We know that people, particularly People In Certain Demographics ™, are waiting until later and later in life to have their first children. What effects do we expect to see, as a result of that change?

There are some obvious ones. We expect there to be fewer kids overall, if only because there’s less time to create them. We expect the average parent to be richer and more-stably-situated, on account of being older. We expect the average parent to have less energy, and to be in poorer health, on account of being older.

What else? What psychological and sociocultural effects do we expect?

I posit: we expect the average parent to have an identity and a self-conception that is less heavily defined by Being a Parent, and more heavily anchored to values and personality traits that existed beforehand. We expect the average parent to be more like a child, and also more like a childfree twentysomething, than was previously the case.

The theory, of course, is that identity starts out very malleable and gets less so with age. Kids and young adults often reshape their values and their personalities with terrifying quickness (usually in the direction of “whatever is most adaptive and convenient in the current situation”). As we get older, we become more rooted in our existing selves, and less wildly flexible in that way. Parenting is the sort of all-encompassing lifestyle change that pushes you towards all-encompassing internal change; a thirty-five-year-old will resist that pressure much more than a twenty-year-old will.

If this is true, we’d expect to see alterations in the average parenting style. We’d expect the average parent to be less hierarchical and authoritarian, more communicative, more anxious and hesitant, more inclined to care about children’s short-term well-being, more emotionally engaged, more emotionally demanding, etc. Which is all to say - more inclined to look at the parent/child relationship from the child’s point of view, and/or to treat it as just another Relationship People Can Have, as opposed to identifying completely with the parental role.

Which is what we do see, pretty clearly, and of course there are a thousand different stories you can tell to explain it, but - here’s one more.

(Note that this runs directly counter to another intuitively-plausible possibility: that because young parents are closer to their kids in age, and also closer chronologically to their own memories of childhood, they’re therefore more likely to feel empathic identification with their children. I think this isn’t what we see, though, and also the story kind of falls apart if you think about it, in the same way that “neighboring tribes with similar cultures should be close allies” falls apart.)

I wish I had some actual quantitative data on this. Actual social scientists are better-equipped to address this kind of question than armchair speculators are.

1. In the week before the government shutdown, I spoke to many Democrats in Congress who endorsed the shutdown strategy but didn’t actually believe it would work. They anticipated that Democrats would face backlash from the public, leading to immediate pressure to surrender, and they mostly hoped that they would not personally need to issue the surrender votes and tempt backlash from their own base. Instead it worked — the public mostly blamed Trump.

2. That’s because Republicans have the White House and both houses of Congress, Trump seems like a reckless guy, and he’s obviously not someone who feels tightly constrained by laws or norms. He literally demolished the East Wing of the White House because he felt like it. People hold him responsible for outcomes.

3. With the recent SNAP fracas, he in fact leaned in to being responsible for outcomes. The decision to interpret the shutdown as requiring him to block nutrition benefits was made by him alone, and he went to court to enforce it.

4. What’s missing from the online anger at Democrats is that a lot of the people I’ve spoken to, both in Congress and in the policy community, were genuinely very stressed out about the harm the shutdown was doing to the country, including lost wages and disrupted air travel. Politically, this is perverse — the public blames Trump for the shutdown, so the worse conditions became in America, the better the political outcome for Democrats.

5. One reason Democrats felt guilty about this, nonetheless, is that lots of them didn’t really believe their own spin. The public blamed Trump, but they blamed themselves and felt bad.

6. Jeanne Shaheen’s group that led these talks has been widely characterized as “moderates.” But I find a style of moderation in which you vote to ban internal-combustion-engine cars and won’t support a voter ID law but then shy away from procedural hardball to be absurd. If you look at the Majority Democrats roster of Michael Bennet, Ruben Gallego, and Elissa Slotkin in the Senate (plus current Senate candidates James Talarico and Angie Craig), they are all against the deal and instead offer some gestures of heterodoxy on questions of public policy.

   Subscribe now

7. Nervous Democrats hoped that Election Day would be a turning point: either Democrats would come up short and that would be the proof they needed to cave, or Democrats would do well and Republicans would feel pressure to throw them a bone on health care.

8. Instead, Trump said the shutdown was hurting Republicans and that the solution was for Republicans to use the nuclear option and either “terminate the filibuster” (his words) or create some kind of carveout for continuing resolutions or appropriations bills.

9. This became, in the eyes of the appropriators and institutionalists of the Senate Dem caucus, the real stakes. Winning on health care was off the table and their fight had become about the future of the appropriations process. A shutdown might drag on for weeks and might pull Trump’s numbers further down, but the endgame would be a rule change and partisan appropriations bills, not a win for Democrats on health care.

10. I’ve been arguing for filibuster reform for more than twenty years now, starting with a G.O.P.-controlled Senate, so I am simply not sympathetic to the view that Democrats needed to abandon a winning political tactic in order to preserve the precious bipartisanship of the appropriations process. But that was the actual choice that induced critical senators to blink, and you shouldn’t let overheated rhetoric obscure that.

11. Don’t miss that, having saved the precious appropriations process, what’s been agreed to here is passage of a few relatively minor appropriations bills, plus a continuing resolution through the end of January. Some version of this drama may well recur in February.

12. Because this is really all on some level about the filibuster, I want to say in an earnest way that I think debate about which party is “helped” by supermajority rules is a bit childish. Both sides would get to pass some high-polling items that the opposition party objects to, and both sides would also have to admit to their base that some of the stuff they’ve been promising isn’t actually viable. I think that would be a win for the country, not a zero-sum transfer from one party to the other — politics would be a little less dysfunctional and insane.

13. Senators hate this, though, because the filibuster really does give individual members more leverage and make things less leadership driven, which helps make being a senator more fun than being a House member. Is that a good reason to blink at a critical moment in American history? I’m skeptical.

    Share

In April, President Donald Trump announced stiff tariffs on goods from nearly every country on the planet, saying they were necessary to "deal with" a "national emergency" involving an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to "the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States." According to a Supreme Court brief signed by 45 American economists, Trump's description of that huge, unilateral tax increase was fundamentally mistaken.

That assessment, which reflects what a leading textbook on international trade calls a "virtually complete consensus among economists," should be of more than passing interest to the justices as they weigh the legality of Trump's tariffs. It goes to the heart of the powers Trump is asserting under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

One question for the Supreme Court is whether IEEPA, a 1977 law that does not mention import taxes and has never before been used to impose them, gives the president any tariff authority at all. Assuming it does, another question is whether the law empowers him to completely rewrite the tariff schedule approved by Congress—a proposition that three lower courts have rejected.

The economists' brief focuses on a third issue: Does Trump's use of IEEPA meet the law's criteria for invoking it? That depends on whether he is right to portray the "large and persistent" gap between U.S. exports and imports of goods as a national emergency.

Trade deficits "have existed consistently over the past fifty years in the United States, for extended periods in the United States in the nineteenth century, and in most countries in most years in recent decades," the economists note. "They are thus not 'unusual and extraordinary,' but rather ordinary and commonplace."

The brief adds that there is nothing inherently problematic about aggregate or bilateral trade deficits, such that they would constitute a "threat" to the United States. Even the term deficit is misleading in this context, the economists note, since the situation that Trump bemoans necessarily corresponds to a "foreign investment surplus."

When a country "imports more than it exports," the brief explains, that means it "receives more foreign investment than it invests abroad." That is why "the leading explanations of the U.S. trade deficit view it as a sign of U.S. strength, not weakness."

Trump seems to view foreign investment as a good thing. Yet "absent offsetting adjustments elsewhere," the brief says, "these investments will increase the U.S. trade deficit."

In addition to worrying about the overall difference between imports and exports, Trump thinks it is inherently suspicious whenever another country runs a trade surplus with the United States. But because of variations in demand, specialization, and comparative advantage, the economists note, "bilateral trade deficits are a virtual logical certainty."

It is therefore "odd to economists, to say the least, for the United States government to attempt to rebalance trade on a country-by-country basis," the brief says. And contrary to Trump's presumption of unfairness, "foreign tariff rates on US exports do not correlate positively with the size of US trade deficits."

Nor is it reasonable to expect that Trump's tariffs will "deal with" this supposed national emergency by shrinking U.S. trade deficits. While "tariffs unambiguously reduce total trade flows," the economists note, "they generally do so in both directions—both in and out."

Consequently, "the volume of trade will fall," but "the level of the trade deficits may remain unchanged." Consistent with that observation, the U.S. trade deficit in goods rose between January and June, "despite a very large increase in tariffs."

Although Trump's tariffs are not working as advertised, the economists note, they will have "a massive impact across the United States," amounting to trillions of dollars during the next decade. That fact is also legally relevant.

The "major questions" doctrine requires "clear congressional authorization" when executive agencies "claim the power to make decisions of vast economic and political significance." If Trump's tariffs do not fall into that category, it is hard to imagine what would.

© Copyright 2025 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post Trump's Economic Fallacies Are Legally Relevant in His Tariff Case appeared first on Reason.com.