use steel and aluminum to make things in America now have three, two-week windows every year—in May, September, and January—to request that products they make be added to the coverage of the existing steel and aluminum tariff actions.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is calling this the “Inclusion” process, and with it he is reviving straightforward and patriotic tariff dialogue for the first time in 95 years.
This new inclusion process is not merely a bureaucratic tweak. It signals a conscious return to the system the Founders created under the Tariff Act of 1789, the first major bill passed by Congress. The first sentence of that Act read:
Whereas it is necessary for the support of government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and protection of manufacturers, that duties be laid on goods, wares and merchandise imported…
From that Tariff Act of 1789 to the last such act, the Tariff Act of 1930, the process was the same: producers testified about the competitive landscape of their industry, lawmakers weighed national interests against potential consumer costs, and rates were set product by product with “catch-all” rates for products not listed.
That practical give-and-take, with an unabashed bias to protecting and preserving the home market for domestic producers, was the key tenant of what Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln later called “the American system,” which nurtured economic growth and turned the U.S. into an industrial powerhouse that was the envy of the world by 1900.
Under this American system, it was considered good and patriotic to protect U.S. producers. Politicians didn’t use language like “level the playing field” or talk about how “American workers can compete with anyone.” No, putting American workers in direct competition with lower-paid overseas workers was considered self-evidently ridiculous. William McKinley put it simply: “Open competition between high-paid American labor and poorly paid European labor will either drive out of existence American industry or lower American wages.”
Progressives in the early 20th century, however, began to take aim at protective tariffs as part of their animus towards the giant monopolies and trusts of the era.
President Woodrow Wilson, addressing a joint session of Congress in April 1913, argued that American businesses—and workers—should, actually, be in direct price competition with everyone, everywhere on Earth:
Aside from the duties laid upon articles which we do not, and probably cannot, produce, therefore, and the duties laid upon luxuries and merely for the sake of the revenues they yield, the object of the tariff duties henceforth laid must be effective competition, the whetting of American wits by contest with the wits of the rest of the world.
Wilson wasn’t persuaded by arguments, for example, from the Rice Association of America, that laborers on rice fields in America were paid $1.50 per day, while in British India and Burma “there is no wage paid.” The Rice Association pleaded:
to ask the American agriculturist, and from him on through the different variations of labor who handle rice, to ask them to put their industry on a basis where they will have to compete with the rice of the Asiatic countries is to invite and bring about annihilation of the industry.
Unfortunately, various political interests combined to eliminate protections, and Wilson’s view about unlimited price competition for businesses and laborers would become the law of the land once Democrats swept into power in 1932.
In 1934, Congress outsourced most tariff decisions to the State Department, and later, in 1947, to Geneva, placing American law under the shackles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Under GATT rules, domestic producers hoping for tariff relief were left to contort themselves into very tight trade-law pigeonholes—antidumping, countervailing-duty, and safeguards—that required expensive lawyers and years of litigation while only offering temporary, ineffective relief.
Labor unions never had a chance. Pointing out that workers overseas couldn’t organize and were paid a fraction of American wages got you nowhere in the new, Geneva-headquartered “multilateral trade system.”
Lutnick’s Inclusion Rounds, however, have now delivered a mortal wound to Geneva’s machinations.
With the new system, a U.S. manufacturer, instead of needing to prove that a foreign rival sells “below cost,” or being forced to conjure up precise metrics by which a foreign subsidy offsets a “fair” price, can make a case for protection entirely familiar to producers from before 1934: one centered on human and industrial development, wages and employment, and national self-reliance here at home.
Contrast that with antidumping cases, which typically cost a minimum of $1 million to initiate and $5 million to arrive at an uncertain ruling, with reams of contradictory “evidence” thrust before a panel. The Trump administration’s new Inclusion process will be a boon to small businesses that could never afford expensive, uncertain litigation.
Even more important, the process restores dialogue between the U.S. government and American businesses. The Founders expected tariff rates to be set by elected officials and thus open to the input of the American people. And while the Constitution gives the ultimate power to set tariffs to Congress, the legislative branch relied on the executive to help set rates.
By inviting petitions thrice yearly, BIS re-institutionalizes this forgotten American tradition.
None of this is to say the new version of this process is perfect. The interim rule dictates that every successful petition inherits the same duty imposed on raw steel and aluminum. This rate had been 25 percent, but that proved too low to provide protection to domestic steel and aluminum mills, so on Friday, President Donald Trump announced that the steel and aluminum tariffs would double to 50 percent.
This increase is a welcome development. But we can continue to improve. One key problem: For goods further downstream from core steel and aluminum products, the 50 percent levy applies only to the steel and aluminum content in the imported product.
How is that content supposed to be calculated? Well, that’s on the official FAQ. The answer: “The value of the steel/aluminum content should be determined in accordance with the principles of the [World Trade Organization’s] Customs Valuation Agreement…”
In practice, that effectively means the importer is supposed to ask its overseas vendor what they recall paying for the steel and aluminum. The 50 percent applies to that alleged price.
It’s an invitation to fraud, and should be discarded as soon as possible..
Ad valorem tariffs are those expressed as a percentage—and are assessed against a price the importer claims they paid abroad. The proof? An overseas invoice. A PDF.
As far back as 1842, the father of the American trade system, Henry Clay himself, warned against using ad valorem tariffs even for revenue, to say nothing of their lack of any protective effect:
It is evident that on the ad valorem principle, it is the foreigner who virtually fixes the actual amount of the duty paid. It is the foreigner who, by fixing that value, virtually legislates for us—and that in a case where his interest is directly opposed to that of our revenue. I say, therefore, that independently of all considerations of protection, independently of all ends or motives but the prevention of those infamous frauds which have been the disgrace of our customhouse—frauds in which the foreigner, with his double and triple and quadruple invoices, ready to be produced as circumstances may require, fixes the value of the merchandise taxed—every consideration of national dignity, justice, and independence, demands the substitution of home valuation in the place of foreign.
The Commerce Department is listening to Clay’s wisdom. The Inclusion Process continues to be refined, and Lutnick has encouraged public comments. For the next Inclusion Round, BIS should ask domestic producers for tariff rates that will ensure their domestic productive capacity is utilized. Doing so is good, patriotic, and compatible with the American tradition. Protect the home market.
Now, for high-value, capital-intensive goods, produced by a limited number of global equipment makers—like heavy trucks—an ad valorem tariff may well be sufficient.
But for most products, especially in industries filled with fly-by-night overseas vendors and imports, an ad valorem tariff assessed on whatever PDF the importer uploads will not limit imports and thus fail to advance BIS’ goal in the underlying tariff action. A 50 percent ad valorem tariff is much better, but as we saw with so many Chinese imports breezing through 125 percent, invoice fraud is child’s play. This is why Clay said that even for revenue purposes, ad valorem tariffs were beneath America’s dignity.
And while fixing the “only applies to content” defect is critical, Commerce should avoid assuming a 50 percent ad valorem will be sufficient for all steel and aluminum products, even if applied to the whole alleged value. America’s original tariff statutes were anything but flat. The Tariff Act of 1789 listed specific tariff rates on dozens and dozens of products: cheese, 4 cents per pound; boots, fifty cents per pair; coffee, two and a half cents per pound. Ad valorem tariffs were deployed for products not individually listed.
“Specific tariffs” are those that are assessed on a unit of volume, like the 1789 Act’s rates for cheese, boots, and coffee above. With specific tariffs, customs fraud is difficult, because the customs officer need only count or weigh the merchandise in front of him to assess the tariff.
We still have plenty of specific tariffs in use today, mostly on agricultural products, although because neither Congress nor any president has updated them for inflation since 1930, they’re all anachronistic.
“Compound tariffs” are those that combine both a specific-tariff element as well as an ad valorem. Flatware (cutlery) has had a compound tariff that has not been adjusted for inflation since 1930. In the current Inclusion Round, the last American producer of stainless-steel flatware—Sherrill Manufacturing—has petitioned to be added to steel’s tariff action. Sherill states that a compound tariff of 50 cents per-piece plus 25 percent is necessary for the steel tariff program’s goals.
Because the inclusion mechanism sits within Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, future rounds can expand beyond steel and aluminum. The administration has already initiated Section 232 tariff actions for wood products, copper alloys, critical minerals, semiconductors, and drugs, which are all expected to have a similar Inclusion process. Each sector will now have a predictable forum, several times a year, to argue its case—without hiring a stable of trade lawyers schooled in Geneva.
The Trump administration, and Commerce’s BIS in particular, should be celebrated for this development so early in the term. It’s no small feat. For decades, Washington has dithered between neglect and panic—ignoring industrial decline until the last domestic producer left to complain is gone.
This September, when the next Inclusion Round begins, BIS should solicit comments and requests for specific tariff rates for particular products sufficient to fill domestic producers’ order books. President Trump can act on those recommendations via presidential proclamations. If he does, the Trump administration will have fully restored a vital American tradition that will cement the dawn of America’s golden age.
The post Trump Is Reviving a Great American Tariff Tradition appeared first on The American Conservative.
The high-profile killings heap fuel on the fire of discontent with the country’s crime situation.
On Tuesday, May 20, Ximena Guzmán parked her car at the same spot in Mexico City she did every other day, waiting to pick up her coworker José Muñoz. As usual, they were to drive to the capital, where they would begin their workday in the office of Mexico City’s mayor, Clara Brugada. Tragically, no such thing would occur that day, or any day thereafter. As Muñoz walked out and got inside the waiting car, a man waiting close by on the busy street pulled out a handgun and fired 12 shots at close range into the car, killing both occupants. The murderer, his job done, fled through the streets and successfully escaped the city with the help of at least three accomplices.
The brutal double murder has left Mexico City in a state of shock. The capital, the most populous city in the country and the seat of the Mexican federal government, has come to be seen as a safe haven from the crime and disorder of the cartel-controlled countryside. The killing, which bears the hallmarks of a professional assassination of the type frequently employed by organized criminal enterprises elsewhere in Mexico, has upended that sense of normality—doubly so as the government has struggled to find any significant information on the culprits and the motives behind the killings.
Both victims were important members of Brugada’s personal team, Guzmán working as the mayor’s secretary and Muñoz as her political advisor, but neither had a significant public presence. Working in an essentially private capacity, there was little reason anyone would have picked up a grudge against them. Instead, the murders seem aimed at the mayor herself, although their intentions and identity remain a mystery.
Whatever the purpose behind the attack, its execution was consummately well-planned. The conspirators staked out Guzmán and Muñoz for at least a week beforehand, familiarizing themselves with their schedule and route to work. When the killer fled, he ran into the area of the city with the fewest security cameras, where he picked up an electric scooter. He met up with three of his accomplices in a vehicle, which they ditched after driving for some distance for another, different vehicle they had placed in preparation for the escape.
The evidence left behind for the government to investigate is minimal. The handgun and bullets are unremarkable, the security cameras don’t provide sufficient detail to identify the suspects, and the cars were stolen and their plates changed to make identification difficult. All the conspirators wore gloves and left no fingerprints. The principal hope for investigators was finding DNA evidence in the vehicles and changes of clothing left behind, but that hope seems to have been extinguished under suspicious circumstances: Two police commanders in charge of evidence have been suspended, and the Secretariat for State Security has opened an internal investigation into the matter, although prosecutors deny that evidence has been tampered with or adulterated. The possibility of various conspiracies involving cartels or other bodies of organized crime—never a stretch of the imagination in Mexico—have thrown the public into a frenzy of speculation.
The entire episode has heaped more fuel on the fire of discontent with the security situation in Mexico. The country is currently suffering from a wave of violent crime that began in 2015 but continued under the previous president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Obrador promoted a “hugs, not bullets” strategy for dealing with crime that attempted to deal with the issue by reducing youth unemployment and increasing welfare provisions for vulnerable populations. The approach was not very successful in achieving reductions in crime: Murders dropped slightly during López Obrador’s presidency, but the number of missing persons increased dramatically—over 10,000 people were reported missing in 2024.
The current Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s tenure has been plagued by high-profile cartel murders, such as the grisly assassination of the newly inaugurated mayor of Chilpancingo, whose head was left sitting on top of his car as a warning to those who seek to combat cartel crime. The murder of politicians is not uncommon in Mexico, but to have it happen in the capital, the seat of federal power, is unusual and strikes a harsh blow against the Mexican government’s prestige.
Sheinbaum has made security one of the themes of her presidency. She has quietly dropped the “hugs, not bullets” rhetoric of her predecessor, and instead emphasized a strategy based on strengthening the Mexican intelligence services and the investigative capabilities of the government’s crime-fighting forces, which is an important step in the right direction. But that didn’t stop her from implementing sharp cuts in the 2025 federal budget for security services, stripping 36 percent of the funds for security and civil protection to fund her promised project of building a million additional houses in the country by 2030.
That was a bet that the Mexican security services could be significantly streamlined and, with a new strategic approach to crime-fighting, obtain better results for less money. The results so far have shown some promise: April 2025 was the month with the lowest murder rate since 2016. But the continued wave of missing persons and ever-more public political assassinations demonstrate that Mexico still has a long way to go.
The post Murders of Mexico City Officials Haunt Government appeared first on The American Conservative.
In America today, dressing well is rare—and increasingly, hard to do.
When I was growing up, I was often referred to as a nerd or bookworm, but the title I treasured above all else was perhaps the unlikeliest: clothes horse.
Under the influence of my father—who was born, raised, and educated in Ohio, but came of age when Ivy League-style dress was nearly all-pervasive—I gained an early appreciation for dressing well. The fundamentals, as taught to me by my dad, included 3-button sack sport coats, Shetland sweaters, and slacks with neither pleats nor a break.
I could recite my secondhand sartorial preferences with such precocious authority that I managed to impress, or at least leave an impression upon, the tailor at a Jos. A. Bank store in downtown New Orleans, where my father ran a company and where I spent much of my youth. On one Saturday afternoon when my father was buying a suit—and I was undoubtedly reeling off the dos and don’ts of menswear—the tailor told me: “You’re a clothes horse like your father.”
I had never heard the term before, but I carried it with me throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. Apparently wanting to live up to the title, I never went through anything that resembled a period of slovenly dress. Now, in my very early 40s, I take it as a point of pride to dress as well as I can.
Yet being a clothes horse ain’t as easy as it used to be.
Last month, I ordered a seersucker sport coat from Brooks Brothers, whose remaining non-outlet location in the bustling metropolis of Greater Columbus closed over a year ago. (Devoted readers of this column will recall an earlier installment bemoaning that sad occasion.) Thus, my purchase was made over the internet, but, having experienced the highs and the lows of Brooks Brothers over the last four decades, I felt confident that I knew what I was getting. By my lights, it was a low-risk purchase, but the story that follows makes a mockery of my confidence.
When the sport coat arrived, I was delighted with the sack cut and even more delighted with the fit, which did not appear to require any significant alterations—not even to the length of the sleeves. Alas, I was too delighted. In my enthusiasm for my purchase, I neglected to note a near-fatal flaw in this particular garment’s construction: two buttons are meant to adorn both coat sleeves, but on the coat I received, one of the sleeves was missing buttons—any buttons.
Was this a newfangled style innovation from Brooks Brothers? If so, count me out.
The reality was far more pedestrian: After I phoned the nearest Brooks Brothers—in Pittsburgh, of all places—I learned that each sleeve did indeed call for two buttons. What I had on my hands was some sort of factory flub. Naturally, the “extra” buttons that are slipped into the inside pocket of every Brooks Brothers sport coat or blazer only contained a single—as in one—sleeve button. In all of my years of purchasing clothes from Brooks Brothers, I have bought my share of questionable ties and socks that too easily grew threadbare, but I had never encountered a snafu at once so simple and detrimental.
I could have returned and reordered the coat, but I decided I might be better off improvising a solution: On the advice of the gentleman I spoke to in Pittsburgh, I decided to call Brooks Brothers stores on the East Coast in search of a pair of spare buttons. I was prepared to spend the afternoon working my way up and down the Eastern Seaboard, but to my happy astonishment, I soon found myself chatting with the helpful manager of a store who understood my predicament. Upon identifying the exact style of my sport coat, and consulting with the on-site tailor, she was able to produce the needed buttons—which arrived, via UPS, the following week.
What is the moral of this story? To start with, a customer with a genuine dilemma—such as a button-less sleeve on an otherwise perfect piece of apparel—can still find good customer service, even if it requires long-distance calling. Most people want to help. But I think the overriding lesson is that clothes horses like me can no longer take their habit for granted. To be well-dressed in a world that does not prioritize being even presentably-dressed requires an ever-increasing amount of effort.
To that end, I am no longer in possession of those sought-after buttons. They, along with the seersucker sport coat on which they belong, are now with a local tailor who is tasked with sewing them on. All those years ago when my father taught me to appreciate the fundamentals of Ivy-style attire, he had no idea just how difficult it would be.
The post The Travails of a Modern Clothes-Horse appeared first on The American Conservative.
Former President Joe Biden joked that he could “beat the hell out of” authors of a book detailing his mental decline during the 2024 race for president.
Investor Kevin O’Leary seemingly bashed the Trump administration’s recent crackdown on Harvard’s international student population, calling the actions “stupid” during a Friday Fox News interview. “Harvard’s taken a lot of heat for other stuff, but they shouldn’t be taking heat for curating amazing cohorts,” the “Shark Tank” star said while appearing on “Outnumbered.” “These kids…
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Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday after a wave of Kremlin attacks last weekend. The three leaders discussed a legislative initiative to strengthen U.S. sanctions against Russia and ongoing peace negotiations according to Zelensky’s office. “Ukraine’s fight is our fight…
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beacon} Welcome to The Hill’s Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense & National Security Defense & National Security The Big Story State Department scraps office dedicated to relocating Afghan allies A proposed reorganization of the State Department would cut an office dedicated to helping Afghan allies escape the country…
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The Trump administration on Friday unveiled more details of the president’s vision for how to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, expanding on its request earlier this month for steep spending cuts. The lengthy budget appendix, which stretches to more than 1,200 pages, comes as Republicans in both chambers have pressed the administration for…
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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that 14 people have been arrested for allegedly stealing over $25 million in COVID-19 relief funds and federal small business loans.