Biden’s Tariffs Will Affect Face Masks, Surgical Gloves, Needles

Plus, the New York Times gets religion

Biden has proposed to increase the tariff on solar cells like the ones on this rooftop panel to 50 percent from 25 percent.

A professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Casey Mulligan, who was chief economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, links to a summary by the law firm Foley Hoag about President Biden’s proposed tariff increases. Here’s the table, via Foley Hoag:

The electric car and solar cells stuff has gotten some press attention, but I haven’t seen as much about face masks, syringes and needles, or rubber medical and surgical gloves. 

A Biden White House fact sheet explains: “The tariff rates on syringes and needles will increase from 0% to 50% in 2024. For certain personal protective equipment (PPE), including certain respirators and face masks, the tariff rates will increase from 0–7.5% to 25% in 2024. Tariffs on rubber medical and surgical gloves will increase from 7.5% to 25% in 2026.”

Biden’s going all over the country bragging about how he’s lowering prices on insulin, but somehow he’s neglecting to mention that he’ll be raising taxes on needles used to inject the insulin and other medicines, in violation of his campaign promise of no tax increases on any taxpayer earning less than $400,000 a year.

Mulligan observes: “When the tariff rate went from 0 to 25%, #econtwitter was apoplectic. Now that it goes from 25 to 50% ... crickets. Are deadweight costs still convex?” 

Mulligan is a shrewd observer. However, he tweets like an economist. To translate, it’s almost like the academic economists are in the tank for Biden. Where is Larry Summers warning that the Biden tariffs will be inflationary, as he’s been warning about Trump’s proposed tariffs (many of which, Trump says, are may be negotiated downward if other countries reciprocally lower their barriers to American exports)? And never mind #econtwitter, where is the whole press corps that learned in college economics class all about how these tariffs create deadweight losses?

As a China hawk, I totally get the national security reasons for not having America reliant on our foremost enemy for key medical supplies. No one wants a replay of the early days of Covid-19, when Beijing cut off its supplies to American hospitals and then expected to be thanked when Jonathan Kraft sent the Patriots team plane to China to pick up some masks for Massachusetts General Hospital. And as a free market guy, I’d like to see the war on China advanced by helping the Chinese liberate their country from Communist Party rule, not by imposing taxes that wind up costing American consumers.

As a political matter, a key point for Trump to remember in the upcoming debate is that when Biden attacks Trump for the tariffs, Trump can reply that Biden himself just proposed a raft of new tariffs. So Biden’s complaint isn’t really about tariffs at all, it’s just about Trump. Anyone who is voting based on tariffs doesn’t have much of a choice, because both candidates are proposing them, though Trump, unlike Biden, is saying publicly that his hope is Americans won’t have to pay them because they’ll be negotiated down to zero.

New York Times gets religion: When the New York shut down its sports section and replaced it with articles from the Athletic, it prompted some predictable grumbling from newsroom types worried that the quality would suffer. Yet it turns out that the Athletic-generated New York Times sports section is actually better than the rest of the New York Times at helping to convey, without condescension or embarrassment, the constructive role that religion plays in the lives of many highly accomplished people. 

If you read the Times news section, a lot of the religion news is negative. It involves religious beliefs used to discriminate against gays, or to deprive people of reproductive rights, or to persuade people to vote for Donald Trump, or to perpetrate child abuse, or to justify violence. “We don't get religion. We don't get the role of religion in people's lives,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said in 2016. Since then the Times has hired my former New York Sun colleague Ruth Graham, who is a strong player on this beat, but it’s a bigger problem than one person can fix.

Yet in the Times sports section today comes a piece by the Athletic’s Bendan Kuty about a New York Yankees pitcher, Louis Gil, who has the words “God bless me” tattooed on his neck. Gil has 9 wins and 1 loss in 14 starts for the Yankees this season, and is leading the American League with a 2.03 earned run average. 

“It’s a way to be thankful,” Gil says of the tattoo and its message. The idea that religion is fundamentally about gratitude (along with humility, community, purpose and meaning) is obvious to a lot of religious people, but it’s frequently absent from Times coverage of religion. It’s nice to see it conveyed here.

Kuty’s article reports that the word is spreading to the rest of the team: 

Several Yankees players were wearing the same navy-colored shirt while walking around the clubhouse and during pregame workouts.

The wording on their chests?

“GOD BLESS ME.”

Elsewhere in the same Times sports section, Jason Jones and Rob Peterson of the Athletic have a piece on “Mr. Basketball,” George Mikan, who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959. It quoted one of Mikan’s sons, Terry Mikan, saying, “Past NBA greats all lined up and honored Dad in some way. Before Pete Maravich died, he reached out and wanted to get to know Dad and sent him a Bible.”

Meanwhile, the Saturday Wall Street Journal has an interview with the musician Usher, who has an A to Z list of advice. A couple of those mention God, too: “L: Love yourself first, and most importantly, love God always” and “Y: You’re unique in God’s grace and no one can replace you. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Lane Florsheim passes this along to readers without sneering at it. That is refreshing and all too rare. 

Kimmelman on the anti-regulatory backlash: Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic who wrote a glowing review of the newly renovated Ford Foundation headquarters and then won a grant from the Ford Foundation for a solutions-journalism project based at the Times, has a Times article about a public library in New York City with housing attached: “Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I detect a growing public frustration, across the political spectrum, with regulations…” he writes. 

Harvard Square housing: Meanwhile, a newsletter from Boston-area design-build firm Byggmeister reports that in April 2024, the firm installed dome pods in the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter. The shelter is in the basement of the University Lutheran Church. “With the recent installation of pods, residents are encouraged to remain throughout the entire winter season (from October 1st to April 15th), departing from the previous practice of shorter overnight or weeklong stays,” the newsletter says. Given that many of the students and faculty are gone for much of December and January, as well as the summer months, at this point some of the homeless may be more permanent residents of Cambridge than some of the university-affiliated individuals individuals. And given declining church attendance, particularly among mainline Protestants, converting churches into housing may be a route as promising as Kimmelman’s public library plan. 

Thank you: The Editors is made in America and supported by readers like you. We have no tattoos or piercings, and we root for the Red Sox against the Yankees, but generally share what we understand to be Louis Gil’s beliefs about gratitude. To protect our editorial independence, support our growth, and defend free markets, please become a paying reader today.

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