It’s A Wrap: The Life And Times Of A Tariff Price Hike Myth
Welcome back to Friday. This is the Breitbart Business Digest Friday Wrap, our weekly survey of news from the economy, Wall Street, Main Street, Washington, D.C., and the newly natalist worldview of America’s top showgirl.
This week, Taylor Swift released a normiecore album celebrating American suburban family life, Jobs Friday came and went without a jobs report, ADP said American businesses weren’t in the mood for new people right now, Larry Summers forgot how to do double-entry accounting, the Democrats finally revealed why they insist on calling illegal aliens “undocumented people,” and the economists at Harvard showed us the Liberation Day tariffs weren’t pushing up inflation at all.
Taylor Swift’s Wish List
Taylor Swift just dropped the most aggressively natalist pop song ever. Wish List isn’t about forgoing yachts and Oscars and rejecting the glamorous life to embrace “simplicity.” It mocks going off the grid and childless celebrities who treat their dogs like substitutes for offspring.
It’s about marriage, homeownership, and procreation. She puts down the glittering set of celebrity ambitions and says: give me a basketball hoop in the driveway and a cul-de-sac dynasty.
Taylor’s wish list:
I just want you, huh (You, you, yeah)
Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you
We tell the world to leave us the f— alone, and they do (Oh), wow
Got me dreaming about a driveway with a basketball hoop (Hoop)
Boss up, settle down, got a wish list
And she sings it like this is the height of rebellion. Because it is.
Not long ago, conservatives joked that the fastest way to revive American fertility would be for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to get married and start producing heirs. Suddenly, she’s writing the soundtrack. Keep in mind, no one really knows why the Baby Boom happened in the 1950s. One factor was a labor market in which demand for workers outstripped supply. Another was a cultural embrace of family life and a celebration of domesticity.
Wish List may be the first pop song in decades to make the American Dream sound cool again. Privacy, kids, driveway sports equipment — it’s radical in its normalcy. The closest precedent is the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice. But that one only dreamt of marriage. Swift goes further. She wants children. She wants enough kids—or maybe cousins also—that the neighborhood looks like Travis. The world is tilting.
One, Two, Three, The Crew Is Called ADP
With most of the federal government furloughed because Democrats are refusing to vote for a spending bill unless it provides taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants, the Labor Department did not release the monthly employment report this month. This meant a lot of attention was focused on the private sector payroll report from ADP. It showed businesses shed 32,000 workers in September, far short of adding the 50,000 economists had forecast.
As we’ve been saying for quite some time, job growth is slowing due to a decline in labor supply. Businesses aren’t hiring because the growth of cheap labor has been choked off by President Trump’s border security policies. The important takeaway, still being missed by most economists and analysts, is that labor growth slowing due to a decline in supply is very different from growth slowing due to inadequate demand. Low hiring levels no longer indicate economic weakness. And the lack of cheap labor is likely to spur investment and productivity growth.
It will probably take quite some time for people to really wrap their minds around this because we went through such a long period of inadequate demand. We are so used to thinking of job creation as one of the most pressing economic issues. Now it will be investment and productivity fueling growth. And, now that we’re tilting toward a pop culture celebrating family life, it’s also likely to fuel a fertility recovery.
Documenting The Democrats’ Word Games
For years, Democrats have tried to scrub the phrase illegal immigrant from our vocabulary. They prefer undocumented person — as if the only problem were missing paperwork, not a violation of sovereignty, law, and democratic control over immigration.
A sign is pictured after a news conference with Republican House and Senate leaders about the “reckless Democrat-led government shutdown,” that went into effect at midnight, on Wednesday, October 1, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
This week, that word game turned into a weapon. When Republicans pointed out that Democrats were holding up government funding to force taxpayer health care for illegal immigrants, the response was: No, we’re not funding health care for undocumented persons.
Translation: the Biden administration handed out parole papers, so in Democratic rhetoric, those migrants are no longer “undocumented.” They’ve got documents now, pieces of paper that say that they won’t be thrown out immediately — and that’s all that matters. Paperwork over policy.
But the law is unambiguous: parole is not admission. It does not confer legal status. A parolee may have a work permit and temporary protection from deportation, but in the eyes of U.S. law they remain an inadmissible alien. Or, in plain English: still an illegal immigrant. Pile up all the paperwork you want, Biden’s documents don’t make an illegal immigrant legal.
Summerstime Blues
Larry Summers took a swing at Stephen Miran this week and missed badly. Summers claimed Trump’s tariff policy would shrink the supply of dollars available to foreigners and therefore reduce the funds flowing back into U.S. investment.
That’s obvious nonsense. If trade policy reduces the supply of dollars in foreign hands, it necessarily increases the supply in American hands. Dollars don’t vanish. They remain available for saving, lending, and investing here at home. In other words, tariffs can bolster domestic capital formation instead of draining it — precisely the opposite of Summers’ warning.
Economics requires not just seeing the first-order effect—lower trade deficits mean fewer dollars in foreign hands—but the second-order effects—more dollars for Americans. Whatever Summers was doing when critiquing Miran, it wasn’t economics.
You Keep Saying Tariffs Cause Inflation—We Don’t Think You Know What That Means
There’s a thing over at the Harvard Business School called the Pricing Lab. The folks at the lab have put together a tariff price tracker, which tracks prices of three categories of goods: tariffed imports, domestic goods affected by tariffs, and domestic goods not affected by tariffs.
If the theory that tariffs cause prices to rise were correct, you would expect that prices of tariffed goods and tariff-affected goods would rise faster than unaffected goods.
Not only is that not happening. It’s the opposite of what’s happening. Since Liberation Day, the April 2nd tariff announcement, prices of tariffed goods are up 1.13 percent. Prices of tariff-affected domestic goods are down 0.67 percent. And prices of unaffected domestic goods are up 1.25 percent.
You probably need the sophistication of someone like Summers to explain this. Perhaps tariffs are doing a double-reverse somersault surprise attack and raising prices exactly where we’d least expect it. For our part, we’re happy to stick with the simpler answer: Liberation Day tariffs aren’t raising prices.
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